Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[MysticWind]

Mercator’s Projectionists (pt. 1)

The Observers are a motley lot, representing veteran military officers and career intelligence agents while hosting one of the more exotic ideologies among the Unity diaspora. Here follows a crosssection of members of the Memory of Earth, both the prominent and the obscure.

The loss of our homeworld can be attributed to insufficient planning and incompetent leadership. We must repent so that this never happens again.

Shrouded in obscurity and clouded by mystery, Deputy Minister Han Jae-Moon of the Memory of Earth Planetary Defense Force is a man whose history no one is entirely certain of. Officially a scion of latter-day chaebol aristocrats born on the Shin Busan L5 orbital installation, Han would go on to become a decorated ROKN officer and then inducted into the prestigious Se Sok O-Gye Academy as a special diplomatic operative. Subsequently reentered society as a diplomatic attaché to the country’s U.N. delegation, advancing South Korean, then post-detente, pan-Korean interests primarily in matters of extraterrestrial and undersea development.

Others allege that this is a cover story entirely concocted by intelligence services, that Han was no less than a DRPK Ministry of State Security infiltrator gifted to the desperate aging billionaire couple after a childhood of indoctrination. Still others claim that he has been a South Korean double agent all along.

Regardless of his actual background, it is known that both before and during Planetfall, Han Jae-Moon built extensive connections among the Unity passengers, from ship’s officers to future colonial administrators, corporate executive assistants to suspected organized crime figures. By the time of rapid factionalization, his connections had made him a prime asset, and he quickly rose up in the ranks of the Memories of Planet upon entrance. Aligning closely with Commander Kleisel Mercator’s vision of species-wide preparation, Han is one of the Observers’ strongest advocates for a united humanity able to contend with all external threats.

Despite his supposed civilian diplomatic career, Han has proven to be an able military strategist, facilitating the consolidation of the disparate armed forces traditions represented among the Unity survivors under the banner of the Chiron Guard and the Mercator mission. Possessing unexpected knowledge of guerrilla hit and run tactics, he aided the faction’s own independent invention of rover quickstrikes. (While not as rigorous as the Spartan equivalent, the Observers’ adaptation of naval wolfpack attacks for land vehicles greatly enhanced their raiding capabilities on par with New Two Thousand Regulator “homesteader reallocations.”)

Became one of the faction’s officer cadre selected for Longevity Vaccine treatments. Eventually rotated out from direct operational leadership by the time of ICS Campaigns- the Commander had determined that “changing times require changing minds” and Han was relegated to intelligence roles. Subsequently directs Project Cheongsu (청수, “Clear Water”), the faction’s expansion into aquatic environments starting with the Great Northern Ocean. Ostensibly for the investigation of underwater Progenitor installations and USO (unidentified submerged object) sightings, Cheongsu has consumed massive dark budgets and the funneling of considerable psi researchers and psi potentials, leading to rumors that Han is recreating the deepsea programs of the Se Sok O-Gye Academy on Planet.

Those who have had the fortune to interact with Han personally find him to be affably urbane compared to his more striking presence in the jingoistic official Observer informational vids. But even as unfailingly polite as his public persona portrayed in MorganLink 3DVision live interviews might be, he never strays from the core message of the Memory of Earth: proper planning, political unity, and constant vigilance is the only way to ensure humanity’s survival in the face of the unknown dangers of the universe. While the deputy minister’s interest in the speculative science of psionics is well-known, his own specific opinions on the commander’s views of extant extraterrestrial intelligence are undefined. Thus in terms of intrafactional politics, Han is a generic Defender in terms of theory: committed to the ideal of global defense and organization, fairly agnostic on the specifics of potential alien threats.

In demeanor, Han is a diplomatic chameleon, taking on any personality as conditions require. This tendency has led some to regard him, in the words of Tribesman envoy Margherita Villanova, “a many-bodied soul”, whose flickering identities are most unpredictable indeed. 

The more case files you pour over, the more skeletons you find, the more you start to feel the wool over your eyes.

Cambridge-educated behavioral scientist Vic Montoya is a lecturer at the burgeoning Mokoena University and occasional “consulting investigator” for the Observer internal security ministry. Formerly a special agent of the Central Security Bureau, the Second American Civil Wartime emergency troika of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, Montoya was dismissed for “insubordinate negligence and frivolous activities” for his personal crusades that he carried all the way to Chiron: allegations that the United States government had been aware of extraterrestrial intelligences since nearly its founding, and had been engaged in active coverup operations throughout its history. Filtered through this lens, Montoya’s in-depth investigation into the Palmer slayings or the death of Apsara Mongkut were not excessive intellectual exercises gone to overtraining, but the obsessions of a deranged, unpatriotic, character.

Despite his dismissal from the CSB, Montoya was both nominated and accepted by the multinational U.N. Alpha Centauri Mission Committee. His admittance was seen as but one among several impolitic choices designed by the United Nations to embarrass America, which it had hoped could be shamed into renewing its commitments to the Unity project. Furthermore, because the debadged agent had focused his accusations on his own nation’s government only, and not other authorities, he was seen as ideologically compatible with the overall project.

Montoya proved himself to be more than a politically advantageous kook during Planetfall, when he deduced that based on their past track record on Earth (and with the benefit of his own personal biases), the Kellerites did not mean to subvert the mission in the same way the Spartans did. While Unity X.O. d’Almeida thoughtlessly brushed off his analysis, U.N. Marine General Salan did not, and indulged in his pet hunches, allowing the opening of dialogue with Kellerite representative Sergeant Landers. The ensuing ceasefire allowed the contingent of survivors loyal to the U.N. led by Salan and Pravin Lal to suffer no further trouble from the Tribals, though no other cooperation would develop from this brief interaction.

Montoya would later emerge among the Memory of Planet, drawn to the theories of Commander Mercator and the faction’s preoccupation with extraterrestrial life. Though even his behavior was too much for the faction ministries to admit him into official capacity, he was allowed to share his expertise. Beyond his instructional duties, Montoya runs a datalinks column, the X-ron Chronicle, correlating the near-daily alien discoveries on Planet to past paranormal incidents from Earth’s history, not to mention tell-tale signs of foreknowledge from the powers-that-be. Though officially frowned upon by Observer leadership, it has a modest following among the more ardent believers of the faction’s Wanters (as in, “I want to know”), exemplifying that theory’s preoccupation with Mercator’s beliefs in UFOs and alien intelligences, and willingness to accuse Old Earth organizations of conspiracy. With its promulgation to the Planetary Datalinks, the Chronicle has since become quite popular among Gaian theists, Dreamer parapsychologists, and Morganite tabloid-watchers alike.

While Montoya is a fairly little-known figure beyond readers of his Chronicle, the continuous spate of new and surprising understandings of Planetlife, and mysterious occurrences during the uncertain violent life in the colonies means that he is increasingly called upon by Observer authorities to consult in cases they cannot satisfyingly explain. As to what Han Jae-Moon, Mercator, or any other person in power might want with the quixotic questioner, the answer can only be found out there.

Notes:

Han Jae-Moon of the inaccurately transliterated Chungsu is from Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide. Here he is portrayed by Rick Yune as Kang Yeonsak in Olympus Has Fallen and as Zao in Die Another Day.

The totalitarian “CIA/NSA/FBI troika” is one of the unfortunate potential outcomes in Replay by Ken Grimwood.

The Chiron Chronicle was a famous collaborative SMAC fanfiction series from the Apolyton forums at the turn of the century.

[Trenacker]

Dole Yudikon confronts a Maronite leader.

The Lone Survivor

Dole Yudikon, alias Carnaveron, arrived at Warm Welcome on a stretcher. The most outspoken individualist in the hemisphere began his time on Planet no differently than anyone else: in desperate need of help. He was one of two hundred occupants of a crashed Colony Pod recovered by Peacekeeper scouts out of Warm Welcome.

Help him, Lal did. But no sooner had the survivor been healed than he was discontent. Though Lal's people had rescued him from certain death, placed him in comfortable shelter, and stood watch for him on the walls, he was, from the first, preparing a quarrel against the Commissioner and his régime.

Other survivors--in every faction and base--fit a pattern. All had questions about Unity’s demise, but these were quickly set aside to focus on the satisfaction of more basic needs: breathable air, medicine, shelter, food, and water. Retrospective inquiry—about Garland’s death, the nature of their new government, even the condition of other survivors—was a luxury. They sampled it infrequently and in small draughts lest reminiscence impede the more practical work of survival. Yet for this newcomer, such asides were a preoccupation. Today would take care of itself—it must do—for yesterday too loudly demanded an inquest and tomorrow lay unfinished on the drafting table.

Dole Yudikon quickly empaneled a coroner’s jury of the colony’s ne’er-do-wells: Charterists, Purists, even Spartan prisoners. Their findings were naturally censorious. As Yudikon himself explained on the faction Datalinks, he did not believe in "Peacekeepers" any more than he believed in haunts under the bed. Contrary to Prokhor Zakharov’s starry-eyed revisionism (he had been the one to suggest dissolving the mission and striking out separately, each leader with their own retinue), Unity had succumbed to mutiny, not revolution. Prior to boarding, everyone had pledged obligation—some to the U.N. Charter, but others to a further range of governing documents that existed in parallel. Francisco d’Almeida had abrogated only the former, and his authority extended no further. Charter colonists still had their charter; the crew, their chain-of-command. Pravin Lal's experiment in participatory democracy, however well-couched in moral nicety, was quite illegal. Any court back on Earth would have said so. Some on Chiron still might.

Life on Chiron was a continuation of life on Old Earth, and fully alive with its learnings, legacies, and obligations. No human society here could arise, sui generis, without respect for Natural Law.

Now amongst the Things peculiar to Man, is his Desire of Society, that is, a certain Inclination to live with those of his own Kind, not in any Manner whatever, but peaceably, and in a Community regulated according to the best of his Understanding… This Sociability, which we have now described in general, or this Care of maintaining Society in a Manner conformable to the Light of human Understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s, and the Restitution of what we have of another’s, or of the Profit we have made by it, the Obligation of fulfilling Promises, the Reparation of a Damage done through our own Default, and the Merit of Punishment among Men. – The Rights of War and Peace, 1625, Datalinks

The Peacekeeping Forces, Dole said, were a work of bastardy. On what grounds had the most-virtuous been crowned king? With what authority did Lal presume to relieve charter colonists of their debts so that they might instead participate in a venture of his own design? Why did he presume that the loyalties with which colonists had boarded Unity could be so quickly reassigned? If it were Lal's pleasure to repudiate commitments as soon as they proved inconvenient, who could afford to repose trust in his word henceforth?

