It's an alternate terminology thing. Any personal vehicle is called a horse, even if it doesn't actually involve the animal at all.
I think that the idea is that anything that moves is a horse? Like, speeder bikes and bicycles are horses, and tractors that tow trailers and carriages are also horses, so I think that a car would be a four-seat wheeled horse?
It's probably really hard to quantify, and not a terribly useful number. Space in this universe is absolutely lousy with habitable planets, or planets which can be made habitable easily. Some families can straight up afford to terraform their own planets. The Concert incredibly widespread in very tiny pockets, able to pick and choose what resources they exploit from infinite possibilities, though not all the civilizations within it do the British estate planet or American homesteading thing, and I bet a lot of them concentrate more of their human population in cities so like... hard to tell beyond simply pointing to population figures, which likely puts the biggest more-or-less unified states as the Qing, the Indian confederation, the German Confederation, Russia, Japan, and the Ottomans in rough order.
Not so much? At this point, the technology behind the Concert forms a giant invisible infrastructure somewhat distant from the interactions of regular people. The age of enormous, revolutionary changes in technology which rapidly shifts conceptions of the possible is somewhat on hold for the moment: technology is advancing steadily but its mostly refinements and improvements on existing capabilities rather than enormous leaps.
The United States is something I'll get into later, but the situation there is pretty wild and very much the farthest outlier in the Concert regarding the relationship between humans and machines, as Bea alluded to in Farthest Reaches.
The Russian Empire exists and is Large, while Austria and other German-speaking states under Habsburg control are today part of the nebulous German Confederation, which contains 39 of the 40 German states. Prussia left and there's a missing star on the flag because of it in the ultimate passive-aggressive guilt trip.
There is one machine type that isn't made much anymore! For a while, sailor machines were incredibly common, and some cheeky fellow named them Jack Tar after the common nickname for British sailors. Well, sea trade isn't a huge thing anymore. The line was modified for space travel, from which we get our William Stars. Some of the old sailors crew spaceships now, some find niche work where boats are used, and some maintain some of the old ships that still crisscross Earth's oceans as part of its tourist trap slash museum planet vibe.
Spoilers!
So there's really two levels of 'job' in the Concert for machines, and that will be a huge thing this book is going to explore. But in short, there's the 'official' jobs which have machines For Them, and the periphery jobs which are filled in by whatever type of machine feels inclined.
Books, music, and the theatre are the big ones. There's theatre recordings as a form of media but it really is just a recording of a play, not a movie. Theatre is one of those periphery industries consisting of a mix of human and machine actors and is probably the part of British culture specifically where the two are in closest contact as peers... which means that actors are followed everywhere with salacious rumours.
Okay, you know how for five minutes cars were horseless carriages?
It is a good image, yeah! Test pilots for processors: "Woooo, literally all I want to do right now is sit down and think about the color blue, I know we were going for a more philosophical-artsy type but this is a bit much"
If the British Empire kept most of its colonies and they're still not on that list and Machines originated in British space, wow, those other places must have really gone nuts on the population.
Does this mean that, for a very very short time, machines had horses inside each of their joints? Or was this convention, defining the engine as the "horse", specific to passenger/cargo vehicles with integrated horses?
I think you mean the Prussian Space Army is in existence with its own space empire.
It's my understanding that here "horse" refers to anything with a single operator, typically with an open cab. If you ride on it rather than in it, it is a horse.
...
But- but- the transhumanism (and transmachinism)! 😭😭😭
Remember, the point of departure for this timeline is roughly 1830.
"It's not that we're against transhumanism. It's that we're all going there together, roped together for safety and checking each handhold and trail marker on the way."
Boo! There's no way that safety checks would approve even half of the things I want to do. Boo safety! 😠
The what
My current working hypothesis is that the Indians successfully secured independence from the British Empire some time in the mid-19th century, then formed a subcontinent-wide government to prevent any of that sort of nonsense from happening again, sidelining the Mughal Emperor in the process because he was clearly about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
Mexico's declaration of independence from Spain predates the point of departure, or at least stands well outside its "light cone" in terms of happening too soon for the first machines to realistically butterfly.
The historic processes that for Texas would be kind of short-circuited here. Machines are invented in the early 1820s, right around the time that Anglos start filtering into Texas to settle (often dragging chains of slaves along with them). By the 1830s, machines have probably at least started to spread to Mexico and are also disrupting the plantation model of agriculture in the American South, though it's unclear just how machines interact with American slavery or how that plays out in the timeline.
