Colonialist Legacies: Interstellar Voyages

Many events prior to the Great Mistake helped make room for the confederacy of Canada to brush aside her former masters and emerge a truly independent regional power. The first opportunity came from the weakening of the USA. As time went on in the 21st century, the once mighty USA had lost much of its imperial authority over the world; China in Asia, Brazil in South America, the African Union, and the Arab nations all began rejecting American imperialism. This loss of influence sent America on a downward spiral into its first ever dark-age as the imperial USA had become excessively dependent on foreign imports to sustain both its military and its people. The dark age of America left the population fighting over what little resources were available, things like food, fuel, electricity, and clean water became scarce and the entire nation erupted in civil war. With their neighbor in disarray, the stable confederacy of Canada began a long, peaceful, campaign of solidifying its hold over the North of the Americas. Because of its distance from the rest of the states, Alaska was easily annexed peacefully into the confederacy, and the North West Passage was declared Canadian Territory; with rising climate temperatures the northern sea lanes became lucrative trade lanes to own. Seeking a new image, Canada adopted the name "Vesperia", meaning "Land of the the Evening Star".

The second major opportunity came from the great migration that had begun to occur from the south to the north. A combination of climate change creating desertification in the south, and the civil unrest throughout the former United States caused many refugees to migrate to the US/Vesperian borders. This influx in population brought a lot of people from all walks of life into the Great White North; many of these people fleeing the south were of the intelligent caste – doctors, engineers, scientists, skilled labor, etc. – all looking for peace and security. The final great opportunity that came, was the Great Mistake itself.

Not much can be said about this period except that all the great powers that now found themselves free from American Imperialism all began acting in reckless ways eventually leading to their own destruction in the Great Mistake. Of particular interest to the Confederacy in this period was Russia; the other great empire from the 20th century which emerged in the fiercest way after America’s decline. To keep it brief – Russian expansionists sought out to regain former USSR territories and began aggressively annexing eastern European and central Asian territories. For decades this happened up until the Great Mistake tore Russia apart from the inside out. The wide spread nation was unable to maintain itself after the Great Mistake happened, civil unrest from all corners literally tore the country up leaving the once glorious Mother Russia into a decentralized mess of small states.

After the events of the Great Mistake a few regional powers managed to maintain stability, The Vesperian Confederacy being one of them.

As the world stabilized once again, former empires change, while new ones emerge. Canada having already annexed Alaska now seeks to control the entire Arctic circle and the shipping lanes that go with it. The former Russian empire that had been torn asunder during the Great Mistake was slowly gobbled up by her neighbours. In the east, the Pan-Asian Cooperative integrates parts of eastern Russia, while in the west the Slavic Federation move into the Crimean region and up to Moscow, leaving the northern regions vulnerable, and open to Canadian interests. Being vulnerable to invasion from PAC and the Slavic Fed, the various independent Northern Russian states met with a Canadian delegation and joined the confederation (the Russian nationalists were not interested in being persecuted by their Slavic enemies, or enslaved into PAC, thus they accepted integration and relative autonomy within the Arctic Circle). This amalgamation of northern nations caught the attention of the remaining Northerners - Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greenland, and Iceland. It didn't take much for the Scandinavia, Greenland or Iceland to join - seeing the economic and strategic benefits of monopolizing the Arctic circle they all agreed to create one confederated nation under the banner of the Vesperian Confederacy.

The Cosmic Voyageur
Biologically, Leifsdóttir may very well be the youngest amongst the Sponsor leaders. The fact of the matter however, is that although she has only spent 32 of her years "awake", she has been alive far longer than anyone to arrive on this new world. It remains true to this day, that Leifsdóttir is humanity's most well travelled explorer - in both distance and years spent travelling. Leifsdóttir, known by her people as the "Cosmic Voyageur" had relatively humble beginnings. Born off the coast of St. Johns, Newfoundland as Noémie Gauthier to Swedish and French-Canadian parents - her legacy as a traveller was evident starting even from birth. Her mother of Swedish origin, was a Vice-Admiral in the Vesperian Navy. Much of her early childhood was spent travelling alongside her parents, stationed in various ports around the North Atlantic. Something of a mascot, the young, cheerful Gauthier was constantly seen darting around places she probably didn't have authorization to be.


Born to be Wild
As she grew older, her interest in the stars above grew likewise. The waters she had spent her life in and around were rather stale to her - and the cosmic abyss, in her eyes, held so much more promise. Using her mother's influence, she managed to land a place as a work experience student at the Vesperian Space Program located in Harstad, Norway. It was around three to four months after her initial placement that an incident that would change her life forever. One of the more mediocre tasks given to Gauthier was to assist in the management of prospective astronaut candidates. Day after day, she was to start up the systems that'd test said candidate's G-Force tolerance. After struggling to convince her superiors of trying the systems out personally, she snuck in after work one day and did tried it out for herself. Her lack of foresight here was evident, and as there was no one to look over her, the ensuing events put her in hospital. Her results however were extremely impressive.