In Dole Yudikon, the mystic chords of memory would not be rendered silent even by catastrophe. The Peacekeeping Forces might be a happy nation of turncoats, glad to cast off the shackles of false allegiance to the Mission Charter and the unhappy consequences of adherence thereto, but he was made of sterner stuff. His watchword was fidelity to the past. Any invitation to acknowledge Pravin Lal as his leader was an insulting lure to prostitution. By taking on charter colonists, as well as by practicing indiscriminate salvage, the Peacekeepers were engaging in simple piracy. Dole Yudikon was the sworn man of Struan’s Pacific Trading Company. He was also an investor whose original contribution to the mission had made possible the survival of those in Lal's care. Thus, to Dole Yudikon, a generous living was owed in return. Roshann Cobb, he knew and respected. Struan’s had provided Dole Yudikon a livelihood amidst the upheavals on Old Earth and might well do so again on Chiron. Pravin Lal was an unknown quantity, and every day revealing himself less worthy.

Struan’s was one of the mission’s twelve Prime Contractors. The Hong Kong-based conglomerate provided supplemental crew as well as charter colonists operating under its own banner. Some of the positions filled in their manner were innocuous: surveyor, arborist, hydrologist, geologist. Others, euphemistic: executive protection agent, correctional facilitator, tactical equipment operator. On the advice of his illegitimate son, Struan’s tai-pan, Ian Dunross, had thrown in as a mission sponsor, waiving lucrative finder’s fees in return for proprietary rights to mount an independent colonial venture on Chiron.

The arrangement was problematic for several reasons. First, every charter colonist was in this way yoked to two masters: a U.N. supervisor and a corporate one. Second, the precise nature of sponsor contributions undercut the integrity of the mainline mission. The timing of the U.N.’s need for money meant that sponsors had supplied the heavy machinery and expertise, especially mobile rigs, without which it would be practically impossible to undertake large-scale terraforming. Because a five-year window was too narrow to expect much progress on that front, it was therefore in the U.N.’s urgent interest either to quickly work the sponsors’ vehicles and personnel to the point of uselessness, or else to ultimately renege on the deal. Nobody really believed that Joralemon Hardacre would not have shied away from martial law if confronted with "splittism" of such magnitude, and he'd had only a poor man's collection of SolarEx ASPs, not the regulars of the U.N. Marine Forces. Third, proprietary colonies implied establishment of a future carrying trade between two solar systems, and, by extension, the survival of Old Earth. Officially, the Unity was on a one-way voyage. Reestablishing communication of any kind was not among Garland’s priorities. Finally, the charter colonies, requiring security of their own, secured permission to embark peace officers whose very presence made a lie of the U.N. Command’s monopoly on violence.

Dole Yudikon’s logic was straightforward, and typical of the attitude that later earned him and others the semi-derogatory label of “Charterist.” The mother colony being stillborn, sponsors were now logically freed of the agreed-upon term of service. Contract laborers must be made to honor the terms to which they originally agreed. They were also due the restoration of their investments. Such a rich treasure, no heir could afford to renounce, no matter how thin his blood. Worse, every minute one withheld, value was subtracted from that inheritance. Men and machinery were worn down, even lost. Dole Yudikon and Pravin Lal might as well have been brothers, then, in competition for the same crown.

A Hive Thinker surveys delivery of Mark VII SAMM's by Pilgrim aerostat. Payment for the transaction, consisting of just under twelve quadrinaries of energy caskets, has been assembled on the same parade ground. Like ancient drovers, the Hivemen herded their mechanical flock out of the desert and into the Neyanza Valley, which they soon drank dry of water.

Dole Yudikon, alias "Carnaveron," was born to misfortune in the southern Sinai Peninsula approximately forty years before Mission Launch. His father was the Ofira harbor pilot and an alcoholic. The mother distracted herself from an unhappy marriage by becoming lost in her work as an irrigation engineer. Young Dole spent most of his time in the homes of Christian friends. Canadian followers of the Vulgatian rite outnumbered Israeli settlers in the region approximately 3:1. Cultural diffusion left the boy with broad vowels and a unique perspective on the interests common to Israel and its growing non-Jewish immigrant population. Together, they poured over the texts of the only literature to hand: the Vulgate and Lost Shakespeare.
 
Israelis practiced Judaism mostly as a civic religion in Dole's era. The Yudikons were no exception. But successive governments saw no reason to discourage the intense millenarianism of the North American Christians. Nearly all the young men in Ofira looked ahead to the day on which they would be called upon to assist their adopted homeland fulfill vague but expansive hegemonic ambitions.

Vid captures appended to his U.N. personnel file show Dole Yudikon as a young man, perhaps twenty years of age. Standing north of six feet, trim, with high cheekbones and olive complexion, he is the archetype of good health. There is no physical incongruity with his profession, which was war.  Commissioned a lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at eighteen, Yudikon served two years in the South Lebanon Security Belt advising his country’s Maronite Christian allies. Twice bitten since the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and afterwards twice shy, they returned to the Israeli bosom with marked hesitancy.
 
Tel Aviv spent lavishly to mend fences. A soldier in Dole Yudikon’s position was called upon to be equal parts battlefield commander, occupier, diplomat, and quartermaster. This was a decidedly Janus-faced undertaking: the same officer from whom a local man obtained a life-saving visa for emergency medical care in Haifa might also torture one of his relatives the next afternoon. As formal allies to the majority-Maronite South Lebanon Army, IDF units also fought alongside them—against the revived Lebanese National Movement and the Syrians officially, and unofficially during countless internecine skirmishes. More than one superior would have needed to concur that Lieutenant Yudikon possessed exceptional empathic and organizational ability, to say nothing of a strong stomach, before he was so employed. With just twenty-six IDF combat effectives at his disposal, Yudikon must have been himself a frequent combatant, and it is certain that he received at least a few months' instruction from Aman, Israel's military intelligence service.

Lieutenant Yudikon turned in mixed results. Anxious to win the favor of his skeptical hosts, he flattered their personal agendas, spending as much time assisting them to assassinate rival militia commanders as he did on building a cordon sanitaire to protect the Galilee against enemy encroachment. Through his mother, Yudikon wrote letters to the Ofira settlers, urging them first to send their money, and later their sons and daughters, to fight for the preservation of the Lebanese Christian state. This was the appeal that many had been waiting for: dozens made the long journey from the Red Sea coast to Marjeyoun. Their bemused hosts celebrated this reunion of co-religionists by relieving them of their cash and setting them to work in the fields.
After much infighting, political leadership in Yudikon’s sector consolidated to the point that Israeli combat commanders rated the local South Lebanese Army units by far their most aggressive and reliable. The IDF soon began most of its northward incursions from local bivouacs.

An intense operational tempo and diversion of sector resources from development to warfare inevitably left their mark. Israeli records, later passed to Bras de Fer Security Services, document that life expectancy and household income declined in Dole Yudikon's sector. Terrorist activity and imprisonments rose starkly. Near the conclusion of his service obligation, PLO infiltrators killed most of the Government of Free Lebanon leadership with whom he dealt directly. Their successors, who owed nothing to Yudikon, complained strenuously to IDF leadership about the worsening security problem and lamented that, despite years of collaboration, virtually every freestanding structure had been knocked flat by Syrian artillery. A review was taken in hand by the Defense Establishment Inspector General. Investigators concluded that Yudikon was prone to excessive risk-taking. Northern Command declined a recommendation of discipline, but the Lieutenant, correctly sensing the walls closing in, declined to reenlist.

Israeli law obliged native-born men to spend another three years overseas upon conclusion of their National Service. Familiar with the structure of army life, a majority opted for corporate employment. Most traveled to North America for opportunities with the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC). Veterans with more marketable skills, ex-Lieutenant Yudikon included, received offers to take on more dangerous work, whether in active warzones or outside Earth’s gravity well. Dole Yudikon went east. He would never again return to his homeland.

The Kä Space Elevator. Because of inadequate security, a notorious draw for contraband headed "upside." Poor relations with the locals meant that while the U.N. was allowed to buy access for its cargoes, blue helmets were entirely unwelcome. Alongside their official contingents, Morgan and Struan were both known to have smuggled additional passengers and equipment of an unknown nature aboard the ship, some in false compartments, others in plain sight.

By the time of Dole’s birth, the peoples of the world were embracing the possibilities of new associations as never before. Since Westphalia in 1648, the sovereign state, with its intrusive institutional presence and, more importantly, a durable monopoly on the legitimate use of force, had commanded the unabridged loyalty of its citizens, and, in return, paid out a reliable set of rewards. These included, but were not limited to: cultural continuity, contract enforcement, and, of course, physical security. The first half of the twentieth century was preoccupied by the question of which nations deserved their own states and which did not. While as recently as 1900, national government had seemed not only remote but also largely irrelevant to the daily lives of most of its citizens except during wartime, by 2000, it was both their shield against iniquity and the guarantor of their comfort in old age. Yet after more than four hundred years, the national state was demonstrating its failure to adapt.

Men hailed the state when it solved our problems, but they resented it, too. As the technocrat was elevated in importance by the increasing complexity of his own creations, so society was forced to accept his values. In the West especially, this arrangement clashed hard with the cherished popular mythology of the rambunctious republican, jealous of his prerogatives and the power of making his own mistakes. In time, many also came to resent the system of public education, which taught a sort of civic ecumenicism the previous generation found threatening and effete. They took exception when their “coarse” opinions were deemed unfit for public consumption, demanding the cultural products of an earlier era and refusing to admit imperfections in their own body politic. In the West especially, where authority was ever on trial and the intellectual came second to the humble “working man,” some began to question whether the state really ought to be making so many important decisions on their behalf.

Social media was to the modern state what the printing press had been to the Universal Church. Growing cynicism undercut the very concept of a shared reality. The state was no longer trusted to name the truth. As access to higher education declined, civic participation, already at an all-time low in the West, dropped through the floor. When Jean-Baptiste Keller made his call for “the renewal of local knowledge,” he swam in vain against the current. Virtual communities built on shared emotion replaced national communities built on shared place, sacrifice, and memory.

Civil wars across the First World provided the final trauma necessary for a broad abandonment of state-based identity. Observers now had too much evidence to deny the inadequacy of the state to protect them. Two great armies, the American and the Canadian, suffered a series of stinging defeats. Spoken allegiance to the wrong flag was now a hanging offense throughout North America.

Even after the emergence of Restored government in both Washington and Ottawa, skepticism persisted. New forms of association had proved more adaptable to the needs of wartime populations. Say what one might about Kellerites and Holnists, they proved the power of individual mobilization. Each provided adherents with values and community more immediately relevant—more practical—than the state. Wartime constitutional adjustments had also dramatically altered the relevance of corporations in the life of the North American citizen. With Letters of Marque, corporations had become “clothed themselves in the power of the state,” their private soldiers all too reminiscent of the “unauthorized” militia they were charged with rounding up. At war’s end, they successfully lobbied to retain their hard-won prerogatives.

The Second Reconstruction underlined just how far the mighty had fallen. The strategy, people, money, and know-how to mend the fallen order—all were provided by the ARC and its competitors. ARC Chief Executive Officer Oscar van de Graaf had better name-recognition than the President of the United States, his country’s ninth in as many years. The U.S. and Canadian armed forces were accustomed to civilian control. As it happened, it mattered very little whether that civilian answered to the occupants of the White House or Rideau Hall, or of 100 Morgan Tower. On the three-year anniversary of its founding, the ARC employed one in six working Americans. From Denver in the West to Cincinnati in the East, old American cities had been laid waste. From their ashes emerged corporate cantonments and United Nations refugee camps. FEMA was forgotten. And so civic contribution became synonymous with corporate, rather than national, service.

