The Future of Humanity After the Inflection Point

[Azem.Ocram]

I started writing this fanfic/story in January after having a vivid dream that took place on this distant planet (away from the in-game sponsors), inspired by playing 50 hours of Civilization: Beyond Earth during the free trial weekend. FYI, my story diverges from reality around turn of the Millennium (roughly 2002-2005 for events, roughly 1990 for characters) and converges with (hypothetically modded) Civilization: Beyond Earth cerca 2200. I want to eventually make a mod for Civilization: Beyond Earth to add MineCo and CasR&D so I might as well start posting with their backstories--even though they were the second-to-last addition to my fanfic, my last addition was Athena Prime...

Origin of new Sponsors

MezaCorp

Spoiler :

Initially a small company founded in Tacoma during the early 21st century. Starting with a revolutionary invention for recycling e-waste, another for producing performance polymers from microbes, a small group of WSYS graduate students, and a guiding philosophy aiming to increase total utility to the entirety of humanity with their innovative and environmentally friendly products, MezaCorp quickly rose to become as much a part of the Pacific NW economy as Microsoft, Amazon or Starbucks. Each co-founder named a subsidiary except for Mr. Marcos Lorenzo Meza, who named their business 'Meza, Cassidy & Company' after himself (inventor of the biopolymers) and his associate Ms. Crystal Alexandra Cassidy (inventor of the e-waste recycling).
By the mid 21st Century, most waste generated on the North American West Coast (from Alaska to Baja California) was sent to MezaCorp facilities.

MineCo and Cascadia R&D are both subsidiaries of MezaCorp.

MineCo

Spoiler :

They built the first Seeding Ship capable of relativistic speeds over interstellar distances in human history. MezaCorp's subsidiary Space Mining Company, MineCo, set off to pave way for Cascadia R&D to settle on a distant planet. Starting with a small population of engineers comprised 90% of women in cryo sleep, with enough embryos to start a viable population through surrogates upon arrival, their systems sped off at relativistic speeds shortly after Al Falah launched their own generation ship.
Founded in the tumultuous times leading up to the great mistake. MineCo was a pioneer in mining asteroids for elements rare or depleted on earth. With data storage servers on Mars, absolutely no scientific knowledge was lost after the great mistake.

As The American Reclamation Corporation gained power with its construction and terraforming projects, MezaCorp lost its spot in the limelight. CEO Michael Moderski also had a bad habit of bad-mouthing MezaCorp, going so far as to frequently slip in scandalous headlines from 21st century tabloids (that had been proven as defamation decades earlier) about the (long dead) founders in casual (televised) interviews. ARC CFO Suzanne Fielding, ever the pragmatic businesswoman, issued public apologies on behalf of ARC--after gaining position of CEO--to MezaCorp and entered a new era of mutual benefit.
MezaCorp manufactured the majority of hardware used by ARC and helped provide logistics for them prior to Seeding. They maintained an indefinite contract with ARC to exchange scientific research.

Cascadia R&D

Spoiler :

The ship sponsored by Cascadia Research & Development was the first populated ship to reach beyond our solar system's main belt, the first ship built for interstellar colonization, and the first Generation Ship in human history. CasR&D set off in hopes of spreading humanity to distant planets and maintain as high populations as can be sustained on each planet. To do this, they set their sights on a super-Earth orbiting around a distant star. Presumed to have been destroyed, their only contact with the rest of humanity after leaving the solar system in 2320 CE was a short superluminal message sent once a decade to MezaCorp HQ and ARC exchanging scientific progress from interstellar space with their research on habitable planets. The original crew boarded in 2200 CE, selected from a large pool of volunteers, narrowing down to 8,000 of the best and brightest men and 8,000 of the best and brightest women, all carefully screened for genetic defects. The volunteers knew that they could never leave the ship after boarding, their children would be the first humans to witness the boundaries of the solar system (previous Seed Ships had everyone in cry-sleep by then), their grandchildren would be the first to be born in interstellar space, several generations will spend their entire lives aboard the Generation Ship in interstellar space, that 2 generations will witness "pit stops" for repairs and resupplies in uninhabitable star systems, and that 2 generations will observe their new home world from orbit before the first colonists set foot on the distant planet. A sperm bank from 100,000 genetically-screened men and ovum bank from 100,000 genetically-screened women was also brought along with the standard seed bank of all plants of potential human use and a complete genetic database of all organisms to have ever had their genomes sequenced.

