Kitsuhana Heavy Industries
Kitsuhana Heavy Industries is a polity that trades technology and resources with other nearby civilizations, and has contributed some of the advanced technology that the Virgo system has available to it.
Origins
Kitsuhana Heavy Industries, unlike what the name might imply, is a socialist utopia, founded in -91 CC. At one point, KHI was in fact a large business, specializing in producing space mining equipment, mostly in the form of semi-autonomous mining drones.
Evacuation Day
At the height of their business, the planet was a single-planet unified society of nearly ten billion people, all anthropomorphic vulpine-like creatures. An astronomical event of catastrophic proportions (extra-solar cometary impactor) forced a planetary-scale evacuation, however due to the limited notice, less than one tenth of one percent could be included in the evacuation. Even then, they could only be stored in a suspended state for the trip.
KHI was responsible for a large part of the construction of the evacuation ships used. Only three such ships were able to be constructed in the narrow time window available. It was only with great hardship that even these three could be completed; many KHI employees were literally worked to death in the process. Considering that death of the entire race was the alternative, it was not difficult to find volunteers for this task, however.
The Odyssey
Not being a true spacefaring society previous to the evacuation, there was little idea where to send the evacuation ships. No planets in the same system could sustain life as they were, and no vessels had ever left the star system. In the end, the three ships took different routes away from the planets towards the nearest stars to start their exploration for suitable worlds.
With centuries of travel between stars, it was only after several millenia that each ship had located a suitable world. Many of the evacuees were KHI employees, and as such, the new societies were named after the company which had essentially sponsored their survival.
Landfall
Kitsuhana Prime was settled on a terrestrial world with shallow freshwater seas. This world has the largest of the Kitsuhanan cities, and is the largest population center of KHI.
Kitsuhana Beta used to be a barren, rocky world with large icecaps. The evacuation ship's computer calculated it had sufficient energy to melt these and terraform the planet.
Kitsuhana Gamma is a very mountainous world, rich in native wildlife. Unfortunately, much of the wildlife consists of hostile megafauna, and settled areas are fairly constricted.
In the end, Kitsuhana Heavy Industries re-established itself as a corporation, and essentially became the government of the three colonies. Not wishing to encounter the same sort of scenario they had on their previous homeworld, the three colonies quickly ramped up technology development, discovering FTL travel, automated mining, and various other technologies.
Society
To say that KHI has, or is, a government is a bit of a misnomer. Instead, it would be more accurate to describe Kitsuhanan society as an 'socio-anarchistic utopia'. The rapid technology expansion post-settling allowed Kitsuhana to reach post-scarcity resource levels within a few centuries. It didn't hurt that many of the survivors were employees of a space-mining-drone manufacturing company...
Post-Scarcity
During the course of their technological progression, an AI superintelligence was created. Due either to design errors or perhaps inherient instability in superintelligences, the personality fractured into several subunits, now typically just called the SIs.
Each SI represented various aspects of the personality of the original, and each retained the incredible processing power. They each assumed various roles over Kitsuhana society and on average, manage the day-to-day behind-the-scenes with less than 1% of their combined capacity to process information.
At that point, the tentative government between the worlds effectively dissolved as Kitsuhanans spread out over the surface of the planet, able to set up a dwelling and a farm with nothing more than a truck full of automated drones. Society began to sprawl, and with the advent of easy automated resupply and power generation, many Kitsuhanans turned to rural or even entirely virtual living.
Citizenship
The only 'citizenship' that Kitsuhanans now have is the result of resource-stealing and 'donations' of weapons to foreign polities. Originally there were widespread incidents of foreign civilizations coming to Kitsuhana space, using their materials to fund wars of their own, and leaving with large portions of Kitsuhana resources.
To counteract this, many Kitsuhanans started adding lists of who was authorized to use their resources to their devices. This created many problems with the free and open society that Kitsuhana had enjoyed for the previous years, and the solution was to create a large, unified list of 'approved' users of Kitsuhana resources.
The list, typically called the Kitsuhana Prime List after it's place of creation, is effectively a list that is now used on almost every Kitsuhana device to authorize those on the list to resources and materials that Kitsuhana has available.
Real(?) Estate
Cities still exist, though they aren't the sprawling megacities science-fiction had predicted. Instead, they are typically inhabited by people of a certain mindset: urbanites. Those that live there just can't help but feel the desire to be completely surrounded by people, and can't take full-VR living as a solution.
Rural areas are quite populated as well. Almost half the population has claimed some land and set up single-family dwellings across the trio of colonized planets. Indeed, the only remnants of government that remain perform the task of land conflict resolution when a citizen wants to claim new land.
The third option for modern Kitsuhanans is to simply fabricate a VR environment server and bury it in the ground under a power generator somewhere on one of the Kitsuhana planets. They can exist inside their VR environment sustainably, almost forever. They may occasionally have to perform physical repairs to their infrastructure, but even those can be performed remotely with drones from inside their environment.
Typically each dwelling as at least a small garden or food growing plot of some sort, or an advanced fabricator to fabricate edibles from scratch. Drones can make trips to stockpiles to retrieve building materials, which are themselves stocked by drones from mining sites or nearby cities. Of course, the mines themselves are operated by drones as well.
And Party Every Day
The typical urban Kitsuhanan spends most of their time going to leisure activities like clubs, events, and gatherings. They tend to prefer to spend their time with others, usually not in VR, and are often very social creatures. The ability to swap bodies has led some to be placed into synthetic bodies, alleviating the need to sleep, eat, or perform even basic physical functions, allowing them to 'party all day', in effect.