The 2090s were likewise a period of remarkable strain on Israeli society. A series of Labor governments tried without success to manage the population crisis brought about by two previous generations of religious revival. Some have credited the country’s bellicosity in Lebanon to its surplus of young men, but Israeli casualties were comparably light and neither that outlet nor inducements of desert land were enough to relieve pressures in the Coastal Plain. The social safety net was cut to the point that one former prime minister complained Israelis could no longer recognize themselves. Thus Israel, famous for its in-gathering of Jews, now sent them out again. Yudikon’s classmates were repeatedly asked to sacrifice on behalf of the nation-state without full access to its benefits. Six percent of all Israelis fought in the Holnist Wars on either side of the Atlantic and two percent were killed, though the State of Israel was never a declarant.

For a year, Dole Yudikon worked inside the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone (IOEZ) as a customs patroller for the Gezah Islands Authority (GIA). At twenty-two, Dole kept a diary, excerpts from which were digitized by private security firm CTR. In several letters to the Ofira Canadians, he counseled them not to follow his trail. The islands were crowded and their inhabitants sickly, “without a good connection to the earth, which is false.” The GIA, a creature of the British Raj, hadn’t the remit or the funding to solve problems of this magnitude—the same limitation that he had confronted shortly before in Marjeyoun. Piracy was a rampant issue. Dole was much affected by the brutalities visited upon the islanders, most of whom were former residents of Dan and already destitute. The lone Royal Australian Navy frigate on-station was usually laid up in ordinary. Dole’s team learned to rely instead on the intervention of Morgan SafeHaven operators, whom they bribed with fuel cells intended for the frigate. Dole was impressed by the SafeHaven crews. He recorded that, far from the amoral buccaneers he expected, they shared his affection for “their fellow discarded souls of the IOEZ.” They accepted GIA fuel as payment for convoy escort and counter-boarding because they too were operating on the end of a long shoestring.

Eventually, Dole found work with the Struan’s firm as a fixer in Singapore. It was what Israelis called “the right fall.” A preferment from Struan’s meant access to good housing, top-class medical care, and competitive pay. The crown jewel of Britain’s Far East possessions glistened even more brightly as the terminus of a space elevator. Yudikon, already worldly, now rubbed shoulders with the Empire’s elite. A steady flood of technicians passed through, outbound for points elsewhere in the Sol System. Here, he struck up lasting relationships with some of the confidants whose services he would eventually recruit personally to the charter colony.

Yudikon’s duties on Singapore Island mostly involved liaison between Struan’s private security forces at Changi Worldport and the British Burma Army garrison. He was mentioned twice in despatches during the eight-month wave of rioting triggered by the U.N.’s announcement that the Unity Mission would accept corporate money. By age twenty-five, the Struan’s Home Office was tracking his career and had signed off on a series of rapid promotions.

Corporate employment continued to pay dividends in other ways. British Empire resources were worn thin. Their priority was on the port; residential districts were a secondary concern. With Singapore often convulsed by riots, Struan’s moved Dole into their proprietary district, safe behind a stockade walked by mercenary soldiers, this time wearing the same colors as Dole himself.

A gateman of the Singapore Special Constabulary, sourced from Struan's Strategic Services. Officers like this one helped to ensure the safety of people and property "under corporate care," as the saying went. Their arrest powers were strictly limited to corporate property, but the Singapore Police Force turned a blind eye to their participation in aggressive "perimeter policing," preferring to treat the Specials as a force multiplier.

That year, 2096, two events changed the course of history for the Houses of Struan and Yudikon. First, Marc Struan, the tai-pan’s natural son and heir-apparent, was diagnosed with cancer. Roshann Cobb, now an Oxford graduate, went to work for MI5, where he would spend the next five years before Marc’s passing. The relationship between Ian Dunross and his "unnatural" son was a bad one. Cobb was the Elder Struan’s second son, previously unneeded and therefore unwanted. Until his teenage years, young Roshann existed on the margins of respectable Hong Kong Society. He experimented with opium and became an odds runner at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. He and his mother, Cantonese chanteuse Chen An-Wei, reacted badly when Dunross had the boy shipped off to boarding schools. Formal equality between the races did nothing to spare Cobb merciless teasing from his companions. The tai-pan conciliated by arranging lessons in self-defense. In his fourth-year, Cobb demonstrated proficiency by pitching one tormentor out a second-story window of the Radcliffe Camera. Upon his elder brother’s death, Cobb left MI5 for a corner office with Sturan’s Hong Kong. Having no other options left to him, Ian Dunross at last determined to take an active hand in the young man’s upbringing. Among his dozen-strong protective detail was Dole Yudikon.

The U.N. Intelligence Cell judged with very high probability that it Yudikon himself brokered the détente leading to intervention from the Royal Hong Kong Police Force and local triads when the third botched attempt on Cobb’s life took place during a 2093 visit to the Kowloon Walled City.

Yudikon became wealthy sometime before January 2108, when he entered cold sleep for the journey to Alpha Centauri. His fortune covered both the costs of a personal stake with Struan’s and passage for a wife and son. In an echo of the past, Yudikon married a Katangese Christian antiquities dealer, Bienheureuse Nzuzi. She is widely supposed by the international press to have been the connection through which Elizabethville Cardinal Pierre Mputu Kasala acquired the cash to help underwrite Katanga’s independence during his residence. Their last known residence was Hong Kong’s Prince Silas Arcology, where neighbors included numerous Colonial Secretaries and prominent naval officers. While most passengers on charter assignment traded comfortable lives to begin indenture, the Yudikons’ accounts were fully settled. Dole anticipated continuing in his station as a salaryman.

Bienheureuse Nzuzi traveled frequently to Switzerland on the Concodre jetliner and was flagged a Person of Interest by INTERPOL. Oxford-educated like Roshann Cobb, she was briefly a classmate of his. Her first known contact with Dole Yudikon occurred while the pair were on separate holidays at Iran's Shemshak ski resort.

Vested Charterists alone received a special allowance for personal effects among the cargo. Problems of volume and mass led the United Nations to enforce a strict limit of 23kg for most crew. Extra space was therefore priceless, though what filled it might well have value only to the owner. Personal cargo was almost always human. Most of the time, it consisted of the Charterist’s own family, safely outside corporate authority but probably lacking the knowledge, skills, or abilities to contribute in a way that would bind them to any competing power structure. Some Charterists without dependents also sold passage to free colonists of their choosing, and under a variety of terms. The U.N. Intelligence Cell hypothesized that Dole's cargo consisted of his wife and child.

[MysticWind]

Mercator’s Projectionists (pt. 2)

Too many crave validation of their beliefs as if it can save the world, and not their world alone.

Doctor Eleanor Argus is one of the Memory of Earth’s foremost medical examiners, renowned for her work on uncovering the specifics of xenoform attacks and actively involved in the faction’s research into mindworm behavior. PanMayo Clinic educated in internal medicine with an undergraduate degree in biophysics from UC Berkeley, Argus originally cut her teeth working with Médecins Sans Frontières post-residency in the American Midwest. During her service, Ellie determined that the mysterious wasting disease afflicting the civil war refugees was not simple malnutrition, but acute cachexia caused by a chemical agent deployed by one of the hypersurvivalist militias active in the region.

Part of Chief of Surgery Pravin Lal’s medical staff, Argus found her way into Zakharov’s camp of engineers and scientists. While her expertise in medicine was gladly appreciated, her background in physics made her an even better fit for the theoretical University in formation. Her empirical skepticism, despite holding on to childhood traditions of faith, made her a natural Academic. On Planet, her abilities in both combined in her role as a forensics xenopathologist, accompanying field teams to determine the nature of death in both colonists claimed by mindworms and ancient Progenitor remains alike. (Indeed, her field experience and courage under threat of xenoform attack placed her on the Schreiber Project’s priority poach list of future hires.) Though the discipline of xenoarcheology remained nascent, Argus gained a reasonable grasp of the topic.

So when a Chiron Guard artifact extraction team defeated her University scout expedition to the Hippotion Gorge, the duty officer recognized Ellie as a prominent researcher. Rather than placed into the prisoner exchange process, she was offered a role with the Observers. Believing in the probability of distinguishing herself in their number, and intrigued by their greater focus on Planetary life, Argus accepted.

The doctor finds the Memory of Earth to be professional yet overly credulous. Upon becoming one of Mercator’s heralded defectors, and a veteran field investigator, Argus has also become an outspoken member of the Skeptic theory. Subscribing to the observable reality that sentient life had disappeared from Planet for untold millennia, Ellie has become a popular critic of supposed sightings of alien intelligence. Using both her biophysics background and medical ability, she has debunked the infamous Bullock sighting, determining the “ghost lights” to be no more than gas arising from the marshy swamps reflecting light from Hercules. She has testified before the Observer Diet and even on pop infotainment datalink programmes about the proliferation of supposed “experts” peddling fraudulent claims about the nature of the universe, and urging factional policy be based on verifiable evidence, not myth and legend.

The Skeptics are an audible minority of the Memory of Earth, their views conflicting with the commander’s worldview. However, as with many theories, Skepticism carries the potential for crossover. Skeptic-Defenders believe in the mundane aspects of global coordinated defense, the possibility of fixing the mistakes of NATO and past petty regional alliances to bridge humanity for the unknown challenges of space colonization. But they believe that fears of alien attack are unsubstantiated and superfluous, a distraction at best and a dangerous source of misinformation at worst. Similarly, Skeptic-Unifiers believe that the Memory of Earth must bring about the unification of the Unity diaspora to avoid repeating the endless conflicts of the species’ past. To fixate on an external enemy is to craft a false scapegoat, rejecting true fraternity on the base of false fears.

Despite the moniker, not all Skeptics are as scientifically-inclined as Ellie Argus. A prominent needlejet flight squadron leader, a former U.S. Air Force captain from Colorado Springs, publicly came out as a controversial Skeptic by evincing belief that the artifacts and monuments of Chiron are not Progenitor constructions but rather the works of Satan. Contrasting with Sister Miriam Godwinson’s proclamation of Planet as a promised land, the airman concluded that it was a purgatory of sorts filled with dangerous behemoths, leviathans, ziz, and demons. Thus the purpose of the Memory of Earth is to shepherd the stranded flock through this dire valley of darkness. Artifacts must then be carefully gathered, ritually cleansed, and destroyed.

More clandestinely, within the internal ministry dwells a cabal of ex-CSB federal agents adhering to the reconstituted Church of Latter-Earth Saints. Believing that the Progenitors to not be some sort of hokey science-fictional elder race birthed from the blind chance of evolution, but fellow brothers and sisters heretofore created by Elohim. They view the scientific marvels of the monoliths as clearly the work of denizens of Kolob, maybe even spirit children of the heavenly parents. Calling themselves New Nephites, as Lehi and his children once similarly crossed a great distance to a new world, these agents seek to use the resources of the Memory of Earth to closely understand the artifacts of Chiron and grow closer to Heavenly Father, perhaps to find His celestial kingdom beyond the next manifold.