A Legacy Begins
Chastised heavily, Gauthier had thought her voyage had ended. The news she received however confirmed that it had only just begun, and at the age of 17, she was on-track to becoming the youngest astronaut in Vesperian history. Generations prior to Gauthier were held down by the notion that they were born “too late to explore the world, yet born too early to explore the stars”. Gauthier, naturally one to prove people wrong used this mantra to fuel her ambition further and at the ripe age of 23, she was launched into orbit, rocketing towards Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.


Visions of the Future
Her missions afterwards increased in both distance and priority and at the end of her tenure, although she had only spent 32 years of her life conscious - she had been sailing within the Solar System for over 75 years, frozen in cryostasis. Whenever she was to return, new nations had risen and empires had fallen. Wars had started upon her leaving were long over by her return. She witnessed the passing of colleagues and family but one thing was always waiting for her upon return - Vesperia. In remembrance of the times of old Gauthier was given the name “Leifsdóttir”, in honour of Leif Eriksson, the original discoverer of the land she called home.


Admiral Leifsdóttir
When she descended to Earth for the last time, Vesperia unanimously declared her as the most appropriate leader for a Seeding venture. Fittingly, was the breakthroughs of this young astrocartographer that had made plans for Seeding ventures possible, as the routes she devised for interstellar travel were second to none. Leaving Earth for the final time, she now carries the hopes and dreams of the Vesperians back home alongside a myriad of Vesperia’s best and brightest.

The Petremirs
Before the roiling chaos of the Great Mistake overtook the world, there was still war, there was still hatred, and there was still arrogant stupidity masquerading as salvation. Such was the world of the Turkmen, of Iran and Kuwait and so many others, ruled by people clinging to old ways and old ideas. They were men of the sword and of the battlefield, and they preached a hatred of the infidel at the Friday prayers even as they grew rich of the oil they sold to them. These men, and it was uniformly men, became known to history as the Petremirs; oil barons on a massive scale, with wealth beyond even the most fevered imaginations, building soaring buildings and even entire islands, monuments to a system that could never hope to last. It didn't.

Islam's Mistake
This fractured band of petrochemical dealers, theoretically united under the banner of OPEC, was shaken to its core when the oil reserves of the Middle East finally ran dry. The resultant wars left nations shattered, and from the ashes rose a new threat: zealotry. Under the command of a thousand tiny warlords, Sunnis and Shias alike rampaged through the region, killing indiscriminately and acting out the ancient tribal vendettas with modern weapons. It was one such weapon, a suitcase nuke in the possession of a Pakistani former medical student, that was used to render Chengdu almost uninhabitable. What followed was a slaughter.

Crashing Down
The nations of the Petremirs were defunct in all but name, and still they continued. The Last Jihad raged for seven years of total war, neither side giving an inch. A stupid war, one that could never hope to be won, mortars and suicide vests against PAC legions and rail rifles. It was only at the end when they relented, when the black banners of the jihadis were vaporized by a nuclear salvo that levelled the holy city of Islam. Only when Mecca burned and the ashes stained with fallout... only then did they relent. Millions lay dead. The sword of the Lion of God was broken, and would never be remade.

The Rising
Islam still endured. Franco-Iberian aid allowed much of the worst-affected areas - Iran, Turkmenistan, the Afghan border - to be rebuilt, but there were no Blue Mosques, no grand and soaring temples. Nothing but tent cities of refugees and fallout-riddled badlands as far as the eye could see. From the ashes, however, arose a new type of preacher, a new imam. His name was Yusuf ibn Rashid, and he was a former teacher who ran a series of successful cyberschools in Tunis. He began a very swift rebuilding program for the beleaguered, in some cases non-existent education programs of various governments, complete with the standard paywall-accessible and microtransaction-funded lesson plans. After the first Crescent Madrassah was set up in Tehran, profits shot up; not least because he was following the laws of the land by teaching about Islam, but of a kind far removed from the warlords' faith.

The Message
Ibn Rashid's version of Islam was liberal and learned, taking cues from the Abbasid and Ummayad Caliphates that came far before him. His Islam taught a generation of young people that the way to salvation was not through violence, but through learning and the creation of beautiful things. To quote the inscription atop the Kuwait City Madrassah, "God has made many jewels, but the most precious are the thinking mind and the loving heart". This ethos won him many friends in Franco-Iberia, particularly among their investors, and before long the Crescent Company was a regional powerhouse, rebuilding shattered cities in its own image like a Victorian factory-owner's model village. The analogy was apt. Islam forbids interest, but the Crescent schools churned out gifted minds who sought to pay back the schools that had given them a second chance at life, and so (over time) the Company became the owners of a patchwork of highly valuable land in booming cities. It even owns one or two of the famous Niyazov Statues, great gold monuments to a mad dictator that somehow survived the PAC occupation of Ashgabat, though it is at pains to point out that they belong to the nation. That the nations practically belong to the Crescent Company is something they prefer not to bring up.

