Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[Trenacker]

The moods of history, like the laws of energy, suggest that, for every advantage gained by some, there must be a disadvantage inflicted on another. Let it not be you. - Armed, Forewarned

Writing in the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed that his country's expansionist ambitions could be fulfilled by draining the Mediterranean Sea.

For as long as humans have lived with the Earth, we have attempted to change it, usually for commercial reasons. The dam and the ditch have been our preferred tools. Egyptian pharaohs ordered canals to be dug between the Nile River and the Red Sea. Governors used them to make New York City into a hub of industry and turn the Great Lakes of North America into vast highways of maritime trade. Soviet leaders attempted to drain the Aral Sea for irrigation water. Huge dams harnessed old waters to bring electricity--modernity--to burgeoning cities in the American West, Central China, and the Amazon Basin. The European Economic Community dammed up Homer's Wine-dark Sea beginning in 1982, with sub-projects extending south, deep into Central Africa. This work resulted in one barrier across the Dardanelles, a second across the Strait of Sicily, a third at the Bosporus, a fourth on the River Congo. Lake Chad swelled to reach Faya-Largeau.

From the 1950s, the great powers did much of their digging with what they dubbed "Atoms for Peace." Nuclear charges blew the tops off mountains and scoured deep trenches in the Earth's crust. This practice was especially appealing to developing nations and imperial powers in possession of large, sparsely-populated or politically-subjugated territories. Leading the way were the Americans, Soviets, French, Indians, Portuguese, and South Africans. Las Vegas became the City the Bomb Built. Atomic engineering was used again on the Moon and Mars to excavate sub-surface habitation, and as a motive force to move small asteroids into accessible orbits for scientific investigation and subsequent strip-mining.

Rising sea levels spurred strong interest in the creation of artificial reefs and island chains. Three distinct habitation zones emerged: a storm barrage along the North American Atlantic Littoral, including in the Gulf of Mexico; in the Indian Ocean in the Bay of Bengal but later extending to the waters due west of Perth, for purposes of refugee resettlement; and in the Southern Pacific Ocean, largely tied to resource extraction.

Use of atomics for purposes other than killing had become so frequent on Earth that the United Nations thought little of supplying Chiron Interstellar Probe and Unity Mission colonists with a full range of warhead sizes. Early settlers used them immediately for terraforming as well as flattening mountain ranges to alter the paths of rivers or patterns of precipitation and water retention.

Performance against fungus was notably unsatisfactory. Different from the lesser wounds inflicted by fire and conventional explosives, the radiological output of nuclear weapons appeared to stimulate planetary aggression and the re-population of fungal mass. Secondary ignition of nitrate beds was problem: wildfires rarely burned hot or long because of Chiron's low oxygen levels--just 41% that of Earth--but fine dust kicked up through atomic activity choked atmospheric filters and produced deadly and destructive arc flashes.

The question of just whose interests were served through these radical reconstructive surgeries of the living Earth was never explored in full, and each megaproject inspired passionate, sometimes violent, resistance. Agribusiness, cultural chauvinists, the non-patriated, and inland city-dwellers were at the forefront of pushing schemes like the creation of "Atlantropa." Politicians sweetened the offer by promising cheap land and lifelong work for those who had neither. The perspectives of coastal populations, logistics firms, and transhumant people were cooler even after assurances were given of priority relocation and huge tax breaks for impacted businesses. Environmental liberationists struck hard and often. As the impacts were disproportionately inflicted on populations and interest groups with the least political voice, critics reckoned sea level change a form of cultural genocide.

Magnets played a feature role in combating the very high rates of cancer experienced by the First Generation. Unity survivors received an extra lifetime radiation dose of between 15 and 1700 rem, asbestos exposure far exceeding the maximum tolerable safe level of .1 fibers per cubic centimeter every 30 minutes, and post-hibernation disorders of the memory and nervous system collectively referred to as Cold Disease.

Led by the University of Planet's Xisho Center for Cancer Eradication, researchers used magnets to create steerable drug payloads and trigger amalgamation of defective and cancerous cells for easy obliteration.

What was used to heal could also be exploited to do harm. At Hive infirmaries, workers received generic "inoculation" with magnetic nanoparticles that allowed Overseers to trigger fatal clotting at the push of a button.

