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.