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

[Axis Kast]

Whether they knew it or not, Holnists were confronting a timeless problem. It is impossible to tell an audience what has happened without also influencing how they feel about it. – Media and Modern War

Notwithstanding the near-catastrophe of 1973, Israel and Iran more or less ran the Middle East table from the late twentieth century forward, acting in concert themselves, or with the United States, to blunt the ambitions of neighboring states.

In early 1979, the Shah was dying of aggressive cancer, and Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein thought he saw an opportunity to meddle in the succession. But Iraq’s Intelligence Service was inferior to SAVAK in every way, and attempts to stir up pro-Communist sentiment failed, triggering an Iranian ground invasion that quickly gained the northern third of Iraq as a Kurdish homeland.

The U.N. spoke airily of experiments in national reconciliation, but retaliatory pogroms gripped the new Kurdistan Republic and two hundred thousand Iraqi Arabs fled its new capital of Mosul hot on the heels of the retreating Republican Guard. Among them was the extraordinary Essa family.

Awad Essa had been a conservator of manuscripts with the University of Mosul, but a vehicle wreck during the escape to Baghdad left him unable to work. Second son, Boualem, joined the army where he earned assignment to an air defense unit and trained under Soviet advisers sent to rebuild the Iraqi armed forces. Radar operators trained for three months in the Soviet Union, where Boualem saw his first computer, an Agat-7 micro-terminal.

Through black market trades, Boualem acquired an RCA Cosmo personal computer and a word processing program in the form of a ROM cartridge. Boualem’s son, Gulzar, built and rebuilt the machine for the year it took to buy writable memory, at which point the real work began: digitizing the text of centuries-old documents their family patriarch had taken with him into exile.

Patriotic feeling had run dry among Gulzar’s generation, and an uneventful conscription did not tempt him to make soldiering his career, but as a typist he made it onto a colonel’s staff. That colonel ran interference with the United Nations on behalf of his political masters, and from those diplomats of the Mongkut School, Gulzar learned of the opportunities available to the descendants of war refugees like himself.

Gulzar Essa at training in France. Data Services personnel abandoned the standard togs of other mission branches in favor of uniform blouses and berets.​

To grasp hold of the future, Gulzar first had to cut ties with the past. Enormous bribes and genuine transit papers provided by one of Boualem’s former commanders took Gulzar northwest across the border into Mandatory Syria, then on a passenger flight to Marseilles, home of the United Nations Interlink.

Data services were the fiefdom of a Tạ Dọc Thân, a notorious martinet who used paramilitary language and stylings whenever his superiors were looking the other way. To Gulzar’s surprise, he was taught less about the fundamentals of database management or electronics repair than the politics of popular memory. Thân, he noticed, had a taste for length. No documentary was too long, no memo too detailed. He delighted in knowing things that other people did not and once explained to a packed classroom that Data Services existed not to determine what should be stored in Unity’s computer systems, but to know where to find what was.

A Data Services technician completes production of one of the 973 million hard disks that will deliver instructions to the Stasis and Fidelity Emergency Control System, the “brain” for all shipboard hibernation functions. With these instructions, colonists experiencing medical emergencies would receive a lengthy menu of automatic interventions based on declining vital signs.​

Thân’s leadership aboard Unity was decisive. He knew his purpose: defense of the Data Core, and abdicated other duties in its favor. For terrified subordinates like Essa, it was the obvious choice: a leader committing to remain with his people when he was most needed. They would not attempt to respond to what was happening ship-wide, Thân explained, and would instead fall back to tending the only machine that really mattered. Whoever was left, they would surely perish without the fund of knowledge held fast in the Data Core.

Gulzar Essa killed his first man for Tạ Dọc Thân in the sixth hour of the Disaster. A Holnist broke into one of two electrical closets abutting Memory Hall ψ. From concealment, Essa shot the man in the side of the head and recovered his rifle. In the finest traditions of the Data Services Division, he organized the defense of his position under heavy duress until the enemy’s resolve flagged.

Brevet promotion followed, and once Planetside, Essa looked to reunite with the mentor he had come to idolize. Only then did he learn the terrible truth: the great man was dead and the Data Core lost—fallen, perhaps, into unfriendly hands. In Thân’s place was a lieutenant, Sathieu Metrion, with a problematical interest in second-guessing his dead master’s decisions.

The Tomorrow Institute divided its energies between two objectives: accumulation of the inputs necessary to operate the largest computer system on Planet and recovery of the information to be stored within. “Forklifts and bullets” was Sathieu Metrion’s clear and unhesitating answer to that infamous first question broadcast to the Planetary Network by Nwabudike Morgan: “What do you want today?”​

A librarian is a field guide, not a creator, and certainly not a curator. There is no decision about what to take, only the most precise attention to where it will go. – Ancient Architecture

Sources:
Gulzar Essa is represented by Seth, a character from the first entry in the long-running Command & Conquer series from Westwood Studios.

Computer image is from IBM, included in this Business Insider article from 2016.

Forklifts picture is “research” by Darnok9 on DeviantArt.

 

[Axis Kast]

Our job is to do for thinking what Henry Ford did for the production of the automobile. - Fragments from the Joining

Information Socialists posited that, once disclosed through shared or recorded, an idea was the shared property of all people. Hackers, like Holnists, made a window-dressing of this philosophy, though most data piracy in the Hopkirk Era was for personal entertainment or partisan political purposes well divorced from clear altruism.

University of Adelaide Wellmand Chair of Computer Science Kyle Porters became an enduring New York Times bestseller and a talk-media staple for his argument that information fit the classic criteria of a monopoly good. Only government intervention, he wrote in 2023's Creative Alcatraz, could ensure the full exploitation of this classically undervalued resource.

Soviet and Chinese Communist propagandists amplified Porters's message whenever they stood accused of industrial espionage, which was often.

The Blue Devil Holnist Cell abducted Porters from Victoria Square-Tarntanyangga and shot him dead three days later. They produced a watch-vid of the assassination, which they put behind a paywall. It became one of the most-accessed vids of all time, earning 17.9 billion views in twelve months.

Building on Porters's ideas, zap theorist Starling Dade suggested that the real benefit of public ownership of intellectual property was to press comparative advantage, as the Datalinks Revolution had already begun to demonstrate. What if an idea in Hokkaido was just waiting for an architect in Zaragosa? And how better to achieve frictionless exchange than via a hive mind?

Ex-Soviet Airborne General Vyacheslav Kolchaiev (left) gradually warmed to the conclusion that a hive mind was the only viable solution to the Developmental Leap, a theorized planetological singularity that humanity needed to cross to overcome an extinction-level event on Planet.​

To find himself one of the Unity colonists was a disgrace for Kolchaiev, a decorated combat commander whose only "crime" was believing deeply in the correctness of Communist political doctrine at a time of political rapprochement with the West. To keep Kolchaiev from making common cause with more militant hardliners, the KGB allowed his emigration to Sudan.

Mercenarism being the highest form of fascist corporatism in his estimation, Kolchaiev kept himself fed by taking contract work with United Nations anthropologists attempting to preserve the cultures of crisis-afflicted populations. In 2068, Kolchaiev was recalled to the U.S.S.R. on the occasion of his son's death and handed his fate.

Kolchaiev's name is known to have appeared on several manifests used by faction leaders as divergent as Chief Engineer Prokhor Zakharov and Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal to sort out the choicest conscripts for their causes. In fact, he was made a Forward Controller by Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida and oversaw the defense of Unity's reserve reaction mass. (The Holnist rampage was so beyond reason that one body of Santiago's people tried to dump the compartment and thereby throw the ship off-course, thereby to consign all its passengers to starvation or strangulation--whichever came first.)

Hard on the heels of the Survivalists, Roshann Cobb's people came looking for Kolchaiev. Proximity to an exploding grenade cost Kolchaiev one ear, one thumb, and, temporarily, his wits. When he woke, Kolchaiev found that the attending physician was none other than Dr. Aleigha Cohen.

Years passed. Too valuable to be wasted on a work gang, too dangerous to be traded carelessly away, Kolchaiev studied his captors and the technologies that enthralled them. Never partaking himself of lucid dreaming, Kolchaiev nevertheless joined the culture it spawned.

Members of the Joining communicated with one another by accessing a sequestered terminal in a storm-damaged agricultural research bay. "Aspirants," as they called themselves, agreed that perceptions and emotions as well as ideas and data should be shared as part of an intellectual commons. The purpose of Dreaming should not be the individual enlightenment supposedly sought by Cobb, much less personal amusement. The truest form of public service was participation in a mental collective that, once large enough, must outpace the University's innovation, predict market shifts more accurately than Morganite polysoftware, and even regulate the baser emotions of its own participants.

Sources:
Information Socialism, also called Nanosocialism, along with its fictional originator Kyle Porters, were introduced in Jan F. Zeigler's Transhuman Space: Fifth Wave, a sourcebook for the GURPS role-playing game system.

First image is "Hardcoding: Redshift Study" by Zaki on ArtStation.

Santiago Cabrera as Cristóbal Rios is our Kyle Porters.

Starling Dad is "Cyberpung girl portrait" shared by paisacrypto on reddit (r/midjourney).

Kolchaiev's picture is "World in Conflict-Soviet Assault, Cutscenes" by Miguel Iglesias on ArtStation, produced for UbiSoft.