Scientific Endeavour
Before long, the cities had sufficient internet connectivity for the Crescent's real moneyspinner to come into force. The cybereducation software of its founder, now repackaged as the famous Samarkand series of cybermadrassahs, was provided at largely nominal costs to huge numbers of people that had never previously had access to education. A boom in productivity was reached, with the Samarkand fora teeming with novel solutions to the problems and hardships faced every day in the rural regions. The region was transformed, becoming green and beautiful again, with strong ties to the liberal-minded Franco-Iberians and a kind of grudging tolerance of everyone else. The Crescent Company worked closely with the ARC before its own Seeding project began, and while corporate espionage was always a worry, it helped to fend off the merger acquisition department in ways that didn't involve the blunt, rusty knives the Crescent board wanted to use. Under the current president, Muhammad Ali Shah, they are one of the largest and most influential corpstates in the world, second only to the ARC in terms of buying power and arguably beyond it in scientific research. Now it is up to Faiza Ibtisam al-Rahman to continue that tradition on the soil of a faraway world. They would expect nothing less of her.

Niyazovsky
Faiza al-Rahman was born in Niyazovsky Oblast, a shanty town of crumbling prefab houses in what was formerly Turkmenistan before it was incorporated into the Crescent Company's auspices. It was not an easy childhood for her; the youngest of seven in a time of great poverty for the former Petremirs, the young girl was forced to make adult decisions at a very early age. What was she willing to do to survive? How was she going to get enough to eat, enough for her family to eat? Her father was nowhere to be found, her mother rendered breathless and infirm by years working in a cleanup crew at a meat packing plant, so it was up to her and her siblings to fend for themselves. They worked hard, and they survived... but they were not invincible.

Raqqa
Sandstorm Raqqa, the strongest supersandstorm in fifty-two years according to official Crescent records, raged across the deserts of the northern Kavithan Protectorate, stripping through the great cities and taking with it something far more sinister. By the time it had reached the Karakum Desert, it bore a deadly cargo of radioactive dust, fallout from the nuclear devices that had so scarred Pakistan. Raqqa descended upon Ashgabat like a wolf upon spring lambs, leaving the ancient city's infrastructure shredded and the cheap dwellings of its townships flattened or outright disintegrated. Sandstorm Raqqa was an appalling humanitarian disaster, and there were thinkpieces aplenty as to whether the Crescent could survive the onslaught from both the ARC's merger acquisition department and the wrath of the Black Sands.

Hearing The Word
There are those who believe Faiza al-Rahman to have been fortunate; of her family, she alone survived the killing sands by hiding in an overturned fridge on a landfill site, her last brother dying of chronic radiation sickness a few months later. She was also fortunate, they say, to have been selected by one of the Crescent Company's orphanages and brought up in a clean, safe, and happy environment. They are wrong. How is it fortunate to lose everything? How is it good luck to have your whole life taken from you by the breath of the djinn? Still, those are the facts. Never religious before, by her own admission, she took to the Islam of the Crescent Company like a duck to water, pouring her incredible energy into her studies. She went from an illiterate, almost feral child to graduating with her first bachelor's degree as the winner of a prestigious interscholastic science prize (beating out a team from Liberty University, to the Company's private but immense satisfaction) in less than seven years. At sixteen, her future looked bright. It got only brighter.

Rising Star
Faiza decided to continue her studies at the ARC's most prestigious university, the aforementioned Liberty U, to the quiet consternation of her tutors. Surrounding herself with new ideas and new scenes, particularly those of the Vesperian Confederation, she completed her first doctorate with the kind of sprezzatura that marked her work ever since; upon doing so, she toured Vesperia's wastes and visited some extreme-climate research stations near the Northwest Passage before returning to Ashgabat. There, beneath the watchful eyes of the massive gold statues, she began her work on the viability of a Crescent Seeding vessel. This project, initially little more than a thought experiment, was to be her greatest legacy.

The Crescent Colony
The Crescent Company's Seeding project is unique among the great ships by being built almost entirely "in-house", using CC resources and personnel rather than those of the ARC. She worked on it solidly, claiming only to need three hours of sleep a day, and she still found the time to create several projects to ease the humanitarian crises that the Crescent found itself lurching between. The Burj-6 design for standard-template housing is used by disaster relief organizations the world over, the soaring pillars a monument to Faiza's genius for simple solutions. It was this drive for simplicity and efficient minimalism that made the Crescent's approach to a Seeding ship even remotely viable; it went overbudget, because large projects always do, but thanks to the so-called "iPunk" aesthetic chosen for the design, spending was kept under control without a repeat of the credit crisis that so comprehensively crippled the Petremirs in ages past.

Explore God's Creation
"God wishes us to know his mind," Faiza's famous quote goes, "for he gave us that great gift, the ability to wonder." This line, from her speech at the unveiling of the great ship Firdaws, is typical Faiza; slightly preening, slightly pompous, but containing that selfsame wonder at the infinite majesty of the universe. As she stepped aboard, she was made the Grand Scholar of the ship's populace, and when they emerged upon the surface of a new world, she would lead them to a new golden age of Islam, an age of prosperity and splendour, an age of artistic and scientific endeavour, and perhaps, at long last, an age of peace. She settled into the stasis chamber, the famous Dreamtime-IV start up theme played, and she spent the years through the stars doing what all good Muslims do.

Striving to be better.