Racing the Darkness: A Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Fan Fiction Photoessay

[Axis Kast]

Overview
This is a fictional account of the United Nations Expedition to Alpha Centauri featured in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a 1999 computer game.

I am presenting material in the form of a photo essay.

Introduction
This is the story of an expedition into the unknown. It was an act of desperation, undertaken not in optimism or from a place of pride, but because our species, and the civilization it created, had run out of time. And so we fled the world we had seemingly destroyed for one that might yet destroy us.

Sid Meier, et al. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Firaxis Games. 1999.

Source Material
The primary source material for this work is, quite naturally, the 1999 AAA title Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and its expansion pack, Alien Crossfire, for which Brian Reynolds was the lead designer. You will doubtless see additional traces of, and head nods to, the works of the late authors Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) and James Clavell (The Asian Saga); Walt Disney; author David Brinn (Postman); futurist Syd Mead; the recent TNT television series The Last Ship; the short-lived 2009 NBC series Kings; Ridley Scott's Blade Runner; the book Cold War Hot (ed. Peter G. Tsouras); Jon F. Zeigler's GURPS Alpha Centauri book; the 1998 Blizzard Software computer game StarCraft and its many companion works; the Fallout series of computer games; Christopher Nolen's 2010 movie Inception; and many other inspirations, including an 1803 oil-on-canvas painting of New Orleans by Boqueto De Woiserie.

I would also be remiss if I didn't give special thanks to some key contributors. The Tribe faction, along with the characters of Pete Landers and John Baptist Keller (here, Jean-Baptiste Keller) are the original creations of an individual with the screen name "Thorn" on a now-defunct web forum called The Frontier. The Shapers faction, including its leader Shoichiro Nagao, come from user "Iron Talon" on the same forum, with additional contributions here from another party, SyntheticGod8 on reddit. MysticWind on the AlphaCentauri2 forums has been instrumental in refining many of the concepts presented here, especially with respect to the Hunters of Chiron.

This project is a creative, not-for-profit endeavor and is not affiliated with Firaxis Games, Inc., Electronic Arts, or the current holders of any rights to the Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri franchise.Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, all names and pictures of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri characters, factions, any other related items are registered trademarks and/or copyrights of their respective trademark and copyright holder.

Visit Our Sister Datalinks!
This story has been in various stages of the telling for some time. Here's a link to the photologue since March 2022.

If interest picks up, some of the information presented in this location will be different.

The work collected here is compiled from various prior activities that include a quest (think a community-driven story) on SufficientVelocity.com and a megagame on a now-defunct forum called the Frontier, which closed its doors in 2017.

Join the Planetary Network!
The Discord community for this fiction can be found here.

Contribute to the Ongoing Story!
Feel free to contribute your own ideas. This is an exercise in worldbuilding, mostly. Letting the imagination soar.

Two ways to engage. First, peruse our GoogleDoc. You can review flavor quotations, the much-expanded tech tree, citizen types, and faction analytics. Second, post your questions and ideas to the thread below.

 

[Axis Kast]

The essence of science is transgression. Dare to defy the orthodoxy. Demand to see the proofs. Rigorously test the ideas of others. Allow no presumption of today to keep you from asking: how could it be tomorrow? Here I have a medicine. Must it be injected? Might I ingest it as a pill? Enjoy it as a meal? Breathe it as a gas? Absorb it passively through the skin? Might I even live it, as an experience? - Address to the Faculty

​

Service Record:
Born in Vladivostok, Soviet Far East. Educated Moscow State University. Appointed to editorial board of Physics Letters A while an undergraduate. Thesis questioned mechanical reliability of nuclear pulse propulsion. Received 2072 Nobel Prize for 2015 calculations leading to first sustainable fusion reaction in a laboratory setting. Served universal military obligation as head of Reactor Laboratory Division aboard aircraft carrier Ulyanovsk.

Deputy Administrator of Experimental Design Bureau (OKB)-1, largest and most prestigious of design bureaus in Soviet space program. Presided over second-generation Tifon spaceplane program. During subject's tenure, OKB-1 experienced a dramatic increase in cosmonaut deaths yet was credited with underwriting successful establishment of Soviet presence in Venusian orbit.

Active contributor to Pravda. Consistent critic of popular resistance to mass vaccination and genetically modified food crops. Declaimed “feudal crutch of religion” as “the foremost barrier to the social progress of our species.”

Recruited by Soviet Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine. Team credited with major advances in anti-aging therpaies, enabling “Long Politburo” of 2041-2065 and laying theoretical groundwork for Wespe-Quinn-Vagner Method of cryogenic stasis. Head of Soviet delegation to U.N. Alpha Centauri Mission from 2052. Awarded Hero of the Soviet Union. Recommended unconditionally by Security Council for Chief Science Officer. Responsible for safe and efficient function of ship’s fusion stardrive and associated sub-systems.

NOTE: Selection proceedings security-locked until 2120.

Psych Profile: Technologist
Cognitive ability at genius level. Believes universe is inherently knowable through empirical observation. Accumulation of knowledge is highest human calling. Worldview driven almost exclusively by instrumentalism. Believes own opinions reflect the undiluted application of logic.

Authorization of work using Gulag prisoners suggests poor ethical judgment and inability to weigh emotional factors. Strong tendency toward self-aggrandizement. Frequent, sustained accusations of misogyny from peers and subordinates. Highly effective manager based on non-human performance measures, but marked inability to function well as part of a team led by others.