 

[MysticWind]

Among the good intentions that paved the road to Chiron, the Stellar Lifeboat Project ranked as one with the most blowback. An ambitious attempt by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees to gift a chance of humanity’s lifetime, the initiative aimed to relocate the forsaken of Earth onto the UNS Unity. Reviewed by Chief of Staff to the Secretary-General Pravin Lal himself, then rubber-stamped by Mongkut in turn, the plan proposed to admit lottery-winning families of vetted stateless No-Pats, political asylum seekers, international refugees, and the internally displaced onto the great ship as ready-made colonists beholden to the magnanimity of the U.N.

The architects of this cockamamie proposal offered a host of rationales: the humanitarian- these poor souls who had lost so much on Earth should be granted a chance to prosper beyond; the coldly pragmatic- by selecting from persecuted populations, their former home governments would be glad for them to be gone anyway, and perhaps even reduce the number of anti-Unity terrorist attacks by otherwise jealous neighbors; and even the anthropological- by including dwindling minorities, this could greatly increase the cultural mass brought to the new planet, preserving customs and creeds otherwise forever lost.

Of course, reality was far starker. Lt. Commander Tạ Dọc Thân was skeptical of swapping valuable high-fidelity datatapes for fragile, mortal people; archivist librarian Élodie looked askance at the supposed cultural value these huddled masses would bring compared to the Grand Canon. Some governments were glad to banish their undesirables into space- saves the dirty business worthy of World Court tribunals, after all- yet crabs in a bucket mentality pushed others to denounce it as a scheme to undermine national or ethnic pride by elevating their enemies all the way to humanity's new frontier. Mob violence and pogroms were not much abated by the dubious "honor" bestowed upon the peoples considered for the lottery. And finally, like with every other aspect of the mission, the project was exploited by opportunists such as James Heid of the IMF front company Eames Emporium to stow away under assumed names, as well as spies, saboteurs, and sleeper agents of dozens of countries, corporations, and causes.

Yet regardless of the grim realities, the Stellar Lifeboat Project resettled a myriad of the once-forgotten, from those left behind by the conflagration of the Six Minute War to the victims of tribal conflict in the American heartland. Uyghur and Tutsi, Quechua and Copt, Roma and Inuit, they indeed brought with them multitudes of tongues and traditions in living color.

Planetfall gave pause to the ember of hope as the true unfortunates of the Lifeboat found themselves press-ganged, conscripted, bonded, indentured, and swindled by warlords and petty kings. Many were caught up in the confusion as the Unity began to break up in orbit. Morgan Industries, ARC, Struan's Pacific Trading Company, and more fought over this readily-thawed source of labor. Yet their utility as a pliant workforce likely saved many of their lives, and kept families- even nascent communities- intact. Placed into one bracket by U.N. bureaucracy, forced into service by the rulers of Planet, the former terrestrial refugees of the Stellar Lifeboat would later come to create societies of their own both within and without the factions.

 

[Axis Kast]

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night - Datalinks

"Raid by two-stage Hopper" appears as the final entry for 391 individual colony sites in the Great Register of Planet, a crowdsourced history that began at Mission Launch and remained active in the Planetary Datalinks until the First Destruction.

Survival suits were never completely stowed, vigilance never completely relaxed. At the close of each cycle in the Hive, Chairman Yang's voice crackled through wall-mounted consoles from which citizens practiced unspooling individual breathing hoses. The warning was always the same: "Move to air. Move to air. Move to air."

No more worshipful hands ever did touch Unity than those of Joralemon Hardacre's drones, who removed every gainful thing. Founded as Rundun's Yard, the towering salvage facility was renamed to Brent's Barrage. Full companies of Impact troops were garrisoned permanently in the sprawling mine fields and defensive emplacements that kept jealous neighbors at arm's length.

Watchkeeper Militia race around the perimeter of Super Station Σπύρος, a steam plant devised by University scientists in service to the Shapers of Chiron. Its purpose was to boil away the permafrost and melt the glacial ice that shrouded Chiron's fourth continent, Aaru.​

Sources:
First picture is "Lomonosov Venus Lander" by Mark Maxwell (1986) from David Hardy's Visions of Space (1989) on the Tumblr 70s Sci-Fi Art.

Second picture is "Mining colony apartment" by JamesCombridge on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "The Outer terrorities-Shipyard" by PeteAshford on DeviantArt.

Fourth picture is "north" by polosatkin on DeviantArt.

 

[Axis Kast]

As our ambitions elevate above petty survival, we ask ourselves: what sacred thing remains to spoil? How long before the water cannot be drunk, nor the earth tilled? - A Social History of Planet

By volume, more than one half of all Unity's cargo and equipment was affixed to the exterior of the hull for independent deployment by retrograde rocket. This made it impossible to access from the ship's interior.

Here, a Multi-Directional Salvage Unit of the Conclave Flight Pillar makes contact with the High-Altitude Sensing Module (HASMO) on Unity's "east" mission arm in preparation for removal.

Four perspectives emerged on the essential purpose of returning to space: salvage, war, study, and commerce.

Despite backing from as unlikely an ally as the Human Labyrinth, the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs was unable to secure support for its proposal that the orbiting remnants of Unity be made neutral ground, subject to recovery by a multi-faction arbitrator empowered to award salvage rights based on proven need. Projecting bravado he didn't have the guns to enforce, Academician Prokhor Zakharov challenged that such an arrangement "reflects only the best interests of the pigs who have not prepared their homes. They would have everyone live in straw and call it fairness."

All factions wanted something from within the stricken hull. Meeting at High Atomica, Dr. Johann Anhaldt and Conservator Sathieu Metrion agreed that retrieval of computer systems should take priority. Cobb, Van de Graaf, and Lal each left numerous diary entries pointing to remembered friends and colleagues who might still be aboard in suspended animation.

Spartans and Memorialists raced to put weapons platforms aloft before scientific or commercial payloads. Santiago experimented with Chiron-facing ortillery (a portmanteau for "orbital artillery") in the form of kinetic re-entry vehicles. Mercator put a pair of solar-powered chemical lasers in geosynchronous orbit above the poles awaiting an external threat.

University astronomers and materials scientists hoped to intercept and redirect a transient comet in MY412.

To please its hard-charging board, Morgan Aerospace took on significant debt during the race to survey the Nessus moon. Successive failures of the company's proprietary Theseus launch packs forced executives to admit that they couldn't meet financial obligations, a condition for which the faction had no established response. Bourse proxies launched a successful takeover on the Planetary Energy Exchange. Other Morganite power-brokers, led by T.M. Morgan-Reilly, would not back the CEO's proposal to close the markets.

Some factions disdained rocketry. Neither the Gaians nor the Dreamers turned their attentions skyward. Factor Roshann Cobb scoffed at his peers' failure to perceive the importance of delving "the true frontier" of the human psyche.

Though he did not advertise it, even Nwabudike Morgan strained harmful pollutants from his faction's water supplies.

As crowding on the Atrean landmass reached a crisis point around the third mission century, factions necessarily began diverting resources from extraction to recovery activities.

Environmental liquidators whose skills had been formerly weaponized to eradicate xenofungus were asked to reapply their original craft by tending the mess that had resulted. At the Planetary Council's behest, the Hunters of Chiron began a decade-long ecological inventory of Planet.

Gaians pursue loggers felling timber and veg within their sovereign borders.

Walkers were an indispensable workhorse of Gaian security organization. The chassis had several features ideal to local conditions: a high stance that kept it well above high water levels, zero turn radius for negotiating dense terrain, and, in the deft hands of a careful pilot, the option to push toadstools aside in deference to destroying them.

Weight management was more a problem than with tanks, but thickly-forested conditions mitigated the obvious liabilities of a walker's hulking profile and limited the kinds of weapons adversaries could use in opposition. The ball turret design used organic superlubricant to speed adjustments when targeting the vehicle's four-barreled laser cannon mount. Note the subtle evidence of biovoltaic paneling on the roof. The vehicle drew energy from the waste heat of the toadstools themselves.​

Sources:
First picture is "Space" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Turbine" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "Into the woods" by Rajanandepu on DeviantArt.

 

[Axis Kast]

Children and adolescents are a paradox for our mission. They offer the great danger of distraction while providing that which is indispensable: a promise of continuity. - Speech to the 76th World Congress of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child

Ten years passed before the population replacement rate turned positive. Most losses were delayed fatalities caused by injuries sustained during the Unity Crisis.

Population replacement was an urgent problem for the Unity survivors, and would have been even had the settlement process unfolded as planned. Passengers under the age of twenty, including Kellerite stowaways and Charterist dependents, represented less than half of one percent of the original ship's complement.

Young, healthy, and fearless is a sometimes-fatal combination, but one to be savor. - The Lost World

Some missions required the finesse of a trained Probe Team. For the rest of the dirty work, there was always another ReSoc retread.

Rites of passage in Sparta culminated with the construction of a rover using parts stolen from the faction motorbay. Prospective warriors then went looking for a fight. They usually got it. Most of these tear-offs ended honorably in death by combat.​

If you ever think, 'I'm not tough enough for this,' just remember: you're still here. You've been tough enough every day until today. Why shouldn't you be tough enough tomorrow? - Manifesting Destinies

Gaians knew better than to resurrect the institution of marriage, which Skye called "a question of property, not of commitment." Lovers loved until they loved no more. Their children were raised in common, sometimes none the wiser as to who their parents were until they became old enough to access the Datalinks. When a member of the faction died, their property was reclaimed and any organic remains composted.

