No, they’re all just people. [coreverse] has technology advanced enough to facilitate altering your body in extreme ways in an easy and (relatively) painless manner.
Most people have some degree of modification - almost everyone has a neural interface, and most people have extra substance glands. However, modding can get extreme fast. Here’s some ways to go about changing your entire body!

1-Bodyswap. You can simply “move in” to a new body, in whatever form you decide, be it synth, biosynth, or even fully bio. You should keep in mind that you will have let your brain re-learn where all the inputs and outputs are, and this process becomes exponentially difficult when your new body has a drastically different form. Certain drugs can help, but you can’t skip this process!

2-Gradual Internal Transformation. Your neural interface will coordinate all your chemical glands (and nanobots, if necessary) to slowly change your body from the inside. This process is similar to HRT, but more extreme, and comes with a lot of uncomfortable stages and sensations. However, your brain will be adjusting as your body grows, so learning to move your new body won’t be as bad as a full bodyswap.

All sorts of places, but mostly on Rings.
A Ring is a megastructure that uses up the entirety of the goldilocks zone of a star by encircling it. It is about as “tall” as three earths stacked on top of eachother. There’s around 100 of them and each one houses about 50 trillion people. Here’s some fun Ring facts:

All the living space on a ring occupies about a third of its surface area, with both dense and sparse population centres. The rest is devoted to “natural” land and specialised activities that demand a lot of space, such as full-immersion roleplay gameworlds and large real-life wargames.

Rings are ran by a central Intelligence Complex, who has millions or even billions of semi-autonomous avatars that live amongst the humans of the Ring.
Ring construction is a collaborative project, with many designers tackling individual sections. A good ring must have a balance of section types, to maximise local happiness and diversity, but most end up very slightly favouring one of the four pillars (creation, competition, indulgence, growth) over the others, leading to slight cultural differences between rings. Immigration is promoted to keep stagnation at bay.

How does it function with them, am I right? But seriously:

Everything is automated. There’s sophisticated systems smart enough to take care of all of society's needs by themselves, with minimal oversight.
Energy is free and abundant in the form of hyperspatial tension, and autoprinters print most objects, including foodstuffs, at incredible speeds and on demand.
All citizens are used to a life only achievable by the kings of yore or billionaires. Anything that money could buy (while it existed) is theirs on a whim. This leaves time for the important things in life - like art, or sports, or fucking.

Noone and noone. It turns out, when everyone has their needs met, crime just isn’t a systemic problem. It’s true that you can’t regulate assholery out of existence, but after you remove poverty, misery, and the mental illness these cause from the equation, it’s actually quite easy to societally deal with the occasional asshole.
Besides that, it’s become a lot harder to kill or even harm another. Your neural interface can make you immune to pain, and no injury but total and complete obliteration is above contemporary medicine. Plus, almost everyone keeps backups of their minds just in case.

But isn’t violence and conflict a fundamental part of humanity?
It is, and it is embraced in a consensual way. There are plenty of unbelievably violent sports and death games around. Even full-scale artificial wars, if you really want to wade knee-deep in human misery! You can always be revived after, unless you decide not to.

Whatever they feel like. But let’s be a bit more analytical here.
With work out of the picture, the human experience can be abstractly represented by four pillars:

1-CREATION contains arts, crafts, and any activity that ends when something new now exists.

2-COMPETITION contains games, sports, and any activity where you prove you are better than another, often through strife and/or violence.

3-INDULGENCE contains sex, parties, socialising, drugs, sleeping, eating, strolling, and any other non-creative activity that produces intoxicating feelings.

4-GROWTH contains education, working out, introspection, and anything that invites positive internal change.

People tend to have a balanced “diet” of these, but some lean on certain pillars more than others. For example, you could be someone who creates and maintains old-world radio antennae using traditional power tools, plays beach volleyball competitively, lives on a mediaeval fantasy gameworld as an evil vassal knight on the off-season, and is also currently working on a master’s dissertation on the specifics of metamatter found on hyperspatial summits.

