Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[Trenacker]

Roshann Cobb, age nineteen, in an ad for Targe Cigarettes.

Calling his musings Seed Theory, Roshann Cobb began at age fifteen to propound the idea that he was a prisoner of coping mechanisms he scarcely understood. "Less than the sum of my traumas," he wrote in a Business Organizer purloined from his father's office.

He smoked opium cigarettes and drank wine without knowing why they appealed to him. Started fights for no better reason than the mood struck him. Found himself placing bets on chess games he already knew he would throw. Confounded by the complexity of his own case, the adolescent Cobb chose an easier study: his father, Tai-Pan Ian Dunross Struan.

There were similar cracks in the allegedly brilliant facade. He was the notoriously jealous master of a multinational conglomerate without ever being able to exert order in his own household. Made and broke eight marriages despite a decades-long and very public infatuation with the same mistress, placing his financial holdings in jeopardy each time. Alienated each of his four legitimate and twelve illegitimate children to the point that several were institutionalized and one attempted to stab him. That last, he shot dead in self-defense.

Ian Dunross Struan, Chairman of Struan's Pacific Trading Company, date unknown.

With this new perspective in hand, Cobb fit his hypothesis to other contexts: industrial accidents brought on by failures of organizational culture, such as the failure of Ice Binder One at the mouth of the Isidis Basin on Mars; public health crises exacerbated by the performative medical obscurantism of well-educated politicians; even the selection process for United Nations Mission to Alpha Centauri prime contractors. The results overwhelming supported the existence of the Collective Unconscious, a mental schema of preferences, phobias, and logical defects common to every member of the human race.

Cobb's great desire was to create a taxonomy of the mind--a master reference to filter the personal from the impersonal. Here is what it means to dream of falling, to obsess over danger, to profess faith in something intangible. Without this work, Cobb predicted that the Unity survivors would merely repeat the mistakes of previous generations.

For how can I know you if our common ancestors keep getting in the way? - White Rabbit's Refuge

The role of genetic inheritance and the large size of the data sets necessary to make his proofs caused Cobb to take special interest in the Human Ascendancy and the Children of Chiron. Collaboration with Pahlavi came naturally: both societies were comfortable with slavery and, lacking for alternatives, it was convenient that the two should make common cause. Anhaldt, on the other hand, extended the services of his data-techs only as a victim of extortion.

Earth's population reached a high of 4.9 billion in 1986 only to collapse to 2.2 billion in 2070, slightly less than a century later. "Replacement labor" to sustain the global economy was provided by androids. This Radio-Dispatched Unit (RDU) was sold by the Park Chaebol in various configurations as a general laborer and night watchman. The Unity Robotics Conservancy (RC), so-called because it maintained existing designs rather than inventing new ones, embraced the RDU as an especially servicable companion for Chironian settlers because of its very low complexity and compatibility with atomic batteries. The large eyes were projections on the plasticized housing that protected the unit's superprocessor.

Cobb devoted about half his shipboard time to cargo selection and the RDUs were early finds. Because the RC couldn't know precisely what kind of mission package would be necessary, it organized the parts in vast lots. Cobb's scrap heaps contained potentially hundreds of unbuilt copies, along with about twenty first put together by D'Almeida's security forces to provide distractions while fighting the Spartans. Each forearm assembly housed a shredder barrel.

Most of Cobb's research was self-contained within base intranets. The faction never developed a Datalinks. Although the Tomorrow Institute is known to have made several failed attempts to obtain Cobb's research notes via Probe Team insertion, it is not even certain the material survived the Factor's capture by Pahlavi after the two leaders fell out.

Better-attested is the passion with which Cobb revisited his earlier thinking after Pahlavi removed him from the Punishment Sphere, a "cure" she claimed had broken the prisoner of his addictions. Cobb was disturbed to find significant differences between the brain activity of first- and latter-generation colonists, a trend broken only among captive Hivemen.

Sources:
Young Roshann Cobb is "Somebody go tell Andy he is smoking again" by Lidiash on DeviantArt.

Actor Pierce Brosnan is our Ian Dunross Struan, a character from James Clavell's Asian Saga.

RDUs are "Retro Robot Prints" by JubbenRobot on DeviantArt, inspired by Forbidden Planet.

[Trenacker]

HMS Vanguard, last of a breed, photographed at Port David, Israel (formerly Egypt's Port Faud), in 1977. Laid down at the start of the Second World War in October 1941, she commissioned only in May 1946, but served the Royal Navy for sixty years thereafter.

Lone battleship in the Fleet from 1958 to 2002, Vanguard inspired powerful emotion in contemporary observers. To Tory MPs, the sleek white hull was an enduring symbol of empire--proof the lion still had claws. During the First Kenya Emergency, when she cruised off Mombasa to the toasts of the settler elite, Izvestzia named her a "terror weapon." Speaking to the press during the Falklands War, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described the huge warship as "a final word to the Argentinian junta on Our Islands." Nearer the end of her service life, Commodore Fleet Air Arm Bernard Molesley called the warship "shameful--a hulk, really, that has been kept on far too long."

Many a study proposed that Vanguard be struck from the Navy list and broken up for low-background steel but the Colonial Office found it convenient to "send a gunboat" wherever appreciation of British prerogatives or the safety of British nationals was in doubt. And so Vanguard was present for the Partition of India (1947), much of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1954, 1959-1960), the First Kenyan Emergency (1954-1955), the Suez Crisis (1956), the First Biafran Crisis (1967-70), and the 1982 Falklands War. Though nobody knew it then, Vanguard actually fired her main armament for the last time in February 1960 in Malaya.

Time savaged her more surely than any enemy. By 1975, fouling had reduced the "fast" battleship's top speed to just 24 knots while her big guns were inoperable for want of proper maintenance and unspoiled propellant. Fresh shells were ordered from the U.S. Navy, but the two batches received were defective and HM Government declined to accept a third.