Leaders already comfortable impoverishing others from afar were quick to argue for the re-institution of slavery by another name. Why convert a prisoner when you could work him instead? A Spartan lieutenant (middle) has an apparently healthy Tribesman for sale (right).

Spartan couples married in the Old Way, speaking vows before a Psych Chaplain and witnesses from their barracks block.

Most factions encouraged procreation with preferential treatment for those with children. In L'État nouvel, membership in a child-rearing family unit became a prerequisite for achieving both full citizenship and flag rank.

Tribals married in public ceremonies marked by weeks of celebration. The betrothed were given away by relatives and neighbors who gave long testimony to their "marriagable" qualities.

Stadtholder approval was required for new marriages among the New Two Thousand. Both pledges required certifications of land ownership and evidence of readiness to occupy and hold ground at the edge of faction territory, for which they accumulated retainers who lived under less formal arrangements.​

Sources:
First image is "Cyber Frankenstein" by Vladimir Manyukhin, discovcered on Instagram under the "Evil Design" account.

Second image is "Carefree," by Seven-teenth on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Sandy Road" by Seven-teenth on DeviantArt.

Fourth image is "They told me I was gone" by Seven-teenth on DeviantArt.

Fifth image is "Big Big Tree" by MCfrog on DeviantArt.

Sixth image is a still from Kevin Costner's The Postman (1997).

Seventh image is a still from Lost in Space (Netflix version).

Eighth image is a still from the MMORPG Ashfall found here.

Ninth image is "Details for wild west sci-fi colony 03" from a Tweet by Francis Goeltner.

Resocialization ("ReSoc") was the process by which Marines were made in StarCraft.

 

[Axis Kast]

God is on the side of the big cannons. - Napoleon Bonaparte, Apocryphal

Given the tools and knowledge predominant among the survivors, direct-fire energy weapons were easier to produce than conventional artillery tubes.

Unity crawlers were excellent gun tractors: rated for extremely heavy loads, designed around redundant systems, fitted to operate in NBC environments, and heavily armored to defeat hostile environments.

Mining vehicles like the Mjolnir stood in for "proper" cannons. Accuracy was wanting: the cannon's original nuclear payloads demanded little precision of its designers. To mitigate this impediment, the vehicle's primary operators--Hunters and Shapers--experimented with gas and splintering munitions.

Cheap to build, easy to repair, lightweight motor trikes operating on biofuels furnished the Human Labyrinth with the larger part of its mobile strike arm. Other third-rate or merely resource-poor militias took the lesson eagerly in hand. Both the Nauvoo Legion and Kellerite Minutemen operated garages turning out similar platforms.​

Sources:
First image is "X-Ray Tank" by Anton Tenitsky on ArtStation.

Second image is "Mjolnir" by KaranaK on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Troika" by jflaxman on DeviantArt. Biofuel idea is theirs.

 

[Axis Kast]

Unless we learn to lift our sights, we already know our sinking fate. There is something inescapably true about Morgan's logic: nothing is ever big enough for sharing. - On Guard for Tomorrow

The Worldshaper Battery fires atomic salvos in the direction of the Blue Line.

A palpable sense of desperation now set in amongst the Human Pact. Reports from Lab Three, Shcherbinaville, Lobachevsky Park, and Razvitia-Progress Base indicated the allies were down to just four months worth of fissile material. Enormous graveyards of abandoned machinery--rank after rank of Unity Rovers--formed just behind the front lines. They were victims of what the techs called "fuel rod lobotomies."

After every breakthrough, Lady Skye's solar techs sent hundreds of vehicles eastward as spoils.

Addressing the Planetary Council in November MY320 from an undisclosed location that many believed was in fact a Hive warren, Liquidator Nagao labeled Skye a genocidaire[/i] and abruptly promised to resurrect Planet after cleansing it with fire.[/i]

Counted as a political unreliable by the junta in which he had come up, Argentine major Ricardo del Moreno Aguirre was made a military attache to Rio de Janiero. He took a subsequent sentence of exile to the Unity as a new lease on life. During the Crisis, Moreno Aguirre collected and led urgently-required reinforcements to Hab Bay 7, organizing a successful flank attack on a superior force of Vigilance mercenaries working for Nwabudike Morgan. Among the prisoners liberated in the attack were Life Support Systems Chief Michael Hefferan and Atherholt Group psychiatrist Steven Zale.

By order of Kleisel Mercator, Aguirre was made colonel and ordered to locate the remnants of the Chiron Interstellar Probe. To assist the search, Aguirre turned to a character whose "services" he had previously used once before: Avtoritet Ryang.

The M-91 Cockroach Self-Propelled Bunker was a modestly successful product of the Chrysler Corporation's Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant. The concept was simple: a rolled homogeneous armor box, hardened against most of the weapons available to insurrectionists, with enough firepower in its triple 40mm guns and three .30 caliber machine guns to enable platoon-level commands to take on numerically superior forces and win consistently.

The memory of the M-91 inspired Chironian copy-cats built around decommissioned earthmovers like this Memorialist wreck on the doorstep of Tribal Corrosiontown.​

Sources:
First image is "artillery barrage" by 5ofnovember on DeviantArt.

Second image is actor Pierce Brosnan in "The Fourth Protocol."

Third image is "Relic" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

Michael Hefferan, Steven Zale, and the Atherholt Group are creations developed in the Chronicles of Pre-Unity, a speculative fan fiction effort hosted on the defunct Alpha Centauri forums back in 1998. Hefferan is a creation of the user MikeH, while Zale and the Atherholt Group belonged to the user Octopus.

 

[Axis Kast]

Exigency is the best argument of kings and cowards. - Defensa de la Justicia

Captain Victoria Reyes resigned her commission in the United States Army in 2039 to serve the secessionist Republic of Texas. Her open letter of intent, published contemporaneously by the Houston Chronicle, was addressed the next morning by the White House Press Secretary and is archetypal of the public apologia produced by members of her profession to justify their realignment of loyalties. Reyes framed her decision as a difficult and deliberate reaction to federal mismanagement of state tax revenues, negotiation of unfavorable trade agreements, and failure to resolve border control issues. This style of public rhetoric leaned heavily on hypersurvivalist tropes. Critics were quick to point out Reyes's reliance upon a combination of inaccurate or incomplete facts sourced from the Global Datalinks. During the Second American Civil War, Reyes served in the Texas Army's Legion of Cavalry as a quartermaster. She oversaw inventory and returns to service of equipment seized by Texas forces at military installations around San Antonio.

Texas soldiers shelter from a partisan sniper in Tulsa, OK during the Second American Civil War.​

Texas governor Frederick Anthem--he retained the old title even after signing a unilateral declaration of independence--launched simultaneous invasions of Oklahoma and Louisiana. From the first neighbor, he wanted more oil. From the second, control of the Mississippi River delta. Both, he thought, could later be traded for a promise of perpetual peace with the rump United States, but a proposal along those lines was rejected out-of-hand by President Katherine Detweiller.

The Texas Occupation of large sections of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Louisiana lasted more than three years. Finding he could not sell the assets back to their original owner, Anthem negotiated instead with a multinational corporation, Morgan Industries.

Reyes, made a captain in Texas service but demoted by the U.S. Army to private after the war, was briefly imprisoned at the Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar, receiving a pardon after two years as a beneficiary of general amnesty. She returned to Texas but found herself blacklisted by the American Reclamation Corporation and was therefore unable to obtain war recovery work. She became a Datalinks journalist, living hand-to-mouth before learning through an outlawed veteran's association about work in the Caribbean.

A Morgan Industries subsidiary, the Rook Corporation, hired Reyes as an Outbound Cargo Manager for the Quito Worldport. Rook furnished Reyes with forged credentials that saw her past U.N. Security Council safeguards on employment for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri. She kept her superiors closely informed about the particulars of the fitting-out process and the manifests submitted to her care.

During the Unity Crisis, Reyes and fellow green-shirts made up part of the [/i]ersatz deck gang that prepared the Landing Pods used by Morgan and his followers. Although Reyes herself was taken aboard, she was given the unenviable task of denying access to additional survivors so that space would be available for additional pallets of undifferentiated cargo.

Prominent among Chironian Servantists was Colonel Moreno Aguirre, who found the Memorialist's focus on imagined, non-human enemies to be a relief from the suppressive instincts of the junta.​

Servantism, also translated as "Service Attitude" in non-English-speaking contexts, was an intellectual movement influential among the armed forces of the world in the mid-twenty-first century. The movement's origins lie in the statements made by Reyes and other commissioned officers regarding their loyalties.

Servantism broke with the older, American articulation of civil-military relations rooted in the post-Revolutionary period and the emerging United Nations doctrines of public service, both of which tied themselves to formal written documents--the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, respectively. Indeed, American Servantists, many of whom were secessionists, argued that they had been punished for attempting to exercise the Duty to Disobey contemplated in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, reflecting the inadequacy of the old system and the reality of its "subservience to special interests."

