Celebrities

Across the Cluster, the closest thing humanity has to a common culture is the Cluster Net. People who share no politics, faith, language, or way of life still watch the same clips, hear the same songs, and argue about the same famous idiots.

Unfortunately, that means celebrities matter.

There was a painter on Old Earth called Peter Paul Rubens whose fame gave him access to rulers and negotiations that helped make peace possible. The people below generally have not managed anything so useful.

Still, if singers, athletes, holostars, and professional attention-seekers can get into rooms ordinary people cannot, they might as well do something with it. It is a long shot. Most worthwhile shots are.

Stylia Vance

Stylia Vance is an ethereal star of Venti dramas, which means she has perfected the art of looking beautiful while crying. Her roles explore love, family, and the Republican Dream, which is a fantasy version of the Venti Republic where the air is clean, the debts are paid, and everyone gets along.

She is a fond collaborator of stars old and new, and appears to have no enemies, which in the entertainment industry is either a miracle or a sign that her loyal fandom can bludgeon lesser stars into silence if crossed.

She recently bought out her corporate contract and announced she is going to direct. Good for her.

Mraz Sol

Mraz Sol is a Venti composer who figured out how to make violins and synthesisers sound like they were not trying to kill each other. His symphonies are broadcast across every corporate channel, which means you have heard his music whether you know it or not.

He has amassed a vast library of works that get recycled into film and television scores, and has written the music for most of the last thirty critically acclaimed films out of Venti Space. That is either because he is the best in the Cluster, or because the studios are lazy and he has a good lawyer.

Rassandra Kael

Rassandra Kael is the reigning champion of the Core Worlds’ most watched sport, zero-gravity course running, and the reason it exists in its current form.

Kael dared to challenge in the Men’s Division. Famously, she won.

Her victory shattered a centuries-old barrier like it was made of glass, forced the league to open up, and now course running is truly mixed-gender.

Kael still competes in the league she helped create. She is a living symbol of peak human performance, which must be exhausting.

Berrilyn Vex

Berrilyn Vex is the face of GELF-skin couture, which is exactly as strange as it sounds. She wears and designs living fabrics that change colour and texture and, more impressively, never have to be taken off. You just put them on and they stay on. Forever.

Can’t say I’ve ever wanted that from my clothes, but her success suggests that some of you do. Her self-funded label has not made it far outside the Core Worlds, mostly because her clothes cost more than most people make in a year and hab-wear is cheaper.

Still, she’s out there doing her thing.

Rachel Thorne

Rachel Thorne hosts Cluster Today, the show where famous people go to have their lives performatively taken apart and fed to the greedy harvester maw of Cluster Net gossip.

She is a nexus of celebrity culture, and has made careers and destroyed them, sometimes in the same episode. This has led to many celebrities endorsing her charities and political projects, presumably out of love for humanity and not fear of tomorrow’s segment.

She is also the one who launched Brock Slate's career with her promotional interviews.

Brock Slate

Brock Slate started as a pro-gamer, which is not usually a career path that ends with "bestselling economics author." But he made the jump, and now he is a celebrated business entrepreneur.

His book is called Speed Run: A Guide to Any% Your First Million. Unfortunately, it has become associated with a particular subculture of corpo types. You know the ones. Their algorithms are full of ads for “horny GELFs in your area” and “ten worlds where hunting people is legal.”

Corbyn Hale

Corbyn Hale writes war novels about the Bunker Conflicts on Brogno. They are gritty, supposedly hyper-realistic, and I have never read one because I lived through something similar and absolutely do not need the reminder.

Hale was accused of exploiting other writers to produce them, which is the kind of accusation that would ruin a normal writer but just gave him more publicity. He still got TV and movie deals. Rachel Thorne famously called him "Hack Hale" after an exposé with one of his alleged ghostwriters.

It’s strange to see my name out there making money while I am over here writing a history book for free.

Creature

Creature is a speciated person who fights in the underground Jambles circuits, and he is terrifying. His adaptability in the ring is unmatched, and his grip can crush a golf ball into dust. That’s how he was discovered, actually. Someone posted a vid of him doing it, and it went viral.

He is an icon for speciated people across the Cluster, which is good, but he has also caught flak for it. Some people say he is endorsing the exploitative culture of the fight circuits instead of fighting for anthrodivergent rights.

I’m not going to judge him. He has no corporate contract, no formal endorsement, and he funds his own fights. That is more independence than most celebrities can claim.

Camille de Lys (De-Li)

Camille de Lys, also known as De-Li, is a legend of the Averi classical stage, teleperforming for the cloistered elite of Magnasanti. She rarely makes media appearances and focuses almost entirely on the Averi market.

She is an enigma. Or  she simply doesn’t care about fame outside her own people.

Drong Drong

Drong Drong calls herself the voice of the Jambles, and the Superpowers wish she would shut up. Her tracks are explicitly anti-authority, and they get illegally downloaded across systems because people cannot get enough of someone telling the Superpowers where to stick it.

