Old and New

Today there are two variants of people described by this word.

Old Bracers are mega-rich who escaped Earth in the twenty-first and twenty-second century, settling instead on the orbital colonies making up Earth’s Bracelet. As the Bracer War destroyed most of these colonies, the survivors fled to the colonies on Luna and collectively began to significantly support the **Seramis Project** on Venus, which today is home to the biggest “Old Bracer” colony.

Old Bracers are generally very, very rich. Most inner planet corporations and nation-states are run by Old Bracers, or rather by their vast estates. Their influence runs extremely deep. It is said that the crushing of the Martian independence movement was based on the conviction of the Bracers that own most of Mars that the Martian population are to behave in ways they dictate. It was Old Bracer money that financed Martian settlement, so Martian settlers must be grateful for the gift of the Red Planet.

Old Bracers are not just extremely rich, they are also very old. Their extreme wealth has allowed them to invest substantially in life-prolonging technologies. Some of the oldest Bracers have uploaded their consciousnesses into machine brains, in order to cheat death. Not all of those have survived into the presence fully intact - but their fortunes and estates have. Many Bracers pursue passion projects of extreme duration. Their functional immortality is a reason for so many of them to have thrown their power and influence behind Seramis.

It is believed that as of 2250 there are forty-five Old Bracers left. Among them they share about ninety percent of the collective wealth of the inner planets. One of the reasons for this extreme wealth concentration is that the Bracer War wiped out a substantial amount of their kind - which allowed the survivors to scoop up the riches that were suddenly freed.

New Bracers have adopted the moniker out of a sense of cynicism. They are those who work in Earth’s orbit, clearing up the traffic lanes for the spaceports of space borne debris. A New Bracer existence is precarious, however pay can be quite lucrative, if one has the stomach for the job.