Narrative Notes:
Soviet physicist Prokhor Zakharov, celebrated designer of the Unity stardrive. The second-eldest of the nearly half-million passengers, Zakharov was 77 years old at mission launch and in declining physical health. United Nations medical staff estimated his odds of surviving cold sleep at only 62%.

Brusque and arrogant, the physicist was widely disliked by his peers on the ship's command crew. During the Unity Crisis, Captain Jonathan Garland found that Zakharov was unwilling to place the best interests of the survivors and their mission ahead of his personal ambitions. Hunted by the Spartans, frustrated by Kellerite interlopers, and working at cross-purposes to the general evacuation ordered by Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida from his tomb in Damage Control, Zakharov's engineers proved unable to save the ship.

Their doomed attempt poisoned hundreds of engineers. The burden of providing lifelong care for so many casualties, often permanently incapacitated and sterile, had dramatic implications for the community that would eventually become The University of Planet: robotic servitors of Zakharov's own design outnumbered living colonists by an order of five-to-one as many as three decades after Planetfall.

Sources:
Ricardo Montalbán from Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan is our Zakharov.

 

[Axis Kast]

Weapons are tools. Their function is violence; when used by a technician rather than a warrior, they can fulfill their intended purpose: to assist in clearing out the useless to make way for the functional. - Fundamentals

​

Prokhor Zakharov performed his three-year military service obligation in the Soviet Navy's Red Banner Pacific Fleet as head of the Reactor Laboratory Division aboard 85,000-ton fleet carrier Ulyanovsk. (With both parents on the Communist Party's Central Auditing Commission, he could hardly afford to shirk the duty.)

Launched in 1996 at the height of the Soviet Union's economic and military resurgence, Ulyanovsk operated the air group of MiG-29 aircraft that famously sank the Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong following the Second Invasion of Arunachal Pradesh in 2019. (Another Chinese carrier, Liaoning, was sent to the bottom by the Indian carrier Vishal during the same engagement.)

Zakharov was noted for his ability to keep the ship's quartet of KN-3 300MW pressurized water reactors operational with a very limited logistical tail. For this, he ultimately made Captain, 2nd rank, equivalent to a NATO Lieutenant Commander.

Subordinates despised the hard-driving genius, however. His achievements were made possible only by deep reductions in safety margins. More than 40 personnel under his command suffered acute radiation poisoning in 2017 and 2018, an early indication of Zakharov's approach to hazards during his tenure at OKB-1.

This short veterancy helped swell the Academician's outsized ego. As the University clashed increasingly with its Neo-Spartan and Morganite neighbors in MY80 and beyond, Zakharov, whose military days were more than a full century behind him, frequently overruled his small general staff. Faction security men, who owed their posts to political maneuvering within the Academy's byzantine faculty structure, took this characteristic tampering in stride, while the paid mercenaries of Force '76 complained bitterly to anyone who would listen.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Folks, I've been following this at AC2 for a long time, and I want to tell you - I don't agree with everything in this series, but it's very good stuff; it builds and builds and builds, adding great richness to the background, with details like, in addition to many credible people histories, diving into where the recon rovers came from and how they were tinkered into something useful on Planet. DO read and keep up with this; it rewards close attention.

-Also? Zakharov posted on Facebook a few weeks ago to express his delight at being played by Richardo Montalban. I'm not making that up.

 

[Axis Kast]

​

Two Dreamers of Chiron overseers prepare to administer nerve staples during a period of unrest at White Rabbit's Refuge. Involuntary labor was a crucial feature of the faction economy: Talents might spend up to sixteen hours a day in a state of shared, lucid dreaming.

As Unity departed Earth in 2071, Dreaming remained a recreational activity still shunned for its criminal associations. Some academic inquiry had begun, but the evidentiary basis was controversial, drawn as it was from serial studies of Soviet and Chinese prisoners.

Struan's Pacific Trading Company was among the first to point up commercial and defense benefits of Dreaming. The recorded brain activity of persons so engaged could be run through mediating algorithms and the component synaptic activity mined by psychologists to produce a high-fidelity facsimile of each sleeper's experiences while in REM sleep. Struan's researchers demonstrated the ability to use the data collected during these REM sleep sessions to produce extremely accurate personality inventories. About the same time, a panic swept the CIA, which complained to its congressional overseers that its assets behind the Iron Curtain were being picked off by Sino-Soviet counter-intelligence at an unprecedented rate--an outcome that Langley attributed to the mandatory participation in Dreaming of high-ranking Communist government officials. Combined with well-timed electrical pulses, Dreaming could also be employed to keep a mind at work on problems long after the work day had ended, harnessing the problem-solving potential of the so-called "Naïve Mind" by essentially invading its recuperative cycle.

In theory, the standard of medical care available to faction members should have exceeded that of most other colonies. Factor Roshann Cobb's personal retinue included numerous practicing physicians and the faction was well-provisioned with medical devices and pharmaceuticals of every type. Cynically, these were hoarded for trade, sale, or recreational abuse by faction elites.

Necessarily, decisions of importance were often taken by a "middle caste" of unsupervised technicians and mercenaries who lacked the moral and titular authority--to say nothing of the education or qualification--to commit faction resources effectively. True labor fell upon re-socialized convicts "rescued" from the dying Unity and enslaved prisoners captured during raids on neighboring settlements.

In the Hive, it was said, one died because, after much consideration, the Chairman thought that the colony would be better off without them, while in the Refuge, one died simply because no thought had been given at all.

 

[Axis Kast]

The Kokirri Armored Personnel Carrier was a favorite among Unity's pioneers because its thickly-armored cab was proof against the psychic attack of Chiron's native Mindworms.

