Eisa is a rocky moon about the size of Mars which orbits a blue gas giant, Saerro, in the Algea star system, several hundred light years from Earth. Eisa is one of the few habitable bodies in the region, so much so that the area is generally called Eisa Sector. Most of Eisa's surface is underwater, and the planet is rich in a wide variety of indigenous autotrophs and heterotrophs, mostly immobile. A substantial number of these are bioluminescent; this phenomenon helps to facilitate and maintain highly commensal ecologies under extremely dense canopies, at night, and in caves, while at the same time shifting the wavelengths of incoming light to frequencies more useful to certain rhodopsins.

The moon was originally colonized by a Soviet expedition of fifty surveyors, engineers, and miners at the order of Yuri Andropov in 1984 to examine its potential for resource collection. The colony was essentially abandoned in 1992 by Yeltsin, and most of the colonists returned to Earth or Mars. The original survey ship, the Vakulinchuk (named after the lead actor in Battleship Potemkin), is sometimes mentioned in calls-to-arms by the few surviving colonists from the Soviet expedition and their descendants.

As with most narratives involving remote settlements by the Soviet Union, Eisa was not without hardship; of its fifteen or so sister colonies, none survived past a major gamma ray burst in 1990. A handful of refugees from these colonies (mostly in their support fleets) made it to Eisa, rarely bringing more resources than they needed to survive.

Through the 90s and early 00s, the so-called "old colonists" subsisted primarily on the agricultural economy they had built during the 80s, occasionally trading with passersby for other supplies. The colony remained in a perpetual economic depression, however, exaggerated by catastrophic flooding in 1997, leading many to retreat from the agrarian foothills surrounding the Eisa Colony settlement and instead grow their food in tightly-packed greenhouses. Starvation was rampant throughout the late 90s and early 00s, leading to a dramatic reduction in population from a peak of around 1200 people down to a tenth of that number.

Nanite Systems arrived in 2005, shortly after learning of Eisa, and began modernizing the mining infrastructure on the moon. At first the company was only interested in the planet for its mineral potential, but after the development of actual nanites in 2006, NS took a cue from its competitors on Earth, and focused on Eisa as a potential, permanent showroom for their Vision of Tomorrow, much in the same way that companies had done at events like the World's Fair for centuries. The economy was developed further; celebrities and businesses were invited to establish a presence in the small town of Eisa Colony which sat at the center of the mineral extraction effort, and "Nanite City" rapidly became a place of excitement, intrigue, and culture.

The presence of the company on the moon was not without tension. The Violet Sky Organization was formed shortly after NS's arrival, staging protests against the company and recruiting sympathizers among the moon's new upper class. In 2007, NS successfully lobbied the United States to recognize Eisa as an unorganized incorporated territory, a strategy which many corporations (including NS) had applied on other worlds as a means of ensuring government support in the event of invasion. Additionally such an arrangement generally pacifies colonists by providing them with constitutional rights, but allows the company to administer its new territory as it sees fit. As part of the Eisa Incorporation Act of 2007, the colonists of Eisa legally became US citizens, and thus protected by the United States Constitution against abuse and exploitation. This sparked Eisa's first outright rebellion, as the hundred or so Russian adults attacked the settlement, an event known as the September Riot.

The September Riot resulted in heavy casualties on both sides. Scores of mining engineers, vacationers, and settlers were killed, reducing the colony's Russian-speaking population to fewer than two dozen adults. Security Division police were unprepared to deal with the attack, having grossly underestimated the level of unrest among the settlers. When reinforcements finally arrived a month and a half later, the settlers staged another rebellion, this time utilizing the thousands of commercial and industrial robots already on the colony. Martial law was imposed after the October Riot (collectively known as the Incorporation Riots of 2007), which drove the Russian resistance underground; today it is known as the Violet Sky Underground Organization, and is mostly responsible for acts of civil disobedience and the occasional bomb plot.

With the official 2015 relaunch of the company's Consumer Products Division, the corporation has found itself in a position to truly make good on its vision of a utopian future by hastily relocating the division's headquarters from New York on Earth to Eisa. The challenges now facing the division's staff are enormous, as they have been effectively put in charge of a city desperately in need of economic relief and social reform without the faintest clue of how to do it—all while meeting profit quotas, maintaining product development, and navigating their own lives.

This is to say little of the Eisan people themselves: divided largely along class lines, they have been simmering under the pressure of their stratifications for nearly a decade. The underclass, consisting of a hodgepodge of miners, interns, low-ranking employees, Soviet-era colonists, and abandoned robots struggles against the upper class of celebrities, well-compensated employees, wealthy business owners, and their well-cared-for robots, while a marginal middle class, consisting primarily of merchants who are not aligned with NS's interests, floats liminally between them. On some days it may seem that Eisa is the New Utopia it claims to be, but beneath the surface, trouble brews.