Barbiturose

Barbiturose, also known as the sleepy country, gained its name from the moon-wide addiction to Barbiturates. Originally, the settled moon, comprised almost entirely of ice, was near a perfectly normal sun, glowing a constant, normal, color. After interference from the New Sunni Techno-Saints, the sun began changing colors rapidly, causing the unfortunately high population of epileptics on the colony to begin having constant seizures. The solution to this was the usage of barbiturates on those with epilepsy, a part of the population that with each generation would grow, until it was every member of the colony.

The current barbiturate addicted colonists are slightly cognitively impaired by their constant usage of barbiturates from an early age. The population is famous for being extremely calm, sleepy, and depressed. A recent study I conducted showed that the suicide rate on Barbiturose was significantly higher than the baseline average across the galaxy. Despite all of their issues, the people of Barbiturose have several key features that keep them from fading into irrelevancy. Due to their high percentage of epileptics, their research on the brain and then neural networks is unmatched, not only being the first to discover the cures to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, but the first to discover how to implant human consciousness in machines, creating the first Think-Tanks. Despite this, the citizens and Think-Tanks themselves still have epilepsy, having never found a cure, still needing constant intake of barbiturates. Currently, 80% of the population of Barbiturose is comprised of Think-Tanks stored in massive interconnecting tunnels under the moon, with the remaining 20% remaining biological and living on the surface, relying completely on imports to survive on the ice-moon. Many of their imports come from the Altitudinarian Fragment, due to a formal agreement to research how to modify some of their brains with the intent of changing their minds' function, in return for several protections and materials (interestingly, excluding Barbiturates), allowing them to survive and build despite the barren wasteland upon which they live.

Written by Treith Merindao