Over the course of her very long service life, Vanguard lost three of her four 15" turrets, half her 5.25" turrets, and nearly all her remaining Bofors guns to make provision for Seacat point-defense missiles and Royal Marine Commandos. Post-refit Vanguard incorporated technologies the U.N. would later select for the Mission to Alpha Centauri, including CCTV guidance packages (for the Seacat launchers) and laser dazzle systems (for use against the pilots of low-flying aircraft). Damage control drills conducted aboard Vanguard, French battleships Suffren and D'Estaing, and the American Iowa and New Jersey-class battleships helped to inform the procedures later adopted for Unity.

Not all of the changes were highly regarded by the Navy that ordered them. When called up for Operation Corporate, lack of faith in Seacat caused Vanguard to delay sailing while a make-shift gun armament, Bofors and Oerlikons, was hastily cut from museum ships to bulk up her antiaircraft capability.

On paper, the match-up in the South Atlantic was a close one. The Argentines were operating two carrier battle groups, centered around Colossus-class carriers, ARA Independencia and ARA Veinticinco de Mayo, respectively. Together, they could put aloft eighteen A-4Q Skyhawk light attack aircraft.Independencia sailed in the company of two elderly cruisers, the General Belgrano (herself a Seacat operator) and the all-gun Nueve de Julio. The British mustered three carriers of their own: Hermes, Invincible, and Eagle, followed much later by Vanguard and two Tiger-class light cruisers reactivated from Standby Squadron Chatham. The battleship provided accommodation for much of Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward's planning staff.

Once on-station in the South Atlantic, Vanguard assumed the role of armored decoy. She was struck twice during the war, aft and amidships, by Exocet missiles, courtesy of Argentine Super Étendards. Both hit above the water line and one was totally defeated by her armor. The ship suffered additional damage when hit by the burning wreckage of a Skyhawk brought down too near by one of her escorts, HMS Blake.

In 2040, HM Government admitted Vanguard had sometimes sailed with five-kiloton nuclear artillery shells, although it was categorically denied that any were issued for Corporate.

Boiler trouble discovered in March 2001 finally put paid to Vanguard. She was decommissioned in February 2002 and sold for scrap. The breakers took her under tow to India but she foundered coming into the yards and partially sank in rough waters not three miles off the coast. There she remained, a popular target of photographers and gulls, until 2048, when a recovery fleet sent by Morgan Marine re-floated the hulk and shuttled it back across the Arabian Sea to Üroan, an unrecognized secessionist state on an artificial island huddled in the shadow of Puntland. Huge sheds hid the hull from view for more than thirty-eight months. (In Washington, HM's ambassador was obliged to make repeated assurances there was nothing of special interest left aboard, though it was implicitly understood that the hull was being stripped for armor to use on another warship.)

An American ballistic missile submarine, Rhode Island, bombarded Üroan with eight submarine-launched cruise missiles. Pentagon brass were horrified when at least two were shot down by land-based point defenses. Close reconnaissance proved impossible, but satellite photography suggested a kill: at least five of the missiles hit their target. But Vanguard wasn't there.

The life-extension package didn't come near to restoring the ex-battlewagon, now rechristened Surger, to its former glory, but as a poor man's cruiser, it had huge capacity for parasite craft and, because of its tonnage and power plant, was an overmatch for anything short of a capital ship. Morgan Industries used it as a mothership for "anti-piracy" and customs enforcement operations.

Senior Morgan Emergency Services rescue-techs on Honua Station remembered their time aboard Surger well enough to regale Unity trainees with stories about hours spent trying to staunch leaks in Surger's hull. (Apparently, she was never fully watertight again after her long soak off India.) Many of the principles these techs used to make Vanguard serviceable again were applied aboard Unity, including installation of triple water mains and quadrupally-redundant generators.


Source:
A friend, whom we shall acknowledge as Ven, thoughtfully provided several of the recommendations used to update this article on 5/1/2023.

[MysticWind]

Troopers! Word from on high have reached mine ears. The general declares this vendetta canceled, and we can all go home. The traitor will get his bricks of blood- the blood of our brothers-in-arms. But, we can all go home. Law, order, and loyalty, all sold to the highest bidder. But we can all go home. I shall not. Let all with the will and the resolution to fight the forces of anarchy join me. Make us a sword of the State, may the light of unity strike down those who reject its precepts. Only then will we have a home to return to! - Inciting address of the Insubordination at Inachus River

The leader of perhaps the most radical of the sub-factions of the Restoration of Earth hails from a distinctly placid pedigree. Chef d'escadron Marie du Lac was born and raised in Évian-les-Bains, a resort spa town on the shores of Lake Geneva. The child of a local hotelier and a socialite, both with greater ambitions for their middle class family, she found herself eminently bored with her bucolic idyll as her parents gently prodded her to seek an arena greater than her native tourist industry.

The defining event was when her father’s Hôtel Savoie-faire played host to the Évian Peace Talks, the accord that finalized Algeria’s devolution from France. For weeks, the sixteen-year-old saw national politicians, veteran warriors, terrorists or freedom fighters, U.N. bureaucrats, and the hodgepodge of schmoozers- including her cousins from southwest of the lake- pile into her family’s home. This terrific gathering of the aggrieved had its excitement even further elevated after a small bomb detonated during the proceedings, harming none but wrecking the Pontecorvo Room. After all of the shouting and speeches, blood and thunder, Algeria had gained its independence in name only, remaining an associate member of the French Union in perpetuity and humiliatingly losing the pied noir enclave of Oranais. But she had found her calling.

This was the era of French efforts to flex its muscles abroad. But surprising her parents, du Lac aspired to an even higher arena, that of the world itself. Enrolling into the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld University for Peacekeeping at Stockholm, she sought to become a Hammershield, one of the elites of the U.N. Security Force. Her eagerness led to a career among the wartorn conflict zones from Ambazonia to Florida, attempting to keep the peace between militant factions, but also often attempting to make a little peace herself. Du Lac’s ability to tread the line on rules of engagement as nimbly as a lawyer program enabled her units to operate with greater lassitude. Preemptive strikes, enhanced interrogations, extraordinary renditions, somehow she always found ways to justify each under the letter of the law, even when it might have grossly violated its spirit. After all, she would proclaim, was not peace the ultimate law, and was she not fulfilling its spirit by facilitating its arrival?