The new philosophy refused to take its cues from either the popular will of democratic majorities or common codes of principle and law. Majorities were fickle and the mob could be cruel. Centuries-old constitutions could not contemplate the problems of modernity. Courts were bought, or ideologically suspect. The fix, according to Servantist thought leaders like Corazón Santiago, was for officers to "be their own conscience." Servantists circulated recommended reading lists for officer enrichment containing works as diverse as Magna Carta Liberatum, History of the Peloponnesian War, the Conclave Bible, The Four Books and Five Classics, Das Kapital, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

Many armies forbane the profession of Servantism on grounds that it ran contrary to their creeds. In the Soviet Union, Servantists were often sent to the GULAG. Post-war loyalty oaths in the United States, Australia, Mexico, and Canada required adherents to explicitly renounce Servantism. Servantism survived in the liminal spaces on the map and, later, enjoyed a rebirth on Chiron, when large numbers of cashiered officers began working for sub- and trans-national organizations or ideologically-motivated factions without strong public service traditions parallel to those that had animated the national armies of which they had once been a part.

Disagreement about the legitimacy of Pravin Lal's claim to be the ranking mission leader fueled the deployment of Servantist rhetoric both as a genuine expression of belief and a cynical rationalization for resistance. The Struan's agent Carnaveron quoted Servantist logic on the Peacekeeping Forces faction datalinks in response to rebukes during public forums during his time as a guest-cum-prisoner at Warm Welcome. After the Fall of Xerxion, Servantists among the Spartan Federation, led by Santiago herself, eventually forswore the Holnists as morally unfit to practice their creed.


Sources:
Captain Victoria Reyes is Julia Reyes (played by Adira Arjona) from the film Pacific Rim: Uprising.

Second image is from the RPG Twilight 2000, sourced from the Black Gate.

Third image is another still of Pierce Brosnan in The Fourth Protocol.

 

[Axis Kast]

Two moments when the system is most vulnerable: at the loading and unloading of tension. - Essays on Mind and Matter

Commencement Day celebrants stroll the main promenade of University Commons in the company of friends and family come to tout their success.

The attractions seen in this painting were permanent in nature. On the far left can be seen the recovered hull of Experimental Satellite-76, the first artificial satellite placed into Chiron's orbit from the surface. Work stations convenient to the main pedestrian path provided public Datalinks access for visitors to peruse students' work or participate in colloquies on subjects interesting to them.

Graduates hooted and hollered their way through a speech from the Academician himself, trading ribald barbs with that famously acid wit, who would inevitably demonstrate encyclopedic knowledge of the hecklers' thesis materials. The experience was the first conquered summit of their academic journey, eighteen years in the making. (Meanwhile, the University Masters squirmed over Zakharov's unseemly humor, another reminder of how far he stood beyond their influence.)

In the center of the Commons is a geodesic dome planetarium used for commemoration of Yuri's Night.

The Witch's Hats were exhibits in Rockefeller Plaza, Morgan Trade Center, constructed by the Berrio-Salva Corporation in honor of CEO Nwabudike Morgan's one hundredth and fiftieth birthday extravaganza.

After a week-long blitz of entertainments during which all base operations slowed to a crawl and only banks remained open, the ostensibly temporary structures were left standing on his orders and converted to restaurants where the CEO's birthday was celebrated continuously and the faction's Talents engaged nightly in craven performances of loyalty to their human god.

There were no days worthy of special recognition in the Human Hive. All moments were ripe for work or instruction.[/CENTER]


Sources:
First image is an artist's depiction of Communicore at EPCOT Center.

Second image is Coruscant concept art by Ralph McQuarrie, discovered on the tumblr "Consumed by Star Wars Feelings."

Third image is "The Tunnel" by wonderlandartworks on DeviantArt.

 

[Axis Kast]

Last month at their Headquarters, the U.N. marked survival. A solemn spectacle, if ever I did see one. This world does not require more solemnity. Here, we celebrate achievement. - Founder's Day Speech, M.Y. 2

Responders restore network connectivity at Epsilon Center shortly after a bombing raid by Ascendancy Needlejets.

An official policy of pacifism brought no relief for the Cybernetic Consciousness. The Prime Function struggled to understand why this should so. Her units had violated nobody's borders. Convergence was a purely voluntary decision.

Tamineh Pahlavi levied a new sort of casus belli: fear that the Consciousness would displace what they called "Biologicals" until the small remnant of human civilization embodied in the fewer than two million survivors and their offspring would be unable to sustain the species through normal reproduction.

Redoubtable "Madam Mim," an M62 Super Casey built by Pacific Car and Motor Works, performed four years more of leal service once reassembled by Furman & Sellars engineers to partake in the Founder's Day parade. As Grand Marshal, Oscar van de Graaf stood in the turret with a wide grin and a lit cigar. The licensing to take her aboard with functioning armament had been handled personally by Tạ Dọc Thân after a referral from Rachael Winzenried.

Thân's permission was granted in part because Mim was supposedly a casualty, holed in three places by shot from newer M551 Sheridan light tanks.

Mim was emblematic of the intent behind the Founder's Day observance: to remind stakeholders that Oscar van de Graaf, not the easily-hoodwinked bureaucrats of the United Nations, was the vision (and yes, pluck) to ensure their survival.

The day after the parade, wounds still unplugged, Mim was tagging Hunter scout rovers with beehive rounds from a firing step on the berm at Camp Challenger West.

Soviet strategic rocket forces used the Szilinger scout car, better known as the Автомобиль обнаружения опасности or AOO-1, for battlefield reconnaissance. The AOO-1 was a single-occupancy 4x4 with a collapsible wheelbase. In "tight" configuration, it could be carried in the back of an Mil M-26 Halo heavy transport helicopter. Following U.N. specifications, the Buffalo Imperial Tank Plant produced an ultra-heavy lander to cart the three examples that the Kremlin volunteered for J.T. Marsh's Forward Contact Team.

One AOO-1 was lost immediately in a peat bog but the other two survived, sipping the air of the planned landing site for indications of nuclear, chemical, or biological danger. Later, they performed roving patrols for hire, spending much of their service lives on or near the Blue Line.[/CENTER]


Sources:
First image is "Cinematic Concept Art Mentorship Batch 02: Week 03 Demo" by Leo Avero on ArtStation.

Second image is "Steroid Pershing Tank" by Michael Kus on ArtStation. Madam Mim is the villan from 1963's The Sword in the Stone.

Third image is from the collection "Atomic vehicle" by artist Tomasz Nowak on ArtStation. Nowak credits an unnamed pinterest.com concept as his inspiration.

 

[Axis Kast]

The fundamental problem of our species is that we are better-equipped to handle routine than choice. - Follow the White Rabbit

Popular mythology blames administrative incompetence and corporate malfeasance for most cases of colony death, but the historical record is replete with examples of self-immolation over social conflicts.​

Unity's destruction at the hands of nihilistic sociopaths seeking only the emotional high of retribution itself was the retelling of an old story, preceded in history by both the Second American Civil War and the Copernicus City Riots.

In 2060, more than seven hundred people suffocated to death during a failed attempt to extort changes in healthcare policy by the Parilon Corporation, which managed the Copernicus ice-production operation on the Moon. Hoping that improved health outcomes would boost production by increasing morale, Parilon had rolled out a new policy in which biological organ replacement would be replaced by cybernetic implants. Notwithstanding scientific consensus that machine components were more reliable, less likely to be rejected by the patient's own immune system, and substantially more functional, workers reacted with a combination of terror and anger. A stunned board reversed the policy and called for mediation, but the original protest had too quickly merged into much broader, global disputes over the role of machines in daily life.

Work stoppages escalated into a hunger strike, then extortion. Human Front agitators arrived from Aldrin Circle with media, entered the Hab Complex, and fomented a campaign of sabotage, venting oxygen from storage. According to survivor interrogations, the saboteurs expected to force the notoriously risk-averse Parilon board into becoming their mouthpiece and hoped that the prolonged unrest at Copernicus would yield a bumper crop of new recruits to their cause. Instead, an unrelated shuttle accident delayed delivery of emergency supplemental oxygen and supplies could not be restored in time to prevent disaster.

These past traumas haunted Chiron faction leaders as they weighed the benefits and danger of ideological drift.

A crash-landed Supply Pod.​

Before factions connected to the Planetary Datalinks, "awakened" colonists were often manipulated into believing there was nowhere to run.

Commissioner Pravin Lal famously agonized over how much information to disclose about the status of other societies. Charterists were a special problem. Those who had exacted generous terms from the likes of Struan's or the van de Graaf Expedition were naturally hopeful of improving their fortunes through escape or emigration, while the considerably larger population of indentured workers inclined toward the argument that preexisting contracts should not be enforced.

It was not unusual for faction leaders to collect and titrate Unity colonists, timing their reanimation for political propitious moments under cover of the claim that resource constraints discouraged adding new mouths to feed at present.

Xenofungal colonization of non-native elements began within four standard minutes of proximate contact.​

Choice of affiliation was a luxury available to only a small minority of Unity survivors.

