This is going to be hell....

... in a fun kind of way, but hell. You see, I had the idea(s) for Rogue Dreams back in 2010. The first version was some 5 pages of notes and 3-4 of story, stalling out when I had to pause the entire thing to find a calendar system to adapt to the setting. Because: novels, man. (Actually 'because novels' would be a handy explanation for many things.) I quickly realized what I had in mind was too much story for one novel and had too many things it focused on, so set it aside in the back of my head. The ideas continued to poke at me, and even try to convince me they'd work as science-fantasy by making the MC some kind of magician in a future-SF setting.

Ideas lie like that, desperate to come to life in one form or another.

So I began a new set of notes, grabbed some recent sciencey books (Physics of the Future, How It Ends, a book on quantum mechanics that's recent (as most of the books I'd read on it were 4+ years ago) and a couple of other odd titles)  and am, this time happily, running into issues of setting and research again.

For example: names. The world is an indeterminate amount of time in the future, after a war against AI that humanity both won and lost [no AI has been allowed to exist since the war, probably to the detriment of the society, in a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater] and there is one global government divided into 1000 city-states all linked together by one vast computer system. As such, there is one homogeneous culture with a single shared calendar (sexagesimal, meaning that there are six months, with six-day weeks and 60 days in each month, holidays between some of them) and language.

It also means that names are purely identity-numbers. 0 is a placeholder, with the first six numbers being a grid reference on the world map, the next six being what city-state one lived in and twelve after that being ones personal identity in that location. Additional numbers indicate city-state of birth, how often one has moved and the like; you meet someone, ping them through System, and get their basic data. As it is both  impractical and absurd to use such a system in actual conversation, everyone selects their own use-name at some point, or accepts one giving to them by parental/authority figures. As use-names can be changed and be jokes and so forth, they also allow people a sense of fun and spontaneity that their 'real' name does not allow.