It has been tried more than once. The latest iteration is perhaps the extremist enclave of Gaea Station. Young refugees—those who have “refused assignment,” in the station’s own terms, and been cast out—have struggled to cope with the multiplicity of human identity beyond Gaea. They speak no language but T-standard, and they follow no religion, unless Gaea’s veneration of human power can be classed as a religion. All of them find themselves fitted into ethnic categories they do not understand. Analysis of Gaea’s early experiments in eugenics suggests an attempt to eliminate visible markers of
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