Was in Montréal when the bombs went off. Posed as an FLQ member in scheme that ultimately disarmed a terrorist cell located in the Plateau, claimed the illegal impersonation was only recourse in a life-or-death solution. Later launched a decapitation strike on Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the local NATO command unit, to prevent an imminent battle with militants in the Underground City. While actions would have been Hague-worthy under any other leadership, Secretary General Mongkut himself promoted du Lac to glory. Not to be a Hammershield, but a Knight Killer- an antiterrorist operative of the United Nations Special Operations Coalition.

Stint at UNSOC cut short by excessive disagreement with leadership. The coalition’s restrained, nonlethal combat doctrine, emphasized after Mongkut’s assassination and replacement by a less cavalier Sec Gen, proved the start of culture clash. Resigned after denied use of force against amassed NATO Norden forces spotted in the Lapland during op to quell Soviet-backed socialist Sámi insurgency.

Returned home to a hero’s welcome briefly to witness father appointed cultural attaché at Helvetian embassy, mother elected to the Senate. Received degree in international law from Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, thesis “The Necessity of Hegemony”, arguing on the basis of Hobbes’ view of war of all against all and Mearsheimer's offensive realism, not to mention her own combat experience, the burden the U.N. must take on to become an actual authority to establish true peace.

Because the d'Avrail government considered Wallonia to be patrimony of Metropolitan France, national law enforcement, rather than outright military troops, were used in the occupation

Subsequently joined the National Gendarmerie. Foiled multiple anarchist, antiwar, decolonial plots during turbulent post-Operation Golf years. Monitored both pro-NATO and pro-EU elements alike, uncovering a safe house of retourneur stay-behinds in Marseilles. Received Médaille de la Gendarmerie nationale for heroism in the consolidation of the département of French Wallonia following the War of Belgian Dissolution. Known by locals as “Mademoiselle Guillotine.” Drummed out of service for insistence that French policy reengage with United Nations commitments, “shepherd internationalism like Jupiter from on high.” Suspected of harboring too many ties with former U.N. comrades.

When Unity opportunity presented itself, the French government eagerly pawned off the overeager internationalist as an Earthside security risk who could nonetheless assert Gallic prestige in space. Mission leaders decided to make du Lac the head of clandestine Blue Operations division. Akin to DEEPEYES was to the office of the Secretary-General, Blue Ops was to serve at the sole discretion of the captain only. Barring his incapacitation, this division would activate, operating fully autonomously to ensure the continuity of the mission. Empowered by the extraordinary abilities granted by U.N. Space Authority Resolution 0451, the tactical sleeper agents of Blue Ops were allowed to violate the very Charter itself, including the Declaration of Human Rights. The inclusion of the Blue Operations agents was perhaps another case of bureaucratic overrun and redundancy, especially as it was unbeknownst to the planners that Sec Gen Simmelmann had already embedded a DEEPEYES cell.

Due to a cryotube programming oversight, the sleeper agents were awoken late towards the final act of Planetfall. Furious at the murder of the captain and apoplectic at the chaos Garland and his staff had allowed to fester, Blue Ops took their silenced ceramic Glock 7 pistols, poison-tipped crossbows, and sentry guns from out of hidden caches and cut a swath of destruction across the ship. The Blue Terror lasted eighteen hours, eliminating scores of mutineers. Private military contractors were targeted as illegal fighters. Ship’s security force officers caught in the crossfire were not spared. Du Lac directed her team of furies to “deprioritize retention of incompetent elements.” Any personnel- combatant or not- were summarily subject to loyalty checks. In the most notorious instance, Blue Ops detained a mixed group of Spartans, Kellerites, Holnists, and colonists suspected of mutiny within a cargo hold. A mysterious power failure disabled airlock controls, launching the entire group into space.  From a repair spacewalk, cosmonaut Colonel Vadim Kozlov reported seeing the grisly sight- “the doors burst, and as a black parade, dozens upon dozens marched out to touch the void.”

Blue Operators surround a trio of hapless peacekeepers in Hangar Bay ∫ during Planetfall

Blue Ops finally halted their rampage when a formation of U.N. Marines forced compliance with heavy firepower. Acceding to Marcel Salan’s authority under the rationale that big guns gave him the position to reassert control of the mission, du Lac designated him provisional mission leader. The relationship was fraught from the start- the Blue Operators dismissed the jarheads as sloppy buffoons who had failed to prevent the degeneration of the mission, and they were the ones left to clean after their mess. The Canadian Marine for his part correctly viewed the French agent and her team as a death squad in U.N. colors, bound to a mandate whose resignation was no less than Garland’s body. Yet the team of combatants fought their way through the dying ship, and broke for the surface.

Chef d'escadron du Lac became a founding member of the Restoration of Earth’s ragtag assemblage of mission loyalists. From the start Salan sought to isolate her latent authoritarianism and her Blue Operators’ bloodthirst. Despite misgivings of the potential to alienate allyable factions, Salan designated Blue Ops as an elite unit within the Defense Directorate rather than with the Interior Directorate, preferring to set them loose as soldiers against enemies of the Restoration, instead of jackbooted police against its own citizens. From Slowwind to Asbolus, her campaigns reinforced the already fearsome military abilities of the faction. Clad in a simple uniform, slinging bolos of orange air gun darts tipped with Conantokin-P, the neurotoxin of the South Sea cone shell, du Lac has become a face of Restorationist power.

As the mission years crept by, the notoriously efficient Chef has issued her own pronouncement within the faction’s datalinks. The Ultramarine Doctrine is a simple document illustrating her cause: the mission of the Restoration of Earth is the Unity mission itself, which cannot be abrogated by cowardly deserters such as Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida. Until no humans exist on Planet, the mission remains in effect, and it is up to dutiful and upright loyalists to assert its existence. Thus, the Restoration cannot simply pack up and return to Earth. Any such venture would be no more than a jaunt, a side-quest to fetch reinforcements and resupply, to continue the original mission. The United Nations’ sovereignty over Chiron is inviolate, and those who seek to usurp its authority- whether rogue charter corporations, terroristic militants, or rebel warlords that call themselves factions- must submit or fall to its righteous authority.

