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

Sergeant Peter "Pete" Landers said:
The best doors knock back. - The Good Neighbor's Bible

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A Dunbar Fortress in the Downpines.
Early evidence provided by the Chiron Interstellar Probe showed that, while not strictly uninhabitable, the closest Earth-like planet was nevertheless inhospitable--and not just because atmospheric conditions wouldn't support unassisted breathing. Resisting efforts to militarize the Alpha Centauri mission, Control first looked to iron-plate it.

The Cahill-Dunellion Construction (CdC) had a $372 billion book of annual business with the United States Government in 2065, standing first among private contractors. [1] Its greatest claim to fame was the highly successful Dunbar Fortress line of bunkers developed and marketed by its space engineering division. A Dunbar Fortress was a prefabricated bunker paired with retrorockets intended to be dropped on-demand from Low Earth Orbit. Éfforos

Dunbars were famously seeded from orbit during construction of the first permanent habitats on Mercury and in the Asteroid Belt to provide workers with ready shelter from solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts. The company also manufactured and deployed hundreds for earthside military use. Oscar van de Graaf's ARC used them extensively during the Second Civil War to help reinforce salients that developed in federal lines. The relationship between CdC and the U.N. was brokered by Folger Surette, a Reconstitution congressman from New Orleans and was considered critical to his subsequent elevation to U.S. Commerce Secretary.

CdC sold forty Dunbar Fortresses to the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri, along with a production license. All forty CdC-supplied packages deployed successfully with Unity's Forward Landing Parties to landing zones chosen by Director of Field Operations, J.T. Marsh, mostly in the Éfforos River Valley. Knowing Hunters used them as outposts while on caravan and sold temporary access to the road crews of friendly factions, but in time, most were overrun by rivals, especially the Shapers, becoming garrisoned strongpoints on the Big Branch Road that ran the entire 35,000-kilometer western coast of Shamash.

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An adolescent Charter expedition member uses an extended stock to steady the aim of her laser pistol during familiarization training at Camp Blake on the Grand Canyon's Southern Rim, c. 2062. Unlike mainline crew and colonists, Charter passengers included family units.

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Gathi Border Guards dismount to take positions at a disused bush airfield somewhere in central Shiloh during the drive on Gilboa.
While the U.N.'s selection boards looked for candidates with a background in space or underwater operations, J.T. Marsh preferred combat veterans for his road crews. Battlefield conditions, he said, best replicated what the expedition could expect on Chiron.

[1] The American Reclamation Corporation had been nationalized the previous year, becoming a federal corporation.

Sources:
First image is "Faraway 3257" by x-Ilusema on DeviantArt. Created using AI tools.

Second image is "Explorer 4" by Suriimii on DeviantArt. Created using AI tools.

Third image is "Echoes in the Void" by CitizenGrumpe on DeviantArt.
 
Factor Roshann Cobb said:
For millennia, we have gazed upon the stars at night and thought, what lies in the darkness beyond? Only rarely have we asked the far more important question: why also darkness within? - Rebuilding Man

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A University salvage tech prepares to draw high-voltage cable through an access port on a crash-landed piece of Unity's hull. His close-fitting encounter suit and reduced-sized oxygen tank make for more nimble work than was possible just a year prior using standard-issue gear.

The patch on this individual's right shoulder marks him as an electrical engineer, hard-worked but undervalued by his leadership.

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An example of the Egyptian Revival style in the country that inspired it, this office complex served the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources prior to the destruction of the Aswan High Dam.

The design choice frustrated some Egyptian nationalists because of the style's origins with colonial fantasists in Europe, but Egypt's president Baako El-Gerges put forward Egypt's history as a foundation for its claims of leadership in the Mediterranean, African, and Arab worlds.

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Vertical, soilless farming helped early colonies to conserve space, water, and nutrients, as well as to evade the constraints of Chiron's unpredictable weather. In nuclear-powered settings, the heightened power demands were a negligible cost. Yet if these methods were incredibly useful, they lacked one great appeal of traditional agriculture: they were not self-sustaining. Fallen fruit did not inevitably become the next season's bounty.

Sources:
First image is "Fixing a Hole v 2" by RunningJokeBillboard on DeviantArt. Created using AI tools.

Second image is "Purratia" by Epic82universe on DeviantArt. Created using AI tools.

Third image is "M.A.X. - Martian Aeroponic Experiment Base" by Wojtek Fikus on ArtStation.
 
It’s been over two years since I got involved with Racing the Darkness, so it’s good to reflect on what I find most compelling about the setting.

Maximalism: the word comes from old online Star Wars debates, but here I refer to specifically how RtD expands on the base Alpha Centauri setting to imagine a Planet that’s heavily populated in both sheer quantity and variety of societies. In some ways, it’s the premise of SMAC taken to its natural conclusion: if it’s the future of Civilization, then why shouldn’t civilization on Chiron be as numerous and variegated as it is on Earth?

RtD applies the concept of more, denser, complexer to all aspects of the setting, which I can appreciate. A more fleshed out future history before the mission. A far larger Unity and complement, which I always like to see in fan reimaginings. Many, many more factions that emerge. And the larger tech tree.

In terms of factions, I’ve always wondered what would happen if more ideological or at least future personalities were to rub up against those of SMAC, so it’s fun to me. I explored how Civilization: Beyond Earth sponsor leaders would interact with those from canon, and it eventually culminated in another SMAC crossover project (on hiatus) or two (still on-going).

