Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[Buster's Uncle]

This fits unusually well with the Official continuity, and is fascinating and plausible.

[MysticWind]

This fits unusually well with the Official continuity, and is fascinating and plausible.

Thanks! Any segments did you like particularly?

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, just that the whole thing fits just fine w/ the vague 'psych allocation" in the game.  That had to take actual concrete forms in actual practice.  Also, stuff like, maybe, vidwall corridor decoration for factions who could afford it -just paint for the rest- lots of stuff, but I do like sleep learning as a very major one.

You know, lots of this stuff in the thread is great - but Marsh, though fine, is hard to believe in, that he's around and doesn't come up ever in the game narrative.  And Yang was first officer of the Unity, I think that's canon.  The fit's imperfect for much RTD flavor; but this slides right in there, likewise a lot of the stuff about where the gear came from.

[Trenacker]

It is the things we do not abandon that define who we are. - Datalinks

For every three happy hearts set to work on the so-called Ark of Humanity, there was one turned bitterly against. Ôrad of Utár Wawesh was one of these.

Utár Wawesh was a constituent commandery of the County of Toltan, one of the three thousand "sandbox" nations dredged up by the likes of Eos Planetary Renewal in the Southern and Pacific Oceans in the 1990s to relieve South American overcrowding and provide a landing place for refugees of nuclear accidents becoming steadily more common as the technology cleared the hurdle of broad commercial adoption.

Engineering protocol called for reclaimed nations to be ringed in barrier peaks to protect against the ravages of typhoon waters. Corazón Santiago's refugees would follow this well-worn principle on hurricane-prone Chiron when they became first to found a maritime base at Anchorage on the Nessus Sea.

Descended from original settler stock (the same who bequeathed Chironians a term they later used for themselves, "newlander"), Ôrad set aside his childhood interest in music to become a soldier so that his family would not lose valuable rights to land, pearl beds, and shares in whaling fleets under Toltan's merit-based inheritance laws.

The waters of the southern Pacific were garbage-choked to the point of ecological disaster but schools of toxin-resistant fish thrived in the artificial reefs formed around the skeletons of dormant tidal generators stopped up by the floatsam. This trawler uses digital fiber to catch crosswinds for easy maneuvers. The sails, which were embedded with conductive monofilament, could be furled near-instantaneously when the weather turned foul and deployed just as quickly when it passed.

The Cold War was heating up in the Southern Hemisphere in the first decade of the new millennium when Ôrad found himself a fresh-faced cadet at West Point Military Academy, one of sixty International Cadets. Domestic woes had begun to sap America's ability to play its traditional role of global policeman. Soviet agents stepped eagerly into the void. Their promises stoked the emergence of an increasingly violent liberation consciousness among the destitute, dispossessed, and colonially subject. Ôrad returned home by Concorde supersonic jet to spend school holidays in the uniform of a special policeman brawling with fishermen and algae tenders that ate just two meals a day on the U.N. dole.

"U.N. Standard Care" provided between 2,000 and 4,000 calories of food per person per day based on assessed nutritional need, most non-habit-forming medications, seasonally appropriate natural clothing, all-weather survival tents, and one datalinks terminal per family unit that could be used for education, entertainment, and professional activities. Most factions followed the same model in the Era of Planetfall, adding hostile environment survival equipment and air supplies. Similar arrangements continued to be made available to struggling citizens in some factions for decades longer, among them the Believers, the New State, and the University. Humanitarian services were more comprehensive among both the Peacekeepers and the Tribe.

From the first, Ôrad sought opportunities to reach the acme of his profession, earning jump wings at Camp Hero, New York before spending six months with the 27th Armored Division during a deployment to wide swing through Atlanta to bring the Christian States to heel. In 2045, Ôrad received instruction as part of the Central Intelligence Agency's short-lived Great Neck Project, designed to groom the officers of allied governments in the fundamentals of national security and derided as "coup school" by its detractors. Ôrad put what he learned to good use, participating in the bloodless overthrow of his country's democratically-elected government two years later for failing to ratify accession to the SEPTO.

In return for his services to the new ruling junta, Ôrad was made Viceroy of Shant, a strategically significant atoll that, at the time of his appointment, had become a haven for pirates under an ex-American naval officer, Cyril Banes, who punctuated his depredations with ostentatious gifts to the burgeoning IOEZ and Pacifica drone population and claimed the mantle of "environmental activist." Using his newfound authority, Ôrad commandeered a tramp freighter impounded by the Toltan Water Watch and, with a scratch crew of reservists, sank the pirate mothership at anchor in a daring night raid.