J.T. Marsh's Forward Contact Team departed Unity more than an Earth-standard month before the micrometeorite collision that proved the ship's undoing. Among other load-hauling and terraforming equipment, they brought with them twenty-six of these "tactical heavy tractors," refurbished after thirty-six years of service with the Republic of Korea Army. The Kokirris spent the pre-Crisis period performing supply runs between the main landing site and outlying sensor towers.

Once Marsh released his subordinates to enlist with factions of their choice, most of the Kokirris and their crews apparently remained under his authority. In this capacity, they continued to be used on convoy duty through hostile territory.

Crews often replaced the standard-issue smoke cartridges in the fender countermeasures launchers with incendiaries to help suppress fungal blooms. By the second decade on Planet, two additional launchers, each with six tubes, were usually installed on the roof. Jury-rigged flamethrowers were a not-uncommon addition to the dorsal turret ring, replacing machine guns.

Note the red jerrycans stored on the external rack behind the cab. The diesel-powered Kokirri was one of only a handful of conventionally-fueled vehicles in the Unity motor pool.

 

[Axis Kast]

​

Staging at a disused quarry in Atalissa, Iowa, Holnist paramilitaries receive final instructions before the Battle of Davenport. They will soon go on to rout two U.S. Army National Guard regiments, inflicting one of the worst defeats on federal forces in eight years of war.

This particular troop is noteworthy for its use of a uniform, lending it an air of unity and professionalism often lacking among survivalists. (The effect was probably achieved by looting a sporting goods store.) Considering the angle and distance of the shot, this image was probably created by the Holnists themselves for use as propaganda.

As a rule, Holnists were heavily armed. Most came to the movement after having already amassed enormous personal arsenals of weapons and ammunition. Machine guns and grenades of recent surplus vintage were not uncommon. The defection or capture of hundreds of local National Guard armories also gave Holnists access to large numbers of armored personnel carriers and advanced anti-armor capability.

Holnists fancied themselves competent soldiers, but this was rarely the case. Firearms fetishism and hoarding of non-perishable food and obscure medicines were distinct from practical fieldcraft. The average early-war Holnist was fifty years old, overweight, sickly, and resistant to the discipline necessary for successful campaigning. Holnists also tended to fall captive to friendly propaganda, making it difficult for their leaders to explain the extent of popular resistance. Holnism succeeded in spite of itself: most of the set-piece fighting was done by cadets and Boy Scouts, policemen, defectors from the regular armed forces or reserves and, later, corporate mercenaries under personal contract to disloyal governors and the ultra-wealthy. The populations of cities and towns could be counted upon to participate vigorously in their own defense, but most municipal civil defense forces had exclusively parochial concerns and were strong enough to refuse impressment of their men for general service.

Like the Confederacy from which it took so much inspiration, the twenty-first century North American secessionist movement struggled to turn all its members to a common purpose. Since a Holnist's motivation was usually the right to simply inflict himself on his neighbors, few had strong incentive to remain in the field if the picking was poor or the situation dire, especially when far from home. Unsurprisingly, Holnists struggled to create a proper a logistical basis for large-scale military action, especially because the seceding states had competing ideas of military priorities. Wounded fighters knew they would receive neither care from their own side nor quarter from the enemy.

The mounted Holnist was such an ubiquitous figure in the wartime Midwest that the U.S. Army issued General Order 116 in Occupied Areas, which directed that any person on horseback within 300 yards of a federal facility be considered hostile and engaged with deadly force.

 

[Axis Kast]

It is the things we do not abandon that define who we are. - Datalinks

For every three happy hearts set to work on the so-called Ark of Humanity, there was one turned bitterly against. Ôrad of Utár Wawesh was one of these.​

Utár Wawesh was a constituent commandery of the County of Toltan, one of the three thousand "sandbox" nations dredged up by the likes of Eos Planetary Renewal in the Southern and Pacific Oceans in the 1990s to relieve South American overcrowding and provide a landing place for refugees of nuclear accidents becoming steadily more common as the technology cleared the hurdle of broad commercial adoption.

Engineering protocol called for reclaimed nations to be ringed in barrier peaks to protect against the ravages of typhoon waters. Corazón Santiago's refugees would follow this well-worn principle on hurricane-prone Chiron when they became first to found a maritime base at Anchorage on the Nessus Sea.​

Descended from original settler stock (the same who bequeathed Chironians a term they later used for themselves, "newlander"), Ôrad set aside his childhood interest in music to become a soldier so that his family would not lose valuable rights to land, pearl beds, and shares in whaling fleets under Toltan's merit-based inheritance laws.

The waters of the southern Pacific were garbage-choked to the point of ecological disaster but schools of toxin-resistant fish thrived in the artificial reefs formed around the skeletons of dormant tidal generators stopped up by the floatsam. This trawler uses digital fiber to catch crosswinds for easy maneuvers. The sails, which were embedded with conductive monofilament, could be furled near-instantaneously when the weather turned foul and deployed just as quickly when it passed.​

The Cold War was heating up in the Southern Hemisphere in the first decade of the new millennium when Ôrad found himself a fresh-faced cadet at West Point Military Academy, one of sixty International Cadets. Domestic woes had begun to sap America's ability to play its traditional role of global policeman. Soviet agents stepped eagerly into the void. Their promises stoked the emergence of an increasingly violent liberation consciousness among the destitute, dispossessed, and colonially subject. Ôrad returned home by Concorde supersonic jet to spend school holidays in the uniform of a special policeman brawling with fishermen and algae tenders that ate just two meals a day on the U.N. dole.