To some degree, RtD is the realization of a misconception I had two decades ago browsing NetworkNode.org, imagining if all of those custom factions happened to be on Planet at once. While likely no one actually thought of the mod repository that way (not in the least because of hardcoded restrictions to seven factions per game!), the way these alternate groups were presented, following the same style of SMAC, gave them a sense of immersion and gravitas, even if it turned out that most were poorly conceived, much less poorly written. But the fact that all of them were framed as in batched sets, and some of them even in custom sets where all seven belonged to a same creator’s theme at once, set my mind ablaze.

So in the same way, RtD appeals to that maximalist notion of Chiron being the destination of humanity’s billions, with governments in the dozens if not the low hundreds. While I did not always agree with the numbers, I have often come to accept them over time. The Unity carrying half a million passengers seemed insanely huge to me, but I’ve since been informed that the “utterly insane upper size limits” of spacecraft basically permit it so long as you have enough fuel. Along similar lines it’s rather bonkers that RtD has eight ex-warships including a light aircraft carrier delivered to Planet (just how huge is this version of the Unity anyway?!?), but on the other hand, it does appeal to me from a different angle.

Maximalism when it comes to settling Alpha Centauri invokes the cozy catastrophe aspect of interstellar arks that I’ve struggled to articulate. Yes, you’re escaping a dying world. Yes, humanity’s survival is in doubt. Yes, you’re going to have to struggle and toil. But on the other hand, when you pack as much as you can in terms of supplies, manufacturing infrastructure, intellectual talent, cultural relics and precious baubles, and state-of-the-art vehicles and weapons into your hermetically-sealed vessel, maybe the apocalypse isn’t so bad for you? There is a sense of coziness to it. It’s like having a shiny ship, and then putting it into a bottle. RtD’s expansion on SMAC manages to strike up that coziness.

More to come.
 
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Official portrait of Martja Nowak at the start of her tenure as CEO of Kish-Nuween Elemental.
Martja Weldje Nowak (b. June 1, 2040, d. MY41 [presumed]) was a space-born businesswoman, heiress, cartellier, and Charterist who joined the U.N. Expedition to Alpha Centauri. From the age of thirty-six, she was CEO of Kish-Nuween Elemental, a mining company with claims primarily in the Kuiper Belt.

Born on a spacecraft en route to Makemake, she was one of the first infants to survive childhood in a trans-Neptunian capsule but spent her formative years in the Free City of Königsburg. Her father, Tomasz, an aerospace engineer, had a history of involvement in the pro-democratic labor movement Solidarity (Solidarność). Already eighty years old when Nowak was born, Tomasz had founded Kish-Nowak with the support of West German and Polish nationalist investors in 2003. Nowak's mother, Aylin, was a special investigator for the Comprehensive Transport Office of Inspector-General. The family was together only a few days each Earth-standard year.

Biographers agree that Nowak's childhood was one of "gilded solitude." To educate their only daughter, Tomasz and Aylin arranged for Interlink courses curated by Geraph the Lesser, a collective pseudonym for several widely-respected scholars affiliated with the University of Beijing. Instruction in music didn't take, but Nowak did become an accomplished downhill skier, taking bronze in the 1958 winter olympics in Sapporo, Japan. She was also a noted literary critic, publishing often in Harper's Magazine. From age sixteen, she attended guest lectures at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University and Sweden's Uppsala University. Nowak's prized possession, a gift from Tomasz, was an annotated copy of Luo Guanzhong's Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Throughout her life, Nowak expressed unswerving admiration for the Chinese warlord, Cao Cao, whom she considered exceptionally wise.

Nowak earned her PhD in management and leadership studies at the University of Copenhagen, where she was close with students from Eastern Bloc countries and participated in pro-labor organizing, frequently making common cause with open Soviet sympathizers. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service and Poland's Ministry of Public Security labeled Nowak a Communist.

Notwithstanding her politics, Nowak found her first employment with Rellichen Functions, a mining services provider that had a significant book of business with Kish-Nuween. Nowak was already Vice President and Chief Logistics Officer with responsibility for Rellichen's solar system-spanning supply chain, before she was offered a place with Kish-Nuween as its Chief Financial Officer. The opportunity proved fraught: Tomasz had heavily mortgaged many of Kish-Nuween's most-valuable assets and the company was under the close scrutiny of Comprehensive Transport due to a series of fatal accidents during orbital cargo transfers. Nowak's solution was a series of fire sales and quality control measures that bought the company two silent partners and the strong support of its own unionized workforce, avoiding the need for a public offering. The cost was a deep rupture with Tomasz's other children, whom Nowak soon purged from their places in the company's C-suite with her ailing father's assent.

Nowak now gained international notoriety as a figure worthy of the dynasty-building drama she so admired, traveling millions of miles by starship to oust her relatives from their rich fiefdoms. Critics ventured that Nowak's popularity within and beyond her company owed much to theatrics: Kish-Nuween was only a "big fish" in the almost-deserted "pond" of trans-Neptunian space, and its major achievements, including participation in the survey work that found Planet 9, rarely made large returns. The company was still posting weak performance into the early 2060s.

With no ready cash for reinvestment, Kish-Nuween struggled to resist the encroachment of larger and better-diversified competitors, especially Morgan Industries subsidiaries, even in its highly specialized marketspace. From 2064, Morgan Astrowrights was sending bulk ice carriers along routes previously served only by wildcatting companies. Starting with old allies in Rellichen, Nowak formed a union of other at-risk companies to resist. Facing their own threat from the Morgan empire, Comprehensive Transport took the extraordinary step of recognizing the Trans-Neptunian Industrial Union as a legitimate bargaining organization.

At the same time, knowing that a badly-weakened Kish-Nuween could not expect to compete in fair markets over the long-term, Nowak appealed to the United Nations. In a wide-ranging media blitz, Nowak pushed for the U.N. Mission to further diversify its suppliers--an idea that cut against efficiency but appealed to internationalists and eventually gained strong support from the Communist Bloc as well as the European Community, both eager to find a counterpoint to mega-corporations and state parastatals like the American Reclamation Corporation. Her logic was simple, and often persuasive.

