Communication

Communication techologies were important even in radical times and had to be completely reinvented after the Flowering.

Radical Communication
The communicator of choice among the hanyos was the blacktab, a radical age scrolllike device, but it used dangerous microwaves from either terrestrial towers or from satellites. The flipping of the poles and the subsequent magnetic disturbances really messed up the blacktab network. Satellites were clearly impractical, and were converted almost entirely into fortresses and cityblasters by 2060. With the contracting of corporations into territories after the 2070s, communication also shrank in scope, until it was restricted to the top ranks of executives. The survivariums communicated for a while through coded messages piggybacking on packets within legit mnetworks, but soon even that disappeared, leaving the survivairums in almost complete darkness as far as communication was concerned. Not till after the Flowering were they able to link up with one another again.

Florian Communication
The machines who helped people come back to the surface initially provided communication by fast relay; even this took several hours to get a message to the other side of the world. Communication remained unsatisfactory till the middle of the second Florian century, when a flurry of discoveries in quantum physics allowed the setting up of the third sound network linking bubbles, scrolls, orbs and machine minds. After the disastrous data losses of the Radical Age, the people of the Flowering decided to make their data storage holographic. Foamstone was the answer to that question.