Finally, a small group of SIGINT analysts within the Ministry of External Intelligence, rallying around a former Research and Analysis Wing bureau chief, believes that the creators of the Chiron artifacts are no less than Earthmen from the age of Treta-yuga who, skilled in the Vedic sciences, built the vimana flying chariots and came to Planet. Interpreting alleged xenoanthropological phenomena through the lens of the Sanskrit epics, they have decided that the Progenitors were their own human ancestors. After the wars with Pakistan, the rise of the Kavithan heresy, and the cataclysm of the Six-Minute War, these embittered survivors believe the only way to restore Akhand Bharat would logically be to use the vimana to return home and smash the mlecchas. (They have tentatively opened a covert channel to the Restorationists, who are understandably perturbed by their notions and enthusiasm.)

By defying the Mercator consensus, despite substituting in their own clearly non-scientific mythos, all of the above groups can be considered Skeptics.

Dr. Argus, for her own part, has some sympathy for the superstitions of these Alt-Skeptics, but no patience for any of their attempts to influence the faction’s decisions. Her public persona as a major Skeptic has thus drawn suspicion and hostility both from them, and from those who support Mercator’s theories, such as the Wanters. While the Observers are supposedly a professional and objective lot, the ideological zeal strikes them as fervently as in any other faction. Thus, even as Ellie speaks out against the forces of irrationality, some of the same forces might conspire to push back.

Notes:

Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway is the protagonist of Contact by Carl Sagan, who becomes the director of "Project Argus", a radiotelescope array in New Mexico dedicated to the SETI project.

[Trenacker]

Rylance Torquay in his laboratory on the Vesta Asteroid. He joined the Unity crew as a Warrant Officer in the billet of Psych-Chaplain, reporting directly to Miriam Godwinson.

A man who offends no one offends me. - Heart of Jade

Out in the Main Belt, few names commanded the same respect as that of Rylance Torquay. Venutian-born and raised, Torquay had never set foot on a planetary body until the final months of his intake training in Mars's Sabaeus Quadrangle.

The anodyne term his type used for themselves, "Organizer," is not useful for understanding the work he did. Better to understand him as the secular equivalent of a psych chaplain. A psychiatrist who provided the roughnecks, spacers, and black-collar workers of the Belt with the services of a physician, social worker, and mediator. To cynics, Torquay was the token sacrifice that companies like Verne Steller Navigation and King Priam Mining used to trick their captive workforces into thinking they were well-cared for. But the workers swore by their Organizers, and nations listened.

The United Nations Life-Saving Service protected occupied equipment. Organizers protected crews. Because they were mobile, they were important sources of news. Companies were forced to supply them with unlimited air and rations, so they were always available at the individual worker's convenience. Their bodies were inviolate, protected by the feared Transportation Authority Police, enforcement arm of Comprehensive Transport, which performed the function of trans-Martian territorial government for the United Nations. Efficient enough for the Americans; brutal enough for the Soviets.

But the Companies tended to like the Organizers as well as their employees. Everybody was on the same page: there was money to be made in space. People were even more valuable than the machines they worked. Skilled laborers with proven ability to thrive in the hermetic hell of an asteroid mining station could return planetside in just three years with enough money to live comfortably to the ripe old age of 150. Unskilled laborers faced two possibilities. Either they would quickly become skilled, or, for their own sanity and the safety of everyone else, they would be flagged and removed by a vigilant Organizer and "sent down to home."

By the 2100s, it was quite literally possible to banish ne'er-do-wells "to the Moon Mines," an expedient attempted only once by the American Reclamation Corporation before being abandoned forever. A desperate man in space was a killer. Even trained astronauts were susceptible. NASA's "Hard Impact" Program, which sent two-seater probes to Near Earth Asteroids on six-month swings, was famously ruined by a confined-space violence problem. Almost half the pairings came to blows.

In the case of Rylance Torquay, it was his scope of practice that drove demand. A history of service on the Venutian gas floats provided the basis for a database that only grew with each new engagement. Data-driven modeling helped Torquay coach his employers and their workers on early (also called "deep") indicators of pending trouble, while also identifying the kinds of personalities most likely to perform well in the spacefaring environment. The U.N. Selection Committee that advanced his nomination called Torquay an "inevitable" pick.

Rylance Torquay's cryopod was missing from its location amidst a cluster of A-class emergency-rated crew when Lt. Commander Fong Na Spínola arrived to retrieve him just twenty-two minutes after the Unity's computer initiated crisis protocols.

[Trenacker]

Thank you, dear readers!

Tell us: what do you like? What do you want more of?

[Trenacker]

The Stepdaughters of Gaia made their second capital at the place they called Paradise Wells, an arcology powered entirely by geothermal steam vents.

For more than a century, the Stepdaughters enjoyed an isolation even more complete than that achieved by the Human Labyrinth. While the Shaper Exile attested to the matriarchy's survival and provided the curious with rough coordinates for its domains, Deirdre and her people soon pulled up stakes. Hunter landrunners gawked at the empty husks of the giant cibola trees at Gaia's Landing and Pine Low, already starting to regrow less than a year later.

A Gaian settler breaks down communications equipment during the final departure of Colony Pods from Pine Low.

Librarians continue to dispute the precise rationale for the Gaians' suddenly aggressive new stance beginning M.Y. 201. Tensions boiled over first with the newly-formed Unicorp, presumably over the draining of wetlands that Deirdre had dubbed the d'Almeida Swamps. A post-incident investigation by the Planetary Council found that the Gaians had launched an unprovoked attack. Laser-equipped Unicorp Field Security Team '화산' (Volcano) held steady against the first wave of Gaian Rangers, armed only with hand weapons, but routed under psi attack from what survivors described as "domesticated" mindworms.

A SMACER foraging party approaches Darkwater from the east. They ride the korath, a semi-aquatic mollusk that, when fully grown, was about the size of a Unity Rover. In returns for protection from the local wildlife, SMACERs served as scouts, spies, and go-betweens for the Gaians of Eastern Shamash.

Deep in the d'Almeida Swamps, SMACERs obeyed the Gaian dictate to live with the land or perish by the sword. At her trial in abstentia, the famed jurist Adnan Sedak laid the very low quality of life in Darkwater at Lady Skye's feet, claiming that her obsession with the dignity of Planet had blinded her to the dignity of her fellow survivors.

Skye attempted, without success, to fight a multi-front war, and although spared the ruin of occupation, most of her other offensives blunted against stronger militaries honed by more regular warfare and armed with the fruits of scientific collaboration. Out of desperation, the Gaian Council allowed their war for Planet to be subsumed into larger struggles over the planetary balance of power so that they might find natural allies. Lady Deirdre didn't trust Contre-Amirale St. Germaine, but she conceded that he had proven himself at least a faithful ally of Planet.

To keep the Gaians occupied at home, rival factions attempted to stir up the SMACERs in revolt. Willing confederates received generous supplies of weapons, including prototypes that had yet to see action in more critical theaters. Through their allies in Struan's, University Design Bureau 6 furnished SMACER resistance teams with acid pellet guns. These devices exceeded even flamethrowers and incendiary bombs in their destructive effects on xenobiologics but Pilgrim Regulators employed them effectively as terror weapons against human forces. Oscar van de Graaf saw no reason why he should not punish SMACERs as harshly as he did everyone else on "his range."

Free access to fungal forests gave Gaians an important edge in salvage recovery that, under the right conditions, could sometimes compensate for the faction's technological retardation. These Ranger commandos wear late-model South African aeronaut suits--ideal protection for the Dead Zone around Morgan Planetary Recovery. Their 9mm Lyttelton Ingenieurswerke Field Disruptors were surely an unwelcome surprise for the Morganites.

The Morganite borehole mine at Sawtooth Peak was an irresistible target for Gaians striking westward, but Corporate Security wisely drilled for action against a variety of potential threat actors. In M.Y. 205, Morgan needlejet pilots Lao Zhang and Arkady Morozov became double aces defending the base against a green squadron of New State fighter-bombers. So far from home, they were probably carried up the Sundown River by long-range cruiser submarine.

Sources:

The Gaian Colony Pod picture is the work of Marcin Jakubowski on https://www.behance.net.

The animal-riding swampers appear on the front cover of Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth.

The red-suited astronauts are the work of Pericolos0, titled "Swamp Planet" on DeviantArt.

The Borehole Base is the work of Ken Fairclough.

The swamp picture used for the acid thrower weapons is credited to Anthony Wolff on Coolvibe.

[MysticWind]

Mercator’s Projectionists (pt. 3)

Jerry: “Hey little buddy. T-minus two hours until kickoff. Got any news for me?”

Dharma: “So there’s a thing about your slogan. Justice and Guard Relations, um, have an issue with ‘MPI: We’re Watching for You.’”

Jerry: “Why? Tested great in focus groups. Assures our viewers what they’re watching is what we’re watching- MPI gets them the latest intel.”

Dharma: “Yeah, that’s great, it’s just- uh, after the Constant Dragnet scandal, the Office of the Commander is extremely leery of reminding citizens their government’s protective surveillance progra-”

Jerry: “Aw, fung, that’s right! It makes the slogan sound like we’re snooping. Those funging Def Force glowworms, this toxifies the whole rebrand. Hot damn!”

Dharma: “Justice suggested, ‘We’re looking out for you.’”

Jerry: “That’s not any better! That’s the same thing in different words!”

Dharma: “'We’ve got our eye on you?”

Jerry: “Even worse!”

Dharma: “What if we, uh, play up the UAP angle- ‘We’ve got our eyes on the skies?’”

Jerry: “Hold on. Now you’re onto something, Dharma. That does sound on brand. But how do we lower the character count? Signage space adds up.”

Dharma: “We- we make a pun of it. Spell eye with the letter- ‘MPI: We have our I on the sky?’”

Jerry: “Our I- that’s gibberish! What does that mean?”

Dharma: “Your I in the skies!”

Jerry: “Okay, that is better. ‘MPI: Your I in the skies.’ So it’s like ‘We’re, like, your proxy out there, guy, we keep an eye out so you don’t have to. We’re your eye.’”

Dharma: “Plus the pun.”

Jerry: “Plus the pun- keeps it pithy. Light. No scary M.I.B.s here! Except the ones we tell you about.”

Dharma: “It’s good, because it’s like, it’s not clear exactly what the hell it means, so, lots of wiggle-room.”

Jerry: “Yes. ‘Your I in the skies.’”

Dharma: “Your I in the skies.”

-  off-the-record conversation at the Ruppelt Building, Memory of Earth Ministry of Public Information headquarters, GOLD JULY BOOJUM routine autolog

For over half a century, the multimedia news conglomerates of the United States stirred up the worst passions of the raucous republic. But after the hypersurvivalist Holnist memetic plagues and the Second American Civil War, the federal government had had enough. The newly-inaugurated Department of Public Sanity, with the reconstructed Congress’ support, enacted many executive fiats restricting the news from hyperpartisan coverage, establishing strict editorial guidelines with violations punishable by severe civil forfeiture.