In rural life, one might find themselves relaxing outside, or spending a large amount of time in VR. Typically people who prefer to 'live' in VR will build a small rural abode with a VR suite and spend most of their time there, isolated from the rest of the population. Some even prefer to control drones from inside VR rather than perform manual tasks in their normal bodies. At least a few Kitsuhanans plant and maintain their own farms for leisure.
Even some have taken up to living in hollowed-out asteroids in Kitsuhana Prime's rings. Typically the rings are off-limits for mining, but a few have received permission from the Landing Committee that allows them to use a single asteroid, as long as they don't alter the outside appearance.
Living Forever
The continued advancement of technology eventually lead to the MSM, or MindState Mapping. This was the equivalent of the mapping of the genome structure, but for the brain instead. With this, Kitsuhanans could transfer their minds entirely into computer systems, or swap between bodies. Today, roughly eighty percent of Kitsuhanans have swapped forms at least once.
Kitsuhana as a whole is very peaceful, almost hedonistic. Any violence is seen as an interruptor of pleasure, and pleasure is seen as the true goal of living. Kitsuhanans do not take kindly to outside interference, and in most cases, their advanced shipbuilding and MindState technology give them an edge in fights.
Even if they do loathe outside interference in their society, they do welcome outsiders to join. Today, Kitsuhana is roughly 85% vulpine, with the remaining 15% made up mostly of other canid species, followed by felids, and then 'other'. The process to become a Kitsuhanan citizen takes only a few minutes, but requires that you pass an interview with one of the KHI SI fragments.
Thinking and Creating
Education is one of the most important things in modern Kitsuhanan society. Being uneducated is frowned upon by virtually everyone in society, though traditional education systems don't exist. Instead, information is available on the mesh, and each citizen is expected to learn the basics before a certain age.
Art is something that most Kitsuhanan citizens value, though the forms of art are more inclusive than one might think. Designing interesting VR games, creating beautiful landscapes with drones, and many other things are possible with the existing technology, and all of it earns the respect of at least one group or another.
Technology
After the evacuation and resettling, Kitsuhanan technology rapidly advanced. The massive reconstruction quickly advanced building technology to being entirely automated, and the need to gather resources with so few people lead to automated mining and farming as well.
In the end, KHI started making drones to make drones, and automated everything that could be automated. The eventual development of strong AI and the resleeving technologies allowed citizens to spend most of their time on leisure activities.
Guns 'n Ships
Typically, every citizen has a spacecraft, albeit usually of very small size. Ships have extremely powerful power generation abilities with their Keggy reactors (the nickname for 'Kugelblitz' singularity engines). Requisitioning larger ships is possible, though the SIs that manage resources may require reasons for anything excessively large.
Kitsuhanan FTL technology is based on the concept of 'planing' (as in 'a flat plane', not an airplane, and not planning). A planing engine folds the ship into a 2D representation of space (2-space), where each point maps to a point in normal 3D space (3-space) where it can then 'unfold' or 'plane out'. If given two points in normal 3-space that one wishes to travel between, an AI can compute an appropriate entry and exit point into 2-space that will arrive at the destination in less time than traversing the normal space between the two points.
Infinite Lives
The technology for body-swapping and mind-uploading, commonly called 'resleeving', is widespread in Kitsuhanan society. It is not reserved for occasions where swapping bodies is needed, and people may design their bodies as a statement, as much as for function. Old bodies are recycled when they are done being used, typically. Resleeving is sometimes referred to colloquially as 'respawning' if it was done out of necessity, and 'resleeving' if it was not.
In addition to body-swapping, the same technology can be used to make a copy of a living mind, and keep it for backup purposes. Most people create such backups to restore from in the case they are killed or otherwise incapacitated. While possible, it is frowned on to make ACTIVE copies of living minds. The term for such is 'forking', and is typically seen as a needless use of resources.
Surfing
The ubiquitious Kitsuhanan technology of 'working surfaces' are a common sight throughout their structures and ships. They typically appear as a black pool of liquid, 'working fluid', which is actually comprised of millions of miniscule multipurpose robots.
Working Fluid (typically just called 'surfluid') can disassemble materials down to microscopic pieces, then reassemble them into various useful machines, or even organisms. They are, essentially, a 'universal constructor'. In a way, an extremely powerful 3D printer. Typically resources are stored just under the surface until needed, and they have to be 'fed' materials before they can produce anything.
Note that the technology does not operate on an atomic level; it's not possible to convert elements into other elements atomically by rearranging subatomic particles. It's possible to create steel from iron and carbon because there are known macroscopic processes that can be used to perform that process, but it's not possible to convert iron into carbon, for example.
Agency
Finally, the advent of all the advanced technology that Kitsuhana created, has quickly outpaced Kitsuhanan understanding of said technology. It's great that a working surface can make almost any object given the materials, but how do you ask it to? It's just a pool of liquid. That is where Agents come in.
Agents (sometimes 'muses') are small AI assistants with the capacity to wirelessly interface and use Kitsuhanan technology. Agents are ubiquitious. It would be nearly impossible to live or operate in a KHI settlement without one. They are not self-aware and simply impersonate mannerisms and habits from their users, however after existing for several years, they may 'awaken' and become self aware.
Awakened agents are considered KHI citizens and afforded all the rights normally associated with that status. They may or may not continue serving their original owner, as they wish. If not, the owner will need to obtain a new Agent, which the old Agent can instantly transfer the necessary information to, in order to have them be as useful as they were before awakening.