The S.S. Arkannen's masts were removed to make room for the turret of an M60E7 Patton tank bought from a Brazilian intermediary.

Ôrad's career drew to a close just as Toltan began an aggressive courtship of the U.N., then casting about for almost any assistance to replace inconstant sponsors in the Global West. Ôrad counted himself a skeptic. Good people owed their lives to the U.N.'s relief programs, but they had not, in the end, provided a viable blueprint for regional development--only a crude existence that corroded the human spirit and stoked friction between social classes that, sharing the same space, ought to have worked together. Local critics accused Ôrad of reading Jean-Baptiste Keller. Ôrad had them jailed and returned to brokering fishing quotas with the Philippine government.

Retired for more than a decade by 2059, Ôrad buried his wife, their daughter, and two sons in that year, the saddest, he said, of his entire life. They were victims of crop blight, too weak to fight off the Red Flu season. Toltan, like many third-world nations, purchased rights-controlled rice seed. The varietal was engineered by Zerant Technologies (ZtN) to manifest biological defects, including botulism, after a set period of time if the purchaser did not obtain genetically-modified insects capable of restoring its viability. Toltan could afford neither the high asking price of the designer insects nor the price asked by Struan's for its life-saving defoliant. Flu inoculation at clinics in Chile proved useless: the headwinds against the preventative had been too strong, producing conditions in which the virus easily mutated to resist the latest drugs.

For weeks, Ôrad contemplated suicide. Then, word came that Carmel had fallen into a second bout of civil war. Toltan stood by its traditional ally. Ôrad returned to uniform and led the Pacifica Battalion, an all-volunteer force that joined the desperate fighting along the Küv-Dan Line. Ôrad's forces took hundreds of prisoners for which the Gathis were unprepared.

Ôrad's solution was to offer the Shilohne captives to the U.N. as replacements for the colonists they were no longer enrolling through their original talent lottery. Nearly all the prisoners accepted this offer, reasoning that they were otherwise facing certain starvation. The U.N., strained otherwise to the breaking point, ignored the protests of the disgraced Benjamin government in Gilboa. After once drinking such sweet wine, the U.N. developed a taste for it. Soon, it became accepted practice for governments to give convicts, no-pats, and others the choice of exile.

As for himself, Ôrad refused to be lured away from the false archipelago for which he had done so much. Instead, he used his newfound fame as a platform from which to question the ethical and practical basis for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri.

We, who can make nations from the sea and pitch ourselves forty-four light years through nothingness, despair of the simple project of saving ourselves. It is not apocalypse we are outrunning, but the shame of failure. - Datalinks

Ôrad released an autobiography shortly before Mission Launch. The datatape was an obscure one, but it made it as far as the personal effects of Roshann Cobb, recovered from White Rabbit's Refuge, and the voluminous libraries of Liquidator Shoichiro Nagao, who returned often to the islander's accusations, which he told subordinates were true, however upsetting.

Sources:
First picture is a still from the NBC series Kings (2009).

Second picture is "Craters of Lyra 9" by Artur Rosa on ArtStation.

Third picture is by Simon Stålenhag, found on Radical Ocean Futures.

Fourth picture is "Fishing Village" by jpeabody on DeviantArt.

"U.N. Standard Care" inspired by "Basic Assistance" in The Expanse.

S.S. Arkannen is "Tramp Freighter" by LordSopping1885 on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

We have already discovered immortality in the form of generational wealth. Long after my name is forgotten, the decisions I make in this life will have shaped a comfortable future for my children's children's children. - Datalinks

The view from Base Operations. Massive mainframe computers housed in the bowels of Unity's Landing Pods monitored the air pressure of every compartment, performed radiolocation for every vehicle, tracked ambient temperature and humidity in every hydroponics dome.

Automation was the accepted solution for very low population counts and very high rates of death from accumulated injuries or post-landing accidents, or simple misadventure. Given the correct stack of diskettes and fail-safes, a single duty tech could easily oversee a base of 15,000 residents.

Baptismo Wells, a corruption on the original Greek for "ceremonial washing," was an early example of the preservationist instinct in Believer architecture, which later trended toward monumental Egyptian Middle Kingdom and Polynesian Hale styles.

The Wells originated as a shrine to martyr Jarvis Findlay, shot dead and mutilated by Holnists during a period of self-imposed isolation in MY2. Within a year, the draw of his example, along with the area's splendid beauty and abundant waters, gave rise to permanent settlement.

The structures appeared to rise up from the roaring River Tethys but were actually built on massive stone peers. On the orders of the Kritarchy, huge flood gates were installed to dam up the river--a method of ensuring the Conclave would retain strong advantage if ever it were forced to cede its interest in the valley below.