This is the research branch that helped MezaCorp spread from a waste management company to a major technology producer, just behind Microsoft in terms of sales of hardware/devices. All their devices were manufactured from a combination of post-consumer waste, pre-consumer waste, renewable resources, and eventually asteroid mining.

Technology and Language

Spoiler :

The common technologies used by ARC's Seeder Ships, such as the 'Plasma Turbine Engine,' were invented by Cascadia R&D and used for their Generation Ship. Relativistic drives were in the prototype stages when Seeding began and Al Falah paid MezaCorp quite the pretty penny to use the proven safest tested version for its generation ship. MezaCorp outfitted the MineCo sleeper ship with a faster drive, which required genetic modification to withstand the acceleration even with advanced cryo sleep units. Due to inadequate inertial dampening, the even faster relativistic speeds enacted G-forces sufficient to induce black-outs on all waking test subjects (in modified sleep pods, designed for comfort and safety, not preservation) but leaving no permanent damage if acceleration reduced sufficiently (if it didn't speed up too fast) after initial activation of engines. The sleeper ship was able to reach the first pit stop star system, set-up robotic mining operations, and construct all the needed parts to upgrade the Generation Ship (enabling it to go faster than Al Falah's Generation ship) by the time the Generation Ship reached the star system. It took almost 8 centuries for the Cascadia R&D Generation Ship to reach its destination in 3170 CE and by then, all the research they were planning on conducting from orbit had been completed, the landing pad for the first colony ship had been built (by sterile robots, so as to avoid contamination), and mining operations had already been set up on Procul-1, the moons of Procul-2 and Procul-3, the astroid belts, and lifeless rocky planets. The sleeper ship even came to Evolution (by slowly changing the internal environment of the Generation Ship, further helped by minimally engineered in-vitro fertilization) over those near-800 years allowed the crew aboard the Generation Ship to be perfectly adapted to the environment of Procul-2, with its stronger gravity (15 m/s/s), brighter daylight, greater concentration of atmospheric oxygen, higher humidity, and lower greenhouse gas concentrations. The culture on board the Generation Ship was extremely different from that on Earth, due to it's emphasis on scientific progress and requirement of 0 population growth.

The MezaCorp citizens commonly called their planet Monderia (pronounced mon-dair-ee-AH) after a corruption of the Latin for world, they called their star Procul Asteria after a corruption of of the Latin for distant star. They called themselves the Monderanoj and their capital city Ĉefurbo, using 20th Century Esperanto for important names where Earthlings typically used Latin. The code name used by MezaCorp (on Earth) for their destination was Munda, the 2nd planet around Procul Astra. Code names were used to grant enough privacy to keep everyone else in the dark about the location of the new colony. Tracking the ships were impossible once they neared their 1st star system and the destination for their final trip came after 2 stellar "pit stops" programmed into the navigation computer. The first pit stop was in roughly the opposite direction from Centauris, the first "stellar neighborhood" discovered to have (barely) habitable planets. Since the closest stars (including the pit stop stars) contained no habitable planets, most everyone thought MezaCorp's ships met their demise.