Those with a tolerant attitude toward emigration included Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Sister Miriam Godwinson, and Game Warden J.T. Marsh. The University's situation was partly determined by the very high demands of patient care arising from widespread radiation sickness, which made it difficult to police desertion, and Zakharov's personal disinterest in the perceived challenge of assimilating "unsuitable perspectives" into his society. Santiago's mutiny and the failed shipboard security response fueled violent antagonism between the Engineering Division and Security Forces. Officers who should have led the faction militia instead were sequestered for their own safety, or sent out on long roving patrols from which they sometimes did not return. After a period of mere weeks, the Office of the Registrar proactively exiled a list of billets handed down from the Provost, including virtually all military and paramilitary functions. While he denied them more than token food and refused to give up any medical supplies--to the point of stripping crash kits from their vehicles--Zakharov otherwise let these unfortunates have the run of his warehouses so that they would make appealing new additions to other settlements.

For two days after Planetfall, Miriam Godwinson remained in a coma. Sympathetic followers had brought her along in their Landing Pod with the intention of offering a planetside burial. Immediately after Planetfall, dozens of survivors dispersed into the bush, most never to be seen again. Once recovered, Miriam's agenda contemplated no priority beyond mere survival, forestalling discussion of politics. Poor planning and failed harvests led to starvation conditions. When they showed up at the gates of rival settlements, Believers were more likely to complain of empty bellies than misinterpretations of Doctrine. Political malcontents showed themselves only later, as Miriam's intent to use faction resources to subsidize faith practice became more obvious.

Marsh appears to have decided on principle to give the Forward Contact Teams freedom of conscience, though the practical problems involved with enforcing his writ over such a mobile, self-sufficient, and self-directed workforce were much on his mind.

Factions were eager to found new colonies on the site of Unity wreckage, which meant both shelter and rich salvage--in terms of people as well as familiar, viable systems with components from a technology base potentially more-current, or at least more complete, than the survival gear they used day-to-day.

An Hourglass Battalion ambush-protected vehicle, abandoned in Atacama, Chile.​

In the brutal and dubious tradition of the European Freikorps, the Hourglass Battalion, later reflagged with a corporate identity, Hourglass Services, was an association of Hypersurvivalist veterans of the Second American Civil War. Canadians, Americans, and Venezuelans predominated, with companies of Argentines, Australians, and Britons serving at various times in its history.

The unit's colorful history runs from its founding in Florida as the majority of that state's Independentist militia during the period of CSA courtship and incursions to the Central Intelligence Agency's cynical attempts at "rehabilitating" its members by involving them in the overthrow of the Cuban Communist government in 2061.

The hourglass badge was in the same vein as the old death's head symbol--a meaningful boast about the unit's ultra-reactionary ideological proclivities and, less-accurately, its battlefield élan.

Hourglass Survivalism was corporate in its sentiments, with less of self-aggrandizement behind so-called mainline Holnisms. "Hourglassers" wanted fascism--performative populist authoritarianism short on ideological consistency--in which they could have modest employment as hired guns by the repressive state. One FBI dossier accurately concluded that Hourglass Survivalism was a lifestyle more than a roadmap for law, although a super-majority of believers were highly skeptical of established power structures--academia, "science," corporations, and government.

Hourglass Battalion performance was markedly superior to that of Holnist volunteers in general. As a semi-professional military unit, it demonstrated unity of command and discipline levels usually lacking among irregular forces. Regular forces were never available in the desired quantity even after the Florida National Guard was back-filled with stay-behinds from dissolved federal units headquartered in the state, and Hourglass was often called to plug in the gap.

Hourglass prisoners were not eligible for the general postwar amnesty in the United States. Foreign-born members in Federal custody were deported, sometimes to face execution in "homelands" they could not remember, sometimes to be welcomed with open arms by U.S.-allied regimes that embodied their preferred ethos. About two thousand Hourglass participants in the successful Cuban venture were given a plane ticket to the non-U.S. destination of choice. Morgan Military Products employed several hundred in Peru. Canvassers for Corazón Santiago, still a big name in Florida survivalist circles, found and reconciled the old fighters to her cause.

A Chironian faction's destruction provided opportunities to map the ideologies prevailing among its members. Scattered after the Fall of Xerxion, the Hourglass Battalion held Santiago to blame for the faction's defeat and offered their services instead to Director Tamineh Pahlavi of the Human Ascendancy, who accepted.

At face value, the Hourglass Battalion's attitudes most closely tracked with those of L'État nouvel, though the Contre-amirale, famous for his formal denunciations of "robotic deviancy," drew a firm line at persecution that most Hourglassers were wont to cross, and the faction's strict speech codes, combined with St. Germaine's own ambivalence toward showmanship, would have cut against the mercenaries' taste for the politically dramatic.

Sources:
"Follow the White Rabbit" is a taunt from The Matrix (1999).

First image is is "Copernicus City" by AdrianMarkGillespie on DeviantArt, from whence I get the eponymous lunar city.

Second image is "Crash probe" by Fetscher on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Beyond The Horizon" by sulvijan on DeviantArt.

Fourth image is "Old spaceship," a piece of AI art by Leoncio22 on DeviantArt.

Fifth image is "Pitbull" by jflaxman on DeviantArt.

 

[Axis Kast]

To militia, we say: Think first. Then shoot. - For I Have Tasted The Fruit

Landing Pod workshops could be turned to war-making but were suitable only to a point. Like the designers of Unity itself, they settled for the proven, if less capable, designs of another era.​

The mercenary was the freest person on Planet. Armed to travel, he roamed wherever the whistle of bullets beckoned and so became wise in cultures and experiences strange by comparison to his own. Fatted with pay awarded in preference to more reliable faction militia, he found welcome at nearly every trading house and drinking establishment without question as to his ideological convictions. His captains were courted assiduously by leaders of mythological stature, including several of the more severely reclusive variety, and on returning shared with him with political intelligence more comprehensive in it ways than was available to any probe team.

University Security await rescue after their turbofan sled seizes in the cold. As they have allowed the warmth to escape from the open cockpit, they are most likely certain of the arrival of pending help.​

Strangers fighting for pay were trusted in preference to familiar Jeremiahs. Faction militia stood on guard for four types of hazard: that arising from nature, that brought by contact with other human factions, that caused by disputes within their own walls, and simple desertion. Once a body knows there is grass beyond the fence, he will seek it out on the mere assumption it is green.

Many factions paid trackers a percentage of supplies recovered from defectors. Reactions toward these so-called "quittists" ran everywhere towards violence. Faction charters frequently prohibited unilateral separation on grounds that it set too dangerous an example and was almost always accompanied by acrimonious disputes over scarce resources leading to general unrest and potential lynching.

Lancer Shellowa Strong, a decorated senior non-commissioned officer of the Spartan Federation and ringleader of the Tallow Conspiracy.

Conceived in a test tube, raised in a common creché and cast away early by her creators, Strong was an uncelebrated drone belonging to the Human Ascendancy before escaping a faction timber camp in MY14. A compass sewn into her togs provided direction to reach Cruesot Pass where she accepted water and food from the Children of the Atom.

She became wise to a Spartan patrol near Fort Montag, following for two days before announcing her intention to join them on the strength of having liberated herself.

Sources:
First image is "Razorback" by jflaxman on DeviantArt.

Second image is "Stranded" by jflaxman on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Lt. Hanover" by ObsidianPlanet on DeviantArt.

 

[Axis Kast]

The Boss said he would give me mealies, not information. That, my friends, is real power. - Golden Dreams, the Authorized Biography of Nwabudike Morgan

SMACER guntokka seen with early-model data wheel. Note the mechanical prosthesis replacing the left arm.

​

The data wheel was a mono-directional information-retrieval device used for mind-machine interface during the late twentieth century. Distinguishing components included a high-capacity tape reel and an electrode-covered stent ("stentrode") threaded through the circulatory system directly into the wearer's cerebral cortex.

Data wheels provided what their West German designer, neurosurgeon Konrad Diest, called rapid memory expansion ("RAME"). In layman's terms, the wearer could recall information stored on the tape reel as if it had been committed to their natural memory. Recall was near-instantaneous and consistently perfect.

Diest specialized in the care of patients with Alzheimer's disease. His intention was to make palliative care more effective by helping patients to access certain critical information such as their home address or the names and images of family members, but the applications for his data wheel far exceeded even those laudable ambitions. Industrial workers used data wheels to help them perform difficult work more safely. Militaries used data wheels to provide their elite soldiers with mission-specific information to increase survivability. By 2070, the data wheel was an ubiquitous presence in most knowledge-centered and high-risk occupations.

Although there is some evidence that use of data wheels resulted in the creation of durable trace memories in the wearer, both corporations and governments appreciated that knowledge transmitted by data wheel was perishable.

Given the number of skills and diversity of information necessary for an intersolar expedition, the United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri stocked hundreds of thousands of data wheels and millions of tape reels.

Attitudes toward data wheels differed according to a society's relative comfort with cybernetics. Peacekeepers, Hivemen, Morganites, Children, and Tomorrowans embraced the data wheel as a valuable tool for work and learning. In University culture, the wheel was disdained as a crutch for lesser intellects, but many instructors used it to lecture rather than devote time to classroom preparation.

For some societies, tape control was an obsession. University Security, Corporate Security, and Dreamer militia regularly tossed citizens' habs for tapes--the University and Morganites to protect their ideas, and the Dreamers to limit access to exploitable dream records.

In the Ascendancy, use of data wheels was grounds to be sentenced to the Nerve Staple. Authorities in L'Nouvel Etat were skeptical of the data wheel, which diminished its public profile and therefore its private adoption.

A portable terminal, the HX-54, colloquially dubbed "Hikes."

