HISTORY
The year is 2280, and all of history's promises about The Future are finally coming true. Disease has been all but conquered, in the first world at least, and space travel, while not quite an inexpensive commodity, has nonetheless become widely usable to civilians. Transoceanic flights that once took ten or more hours with old-fashioned air travel can now be completed in three to five hours thanks to the widespread use of suborbital spacecraft, not to mention orbiting resorts and parks on the (newly-terraformed)moon, for those bored with mundane vacations. There are even several small communities housed in large space stations orbiting the Earth! Jetpacks that won't burn your legs to a crisp are rumored to be in the works.
All this, naturally, led to the development of the first deep space colony. Originally a simple military base orbiting Jupiter(itself chosen for its proximity to the asteriod belt and thus to a massive amount of raw metals and materials usable in military research, as well as the availability of the gases that make up most of Jupiter's bulk), those assigned to the Jove Station, as it was called then, began to discuss the idea of turning the station into a permanent settlement; the colonies in Earth's orbit had proved extremely popular, and having a community and a controlled economy would provide the station with both funding and labor, both in somewhat short supply otherwise.
While the Jove was designed to house a large number of people at one time, it wasn't designed to simulate a real community. The inhabitants had their work cut out for them, and after reviewing what it would take to convert a utilitarian military space station into a town that people could live, work, and play in, it became obvious that more labor would be needed. Funding wasn't much of a problem; they recieved a good amout of it after presenting the plan to ther superiors, but people who could carry the plan out were less forthcoming. So, naturally, they did what anyone in their position would have done.
They emptied a couple of prisons, maybe 200 people total, shipping the inmates halfway across the solar system to do the work in exchange for relative freedom living on the station itself, if they so chose. And it worked; the promise of going back to a relatively normal life proved to be very effective motivation to do a good job. The construction itself took just a little over three years when it was estimated to take at least five, and the inmates, military personnel and scientists became the first people to live past the asteroid belt, and the station itself became the furthest functional colony from Earth. To commemorate this occasion they officially changed the name of the station, and the First Autonomous United Space Terrain, or FAUST, was born. (It was rumored that the station was named after one scientist's pet cat, but the official story was that it was simply a happy coincidence.)
It was another year before they opened the station to civilians, and for a while the trip was too expensive for normal people to take, though as with all things it became much more affordable as time went on. Within a year the population of the station passed 500; within two years, 900. By the present, the city has plateaued out at 1200 legal citizens, including the researchers and military personnell still stationed there, and the culture has started coming into its own. Most of the colonists are required to share an apartment to save on space, and the community functions mostly peacefully, although every now and again there's an incident that requires harsh action. Everybody works to the benefit of the station, and the economy is very closely monitored to make sure that everything runs smoothly. It has been criticized as being rather Communist, but the population has yet to grow past the point that it would become seriously detrimental.
The station itself is huge, as far as artificial sattelites are concerned. With a circular dome six miles across, and the Central Tower running straight through it, coming out on either side, the structure is an engineering marvel the likes of which hasn't been seen in the near-Earth colonies. This is a feat in itself, considering how far from Earth the station is; any sort of maintainance or repairs have to be performed by the citizens on the station itself. The sheer amount of space between FAUST and Earth creates a significant lag between an emergency happening and aid being sent in, and as such the station is required to be almost entirely autonomous, thus the name.
TBC