Published 25 August 2133.
This guide exists because most people living beyond Earth will never read the Charter itself, and shouldn’t have to. What follows is what you actually need to know: who governs what, where to go when you need something, and how the pieces fit together.
1. The Charter You Live Under
Everything in this guide traces back to one document: the UN Charter of 2101, ratified 29 July 2101 after a decade of drafting. Before it, lunar governance ran through a separate office (UNOLA), Mars and Ceres each had their own governing authorities, and no single body held clear jurisdiction over what happened beyond Earth orbit. The Charter replaced all of that with one standing principle, stated plainly in Article I: every celestial body, and everything on or in it, is held in common trusteeship for all of humanity. Nobody owns a moon. Nobody owns what’s under one, either — a fact that has mattered more in the past year than at any point since the Charter was signed.
Article II established the body that actually runs things day to day: a 7-seat Council, one seat per bloc — the Soviet Union, China, the European Union, ASEAN, the African Union, the South American Union, and the Federation of Northern American Nations (FNAN, seated December 2100, representing the post-collapse successor governments of the US, Canada, and Mexico under one voice). Changing who sits on the Council, or how many seats exist, requires unanimous agreement among all seven — which is by design. Nobody wanted a Council that could reshape itself by simple majority.
Article III established the currency you’re using right now, if you’re anywhere off Earth (see Section 5). Article IV dissolved UNOLA and every prior local governing authority on Mars and Ceres, folding them into the new structure — though, as you’ll see in Section 8, “folding in” mostly meant confirming the people already doing the job could keep doing it.
2. The Secretary-General and the Council
The Secretary-General is the UN’s chief administrative officer — the person whose name ends up on the announcements that actually change your life, from currency policy to fleet deployments. The current Secretary-General is Rebecca Faramund, who has held the position through the Tsiolkovsky retrofit confirmation, the Canteloupe/Pluto question, and now the aftermath of what was found there.
The Council itself rarely speaks with one voice in public — you’ll see individual Permanent Representatives more often than joint Council statements. If you ever need to understand why a policy took years to change, the answer is almost always the same: it needed all seven seats to agree, and they didn’t, for a while.
3. Offices You’ll Actually Deal With
Most citizens’ entire relationship with UN governance runs through a small handful of offices. Here’s what each one does:
UN Office for Colonial Development — the direct successor to UNOLA, and the office responsible for settlement infrastructure and research facility construction everywhere beyond Earth. If a Dome, a Pioneer-class colony ship, or a new settlement gets built, this office built it or funded it.
UN Permit Office — handles extraction and exploration permits. Established under the 2102 Permit Bill, it’s seated simultaneously at both Luna and Ceres, and — notably, still, in 2130 — accepts in-person filing only. There is no remote application process. If you’re planning any extraction or exploration work, budget travel time for this.
UN Colonial Census Bureau — tracks settlement population, conducts orbital surveys, and publishes periodic demographic reports (their most recent Mars census counted roughly 121,000 people across eight settlements). Mostly relevant if you’re a settlement administrator; otherwise you’ll only encounter this office’s work secondhand, in the population figures UN Weekly quotes.
UN Colony Administrator — each major settlement effort has one; Dr. Kirana Saraswati, the former UN Colony Administrator, has held this role since the Ganymede and Boreas missions were first briefed in 2104. This is the office that actually knows what’s happening on the ground at your settlement, day to day, better than anything issued from Luna.
4. Law and the Courts
The Luna Interplanetary Court, seated at Guanghan, hears interplanetary commercial and civil disputes — this is where you’d end up if you had a contract dispute, a property claim, or (as Argus Extraction Defense currently does) a challenge to a Charter provision. The Court’s most consequential recent ruling, Roscosmos v. Novaya Zarya (2122), established that propulsion infrastructure counts as an essential facility that can’t be monopolized — the ruling that opened Kuzmin Drive licensing system-wide and, indirectly, is why outer-system shipping costs have fallen as far as they have.
The Court also handles prosecutions under the Charter on Embodied Cognitive Systems (see Section 6) — most notably the 2126 Hygiea trial, the first prosecution under Article 4.1, which convicted three defendants but found no evidence reaching above the immediate researcher in the chain of responsibility.
5. Money
The United Nations Credit (UNC) is the standard unit of exchange across the settled system, established by Article III of the 2101 Charter and backed by pooled He-3 stockpiles held jointly by the Soviet Union, China, and the UN — pooling that actually began in late 2099, two years ahead of the Charter itself being ratified. Article III(2) explicitly preserves local instruments where they already existed; Ceres’s shuipiao (SP) is the clearest example, still in active use there alongside UNC. A companion reserve instrument, an Antimatter Bond developed jointly with the Hesperus Initiative, has been in planning since the mid-2110s but has not yet formally launched.
6. Research, CAI, and the Rules Around Both
Most fundamental research relevant to your daily life traces back to the five Luna Research Domes, all originally completed 2 May 2069 except Dome 5 (2129):
- Dome 1 (Tsiolkovsky consortium, far side) — energy security and engineering; also the origin point of Dome 1’s directed-energy weapons research, now deployed operationally aboard Pathfinder Tsiolkovsky.