​

"Hikes" were handheld personal microcomputers used to read and write to low-capacity data tapes. Hikes replaced data wheels in the hands of factions uncomfortable with mind-machine interface, the number of which grew over time as cybernetics took on nakedly political overtones.

Hikes was useful in ways that the data wheel was not, but the speed of learning and the fidelity of information transmission were exponentially less.

Sources:
First image is "Survivor 2" by fightpunch on DeviantArt.

SMACER is an acronym for "Scroungers, Malcontents, Antisocialites, Criminals, Exiles, Rogues." They are the unaffiliated of Chiron, and a creation of my collaborator on this story, MysticWind.

On mind-machine interface and the stentrode, see this story in Wired magazine.

Second image is "Handheld C64," a 3D rendering by Cem Tezcan as seen on the indieretronews tumblr.

 

[Axis Kast]

Only assessments of strong confidence (70% certainty) or greater are included in this product. - Yearbook of Chiron, M.Y. 21

Starting with the example set by J.T. Marsh, whose road crews provided support for other factions largely without discrimination during the moment of Planetfall, Chironian societies attempted to create markets for goods, services, and too often, people, for which they had no immediate purpose.

The Memory of Earth was one of many factions selling tailored intelligence products, though unlike the Dreamers and Morganites, they limited this offering to allies in good standing. This service was usually provided via The Dark Glass, a commercial venture named after a passage in the Second Testament of the Conclave Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:12.

Precisely where the Glass obtained its notoriously accurate information has never been answered. Leading theories include secret uplink to still-active Unity spotting devices, a primitive space launch capability that allowed the faction to sent aloft its own spying machines, intercepts of signals intelligence, and a large network of human assets. An investigation prepared by the Children of the Atom using their ZHANG LIANG Calculator concluded that the Projectionists must be working directly with other faction defense forces to produce the highly specific material handed on by The Dark Glass.

Annual reports, compiled under the signature of company president Alessandra Marković, formerly of the Yugoslav State Security Service, or UDBA, were mandatory reading for audiences as diverse as the Spartan High Command, board members of Morgan Industries, the Governor's aides in Terra Nova, the Tribal Command Council, and cadets of L'État nouvel.

K Squadron of the Spartan Federation's ε Speeder Regiment, spotted at night by Tribal pickets, represented an urgent threat to proximate factions, mitigated only by the difficulty of making sorties from the surrounded Xerxion massif. Santiago's edge in this regard reflected the care she had taken to select co-conspirators with skill sets that lent themselves to the creation of a small regular army. Unlike the joyriders and teamsters of other factions, her tankers were the genuine article, trained on the battlefields of Kansas, Afghanistan, the Punjab, the Ronne Shelf, and the Mongolian plains.

Note the mineral growth on the cliff ledge. The Spartans mined their own fortress to fuel wartime production.

Notwithstanding the competence of the original Saber Company and SafeHaven mercenary units positioned with Roshann Cobb and Nwabudike Morgan, the fighting forces of the Dreamers, Morganites, and Conclave in particular were mostly light infantry punching at, or just above, their own weight with some assistance from technicals and overhauled military equipment several generations old. A high operational tempo ground down both Dreamer and Morganite resources within only a few years of landfall, while the Nauvoo Legion, once seasoned, withered into a demoralized camp force, better-skilled at thwarting mindworm assaults and desertions than standing off a determined attack by human adversaries.

These Nauvoo Legion scouts are armed with hand weapons that represented the cutting edge of the early twenty-first century. More interesting than their weapons are the gear that accompanies it: full-spectrum gas masks and backpack radios that suggest both access to a valuable cache of defense equipment and competent direction.

Devoting too many of one's able-bodied adults to combat could render a colony unviable. Most confrontations were between just dozens of fighters, many trained only as reluctant constables. The main "punch" was provided by smuggled armor--often no more than a company's worth. As benefit crown jewels, they were almost always used cautiously and in contexts where they could be recovered if knocked out.

Here, Oscar van de Graaf's "Spitting Dragons" trade fire with an unseen foe.

The Dark Glass cautioned that settlements like Fort Meriwether Lewis were tougher than they might at first appear. Using sectioned defenses, the Tribe was able to quickly perform repairs on damaged sections of curtain wall. Landers brought a number of crew-served weapons dragged off by Tribals after victory over their Holnist foes, who used old museum pieces and the dregs of National Guard armories handed down from allied state secessionist forces who sometimes employed the hypersurvivalists as auxiliaries. Both towers are equipped with old antiaircraft emplacements.

The Soviet armored personnel carrier attempting to negotiate the wooden causeway was probably demilitarized for service as a civilian tractor, but it was easy enough to fit a machine gun back into the turret mount.

Holnist fighters use a 20mm Oerlikon gun to shell a Willamette Valley federal building. Judging by the gardens that have sprouted up in the background, this image was captured well into the war, after towns like this one were cut off from Federal help.

Santiago, Morgan, and van de Graaf were intentional about incorporating crew-served weapons into their cargo complements.

By far the deadliest infantry on Planet were Ascendancy Myrmidons, seen here using baffles to descend into the bowels of a missile silo at Chernitskygorsk. Zakharov's under-trained Security Forces usually retreated in the face of anything more threatening than a thrown bottle. Still, Pahlavi's raiders have come in force, accompanied by a manned weapons platform that gave infantry the same firepower once only provided by much larger vehicles.

The only forces equivalent to the Myrmidons were fielded by the Neo-Spartans, Projecitonists, and the semi-mercenary Bourse.

Marković was a qualified field operative and suffered severe radiation burns and the blinding of her right eye during an otherwise successful mission to destroy the Great Beltan Power Station. Because its operators, the Tomorrow Institute, ran their closed grid at tight margins, they were unable to prevent cascading power loss and severe power quality oscillations. Damage reports submitted to the Planetary Council claimed "significant, permanent losses to historical, scientific, and patent libraries with incalculable cultural and future economic value."

Marković, a student of Tito's Third Way School, believed in Mercator's warnings that the petty squabbles of the Unity factions would surely destroy the mission survivors if not somehow suppressed. Lal chose reason. Mercator tried the distraction of an external threat. Marković proposed to wage an unrelenting war against any who would not submit, reducing other factions to depenency on the largess of her own.

The Great Beltan Power Station a decade after its destruction. Master Archivist Sathieu Metrion engaged the Shapers of Chiron to attempt site recovery and twice reoccupied the area with his Sweeper militia but could not supply the resources necessary for meaningful reconstruction.

The Dark Glass pointed out that armored trains cleared "no-go" zones considerably greater than was commonly believed. Marković's observation led to more serious efforts at destruction of these strategic assets.

Here, a University Needlejet responds to protect the Very Long Line between Admiralty Base and Morgan Vintages from a despoiling attack by Tomorrowan Hopper.​

Sources:
K Squadron is "Red Zone Rumble" by Karl Beiler on ArtStation, a piece of art based on the Command & Conquer franchise.

Second image is "Space Raiders" by Imad Awan on ArtStation.

Third image is "JGSDF LAV-25" by BeignetBison on DeviantArt.

Fourth image is "Swamp fort" by JuavT on DeviantArt.

Fifth image is a still from The Postman (1997).

Pahlavi's raiders are "Descent" by sekido54.

Train attack is "Contact - Aliens on a Train" by Shimmering-Sword.

Our Marković is Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster in Black Widow (2021).

The Great Beltan Power Station is "nuclear power plant" by Biubiubiu on ArtStation.

 

[Axis Kast]

Facility: Entertainment Center

A Laser League gridiron during play.​

Perhaps the high gravity best explained Unity survivors' great enthusiasm for Laser League, a fast-paced sport combining elements of individual target shooting, team orienteering, and the child's game of laser tag. Exhausted to the point of immobility by the day's labors, oppressed by an alien gravity one-third greater than Earth's, workers saw their own aspirations for freedom of movement play out in the vibrant, coruscating ballet on their terminals.

The rules were simple. Competing teams of five, seven, or eight athletes used rocket packs and weak laster marking guns to play a game of elimination. One shot, one "kill." Five teams played the game simultaneously: blue, yellow, green, white, and orange. Gunners started singly in random locations on the gridiron behind hardlight barriers of their own color.

For each team on the field, there was a controller sequestered in a radio booth with full overhead view of the gridiorn. A controller's job was to supply route guidance, early warning, and tactical recommendations for their gunners, while also putting down shot-obstructing "hardlight" barriers between rounds. All team members sat the controller's chair twice in a season.

Hardlight was impassable for both gunners and their beams, but the gridiron's outer boundaries reflected light and could be used to bank shots. Barriers were reconfigured every three minutes, and again after each kill. The number of barriers available to controllers increased over time until the game's final rounds were fought in heavy cover. Barriers were laid in sequence. The controller of the last team to score a kill laid down the first segment, followed by the next team laying down the second, and so on. Teams tied in score were given a random order of precedence.

Games of Laser League took place at Entertainment Centers, glitzy, windowed successors to the drab gymnasiums and closely-supervised reading rooms of the First Generation. Drones were the main clientele, wont to lose themselves in drink and dance before ending the night on arcade games like Ski Free and High Noon. For a few credits more, they could also log into the Planetary Datalinks. Faction networks continued to be used for knowledge-sharing and commentary as before, but Chiron's World Wide Web soon came to resemble that of Earth: dominated by the production and reproduction of conspiracy. Leaders soon learned to distract their more restive elements by organizing team sports, played by semi-professionals, that could unite fans in the ecstasy and agony they would otherwise seek out on their own.

