Most undead are what happens when the Void refuses to let go—corpses locked to torn souls, kept moving by Rift-static and unholy code-rituals instead of heartbeat and breath.
Necro-fleets, corpse-harvesting guilds, and void cults treat them as both workforce and weapon: tireless guards on derelicts, shock troops in hard vacuum, and disposable bodies to throw into Rift storms where living lungs and sanity would shred in seconds.
The average spacer doesn’t see “a person with a medical condition”; they see a walking environmental hazard—void energy wrapped in meat, radiating bad luck and unlicensed theology.
Even when the undead retain their minds, like corpsefolk who remember their past lives, the smell of void-burn and the way lights flicker when they enter a room keep most stationers on edge.
Void Work and Salvage: Undead labor teams are ideal for cutting open irradiated hulks, patching hull breaches during storms, and walking naked through zones that would cook a living crew in minutes, since they ignore normal environmental diseases and poisons.
Shock Logistics and Black Labor: Some guilds quietly “employ” press-ganged undead as loaders, miners, and tunnel clearers—no air, no food, no hazard pay, just necromantic upkeep and void-channelers on call.
Esoteric Research Assets: Chronomancers, Rift physicists, and cult archivists use cooperative undead subjects to study long-term void exposure, soul fragmentation, and the boundary conditions of consciousness when the body is technically dead but still mobile.
Reliable undead technology and rituals have pushed certain frontier economies toward brutal efficiency: a colony can run a mine or refinery with almost no living workforce, at the moral cost of treating souls as replaceable infrastructure.
Religious blocs and civic authorities argue endlessly over whether undead should be recognized as citizens, weapons, or hazardous waste—especially in systems where corpsefolk and similar “walking dead” insist they’re still the same people they were before.
The existence of undead who break the usual “destroyed at 0 HP” rule (PC-facing options like corpsefolk) forces governments and guilds to codify two categories: expendable necro-assets and protected post-mortals with rights, insurance, and voting codes.
Black markets thrive on this ambiguity, selling “temporary citizenship waivers” and shady contracts that let megacorps work undead bodies to dust while claiming they’re just operating “disposable constructs.”
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