Understandably, the strident militarism of the Ultramarine cause has alarmed even the stratocrats of the Restoration. Adherents to du Lac’s doctrine are known as Reclaimers- called derisively as Revanchists, Rerunners, Reruns, and even more offensive pejoratives. Yet there is a subversive popularity to the sub-faction among the younger officers of the faction. The Reclaimers, after all, represent a cause that is readily available and foreseeable to the faction, and does not require humanity to reinvent the interstellar fusion drive spaceship to spend untold decades to return to a planet of unknown provenance. And there is a certain satisfaction to imagining the Restoration asserting its will to subjugate the fractious factions of Planet, rather than turning tail.

Restorationist troopers display their pro-Ultramarine sentiments while occupying Tribal base Putnam's Redeeming

As for du Lac, her Doctrine makes some suggestions as to how the reunification of the Unity diaspora might commence. As the rightful continuation government of the U.N. mission, the Restoration must first seek to explore every avenue short of war to return its wayward brothers into its fold. Diplomatic, economic, even legal methods must be used so that friendly- or weak- factions may see the leading light of the Restoration. Then, the threat of vendetta against those weak but unfriendly. Next, probe action, following the political engineering methods of the U.N. Intelligence Cell, may be used against those resistant to military force, but internally divisible. Finally, vendetta against all rogue nations unwilling to submit to U.N. power.

As to the identity of these, it is a common parlor game among recruits at Roméo Dallaire Academy to determine where each known faction falls under. But it is known that the Chef has her own idiosyncratic opinions. The Spartan Federation, for instance, is considered not an imminent military threat, but a potential source of expansion- respecting the Colonel’s ironclad discipline, du Lac believes the Spartans would be a great boon to a new U.N. Security Force under Restoration authority she dubs “MilSec”- if only Santiago could be convinced to join them. The archnemeses, on the other hand, include the meek and mild Peacekeeping Forces. Worse than an adversary, she believes, is the traitor, the illegitimate claimant, the poisoner of loyalties. Du Lac and her camp has repeatedly spoiled Restorationist attempts to open diplomatic ties with the Peacekeepers, viewing them as the ultimate enemy. Though the Chef holds no less vitriol for the New State. Ostensibly declaring them as the Restoration’s most dangerous naval enemy (the Nautilus Pirates, in comparison, being powerful without but easily divisible within). But it is also whispered that Marie du Lac still harbors a smidgen of nationalist nostalgia and pride, and cannot stomach a rival pretender to the mantle of Marianne.

Casting

Marie du Lac is portrayed by Marianne Thieme of the Party for the Animals

Image Credits

MPs surrounded by blue uniformed gunmen is from Akira

Gendarmerie Nationale in a city is "Police of France" by Jose Hernandez

Notes:

Marie du Lac is the leader of the Mission Loyalists, a  faction from the SMAC Fac Pack mod project. Details on her ideology's basis on international realism and Leviathan is based on correspondence with mod co-creator nweismuller.

Marianne Thieme is the former party leader of the Party for the Animals, a Dutch animal rights party, known for her elaborate costumes. While no longer in charge, the PvdD has recently hit a polling record. Multiparty democracy, at least in Europe, is fun.

I first learned of Thieme from intrepid Twitter fringe and other politics correspondent @PopulismUpdates, who uses her visage as his avatar. Populism Updates Substack here.

The opening quote is a loose adaptation of Colonel William Guile's speech from Street Fighter.

“Hammershield” is the English translation of Hammarskjöld, and the Hammershields would make a cool name for a peacekeeping force, and this name does appear in The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga.

Joseph Manderley’s password is “knight_killer.”

The conception of Blue Operations is thematically similar to the Black Ops of Half-Life at least when it comes to their relationship with the U.N. Marines (analogous to the Black Ops' attitudes towards the HECU Marines), but they are probably dressed differently. Another source of inspiration is Tom Clancy's The Division.

Using Conantokin-P as a poison weapon comes from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

[Trenacker]

National Profile: French Union

France is an idea. France is progress. France is stubborn. As Unity left the Sol System, France was still synonymous with political erraticism, fashion, haute cuisine, automation, civilian use of nuclear energy, and, less salubriously, colonial repression.

France spent the twenty-first century attempting to unwind the long diminution of its political, cultural, and economic relevance during the nineteenth and twentieth. This meant bloody attempts to retain the crown jewels of its old colonial empire and refusal on principal to integrate with political and economic initiatives not of its own making.

Results varied. French ambitions exceeded French resources. Until the mid-1960s, France was essentially a pensioner of the United States and a junior partner to Great Britain in ham-fisted attempts to reassert European prerogatives in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Despite some success, this humiliation was too much to bear, and, starting as early as 1958 under the leadership of war hero Charles de Gaulle, France began to chart the independent and often-hypocritical course in world affairs that his many less-talented successors would follow for another hundred and fifty years.

Paratroopers of the 1er Régiment de Parachutistes d'Infanterie de Marine watch their comrades drop in Laos, 1971.

Politically, France succeeded in retaining Algeria, much of Lebanon (divided with Israel), and most of Indochina. A combination of American bombers and gifts of tactical nuclear weapons salvaged major blunders at Điện Biên Phủ, but the wayward colonies remained bleeding ulcers, atrociously expensive to pacify and severely divisive at home. Student riots and labor strikes became a semi-permanent feature of life in continental France, so common they reshaped the work week and dictated train schedules. Workers received automatic time off because employers could not prevent their attendance at demonstrations. White settler populations grew explosively from the mid-twenty-first century as rising sea levels in Europe made emigration to war-torn colonies more attractive, and together with ex-servicemen and local garrisons, formed a power bloc that French presidents crossed only at their mortal peril.