"U.N. Standard Care" provided between 2,000 and 4,000 calories of food per person per day based on assessed nutritional need, most non-habit-forming medications, seasonally appropriate natural clothing, all-weather survival tents, and one datalinks terminal per family unit that could be used for education, entertainment, and professional activities. Most factions followed the same model in the Era of Planetfall, adding hostile environment survival equipment and air supplies. Similar arrangements continued to be made available to struggling citizens in some factions for decades longer, among them the Believers, the New State, and the University. Humanitarian services were more comprehensive among both the Peacekeepers and the Tribe.​

From the first, Ôrad sought opportunities to reach the acme of his profession, earning jump wings at Camp Hero, New York before spending six months with the 27th Armored Division during a deployment to wide swing through Atlanta to bring the Christian States to heel. In 2045, Ôrad received instruction as part of the Central Intelligence Agency's short-lived Great Neck Project, designed to groom the officers of allied governments in the fundamentals of national security and derided as "coup school" by its detractors. Ôrad put what he learned to good use, participating in the bloodless overthrow of his country's democratically-elected government two years later for failing to ratify accession to the SEPTO.

In return for his services to the new ruling junta, Ôrad was made Viceroy of Asidaph, a strategically significant atoll that, at the time of his appointment, had become a haven for pirates under an ex-American naval officer, Cyril Banes, who punctuated his depredations with ostentatious gifts to the burgeoning IOEZ and Pacifica drone population and claimed the mantle of "environmental activist." Using his newfound authority, Ôrad commandeered a tramp freighter impounded by the Toltan Water Watch and, with a scratch crew of reservists, sank the pirate mothership at anchor in a daring night raid.

The S.S. Arkannen's masts were removed to make room for the turret of an M60E7 Patton tank bought from a Brazilian intermediary.​

Ôrad's career drew to a close just as Toltan began an aggressive courtship of the U.N., then casting about for almost any assistance to replace inconstant sponsors in the Global West. Ôrad counted himself a skeptic. Good people owed their lives to the U.N.'s relief programs, but they had not, in the end, provided a viable blueprint for regional development--only a crude existence that corroded the human spirit and stoked friction between social classes that, sharing the same space, ought to have worked together. Local critics accused Ôrad of reading Jean-Baptiste Keller. Ôrad had them jailed and returned to brokering fishing quotas with the Philippine government.

Retired for more than a decade by 2059, Ôrad buried his wife, their daughter, and two sons in that year, the saddest, he said, of his entire life. They were victims of crop blight, too weak to fight off the Red Flu season. Toltan, like many third-world nations, purchased rights-controlled rice seed. The varietal was engineered by Zerant Technologies (ZtN) to manifest biological defects, including botulism, after a set period of time if the purchaser did not obtain genetically-modified insects capable of restoring its viability. Toltan could afford neither the high asking price of the designer insects nor the price asked by Struan's for its life-saving defoliant. Flu inoculation at clinics in Chile proved useless: the headwinds against the preventative had been too strong, producing conditions in which the virus easily mutated to resist the latest drugs.

For weeks, Ôrad contemplated suicide. Then, word came that Carmel had fallen into a second bout of civil war. Toltan stood by its traditional ally. Ôrad returned to uniform and led the Pacifica Battalion, an all-volunteer force that joined the desperate fighting along the Küv-Dan Line. Ôrad's forces took hundreds of prisoners for which the Gathis were unprepared.

Ôrad's solution was to offer the Shilohne captives to the U.N. as replacements for the colonists they were no longer enrolling through their original talent lottery. Nearly all the prisoners accepted this offer, reasoning that they were otherwise facing certain starvation. The U.N., strained otherwise to the breaking point, ignored the protests of the disgraced Benjamin government in Gilboa. After once drinking such sweet wine, the U.N. developed a taste for it. Soon, it became accepted practice for governments to give convicts, no-pats, and others the choice of exile.

As for himself, Ôrad refused to be lured away from the false archipelago for which he had done so much. Instead, he used his newfound fame as a platform from which to question the ethical and practical basis for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri.

We, who can make nations from the sea and pitch ourselves forty-four light years through nothingness, despair of the simple project of saving ourselves. It is not apocalypse we are outrunning, but the shame of failure. - Datalinks

Ôrad released an autobiography shortly before Mission Launch. The datatape was an obscure one, but it made it as far as the personal effects of Roshann Cobb, recovered from White Rabbit's Refuge, and the voluminous libraries of Liquidator Shoichiro Nagao, who returned often to the islander's accusations, which he told subordinates were true, however upsetting.

Sources:
First picture is a still from the NBC series Kings (2009).

Second picture is "Craters of Lyra 9" by Artur Rosa on ArtStation.

Third picture is by Simon Stålenhag, found on Radical Ocean Futures.

Fourth picture is "Fishing Village" by jpeabody on DeviantArt.

"U.N. Standard Care" inspired by "Basic Assistance" in The Expanse.

S.S. Arkannen is "Tramp Freighter" by LordSopping1885 on DeviantArt.

 

[Axis Kast]

We have already discovered immortality in the form of generational wealth. Long after my name is forgotten, the decisions I make in this life will have shaped a comfortable future for my children's children's children. - Datalinks

The view from Base Operations. Massive mainframe computers housed in the bowels of Unity's Landing Pods monitored the air pressure of every compartment, performed radiolocation for every vehicle, tracked ambient temperature and humidity in every hydroponics dome.

Automation was the accepted solution for very low population counts and very high rates of death from accumulated injuries or post-landing accidents, or simple misadventure. Given the correct stack of diskettes and fail-safes, a single duty tech could easily oversee a base of 15,000 residents.