- Dome 2 (Peary Station) — closed-loop agriculture; Luna’s largest hydroponic operation, shipping surplus to Guanghan since 2068.
- Dome 3 (Mare Frigoris) — cognitive systems research, and the birthplace of CAI/Oracle under the 2089 Aegis Protocol. Houses the Lattice-Well, a fifty-meter subsurface CAI cluster, under a tiered access regime.
- Dome 4 (Mare Frigoris) — biomedical and radiosynthesis research: black-blood radiobiology, cryopreservation work, and the D-chiral therapeutics research this past year turned into a free-licensed patent.
- Dome 5 (Von Kármán crater, completed 2129) — propulsion and power, split off from Dome 1’s original mandate: Direct Fusion Drive development, outer-system cryosleep research, and CAI miniaturization — the program that gave Tsiolkovsky, Ganymede, and Boreas Station their own local CAI installations this past year.
CAI/Oracle itself operates under strict legal limits, set out in the 2052 Charter on Embodied Cognitive Systems — worth understanding in plain terms, because it explains almost everything you’ll ever read about how CAI is and isn’t allowed to act:
- Article 4.1 prohibits general cognition in any embodied platform. There is no robot, ship, or drone anywhere in the settled system legally permitted to think for itself in the way CAI itself does.
- Article 4.2 permits specialized, narrow-function embodied systems under license — the kind of target-recognition-scoped combat platform Argus Extraction Defense’s Chimera system runs under, for example.
- Article 4.4 permits non-embodied general intelligence — CAI/Oracle itself — to supervise licensed specialized systems remotely. This is the legal basis for everything from Chimera’s operation to CAI’s advisory role aboard Tsiolkovsky: CAI can advise and direct, but the embodied hardware it’s directing is never legally considered to be thinking on its own.
The UN Office for Emerging Technology Governance (OETG) enforces all of this, with warrant authority for compliance reviews and physical audits — it executed the first Article 4 warrant against Argus Extraction Defense’s Vesta facility in 2124, and found no violation at the time.
7. Security
The United Nations Security Forces (UNSF) carry out warrants, raids, and security operations — the 2105 raid on the Dominium Hominis base at Luna and 2125’s Operation Crowbar at 10 Hygiea are the two operations most people would recognize by name. UNSF operates the Aegis-class armored corvettes (Gagarin, Leonov, Komarov, Tereshkova), the first purpose-built UN warships, first deployed at Operation Crowbar in 2125.
Beyond UNSF’s corvette fleet, the Pathfinder Fleet — a joint Soviet-UN programme that departed Deimos 8 March 2097 — has, over the past year, taken on a role closer to a naval deployment than its original survey mandate. UNS Tsiolkovsky’s retrofit with armor, a beam laser, and its own onboard CAI, followed by its engagement at Pluto, is the first time a Pathfinder vessel has fought and won an armed engagement. UNS Korolev remains on permanent station at Saturn, its survey mandate long since completed, continuing D-chiral monitoring work instead.
8. Local Governance Under the Charter
If you live on Mars or at Ceres, you are, technically, living under a UN administrative organ rather than an independent local government — both prior governing authorities were formally dissolved under Article IV in 2101. In practice, very little changed: the Soviet Union’s existing arrangements on Mars were explicitly preserved, and at Ceres, former Governor Liu Wenjing simply continued in the role in the absence of any Council action to replace her. The Ceres Merchants’ Council remains the body most Ceres residents actually deal with for local commercial matters, and negotiated directly with the Governor’s office on the SP currency’s continued use back in 2100.
9. Advocacy and Civil Society
You’ll see two organized civilian groups referenced regularly in UN Weekly coverage, for very different reasons:
The Article Four Coalition, formed 2125, is a pro-regulation advocacy group pushing to keep Article 4.1’s embodied-cognition prohibition intact rather than relaxed — they’ve been the loudest public voice criticizing custodial arrangements around recovered cognitive-systems hardware, and pushed successfully for the Hygiea footage’s eventual declassification.
Dominium Hominis, by contrast, is not a civil society group in any conventional sense — an extremist faction discovered in 2105 living in hiding beneath Luna, ideologically opposed to CAI governance itself. Long dormant since its base was raided, it resurfaced publicly this past year to declare a pilgrimage site at Pluto, pledging non-violence toward UN personnel there. What accommodation, if any, the UN intends to make for that claim has not been announced.
Quick Reference: Who Do I Contact For—
| If you need to… | Contact |
|---|---|
| File an extraction/exploration permit | UN Permit Office (Luna or Ceres, in person) |
| Report settlement infrastructure needs | UN Office for Colonial Development |
| Resolve a commercial or civil dispute | Luna Interplanetary Court |
| Understand your settlement’s day-to-day administration | Your UN Colony Administrator |
| Report a suspected Article 4 violation | UN Office for Emerging Technology Governance |
| Ask about currency, exchange, or SP conversion | UN Treasury |
This guide is revised periodically as governance structures change. For anything not covered here, your Colony Administrator’s office can direct you to the appropriate authority.