And lo, the RoyStar Weiguo news and entertainment empire, that venerable symbol of yellow journalism, did go full tabloid, pivoting to sensationalism on topics existing in the spaces beyond the reach of DoPS censors and accuracy ombudsmen. It turned its armies of shock jock pundits and bottomfeeder muckrakers, hidden camera gotcha journos and dashboard-datalinked angry ranters away from political points-scoring and towards celebrity gossip, sports news, business drama, true crime, and a grand revival of the News of the Weird. RoyStar rolled out half a dozen multimedia networks covering everything including speculative cybernetics, missing link simian sightings, modern witch cults, mysterious murders, and alien appearances.

Thus when the ancient founder of RoyStar deigned to buy his way aboard the Unity, opting instead to continue his interminable search on Earth for who to replace himself as head of the empire, it was Vice President of Fortean Hypermedia Jerome “Jerry” Wobegon who became the hapless executive dispatched to Alpha Centauri. Like so many other robber barons, the RoyStar head intended to continue his gigacorporation in space, owning the media sector even before there was an economy. By spearheading Operation Succession, Jerry would be the Johnny Newspaperseed who was to found RoyStar’s first media outlet upon an alien land, conditioning audiences for the distant future when it would be feasible for the company to launch its own mission. Some said the old man himself was undergoing experimental cryo-treatments to live to the far day of that speculative voyage, when he himself had settled the question of chairmanship on Earth, so he could report the news on Chiron free of the tedious political fishmongers and their pesky laws.

Jerry, the time-and-again disgraced exec who had risen swiftly, yet precariously, thanks to a strategic marriage into the corporation, had accepted the white elephant mission not out of regret of perhaps eternal exile, but rather a short-sighted, sweaty, frantic leap at a shrouded rung upon the media company’s infinite career ladder.

Part of the small RoyStar contingent was young Donald “Dharma” Vetter, his aide-de-camp of an executive assistant, a distant relation to the founder, and a minor titled noble, also thanks to careful courtship. Becoming adrift on the homeworld after attaining a moderate level of hyper-wealth and success, and increasingly browbeaten by Wobegon into continuing their relationship into space, Dharma found himself also undergoing months of hard training just so he could run a satellite office on a dangerous frontier colony.

The pair experienced Planetfall with a predictable amount of screaming and running around like decapitated fowl. But as masters of cleaning symbiosis, both eventually found their way into usefulness for larger, better-armed bodies: Jerry briefly became one of d’Almeida’s message-crafters during the crisis, crafting the executive officer’s missives the best his rump team could, given the circumstances. Despite effort and panic, their attempts at reconciliation, of would you kindly surrender in exchange for maybe reduced sentences, were lost on both Spartan, Holnist, and Kellerite alike. Meanwhile, Dharma found himself having an easier time working with the much less scary and shouty Garland, whose well-meaning communiques also had little impact during Planetfall, and it all quickly fell apart after the captain’s demise.

Somehow, the duo found their way into the Memory of Earth. The commander, no stranger to the movers and shakers of ufology, was quick to identify persons of interest for his faction in formation. An Observer undercover agent approached the discombobulated exec at U.N. Great Refuge and offered him a job, upon which Wobegon was exfiltrated to Mercator himself. The job, it turned out, was to be the very head of the Observer’s public relations and communications, the official media organs of this new state. Faced with an offer he could not refuse, Jerry allowed himself to fall upwards even more and accepted, becoming the faction’s Minister of Public Information. With one negotiated condition or two- one snatch and grab probe team mission later, a bewildered Dharma was similarly taken from Gaia’s Landing and brought into Memory.

The two quickly discovered that creating a media empire on a new planet, even a successor petty kingdom, was no easy task. But they were blessed with a faction with no shortage of military public affairs personnel, war correspondents, counterintelligence officers, and political warfare specialists. In some ways, it was an easier task than their original mission of creating RoyStar Centauri on their own: they had a much larger talent pool of experienced consent-manufacturers to work with. And they found the messaging to be fairly simple. Cover all news through the lens of Mercator’s mission statement, and the viewers will come.

The Ministry of Public Information’s framing of Planetary goings-on is straightforward: Appeal to the [curiosity|fear|anxiety] of the extrasolar unknown, and uphold joint military defense, preparation, unification. Given their years of work at RoyStar, both Jerry and Dharma are seasoned veterans of datalinks memetic breeding and crosspollination. Knowing all of the classic newsmen’s tricks that the most sensationalistic multimedia outlets of late stage America had to offer, their work has made MPI a highly rated source of news and entertainment on Chiron, both in-faction, and upon the Planetary Datalinks, out. Offering an array of programmes from the matter-of-fact (“Observer’s Eye on Planet”) to the in-depth and serious (“End of Line Reports”, “Follies of Earth: Cold War Edition”) to the partisan and polemical (“Live Fire: Destroying Lotus Eaters with Reason and Data”) to the frivolous and vapid (“Prehistoric Progenitors”, “Psi-X Investigators”, “Can You Survive Chiron for 18 Hours?”), MPI is seen as one of the most professional- in operation, if not in content- multimedia organizations of Planet.

MPI programs under Jerry Wobegon’s tenure blended news updates with dramatic, visceral imagery and a heavy dose of mission-oriented statements. They appeal to the average Observer faithful and to curious outsiders alike.

Both Jerry and Dharma can be classified as adherents of the Hoaxer theory. Like many Observers who are apolitical and convictionless, they are apatheist towards the existence of aliens- or at least, some grand shadow war involving them- and find one authority on Planet as good as another. As in any faction, most citizens are simply getting by, doing a job- or in the case of drones, perhaps none. But what grants them a theory, what assigned them a side, is that their job happens to be perpetuating the Memory of Earth’s mission statement. By ordering investigation into alien life, proliferating the UFO narrative, and crafting stories where there were none, both are self-consciously hoaxing the public, even when their personal beliefs do not align with the mission.

It is hard to say how many Hoaxers exist within the Memory of Earth. Outside of dramatic actions such as running, or just working for, the very media ministry that upholds the mission, there are plenty of lesser examples such as Defenders or Unifiers who carry about planning or collective security more than they do about xenomachy. On the other hand, there are those who do not particularly care for mundane human political projects and care only about the faction’s search for unknown intelligence. And so many theories are in their own way, Hoaxer to some extent.

The MPI, for its part, is ecumenical in its loud blaring content. It has indeed offered many a Skeptic, including the good Doctor Argus herself, appearances on its networks. There is an entire newly-founded datalink channel dedicated to Skeptic views, seen as subversive to mainstream Observers and rather tiresomely faux-edgy by the actual government.

Since Jerry and Dharma’s work have been such an unexpected hit, they’ve caught the eye of rival operations, even the likes of Morgan Entertainment and Restorer InfoCom. In fact, both men secretly entertain ambitions at rival networks, if not for the fact that the Chiron Guard remains a terrifying adversary. Wobegon considers more outlets he could head, Vetter has an unspecified legal case against the Stepdaughter’s of Gaia; both could profit from opportunity at other factions, if not for the fact they would quickly rise up on Mercator’s priority probe lists. So while at present they are securely ensconced into the Observer faction at the very top, RoyStar’s own mission looms large in the background, at the backs of their minds. For even though there is no news yet from Earth, old man Roy is out there.

Notes:

The opening quote is a pastiche of this exchange.

Vetter is German for “cousin.”

[Trenacker]

Chadian youths hitch rides on the supply crawlers of 914 Groupe de transport automatisé in the capital of N'Djamena during the Saharan Burst Wars. It was a dangerous stunt, performed more for thrills than convenience. Civilian foot traffic confused the master control algorithms so that the vehicles learned their business improperly, braking suddenly even when at high speed. Street runners caused many casualties. Life-safety protocols would send the crawlers into buildings or trees before they would allow collision with a pedestrian. Pandemonium results when the crawlers detected armed pursuers. Then, they might exceed speeds of 140km/h, heedless of the fates of those crowded on their hulltops.

Partial Table of Weapons Types

Sublethal weapons are designed for use by law enforcement for use against civilians to achieve crowd control and personal immobilization. As the name implies, they are usually (but not always) intended to disperse, discourage, or impede targets, not to kill them. Sub-lethal weapons in use on Chiron include: simple, expandable, and stun batons; simple and stun shields; high-pressure water hoses; fast-hardening foams or gels (e.g., Togra Labs StickFoam®); simple smoke; baton rounds; irritants; sonics; and radiation projectors. The relatively large proportion of sub-lethal weapons in comparison to military-grade weapons accessible to the early colonists meant that sub-lethal weapons were a staple of warfare for want of better options. Because of their extremely short effective range and original deterrence mission, flechette weapons, including all Shredder weapons, are usually classified as sublethals, notwithstanding the egregious and crippling wounds they inflicted. The Unity armory carried six thousand Shredder pistols and five hundred Shredder rifles.

U.N. Security Forces drill to re-secure Damage Control during a hostage-barricade scenario. All of the team members carry shredder rifles.

Hand weapons are dumb-, direct-fire small arms and light, crew-served weapons. The term also covers the basic personal protective equipment. Both are from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A very large quantity of hand weapons were smuggled aboard Unity and brought down with the survivors. Most rifles were chambered to 5.56 x 45mm NATO, 7.62 x 51mm UN, or 7.62 x 39mm WARPAC standards. Popular and ubiquitous types of hand weapons included the M16, M4, AK47, G3, and R1 rifles, .50 BMG and DhsK heavy machine guns, Light Antitank Weapon, RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher, M47 grenade, and M79 40mm brake-action grenade launcher. Early nylon and fiberglass "flak" vests and steel helmets provided wearers with limited protection against shrapnel and mostly-spent rounds. Hand weapons remained standard-issue for Chiron militaries until well into the fifth generation. Today, they are still used to arm most auxiliary units, including faction militia.

Tribal Minutemen evaluate modified hand weapons picked from Sabre Corporation prisoners.

Smart weapons reflected the advancements of the 1980s digital revolution, providing increased battlefield awareness that led, in turn, to superior battlefield performance. Personal weapons evolved to provide the individual soldier with more information, enhanced protection from rifle fire, and the ability to engage multiple different types of targets successfully at beyond visual range (BVR). Man-portable drones, guided missiles, squad radio networks, variable-range ammunition, and Kevlar body armor made their appearance during the "Smart Era" of warfare on Planet Earth. These weapons were more than a century old at Mission Launch, but few appeared on the Unity manifest and the fundamentals of this type of warfare had to be relearned by the survivors as they made appropriate simultaneous advances in long-range and satellite communications.

A сом heavy-haul 'copter out of Forward Support Base Danger delivers SolarEx ASPs and their mechanical mules to the blasted outworks of The Core. The hardened ASPs easily swept aside Johann Anhladt's Defender militia. In the hands of unseasoned troops, predictive algorithms were no match for veterancy.