Baptismo Wells, a corruption on the original Greek for "ceremonial washing," was an early example of the preservationist instinct in Believer architecture, which later trended toward monumental Egyptian Middle Kingdom and Polynesian Hale styles.

The Wells originated as a shrine to martyr Jarvis Findlay, shot dead and mutilated by Holnists during a period of self-imposed isolation in MY2. Within a year, the draw of his example, along with the area's splendid beauty and abundant waters, gave rise to permanent settlement.

The structures appeared to rise up from the roaring River Tethys but were actually built on massive stone peers. On the orders of the Kritarchy, huge flood gates were installed to dam up the river--a method of ensuring the Conclave would retain strong advantage if ever it were forced to cede its interest in the valley below.

​

Imagine the entire contents of the planetary datalinks, the sum total of human knowledge, blasted into the Planetmind’s fragile neural network with the full power of every reactor on the planet. Thousands of years of civilization compressed into a single searing burst of revelation. That is our last-ditch attempt to win humanity a reprieve from extinction at the hands of an awakening alien god. - Planet Speaks

Centauri Computing built on understandings of the xenofungus as analogous to a nervous system at planetary scale. The same mind-machine interface between humans and computers, still dangerously imperfect, was attempted with Planet itself.

Alexandria's Elegy, built and operated by the Tomorrow Initiative, thought the exchange was a one-way street: its librarians drew energy from the fibral network of xenofungus to speed indexing and retrieval from the Unity Data Core surrendered by the Restoration under orders from the Planetary Council. Without the speed enhancements of optical computing, this was a brute-force action, and the residual heat required that the base by placed directly at the sub-zero headwaters of the Tartarus Frost Range. Circuits burned so quickly that Morganite liquidators were in permanent residence. Planet attempted to crush the pyramidal stacks from without: they were built from plasma steel to warp with the attempt.



Captain Shizen Ito of the New State submarine Burr enjoys the suns. She has developed a personal style distinguished by the use of leather, outlawed everywhere on Earth after 2021. Her jacket might be a rare heirloom, but given the flawless condition is almost assuredly a harmless reproduction. The sentiment behind her appearance--the idea that giving and receiving offense is a critical aspect of healthy society--reflects the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of L'État nouvel, where the often hidebound population demanded the Admiralty protect them from the emotional consequences of their own prejudice.​

Sources:
First quote is paraphrasing the character of Donald Whitfield, played by Timothy Hutton, in 1923, produced by Taylor Sheridan.

First picture is "Stargate Research Base" by Nevena-Jevtic on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Watercity After Storm" by the same author on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "Alien World 2" by the same author on DeviantArt.

Fourth picture is "Xiang Lavigne" by CodexBorderlining on DeviantArt.

 

[The_J]

Thanks for your hard work .

(I might delete this post later, for uninterrupted reading)

 

[Buster's Uncle]

I believe Axel wants comments far more than purity...

 

[Axis Kast]

Thanks for your hard work .

(I might delete this post later, for uninterrupted reading)

Thanks kindly!

Comments, and even contributions, are welcome! Questions help me generate new ideas for content. Engagement is the fuel of motivation that has kept this project going for nearly a full year.

 

[Blake00]

Yeah I've been complimenting Axel elsewhere so to not disturb the flow here but I'm loving this.. man you really know how to pick good pictures to convey the world you're writing about. Great stuff!

 

[Axis Kast]

It was easy to love the Earth. Standing barefoot in the sunshine, we swallowed cold lungfuls of juniper-tinged air and plucked apples from the trees. What use to us is this other place that we cannot even taste? - I Reject

At Folger's Tear, the waters of the broad River Lethe completed an important milestone on their their long journey to the sea. Flat, fertile plains beckoned irresistibly to human settlers. Pilgrims made the place their home in MY4 using materials found at nearby crash sites. Hungry for familiar foods, they exterminated the local fungus and began Terraculture. Within a decade, aggressive cancers had claimed fully half the recent arrivals, defeating the rudimentary chemotherapies still at hand. Hunter hydrologists soon discovered why. A chemical tank had impacted just twelve kilometers away and forty-four million gallons of ethylene glycol had soaked into the water table.



Morganite cities embraced the Second Empire style. In the eyes of the Families, giving form to one's megalomania was evidence of their fitness to rule.

Drones were rarely inclined to surrender the energy credit required for entry into any such domicile of the elite. Instead they sought the "Liberté, égalité, [et] fraternité" of the open market stall and the salvaged cargo container.

Morgan outlawed the dangerous phrase. Corporate "Specials," deputized by the powers-that-be, made regular runs through the Commons, ostensibly looking to enforce the vice laws that forced the less-fortunate to take whatever solace they could in the gambling halls.



Telbi Acharya first spoke on behalf of the Conclave in MY51 during Sister Miriam Godwinson's Second Convalescence. Her appearance, and the strident warning she offered to her Ascendancy interlocutors, were a radical departure from the scrupulous humility and extreme agreeableness of the Believer diplomatic corps.

Records indicate that Acharya was a resocialized victim of Post-Nuclear Madness, a disease she contracted during childhood in Kashmir. Before withdrawing from the region, a Chinese "relief mission" attempted to "cure" her by implanting a Memory Cassette loaded with the eighty books of the Conclave Bible, which Acharya could thereafter quote at will.

Acharya perceived herself the perfect accompaniment to Miriam's honeyed leadership style, for she was willing to do what the Blessed Sister was not. Like Pravin Lal, Godwinson gambled on a team of rivals to balance her natural inclinations.