CEO Martja Nowak said:
Our world lies dying. If it were otherwise, you would not be building this great ship to make your timely escape. And if you will not stop your hoarding the last wealth that remains to be had--if you will not tend to the stick and the starving right here and now--then you must at least allow us the benefit of the scraps from your table. Decency demands it. - A Last Appeal

Quotas were drawn up and the U.N. undertook to reserve 40% of remaining work, including stocking and programming, for "small" companies and "small-country" donors. Consumed by the Second American Civil War, the United States declined to veto the measure, which passed with French, Soviet, and Chinese endorsement. More than most, Nowak and her grand design was to thank for the Unity's patchwork condition, the low quality of later construction, and the high variation in the types of equipment carried.

Nowak was awakened on-Planet by the Free Drones, one of just a handful of survivors ever collected from salvaged supply pods by Foreman Domai's renegades. Like many of the faction's unstapled members, she was most attracted to the romance of their history, and came to see herself as someone cut from the same well-meaning cloth as the organizers who formed most of Domai's inner circle. She was soon entrusted with governorship of the faction's second base, Przekładnia Zamek.

At the start of the Grand Season in MY41, Nowak's entourage was transiting the lower Slowwind en route to a meeting with Governor Oscar van de Graaf at Fort Enterprise when it was overtaken by a Dreamer patrol just north of marker 70. With seventeen others, she was taken prisoner, at which point there is no further public information regarding her fate.
 
To me, the extended lore of SMAC is best exemplified by the faction leader bios that were on the official Firaxis website. Just great pieces of elliptical storytelling. Fun bits of of a dystopia and surprisingly compelling hints of the psyches and psychoses of the would-be supreme leaders of Chiron. All of my fanfics are ultimately variants of that style, and often informed by the lore of that style. What I find appealing in Racing the Darkness is no different.

The bios themselves follow a simple but effective flow whose steps this project has in spades.

Grand Elliptical Future History: As I say, fragments of the dystopia that precedes the mission, and motivates it. Always love the references to future disasters, conflicts, and polities that haunt it, and with a retro late-20th century perspective to boot. Gives me an excuse to try to introduce concepts from similar settings. Still need to slot in the crusader state of Cyprus, Malta, and the Peloponnesus.

RTD has it take place in an alternate future where the Cold War rages on, half of the colonial empires of Europe are still around, and with miscellaneous bits like Spanish Peru, which is a novel choice. While originally skeptical of it, in time I've come around to seeing it as a decent way to justify renewed great power struggle, rather than (only) dealing with the fall of a postwar hegemonic power.

And hey, the Cold War was a great motivator for space races- from For All Mankind to The Sky People duology to the latest tabletop RPG supplement from Zozer Games, extended Cold Wars are a good way to keep space colonization actually within reach. (Plus, modern Russia is just somewhat uninspiring as a geopolitical archnemesis when it comes to the window-dressing.)

I had also thought Earth being able to colonize the Solar System and raise continents from beneath the sea and such was rather out there- if they could do all that, why bother going all the way to Alpha Centauri? <hey shut up> But it does add more flavor to the pre-mission drama. And it does remind me how in the Civilization: Beyond Earth background fluff you have references to similar grand projects being undertaken in the wake of the Great Mistake. Yet the Inflection Point is undeniable and so on, humanity must leave Sol in order to survive. There's something powerful in that. RTD is similar in that, and there's the plausible deniability that maybe this was all just one big boondoggle, or just a scheme for megacorporate elites and power-hungry governments to find another land to bleed, and so on.

Shiny Spaceship in a Bottle

Whenever I'm trying to add new leaders or other characters in Alpha Centauri, it's always fun trying to figure out what ranks and positions on the Unity they could have filled, with many major ones already taken by the canonical cast. Goes into the "maximalist" approach of expanding the original premise for a cast of thousands. And makes one think of the additional spaces/areas of the ship (never mind it's a sleeper ship- give it a recreation center with Olympic pools!), more potential vehicles/equipment/weapons it brought along, and more institutions that were represented. More on that next time. I already wrote about how it's sort of cozy to imagine humanity pack for one last big camping trip to stars' end, so I shan't reiterate this too much.

Big Planetfall Brawl

Probably one of the biggest ways RTD has influenced my other stories in general- Civilizations Beyond Chiron in particular- making the tragedy Planetfall into an even bigger clusterfudg is quite entertaining to me. RTD does this by having two mutinies- the Spartans (with the Holnist hardliners as an even more volatile subgroup among them) and the Tribals. CBC is currently on indefinite hiatus, but had imagined a rather similar civil war-on-a-ship setup:

Spoiler :
Planetfall Order of Battle

Dame’s Militia: inconsistently armed members of the Society of Free Thought. Loosely trained, some possessing military experience. Core leadership includes former Earth professional protesters, Black Bloc agitators. Ideologically motivated by anti-authority. Prefers vandalism and psychological chaos to outright violence. Some on psychedelics, other narcotics. Weak non-aggression pact with the Spartans. (350)

Spartan Coalition: well-armed, well-trained, well-disciplined. Composed of a third of Unity Security team- covert Spartan members, sympathizers, or press-ganged- and numerous like-minded followers from the rest of the crew. Claiming to be only opposed to mission overreach and obstruction of faction’s goals of survival (“don’t tread on me”), in practice in constant state of conflict with the crew. (500)