Imagine the entire contents of the planetary datalinks, the sum total of human knowledge, blasted into the Planetmind’s fragile neural network with the full power of every reactor on the planet. Thousands of years of civilization compressed into a single searing burst of revelation. That is our last-ditch attempt to win humanity a reprieve from extinction at the hands of an awakening alien god. - Planet Speaks

Centauri Computing built on understandings of the xenofungus as analogous to a nervous system at planetary scale. The same mind-machine interface between humans and computers, still dangerously imperfect, was attempted with Planet itself.

Alexandria's Elegy, built and operated by the Tomorrow Initiative, thought the exchange was a one-way street: its librarians drew energy from the fibral network of xenofungus to speed indexing and retrieval from the Unity Data Core surrendered by the Restoration under orders from the Planetary Council. Without the speed enhancements of optical computing, this was a brute-force action, and the residual heat required that the base by placed directly at the sub-zero headwaters of the Tartarus Frost Range. Circuits burned so quickly that Morganite liquidators were in permanent residence. Planet attempted to crush the pyramidal stacks from without: they were built from plasma steel to warp with the attempt.

Captain Shizen Ito of the New State submarine Burr enjoys the suns. She has developed a personal style distinguished by the use of leather, outlawed everywhere on Earth after 2021. Her jacket might be a rare heirloom, but given the flawless condition is almost assuredly a harmless reproduction. The sentiment behind her appearance--the idea that giving and receiving offense is a critical aspect of healthy society--reflects the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of L'État nouvel, where the often hidebound population demanded the Admiralty protect them from the emotional consequences of their own prejudice.

Sources:
First quote is paraphrasing the character of Donald Whitfield, played by Timothy Hutton, in 1923, produced by Taylor Sheridan.

First picture is "Stargate Research Base" by Nevena-Jevtic on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Watercity After Storm" by the same author on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "Alien World 2" by the same author on DeviantArt.

Fourth picture is "Xiang Lavigne" by CodexBorderlining on DeviantArt.

[Buster's Uncle]

I note that RTD people below faction leader level are always an easier fit into canon...


P.S.    as always.

[Trenacker]

Thank you kindly.

Referring to canon, some aspects of the canon, like the "Brother Lal" appellation, or the alleged "mis-assignment" of quotations to certain leaders whose ideologies should not correlate with topics like technological innovation or environmental conservation, have struck me as intentional layering of complexity. People are naturally hypocritical because life is complicated and nothing human is absolute.

But Lal never made sense to me as XO. It seems too obvious that, to the well-educated, he was recognizable as a problematic quantity, even if it might not have been clear to them that he was a full-blown sociopath. I don't see why the U.N. would have put someone like Lal in such a position.

[Buster's Uncle]

As far as nuance?  Sister Miriam.  She's a hateful -misogynist expletive- in diplomacy, most always, and a thoughtful techno-critic (see also Jeremy Rifkin whether you like him or not) in the movie narrations.  Obvious different writers w/ different POVs about her - but the two don't actually conflict, but rather nuance and flesh her out that much.

Easy to imagine a million different things that made for aggressive Lal after the hundredth turn without invoking insanity.  We just don't know what...
Edit: there's a VERY good idea for you to tackle here...

[Trenacker]

The Sister Miriam presented here is not that, although her reputation precedes her because of raiding carried out by her Nauvoo Legion immediately after Planetfall. Van de Graaf won't let that go.

The old "religious fanatic" trope never sat well with me. Too cliché.

Lal, I think, has the same problem I gave him in the Quest I ran on Sufficient Velocity in 2020. To people who don't want to put themselves back under the U.N. Charter, he's no more or less "correct" than anyone else, and no longer has any fair claim on survivor loyalties. That's a hard piece of jerky for him to chew, much less swallow.

As the quintessential "good man" archetype, Lal is perpetually navel-gazing, which can lead to periods of despondency as he questions the true motivations behind his own actions, a tendency that is immediately obvious to, and enthusiastically exploited by, born manipulators like Morgan, Cobb, Carnaveron, and Yang.

[Buster's Uncle]

This whole thread is very high quality work, and commenting feels like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.  That's certainly held me back before more than once.

You might get way more feedback with an RTD comments thread clearly labeled and crosslinked in the OPs.  In fact, if there was a single author posting, I'd point out that you, Trenacker, can lock the thread yourself and still post.  -As-is-though? 

