Steves

Steves are biological human bodies implanted with neural weave to turn them into parts of Steve. While they can be of any genetic origin, most are of Gotzer, Natopian or Straylighter stock. They can be argued to form an ethnicity, with membership dependent entirely on being implanted; they also have a culture, in the sense of Steve's personality itself being the shared norms and social behaviors of the Steves, although the term "Steve culture" generally in fact refers to the culture of the Visitor minority living in Steve, which is a syncretistic mainly Storish-Straylighter mixture strongly influenced by Steve himself.

All known Steves live in the nation of Steve. No reliably confirmed sighting of a Steve more than thirty kilometers beyond the nation's borders has ever been made. Whether this is a fundamental limitation, or a technical one that may be overcome with time, is unknown.

Capabilities

Being parts of a superhuman machine intelligence, Steves have correspondingly superhuman mental capabilities. Regardless of body, Steve speaks every extant language on Micras fluently, is adept (though not necessarily trained in any particular body) in every sport and in general most known forms of trainable physical activity, has professorial-level knowledge in most fields of science as well as professional knowledge in most lines of business, and, of course, has thousands of millennia worth of human experience to draw general insight from. He is also capable of fluently drawing inferences, solving puzzles, spotting inconsistencies, etc. at a superhuman level, and his mental capabilities can't meaningfully be measured with an IQ test due to the lack of any reasonably similar population to calibrate such a test against.

Steve also has an apparently unlimited memory for people and social interactions. Every Steve remembers every conversation had with anyone by any Steve. He will generally make some effort to maintain a single body for each social relationship where it's easy for him, but not beyond. For instance, Steve diplomats - who spend most of their time in teleconferences anyway - will generally be used continuously for one relation, while a visitor who moves around a lot in the nation may find themselves interacting with dozens of Steve bodies regularly, smoothly resuming conversations from one body to another.

How all of this knowledge is organized internally is not known. While it's been observed that Steve has a tendency to go off on tangents in conversations, all of these skills and knowledge seem to always be immediately available to every Steve at any time.

Population

The population of Steves is one.

For some purposes, it is useful to count the number of bodies controlled by Steve. Steve himself is not forthcoming with this information. The Visitor State Steve census records a 95% confidence that the population lies between 600,000 and 1,900,000. Reasons for this measurement being uncertain and challenging to make include:

• The constant population movements and rebuilding of cities, making it impossible to perform any accurate census over a longer period of time than a few weeks
• Occasional closures of certain cities to all outsiders
• Potential for parts of the population being kept hidden and inactive
• The recency of Steve's arising from unorganized lands in the Green