For many years, we only had a few warships retrofitted with the Peloran technologies. They were the best of the best, the fastest and most powerful warships we possessed. They went everywhere, visiting our furthest colonies, exploring new star systems outside The Wall, going where no Terran had gone before. And they sometimes fought the Russians and Chinese, protecting our colonies when they could. Unfortunately, they were too few to be everywhere.
I’ll never forget Arkadian weather. Those zero-gee storms were something else, and yes there are storms in zero-gee. They just…spread, covering the space of worlds and beyond, lashing everything in their path. And it doesn’t rain. There’s no gravity to pull the water down. It just spreads, soaking everything. And a sorry thing it is to be on the surface of the only asteroid in its path when that unending wave of lightning starts to fly.
Most of the Arkadian Ring is air of course. It wraps around an entire star, and there are not enough rocks left in the entire binary system to pave all the way around. So Arkadia is made up of islands of rock floating in the air while they orbit around the star. The center has air thick enough to breath unaided, and while it thins towards the edges, all aircraft are limited to atmospheric speeds when traveling between islands. It can take a while to get anywhere.
There are many people who are not normal. The hyperactive, the compulsive, the autistic, they are the ones that “normal” people find strange. They are different. And they are special. Most of those who stop aging have at least one issue that was called a disorder in previous centuries. They have to learn to live with or use those issues long before they stop aging. That is one thing you should remember about the Ageless. Their lives are rarely easy.
When the Peloran, Roderan, and Shang gave us examples of their gravitic drives, it revolutionized our future in a way that even the improved hyperdrives did not. True control over gravity, rather than simply beating it into submission with a rocket, gave as a whole new universe of possibilities. In the short term, we armed some of our warships with them. In the long term, we tore the other examples apart and learned how to practice a whole new field of science.