Cas R&D invented the Speech Compression Computer (used by all sponsors) in order to minimize wasted resources when storing the entire sum of human knowledge relevant to industrial, scientific and engineering progress. While Franco-Iberia stored the entirety of human knowledge relevant to European culture (to be translated into French, Italian, and Spanish), MezaCorp's colony ships exclusively stored to all research considered unimportant or otherwise inaccessible to other sponsors translated into an Esperanto derivative designed to be more precise and efficient than any other language capable of being written and spoken by mankind. This language was the basis for the compression algorithms because the vast majority of even the most complex of discreet concepts could be accurately described with words using a small handful of characters each. However, much like Japanese, this language used a different alphabet with far fewer characters to represent spoken word. Unlike Japanese, this language had 35 sounds and only 1 proper way to pronounce any character. Most simple concepts like fish, human, female, healthy, enjoyable, and sound could be described with 1 or 2 syllables but a concept like "siren song" required a minimum of 3 words to describe with each discreet concept being represented by a character that might have multiple syllables to pronounce (beautiful/female/human/fish = mermaid, alluring/dangerous/false = "lies," communication/vocal/distant/enjoyable = song) with different intonations implying different things. Therefore, the full translation of "siren song" literally means 'mermaid lie song' but it uses 11 distinct characters to unambiguously describe without background knowledge and could be spoken with various easier synonyms depending on context such as dangerous/false/communication/enjoyable (which would translate as "reassuring lie" or "false sense of security" depending on context) which saves a lot of breath and valuable time.

Translating the Bible into English has similar issues such as Hallelujah translated to "praise God" but the type of praise described is much different from what "praise the lord" is typically used to describe. Yah is the Abrahamic God and 'hallelu' is the conjugated form of "hallal," which fully translates to a joyous, raving, boastful song of praise that makes one look foolish. Translating hallelujah in full over to the new written language would literally mean true/happy/proud/crazy/communication/enjoyable deity/Jew but would be commonly shortened to true/happy/proud/communication = "praise." However, no MezaCorp citizen raised by anyone born off Earth would have any concept of religion.
The first communications between MezaCorp's colony and Franco-Iberia required quite a bit of look-ups into the language database of encyclopedic dictionary translations. Even then, most of the context was lost in translation to the Monderanoj. Unless Ms. Fielding or Dr. Sochua requested face-to-face communication with the Ĉefurbo government, they avoided visual conferences with the 12 Sponsors. PAC refined the technology that allowed ARC and MezaCorp to communicate to build the Holon Chamber, which allowed MezaCorp to receive higher bandwidth signals. When MezaCorp built their own Holon Chamber, a new era of diplomatic, cultural and scientific progress dawned, thanks to unlimited, perfectly secure, communication with perfect fidelity between planets over 250 Parsecs away, with no worse delay than DSL! Holographic communication (on both planets) was reserved exclusively for government officials, head researchers, corporate executives, and other elites trained in the art of negotiation and cultural awareness.

I have all the stories saved on my flash drive but the first story I wrote (about a young subterranean-dwelling student who becomes the personal chef to a wealthy surface-dwelling family and eventually becomes the chief food (processing, growing, etc) scientist for the cold sub-arctic region of Monderia) takes place later on in the chronology.

 

[Azem.Ocram]

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Millennials

Mr. Marcos Lorenzo Meza, PhD

Spoiler :

Me, if I had a slightly different name and always lived up to my full potential. He entered the WSYS when he passed the ACT in 6th grade. His classmates understood him better than any public school kids ever could. His teachers saw his full potential and helped him reach it. He quickly became a prominent biotechnology chemist.

Ms. Crystal Alexandra Cassidy, PhD

Spoiler :

Original Character. Child prodigy who always enjoyed getting her hands greasy to fix things the boys can't. She passed the ACT and SAT with flying colors in 7th Grade and was admitted into the prestigious Washington Search for Young Scholars at the University of Washington (real program, real place, I know little about because I foolishly declined the offer). She quickly made friends with the other young scholars by being the best to work with on projects. She, Marcos, and their close friends shared the same vision for making great contributions to knowledge that benefits mankind and innovations for increasing sustainability and decreasing human suffering.

Leaders of Monderia

COO Ministo Kvalifikitaj

Spoiler :

"Born" (ex-utero) aboard MineCo's colony ship after Cascadia R&D's generation ship reached the Procul solar system 2 years before the expected planetfall with the genetics of charismatic leaders, brilliant scientists, and inventive engineers with adaptations for life on Procul. Raised from conception in the leader's suite (constructed after mining operations commenced in the asteroid belt), he was taught everything needed to oversee and optimize the industry on the new planet. He finally set foot on the planet as MineCo's colony ship landed on the planet, a year after Cascadia R&D.