Unity Security: less than well-armed due to looting of armories. Well-trained but low morale, in disarray after death of Chief of Security Joachim Ortega, defection of over a third of available personnel to Spartans. Led by Captain John Garland, then the provisional council, then finally by Executive Officer and Acting Chief of Security Dr. Sheng-Ji Yang. (380 loyal and ready out of 700)

U.N. Peacekeepers: armed below standard due to late awakening after armories looted. Well-trained and under firm leadership of Force Commander Bolivar and the Unity emergency provisional council ("Provos"). Understaffed because of inconsistent awakenings, fewer medical personnel, cryosleep equipment failures, insufficient post-hibernation recovery, sabotage. Some desertions. (530 ready out of 5000)

Kavithan mobs: armed inconsistently, mostly scavenged or improvised weapons, some looted from armories. Fanatically motivated by Thakurist religious personality cult. Opposed to all enemies of the prophet, namely the insurgents but at times against the crew. (100)

Unity engineers: armed with improvised weapons by Daoming on the orders of Zakharov. Selected by those with the most combat training in the engineering and science teams. Upgraded to standard conventional arms following fall of first Spartan headquarters. Motivated by the charismatic leadership of the Chief Scientific and Chief Engineering Officers, follows the provisional council but personally loyal to the two chiefs (230)

Chungsu operatives: well-armed with smuggled weapons and armor, small special operations teams of former Corean military and intelligence personnel, sleeper agents. Directed to undertake rapid smash and grab missions to secure mission assets for Chungsu. Avoids hostile contact but authorized to respond with overwhelming deadly force when provoked. (35)

Al-Falah revengeance squads: lightly-armed from scavenged equipment and improvised weapons, explorer-“settlers” with grievances against nationals from Project Al-Falah countries (50)

Empire Management private contractors: heavily-armed, well-trained mercenaries with extensive experience, led by aggressive Lt. Colonel “Admiral” Heid. (60)

U.N. Gendarmerie:

Dai Seung company security: lightly-armed, primarily trained for protection of VIPs. Some former United Corean military servicemen. Mostly employees armed with construction and mining equipment led by middle managers who took the initiative (90)

Knights of the Holy Sepulchre: chivalric humanitarian Roman Catholic order made militant during Crusader Wars. Journeymen and novitiates armed with assault rifles as mandate to protect missionaries, many smuggled in. Vast majority Catholic faithful colonist and crew laypersons with various levels of training (100)

Unity starwrights: armed loosely with construction equipment under Lead Starwright Hughes’ authority to protect repair efforts and the conversion of a lander pod for aquatic capability. Minimal combat training, some North Sea Unlimited contractors with security experience. (80)

Unarmed groups: Skye’s botanists, Godwinson’s psych chaplains, Domai’s miners, Barre’s colonists, Kozlov’s cosmonauts, Hutama’s communications specialists, Gilpin’s agronomists, damage control teams, maintenance crews, life support engineers, medical team, datatechs, librarians, service workers, other colonists, etc.


(Though in that story, Planetfall takes sometime between three to ten days, for max factionalization - as far as I can tell, RTD follows "Journey to Centauri" canon of it happening in about 24-36 hours or so?)

It's extremely cool to view Planetfall as a foreshadowing of what life on Planet is to come, and what the main players that emerge are. Racing the Darkness' version of Planetfall does this in spades. As always in my book, the more the merrier- and the messier!

More to come.
 
What a pleasure it is to log on today, my birthday, and spend some time with MysticWind’s reflections. I’m flattered by, and deeply appreciative of, the engagement. Thank you. Hopefully these words of mine will do your analysis some justice.

Maximal” is a very good description for RtD. The amount of extra detail alone would tend to support that description, even if huge effort had not been put into fleshing out the mission backstory. But yes, the essential thing is a much larger mission with many more factions to compete for dominance over the future of mankind.

Ironically, I don’t always think of RtD as densely-populated—or, at least, I like most the aspects of the story that take place just before mission launch and just after Planetfall. I think the leaders and their societies are bound to be most interesting in immaturity, when ambitions, loyalties, and identities are still most-fluid and the memory of what was supposed to be is strongest.

I do think the original game in some ways presented “cozy catastrophe,” but that was probably because it’s not very fun to simulate tent societies and medical triage. My way of handling all that was to suggest that a lot of the survival gear put aboard Unity was badly out-of-date. It’s cliché, but I enjoyed squeezing the most out of the old trope that the U.N. couldn’t find its way out of a bathtub if one foot were already outside it.

I too am hugely inspired by the website lore. Those bios are a touchstone for me, and I return to them for inspiration whenever I write a new character. In fact, back when this project was hosted on alphacentauri2, Buster’s Uncle was kind enough to help me create my very own version of the bios for faction leaders old and new.

Speaking of the Crusader States, my other major project, an alternate history of the Great War, explicitly incorporates the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Counties of Tripoli and Edessa, and the Principality of Antioch. In RtD, Israel has ballooned to approximate the old Kingdom of Jerusalem’s borders at greatest extent, overrunning the Sinai, Aqaba, and South Lebanon, while the French have retained Syria and the rest of the Levantine coast. Greece did return to Constantinople in a historical departure that dates back to the time of the Great War, with exclaves around Smyrna and Trebizond.

The colonization of the Sol System is really a fun way for me to introduce new characters and institutions that don’t owe all of their allegiance to a country—or at least not in the way you and I might think about our personal relationship to citizenship. It also lets me explore some of the skill sets and experiences that I think it’s plausible for future leaders to have circa 2070.

Yes, choosing ranks and billets is always interesting. I think Marsh as Warden, Germaine as Aquatic Operations Section chief, and D’Almeida as damage control lead were all good fits that aligned well with the way I wanted to present them. Marsh as the man’s man, Germaine as the man aloof from his peers, and the XO so skeptical of being able to hold the mission together.