Laser League's appeal was broad and enduring. There was something for every taste. The game was played continuously in the Planetary Olympics from MY 96. Every faction supplied a team. Hive teams were big on sacrifice plays, rushing two flankers forward to distract and divide their opponents. Spartan and Morganite controllers devoted themselves to just one star player while the remaining gunners operated as "free agents" unencumbered by a common plan. Conclavists moved in cautious formations of two or three so that most contacts generated a prolonged firefight. The New Two Thousand played aggressively, thrusting hard in the early game when the burdens on the controller were still small. New Statists and Memorialists played defensively for time until surviving players could operate as a single fire team, clearing corners systematically.

A Hive gunner has harsh words for a referee.​

More traditional pastimes certainly kept their luster. Chess continued to fascinate as a social game. University children were assigned chess problems beginning in the third form to stimulate spatial reasoning. Morganites gambled heavily on mahjong. Hunters organized races eagerly attended by their employers. These were actually overland expeditions intended to perform commercial tasks, but with the addition of a catchvid team, they became spectacle for viewers who were themselves too timid to stray "outside the wire."

Sources:
Inspired by the game Laser League by Roll7.

First image is from Disney's Tron (1982).

Second image is from Laser League.

Hardlight barriers are from Planetside 2.

Ski Free is an old computer game for Windows 3.0 released in 1990.

 

[Axis Kast]

For every job that posed an unacceptable high risk of injury or death to a human, and many more that did not, the Unity mission designers arranged for a mechanical stand-in. Whether the settlers would deign to use them was another matter.

Robots like this British-built Carrington Mobile Systems Critical Response And Suppression Helpmate (C.R.A.S.H.) showed themselves valuable almost at once, performing duties as varied as firefighting, electrical fault detection, medical diagnostic testing, and cargo bay inventory monitoring.

C.R.A.S.H. unit characteristics were typical of Second Generation androids: vaguely humanoid configuration, multiple articulated appendages including lamp arm, articulated gripper, foam monitor, and hydraulic jacks. Just one minute after the micrometeorite impact, Unity's central computer dispatched fourteen hundred C.R.A.S.H. units ship-wide to conduct preliminary damage assessment.

This "Carrington C.R.A.S.H." clears a path to the bridge from the main cargo bays. Bridge sections are indicated by the vertical band of blue from floor to ceiling. The C.R.A.S.H. follows a path from the ship's main holds, indicated by the yellow reflective tape on the deck plating. The so-called ark was really a labyrinth. At the time the crew entered cold sleep, Unity remained unfinished. Responders trained on physical mock-ups of the ship's interior. They had never walked her decks.

For crew, to stray from the surety of the tape was to risk becoming lost without hope of reorientation. The ship was so large, call boxes had to be installed to supplement the colored deck traces. The idea was that lost workers would "call in" to Bridge, where, if the circuits had not been cut, they could receive assistance with navigation. But there could be no certainty about the path from "here" to "there." Following C.R.A.S.H. units was out of the question. The data tapes that spelled out their instructions were inaccessible from outside the cranial command module and they were unable to receive external commands. Instead, they worked to their own tune, following prearranged routes, solving only the problems imagined by their programmers--usually bit-rate workers whose many inevitable errors compounded with tragic results.

Debates over the role of robotic help played out across two distinct cleavages. The first cleavage concerned whether to use robots in any capacity. Hunters took the most reactionary line, followed by the Ascendancy, the New State, and the Gaians. All four factions practiced a philosophy eventually to become known as Conservationism around M.Y. 100, under which they sought to avoid incorporating certain "enervating" and "integrity-compromising" devices into their societies. The precise list of prohibitions varied, but the intent was always the same: to reduce opportunities to surrender routine tasks to machines, whether occupationally or intellectually. Speaking practically, Conservationism's hallmark was the absence of machine cybernetics or any technology made to compensate for human frailties. A Hunter would gladly use a radio, motor, or electronic navigation--technology judged not to impinge upon human prerogatives--while refusing an artificial limb replacement or to use a robotic assistant for camp tasks.

The second cleavage arose over the extent to which robots should be allowed to learn, such as through the iterative process enabled by polymorphic algorithms. Artificial intelligence and robotic companions designed to replace the human worker attracted considerable interest by some of the factions most certain of the individual: among the University, the Morganites, the Tribe, Dreamers, and Peacekeepers. Robots were tools, and better tools meant a better life.

Those with a darker outlook on human nature were more leery of trusting machines. Pilgrims, Spartans, Memorialists, Hivemen, and Conclavists speculated that their creations might one day betray them. Tomorrowans and the Children of the Atom were less concerned that they would one day lose control of their machines than that unfettered programmers could outrun their own expertise, inadvertently damaging their interests. Sathieu Metrion reminded his companions that the total number of known errors in the Data Core's machine code exceeded four hundred trillion lines. The accepted solution for "roboskepticism" was strict "disk obedience," limiting users' ability to reprogram their machines.

Sources:
Image is concept art from the Disney movie Black Hole by Robert McCall (d. 2010).

 

[Axis Kast]

As his body began increasingly to fail him, so Academician Prokhor Zakharov's hunger for new knowledge grew. Already infamous as the Man Who Doomed Unity, Zakharov gained further notoriety for impatience. Scholarly ethics committees were told to concern themselves with unethical proposals "only to the extent that they might not work." Recklessness was his new watchword.

There were indulgences in Somnacin from which he had to be awakened by external defibrillation. One long walk through a fungal forest, made at the cost of three militiamen, ended when Zakharov cried out, "I can hear no song!" Seizing a flamethrower, he burned his way out. Another attempt to stimulate resonance activity involved detonation of three small mining warheads at ground level and a fourth in the sea. (This last was answered with bombardment of Hydrothermal Institute by New State pressure hulls.) Agritechs released a quarter-million bees from the tent apiaries of University Base, though without apparent effect. Over several months, a known polymorphic virus replicated on the faction network unchecked while Institute of Electrotechnology computer science students measured for sentience across forty-four indices. Progress on research ground almost to a halt faction-wide as findings were copied laboriously to data-tape and exchanged hand-to-hand. In M.Y. 30, rumor had it that two Ascendancy prisoners were vivisected while the Academician made dispassionate suggestions from the observation deck over the surgery.

The old man despaired of the inadequacy of his prosthetics: an oculus for the left eye, overcome by cataracts; a hoversled because doctors refused hip replacement under what they said were "unfavorable" conditions in which to perform such a complicated procedure; transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation for vertebrae crushed during the hard landing. Attempts to grow new eyeballs in a wet lab with the help of stem cells were dashed by transcription errors in the retina. To keep his mind sharp while the rest ailed, the Academician carried on as many as forty games of chess at any one time, overriding the stern warnings of his own faction security to engage such adversaries as Morgan Industries CEO Nwabudike Morgan and Factor Roshann Cobb of the Dreamers of Chiron. Determination to preserve the best part of himself lured Zakharov toward the mind-machine nexus, though not before he inflicted permanent brain damage on a slave purchased from the Dreamers for the purpose of a "neural incursion," in which learning algorithms and stem cell therapy were deployed in tandem to attempt to colonize the victim's brain.

Sources:
Image is from Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan.

On the possible future of cures for blindness or eye damage, see this article.

 

[Axis Kast]

The twentieth century bore witness to the state at its zenith, expressed in the war-, wealth-, and sense-making potential of the Great Powers and their Three Ideologies: fascism, communism, and democracy. In the Atomic Peace that followed World War Two, bureaucrats and their computers changed everything. The war had been a testament to the importance of political and industrial organization, lessons that continued to be applied with gusto. There were New Deals, Five Year Plans, Great Leaps, and Great Societies. Soviet and ex-Nazi science propelled Yuri Gagarin into space. American science carried Raia Muñoz to the floor of the Challenger Deep. The promise of Tomorrow was close within reach.

But the promises soured with time, as promises always do. The Bomb was dirty. And it was tempting. The soil began to fail. Cancers and birth defects reached epidemic levels. New wars, fought in minutes, wrecked such havoc as had never been known. The men in this equation were fallible, but now, easily replaced. Why pay a man of uncertain character or skill a steady wage when you could buy a robot tailor-made to do that same job instead? Computers were more than calculators, they were prophets, and anyone who rejected their dispassionate conclusions was a Communist or a Capitalist or a Splittist, or whatever people became when they refused to recognize the truth of something and chose to remain a slave to their own emotions.

Trust eroded. In Europe, the huddled masses longed for simplicity. In North America, dignity. In the Soviet Union, freedom. Early in the twenty-first century, the Hypersurvivalists revolted under the argument that a state provided nothing but trouble. Their effort was for naught. Decades of warfare simply made space for a new master, the corporation. Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss. Corporations rewarded those who served them, true, but they were less willing than states to share their spoils, and, unlike the state-sponsored ideologies of yesteryear, corporate business plans did nothing to soothe the alienation of their beneficiaries.

This history, Tamineh Pahlavi and her followers knew intimately. Their point of divergence lay in the Eisenhower years, when machines were trusted only with tabulation, government was in the hands of responsible adults, and the worst ravages of the atom were as-yet unsuspected.