Pick any post on the first page of the thread that you don't mind duping onto this page, do so, rewrite the original as the OP of a comment thread, and I'll be happy to trawl through and do some thread surgery for you.  Re-doing an early post into that OP makes it practical to move this post, for example, and leave you first spot.


Best of both worlds, I think, can't hurt and may well increase feedback a good deal.

[Buster's Uncle]

But Lal never made sense to me as XO. It seems too obvious that, to the well-educated, he was recognizable as a problematic quantity, even if it might not have been clear to them that he was a full-blown sociopath. I don't see why the U.N. would have put someone like Lal in such a position.

OH - you meant YANG and your fingers forgot.  Now it all makes sense.  I don't disgree at all.  Perhaps his hive tendencies didn't show until he got his shot to practice them on Planet?  He's very capable otherwise, I do think, what with his attitude towards self discipline and self improvement.



Back on Miriam?  I've been on the record as long as I've been in the community -see my Sister Miriam De-uglified thread redone on this forum- that, coming at it as a faction modder artist who's made a lot of leaderheads, Miriam is also a visual hatchet job.  She's Dana Carvey's Church Lady character with red hair and an army, not coincidentally played by the least attractive-looking human being of the original seven.

[Trenacker]

This whole thread is very high quality work, and commenting feels like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.  That's certainly held me back before more than once.

You might get way more feedback with an RTD comments thread clearly labeled and crosslinked in the OPs.  In fact, if there was a single author posting, I'd point out that you, Trenacker, can lock the thread yourself and still post.  -As-is-though? 

Pick any post on the first page of the thread that you don't mind duping onto this page, do so, rewrite the original as the OP of a comment thread, and I'll be happy to trawl through and do some thread surgery for you.  Re-doing an early post into that OP makes it practical to move this post, for example, and leave you first spot.


Best of both worlds, I think, can't hurt and may well increase feedback a good deal.

Thank you for the very kind words! I'm glad you've been enjoying the work. Feedback is my fuel.

[Trenacker]

But Lal never made sense to me as XO. It seems too obvious that, to the well-educated, he was recognizable as a problematic quantity, even if it might not have been clear to them that he was a full-blown sociopath. I don't see why the U.N. would have put someone like Lal in such a position.

OH - you meant YANG and your fingers forgot.  Now it all makes sense.  I don't disgree at all.  Perhaps his hive tendencies didn't show until he got his shot to practice them on Planet?  He's very capable otherwise, I do think, what with his attitude towards self discipline and self improvement.



Back on Miriam?  I've been on the record as long as I've been in the community -see my Sister Miriam De-uglified thread redone on this forum- that, coming at it as a faction modder artist who's made a lot of leaderheads, Miriam is also a visual hatchet job.  She's Dana Carvey's Church Lady character with red hair and an army, not coincidentally played by the least attractive-looking human being of the original seven.

Yes, Yang. Apologies for the error. Based on the fictional biography prepared by Michael Ely for the SMAC website, the psych screeners already perceived that there was something "off" about Yang. They just calculated that he was worth the risk. Still, it seems odd that they would freight Garland with a guy they knew would make an ideal mutineer.

Yes, that is fair to say about Miriam, who is every bit as much a stereotype as the beautiful Hippie or the collectivist Asian.

[Trenacker]

It was easy to love the Earth. Standing barefoot in the sunshine, we swallowed cold lungfuls of juniper-tinged air and plucked apples from the trees. What use to us is this other place that we cannot even taste? - I Reject

At Folger's Tear, the waters of the broad River Lethe completed an important milestone on their their long journey to the sea. Flat, fertile plains beckoned irresistibly to human settlers. Pilgrims made the place their home in MY4 using materials found at nearby crash sites. Hungry for familiar foods, they exterminated the local fungus and began Terraculture. Within a decade, aggressive cancers had claimed fully half the recent arrivals, defeating the rudimentary chemotherapies still at hand. Hunter hydrologists soon discovered why. A chemical tank had impacted just twelve kilometers away and forty-four million gallons of ethylene glycol had soaked into the water table.

Morganite cities embraced the Second Empire style. In the eyes of the Families, giving form to one's megalomania was evidence of their fitness to rule.

Drones were rarely inclined to surrender the energy credit required for entry into any such domicile of the elite. Instead they sought the "Liberté, égalité, [et] fraternité" of the open market stall and the salvaged cargo container.

Morgan outlawed the dangerous phrase. Corporate "Specials," deputized by the powers-that-be, made regular runs through the Commons, ostensibly looking to enforce the vice laws that forced the less-fortunate to take whatever solace they could in the gambling halls.