I love the Tribe because they feel so believable to me as a faction. Luddites with the mystique of Mormons and the values of stereotypical 1950s Boy Scouts. They ironically offer the “Tall Play” option that a lot of players gravitate towards in games like this, myself included, and Landers is the closest thing to a blue collar guy among the leadership—the only major faction leader without a formal education. Miriam references the Conclave Bible often, but she's a theologian in her own right. The intellectualizing provided by Landers is usually taken from Keller, himself an armchair messiah.
 
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Kasma van Ossiter said:
On Chiron, the grass ets the cows. - A Pilgrim's Progress


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Sights along the road to Gaia's Breath called to mind of some of Old Earth's most unlikely evolutionary tricks.

Outside the tall forests of Chiron's tropics, trees grew sparse and crooked. Competition from fungus kept their root structures from making the most of the nitrate beds. Over the eons, the kistin responded by taking their search skyward, turning dense canopies of small leaves to the weak sunlight and straining nutrient-rich dust particulates from the heavy, fast-moving air.


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A fast-pack hydrofoil is painstakingly returned to service by Conclave technicians in the sunny shelter of the Fisherman's Bight. This mothership will operate survey drones from a spine-mounted catapult and replenish watercraft from its underbelly platform.

Mission standards had called for items to be bundled and packaged with spares. The hope was that the parts of, for example, a deconstructed factory would arrive together, in company with all the kit necessary for rapid reassembly. Unfortunately, hard landings and harsh weather conditions caused tremendous spoilage.

Mission recruits had rudimentary training in mechanical repair, but damaged vehicles often exceeded their ken. Cooperation on ambitious repair projects, which usually led to time-sharing arrangements, was the first diplomacy on Planet.

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The Araignée (Fr. spider) was a Helvetian rescue vehicle made by Liebheer for operation over exceptionally rough terrain. It found use primarily as an all-weather rescue platform.
Major users of the Araignée were found in the Canadian Rockies, the high Andes, and in or near the Antarctic Circle. About forty original examples of these spindly wonders were shipped up to Unity, but once planet-bound, datalinks exploration inspired thousands of similar designs. Factions settled in exceptionally rocky terrains included the University of Planet, the Human Ascendancy, the Peacekeeping Forces, and, once in exile, the Spartan Federation.
Sources:
First image is "Dragon Tree Valley" by GazeIntoInfinity on DeviantArt. Created using AI Tools.

Second image is "The Silent Harvest (99)" by Jetprovert on DeviantArt. Created using AI Tools.

Third image is "Dystopian Adventure #006" by PixelsGoBankg (PixelChemist and PixelsGoBang) on DeviantArt. Created using AI Tools.
 
I too am hugely inspired by the website lore. Those bios are a touchstone for me, and I return to them for inspiration whenever I write a new character. In fact, back when this project was hosted on alphacentauri2, Buster’s Uncle was kind enough to help me create my very own version of the bios for faction leaders old and new.
This is still up.
RtD-Homepage.png

 
Thanks, BU!

Any news about the forums? We're all interested in supporting you, if you've got a plan. And not just with donations. We're happy to run down people you might need to help fix the site.
 
Tech support.

I never lost interest in doing the hard work of keeping the place going and pretty, but I know knows nuttin' 'bout that sysop stuff. I needs me some tech support that'll actually do the work. Dunno what's got into my tech d00dz.
 
I think there should be two ways to go about finding that.

First, if you can specify what kind of work needs doing, we might be able to find some folks with those skills who'd be willing to lend a hand.

Second, if there's a paid service that can host and troubleshoot the tech side, we could look at taking up donations or something along those lines.
 
Well, we've got some sort of hacker script active, that doesn't seem to do anything but break the forum - Solver, for one, had a look and says so.

All the .html pages -the Official Website mirror, my Custom Factions page, the Alpha.owo forum archive, your pages, the AC Wiki, other resources- I made work fine, load fine - my d00dz assure me we need to migrate to another server, which I decided to do in July of 2013, but nobody stepped up to do the considerable work that takes...
 
Okay, so we need a server migration and somebody capable of dealing with a malicious script. That's a good start! Thank you!
 
Racing the Darkness, like Alpha Centauri, is not cyberpunk per se (even in the face of Alien Crossfire), but traffics in many familiar genre tropes. One memorable being the widespread namedropping of brands, both fictional and real, often in an anachronistic manner that invokes nostalgia for eras gone by. This serves several purposes. First, it emphasizes the future dystopia of multinational corporations run amok, expanding in wealth and power at the expense of traditional governments in theory responsible to the people, rather than shareholders. Second, it’s a very economic way to worldbuild. As in cyberpunk, SMAC’s proliferation of evocative names is elliptical storytelling. (Funnily enough, I actually can’t recall the website profiles mentioning any private businesses besides all of the Morgan subsidiaries.) Long before I came across this project, I came up with Honeywell-Messerschmidt.


This approach was popularized in Neuromancer, and as replies from above link might be termed ‘thisness’, ephemeral visual detail (after the style of Ian Fleming), or in William Gibson’s words himself, “applied a poetic composition.” Whatever the term, namedropping brands grounds the reader in the familiar yet induces dissonance through unfamiliar context. Via tension and contradiction, verisimilitude emerges.