Head Researcher Ruza Sagaj Esploristo

Spoiler :

Born aboard Cascadia R&D's Generation Ship 17 years before planetfall, to the most creative and charismatic researcher aboard with sperm from the most intelligent and analytical engineer, Ruza proved herself to be a child prodigy. No one learned as much about any planet as she did in the mere 10 years after landing. She became the main teacher to young Ministo while continuing her work researching. Her excellent creativity, wit, analytical & critical thinking, research & presentation skills, and tact earned her the honor of Head Researcher in charge of planetary research.

Main Planets and their controlling Sponsors (turn 250)
Antagonists:
Frozen – Slavic Federation (20S/8H/0P)
The North Sea Alliance landed on the Frozen Planet but was forced to evacuate
Lush – Brasilia (17S/15H/0P)
Franco-Iberia, ARC, and INTEGR landed on the Lush planet but were forced to evacuate

MezaCorp's Allies (local Protagonists):
Primordial – ARC (17P/13S/3H), PAC (13H/13P/7S)
PAC shared the Primordial planet with INTEGR and ARC though they initially operated on the Lush planet.
ARC invented the Warp Gate before anyone else in the galaxy and lead the evacuation of the Lush planet.
Brasilia never researched Nanotechnology and ARC set an explosive timer around the Warp Gate to ensure safety.
ARC and PAC sent encrypted instructions to Polystralia and Chungsu on how to block all Warp Portals in their star systems.

Neutral Parties:
Arid – Kavithan Protectorate (18H/8P/1S), Franco-Iberia (19P/10H/4S)
Polystralia also settled on the Arid planet but joined the Ascendant Transcendence Hive Mind
Al Falah landed on turn 90, declared war against Polystralia on turn 180, and eliminated on turn 191 at affinity level 12S/8H/0P
Fungal – African Union (15P/9H/7S)
Chungsu landed here, eventually the North Sea Alliance was forced to resettle here
The North Sea Alliance built a Warp Gate in Deep Castle at turn 240 in order to evacuate after most of their cities were taken.
ARC and PAC sent encrypted instructions on how to do so but Duncan didn't have the luxury of time to completely destroy his Warp Gate. A few NSA gun boats left behind fired at the Warp Gate after the evacuation to close the portal and make it more difficult for Kozlov to rebuild it.
The Slavic Federation captured Deep Castle after NSA's 3 Colonists and 4 Patrol Boats went through.

Spoiler :

Frozen was the smallest inhabited planet, Fungal (Atlantean) and Lush (Terran) were slightly larger but had the highest sea levels, Primordial had the most usable land mass and mineral wealth but it's toxic atmosphere, combined with temperamental fauna, and hot & dry climate made it a low priority for everyone besides PAC's research engineers.

Presume the game has the following mods: Franco-Iberia's colonists were 'Aristocratic Artists' (+2 Energy, +3 Culture), PAC's colonists were 'Research Engineers' (+2 Science, +1 Production), Affinity 24 is cap, Affinity 21 (or 17/17) allows Starship construction, Harmony 14 unlocks Mind Flower, Nanotechnology+Hypercomputing unlocks Warp Gate, affinity levels unlock Warp Portals, straight affinity 12 or hybrid affinity 9/9 unlocks Affinity Tile Wonders and that P/H Transcendence is mostly voluntary with individuality of humans preserved more with increasing Purity Levels of the builders of the Ascendant Capitol.

All factions not listed here were eliminated by Rejinaldo de Alencar and Vadim Kozlov. Official Sponsors without displayed affinities lost. Time Victory set at 250 with winners able to progress and losers subjugating peacefully to the winners.

