During the last phase of The Fall and the evacuation of Earth, more than four hundred million refugees were uploaded and egocast to orbital databanks. From there, infomorph refugees were beamed to databanks throughout the solar system. They were forced to flee Earth without any of their possessions, even their bodies. Instead, they became infomorphs who had nothing beyond their minds and memories—the most destitute group of refugees ever to exist in human history.

In the years since the Fall, large numbers of these infugees have been resleeved. Anyone with valuable skills was first to gain a morph, followed by anyone with friends or relatives already living in orbit who could take responsibility for the person’s resleeving.

Those two groups accounted for only half of the refugees. The remaining found themselves in a far
more difficult situation. Lacking either personal contacts or vital skills, they had no one else to help them. In the first few years, many of these infugees signed contracts promising their labor or other services in return for resleeving and a guarantee of some form of income sufficient to support them. Because of the critical labor shortages in the first five years after the Fall, another thirty percent of the refugees managed to regain bodies (usually cheap synthmorphs).

The Clanking Massess

These indentured servants performed all manner of critical tasks, ranging from scavenging ruined habitats for useful devices to mining or asteroid herding. Others became servants or bodyguards for the rich, or performed less moral services for criminal syndicates. Most took on orbital construction jobs, helping to construct the new habitats that would eventually become their home.

With so many infugees acquiring cheap synthmorph shells—particularly cases and synths—and being
unable to afford anything better, synthmorphs have become associated with poverty throughout the solar system. This lowest strata of the poor are often referred to as “the clanking masses,” and compose one-sixth of the transhuman population. Most of these people strongly desire to acquire a biomorph, even if it is only a splicer or worker pod. As a result of their presence, however, many synthmorphs are now viewed with distaste, especially in elite social circles. Even those
who have expensive, lovely, custom-designed synthetic morphs fitted with all of the latest augmentations are considered to be eccentrics with poor taste.

The social stigma against synthmorphs is strengthened by the fear that, in the event of another attack by the TITANs, their robotic shells could be rapidly co-opted to become a deadly TITAN-controlled army. This has led to some habitats going so far as to actively segregate their synthmorph populations, rationalized by the fact that synthmorphs can easily inhabit unheated and unpressurized portions of various habitats.

Exploitation of Infolife

Some infugees found work performing services like data-mining, monitoring automated factories, or other jobs that could be done by infomorphs. After the Fall, infomorphs were used to take over numerous tasks previously handled by AGIs, who were no longer trusted.

Unfortunately, some infomorph refugees made bad or unlucky deals and ended up working for years only to find that their employer either kept finding ways to delay or reduce the payment or vanished before they delivered on their promise. As a result, slightly more than twenty percent of the original infomorph refugees remain infomorphs; some by choice, but most because they have not been able to acquire the means to resleeve themselves or are still working long contracts
to gain their morph.

The problem with obtaining bodies for these infugees goes beyond simply providing a new morph for resleeving; living beings require living space as well as a steady supply of consumables. With space in short supply, the waiting list for infugees looking for a habitat to call home is quite long.

Both the hypercorps and the Planetary Consortium were quick to make use of this vast labor pool,
especially on Mars. Mars has large amounts of open space and resources and is sufficiently close to habitable that Mars-adapted morphs like the ruster are inexpensive to create. As a result, the Planetary Consortium has been responsible for the employment of almost half of all remaining infomorph refugees.

For the past decade, the vast majority of infomorph refugees who want bodies have found that indenturing themselves to the Planetary Consortium or one of the associated hypercorps involved in Martian terraforming is the most reliable way to find both a morph and housing, since both are guaranteed at the end of the contract. The work involved is particularly difficult, however, and the contracts are normally quite long. The Planetary Consortium is also particularly adept at adding charges that prolong indenture—though most indentures carry five to twenty year contracts, in reality these indentures typically last between eight and twenty-five years; some go on even longer.