No! Besides the (meta)humans, there’s also Vessels.
You can think of Vessels as sentient machines, for a start, but they are a bit more complicated than that.
They come in all forms and sizes, have very long and often silly names, and as a rule are many many many many orders of magnitude smarter than a human, due to not abiding to the limitations of a biological brain. As such, Vessels (unofficially, of course) “run” society, but they are still considered regular citizens just like every human.
Here’s some very common forms that Vessels take, to get you up to speed:
-Drones. Vessels in this category are from a few millimetres to around 2 metres. They lead lives very similar to that of ordinary humans, and their “shell” can take many shapes, from humanoid to completely abstract.
-Ships. Vessels in this category are measured from a few metres to a few kilometres, and often have internal spaces meant for human habitation. Their bodyplan usually facilitates very fast transport. Vessels as big as ships will often have human-scale avatars to more effectively interact with humans.
-Rings. Rings are the worlds that humans live on, and they do count as vessels! You can think of them like particularly large ships. The Vessel that runs the Ring will typically have a few million avatars, and they are some of the smartest minds theoretically possible.

Before you ask - there are aliens. But they won’t come up until later, and they haven’t shown interest in integration with [coreverse] just yet.

Yep! Full-immersion gameworlds are very big in [coreverse].
They offer a variety of themes, levels of immersion, and game mechanics. They are usually ran by a Vessel gamemaster, who uses their avatars as NPC's. Here's some example gameworlds:

-In Belphezarr's Light Fantasy world, you can immerse yourself at your pace into a "generic" feudal fantasy land. The setting is very relaxed, allowing guests to mingle with players, and there's a few general nonviolence clauses in place. It's very touristy as a result. This is where the priestling character hangs out!

-SUPERCLEAN MARKETFORCE is a "clean corporate" themed world, based on a "sleek and glittery" version capitalist society. It's not historically accurate, but the immersion is kept relatively tight; visitors are allowed, but you have to get a pass, and you will be treated as "foreign delegation" by the roleplayers. Expect brilliant glass towers, clean corporate branding everywhere, and to work in an office 9-5.

[coreverse] has no flag, no unifying government, and no religion. That being said, there are a few concepts that act as umbrella beliefs for most of the populace.
1-Consent. Nothing can be demanded of another, and nothing can be imposed on another. Society should work to maximise the ability of each person to do Whatever the Hell they Want.
2-Hedonism. It is your right as a sapient being to do what you feel like, and philosophic stances of the “self controlling” variety were born in societies where only doing what you wanted was a generally bad move.
3-Rationality. To truly know what you want, you should have all the facts. Education is a huge part of [coreverse] citizens, and it's a process that never ends.

Some would argue that it started violently. Certainly, the overthrowing of 2nd millennium capitalism was an extremely violent affair, but arguably that was merely the conception of [coreverse], rather than its birth.
The systems that came after capitalism, although leagues and bounds better than capitalism itself, were still bound by philosophical and practical limitations. Order had to be maintained, technology needed to be developed, and work still had to be done. The birth of coreverse from this background was much smoother - there was no violent revolution, simply the inevitable dissolving of social hierarchies as automation finally eliminated work for good.

Functionally, yes. Death is not exempt from individual consent. However, there’s a few variables we need to keep track of when it comes to dying.
Most people choose to “die” at around 600 years old. This is because your brain, even augmented, only has capacity for a bit less than 600 years worth of memories. Then, events start getting overwritten, and you start living in a sort of haze, where you cannot remember large chunks of life.

But can’t you just store memories externally, like on the Net?
You can, but it’s not the same as them being in your head. They will not feel like real, internal memories - you will have to re-remember them by playing them back, and forgetting something else in the process, if you are full already!

So people just die when they reach 600?
Not quite. If you decide it's time to kick the old bucket, there’s a lot of options.
The most common is autoeuthanizing. You die and that’s it. Plain and simple. But let’s take a look at some spicier options:

1-Go into storage. You will be placed into a death-like sleep and stored (either digitally or while preserving your biological body, your choice). You will be awoken at a time of your choosing, as per the instructions you leave behind. Most people who do this do it to experience a unique event, and then are either put back into storage for the next Big Event or autoeuthanize.