Sale of subscription billets through the charter colony scheme led to a 40% increase in Unity passenger capacity. Project managers turned to museums and private collectors to obtain serviceable equipment. Soviet space suits were favored for their ruggedness, while American styles incorporated better safety features in case of a breach.

Sources:
For more about Atlantropa, see this article on allthatsinteresting.com.

"Fantastic Voyage" diagram is from Sylvain Martel, "Magnetic Microbots to Fight Cancer," IEEE Spectrum, Robotics, 25 September 2012, https://spectrum.ieee.org/magnetic-microbots-to-fight-cancer (accessed: 5 March 2023).

Clumping magnets are described here on howstuffworks.com.

Rem exposure chart from Idaho National Labs.

Third picture is from the Apple+ show For All Mankind.

[Trenacker]

If you've ever wondered what true despair looks like, ask a prize-winning author to help you dig a latrine. - Life, Barely

Specialization of labor is both the first sign of a wealthy society and the very means by which it can become that much wealthier. Tests of faction leadership on Chiron were often about creating opportunities for some of Earth's best-educated people to do what they were good at.

Mission planners had tried to mitigate that very problem through painstaking selection. At first, consideration for inclusion in the mission was limited to candidates who fell within narrow parameters of age and physical fitness. The rule was clear: prefer the well-rounded 'jack over the narrowly-focused master. Once accepted, prospective colonists began two or three years of intense practical training in any of two Colony Occupational Specialties. Mathematicians became journeyman welders and elite rescue swimmers. Surgeons tried their hands at welding. Then came the time in classrooms. Theologians fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were taught machine language. Poets studied criminal justice and project management fundamentals.

Standards relaxed, then vanished. About a third of Unity passengers graduated the full program. Another quarter completed some training through the U.N., usually the physical component, with a focus on life-safety. Approximately the same number of colonists and crew undertook "equivalencies" with their national governments or qualifying corporations, some in addition to their U.N. commitment, some in lieu of it. Jonathan Garland believed such replacement education was suspect, amounting to political indoctrination, and he turned over document verification to Rachael Winzenried's Security Forces for three months before higher-ups in New York overruled him. Anyone not participating in U.N. or national training was awarded between two years and one month of credits to participate in InterLink correspondence courses--just enough, remembered Aayla Cantwell, to begin to confront all the things one didn't know. Crew members called it being "scared straight."

U.N. Security Forces recruits participate in room-clearing drills on the orders of Unity Security Chief Rachael Winzenried.

Once on the ground, natural hierarchies arose. They followed a familiar pattern. Leaders and their coteries gained and retained status by assigning posts and dispensing favors. Absent coercion, techs of any kind were next-closest to the top of the heap since anyone who could keep a body or machine going in adverse conditions was nearly guaranteed to receive supervisory duties and the perquisites that went with them. (Subordinates were to learn through proximity and observation.) The next layer belonged to professional soldiers and safety responders, first in the way of harm. Weapons were useful and scarce, therefore valuable. Morgan, Santiago, Cobb, and van de Graaf incentivized their combatants with the promise of plunder. On the third rung were those who filled out the common labor pool, digging and hauling. Below these was anyone who could do no more than watch a gauge or check the seals of a spacesuit.

Within each layer, more granular divisions emerged. Medical professionals were early celebrities. Among paramilitary types, national service usually trumped.

Pilots learned that they were mechanics first, drivers second.

In time, adjustments were made. Morgan and Van de Graaf linked political power with property rights so that one's occupation mattered less. The University made distinction between those who only worked at a job and those who could instruct others in its performance or otherwise contribute to their "economy of ideas." Factions that employed overseers--the Morganites, Spartans, Dreamers, Hive, and Ascendancy--initially ranked them alongside or just below soldiers, but all learned quickly to carefully circumscribe their authority and limit their access to weapons lest they become an internal fifth column.

Practice economy by match reward with need. Recognize the veteran and the drone with food and rest. Tomorrow, they will fight and work all the harder. Send the doctor to the datalinks and he will educate himself in a finer technique. Give the parent a primer and she will use her time to better her child. - Institutes of Leadership

Happiness is a menu with many options. - The Centauri Monopoly

Sources:
Joseph Plumb Martin was a Continental soldier and diarist who, after the war, left behind an autobiography titled, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of Joseph Plumb Martin.