Telbi Acharya first spoke on behalf of the Conclave in MY51 during Sister Miriam Godwinson's Second Convalescence. Her appearance, and the strident warning she offered to her Ascendancy interlocutors, were a radical departure from the scrupulous humility and extreme agreeableness of the Believer diplomatic corps.

Records indicate that Acharya was a resocialized victim of Post-Nuclear Madness, a disease she contracted during childhood in Kashmir. Before withdrawing from the region, a Chinese "relief mission" attempted to "cure" her by implanting a Memory Cassette loaded with the eighty books of the Conclave Bible, which Acharya could thereafter quote at will.

Acharya perceived herself the perfect accompaniment to Miriam's honeyed leadership style, for she was willing to do what the Blessed Sister was not. Like Pravin Lal, Godwinson gambled on a team of rivals to balance her natural inclinations.

Serious misgivings about Acharya's judgement did not prevent Godwinson from ceding authority over the Nauvoo Legion, which she felt unable to use to best advantage during a time when enemy encroachments were reaching intolerable levels.

Sources:
First picture is "Crater" by NeotericEvolution on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Bridges" by AndreeeWallin on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "Zaide Sayadova" by CodexBorderlining on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

Like the teeth of some ravening monster, the hard angles and false promise of mechanical ingenuity have come again to reduce us all to drones. - We Must Dissent

"The Stacks" are an area of volcanic badlands in far northwestern Agammen bounded by the Odyssean Sea to the north, the Iapetian Piers to the south and west, and lava flows to the east. The nearest permanent settlement is Watch Station LR-4, maintained by the Memory of Earth.

Ambient winter temperatures bottomed out at 114°F. The boiling water that churned from its geysers had a pH of zero. Caustic burns were a constant concern: local conditions visibly corroded most materials after just one standard hour.

On a world where the land fought back with ferocity and skill, a base's first significant expansion was apt to be skyward.

As time went on, the humans of Chiron, already fractured by ideology, divided again along the fault lines of their affinities toward technology and ecology. In cities like Electroville, people who had never seen Planet Earth cocooned themselves in glass and steel to gain a better understanding of their ancestors.

F-26M Polecat Interceptors of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force prepare to meet a Soviet Tu-210 Bashplate over the Sea of Okhotsk during the Confusion in Heilongjiang.

The tenterhooks of nationalism had loose claim on most mission survivors, and no leader with any significant following proposed forming colonies around national or ethnic ascription. In the chaos of the escape from Unity, there had been no time for such a sorting. Yet the political bequests of our divided homeworld were obvious.

As a shining success from a brutal system, Academician Zakharov retreated from students' calls to act decisively against such things as hazing and provide greater insight into faction governance. In public, he denigrated the ability of the "lesser-educated" to "apply the necessary discernment" around what to study or where to allocate scarce resources. Privately, he lamented the presumptuousness of the student body and rarely expanded his circle of close confidants, always men, frequently fellow products of similar authoritarian regimes.

Many factions tolerated the continuing use of national symbols like the Red Star or the Union Jack as a means of either fostering collective memory or rejecting the continuing authority of the United Nations, which had instructed they be painted over.

One-time U.S. presidential hopeful and ex-Cabinet member Oscar van de Graaf went furthest in exploiting the memetic qualities of national identity--Pilgrims waved the American flag--but his vision of the future was essentially a fantasist's riff on concepts of self-reliance and fair dealing popularized more by the likes of Walt Disney than the Founding Fathers. Van de Graaf saw no requirement for equitable courts, much less an independent legislature jealous of its own prerogatives. Besides that, his colony had a distinctly international mien since he'd hired without much consideration of national allegiance. To whom would his workforce write home?

Other key leaders spent much of their lives abroad from the countries of their birth: Deirdre Skye, J.T. Marsh, Roshann Cobb, and Aleigha Cohen were as much victims of British imperialism as loyal citizens of Empire or Commonwealth. Nwabudike Morgan was a political renegade that had tried more often to unmake governments than to serve them. Tamineh Pahlavi was an expatriate by circumstances outside her control. A short stint in the service of the American Reclamation Corporation had hardly inclined her toward national consciousness. Johann Anhaldt was of more use to the French government than the Swiss, but left his homeworld embittered. St. Germaine and d'Almeida both cultivated national cadres, and the Executive Officer was reckoned a hero by his country's elite, but the Contre-amirale was too much a believer in the correctness of his own wisdom to have loved France better, while d'Almeida was too much a realist to attempt the resurrection of a thing bound to another time and place.


Sources:
First picture is "Sci-Fi_character practice." by TylerThullCreations on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Sunshower" by JonasDeRo on DeviantArt.

Third picture is a screen capture from Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993).