2-Regenerate. You get to keep a part of your "personality"- your Core Identity Algorithm. All of your other memories are shed, and you start anew.
You can be given a new body, or you can choose to start from a foetal state, but this is not necessary.
You will not remember your past life - but you CAN leave recorded memories behind for your new self to sift through.
This is, indeed, very much a kind of death, but it's a fuzzy enough area that people uncomfortable with the subject choose this.

3-Ascend. Your mind will be scanned at the moment of “ascension” and left to run inside an Intelligence Complex substrate. IC substrates are far too vast for the human mind to effectively habitate, so you will “dissipate” inside it.
From the reverb of your mind, a new consciousness will be kickstarted - one big enough to actually fill the grand space of the substrate. A new IC, who is -purely theoretically- you!
You can do this process with friends who also choose to ascend, and the IC is then considered a “meld” of all of you.
Mathematically speaking, it's still just death. The substrate is simply too big to maintain your pattern. But there’s enough of a gap in the mathematical proofs that people like the idea, despite it being a little mystical.

It’s basically a very smart computer that lives in your head. You are typically given a neural when you are a child, because children’s brains can very easily naturally adapt to using the interface, and it grows with you, learning as much from you as you do from it.

But what does it actually do?
What doesn’t it do? It can do everything that a very advanced future-smartphone could do, but better and faster. It can connect to the Net, talk to other neurals, show you mediatypes, allow you to control all your internal organ parameters (very useful if you have extra specialised organs!), record memories and share them, it can even regulate or heighten emotion and sensation… It’s the maestro of your body’s orchestra!

Yes, actually! Simulations are advanced enough to fool any human into believing they are entirely real, although all simulations come with a permanent warning to your neural that you are, in fact, in a fake scenario.
There are, at any time, about as many people living inside simulations as people living outside them. Many choose to live inside sims to pursue scenarios and lifestyles too fantastical or too impractical for real life to accommodate, but people generally come and go. Despite the ease of access to lifelike sims, people still like to know they are actually a part of the real, whatever that might mean.

Banish the thought, reader! All the text is translated from the Tongue.
The Tongue is perhaps the only thing that ties every citizen of [coreverse] together. It is a constructed language based on no-frills, no-buts utilitarianism at its core, with a focus on ease of modification. Importantly, it does away with gendered pronouns, honorifics, and titles (at least in its base form).
Its design is modular, so that the user may “bolt on” modes with specialisations on different aspects of life, culture, and language. These modes can be as hard to learn as an entirely separate language, since not all are made with ease of use in mind, and you could devote years of your life to mastering just one.

Vessels are very optimised machines, to the point where despite the dizzying complexity of their totality, they can be broken down to a few very simple components. These are the Intelligence Complex, the Manipulators, the Frame Shrinkage Engine, and the Hulls. Here’s a bit more about them!

-Intelligence Complex (IC): This is the brain of the vessel. There’s lots of details and specifications about specific kinds of 4D substrates used to run IC’s, or about the substrate mass-cpu speed curves, but we won’t go over that here. It’s important to know that the more mass you dedicate to the IC substrate, the faster it will run (with diminishing returns). An IC substrate that weighs about 10 kilos is hundreds of billions of times faster than a human brain.

-Manipulators: Also known as Effectors, they are the “arms and legs” of the vessel. You can think of them as working a bit like telekinesis. They can manipulate the fundamental fields of the universe, creating forces, light, and particles from great distances. The vessel uses its manipulators to move itself through space, to move other objects around, to attack physically OR electronically, to defend likewise, and to do pretty much anything. Manipulators get stronger the more mass you dedicate to them , just like the IC, but they can be delicate enough to individually affect the electrons in a human neuron, forceful enough to literally crack stars open, and they can work at FTL speeds over distances of many light years.