First picture is from "Mech Constructor" by Slava Zhuravlev on Bēhance.

Second picture is "training-0217" by Jay Li on Art Station.

Third picture is "Netspectre - Cyberpunk Hacking Roguelike - Hummus bistro" by Joseph Surý on Art Station.

[MysticWind]

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

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

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

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

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

[MysticWind]

Official flag of MECO

The Stellar Lifeboat Project proved to be a boon for authoritarian states to offload citizens deemed troublesome. While FEMA Spring Cleaning, the clandestine American system to deport HERITAGE Act-ineligible nonviolent dissidents, was excoriated by the international community thanks to the heroic efforts of anonymous leakers, other governments cloaked their own schemes. The Damascus Axis, also known as the Middle East Coalition, momentarily got over its member states' mutual mistrust and attempted the Al Falah Plan ("our success"), an intelligence-sharing nexus to identify potentially destabilizing persons of interest before dropping them on the Stellar Lifeboat's doorstep. These largely secularist-nationalist, Arab socialist, Arsanjanist, Green Booker, and renaissance republican regimes and personalist monarchies saw dangers at every turn. Whether Soviet, Israeli, or French provocateurs from Dār al-‘Ahd or jihadist movements like the Al-Samad network and national liberators like the People's African Union within Dār al-Islām, there seemed to be no shortage of bogeymen.

Among those snatched up from their beds by Al Falah was a particular Iranian activist from Khuzestan. Despite being a peaceful advocate for Arabistan independence, the Pahlavi monarchy brooked no patience for such sentiment. Upon the d'Avrail administration's reprisal bombings of Syria ("the Damascectomy"), which both caused the bloc to be renamed to the Aleppo Axis and shifted the fulcrum to Tehran, the increasingly junior partners of MECO were perfectly willing to sell out their brethren living under imperial Persian rule.

For his role in distributing literature about Ahwaz liberation, Ali Numrūd Kašk was confronted by SAVAK hatchet men and given a choice of indefinite detention in Evin Prison, or off-world exile. Having already lost his wife to the regime, he signed the voluntary confessions and, along with his sole surviving child Firyal, was sent across the Iraqi border to the Middle East Coalition's joint launch site at Al Anbar. For mysterious reasons, the two were separated. Inattentive UNHCR inspectors waved the daughter through, sending her into orbit. She would never see her father again. Carrying nearly three hundred captive passengers, the bulk transport Golden Shah arrived at the Stellar Lifeboat's later-stage training facilities on the Moon before departing for the lunar cradle, where it was retrofitted into a large landing pod for the UNS Unity itself.

An Al Falah men's billet trains at rapid assembly of solar arrays for colonial manufacturing, William Diego Base

The mission's lunar assets were a shadow of their former glory. Once the shiny toy of the great powers, the bases were now equal-access playpens under U.N. governance. Through the Al Falah Plan's shell corporations, MECO funneled sumptuous contributions to the mission to ship its people there on one-way flights. Firyal and the others had bypassed basic training and survival school the mainline colonists received, only to be tossed into the dangerously grueling screen of low-g. For months, they were subjected to intense training for a mission that was not their own.

Presided over by apathetic backwater United Nations Space Authority officials and impassive Morgan Emergency Services instructors, Firyal learned first aid, life support mechanics, welding, conflict deescalation, emergency delivery, and disaster rescue while walking on the Moon itself. Perhaps it was a prisoners' camaraderie among the Al Falah exiles that aided their survival rates compared to other Charter billets. Indeed, some observers joked that if the Stellar Lifeboat Project had been considered a regular Charter, it was perhaps among the most cohesive- but neither its factors nor these Charterists themselves really wanted to be there.

And even in the face of the worst adversity, love could bloom on the battlefield of hardship. During surface spacesuit training, Firyal Kašk would meet a young Pakistani migrant worker who had been drafted into Al Falah by Connex-Killen for organizing fellow laborers in the oil fields at Dhahran, of the Triplet Cities Emirate. Bonding over the family and lands they had left behind, raging against the oppressive forces that had brought them into this space hell, the two struck up a relationship that would take them all the way to Planet.