This great inversion of power tempted politicians to use all three subjugated nations in ways they would not have used their own. Southern Algeria and French Polynesia became testing grounds for the French nuclear weapons program. In 2030, the DGSE sabotaged Friendship Station Nam Đinh in North Vietnam, which melted down unexpectedly at the cost of eight hundred thousand lives. Ecological advocate Deirdre Skye explained this cruel dynamic to tens of millions of readers for the first time in 2059:

The more they were victimized by the decades of atomic fallout caused by tests and by war, by the countless industrial accidents encouraged through weak regulation, by environmental travesties inflicted through the utter carelessness of their colonial masters, the greater was their dependency on the administrative and logistical powers those same masters refused to let them build for themselves. This was the essence of colonialism. We would beat them until they cried out for us. – The Eden Thesis

After a period of post-war adjustment in the mid-twentieth century, the gross domestic product of France consistently ranked fifth or sixth globally. Led by strong energy, agricultural, recycling, and heavy manufacturing sectors, the French economy was diverse and its workforce highly skilled. Behind the two superpowers, France was third in the sale of defense products. Behind the United States and Japan, French firms vied with those of India for third place in the sale of consumer electronics equipment. French automakers Renault, Peugot, Panhard, and Citroën had a stranglehold on the African and South American markets.

Paris, France, c. 2040

Influenced by both national chauvinism and socialist deputies, French economic policies were blatantly protectionist. Foreigners paid dearly for access to French markets, and mercantilist policies turned Algeria, Indochina, Lebanon, and later, Quebec, into captive markets for goods and services made in France. In the late 1970s, France developed its own telephonic, videotex intranet service, the Minitel, never fully embracing the World Wide Web.

A Minitel terminal.

The Minitel preceded the Web and, until 2005, offered considerably more functionality to its users for lower cost, including directory services, transportation scheduling, mail-order shopping, library services, games, and chat. To encourage wider adoption of the Minitel, the French government distributed terminals at its own expense in campaigns that reached every corner of the Union. Similar gifts were made to French allies. The scheme was remarkably profitable after factoring in savings from reductions in print services, physical mail delivery, and the use of live operators. The government was deliberate in courting potential opponents of the Minitel, especially newspapers, which received preferential treatment on the service.

Eventually, the Minitel’s capabilities were surpassed by the World Wide Web both in terms of data speeds (served by dedicated lines rather than coterminously with voice traffic) and application variety. Nevertheless, the French government resisted encroachment of “foreign” services and successfully leveraged the monopoly status of the Minitel to charge “extortionate” fees to foreign entities seeking an entree into France’s territoire électronique via the Web, which they required to be done via the Minitel. One legacy of the Minitel is that France was essentially behind a firewall. Thus, the country suffered considerably less than other developed countries during the decade of Global Information Purges beginning in 2017.

Culturally, France was safe in the hands of Élodie, Minister of Culture for three presidents, who organized for France on the Minitel an exhaustive database of language, genealogy, art, literature, music, cuisine, and national mythology that provided the pattern for the subsequent U.N. effort to index the cultural heritage of the Earth. Élodie called her achievement La Note.

France naturally resisted the creation of the European Common Market, both from fear of competition and to discourage the success of another forum in which Britain or West Germany might press their respective national interests. To get a run in on its neighbors, France was a leader in detente, the systematic reduction of tensions with the Soviet Union, and became the major pipeline for passing western technology through the Iron Curtain. In return, the Soviets cancelled, withheld, or reduced their traditional support for insurgencies and client regimes active in French colonies.

In international politics, France quit NATO. Paris refused to contemplate nuclear test bans. France also put itself forth as the patron-of-last-resort for reactionary regimes from Pretoria to Taipei and intervened aggressively in Saharan Africa under the pretext of responsibility for its former colonies. During the Burst Wars of the 2040s, Foreign Legionnaires parachuted down to preserve French-aligned governments in Mali and the Central African Republic in the face of pressure from Morgan SafeHaven. A proposal to reconstitute French Equatorial Africa (ostensibly as a bulwark against corporatism) went nowhere, however.

The Morgan "starscraper" obscures the moon on an otherwise clear night in central N'Djamena.

To complicate attempts at restoration of the status quo, arms dealer Nwabudike Morgan invited Millennarian separatists to settle the Burst Zone. Promises of sweet water were mostly untrue, but his contractors had enough helicopters to give most rebels and ex-government loyalists trouble.

French intervention force deploying to fighting positions in eastern Mali ahead of an expected raid by Morgan-backed militia.

Without success, France attempted repeatedly to assume leadership of the Non-Alignment Movement, which it hoped to bulk up into a counterweight against the United Nations. This courtship was ill-fated: as an inveterate imperial power, France lacked the credibility to speak for nations that themselves were only recently liberated and wanted no part of the kind of neo-colonialism in which France unreflectively trafficked.

French domestic politics was famous for its oscillation between Socialists and Conservatives (Republicans). Socialists predictably opposed automation and favored detente with the Soviets while conservatives took opposing views. The French remained notoriously sensitive about their country’s relevance in global affairs, and proud of the manner in which they have navigated between the Scylla and Charybdis of Cold War alliances while at the same time adapting to the inundation of more than ten percent of European France’s total landmass. (Rising sea levels also claimed large swaths of populous northern Algeria and southern Indochina.) Frenchmen also credit themselves for the continued survival of pariah regimes in South Africa, Israel, Rhodesia, Biafra, and Taiwan.

Traditional Survivalism didn’t get much traction in France even among the colons, who frequently shared the Holnist’s taste for machismo, violence, and the politics racial grievance but preferred to suborn rather than fight the government and its all-important ministries—the best guarantees, they knew, of their precarious livelihoods. Nevertheless, revanchism gripped the French, manifesting in land-grabs on behalf of “oppressed” French-speaking minorities in Wallonia, Switzerland, and Riviera Italy during the chaos of the Floods.

Unsurprisingly, France played a major role in the Second Crisis of Québec Secession, running diplomatic and media interference for the separatists and their excesses. French companies and French intelligence helped get weapons to FLQ fighters. After Quebec gained its negotiated independence, France organized the referendum that resulted in its accession to the shambolic Union as an “independent” member. Quebec Francophones were happy to participate in this arrangement, and France soon nationalized Canadian and international firms resident in the ex-province, which became a cockpit of railroad and aerospace manufacturing. A majority of those who left France as refugees from flooding resettled in Quebec.