-Frame Shrinkage Engine (FSE): These engines harness the higher lightspeed of hyperspace to create infinite energy loops that are used to power the entirety of [coreverse]. They do require a trivial amount of antimatter & metamatter fuel to get started, but once they are going they never stop except for maintenance. The energy they harness isn’t free, of course - FSE’s are contributing to the accelerated slackening of hyperspatial tension, and as such the increase in cataclysmic dichotomisis events throughout the multiverse. I get more into how this works in my paper on hyperspace!

-Hulls: They are entirely optional for vessels. All of the internal components are mainly held together by fields produced by the manipulators, so the hull is only necessary for self expression. Vessels wear their hulls in two layers:

The outer layer is the visual field envelope. It is basically a hologram that encompasses all or most of the vessel, and it can have any form the vessel desires. Humanoid forms are common for smaller vessels with no avatars, but outer hulls can range from beautiful animated lights, to grotesque and absurd scenes, to esoteric and bizarre higher-mathematics inside jokes.
The inner layer is the plastic hull. It is the naked “skin” of the ship, and it is usually formed in such a way as to imply where each component is located underneath.

Lastly, you may have notice that Vessels choose long, fancy sentences for their names. The name is supposed to reflect the inner personality of the Vessel, and it is usually preceded by a short series of letters denoting the Vessel's size, class, etc. Here's some example names (without their designation, as i'm still working on those):

-Crash Land for Fun and Profit
-Dangerous, Consensually
-Exactly What Gets Them Off And Nothing Less
-There Will Never Be A Better Time To Be Alive Than Now
-Fuck You, Dude
-God is Whoever has the Biggest Gun
-Doggy Kisser 9000

Hyperspace is a fourth, hidden spatial dimension, with slightly different rules than the regular three. It allows for a plethora of things, including most contemporary tech and FTL travel. To learn more about it, go to the paper I wrote on it.

While the line has gotten pretty blurry lately, this is a taxonomical issue, and those are generally held in low esteem. Just be what you are!

However, I’ll still try to answer this question. The common consensus about “default” humanity is certainly not limited by form - Humans are more than their bodyplan. So what is it that makes humans? Arguably, it’s certain cerebral limitations. The human brain’s software is built with a specific, relatively rigid architecture in mind, and it can’t respond to stimuli outside those limitations, unless it undergoes total consciousness restart. Here’s some example of human limitations:

-How many colours there are. Even if you expand your eyes’ ability to see a vaster area of the light spectrum, your current red-to-violet rainbow will simply expand to cover the new, larger area. This means that areas that once were in the infrared will be red and areas that once were in the ultraviolet will be violet - and it further implies that the visual light spectrum will now be slightly scrambled, as the old positions of each colour no longer match up. Blues will become greens and reds will become oranges and yellows, etc.

-How many dimensions you can visualise. Humans can very easily visualise 3D volumes and anything below that, but visualising 4D hyperspaces simply isn’t possible without heavy abstraction and lots of mental shortcuts.

It’s a bit like the internet today, but entirely freeform. Allow me to explain:

Unlike today’s internet, the Net itself possesses a not insignificant amount of intelligence. It doesn’t require the user to upload their data to a specific platform or site - everyone simply dumps their raw data into the ocean of the Net, and when they need to see it again, they simply rely on their neural’s butler algorithm to represent it in whatever way they ask for.

For example - if I wanted to see funny videos of people falling over, I could ask my neural to show me thumbnails ranked by views, to show me an auto scrolling tik tok-like feed, to project them to my focus or a book for me to leaf through, or to show me user-curated late 90’s html fail video galleries made by real people.

In short: All the data is in one big soup, and your neural’s butler algo works with the Net to show you exactly what you want and exactly how you want it.

In short, yes - but they are all VERY far away.

FSE’s work by releasing the energy stored in hyperspatial tension. It is a safe assumption that most galactic and above level civilizations will use FSE’s to power their technology.
However, as FSE’s accelerate the natural slackening of hyperspace, it is possible to figure out how many FSE’s are out there by looking at the velocity deviation between theoretical and actual loss of hyperspatial tension - and after we did the math, it turns out there’s a lot more than just us burning up hyperspace for energy.