Notes:

The Middle East Coalition is inspired by the Middle Eastern Coalition from Battlefield 2.

Arsanjanism here refers to Hasan Arsanjani, the populist Iranian minister of agriculture whose radical land reform concept presaged the Shah's institution of the White Revolution. In our world, he was forced to resign.

Al-Samad is from Alpha Protocol.

The "Damascectomy" (the taking out of Damascus) is from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams.

Lunar base image is taken from the Alien Legacy opening cinematic.

Connex-Killen is from Syriana.

Dhahran being an independent oil state (or part of one) is a very tiny reference to the massive Tripartite Alliance Earth alternate history by Randy McDonald.

[Trenacker]

I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man. - Ecclesiastes 3:12-13

A Hive labor unit distributes the standard ration. Civic Dieticians worked day and night to enhance the gruel's nutritional value but the Chairman insisted that it be rendered flavorless. Longing for joy in food was an "anchor sign," he said.

In Talents, deviation from the Chairman's Tenets could be punished with demotion or added work, but in drones it was overlooked with tolerance bordering on affection. Favorite meal accompaniments were simple: rock salt, green onion, and mushrooms grown in the patches where pipes leaked.

Fourteen percent of Unity's cargo by volume was shelf-stable food and potable water. It was stored in radiation-shielded, climate-controlled vaults together with the mission's seed stock, blood banks, and temperature-sensitive medicines.

Bulk medicines were sourced from the International Red Cross and broken down for distribution with individual meals. The U.S. Federal Disaster Agency contributed water purification chemicals drawn from post-war storage. Morganite loadmasters blunted the desired public relations effect of the donation by repainting the livery.

Shipboard radiation levels remained so high for so long that the original storage measures failed to prevent widespread radiation poisoning. Knowing full well the dangers of introducing alien crops to a new biome, all factions preferred to recover Supply Pods deployed ahead of the disaster, but they also raced to grow fresh food in Planet's willing soil.

At first, spoiled rations couldn't be entirely avoided. Democratic societies arranged schemes to keep dose rates equitable, factoring age, weight, and other health factors. Crawlers like this one shuttled supplies between bases where Base Operations oversaw distribution. Some leaders had other ideas. Spartans fought duels over the small number of clean meals. In the Ascendancy, Pahlavi ensured that the older and sicker residents received the worst rations. As intended, they died in droves, relieving her of the duty for their care.

Submarine crews of L'État nouvel received special allowances to supplement their rations with food purchased at the faction's Exchanges. They prized selections particular to the land, especially wheat-based and milk products.

Tribal meals were near-celebratory occasions. Neighbors pooled resources to organize meals cooked with a wider range of ingredients than were available to any single household. Tribals, like most Purists, insisted on real meat and beer. They brewed the latter from corn.

Subrids were bread for their flesh, which most colonists found appetizing. Colonists usually combined their fresh food with accompaniments drawn from their survival meals. Hot sauces retained the same cult following they'd enjoyed back on Earth.

Fire-starters, seen here in the bottom right quadrant of the open tin, often failed to ignite but were valuable precisely because of how difficult it was to make fire without them.

Resurrection of extinct megafauna fueled a popular resurgence in sport hunting among a certain type of wealthy traveler on Earth. For a time, Warden J.T. Marsh had made his living leading safaris of this type. Hunter Lodges took pride in organizing "hungry" expeditions that left their bases without survival packs and undertook to eat only what they snared or shot while on-scout.

Sources:
First image is from The Expanse.

Second image is "Where you want 'em?" by Marrekie on DeviantArt.

Third image is from the film Alien.

Fourth image is from the TV show Firefly.

Fifth image is "Pocket-Sized Star Wars Emergency Ration Kit" by Chrononaut on Autodesk Instructable.

Sixth image is from The Lost World.

[Trenacker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forklifts picture is “research” by Darnok9 on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Santiago Cabrera as Cristóbal Rios is our Kyle Porters.

