Shellac records — an exohuman Earth-era medium first popularised in the 19th century — experienced an unlikely renaissance on VOI 700 D.
When the colony ark Last Frontier crashed on Day Zero, the settlers lost their quantum internet, most high-density drives, and any hope of cloud computing. The Tier-1 AGI GAIA, suddenly marooned in isolated vaults, still needed a way to push firmware patches, security keys, and medical data to each Local GAIA Hub — but every byte had to travel on minimal power and leave a tamper-evident audit trail.
To meet that need, engineers in New Kourou founded the New Kourou Shellac Corporation (NKSC) in 2625. What they made:
Beginning in 2627 NKSC used the same presses for culture: every Friday Weber Broadcasting Services cut a “Studio Master” live-session disk that couriers of the New Kourou Courier Service and Firetown Courier Service rushed to pubs across the Free State of Settlers. Owning the week’s groove became a status symbol and forged a shared playlist between settlements.
When the Free State collapsed and the Federal Confederation rose in 2631, the NKSC was absorbed, re-badged as the Federal Shellac Manufactory (FSM), and given an exclusive charter to supply the newly founded Federal GAIA Agency. Whether labelled NKSC or FSM, the same workshops still turn out the disks and the rugged readers that keep GAIA’s network alive.
From the improvised ingenuity of the Beta Age to the energy-rationed bureaucracy of the Gamma Age, shellac records — and the devices built by NKSC/FSM — carry the Confederation’s lifeblood: firmware, legislation, culture, and contraband alike, all etched into brittle spirals of resin.
Early-20th-century shellac records were made from insect resin, prized for durability. On VOI 700 D settlers replaced the resin with a native fungal polymer that could be cast in low-temperature kilns, matching treaty eco-limits.
The crash vaporised the orbital relays and toasted most mass-storage hardware. When the Free State of Settlers formed, it ran a laissez-faire economy — no central planning, no nightly ledgers to collect. Communication therefore flowed almost entirely downward from the sole surviving GAIA core in New Kourou:
One-way lifeline from the Kernel: No uplink analytics, no quota traffic — just a weekly lifeline of firmware and knowledge from the Kernel to keep each isolated node on speaking terms with its parent.
Post-Great War, under Communardism the Federal GAIA Agency formalised a stricter cycle:
| Step | Medium | Time |
| —— | ——– | —— |
| Agencies burn ledgers to shellac | Disk | 19:00–23:59 |
| Disks walked to Local GAIA Hub; vault crunches analytics | — | 00:00–05:30 |
| Hub sends summary to *The Kernel* | Short-wave | 06:00 |
| Kernel aggregates & emits dashboards | — | 06:15–08:00 |
| Thu 02:00 — Kernel cuts weekly firmware delta | Disk | weekly |
Enabler of a Data Driven but (mainly) Analogue society: Shellac is the de facto courier of the Annual Plan, ration tables, and treaty audits.
From 2628 to 2630 the weekly WBS “Studio Master” pressings — live music sessions cut by the New Kourou Shellac Corporation (NKSC) onto mirror-finish blanks and issued in numbered sleeves — quickly became status trophies. Pubs would race to spin the fresh groove on Friday night, and a tavern’s prestige was measured by how many dog-eared Masters lined its shelf.
To hear them without siphoning a QFB, NKSC also sold EchoHorn kits: a bronze pickup saddle and folding hardwood horn that bolted onto any clockwork sequencer, boosting output to roughly 70 dB. Perfectly legal during the Beta Age, EchoHorns were banned after nationalization, in the Gamma Age they are only available on Firetown's black market.
Those same late shifts that kept GAIA’s firmware presses running also birthed “ghost pressings.” Technicians lingered after hours, striking surreptitious runs of music disks, Tone-30 Pro upgrade heads, and spare stylus sets, then funnelling the contraband west through a chain of Firetown middle-men.
A quieter offshoot is the Data-Art scene: hobbyists feed raw GAIA packets into lathe-writers and perform the resulting atonal hiss as ambient soundscapes — half protest, half meditation on the thin line between information and culture.
The use of shellac records across the Beta and Gamma Ages demonstrates the adaptability and resilience of ExoHuman society:
Shellac records stand as a testament to humanity’s ability to reimagine antiquated technologies to meet futuristic challenges.