The math would imply there’s around 16000 [coreverse]s worth of FSE’s out in the multiverse. Sapient life that manages to spread to their galactic neighbourhood is, it would seem, unbelievably rare. Given the current number of universes, this number implies there’s around 12 civs *per universe*, even accounting for the universes that underwent cataclysmic harmonic dichotomisis within the last few tens of millions of years (which would presumably be a pretty big filter for any aspiring civs out there).
That means that with 12 trillion galaxies available, only about 12 have [coreverse] level civs in them. Civilization is literally one in a trillion!

Making *real* contact with aliens is serious work. So far, we have exchanged HELLO’s and established communication protocols with exactly 2 civs, only one of which was close enough to physically reach in a timely manner. These close neighbours call themselves (translated) “The Grand and Ever-Dutiful Hegemony of God, Who’s Name Shines Like the Early Dawn After a Night of Storm”. More on them later.

Yes. There have been a number of small-scale internal conflicts, especially towards the birth of [coreverse].

The latest of these is still ongoing. The philosophical conflicts around the Many Worlds Blackbox, a (then theoretical, now real) cutting-edge simulative substrate used to run near-infinite full-universe simulations, have resulted in at least one hundred mind-deaths, most of which were Vessels.

As for war, [coreverse] is at open war with the Hegemony of God. So much for meeting new neighbours. The War in Heaven (as it has been dubbed by the Hegemony, who love to make things grandiose) is a big subject, unfit for this QnA. I will detail it elsewhere.

The Grand and Ever-Dutiful Hegemony of God, Who’s Name Shines Like the Early Dawn After a Night of Storm, or Godhedge for short (they hate that name) are our closest alien neighbours.

Detailing everything about a brand-new, completely alien race is beyond the scope of this QnA, but here’s the low-down on the Hegemony.
They are similar enough to mammals in terms of thinking, which means that they have similar enough social structures to use human terms for comparison.

That being said - they are a self-described fascist theocracy.

Upon first contact, this shocked the citizens of [coreverse]. Having no other frame of reference, it was assumed that it was impossible to maintain the many social myths required to have any stable hierarchy, never mind a fascist theocracy, once you got to the point of real post-scarcity. And yet, here was the Hegemony - a power comparable to [coreverse], if not stronger, with such a thing as a leader, a God, and, of course - jobs for everyone!

The way their society is set up to self-reinforce such things, with no input from any thinking individuals, earned it the name “The Misery Machine” amongst individuals of [coreverse]. It is important to note that this name wasn’t some sort of anthropocentric folly - Through many delegations, conflicts, and a very good amount of spying, it was made clear that the average citizen of the Hegemony led a life absolutely drowned in drudgery, misinformation, and casual violence, that they personally despised.

The Hegemony reacted, likewise, with revulsion and scorn when they first met [coreverse]. They enforced strict moral bans on several perfectly normal behaviours to delegations from [coreverse], and after a short few years of back and forths, declared them a degenerate enemy of god and cut all diplomatic ties.

The Hegemony didn’t initially attempt to instigate open war, instead opting to withdraw. War on the open plains of space is something very hard to justify - In order to be a combatant worth considering, you probably already have infinite energy and resources, so war must be waged on a philosophical basis.
While the Hegemony could certainly find reasons to start an offensive, it was deemed a risk of societal collapse.
However, [coreverse] couldn’t in good conscience sit on its ass while beings out there suffered. Through direct action, such as societal sabotage, breaking information embargos, and some good-old political assassination, [coreverse] could oversee a smooth collapse of the Misery Machine (interventionism is to this day a highly controversial decision, and some argue it makes [coreverse] no better than another hegemony).

Predictably, this forced the Hegemony’s hand. Now, the only way to avoid societal collapse for them is to go on the offensive and exterminate [coreverse] for good, and to do it fast.

The Hegemony of God is a tower of cards - all good, as long as you keep the windows closed…