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

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

[MysticWind]

A corporate overseer awakes a demolitions expert during Planetfall

The Stellar Lifeboat struck against its moorings and splintered into a thousand pieces during the Planetfall crisis. Scores of incognito stowaways threw off their disguises and dissolved into the night, infiltrating factions as useful operators in one vital specialization or another, rather than the former victims of Earth's misfortunes. Scores more were hunted down as human assets to be bartered with and exploited. Unity Comptroller Suzanne Marjorie Fielding laid down her duty to the flailing mission and resumed her due diligence to the American Reclamation Corporation, using her masterlink access to create harvest lists of choice Lifeboaters for collection. Rushing to beat their corporate rivals to the punch, her Overseers employed lawyer programs to mass-draft contracts of indenture, customized for each individual's polity of origin- usually U.N. compacts governing treatment of No-Pats- and went to the cryochambers, becoming the first sight for many a bewildered refugee after sixty years of sleep.

An American Machines R-79 Robodigger "Rusty" deploys from the Golden Shah in search of potables

Al Falah, one of the larger providers to the Stellar Lifeboat Project, made up of just over eleven percent of the ten thousand. Nearly all of the billets belonging to the MECO black project were scooped up by ARC, secured by newly-awakened corporate security forces and PMCs that included the Val Verde Veterans. In a stroke of cosmic irony, these conscript Charterists were crammed into the landing pod built around the imperial Iranian-constructed Golden Shah and sent to the surface. A double dose of coincidence led them to land just east of the central stretch of the Great Dunes, hundreds of kilometers away from any coast or large body of water. Without motorized vehicles, the motley crew were forced to set up base amidst the inhospitable wastes. Mercifully, they had brought along robotic servitors who were able to locate a nearby well. From humble, mutually suspicious beginnings, Fort Quileute was established.

The medina of Fort Quileute during the high years of the Director's Council

Even after they reunited with the New Two Thousand, the base was a lonely outpost only tangentially related to van de Graaf's ambitions. Isolated from ARC leadership, the would-be overseers were at a loss of what to focus on, and survival was a necessary priority anyway. Perhaps out of paranoia of their own security forces' loyalty, and out of an Orientalist understanding of the very own Charterists they had assembled, the governors of Quileute granted the Al Falah host the privilege of self-management. Deferring to the refugees' cultures of origins- in reality, the vast majority were urbanites whose contact with the desert amounted to the occasional vacation tour- ARC permitted Al Falah to build their new civilization on their own terms, with minimal interference. This allowed a rather hands-off synergy as the corporate heads retreated into their inner sanctums to hem and haw about what the big chief would want, their guards and mercenaries made splendid war against the peculiar armored local mindworms Tomorrow Institute xenoentomologists at Bembridge called "scarab-snakes," and the interstellar refugees were free to run their own affairs.

An ARC-Al Falah exploratory group chances upon the fossilized pincer of a great desert subrid

Firyal Kašk volunteered for the hastily-formed Sand Scouts, putting the high marks she had received on the Sea of Serenity survival courses to real use in the field. Rising quickly, she took ARC expeditions further and further into the wastes, finding new water sources from Chiron succulents and food from the canny species that lurked among the dunes. Firyal's comrades grew to respect her daredevil spirit, and love how she saved them from sandstorms and scarab swarms. Yet her impetuousness hid a deep melancholy from leaving behind her father and all she had known back in Khuzestan. Pouring her grief for her lost land and life, Firyal spurred on the scouts into the ancient alien complexes that littered the Great Dunes, discovering relics unique to that region of Planet.

Augmented with last-gen prosthetics, a Sand Scout veteran turned cyborg Qawwāl sings devotions at the door to the al-Farghānī Mosque at Garlandabad district

Meanwhile, her lover rallied the people of the new base, endowing the workers of Quileute with a sense of ownership and unity that had been denied back on Earth. A local labor leader who once brawled against Triplet Special Police and rooted out Connex-Killen oilmen infiltrators alike, he moved to form a united front among the Al Falah, drawing from their shared trauma and cultural similarities between the variegated peoples of the Stellar Lifeboat. To the ARC administrators he smiled and promised unparalleled productivity from worker cohesion; in dark hallways of the hab he whispered the need for all to set aside their difference to avoid megacorp domination. He forged this union in the converted supply closets that became musalla prayer rooms and the improvised washrooms used for wudu. Posing faith and tradition as an affectation of a superstitious, backwards people, the Al Falah veiled their growing unity. In their sacred spaces they formed their own secret social structure free from ARC's prying eyes.