Serious misgivings about Acharya's judgement did not prevent Godwinson from ceding authority over the Nauvoo Legion, which she felt unable to use to best advantage during a time when enemy encroachments were reaching intolerable levels.​

Sources:
First picture is "Crater" by NeotericEvolution on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Bridges" by AndreeeWallin on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "Zaide Sayadova" by CodexBorderlining on DeviantArt.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Nauvoo Legion sounds Mormon, which I really don't think fits with Miram. Background on that?

 

[Axis Kast]

Miriam in this continuity is a Christian ecumenicism, and, arguably, a religious fusionist. The Nauvoo Legion is a historical military unit with an explicitly religious identity, and a history, along with the descendant Mormon Battalion, situated firmly in the context of taming a new and wild land to meet the needs of religious settlers. It is less freighted with meaning for most audiences than, say, "Knights Templar" or "Knights Hospitaller," too.

Linking the Legion to someone like Acharya, who it is implied sees religious obedience as a much more urgent matter, also begins to separate it from Miriam's individual character and style.

 

[Axis Kast]

Like the teeth of some ravening monster, the hard angles and false promise of mechanical ingenuity have come again to reduce us all to drones. - We Must Dissent

"The Stacks" are an area of volcanic badlands in far northwestern Agammen bounded by the Odyssean Sea to the north, the Iapetian Piers to the south and west, and lava flows to the east. The nearest permanent settlement is Watch Station LR-4, maintained by the Memory of Earth.

Ambient winter temperatures bottomed out at 114°F. The boiling water that churned from its geysers had a pH of zero. Caustic burns were a constant concern: local conditions visibly corroded most materials after just one standard hour.



On a world where the land fought back with ferocity and skill, a base's first significant expansion was apt to be skyward.

As time went on, the humans of Chiron, already fractured by ideology, divided again along the fault lines of their affinities toward technology and ecology. In cities like Electroville, people who had never seen Planet Earth cocooned themselves in glass and steel to gain a better understanding of their ancestors.



F-26M Polecat Interceptors of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force prepare to meet a Soviet Tu-210 Bashplate over the Sea of Okhotsk during the Confusion in Heilongjiang.​

The tenterhooks of nationalism had loose claim on most mission survivors, and no leader with any significant following proposed forming colonies around national or ethnic ascription. In the chaos of the escape from Unity, there had been no time for such a sorting. Yet the political bequests of our divided homeworld were obvious.

As a shining success from a brutal system, Academician Zakharov retreated from students' calls to act decisively against such things as hazing and provide greater insight into faction governance. In public, he denigrated the ability of the "lesser-educated" to "apply the necessary discernment" around what to study or where to allocate scarce resources. Privately, he lamented the presumptuousness of the student body and rarely expanded his circle of close confidants, always men, frequently fellow products of similar authoritarian regimes.

Many factions tolerated the continuing use of national symbols like the Red Star or the Union Jack as a means of either fostering collective memory or rejecting the continuing authority of the United Nations, which had instructed they be painted over.

One-time U.S. presidential hopeful and ex-Cabinet member Oscar van de Graaf went furthest in exploiting the memetic qualities of national identity--Pilgrims waved the American flag--but his vision of the future was essentially a fantasist's riff on concepts of self-reliance and fair dealing popularized more by the likes of Walt Disney than the Founding Fathers. Van de Graaf saw no requirement for equitable courts, much less an independent legislature jealous of its own prerogatives. Besides that, his colony had a distinctly international mien since he'd hired without much consideration of national allegiance. To whom would his workforce write home?

Other key leaders spent much of their lives abroad from the countries of their birth: Deirdre Skye, J.T. Marsh, Roshann Cobb, and Aleigha Cohen were as much victims of British imperialism as loyal citizens of Empire or Commonwealth. Nwabudike Morgan was a political renegade that had tried more often to unmake governments than to serve them. Tamineh Pahlavi was an expatriate by circumstances outside her control. A short stint in the service of the American Reclamation Corporation had hardly inclined her toward national consciousness. Johann Anhaldt was of more use to the French government than the Swiss, but left his homeworld embittered. St. Germaine and d'Almeida both cultivated national cadres, and the Executive Officer was reckoned a hero by his country's elite, but the Contre-amirale was too much a believer in the correctness of his own wisdom to have loved France better, while d'Almeida was too much a realist to attempt the resurrection of a thing bound to another time and place.


Sources:
First picture is "Sci-Fi_character practice." by TylerThullCreations on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Sunshower" by JonasDeRo on DeviantArt.

Third picture is a screen capture from Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993).

 

[Axis Kast]

The moods of history, like the laws of energy, suggest that, for every advantage gained by some, there must be a disadvantage inflicted on another. Let it not be you. - Armed, Forewarned

Writing in the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed that his country's expansionist ambitions could be fulfilled by draining the Mediterranean Sea.​

For as long as humans have lived with the Earth, we have attempted to change it, usually for commercial reasons. The dam and the ditch have been our preferred tools. Egyptian pharaohs ordered canals to be dug between the Nile River and the Red Sea. Governors used them to make New York City into a hub of industry and turn the Great Lakes of North America into vast highways of maritime trade. Soviet leaders attempted to drain the Aral Sea for irrigation water. Huge dams harnessed old waters to bring electricity--modernity--to burgeoning cities in the American West, Central China, and the Amazon Basin. The European Economic Community dammed up Homer's Wine-dark Sea beginning in 1982, with sub-projects extending south, deep into Central Africa. This work resulted in one barrier across the Dardanelles, a second across the Strait of Sicily, a third at the Bosporus, a fourth on the River Congo. Lake Chad swelled to reach Faya-Largeau.