The French military was well-respected. The French soldier was tough, innovative, and above all, daring. The French were acknowledged experts in counter-insurgency warfare. France made its military equipment available on liberal terms to virtually any buyer. It did a brisk business with the Portuguese, Israelis, Argentines, and South Africans.

The Force de Frappe, France’s nuclear strike assets, consisted of land-based tracked and rail launchers and submarine-carried nuclear missiles. (France’s three aircraft carriers could arm their strike fighters with nuclear missiles, but were not officially considered part of the Force, which remained a dyad.)

French intelligence had a hair-raising reputation the world over. The DGSE took on the role of extortionist, applying the necessary “incentives” for smaller countries to play within the boundaries set out by the politicians in Paris. French spies were killers, it was said, and could be hired to carry out the dirty work of shahs, board executives, and even the Soviet Politburo.

France’s very active space program was based at Korou in French Guyana and in the Algerian desert, with lesser operations in French Polynesia and leased facilities in the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville). In 2002, construction commenced on a space elevator in French Guyana that contributed to the construction and fitting out of U.N.S. Unity. Though a founding participant in lunar settlement (a domed French Quarter is among the very few charms of Verne City), France focused mostly on “downward-looking” space applications via satellite operations, including deep ocean mapping.

Verne City, Luna, c. 2051

French support for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri peaked in the 2040s, waxing as American focus was diverted to war at home, but many French politicians still viewed the project as a constant and painful reminder that there were other more potent actors than they on the world stage. France charged the U.N. heavily for access to its space launch infrastructure.

Two French mega-corporations, the Groupe Aéronautique Degére (GADE) and manufacturer of prime movers, Former Ciel, were major sub-contractors on the Unity Project, together employing a workforce of almost 90,000 in Earth and space.

The major French “bequests” to the Mission were a large stock of surplus hand weapons (mostly ex-American) left over from its colonial wars and tens of thousands of older Minitel terminals for connection to Network Nodes.

Sources:
French paratroopers picture is from a History Channel website article on the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Picture of future Paris is by French company Vincent Callebaut Architectures, shown on archdaily in an article by Holly Giermann.

"Starscraper" name and picture are from "Starcraper #1" by miggysmallzXD on DeviantArt.

Desert cathedral is "Arizona Arcology - Earth That War" by nixoninevile on DeviantArt.

Picture of French troops in Mali is by Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times.

Verne City picture is from this article by Joshua Hawkins on BGR.

The character of Élodie was created by Strategos' Risk/MysticWind.

[Trenacker]

Unity Tech: Stims

Stims were mildly narcotic stimulants used as performance-enhancers. They were chemically simple. Primary ingredients included caffeine, Ibuprofen, and epinephrine. Stims were popular among military and space professions.

A stim was injected sub-subcutaneously using a single-use pneumatic auto-injector about the size of an adult thumb. The injection was suitable for delivery through capillaries and could therefore be applied to almost any portion of the body.

The expected primary users of stims among mission staff were emergency and security personnel. Stims were Class 2 equipment, issued personally to all crew for their lock boxes and included in all medical, emergency response, and survival kits.

Stims were habit-forming. Stim addiction was a disqualifying trait for mission personnel recruited by the United Nations. According to the World Health Organization, nearly all users of higher-grade narcotics also abused stims.

Private manufacture of stims was very common, especially by teenagers and spacers. Modification of stims was treated as a serious crime by most judicial systems.

Hallmarks of stim addiction included eye mydriasis, episodic hypertension, insomnia, constipation, and heart arrhythmia. After extended use, side effects included visual, auditory, and tactile exclusion, creating a sharp cliff of diminishing returns.

Because of disparities in the supplies accessible to different factions before Planetfall, med-techs rarely had the medicines necessary to treat the many traumatic injuries afflicting their patients, nor any way to manufacture them. Stims were a popular, albeit minimally effective, treatment for chronic pain.

Factor Roshann Cobb of the Dreamers of Chiron suffered from addiction to stims.

Stims were a part of the culture of many factions. Stims could be obtained from vending boxes at most University bases, though their public use was limited to academics (drones were considered less-responsible). Stims were paid out as an accompaniment to wages by the Dreamer faction, which produced them in bulk. Morganite overseers were trained to dispense stims to any worker that met their daily quotas. They were available on a complimentary basis on the gaming floors of company casinos. Mercenary outfits expected stims before fighting.

Leaders in the Ascendancy, New State, Gaians, Hunters, and Conclave inveighed loudly against stims, which they saw as antisocial, though they were popular with Hunter road crews and New State mariners. Colonel Corazón Santiago seized stims when she could and openly punished those who used them. The Human Hive outlawed them altogether.

Security Bots check for stim effects before drones are released from the Entertainment District of Morgan Bank back into GenPop.

Sources:
First image is "Stim Pack" by karlavaggio on DeviantArt.

Second image is "Future Nightlife District" by ClaudioPilia on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

As Unity's launch date neared, the cost of pretense mounted. Governments and mega-corporations that had been dithering with the United Nations over the terms of their participation now sang a different tune. Between January 1, 2068 and November 1, 2071, a total of 7,800 launches were carried out between the American, European, Soviet, French, South African, Chinese, Scandinavian, Argentine, Japanese, Indian, Iranian, and Israeli space agencies, never less than four a day. High-value personnel and equipment were recalled from as far as Hippocamp, a moon of Neptune.

If the expedition were really leaving, it must be because the United Nations had information that others did not. Was Earth truly beyond salvaging? Best not to be left behind. If unable to join in, what did it hurt to be generous with a final bequest? History dubbed it the Anti-Ozymandias Protocol, a name that would reemerge two hundred years later on Chiron. But that is a story for another day.

Like the stunned womanizer who promises change only after his much-abused lover has at last begun to collect her things, they realized the fullness of their mistake. - What We Left Behind Us

Soviet space habitat Друг рабочего (Worker's Friend) where the first vitamin-replenishment therapies were developed to help combat the debilitating effects of extended weightlessness.