Notes:

Lawyer programs are a concept from Earth by David Brin.

Robodigger is from Sierra On-Line’s Outpost.

The Quileute are a Native American nation who Frank Herbert learned greatly from prior to writing Dune.

The medina image is “The Center” by Ismail Inceoglu.

The giant crab art is from Yukinobu Hoshino’s sci-fi classic 2001 Nights, specifically "Night 10: Medusa's Throne."

The multi-limbed sitar player painting is by Omar Gilani.

[MysticWind]

Antiquity Abubakari-9429, or the Projection Stone

After a robosurveyor detected a subterranean network during a water search, veteran Expedition Leader Firyal Kašk launched a dig just east of the Charbagh of Bones. Spelunking through caverns measureless to man, the Quileute Sand Scouts discovered a vast Progenitor complex containing several alien artifacts. Among them was a mysterious rock etching that seemed to depict the Centauri system with strange satellite trajectories projecting forth from Planet. Aeons old according to radiocarbon dating, this was the most coherent xenogenous symbolic representation discovered yet. The fort's meager computational resources spent a fortnight attempting to decrypt its inscrutable writings. Appraisals made later by the New Two Thousand's ARC art valuation division suggested that when taking into account its immense historical and scientific value, the rock was worth hundreds of millions of ¤.

ARC Chief Human Intelligence Officer Suzanne Marjorie Fielding speaks to the wayward colony for the very first time

Fort Quileute's pseudonode had had no luck in unravelling the mystery of the etchings, but in one of the miracles of Alpha Centauri science, the scanning process stumbled upon an anomalous harmonic resonance beneath the surface of the Projection Stone. This “Wow!” signal was backwards-engineered by the lone ARC acoustics engineer attached to the fort, who along with a Cairo University mathematics professor (and Muslim Brotherhood member) banished by the United Arab Republic, devised a transmitter that boosted the base's communications array tenfold. Nearly a continent away, an assistant to the executive assistant of ARC CFO-CHIO Suzanne Marjorie Fielding picked up the phone and was bewildered to find himself dealing with a first contact situation. Escalations were raised and c-suite notified. After mission decades of isolation away from the New Two Thousand body politic, the desert outpost reestablished contact with mother base.

While Terra Nova was far from the Great Dunes, overland trade expeditions were attempted to bridge the two. Governor Oscar van de Graaf was eager to restore another one of his stakes back to his righteous patrimony. CFO Fielding was keen to introduce proper Pilgrim operating standards upon the colony. And the long-lost Director's Council of Fort Quileute was desperate to prove to the Pilgrim elite "back home" that they were proper stakeholders, not provincial sand-eaters.

The Three Domes of Fort Quileute. Right to left: The Green Crescent Primary Agridome, producing over seventy percent of the colony's food supply. The Jamshid Manufacturing Plant, a multi-industry factory. And the Bayt al-Hunayn, the House of Yearning, a shared reliquary and library bearing the population's memories of Earth

To their credit, salutary neglect had benefited the city. The labor leadership formed by Firyal's lover had kept the interstellar felaheen satisfied with autonomy, hummingly productive, and in the captain's seat. United against even the threat of subordination, the Stellar Lifeboat families overcame their cultural, sectarian, and linguistic differences to create a new ummah. Never would they tolerate being played by ARC as their home nations were once subject to the interventions by the Americans and other farang powers. Dispersed by their own governments, brought together by fate, the peoples of Fort Quileute created a cosmopolitan refugee society.

Each district administered its own district rules, often organized along the spiritual life of the respective community, through cramped meeting rooms that doubled for prayer and ritual. Headmen and elders were appointed to a "Senate" of sheiks that governed the overall population. Differences and disputes between the communities were mediated by the Al Falah Trade Union, the name of their embittered exile reappropriated for their new success.

This arrangement kept peace between Arab and Jew, Turk and Kurd, Persian and Mandaean. And the drone population exceptionally low- though the ever-pervasive threat of "second exile" into the desert wastes, or conscription into the Sand Scouts to fight scarab-snakes and SMACER bandits under cruel hazing by V3 mercenary officers, already deterred shirk. The worker cohesion of the Al Falah diaspora, assisted by the mystical benefits of the alien artifacts retrieved from sandblasted monolith ruins, created a modestly successful standard of living. When the first Pilgrim caravan arrived from Eaton's Shore, they were amazed to find a rough-cut but shining jewel in the desert, its agridomes filled with well-tilled fields of emmer wheat and barley, its sole factory outputting small batches of fuel cells, robotic parts, and textiles.

