Four delegations sat down on Mars this week to carve up gate routes nobody owned a decade ago. Three signed. The Jovian moons did not. A Ganymede attaché was heard to remark, on his way to the airlock, that you cannot divide a road that still kills the people who use it.
Mars is acting like the center of something. It can afford to. It has the lights, the relay, and most of the survivors who still have money. The rest of the system is invited to catch up, or to keep paying tolls.
The provisional council met under a roof that has been patched four times. The motion passed. There was no one to vote against it, which the chair noted, and then moved on.
One point five billion of us are still down here, under a sky that has not stopped falling in four years. The colonies call us a backwater. We call it home, mostly because the word for what it actually is has not been invented yet.
One week into circulation and the system's new currency has not collapsed, which in 2026 passes for a triumph. It settled near 100 to the old American dollar — roughly a cent apiece — and twitched there all week, because the thing is brand new and nobody's sure what it's worth from one hour to the next.
The syndicates noticed. They always notice. Use the converter while the number means something. By next week it may not.
Until this week, every vehicle on Mars arrived in a crate from somewhere else. On Tuesday a Tharsis assembly line — three years of borrowed tooling and stubbornness — rolled out its first homegrown mono-wheel, and Gina Motors became the first thing the frontier has built for itself instead of imported. It is ugly. It runs. Out here that is the whole review.
Pippu Cola bought the side panel before the paint dried. The drink is in every dome, every gate lounge, every relief crate; its founders understood early that on a planet with nothing, the company that sells you the small comfort wins. HexaChess, the puzzle outfit whose game has quietly eaten everyone's idle hours, says it'll license the dashboard next.
None of these names existed five years ago. That's the story of the section: in a system rebuilding from zero, the businesses being born now are the ones your grandchildren will think were always here.
The Ganymede gate is open again at half flow. Officials call it stable. Officials called the first one stable too, in 2022, and we are still sweeping up the moon.
Travelers are reminded that the bank scans at the gate are, for the third quarter running, "under review" following unexplained withdrawals from transit accounts. Carry cash. Carry less of it.
REWARD: ₩ 8,000,000
REWARD: ₩ 4,500,000
REWARD: ₩ 11,000,000
She works the night shift keeping the Mars relay's coolant lines from freezing — the same relay that lets you read this. Between rounds, on a terminal older than she is, Mara Okonkwo taught herself to write a HexaChess engine. This week it beat forty veterans and a syndicate-backed favorite to take the inaugural Open. Asked for her strategy she said she didn't have one, she just had a lot of quiet nights.
Elsewhere: Tomas Reyes walked forty kilometers of newly drained Ganymede shelf and came back with a hand-drawn map nobody asked for, which the floating cities are now using to plan their next ring. And Antonio, Carlos and Jobim — yes, them again — entered the Alba City domino league as a team, lost in the first round, and left insisting they had personally built the table. The table, for the record, predates all three. Probably.
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Map is a built-in SVG so impacts plot on real coordinates with no external asset. Swap in any licensed map raster on deploy if you want photographic terrain.
Bell Peppers and Beef — the Official Special
- 4 green bell peppers, sliced thin
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 thumb ginger, minced
- 2 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tbsp oyster sauce
- 1 tsp sugar · a pinch of pepper
- oil for the wok
- beef, thin-sliced — if you caught a bounty this week
- more bell peppers
- a tin of whatever's in the locker
- your dignity (optional)
- the line "it's a lighter take"
- Get the wok smoking hot. This dish forgives nothing and rewards heat.
- If you have beef, sear it fast and set it aside. Try not to mention what it cost.
- Garlic and ginger into the hot oil — ten seconds, no more.
- Peppers in. Toss hard and keep them bright; limp peppers are a confession of defeat.
- Soy, oyster sauce, sugar, pepper. Return the beef, if it ever existed.
- Plate it like you meant it to be all peppers. Out here, conviction is half the meal.
Mini Guide — Growing Shiitake & Tomatoes in Space
Shiitake. They don't want light, which makes them the easiest thing to grow in a place that hasn't any to spare.
- Start with a hardwood block or sawdust brick already inoculated with shiitake spawn. Soak it 24 hours in clean water.
- Keep it cool and humid — a sealed crate with a damp cloth holds the air. Low light is fine; darkness is fine.
- In one to two weeks, pins appear. Mist daily. Don't drown them.
- Harvest by twisting, not cutting. Rest the block two weeks back in water and it fruits again. A good block feeds a crew for months.
Tomatoes. The opposite problem: greedy for light, and worth every watt.
- Pick a dwarf or "micro" variety — they fruit in small spaces and don't fight the ceiling.
- Grow in a bucket of inert medium fed with nutrient water (hydroponic is cleanest where soil is precious). Roots still need oxygen, so never leave them waterlogged.
- Give them the brightest light you've got, 14–16 hours a day. A cheap grow lamp beats a porthole.
- In zero-g there are no bees, so airflow does the pollinating — run a small fan, or flick each flower daily. No buzz, no fruit.
- Six to ten weeks to red. The first ripe one is traditionally eaten standing over the sink, alone, saying nothing.
The Weekly Woolong is a work of collaboration between human editors and AI. The world, the voice, and the rules are written by people; the weekly news, the images, and the running storylines are generated by AI agents working inside those rules. We do this for one reason: AI is the only way we found to keep an entire fictional solar system alive, in-character, every single week, without the vibe ever slipping. The atmosphere is the point, and this is how we hold it.
We won't pretend this is uncontroversial. For a lot of people — artists especially — AI is a genuinely fraught subject, and we don't think that concern is silly. So we'll be plain about it: we use AI here exclusively as an atmospheric instrument for a fan-made, non-commercial work of fiction, not as a replacement for the human artists we're actively paying through our Artistic Bounties. If you make things, we'd rather hire you. The email is on the front page.
The honest environmental cost of AI is mostly water and power — data centers drink a surprising amount of both. A paper obsessed with a half-dead Earth would be hypocritical to ignore that, so here's exactly what we do about it:
- ▸ We choose water-conscious AI providers. Where there's a choice, we opt for companies with water-conservation commitments and efficient cooling.
- ▸ We host as lean as possible. The site is a static page on efficient infrastructure — there's no heavy server running around the clock to serve it.
- ▸ We generate once a week, not constantly. One batch of writing and images per issue. No always-on inference.
- ▸ We cap it on purpose. We keep the weekly reader cap under 500, which keeps the whole footprint small by design.
Our target, all in: under 5 liters of water a year for the entire project. Roughly a couple of bottles. We'll keep that number honest, and if it ever creeps, we'll say so here.
— The editors. Earth-produced, Mars-relayed, water budget watched.