High up in their snow-bound mountain redoubts, management was reserved for the aged--those made wary by the honing blade of their own past mistakes. Pahlavi would let no callow youth lead her people on some doomed crusade. Robots were not made in the likeness of the human form, nor used for tasks that were easily performed by a human. Machines, she said, were incapable of resolving "the emotional component" of a decision. Then there were the breeding programs--efforts to restore the "natural progress" of the species using a population that had been mostly chosen for its superlative qualities and certified free of the defects that some thought would make natural population replacement impossible on Earth as soon as 2100.

Prototypical Ascendancy citizens came from the politicized sciences--rocket bureaus, technical ministries, and federal laboratories--or the allied professions of the Administrative State. The purpose of science was not to know, but to control. Likewise, the purpose of governance was not to advance the general commonwealth but to execute a particular agenda of empowerment for those best-fitted to rule--not because of a cultural bequest, as in L'École nouvele, but according to their intellect and education.

Pahlavi played a hard game. The Ascendancy was notoriously paranoid and aggressive. She wanted captives to fuel her eugenics work and relieve the burdens on her scientists, and the safety that is possible only when one's neighbors have been wiped out.

Sources:
Our Pahlavi is actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, Secretary Avasarala from The Expanse.

 

[Axis Kast]

In a word, brutality. - Datalinks, excerpt from a discussion with Staunton Communications on the life of Nwabudike Morgan

Nwabudike Morgan c. 2040, before physioenhancement.​

Shortly before his death during a botched surgery in July 2066, conflict journalist Mortens Andersen gave an exclusive interview in which he discussed the major themes of his latest book, a biography of the world's richest man, Nwabudike Morgan.

He was not a celebrated inventor either of products or business models. Gun-running had been a venerable profession for centuries by the time he first came along. As managerial geniuses went, there were many ahead of him in line. The strategic missteps that saw his companies take up the part of blatantly weak and broadly unpopular secessionist movements have occupied many volumes in the discipline of failure studies. Nobody in his own time was particularly interested in what Nwabudike Morgan had to say about the performance of specific funds or the future of particular commodities. What most set Morgan apart--what Andersen said made it possible for him to reach the pinnacle of material success--were his willingness to do unto others what others had previously done unto him, and his lack of any firm obligation to a government that could have moderated his behaviors.

Andersen explained the reason for Morgan's success bluntly: he was a sociopath incapable of empathy. Was that not the root cause of enduring public fascination with his infamous response to appeals for the plight of refugees or environmental conservation? "Why?"

At first, Westerners saw what they wanted to see. American Central Intelligence mistook Morgan's interest in the displaced Igbo population of Nigeria as a "weakness for the underdog." The vehemence of Soviet denunciations of Morgan's early ventures convinced Morgan's boosters that the Young Buccaneer had a well-deserved place in the firmament of ideological allies of market capitalism alongside Pinochet, Park, Tshombe, Protokev, and Diem. When Morgan turned on his Chadian paymasters, they dismissed the coup as fair play in a faraway land where the rules were supposedly different. Comfortable in their unexamined racism, they changed the channel.

In independent Biafra today, public buildings are named in Morgan's honor. School children are taught that his ingenuity helped to make possible their present safety and security. The government insists that Morgan came out of a kindred sense of duty to another oppressed people. Speaking to an authorized outlet years after his first visit to wartime Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Morgan remembered the experience very differently. The Nigerians already had suppliers in the form of the British and Soviets. They weren't interested in the third-hand relics Morgan had to hand--stockpiles of old hand weapons captured from rebels by Portuguese Flechas. He sold to the Biafrans because they were willing to take his low-quality product. And he later hired Biafran veterans "because they were in Port Harcourt, and so was I," when the next opportunity came from Chad.

Morgan earned his fortune by making deals that others would not. Both the CIA and the KGB relied on him to conduct assassinations and prisoner rendition. The Sahara became ground zero for new Cold War intrigue. Spies rubbed shoulders with buyers acting on behalf of warlords, narco-terrorists, and the "temporarily displaced" ruling elites of nations suffering through "periods of unfortunate revolutionary transition." There were three places one could go to see the rich and famous: Hollywood Boulevard, Walt Disney World, and L'avenue du 10 Octobre in N'Djamena, where it was popular knowledge that Morgan housed a parliament's worth of down-and-out leaders hoping to fall into the means to finance their political resurrections. In the mid-2040s, two successive American presidents resigned in disgrace after special counsels discovered that both had paid the New Adventures Corporation, a Morganite holding company, to send mercenaries to fight in the war between Egypt and Sudan, violating a Congressional amendment.

"What's lacking throughout," Andersen insisted, "is any trace of concern about the consequences for others." More than once, Morgan claimed to have implicated others in his own thefts from the Namibian diamond pits he worked as a youth. His company's take-over of Chad, sometimes interpreted as a form of comeuppance by hagiographers, involved assumption of ownership for national resources, but not acknowledgement of any obligation to govern. Morgan's mercenaries and allies defended the towns in which they were interested but stood by as the remainder of the country fell into chaos. Eventually, Libya and Sudan shouldered their way into territory that Morgan was then happy to sign away--as if it had been his responsibility after all. Pride in his reputation for supplying clients with only the most effective operatives didn't keep Morgan from signing untrained criminals and refugees to fill billets in Texas, Missouri, and the Christian States--a situation brought about by the unwillingness of properly-informed people to take up the secessionists' flagging cause, he said. Leaked board room audio reveals that Morgan Industries executives laughed upon being told their deception was convincing. These were conflicts Morgan didn't especially care about winning. Morganite unit commanders were forbidden from coordinating across state lines because the clients hadn't thought they should have to pay for the privilege.

Morganite operations in Spanish Peru reveal the full nihilism of Morgan's take on the Human Predicament. Within just five years, virtually the entirety of the Peruvian Amazon was clear-cut to open range for cattle. A few dozen conservation and pleasure domes were built to advance pharmaceutical research and ecotourism.

Conservationism is of no concern; after all, you have just told us Earth is dying. - Morgan responds to his critics on "Roundtable," a production of Track Eight News

Morgan is happy to spin his attitude as a sublime philosophy. His favorite tactic is to question his interlocutors. Why should Morgan be asked to do the work of caring about humanity when there is nobody to help him do it? Even if he were to try, he would fail for want of help. It is just a tactic to distract him while others put themselves first--which is their right, of course. Appearing twice in absentia before Congress, Morgan fulminated against being denied the right to do business in the Restored United States over his role in their civil war, arguing that the country's historical commitment to free enterprise made it necessary to conscience his return. "Regulation is simply another word for fear of freedom," he said. It should not be up to governments or their cronies to decide what was best for people--they could do that themselves through observation. (This extreme take, echoing the anarchic strains of Holnism, was no longer as well-beloved by Americans after their prolonged bloodletting.) When called to account for his part in the arms trade, Morgan wrapped himself in Luttwakian Ethics. Some things were worth fighting for--and, if so, deserved to be brought to a swift conclusion, if only so that the warring parties could reassess their willingness to keep it up.

On Planet, Morgan used the lure of Hedonism to build and sustain his empire. To do this, he held himself out as a dissenter from the campaign of self-sacrifice "waged over the last six generations." What had the market socialisms, "compassionate" conservatisms, and Communist dictatorships really done for Earth but ushered it unhappy to its demise? Perhaps, as inevitable victims, they ought to have instead eaten a fine last meal, savored a last cigarette? It was an easy leap for those too shell-shocked to give any more of themselves on behalf of the mission. Work hard, Morgan said, and you will be allowed--even encouraged--to play hard. Corporate guardianship had been common enough on Old Earth. Governments could be fickle, but businesses, at least, had a reputation for single-mindedness. At least there would be comfort and consistency.

Morgan used the stick and carrot for motivation and imposed few expectations beyond the generation of value in terms of energy credits. Safety margins were worse than those in the Human Labyrinth, which at least recognized that a human life was worth precisely the output of its thought and labor. The politics was very bad. Since failure meant seizure of one's assets by creditors--up to and including one's future labor--the competition was exceptionally intense. Theft, sabotage, and intimidation were acceptable business practices. Without regulation, many inadvertently drank, gambled, or otherwise signed their freedom away without ever intending to do so. To buoy spirits, the availability of drink, drugs, and distractions was pushed to its limits. Six hours of labor for seventeen of pleasant numbness. Morgan himself was surprised by the number of people for whom these arrangements were seemingly acceptable, a placebo for the superior fulfillment they doubted they could get in service to other causes.

Capitalism was just a buzzword to Morgan. A free market was indeed supposed to reward good ideas naturally as customers adjusted their behavior to pursue more of what they liked. But, contrary to Morgan's assertions that an economy was most free when governments exercised restraint--the freedom to exploit, Andersen called it--no healthy market could endure without active monopoly-busting. The vision Morgan sold his adherents was a lie. Morgan had no qualms about engaging in market-distorting behavior if it was to his own advantage.

Sources:
Picture of Morgan is a Midjourney AI creation made and shared on the AlphaCentauri sub-Reddit by user Gold-Ad-8211.

Morgan's second quote, along with his take on the rainforest is from an alternate history work by RvBOMally, "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri," on DeviantArt.