RTD is similar to Blade Runner - both an inspiration to, and influenced by many of the same sources as, Gibson in writing Neuromancer, in that the businesses are not simply fictional tech-wizards, but brands of venerable Americana. (Really, it’s all Ridley Scott, as he also coined Weyland-Yutani and brought that idea to the forefront.) Because it’s a work that’s not simply rooted in the ‘80s, but ‘70s cassette futurism all the way back to golden age sci-fi of even earlier decades. I think its conception of business isn’t simply exotic eastern zaibatsu, but the all-American giants that dominated the postwar boom. A bit of nostalgia for the brands of Main Street to Mad Men. And ironically, so many of the on-screen businesses in the film became subject to the Blade Runner curse. In RTD’s future alternate history we presume that many managed to survive, somehow. One of my most emblematic passages I have written for this project evokes this ideal:

Lyonesse Strategies, a proud Nox Conglomerate subsidiary, had cut its teeth in the shadow of the Big Six while on Earth. Experts in modern scientific efficiency methods, they were sent around the globe to dissect and suture all sorts of failing projects. These management consultants strategized on everything from keeping the Concorde flying and Pan Am solvent, to increasing crop yields in modernized Golden Chinese factory farms, to hiding the cooked books of the petty kingdoms in the Indian Ocean- not to mention massaging their PR records even as human rights violations came to light.

The same segment has the elite management company Lyonesse advising WorldCom in the post-Second American Civil War reconstruction. So, moribund businesses from all sorts of decades appear in my conception of the setting. Alternate histories where product battles and corporate clashes went differently. Maybe the memory data tapes of RTD are formatted in Betamax. Embrace the anachronism.

Placing real-world companies in fantastical contexts is not limited to cyberpunk- see a John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer in this excerpt of SMAC-influence Red Mars, perhaps it should also appear in RTD. And I’ve followed suit, with a sleep-reading hypnopædiac Book Club by Oprah, Red Bull blowing past Powertrains to make muscle cars, and Morgan Industries’ own line of Bloomberg terminals- perhaps licensed from the latter, as they keep the naming.

But this is in service of more than Easter Eggs. RTD recontextualizes the typical corporate dystopia of the genre. Or at the very least, it goes beyond the classic ‘80s cyberpunk tropes of Chrome, Guns, Boobs, and Blood. In this future history, the multicorps aren’t merely avaricious and power-hungry. Sometimes, they’re competent. Sometimes, they’re the only ones. I’m leery of the concept of hero companies- imo Beyond Earth’s lionizing of ARC is hilariously naive, a hopepunk product of the Obama years. As we see in the recent return of non-zero interest rates, the road to enhorsehockeytification is universal. But competency wish-fulfillment doesn’t require moral valence; it could just be that the corps are a little more effective than shambolic political regimes.

And, to take our gaze away from RTD for a moment and look at the real world, corporations are occasionally capable of such breadth of preparedness and ability to execute that rival the most meticulous of governments. One example is the Disaster Recovery Testing event exercises held by Google. To ensure continuity of operations, the company regularly tests elaborate scenarios from zombie attacks on data centers to Bay Area earthquakes that essentially cause a decapitation strike, cutting off contact between headquarters and the rest of the company. These elaborate drills ensure that the company’s systems have multiple redundancies and the emergency procedures protecting them are familiar to the sysops and continuously patched and improved upon. All this to guarantee uptime within bounds of the service-level agreement. One hopes that one’s nation’s digital services are as ironclad.


My other example is restaurant chain Waffle House, renowned for its storm center response, tracking inclement weather and deploying “jump teams” to support locations to keep them open, while relieving local personnel to take care of their own homes. As Waffle House is known to be so effective of disaster management, FEMA has used a Waffle House Index to determine areas that are most in need of disaster recovery if the local Waffle Houses are closed. The other “Top Four” companies- Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Walmart, are also exemplars of disaster preparedness, with mastery over supply chains, logistics, and crisis response. Private business reacting well in the face of physical existential risk is quite something to behold, and I would definitely like to work in the Waffle House storm center into RTD somewhere, at least as the background of a Planetary meteorologist or a colonial DIRT (no relation to Google) dispatcher.


When it comes to integrating company brands into RTD I tend to use the approach of Silicon Valley: the companies of our world exist, but then so does Hooli (logo appears at the end of the above sequences), a particularly bloated, self-indulgent, and bumbling caricature of many of the worst elements of its real-world influences. (And so do fictional startups, especially Pied Piper- but the megacorp’s existence is the most dramatic difference.) It’s somewhat like how Metropolis and Gotham City exist in DC comics, but then so do New York and Chicago. What’s one more walled garden, alongside all the others? Same applies for Morgan, ARC, Struan’s, and my additions.

Though there are some dramatic differences, of course- since this is taking place in an alternate future history, many of the technologies, let alone industries, businesses, etc. are dramatically reshuffled. My own idiosyncratic preference is to have many of the fallen names of pre-Y2K tech- some of which would’ve been contemporaries of the Firaxis that released SMAC in ‘98- somehow survive to the 2070s, even in a cassette retrofuturistic setting. Because dot com era brands often have a distinct sense of personality and style that I find compelling, and so I devise desperate counterfactuals based on Asianometry’s historical accounts. So, ironically, most of the companies that actually show up in Silicon Valley would not appear in my RTD works, except Apple, grandfathered in an early post that referred to it as Apple Electronics. (And because the company is indeed old and venerable enough to be a ‘70s and ‘80s icon.) Its one time archnemesis and one-time ally, IBM, also exists in RTD as well. But not Microsoft- despite what I said about the amusement of seeing Hooli exist in a world of Google and Amazon, the Morgan Industries’ parodies of ‘90s monopoly-era M$ make it kind of redundant to be in RTD, and so maybe it’s better to have microsofts be cyberware as per Gibson.

