Symphony D. said:
...the Dorsa Brevia agreement...
Nice
Story:
Jagannatha
the compassionate lord of the world
one of the names of Krishna, the dark-blue one, in Hindu tradition. In part it is an appropriate name for our world I suppose; most of our population is of Indian extraction after all, and it is a deep, dark blue when seen from space. However the compassionate appellation is something I would take umbrage with, for the world is nothing of the sort.
A brief history now, from my own skewed perspective of course. Jagannatha and its system (TLC1-AS, now corrupted in the vulgar and refined argot like to Telcias) was discovered in much the usual way in the late 2300s by a slow scout ship, its name now lost in the Sublimation, out of Parvati 4, the ship swinging by the hot A2 more out of the need for a course correction than any real hope of finding a habitable planet. However when the dark-blue rocky world was spotted swinging a distant 6.7 AU from the primary the crew were duty bound to decelerate and investigate, and investigate they did. Of course the initial scans didnt look promising; optical showed an unbroken cloud layer stained dark by storms and a smog of exotic compounds, radar that only a few jagged and mountainous islands projected above a chill and thick world ocean. Lacking appropriate facilities for surface exploration in such conditions, and anyway eager to travel on to better looking worlds the Old Republics arrays had spotted, the scout ship beamed the information, along with a catalog of the systems asteroid belts and gas giants back to Parvati and continued on their way.
The next visitors to Jagannatha were of course the Parvati Mining Corporation some sixty years later. They did not intend to colonize the seemingly inhospitable dark blue marble, but were intending to use its abundant water inventory to supply mining stations and habitats in the asteroid belts, but all that changed when the first landing pods screamed through the cloud deck to land on the storm wracked shore of one of the rocky islets. The sea was dark and purple-black, almost sludgy with cables and threads of material and larger conglomerations like haystacks further out from shore. It was clear they had found that most interesting of chemical reactions life. It wasnt life as they knew it of course, instead of squiggly lipid coated bags of protein and DNA life on Jagannatha consists of a strange mélange of chalogen-carbon tubes and carbohydrate like groups, each replicating organism being a single molecular structure ranging in size from viroids to Volkswagens. This was something very rare indeed, and as all you businessmen out there know, rarity brings profit. The PMC set up a subsidiary to study and develop commercial applications for Jag-life, and used its considerable clout to get Telcias system declared part of Parvatis Outback[1].
Jag-life soon proved its worth when techniques was developed to connect to the silicon and nanotube wires of human technology, effectively having the Jag-life become an extension of a processor. This technique was used to convert large nodes in the ocean into molecular factories, able to produce thousands of tonnes of nearly any molecular structure required, including some novel tools that Jags biochemistry had inspired. The next step was logical and inevitable, and the specially designed class seven AI Ganesha was connected and ensconced in a node. Ganesha rapidly expanded his node to several kilometres in size using the awesome Manas he possessed. This living mountain was the first of what would be the next stage of Jagannathas development, as the great breathing citadels of the Devas-AIs drifted through the world ocean, synthesizing enormous amounts of material. Each supported dense populations fed by the food-weavers, and great research and commercial activity was carried out. The success of this belle époque was such that Jagannatha was able to afford an extensive asteroid exploitation program and even (with Parvatian assistance, the mother world desiring Jagannatha cheap matter craft) construct a Handwavium Bubble; a new and glorious era was at hand
..or was it? Whilst Jagannathas foolhardy government (the pantheon of Devas-AIs and elected officials) was still paying for the HB a grave threat appeared; cheap human designed nanotech was beginning to appear. Jagannathas economic advantages disappeared in a matter of years, and although it had other strengths a novel approach to AI design for one, the economy soon plunged into recession, and the HB stood idle for months at a time. In the end Jagannathas commerce turned to a darker path, to the design of strange neurochemicals based on Jag-biochemistry. One of them, Blue Picasso, stood out as the strongest seller, and is very important for our current situation. Now no one living, not even a famed risk taker such as myself, has ever had Blue Picasso, despite the immorality of its production, taking it without significant augmentation would be akin to opening an airlock without wearing a spacesuit explosive decompression of the mind! But such a product was in high demand among the altered and augmented sybarites of the core republican worlds, and it was demanded that production was stepped up.
Ah production, that word has covered as many sins as reorganization or solutions. In this case production consisted of keeping an entire caste of men and women trapped in the citadels for their entire life, never being allowed the freedom to choose their course and subjected to painful indignities. For one of the core ingredients in Jag neurologicals was distilled Buddhi of humans; looms of engineered Jag-life were implanted in the skin and nerves and cells of base-level humans (base-level pain to give those more visceral experiences the degenerates craved), and constantly read their thoughts and feelings, distilled them, chemically encoded then on engineered molecules and then milked from our bodies by the corporate overlords. Yes, those blue patches everyone carries are no less than the udders of a cow! The overcrowding, the despair, the pain were all to add spice to the concoction. It wasnt the Devas or the Government that did this of course, dont get me wrong, the first were program bound and the second were powerless as the PMC and the republic sent in its bullies and slave owners.
So the situation might have remained for ever more, the people werent allowed any access to augmentation beyond the looms, and the Devas utterly controlled the physical environments, any riot or rebellion would have seen the warrens flooded by the waters of the cold sea. But then a miracle happened the Sublimation as every augment and AI disappeared in an instant; some argued this was the opening strike by some unknown alien race, or the blessing of the deity, most however realised the dire circumstances they were in. Without the Devas the living citadels were frozen into immobility, and the people had to cut their way out of the warrens and into the abandoned higher levels, and use what remained there to survive. Those weeks and months were brutal and savage as factions fought for control and scant food, and over half the population was lost, but eventually order reigned as the Lokapalas managed to gain control and the citadels were dragged by iron ship into shallow water to form new archipelagos. The next problem was of course food the constant storm clouds of the planet made chlorophyll driven food production impossible - even now, forty years on the mention of the Famine Times will bring a shudder and a quick prayer from any survivor, with seven eighths of the population starving over a period of four years.
It was a cosmic irony that the very thing that had been the rational for our serfdom would now be that which saved us, for it proved possible to reprogram some basic parts of the engineered Jag-life by interfacing it with our own implanted cultures, and through a painful and laborious process
I trust you have gone to the tomb of the Āditya martyrs?...dont roll your eyes at me boy, those people gave their lives to find the interface protocols for the food-weavers, hundreds dead from toxic feed back!...Anyway we eventually managed to return to space and restart the remaining asteroid mining machinery and ships
oh give me lip will you? Well see about that you abyss damned Chut! Have at you!...
-Extracts from the drunken lecture series given by the estimed philosopher Ser C. N. Annadurai outside the Sunset bar in Ganesh-12, moments before starting a fight.
[1]Outback being a term used in the Old Republic for systems with continuous contact with imperial worlds via slower than light ship, but whose worth does not justify the costs of constructing a Handwavium Bubble in the system.
I somehow rather doubt all of humanity just stayed inside these protective bubbles; there are always crazies.