Notes:

Space base art is "Exoplanet Space Station" by Alfie Rodriguez

Agridomes (agricultural domes) are from Outpost and Outpost 2. Here's a short story from the latter.

Eaton's Shore refers to U.S. Army officer William Eaton, who fought in the First Barbary War.

[Trenacker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fourth picture is "north" by polosatkin on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second picture is "Turbine" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

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

[Trenacker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Trenacker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second image is "Mjolnir" by KaranaK on DeviantArt.

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

[MysticWind]

"The Rainbow Wedding", by Rana al-Mami, watercolors. The bridal couple is flanked by shamdan candelabras, symbolizing clarity and vitality

After mission years of service on behalf of their found families and the city they were made to build, the Pathfinder of the Sea of Thirst and the Muezzin of the Exiled Asabiyyah were finally wedded in the greatest celebration known to Fort Quileute. Incorporating a mosaic of cultural traditions from lost Earth, the ceremony was the boast of the base as all denizens gathered to witness the marriage of these two heroic citizens. Decorated in South Asian henna patterns from the mehndi night before, clad in a dress spun from revived Egyptian cotton strains, Firyal Kašk was escorted to the sofreh aghd wedding table by an honor guard of her fellow Sand Scouts and given away by Colonel Kassad himself. Her groom wore a simple sherwani of pure white as he presented to her the mahr dowry: an ornate jeweled compass crafted from desert glass in Jamshid's foundries, and a key to a larger suite in the base's newly-remodeled hab complex. Their zaffe grand entrance to the reception was accompanied by the beating of dholak and dohol drums, the twinkling of the daf, and the piping of dozens of mizmars.

Pilgrim Joe, a resurrected Titanotylopus camelid, was originally intended to be a gift to the Wrangler Lodge prior to yet another vendetta with the Hunters of Chiron

Normally a place of somber remembrance, the House of Yearning had never seemed so full of life. From the rising Al Falah workingmen to the nervous, yet boastful ARC directors and their raucous Val Verde Veteran soldiers of fortune, all reveled in the union of this power couple who had done so much for the colony. And it was a celebration that went beyond the walls of the scorching dunes: it was the six-month anniversary of recontact with Terra Nova. The very first caravan from the New Two Thousand had arrived but a fortnight ago, bearing gifts- one of the Governor's famed stunjack cannons for disciplining unruly slaves, an Agenid Hermes hoverbike hardened for desert travel, and even a resurrected Titanotylopus extinct North American giant camel.

The eleven-foot tall prehistoric megafauna, revived by Schreiber Project mad science and gengineered for docility, had been eagerly welcomed by Tuareg and Rajasthani refugees. Camel trainers from the respective Stellar Lifeboat populations had taught the great beast to follow the sound of singing women and the rhythm of the Nigerien Tendé drum. And so it now danced to the great merriment of the Quileute crowds. The wedding couple laughed politely from their table at the center of the library dome, underneath the new Projection Stone exhibit. Satisfied at the reception of their gift, the leader of the Pilgrim caravan, a Regulator officer, sat in attendance with his men as guests, carefully surveying this alien society that they would now bring back to Oscar van de Graaf's fold. His gaze could not help but be drawn to the mysterious rock, its ancient etchings infused with unknown purpose, its polished surface shining with eldritch colors out of space and time.

Notes:

The artist’s depiction of the wedding of Firyal Kašk and her unnamed lover is “Ancient Eastern Wedding” by Hanaa Al-Mansour

Kassad, of course, is a reference to the legendary FORCE soldier and Final Shrike Pilgrim of Hyperion.

Stunjack cannons (& training for police) is the Flavor.txt description for Non-Lethal Methods.

“Space Camel” is by Anastasia Johnson.

Camel dancing is indeed practiced by both Rajasthani people in India and the Tuareg of Niger.

[Trenacker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third image is "Relic" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

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