The Unity Generation was notoriously sickly. Radiation sickness, sterility, severe osteoporosis, combat and crash injuries complicated the creation and sustainment of viable colonies.

Unity's bridge was an afterthought. Nobody expected it would ever be used in extremis, for if it were, then per force the ship would have to be so compromised that no input from captain or helmsman would be enough to avert disaster. Either damage control would succeed, or it would fail--quite independently of input from the brass hats. Led astray by the probabilities, Mission Control did not contemplate that a disaster might occur within spitting distance of the expedition's destination. Therefore, the crew did not prepare for one. When Jonathan Garland assembled his command for the first time, he that his scopes furnished little in the way of meaningful information about the status of ship's systems. Two precious hours passed as the groggy, frightened leaders groped their way through a user interface that had changed drastically while they were asleep.

Sources:
First image is "Gone Astray (to the stars) by aerroscape on DeviantArt.

The Anti-Ozymandias Protocol was a faction designed by Cetashwayo for the forum-based mega-game "An Unraveled Tapestry" on SufficientVelocity.

Second image is "FUE Soviet Space Station" by MeckanicalMind on DeviantArt.

Third image is bridge art for the Nostromo from Alien, artist unknown.

[Trenacker]

What's different about the Racing the Darkness universe?

We did not require to be told the obvious--that once the apple is plucked, it can never be restored to the tree. - On the Nature of Progress

An XB-36H Crusader demonstrates the potential of the Nuclear Aircraft Program during a test flight in February 1957, shortly before its acceptance for general service. Under Operate Chrome Dome, a fraction of the American nuclear arsenal was permanently aloft from from 1960 to 2044, resuming in 2054.

The atom bomb was used again in anger after the Second World War. Taking advantage of its strategic bomber force, the United States used atomic weapons against the North Koreans and Chinese four times in 1950 and 1951. Central Intelligence Agency pilots of the American Civil Air Transport program dropped a small atom bomb on Viet Minh forces in early spring 1954, inadvertently dooming much of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps to radiation sickness but lifting the siege on the French base at Dien Bien Phu. The Iraqi Republican Guard detonated an atomic device in Khorramshahr in 1980 during Saddam Hussein's unsuccessful invasion of Iran, with ruinous consequences for the Shatt-al-Arab. (The Imperial Iran military easily shouldered aside Saddam's troops, temporarily occupying Baghdad and prizing away Kurdistan for their trouble.) Pakistan and India traded nuclear salvos during the 1991 Kargil Conflict, an exchange that by some estimates eventually cost the lives of a half-billion people and rendered Gujarat, western Rajasthan, and Sindh essentially uninhabitable. What is believed to be a domestic terrorist partially detonated an atomic device in Seattle in 2051 during the Second American Civil War.

Proliferation, though worrisome to the Great Powers, was widespread. In some cases, patrons assisted their clients to a bomb. The British helped its Commonwealth allies Canada and Australia to find their way to the Bomb. The French underwrote much of the Israeli program, and the Israelis, in turn, assisted the South Africans and the Taiwanese. Spurred by Soviet adventurism in other theaters, the United States quietly helped Communist Yugoslavia grope their way into a deterrent much later. Independent regional powers like India, Pakistan, Argentina, and Iran developed atomics as the bluntest sort of insurance against their traditional adversaries.

There was no convention against the militarization of space, a problem unmoderated except by cost. (As of 2071, only the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are known to have troubled themselves.)

The atomic powers and their dates of accession to the "Club":

• United States of America (1945), now the Restored United States of America
• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1949)
• United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1952)
• French Fourth Republic (1960)
• Canada (NLT 1963)
• Commonwealth of Australia (NLT 1963)
• People's Republic of China (1964), now Empire of Golden China
• State of Israel (NLT 1973)
• Republic of India (1974)
• Federal Republic of German (1975)
• Republic of China (Taiwan) (1979)
• Iraqi Republic (1980) [believed to have been provided by the U.S.S.R.]
• Portuguese Republic (NLT 1986)
• Islamic Republic of Pakistan (1987)
• Republic of Argentina (NLT 1988)
• Republic of South Africa (NLT 1989)
• Imperial State of Iran (NLT 1992)
• Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (2002)

Fission is the primary method by which electrical power is produced worldwide. Most military equipment is powered by nuclear reactors or fission batteries. Most space propulsion is by the nuclear pulse method.

Government trade agencies regularly detonate "commercial-scale" bombs in support of mega-projects around the world, especially in the western United States, Africa, and South America.

Major commercial nuclear and radiation accidents, defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as events involving damage to reactor cores and significant radiation release, occurred at an average rate of three per year in the United States and Canada, starting with an explosion at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls in 1961 running through 1970. Domestic extremism in the United States prompted a reassessment of power system security around the turn of the millennium and in 2023, the Francisco Act significantly increased the stringency of regulations governing emergency operations and physical security at nuclear stations throughout the United States.

Military accidents are also a global commonplace, although for obvious reasons the details are usually suppressed. A rare New York Times expose of May 1992 reported that U.S. Strategic Air Command was unable to account for at least seven bombs in the American arsenal.

At midnight on 30 June 1997, the New Territories reverted to Chinese control, but Hong Kong and Kowloon remained possessions of the British crown. Her Majesty's government used a combination of skyscrapers and shoreline reclamation to make conditions in the Crown colony more tenable. British administration of the New Territories was resumed under a new 99-year lease arranged with Golden China.

Powers that pretended to economic and military greatness valued colonies as easy sources of raw and human material, captive markets for noncompetitive goods and services, quiescent proving grounds, and valuable bases from which to project power into distant regions or, if in equatorial latitudes, to put payloads more cheaply into orbit.

Imperial ambition and atomic terror went hand-in-hand with large standing militaries and the budgets to match.