Impact weaponry provides an individual soldier with exceptional firepower. The scope of impact of this revolution in military affairs is much smaller than that of the previous generation, focusing almost entirely on the portability and striking power of crew-served weapons. The Impact Squad usually incorporates the coilgun, or Gauß rifle, a type of electromagnetic accelerator firing a magnetic round at very high speed, ideal for anti-armor work, and the chaingun, a rotary cannon capable of firing as many as 4,000 rounds per minute. Impact weaponry is controversial: the very high power requirements associated with Impact-style firearms greatly reduced squad mobility.

Spartan prisoners faced one of two unwelcome fates. Most were remanded to become helots, performing the basic labors required to keep the faction supplied. However, those with proven mettle were forced into the role of OPFOR, participating against their will in live-fire exercises against Spartan warriors. Victors were rewarded with their freedom. Here, a squad of Chiron Guard go on the offensive, breaching a Myrmidon bunker. The breacher hefts an Impact gun.

Powered Combat joined the innovations of the two prior eras of warfare. Exoskeletal frames provided the defensive protection, physical endurance, and rapid movement necessary for their human operators to reclaim the battlespace from remotely-operated vehicles. Soldiers in battlearmor replaced the tank as king of the battlefield.

SafeHaven's Thunderchief Battle Armor used a detachable jet pack to provide up to 7 minutes of actual flight capability. The weapons load-out was variable, but a Gauß cannon in the right arm and a 40mm grenade launcher in the left were standard, providing both anti-armor and anti-personnel solutions. The grills at wrist and calves could expel flames: the operator could bath themselves in fire if swarmed by mindworms.

Sources:
The picture of U.N. Security Forces is actually a still from the show Bablyon 5.

The picture of actor Matt Damon is from the 2013 movie Elysium.

The Longinus Battle Armor is credited to ancient klaxosapien on Pinterest.

The breaching scene is from the movie Aliens.

[Trenacker]

Pearson's Ladder was the site of Planet's first space elevator. Conceived by Zakharov's scientists, the structure was built to exacting Unicorp specifications.

At first, all the fuss was one-way. Men, materials, and food went up but did not come back down. Meanwhile, the ladder grew ever taller while combat raged below.

It happened that the terminus of the elevator was in fact the starship Unity. One day, in M.Y. 364, Planet's biggest supply dump became the lay-down yard for the largest salvage operation in human history.

The Ladder was heavily protected. Since nobody trusted University Security or the hard-fighting, oft-losing Dai Seung Security Force with such a high-profile target, it was a multi-faction affair. Defenders included Restoration Marines, U.N. blue helmets, Tribal Minutemen, and Miriam Godwinson's Nauvoo Legion.

Cosmonauts of the fourth generation called their Extravehicular Operations Suits "Жирная свинья," for fat pig. The high-tech over-garments earned a deservedly strong reputation when carrying out high-heat mining operations on Mercury and were brought to Chiron in large numbers through the good offices of promyshlenik Andelko Saratov. Hundreds served during the breaching and inventory of the derelict Unity. They found their way later to the ice mines of Issus.

[Trenacker]

So stand by the mainsail. The fierce storms we'll race. Aloft with ye, mates, or King Neptune we'll face. - The American Adventure

Somewhere close to the front rank of exceptional sailors to survive the Unity Crisis was Ulrik Svensgaard.

Cursed to live in interesting times, Svensgaard, a reluctant reservist in the resurrected Massachusetts Naval Militia, spent five years protecting Boston Harbor from Holnist saboteurs. Poised for dismissal on disciplinary grounds, his career and freedom were spared by the need for seasoned hands to take up interdiction patrol on the Nova Scotia Shelf, keeping pace with Soviet "fishing trawlers" and helping to enforce the Canadian government's closure of its east coast ports. Successive commanders put the hot-tempered Glousterman on small craft where he brought a cynic's eye and a nihilist's fondness for violence to difficult boarding actions.

Four years deeper still into a profession he disliked, Svensgaard, now a respected Chief Petty Officer, was recommended for Officer Candidate School. Captains trusted him with the lives of their sailors. He intended to decline the opportunity, he said, "but plumb forgot the deadline to withdraw." Two years later, he was master of his own patrol skimmer.

Making a career of naval service put Svensgaard on the front lines during the Battles for the Arctic, and he did dangerous inshore work on the margins of the costly NATO victory over the Red Banner Fleet at Baffin Bay, even sinking a Soviet LCAC. Wounded by a vengeful destroyer, he refused rehabilitative surgery and lost an eye for his troubles. One Navy Cross later, Lieutenant Commander Svensgaard was transferred to Unity Project following discovery of Holnist literature on a government-issue tape reader in his posession. (The short-lived Wearington Administration used the U.N. as a penal colony for politically unreliable officers.)

Amazingly, the U.N. accepted Svensgaard despite knowing he was a neo-fascist sympathizer. Setting aside Soviet recommendations to first "rehabilitate" its fresh crop of "defectives," the U.N. instead heeded encouragement from the World Health Organization, first sealing their records and then attempted to provide them with purpose. Inspired by Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Pravin Lal described the intent as "peace with charity." Svensgaard performed well in training evolutions already familiar to him as a wartime sailor and looked forward to independent command of a coaster within the Aquatic Operations Division.

On Planetfall, Svensgaard was one of just five men with surface warfare experience available to the New State. When Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine vested him with command of a coveted Unity Gunboat, Svensgaard waited only to sail over the horizon before hoisting his own flag.

Svensgaard's U.N. Psych Profile indicates a pathological animus toward "elites," his preferred epithet for the formally-educated. Instructors complained that he disliked by both peers and superiors despite ample physical bravery and acknowledged competence as a Surface Warfare Officer. One Royal Navy evaluator expressed the common opinion: "Obsessed with the appearance and performance of 'strength.' Incapable of empathy. Avoidant behaviors easily mistaken for "salt-wisdom," or even concern for subordinates. Long exposure to crisis situations has greatly increased subject's tolerance for risk and pain.

Svensgaard's General Taylor, a heavily-modified coastal patroller, outclassed anything afloat in the waters of northern Chiron until at least the arrival of Malaki Ro's Skagway in M.Y. 12. Two Mk280 4" rapid-fire cannons, four variable-mission canister launch systems, two close-in sonic projectors, and a dense countermeasures suite sent the Peacekeeper Heavy Foil Zweihänder to the bottom during the Battle of U.N. Relief Station, killing Captain Eugen Köhler. Svensgaard himself wasn't present at the fight, which also saw the loss of General Taylor to the concentrated fire from Sathieu Metrion's gargantuan combat hovercraft, the improbably-named Kungalooshi.

[Trenacker]

Apsara Mongkut, Thailand's favorite son. A personal institution at the United Nations, where he served more than four decades, two of them as Secretary-General. Cambridge-educated. Moscow-aligned. Acerbic, self-assured, and sartorial. Well known (and oft-criticized) for his lavish lifestyle and skillful deployment of social media to influence national policies in line with U.N. objectives. Ardent anti-colonialist who filled his unused New York office with relics of empire, described by Time Magazine as an "ironic commentary." Credited himself with winning Québec independence by urging the Communist Bloc to call NATO's bluff. Revived the moribund Unity project through private subscription. Mediated resolution of the War on the Aegean after Greek withdrawal from NATO. Central figure in numerous scandals and conspiracy theories, including the disappearance of Abaddon Vesper while on medical holiday in Switzerland and pay-for-play schemes involving U.N. relief contracts worldwide. Killed in a car crash in British Hong Kong Colony. Known enemies included the Federal Republic of Carmel, NATO, Struan's Pacific Trading Company, the American Reclamation Corporation, Morgan Industries, the Southern Ocean Sovereignty of Es Ankhenadron, Comprehensive Transport, and the Kaestral Group. His New York Times obituary remembered him as "sometimes successful, more often thwarted, but always, and unavoidably, relevant."

The unsolved assassination of U.N. Secretary-General Apsara Mongkut caused his successor to rethink executive protection and international policing. With the assistance of CTR, the U.N. Security Forces birthed DEEPEYES, a "hard military" force of non-patriated persons ("No-Pats"), directly answerable to the Secretary-General. DEEPEYES recruits received training from both the French and Soviets. In 2078, the project received a severe blow after a joint MI6 and Chinese National Security Bureau discovered two DEEPEYES agents working to foment a Communist counter-coup in Shanghai. A second embarassment surrounded the total kill of a DEEPEYES tactical team during a botched raid on the lunar compound of Barrow St. Ledger, chairman of the Solar Caravan Company. (A Senate inquiry ultimately revealed that the United States Government had assisted in the chairman's defense.) DEEPEYES was widely considered a failure and discontinued after just 10 years as the U.N. scraped to finance conventional protection of its space elevator sites.

For every successful settlement on Chiron, three others were abandoned by their founders. Hostile action forced the small research team at the Saịtị Ụbọchị site to retire to Loaves and Fishes. It was a familiar story. Breakfast had not yet been served when a platoon of Morgan Crisis Crush commandos sent nineteen hungry zoologists back to Loaves and Fishes without so much as a survival suit between them. Most perished of nitrogen poisoning before the day was out. Yet for their trouble, the raiders found little worth taking. Miriam's quartermasters were stingy only because they could not issue what they did not have. The base's original inhabitants had been preparing to dine on irradiated rations originally sourced from Unity itself.

Sources:
The picture of the Thai politician used for Apsara Mongkut is actually that of Suthep Thaugsuban.

"No-Pats" are a stateless people in Battlefield 2042 who, according to the Battlefield Wiki, are "unable or unwilling to exercise their right of return, and instead unite under a global, non-national identity."

DEEPEYES is a hunter-killer special forces team from the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

The final picture was evidently produced by Bungie Entertainment and found on Google image search.

[Trenacker]

And as their wealth increseth, so enclose / Infinite riches in a little room. - The Jew of Malta, Act I, Scene 8

A pair of AMCORE Juggernauts, armored cavalry assault vehicles, rolls down the unloading ramp of one of the mission's four Imre-Meinertzhagen Heavy Cargo Landers, a kind of high-capacity Landing Pod. The rolling fortresses proved nearly impervious to Morganite weaponry during the Ancalagon Trade Wars of the '40s and were still in action protecting Bourse interests a century later.

Critics had it that Apsara Mongkut was nine times a Judas. Under his watch, the U.N. parceled out the last precious space aboard its outgoing ark not on the basis of who was most worthy or most in need, as the founding principles of that organization might suggest, but instead for money. This was an under-appreciation. The man who succeeded Mongkut, Dr. Vasco Paredes Tottodoro, sold three more billets for an even greater total sum. And while the twelve charter colonies commanded obsessive attention from the public and their media watchdogs, just over a thousand individuals and lesser organizations also negotiated fee-access without receiving proprietor's privileges. About four thousand of the 450,000 personnel aboard Unity were fee-access passengers.

As a rule, passengers caused more problems for the Mission than selected colonists and crew. Marching to their own drum, the former had much greater incentives to circumvent the strict rules on personnel eligibility. With Mongkut's knowledge, hundreds of "fee-accessers" paid special subscriptions that entitled them to additional cargo space, sometimes a great deal of it. Like the "Big Twelve," fee-accessers also bribed the mission contractors to load off-manifest cargo behind false bulkheads or in spaces gutted due to redesign and never detached due to time constraints.

