Jardín del Almanecer

The *Jardín del Almanecer* or Sunrise Garden was a facility dedicated to the preservation of alien biospheres in case of catastrophe on their respective worlds. It orbited the Sun between the Earth and Mars, and measured several kilometers across at its widest point. The Garden found practical use in the time following the Remembrance, during which conflict many planets were entirely scoured of life. Efforts by Garden seeders and terraformers allowed reestablishment of native life on said planets, as well as aiding in the recovery of those which were merely damaged over the course of the wars.

The methodology of the Garden and its Gardeners were largely as follows. Whenever a planet which supported life was discovered, Garden operatives would immediately journey to said planet and drop sterilized research facilities evenly across its surface which could be remotely operated from orbit or beyond. In many cases, these activities were technically illegal and considered trespassing, poaching, or theft by the powers under whose jurisdiction a planet fell. The Garden was very well equipped, however, receiving funding from many renowned philanthropists throughout the galaxy as well as donations from normal citizens, and could thus afford to spend copious quantities of money on both cloaking technologies and mass-production of the aforementioned research drops, rendering elimination of all such facilities on any given planet too costly to be practical. Indeed, the Garden commanded such widespread support that it had access to advanced prototypes of military-grade cloaking technology from across the galaxy, and Garden planetary research stations were renowned for being nigh incorporeal. Operation of all research stations could be accomplished from the Garden itself through its dedicated FTL intranet, and could function independently of external input due to onboard AI, providing relative immunity from potential Inchworm attacks. These stations would collect data and physical samples which would both be sent back to the Garden through dedicated onboard jump points. In this manner, the Garden obtained massive quantities of realtime information about the statuses of all known biospheres in the galaxy, as well as preserving said biospheres. In case of disaster, there were of course regularly updated backups of both data and samples in many locations across the galaxy.

The Garden sourced many of its staff from the widespread biohacking movement which existed at the time, known collectively as the Pluripotence, many of whose more well-known members were unable to find reliable work despite significant expertise in their fields due to existing criminal records. Said records were largely related to intellectual theft, primarily from large corporations which had the influence or outright political power to make their lives difficult. The Garden provided an attractive destination for these individuals not only due to its status as a safe haven, but also for the goals it pursued, i.e. the preservation and dissemination of information on all life in the galaxy. Prior to the Garden's formation, many corporations were able to charge exorbitant and unjustifiable prices for drugs produced using organisms only found on corporation-owned worlds. The Garden put a stop to this, becoming an unstoppable force for freedom of information despite desperate efforts by pharmaceutical companies to the contrary. This was in fact the primary reason it had access to such advanced technology: powers concerned with ensuring that none of their political enemies had an advantage over them provided it with access to the latest and greatest in cloaking tech. Any individual could obtain data or samples from the Garden, and indeed the average person in the galaxy experienced a significant increase in overall health following its foundation as the black market was flooded with cheap but equally effective versions of previously prohibitively expensive products. This tide of good health notably included the proliferation of many anti-agathic drugs, previously only available to the very wealthy, thus extending the average lifespan by over a hundred years.

-Excerpt from *Life for all its Forms* by Ánthos Daskydox