From the 1950s, the great powers did much of their digging with what they dubbed "Atoms for Peace." Nuclear charges blew the tops off mountains and scoured deep trenches in the Earth's crust. This practice was especially appealing to developing nations and imperial powers in possession of large, sparsely-populated or politically-subjugated territories. Leading the way were the Americans, Soviets, French, Indians, Portuguese, and South Africans. Las Vegas became the City the Bomb Built. Atomic engineering was used again on the Moon and Mars to excavate sub-surface habitation, and as a motive force to move small asteroids into accessible orbits for scientific investigation and subsequent strip-mining.

Rising sea levels spurred strong interest in the creation of artificial reefs and island chains. Three distinct habitation zones emerged: a storm barrage along the North American Atlantic Littoral, including in the Gulf of Mexico; in the Indian Ocean in the Bay of Bengal but later extending to the waters due west of Perth, for purposes of refugee resettlement; and in the Southern Pacific Ocean, largely tied to resource extraction.

Use of atomics for purposes other than killing had become so frequent on Earth that the United Nations thought little of supplying Chiron Interstellar Probe and Unity Mission colonists with a full range of warhead sizes. Early settlers used them immediately for terraforming as well as flattening mountain ranges to alter the paths of rivers or patterns of precipitation and water retention.

Performance against fungus was notably unsatisfactory. Different from the lesser wounds inflicted by fire and conventional explosives, the radiological output of nuclear weapons appeared to stimulate planetary aggression and the re-population of fungal mass. Secondary ignition of nitrate beds was problem: wildfires rarely burned hot or long because of Chiron's low oxygen levels--just 41% that of Earth--but fine dust kicked up through atomic activity choked atmospheric filters and produced deadly and destructive arc flashes.

The question of just whose interests were served through these radical reconstructive surgeries of the living Earth was never explored in full, and each megaproject inspired passionate, sometimes violent, resistance. Agribusiness, cultural chauvinists, the non-patriated, and inland city-dwellers were at the forefront of pushing schemes like the creation of "Atlantropa." Politicians sweetened the offer by promising cheap land and lifelong work for those who had neither. The perspectives of coastal populations, logistics firms, and transhumant people were cooler even after assurances were given of priority relocation and huge tax breaks for impacted businesses. Environmental liberationists struck hard and often. As the impacts were disproportionately inflicted on populations and interest groups with the least political voice, critics reckoned sea level change a form of cultural genocide.

Magnets played a feature role in combating the very high rates of cancer experienced by the First Generation. Unity survivors received an extra lifetime radiation dose of between 15 and 1700 rem, asbestos exposure far exceeding the maximum tolerable safe level of .1 fibers per cubic centimeter every 30 minutes, and post-hibernation disorders of the memory and nervous system collectively referred to as Cold Disease.

Led by the University of Planet's Xisho Center for Cancer Eradication, researchers used magnets to create steerable drug payloads and trigger amalgamation of defective and cancerous cells for easy obliteration.

What was used to heal could also be exploited to do harm. At Hive infirmaries, workers received generic "inoculation" with magnetic nanoparticles that allowed Overseers to trigger fatal clotting at the push of a button.



Sale of subscription billets through the charter colony scheme led to a 40% increase in Unity passenger capacity. Project managers turned to museums and private collectors to obtain serviceable equipment. Soviet space suits were favored for their ruggedness, while American styles incorporated better safety features in case of a breach.​

Sources:
For more about Atlantropa, see this article on allthatsinteresting.com.

"Fantastic Voyage" diagram is from Sylvain Martel, "Magnetic Microbots to Fight Cancer," IEEE Spectrum, Robotics, 25 September 2012, https://spectrum.ieee.org/magnetic-microbots-to-fight-cancer (accessed: 5 March 2023).

Clumping magnets are described here on howstuffworks.com.

Rem exposure chart from Idaho National Labs.

Third picture is from the Apple+ show For All Mankind.

 

[Axis Kast]

If you've ever wondered what true despair looks like, ask a prize-winning author to help you dig a latrine. - Life, Barely

Specialization of labor is both the first sign of a wealthy society and the very means by which it can become that much wealthier. Tests of faction leadership on Chiron were often about creating opportunities for some of Earth's best-educated people to do what they were good at.

Mission planners had tried to mitigate that very problem through painstaking selection. At first, consideration for inclusion in the mission was limited to candidates who fell within narrow parameters of age and physical fitness. The rule was clear: prefer the well-rounded 'jack over the narrowly-focused master. Once accepted, prospective colonists began two or three years of intense practical training in any of two Colony Occupational Specialties. Mathematicians became journeyman welders and elite rescue swimmers. Surgeons tried their hands at welding. Then came the time in classrooms. Theologians fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were taught machine language. Poets studied criminal justice and project management fundamentals.

Standards relaxed, then vanished. About a third of Unity passengers graduated the full program. Another quarter completed some training through the U.N., usually the physical component, with a focus on life-safety. Approximately the same number of colonists and crew undertook "equivalencies" with their national governments or qualifying corporations, some in addition to their U.N. commitment, some in lieu of it. Jonathan Garland believed such replacement education was suspect, amounting to political indoctrination, and he turned over document verification to Rachael Winzenried's Security Forces for three months before higher-ups in New York overruled him. Anyone not participating in U.N. or national training was awarded between two years and one month of credits to participate in InterLink correspondence courses--just enough, remembered Aayla Cantwell, to begin to confront all the things one didn't know. Crew members called it being "scared straight."