Clustered together in cryobays reserved for them alone, a small number of these fee-accessers banded together during the Unity Crisis, securing their own dedicated Landing Pods and filling them with equipment to which only they had access. Some number of these rallied after Planetfall to form the organization latterly known as The Bourse, an Outpost-class faction determined to carve out an exclusive commercial preserve on the continent of Ancalagon, come hell or Nwabudike Morgan.

Although monopolists themselves, the untender mercies of The Bourse merchants were still deemed preferable to those of Morgan himself by Ancalagon's chief occupants, the New Two Thousand and the Children of the Atom, which provided succor to Bourse operatives when Morgan launched his grand counterstroke. If Oscar van de Graaf or Johann Anhaldt lacked for faith in their choice of allies, the discovery that The Bourse was in possession of two eighth-generation Juggernauts must have been bracing indeed.

Amusing, both the Morganites and their arch enemy, the Pilgrims, were confounded by the revelation that two of the massive fighting vehicles had been ferried across the stars. What kind of profit-seeking venture would miss out on the opportunity to ship more productive machinery?

Source:

This picture is credited to Marcin Jakubowski on Behance.net.

[Trenacker]

We have a Discord! Join us at https://discord.gg/tfD3tuNU

[MysticWind]

Mercator’s Projectionists (pt. 4)

Humanity seems predestined to fail against the forces of distrust and discord. How many warring armies did Unity ship to Chiron? As history illustrates, further balkanization is imminent without intentional intervention. How many more factions will tomorrow bring? How much longer must we remain divided? - A House Crumbled: Geopolitics of Planet

Gennaro da Gama was Brazil’s most celebrated data librarian, until he gave it all away on account of conscience. Born of a father who was a WTO representative with a heart of gold, and a mother who was the best network security specialist in academia, he studied library sciences and the psychological analysis of history, becoming an early datalinks tech pioneer.

Instead of going into industry, da Gama entered public service and would become an unlikely symbol of Brazilian patriotism and strength during the Novo Brasil era. His work to use the datalinks to digitize and store the entire collections of the Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil was heralded as a sign of the nation’s immortal spirit and contribution to humanity. Da Gama would then go on to become the stewart of multiple grand projects preserving cultural heritage across all of Latin America and the Lusophone-speaking world.

But less than a decade later, da Gama had left his honor posts aboard the country’s ceremonial soft power spacecraft to teach poor indigenous youth, amidst accusations of treasonous whistleblowing. No one is entirely sure who had leaked the warehouses’ worth of data on the Brazilian Space Corps’ clandestine plans to break the Outer Space Treaty, but the careful curation of the information, easily organized for reporters and future historians alike, as well as his opportune role aboard the Tiradentes made him into the primary suspect in the court of public opinion. Thus he was scorned among scandal, as he went to aid the forgotten of Novo Brasil.

The act of kindness was punished as the Amazon became a danger zone when the eco-sovereigntist Smoke Jaguars waged war against the Brazilian government and its Portuguese patrons, attacking outsiders who were there to help. The ensuing hostage crisis, with its bloody resolution delivered by the vicious tactics of the Amazonian BOPE, shook da Gama to his core and drove him to retirement. Only years later, with the advent of Unity’s launch finally in reach, did he accept the United Nations’ request for him to join as a cultural archivist for the ship’s Data Sciences team.

Da Gama’s work on the new datacube storage format was his main impact during the leadup to the mission. Having cordial but curt relations with Lt. Cmdr. Tạ Dọc Thân, the archivist worked on preserving supplementary records. Thanks to his own government’s complaints and nudging, he was ostracized, restricted from interfacing with the Data Core itself. That much of Brazil’s actual contributions to the Core, intended to be part of humanity’s collective knowledge up to the mission, were derived from his past preservation projects, was an irony that was not lost to Da Gama.

This unkind act proved to be his saving grace during Planetfall, as he was not part of the team of data technicians and librarians lost when the Data Core was mysteriously jettisoned. Awakening towards the tail end of the crisis, the archivist gamely shuffled off on a refugee pod belonging to the Peacekeepers, and became the head of Lal’s attempt to rebuild the United Nations Digital Services Agency on Planet. Tasked with reassembling the supplementary data fragments that the faction possessed, Da Gama slipped back into the depressive moods that had consumed him during his service in the BSC. Expeditions to salvage the Data Core were thwarted by bandit SMACERs and hostile factions alike. UNDSA was chronically underfunded as resources were shuffled towards not just critical infrastructure, but to Terrance LaCroix’s weaponized Signals Intelligence probe operations. Each Mission Year brought news of broken Treaties of Friendship and hastily forged Pacts in response to new Vendetta.

After U.N. Digital Services was reassigned to Peacekeeping defense projects by Major King’s initiation of Operation: Plowshare, da Gama found himself again enmeshed in military activities against his will

Gennaro gradually realized that for all of Lal’s ideals, the Peacekeeping Forces did not have the wherewithal to ensure that humanity’s knowledge was properly preserved. Moreover, the safekeeping of wisdom would be pointless if the Unity diaspora was lost to humanity’s insisted self-destruction.

So then, who to join? While the librarian had the ideal background for the Tomorrow Institute, he decided Metrion’s activities were ultimately looking in the wrong direction: by focusing all of their energies on the past, the Institute sought inward, in what could not be changed, rather than shaping the future. Without a future to look to, records of the past would inevitably be as useless to mankind as the dusty ruins of Planet were to the long-gone Progenitors.

Other knowledge-based factions, da Gama believed, were consumed with their own respective narrow focuses. The Children of the Atom did have the potential to unite the Planet behind artificial intelligence, but inevitable pushback from anti-technologists and those skeptical of living under computer rule would only lead to fiercer ideological wars, according to Gennaro’s psychohistorical models. Zakharov’s University was not a universal one, but one that only operated within the narrow confines of the provost’s positivist worldview. The Ascendancy were eugenicists. The Dreamers were torturers. So many others were simply mercantilists, tyrants, or warlords.

As unlikely as it was, the Memory of Earth became the natural choice for defection. While the commander’s preoccupations were eccentric in their orbits, da Gama decided the professional personnel and pro-unification mission of the faction made it the best candidate to prevent the imminent destruction of all human civilization on Planet. So he left, sneaking aboard an Observer rover heading home from the embassy at Warm Welcome, taking with him zettabytes worth of datacubes, including libraries worth of records, footage, and analysis of UFO-related data.

Among the data da Gama delivered was high quality imagery of the Cidade Sorriso entity, one of his native country’s most famous UFO sightings

The Brazilian librarian became yet another one of the commander’s unlikely collaborators. Finding da Gama’s ideals sound, if rather overly pessimistic, and delighted by the ample stores of ufology evidence now made available, Mercator welcomed him into the ranks of the Observers. He was allowed to preach his testimony on the need for interfactional unity in the face of imminent obliteration upon MPI networks, paraded around by Wobegon’s media consultants and the Planetary Defense Force’s PR talking heads as evidence of the Memory’s righteous cause.

(Back at U.N. Headquarters, the loss of such an upstanding talent proved to be an embarrassment to the commissioner’s administration. Publicly, Lal made statements about the openness of the Peacekeeping Forces’ commitment to an “open society with free movement and association for all”, and regretted the “baffling sudden departure of a passionate, if flighty, specialist.” Privately, Lacroix and King were given carte blanche to repatriate da Gama in the future- or at least the data stores he hoarded.)

Despite his fervor in accordance with the Memory’s purpose, da Gama quickly wore out his welcome with his doomsaying. As attention-grabbing as the initial message was, the Observers were less enthused by his harping on the dire need for diplomacy, or the way he cited reams of past records to make his point. So he was shuffled off with a commission with the Ministry of Special Political Operations. Taking great pains to assure him that all of his work would be civilian in nature, in perpetuity, his new superiors have tasked da Gama to collate, organize, and archive immense amounts of statistical data, interpret vast amounts of historical behavior of faction leaders, and create new psychohistorical models. For what reason, he is not told, but this massive amount of macrodata refinement no less than the beginnings of a Secret Project: the Cassandra Almanac is the Observers’ attempt at creating a computerized social model of Planet. By crafting the most sophisticated simulation of human power relations this side of the Children of the Atom’s algorithms, the project’s initiators- whether Mercator or Han or someone else entirely- intend on forging the perfect path to unification.

Observer librarians, many ex-NATO Communications and Information Systems Services Agency staff, incorporate current events into the Almanac’s model under the direction of Minister of Special PoliOps da Gama

Me against my brother. My brother and I against my cousin. All of us against the stranger.

There are Unifiers in every faction. It is not simply a theory but a pathos, a vibe: to bring all of humanity together under one roof and one ideology. Some, such as the Peacekeepers, may not call for much ideological rigor to join the club. Some, such as the Dynamic Enterprise, view their system as one without alternative. The Memory of Earth believes in unification as not an end but a means: to ensure the victory of mankind over the monsters who lurk out in the inky ether.

Intrinsically linked to the Defenders’ vision of organized mutual military defense and world crisis planning, Unifier theorists are perhaps those of a different, less confrontational temperament. They believe that the Observers must lead the way into ensuring a species-wide understanding can be reached. Only then can a proper global defense initiative be created- anything prior to that is just forging more regional and ideological pacts, no different from the failed treaties of the Cold War. As one of the most staunch symbols of the theory, Gennaro da Gama has touted it not simply as a means- he has little interest in hypothetical alien civilizations, and finds the need to pander to the commander’s beliefs to be often maddening- but as an end on its own, a necessary prerequisite for man to reach his full potential. Whether that be building one true military, or creating records of its nature even longer-lasting than the relics and ruins of Planet, it does not matter to Unifiers like him- we must stand together, or kneel apart.

Vulgar Argot

Battlezoner: A believer in a popular Wanter narrative rooted in Commander Mercator's concept of the “other space race” alleging that Eisenhower established a covert space military program- the hypothetical "National Space Defence (sic) Force" and the Artemis program- parallel to NASA and the Apollo program- that established an armed American presence on the lunar surface in competition with the Soviet space program. Details of this techno-myth include supposed discovery of alien relics or exotic bio-metallurgical materials, field use of top secret experimental vehicles and weapons on the Moon. See also Black Dog, named after an officially nonexistent (but supposedly formed) NSDF military space unit that participated in this space race.

Artistic rendition of the short-lived NASA-Vorona partnership that built the Kletka space lab

Kletkaist: Adherent of the popular ufological techno-myth that the Kletka orbital space laboratory, constructed in 1960, was used to house and constrain an extraterrestrial species previously discovered by the Soviet cosmonauts operating under the Vorona design bureau. Conspiracy theorists claim that a secret joint agreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev allowed for the building of the installation, leading to the minor detente that was only ended by the former's assassination. One of the prevailing narratives used to support Commander Mercator's belief in the “united deception” great powers use to keep the truth hidden from the public. The nature of whatever supposed aliens discovered are unknown, but Wanters will of course allege a link between them and Chironian species.