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While I personally find contemporary hypermodern Big Tech and their unicorn brethren to not fit the tone of RTD, the corporate behemoths of decades past are more viable brands. I already had Westinghouse create the lost bridge droid of the UNS Unity- and have just only realized that the real-life company really did build several robots, including the Televox in 1926 (just years after Karel Čapek coined the word), and Elektro the Moto-Man who wowed visitors at the 1937 World’s Fair. (Come to think of it, the World’s Fair seems like the sort of event to still exist in RTD’s future.) But I had merely picked their presence to provide the beginning part of the machine’s name of Werk, this was sheer unconscious inspiration. And yet, this is the sort of old-school all-American industrial conglomerate that would fit well in RTD. The big names dropped in Arthur Jensen’s diatribe in Network (1976) - “You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.” AT&T is no doubt still engaged in computing in this alternate future alongside the real-world lessers that ate its post-antitrust lunch. General Electric is likely competing with Westinghouse in the same future, taking the War of the Currents to the stars. (Maybe in robotics tech- and also in competition with General Atomics, which has already been established to be behind the Fallout-style robots, and in Project Orion, suggesting a mix between the fictional version and the real thing.)

Speaking of GE, who Kurt Vonnegut once worked at and became the fictionalized setting of his first novel, the powerfully prophetic science-fiction satire Player Piano, (a work which intrigued a young Philip K. Dick!), now that’s another postwar to ‘80s brand that would belong in this setting. One of the biggest industrial giant-scientific innovator-ubiquitous consumer maker there was, General Electric is the likely the inspiration for General Technics in Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner in 1968, a company that builds everything including semi-sentient supercomputers, and sends its armies of young technocratic executives galloping across the globe to bring business expertise to developing world nations a la McKinsey today (oh, hello again Lyonesse). But also the fate of GE in the 1980s might also be a retroactive justification for why RTD has so many anachronistic big brands from past eras. Maybe Jack Welch never ascends to the CEO’s seat, and GE - and American business culture in general - is spared the financialization, downsizing, and shareholder value supremacy that inflated corporate returns yet gutted out its vitality of creation in favor of speculation.

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On the subject of alternate history, I’ll close this out with one of the original magnum opuses of the genre, now quite forgotten: For Want of a Nail, published in 1973 by business historian Robert Sobel. A sprawling faux-textbook of an alternate historical novel, it might have predicted the online incarnation of the genre with its dry election tables and dusty mountains of footnotes to imaginary sources. With the premise of the American Revolution failing due to Burgoyne winning at Saratoga, FWoaN goes on to chart a different course for the continent, split between the British loyalist Confederation of North America and the bilingual United States of Mexico with an Anglo co-ruling class descended by the defeated revolutionaries who reorganize the former Spanish colony under Andrew Jackson. And it also has a megacorporation Kramer Associates, formerly a Mexican transportation company that vies to build a transoceanic canal in Central America, and through the chaos of the early twentieth century becomes so big as to essentially take the island of Taiwan as one big company town, and then invent the nuclear bomb to force a worldwide peace. I’ll let this summarized timeline and this recent review provide more details.

Such an unexpected (remember, this novel precedes cyberpunk), yet un-fantastical turn of events (Sobel is no Turtledove nor Stirling, but an academic who goes on to include a critique in his book from a fictional professor against his novelized counterpart). The review above points out that it’s not even the only megacorporation in the novel-

Much of their early dominance is in partnership with Petroleum of Mexico, before merging with that organisation in 1892. These organisations are not limited to the USM, with the Galloway family’s North American Motors being wealthy enough and powerful enough to launch their own sponsored migration scheme in the CNA and beyond from 1922. Nor are they limited to private enterprise, with the CNA’s National Financial Administration existing as an arm of the government to provide financing throughout the Confederation. These organisations are not without historic precedent, and Sobel’s profession as a business historian many have been the reason an alternate path whereby these corporations grow evermore powerful rather than being curtailed by governments is so emphasised within For Want of a Nail.

But this older, turn-of-the-century review from AH.com’s own Ian Montgomerie goes into this characterization deeper, drawing a contrast between large corporate monoliths of the 1970s and before, with the software titans that arose in the '80s and '90s, underlining mine:

That, however, brings me to the only really glaring problem of the whole timeline - Kramer Associates. Kramer basically starts out as a monolithic, government-supported corporation in Mexico, with control of a lot of important natural resources and their exploitation. Due to friendly relations with Mexico's government, it emerges to become the largest corporation in the world - and then it successfully diversifies, becomes a true multinational, and moves out of Mexico. At this point things begin to get very implausible - it just grows and grows and grows. By the end of the timeline, Kramer Associates is more powerful, and richer, than any nation except the CNA, it has effective control over many Pacific countries, it played a vital role in the global war, and it was the discoverer of the atomic bomb. Given the personalities and aims attributed to its leaders, it can basically be described as the Enlightened Supercorporation. It is far more successful than it has much reason to be, and that's after Sobel has a lot of things go very well for it throughout the timeline. The more I think about it the more annoying it becomes, actually - Kramer Associates is almost a toned-down, economic Domination of the Draka, in the sense that its leaders are too smart, it has too much technological success, and luck seems to go its way the great majority of the time.

This is, in actual fact, probably attributable to when the book was written (and by who). Sobel was a business historian, writing in the late 60s/early 70s. This was a period when the accepted view was that large, monolithic/monopolistic corporations worked very well, that command-based economic practices and pure Keynsian controlled economics was the road to success, and that the big old companies with governments in their pockets were around to stay. Of course, we have since learned that this view has profound flaws, both in and of itself and in terms of its relevance to the modern world. Bell was broken up, the Zaibatsu and their relationship with the government led to Japan's current economic problems, the Asian Tigers got hit with collapse due to problems their growth-oriented economies were not prepared for, resource-based cartels such as OPEC and DeBeers lost their power. And last but not least, we saw how the information revolution began changing our economy and in the process, who was on top of that economy. In record time, the grand old dinosaurs of the electronics and information businesses were crushed by the likes of Microsoft. Today we know a lot that Sobel didn't about the kind of problems Kramer Associates would experience, so what to him probably looked like an interesting and possible what-if, appears to us as incongruous and implausible as old science fiction novels that casually assumed the Soviet Union would be a competitive threat well into the 21st century.