 

[Azem.Ocram]

Stories

Turn 200-250 era
Harmonious Kavitha Thakur, the wise and graceful princess of peace is the only ally of Ascendent Élodie. She knows how long the Mind Flower takes to bloom so she already built Mind Stems and Xeno Sanctuaries in all her own cities. She even built the Xenoscape and Mind Flower in her city closest to Élodie's border. Ascendant Élodie, gloriously cultured (and restored to her youthful vigor thanks to KP's resurrection device and further enhanced with genetic engineering) sits on the throne of the Ascendent Capitol like Hera before her, sharing her thoughts with her psychic senators, as she awaits the activation of the Mind Flower in her Greco-Roman inspired golden armor over the finest reslin robes. From her vantage point outside Mirabelle, she can clearly see the bizarre green skyline of Udyama against the striking crimson sky and the fiery disc of light dipping below the horizon but the best part is that she gets an up-close look of the Mind Flower. Construction was completed hours ago and the harmonious drones and engineers should be done by now.
As the last rays of sunlight fade and the stars of this foreign sky become visible, it happens! A surge of light and the Mind Flower activates! Reveling in the triumph that Transcendence is imminent, only a few decades away, Élodie basks in the glory of this alien light! What felt like mere minutes later, her senators let Élodie know they have already joined the night's festivities in downtown Mirabelle.

Years pass and the rush of the upcoming Transcendence is as strong as ever. That puritan businessman, Hutama denounced Queen Kavitha Thakur and cut off all trade with the Protectorate. Little does he know that his biggest trade partner, Empress Élodie is in on the action. Franco-Iberia and the Protectorate share the same power grid. Hutama needs the energy to recover from his war with Al Falah. Kavitha and Élodie have regularly siphoned Polystralia's energy for centuries but they mostly focused on stealing science from the Voracious Kishk until Hutama finally defeated those whackos and Hellions invading his lands. Kavitha and Élodie stayed neutral in that situation but built up a sufficient defense force around their borderlands. Now that this small planet has only 3 Sponsors, peace is much easier to maintain even if Hutama is upset.

Decades pass and Hutama hasn't done anything rash yet. Queen Kavitha and Empress Élodie share an intimate outdoor dinner in the Hybrid Forest between the Mind Flower and the Capitol. Their chef for the night is a RoButler imported from Polystralia, programmed with all the delicacies of Old Earth and their new paradise. Kavitha disapproves of Élodie's extravagance but appreciates this gesture, and regular energy infusions. Kavitha usually eats fresh produce from local Biowells, prepared in the simple ways of harmonious cuisine. After blessing their meal, Kavitha hesitantly begins to dine, with Élodie ahead of her. Much to Kavitha's surprise and delight, the plate (a traditionally prepared vegan dish common to India and Pakistan of Old Earth) brings tears of joy to her face as Kavitha is immediately transported in memory to her childhood, shortly before the Great Mistake. Élodie, sitting across the table and focusing on her own dining experience immediately looks up as she sees and hears the rushing memories of Kavitha. Both now fully appreciate the privacy away from the prying minds of their courts. This intimate moment shared between them would be ruined at a banquet. Both queens can form mental connections with appropriately spliced persons but the current system gives everyone around them easy access to all the surface thoughts these queens have whenever they don't actively concentrate on blocking out prying minds. They spend hours together in lively conversation, speaking vastly different languages but understanding each other perfectly.

EDIT:
Near Turn 200:
Suzanne Fielding looked upon the resplendent Central's from her executive office on the top floor of the HQ Ziggurat, inspired in part by Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Central's architecture consisted of opulent Art Deco and Classical Inspired supertalls. Shades of brown, tan, gold, and bronze, combined with the decorations taken from America's most iconic buildings made for a beautiful sight. Nearby, the business district shone and sparkled with its more technological-inspired crystal spires and ivory iTowers (named affectionately after the resemblance to 21st century Apple products AKA smooth-edged ivory boxes). In the distance, CEO Fielding eyed the future location of her Warp Gate, anxiously hoping that she can evacuate the majority of her population before Rejinaldo conquers her last continent.

 

[GenyaArikado]

idgaf about you fanficfactions but im here for that little tale with Hera Elodie and Kavitha

 

[Azem.Ocram]

I have such a vivid imagination that it takes me hours (and occasional dictionary/thesaurus look-ups) to convey the imagery and stories in my head. My artistic talents can't get anywhere close to what I visualize! It really is too bad because a picture is worth 1000 words.

The "fanficfactions" in the first 2 posts are there to help me plan and organize the lore and Civilopedia entries for my WIP mod to be released in 4-8 weeks.