U.N. Security Forces recruits participate in room-clearing drills on the orders of Unity Security Chief Rachael Winzenried.​

Once on the ground, natural hierarchies arose. They followed a familiar pattern. Leaders and their coteries gained and retained status by assigning posts and dispensing favors. Absent coercion, techs of any kind were next-closest to the top of the heap since anyone who could keep a body or machine going in adverse conditions was nearly guaranteed to receive supervisory duties and the perquisites that went with them. (Subordinates were to learn through proximity and observation.) The next layer belonged to professional soldiers and safety responders, first in the way of harm. Weapons were useful and scarce, therefore valuable. Morgan, Santiago, Cobb, and van de Graaf incentivized their combatants with the promise of plunder. On the third rung were those who filled out the common labor pool, digging and hauling. Below these was anyone who could do no more than watch a gauge or check the seals of a spacesuit.

Within each layer, more granular divisions emerged. Medical professionals were early celebrities. Among paramilitary types, national service usually trumped.

Pilots learned that they were mechanics first, drivers second.​

In time, adjustments were made. Morgan and Van de Graaf linked political power with property rights so that one's occupation mattered less. The University made distinction between those who only worked at a job and those who could instruct others in its performance or otherwise contribute to their "economy of ideas." Factions that employed overseers--the Morganites, Spartans, Dreamers, Hive, and Ascendancy--initially ranked them alongside or just below soldiers, but all learned quickly to carefully circumscribe their authority and limit their access to weapons lest they become an internal fifth column.

Practice economy by match reward with need. Recognize the veteran and the drone with food and rest. Tomorrow, they will fight and work all the harder. Send the doctor to the datalinks and he will educate himself in a finer technique. Give the parent a primer and she will use her time to better her child. - Institutes of Leadership

​

Happiness is a menu with many options. - The Centauri Monopoly

Sources:
Joseph Plumb Martin was a Continental soldier and diarist who, after the war, left behind an autobiography titled, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of Joseph Plumb Martin.

First picture is from "Mech Constructor" by Slava Zhuravlev on Bēhance.

Second picture is "training-0217" by Jay Li on Art Station.

Third picture is "Netspectre - Cyberpunk Hacking Roguelike - Hummus bistro" by Joseph Surý on Art Station.

 

[Axis Kast]

I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man. - Ecclesiastes 3:12-13

A Hive labor unit distributes the standard ration. Civic Dieticians worked day and night to enhance the gruel's nutritional value but the Chairman insisted that it be rendered flavorless. Longing for joy in food was an "anchor sign," he said.

In Talents, deviation from the Chairman's Tenets could be punished with demotion or added work, but in drones it was overlooked with tolerance bordering on affection. Favorite meal accompaniments were simple: rock salt, green onion, and mushrooms grown in the patches where pipes leaked.



Fourteen percent of Unity's cargo by volume was shelf-stable food and potable water. It was stored in radiation-shielded, climate-controlled vaults together with the mission's seed stock, blood banks, and temperature-sensitive medicines.

Bulk medicines were sourced from the International Red Cross and broken down for distribution with individual meals. The U.S. Federal Disaster Agency contributed water purification chemicals drawn from post-war storage. Morganite loadmasters blunted the desired public relations effect of the donation by repainting the livery.​

Shipboard radiation levels remained so high for so long that the original storage measures failed to prevent widespread radiation poisoning. Knowing full well the dangers of introducing alien crops to a new biome, all factions preferred to recover Supply Pods deployed ahead of the disaster, but they also raced to grow fresh food in Planet's willing soil.

At first, spoiled rations couldn't be entirely avoided. Democratic societies arranged schemes to keep dose rates equitable, factoring age, weight, and other health factors. Crawlers like this one shuttled supplies between bases where Base Operations oversaw distribution. Some leaders had other ideas. Spartans fought duels over the small number of clean meals. In the Ascendancy, Pahlavi ensured that the older and sicker residents received the worst rations. As intended, they died in droves, relieving her of the duty for their care.

Submarine crews of L'État nouvel received special allowances to supplement their rations with food purchased at the faction's Exchanges. They prized selections particular to the land, especially wheat-based and milk products.

[IMG width="500px" height="300px"]https://expresselevatortohell.files...2013-jan-table-firefly-dinner-table.jpg[/IMG]

Tribal meals were near-celebratory occasions. Neighbors pooled resources to organize meals cooked with a wider range of ingredients than were available to any single household. Tribals, like most Purists, insisted on real meat and beer. They brewed the latter from corn.



Subrids were bread for their flesh, which most colonists found appetizing. Colonists usually combined their fresh food with accompaniments drawn from their survival meals. Hot sauces retained the same cult following they'd enjoyed back on Earth.

Fire-starters, seen here in the bottom right quadrant of the open tin, often failed to ignite but were valuable precisely because of how difficult it was to make fire without them.



Resurrection of extinct megafauna fueled a popular resurgence in sport hunting among a certain type of wealthy traveler on Earth. For a time, Warden J.T. Marsh had made his living leading safaris of this type. Hunter Lodges took pride in organizing "hungry" expeditions that left their bases without survival packs and undertook to eat only what they snared or shot while on-scout.​

Sources:
First image is from The Expanse.

Second image is "Where you want 'em?" by Marrekie on DeviantArt.

Third image is from the film Alien.

Fourth image is from the TV show Firefly.

Fifth image is "Pocket-Sized Star Wars Emergency Ration Kit" by Chrononaut on Autodesk Instructable.

Sixth image is from The Lost World.