I would not include Kramer in Racing the Darkness, but this is the sort of prototypical concept of an entire class of corporation, and perhaps an earlier type of American capitalism that existed before the corporate raider neoliberal takeover of the cyberpunk ‘80s, that this timeline seems to be full of. Would be interesting to compare them with other conceptions of megacorporations. And their continued existence in RTD's retrofuture would fit in alongside the survival of the Soviet Union and the western European colonial empires. Anyway, brands.

One more to come.
 
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Great post!

I think it was the BattleTech universe that first turned me on to the use of real-world corporations in science fiction with Federated-Boeing. I also use some fake corporations not of my own design, like Struan’s, which is from James Clavell’s The Asian Saga.

As a historian, I’ve been fascinated by the role of corporations in conflict ever since learning about the Dutch and British East India Companies. (I get a kick out of the fact that “The Virginia Company” is a song on the soundtrack to Disney’s Pocahontas.) More proximate to our times, we might look at United Fruit or the Union Minière. And that doesn’t even get into the reprivatization of military force that began during the Cold War era and continues on today in the guise of entities like Executive Outcomes, DynCorp, and Wagner. In RTD, Oscar van de Graaf effectively wields the power of American government against his enemies by leveraging his personal wealth to obtain the legitimacy that only politics can bestow: Letters of Marque and Reprisal that allow him to plunder his commercial adversaries at will.

In college, my political science courses explored the question of what might come after contemporary sovereignty. Today, it is not uncommon to find articles pointing to the emergence of a counter-programmed elite—not the meddlesome “Globalists” represented by the likes of Marita Covarrubias in X-Files, but people whose massive and decentralized personal wealth provides a buffer against personal ruin if their home country fails.

And sure, to the extent that any organization is interested in self-preservation, they will manifest hierarchies, policies, and capabilities commensurate with their hazards. Part of what the ARC and even Struan’s must do to qualify for their charters is provide not only the funding, but the other elements—people, equipment, processes, etc.—of full-blown missions-within-missions. They must demonstrate, by replicating core mission functions, that they will not be forever dependent upon the “mainline” colonization effort. Of course, in forcing them to develop those means, the U.N. is all but ensuring that one day van de Graaf and Cobb will ask, “Why should I answer to Garland when I have all the makings of my own feudal estate right here?”

Then, also, you are very right to point out the power of brands as ideas. Even in RTD, Grumman is still the “Ironworks,” turning out notoriously rugged products just as it did during its mid-twentieth century heyday in OTL. And I have a certain fondness for Netscape myself.
 
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ice_breaker_megawhale_from_the_deep_by_hugofredoueil_defn2ez-pre.jpg

Artist's rendition of a Sounders Whale.

The Sounders Whale, also xenoleviathan, or popularly, xeno-lev, is a species of toothed cetacean common in Chiron's southern abyssal depths. Sounders Whales are named after Simbel "Big Sim" Sounders, a Peacekeeper electrician's mate who first captured footage of a breaching specimen in waters off Warm Welcome in Planet's antarctic zone. Similar in shape to a Terran blue whale, the Sounders Whale is distinctive for its very great size, prow-shaped foreskull, flaring frontline, tiered jaws, and four pectoral fins. Adult Sounders Whales have been measured at lengths up to 79.5 meters, weighing up to 510 tons. Mobility and ciruclation are assisted by a redundant skeletomusculature and subordinate organs that assist with respiratory, circulatory, and sensory functions. Sounders Whales can take and disgorge air simultaneously through two blowholes at either end of their bodies, both of which feed the same set of lungs. They can spend as much as four hours underwater at depths approaching 5,000 km. Specimens are prized for their meat and blubber, as well as the medicinal value of their blood and organs. The redundant kidneys of Sounders Whales are used by some Hunting Lodges of the Coldshells to strain fung beer.

Large counts of Sounders Whales have been made in waters that range seasonally between -12° and 3° C. Individual Sounders Whales are solitary hunters that claim personal territories up to 1.6 million km², which they patrol aggressively against encroachment by members of their own species. It is thought that the Sounders Whale feeds primarily on food sources found at sea, but they have also been observed coralling and taking subrids through the ice, which they bash with a thick dorsal fat pad that abuts from the top of the head.

Sounders Whales are highly vocal, using both infra- and ultra-sound as a weapon to disorient prey items as well as in combat with competitors of their own species. Sounders Whales are known to give chase to submarines as well as to interfere with slow-moving surface water traffic.

The hemoglobin of Sounders Whales is highly efficient, with qualities resembling those of the perfluorocarbons that are often used in blood substitute, such as very small size and very high capacity for oxygenation. Sounders Whale blood also moves considerably faster than human blood at the same pressures. Several human laboratories are studying Sounders Whale blood for its potential application to cardiovascular performance enhancement.

Morganite fisheries target the Sounders Whale commercially to serve medical buyers across Chiron. Acoustic torpedoes are the favored weapon for dispatching the whales' thick flanks, which often withstand repeated batterings. The open jaws of a large Sounders Whale are set behind the CEO's chair in the executive conference suite of Morgan Marine.

New State Oceangrapher Giles Maiga, Planet's foremost expert on the Sounders Whale, has linked their whalefalls to healthy reef formation in Planet's southern latitudes.

Sources:
Image is "Ice breaker Megawhale form the deep" by HugoFredoueil on DeviantArt.
 
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