Life in the Maelstrom: The Floating Cities and Moon-Forges of Jupiter

Jupiter is not a home. Nobody who lives there would describe it that way. It is a workplace, a factory floor the size of a failed star, and the 15 to 20 million people scattered across its floating cities and moon colonies understand this with a clarity that citizens of the Core Worlds rarely achieve. You do not move to the Jovian system because you love it. You move there because you are good at something, and Jupiter pays well for competence.

The gas giant itself is a monster. Its magnetosphere floods the surrounding space with radiation that would kill an unshielded human in hours. Its atmosphere is a crushing ocean of hydrogen and helium, banded with storms that have been raging longer than human civilization has existed. The Great Red Spot alone could swallow Earth with room left over. And somewhere in all of this, floating in the thin upper layers where the pressure is merely dangerous rather than instantly lethal, humanity has built cities.