The Duncanites are a loose affiliation of libertarian, nanarchist, and transhumanist outposts in the Main Belt and Trojans, centered on Silas Duncan Station and Freehaven, with settlements and outposts on Callisto, Europa, and even the Kuiper Belt. Cloning, exogenesis, and immigration have swollen the ranks of the original handful of settlers to several thousand people, scattered across more than 40 asteroid settlements. The Duncanites represent the most widely dispersed human culture in history.
Duncanites support themselves through subsistence asteroid mining, comet herding, and human genetic engineering. Duncanite society is based around free-market transactions: the exchange of goods, currency, information, or services without any form of coercion. There are no fundamental laws and no fundamental rights. There are no governments, which Duncanites define as bodies that enforce laws without prior consent and possess ultimate authority over the people. In the Duncanite colonies, corporations or extended families carry out most of the functions of government bureaucracies.
These are Duncanites ideologically committed to pantropic colonization and morphological freedom, including those who founded Avatar Klusterkorp and the sponsors of the Europa Project. The major Green Duncanite settlement is Silas Duncan Station, on Ceres, but there are outposts scattered throough the Main Belt, including a base on Europa.
The Duncanites who settled the Trojans are known as 'Red Duncanites', named after the spectrum of the dark, carbonaceous asteroids there. Their main settlements are Liang Mountain and Freehaven.
They are nicknamed the 'Trojan Mafia' due to their willingness to flout international conventions, acting as a clearing house for illicit and gray-market technologies, mostly in the form of software blueprints. Their customers, who often communicate through quantum-encrypted laser channels, include eccentric private citizens, survivalist enclaves, shady corporations, Green Duncanites, criminals such as the Martian Triads, and even some Earth governments. Red Duncanite asteroids can be good places to buy regulated materials such as tritium and antimatter, but they are mainly data havens and banks. In addition to virtual cash and proprietary information, they are said to have backups of celebrity xoxes, orphaned sapient AIs, and emergent intelligences.
China accuses the Trojan Mafia of supplying terrorist groups such as Negative Growth with nuclear materials and other technologies. Recently, China launched punitive strikes against Liang Mountain, killing several people and inflicting millions of dollars in damage. The Red Duncanites have since upgrade defenses and dispersed their facilities over more asteroids. A number of private security operations, known as privateers, have attempted to collect compensation from Chinese facilities in the Main Belt.
A splinter faction of the Duncanites, the Gypsy Angels have a nanarchist society based around a few dozen collectively run spacecraft. They operate freighters (some carved out of ice asteroids) that tie together many of the dispersed asteroid stations. They have business associations with both Xiao Chu and Exogenesis, and may be assisting rogue Exogenesis elements. Unlike the Red Duncanites, they have friendly relations with Rust China, which hires them to send Kuiper Belt Objects towards Mars.
A few Gypsy Angel craft have a reputation on Earth and Saturn as space pirates and smugglers, dating to their activity as the 'Pirates of Hyperion' back in the 2080s. Their reputation is more positive on Rust China, where they were praised as heroes for bringing He-3 fuel to Mars despite the U.S. embargo. Some Gypsy Angels have reportedly sent missions into the Oort Cloud.