She calls herself "the last Jambles supremacist," which sounds worse than it is. She means she believes in Jambles unification, the idea that the Jambles should stop being the Superpowers' playground and become its own thing.

Zandrina Or

Zandrina Or makes expensive clothes for people who have never worried about a budget. She pioneered hab-wear, designer jumpsuits that look good and actually work.

Her stuff is for the ultra-wealthy, which means I will never own any. Recently, though, she released a more affordable line called Flaneur. It still costs more than my monthly rent, but apparently that counts as affordable in the Core Worlds.

The marketing campaign was stylish, and now everyone wants one.

Priya Sharma

Priya Sharma speaks up for synthetically created beings, which means she spends a lot of time yelling at corporations in the Core Worlds.

Now she is under investigation for alleged ties to extremist groups on Balharn. I don’t know if the allegations are true. But I know that accusing activists of terrorism is a very old trick.

Chinedu Okoro

Chinedu Okoro is a culinary pioneer who creates extraordinary dishes from previously uncooked flora and fauna across the Cluster. He hibernates through the long voyages between systems, then wakes to stage tasting events built around whatever the local world has tried not to eat yet.

His endorsements fund the whole touring operation. Apparently there is excellent money in being the first person brave enough to put something on a plate.

Haruto Tanaka

Haruto Tanaka grew up in the Jambles, which is not where you expect genius physicists to come from. But he made it.

He received the highest Temple decoration and sponsorship for his research into the naked singularity reactor and the curvature drive. I... do not understand what either of those things is, but the Temple does not hand out awards for nothing.

Beatriz Cruz

Beatriz Cruz makes her living telling people the truth and making them laugh about it. She skewers the Superpowers, political hypocrisy, and anyone else unfortunate enough to deserve the attention.

Originally from the Union Territories, she now works from the Core Worlds and spends a fair amount of time mocking the political culture she once believed in. Most people who leave the Union pretend they never did. Cruz built a career out of admitting she did.

Omar al-Farsi

Omar al-Farsi built a logistics empire in the Frontier from scratch, and now it rivals the Zyrgyzoi. That is like saying your backyard workshop is competing with a Superpower.

He got there by locking down contracts with the Lagrange Nations Assembly and the Venti Republic, servicing their mining and cycler operations. He moves things. Lots of things. And he gets paid very well for it.

Lǐ Wěi

Lǐ Wěi is a controversial genius. Seventy years ago, her universal inoculations liberated humanity from the fear of alien plagues. They also encouraged the erosion of existing safety protocols, which got a lot of people killed before she perfected the vaccines.

She ended the costly quarantines that once hindered expansion. Now colonisation is just a matter of logistics. Except when access to the cure lowers caution. Particularly virulent strains continue to wipe out populations. Perhaps the universe might be best served by Lǐ Wěi inventing a common sense infusion.

Ximena Rios

Ximena Rios stars in Cursed Republic, a Venti horror drama that has been running longer than some nations. She is beloved, which in the entertainment industry means she has not been cancelled yet.

When the show was syndicated in the Core Worlds, her residuals apparently became a planet-sized pile of criptoscrip. She is now the wealthiest TV star in human history. Must be nice.

Arash Farhadi

Arash Farhadi is a visionary filmmaker known for immersive augmented reality documentaries, covering topics as mundane as cooking and as bombastic as open-heart surgery on a wounded veteran.

He is an example of a self-made man who rose to acclaim not through carefully curated public image, marketing, or corporate sponsorship, but as a Cluster Net phenomenon for his freely accessible, high-quality documentaries.

He collaborated with a corporation precisely once, when he partnered with Chinedu Okoro for an immersive cooking experience where he asked him to boil an egg.

Wanjiru Omondi

Wanjiru Omondi is the kind of reporter who keeps corporate lawyers up at night. A fearless investigative journalist for the Free Cluster Dispatch, she exposes corporate and state corruption across the Cluster.

Her work led to the dissolution of the Morellis Corporation after she uncovered violations of intercorporate law and safety regulations in the construction of its orbital habitats.

Minh Tran

Minh Tran is a renowned expert in Old Earth psychology and AI-mediated therapy. Her work has been integral to reviving lost practices and papers on gravity-related burnout, and has helped expose the unsustainable work practices of orbital populations.

Enrique Perez

Enrique Perez is a former Temple Diacon who sells medically mediated long-term hibernation as a bridge to eventual immortality and personalised digital afterlives.

His fortune rests on clients believing reliable revival technology will exist by the time they need it. Perez and his investors are currently asleep, which is one way to avoid answering difficult questions about the business model.

GOJI

GOJI, the Graphically Optimised Junction Interface, was the first AI celebrity. Over two hundred years, her career has produced music, movies, and a string of notably well-funded charities sustained by her unending tours.

She began as a Colloquy product, originally conceptualised as a promotional campaign for its X-Mind series of brain-computer interfaces. She served as mascot, visual assistant, and proof of concept.

She has taken on a life of her own, however, and has proven far more profitable than any product she was built to sell.