Paradoxian: Diehard devotee of the Fermi Paradox. Grapples with the unanswered question: if there once was intelligent life on Planet, why aren’t they here now? From a Skeptic perspective, if the Progenitors are long-gone, along with any observable extrasolar species, why are they absent, and is it inevitable? From a Wanter perspective, where did they go, and can we find them again?

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?

- Address to the 42nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly, 1987

President Ronald Reagan: “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?”

Premier Mikhail Gorbachev: “No doubt about it.”

Reagan: “We too.”

- 1985 Geneva Summit

St. Reaganite: Slur by Skeptics against the Unifier position, in reference to the American president’s use of alien-tinged rhetoric as means for rapprochement with WARPAC. Denotes skepticism towards the feasibility of utilizing external fears to engender interfactional understanding. Can imply that the deference to “Saint Reagan” is based in Hoaxer cynicism, covering up militarism with feigned utopianism.

The Raygunner: Skeptic nickname for Commander Mercator. Pejorative.

Zookeepers: Nickname for advanced extrasolar intelligent lifeforms. Drawn from the Zoo Hypothesis, which argues for their no-longer visible status is due to intentional seclusion from humanity, possible retreat into the abyssal depths of Chiron's oceans, or even deep into the planet’s core itself (the “hollow Planet” theory). This general concept is scoffed at by Skeptics and Wanters alike- the former for its non-falsifiability, and the latter for its contrivedness. Also see Projectors, in reference to the Planetarium Hypothesis.

Notes:

Gennaro da Gama, like Trung Thi Hoang, Cuzco Sol, and Robin Huxley, is one of my custom faction leaders from the Second Ship.

Gennaro’s portrait is “The Fixer” by Josan Gonzalez.

The NSDF and the Black Dogs are from the 1998 Battlezone remake.

The Artemis program is from the comic Planetary.

[Trenacker]

We keep talking about a project. But that very term implies a discipline we never really achieved. It was many minor miracles held together with string. Zakharov and his star drive. Mongkut’s unbelievable political gymnastics. The staggering corruption of Morgan Industries. Incredible failures of security by the United Nations. Over and over again. The U.N. demonstrated cowardice on such a scale as to completely invalidate their moral credibility. When she launched, Unity was cheered. Not because the people of Earth were excited to see her off, but because they were finally relieved of the burden of having to sacrifice for the sake of this expensive folly that did nothing to quench the fires burning all around them.

Vinka Dialyse, in cold sleep.

Reconstructing a complete, much less a true, record of what, exactly, happened aboard Unity after the meteor impact may be quite impossible. Post-graduate study at the University of Planet’s Garland School of Recent History begins and ends with symposiums on this, “the most vital question of our age.” Ostensibly, the purpose of this coursework is to reconcile the student to the only sour certainty: that all history is subjective. Much less healthfully, Institute datacrawlers hold out hope that they can use the same material to solve the mystery of who is to blame for the death of Mission Area Director Tạ Dọc Thân. Peacekeeper clerks mine decrypted records for what they believe with be the vindicating proof that Commissioner Lal is, in fact, the ultimate political authority on Chiron, an endeavor that requires they first reconstruct the details of what happened in Damage Control after the moment of Jonathan Garland’s death.

As University course materials explain, truth-seeking in this context presents numerous dilemmas. Survivor recollection is fallible. The ship’s Data Core, which contains a time-stamped history of every mechanical action and digital communication made since its activation, has been tampered with several times, both before being jettisoned to Chiron’s surface and afterward. Accessing the fullness of the records contained within requires the creation of a specialized communications infrastructure. Moreover, the actual layout of the ship is unknowable, and so many narratives are confusing and unverifiable. Even before mission launch, the U.N. Intelligence Cell estimated that as many as 25,000 of the ship’s half-million authorized cryobeds were occupied by somebody other than the person listed on U.N. manifests.

Partial view of Unity during trials. About one-eighth of the ship is visible from this angle, including hydroponics bays, solar batteries, and fuel cells.

An endeavor as large as the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri required that construction take place according to a modular design, while supplies were laid in on a continuous basis over the course of whole generations. Many colonists therefore had to be trained to operate technology based on principles that had already been forgotten during the lifetimes of their great grandparents. Thus, for example, the ship’s computers were a mess of systems and applications characterized by both sub-optimal performance and sloppy coding. Unity’s hardware operated on more than three hundred distinct machine languages. Deconflicting the software of so many different eras was an exercise in agony. Reliance on older systems for core functionality also meant that much of the value of newer components was thereby denied to the expedition: they simply couldn’t be used for lack of processing power or compatibility. Even worse, threat actor intrusion was impossible to track or remediate on a large scale. There were too many people with hard access, too many systems to protect, and not enough experts available. Diotan Chun-kuo, head of Cybersecurity Initiatives for the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism, was forced to remind the Security Council more than once that the very labor force he required to guarantee the mission’s protection was ten years on ice!

Occasionally, the case for a targeted redesign was overwhelming, and the U.N. therefore agreed to gut entire compartments of the starship (always at great cost) in favor of newer, “better” solutions. Considerations of time and money meant that these retrofits were accomplished at the expense of quality. The U.N. attempted to salvage what they could from the modules slated for replacement, but it was not always feasible, and 12% of Unity’s volume was “supernumerary” space when she entered trials. Some of this space was loaded with cargo that the logisticians had decided wasn’t worth the effort to move elsewhere, even to save mass; some still received power and life support to avoid the cost of rerouting those systems.

One of the most interesting cases of uncertain identity was that of the crewmember called Vinka Dialyse. She belonged to a set of survivors contained in a Hab Pod recovered just weeks after Planetfall by the Peacekeeping Forces. The rescuers tended to a wounded Caucasian female who appeared to be in her mid-to-late twenties. Per the responsible med tech’s recorded session notes, the subject’s Space Force uniform name tag read Dialyse. There were also the insignia of a lieutenant and a patch for the ship’s Corrections Division.

The individual called Vinka Dialyse, at Warm Welcome, M.Y. 0.

Evidently, the patient was startled by the decanting process. She became violent. Patient and nurse practitioner fought. Dialyse knocked the med tech unconscious with a blow to the temple and fled the field tent, at which point she soon succumbed to oxygen deprivation.

Records already available to the Peacekeeping Forces contained helpful information about Dialyse, first name Vinka. She was the fourth daughter of an Aylūl banker, Kammermun Dialyse, and her much younger husband, Rafael Alvarez, a popular diarist and semi-professional protester on behalf of anti-colonialist causes. The latter had made himself persona non grata throughout much of Europe and lived in a kind of exile on Aylūl where he regularly embarrassed the government.

Dialyse the Younger had attracted the attention of Aylūl’s Selection Board because of her exemplary record during national service. “Officer-like Qualities” included eloquent self-expression (perhaps a legacy of her father’s written verve), empathic predisposition, and an undaunted attitude toward failure. At the national university, she studied geology and summered with the Aylūl Geologic Survey, a quasi-military body operating in that country's Antarctic territory. Her later education was provided by the Universidad de Chile, where she declined plumb offers of employment from several mining companies, including Morgan Metals, Southern Mantle, and the Peruvian Amazon Company. She instead took work with the Gezah Valley Authority (GVA), a Carmelite instrumentality working to develop that country’s deep interior. The GVA was a post-war haven for those with former allegiance to Vesper Abaddon, not long since in retirement. In correspondence home and to schoolmates, copies of which were obtained during her CTR background investigation, Dialyse expressed considerable satisfaction over both the GVA’s impact on regional development and the relationships she was forging within the expatriate community in Far Shiloh. In 2066, one year before being approved for transfer to the Unity crew as part of the Aylūl contingent, Dialyse appeared before the Carmelite legislature representing the GVA when Carmelite prime minister, Harlan Versh, was entertaining its privatization. The GVA remained a federal agency and Morgan Industries was dealt a rare setback.

Tragically, Dialyse was killed while still in training, victim of a trans-orbital shuttle accident. She had not yet been formally granted the rank of Ensign, let alone commissioned a full lieutenant. An exchange of records with the Resident Commissioner of the Watchers of Chiron raised only more questions. The Mission Area Director had nothing to indicate that a Vinka Dialyse should have been among his staff—and his was, at least in theory, the final word on that matter. But the name Vinka Dialyse did appear elsewhere in Peacekeeper records: it had been spoken by U.N. Security Forces officer Fong Na Spínola. Dialyse, he said, had been with him and Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida in Damage Control, and she had survived long enough to participate in the running firefight that ensued as the Portuguese general had led the way to muster stations. Fong had lost sight of Dialyse as a smoke grenade obscured his vision. He had assumed that she and d'Almeida were shot dead by the pursuing Kellerite breaching party.

UNSF Major Fong Na Spínola, the last person to report seeing Vinka Dialyse alive prior to Planetfall.

A secure medical bay at U.N. Relief Station where Base Operations maintained unknown personnel in indefinite suspension, a practice judged inhumane by the Planetary Council in M.Y. 32. The Vinka Dialyse case reinforced a predisposition on the part of Lal and his closest subordinates to titrate new colonists into the Peacekeeper population lest they prove faithless.

After medical release from the Peacekeeper infirmary, Vinka Dialyse departed Lal’s territory with a SMACER work crew headed north. She was tracked on Peacekeeper scopes until the crew rendezvoused with a Sabre Corporation security team—not an unusual event considering the faction’s dependence on externally-sourced labor. Her case returned to focus only years later after the Dreamers’ functional demise. During debriefing with the Planetary Council, Dr. Aleigha Cohen referenced Vinka Dialyse as an enduring mystery. At Dialyse's own requested, Dream analysis had indicated that she believed honestly in the truth value of her own statements, though cross-referencing her biological material with U.N. records had offered decisive confirmation that she was someone else entirely. Cohen felt Dialyse must be a partisan of Vesper Abaddon, or how else to explain the personal history? Unsurprisingly, Abaddon denied knowledge of Dialyse and pointed out that the remote location of the GSA had been attractive to ne’er-do-wells of all stripes, including those without any nexus with his regime. At the time of the original dream-reading, Roshann Cobb had ordered Cohen to obtain more intrusive scans, which Cohen had done, though without coming across anything she considered noteworthy. To avoid taking on another mouth to feed, disdaining trouble with the SMACERs, and believing that somebody would eventually come to "collect" Dialyse, the Dreamers allowed her to depart. The name appeared again, eleven decades later, on citizenship rolls submitted by The Bourse during the Planetary Census of M.Y. 144.

Sources:

Vinka Dialyse in cold sleep credited to Vladimir Manyukhin on wallpapercrafter.com. Wallpaper ID: 133775.

The second picture of Dialyse is labele d"Regular Female Sci-Fi" on Pinterest, which credits the original to Imgur.

The Unity picture belongs to Nichlas Benjamin per the source URL.

Fong Na Spínola's picture is "Character 5 Mech2," created by user MitchellMohrhauser on Deviant Art.