On the ground, colonial populations often policed themselves. British readers were eminently familiar with the exploits of the King's African Rifles (KAR), the Brigade of Gurkhas, the Singapore Rifles, the Burma Rifles, and the Royal Ulster Rifles. The Far East Expeditionary Corps was composed primarily of fighting men from Algeria, Lebanon, and Indochina.

Mercenaries and expatriates were a common element in many militaries. The French and Spanish operated large foreign legions swelled by the exiles of climate change and fallout. The British enrolled South Sudanese in the KAR. The Portuguese inducted Zairian exiles into the colonial armies of Angola and Mozambique. Rhodesia aggressively courted veterans of French colonial and American internal wars. The richer sovereignties in the IOEZ let contracts for service with firms like Rockhalter and R.J. Earlingborne & Sons that sifted the professional cream off the tops of elite Western units.

At sea, cruisers, especially "through-deck" cruisers with the deck space to support helicopter and vertical take-off/landing aircraft, endured as elements of a well-rounded fleet.

Operating from 1992 to 2050, the Kings Mountain class of American cruisers favored automatic 5" and chemical laser mounts over the temperamental missile armament of other late-century warships and shipped up to six Sea King helicopters in cavernous internal hangars. While highly effective for fleet air defense, the lasers could do almost nothing else, and both the Royal and U.S. Navies found the quick-firing cannon to be even less satisfactory than the TV-guided missiles they were meant to replace.

U.N. Chief of Staff to the General Secretary Pravin Lal described cruisers as "the last bastions of scoundrels," for they possessed enough crew and firepower to conduct essentially independent foreign policy. The theory behind twentieth and twenty-first-century cruiser warfare could be heard echoing on Chiron where military units were at times ungovernable and needed to be given extreme latitude because of basic communications difficulties.

Have just been told I am at war with Sparta and Ascendancy. Leaders, unknown. Their crimes, very bad. Locations, unclear. Reasons for hostilities, unclear. Friendly casualties, very high. -Personal Diary

France insisted on the AZERTY keyboard, complicating the lives of datatechs for more than a century afterward.

Global telecommunications were hamstrung by long-standing international animosities, extreme weather, and regime obsession with domestic stability even in the traditional democracies. Electronic data storage limits were low, retrieval speed even lower, and the power draw of supercomputers capable of industrially relevant calculation was extreme. Rudimentary national intranets created a phenomenon called the Splinternet, meaning that information exchange had a variable rate of speed, proceeding speedily within the same language bloc but slowly between blocs. Scientific and cultural experience became fragmented. A Soviet scientist knew of theories and techniques his American counterparts did not, and vice versa.

Sources:
NB-36H picture is a 1955 image from the U.S. Department of Defense (U.S. Air Force) labeled DF-SC-83-09332.

For more on nuclear escalation during the Korean War, see this article in Smithsonian Magazine.

"Neo Hong-Kong Sunset" by is by JJcanvas on DeviantArt.

Cruiser CA-847 is "Advanced Gun Cruiser beautyshot" by kaasjager.

"Splinternet" concept introduced to me by MisterP on alternatehistory.com.

[Trenacker]

Tell me more about what's different about the Racing the Darkness universe.

What's up in Africa?

• Western tolerance for independent settler states was almost limitless, reflecting anti-Communist hysteria (worse since the Americans themselves had used the Bomb), the political impossibility of critiquing colonialist practices in which Europe was still heavily involved, and the need to "outsource" leadership on the continent during the apogee of Hypersurvivalism in the North Atlantic world.
• The successes of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga in the 1960s and Morgan Industries in the 2020s convinced other companies that nation-building could be a profitable endeavor.

What's up in South America?

• Early points of divergence for the alternate history. In Brazil, the colonizers held on tight. In Peru, they returned shortly after independence. (Spain reconquered Peru in stages beginning with the Chincha Islands War.)
• In return for stabilizing its faltering economy, Spain gifted the Peruvian Amazon to Nwabudike Morgan as virtually a private fiefdom.
• A Bolivian junta stood for self-determination on the continent but was in fact dependent upon American defense assistance to pursue simultaneous wars of territorial aggrandizement against three of its five neighbors.

Gas diffusion towers have their roots in the subterranean mining complex below the silver mountain that is Bolivian Potosí.

Is the level of technological advancement any different?
Yes. Computer guidance systems were still rudimentary in 2071. For this reason, the precision of missile weapons was quite low. Missiles could only be used successfully when very large (read: atomic) payloads compensated for this drawback, but in tactical applications, wire and CCTV guidance was still the norm.

Lasers were viable in combat because of the prevalence of fission batteries, but bulky. Most designs were vehicle-mounted.

Robotics evolved with a heavy emphasis on human control. The performance of a robotic companion had to be closely monitored for acceptability and their behavior adjusted through frequent input by an experienced programmer.

Technologies required to tame and explore the world's oceans, and the wider solar system, were considerably further along than in OTL. However, this work was extremely labor-intensive.

The sending rig for Sea Base Alpha above the Mata Nui Ocean Habitat. Shown here at center, the hydrolator descends more than three miles, a journey of six hours for humans or other "pressure-sensitive" cargo.

Sending rigs were small cities in their own right--home to thousands of tradespeople responsible for maintaining the complicated machinery necessary for the denizens of Base Alpha to communicate, trade with, and return to the wider world.

In what ways is culture different?
Supersonic passenger flight was a commonplace. Most wealthy people could afford terminals that connected them to the World Wide Web and its hundreds of unmoderated newsgroups. By 2071, their emerging technocratic uni-culture placed strong emphasis on STEM education in preference to the "crass" and "political" humanities (tainted by the perception that they were easily deployed to excuse political violence); government service over corporate or independent employment (the former was "padded slavery," the latter a road to sure penury; guilt-free use of consumer robotics; acceptance of designer medicine, especially to confer disease-resistance and manage the effects of aging; and class consciousness.

The idea of the "drone" emerged--one who traded non-supervisory craft labor to a corporation for subsistence living according to a contact and was therefore without the traditional political protections derived from Natural Law and previously supplied by a government irrespective of one's employment status.

"Drone" was derogatory, emphasizing the perceived loss of human value inflicted upon the subject, who was usually assumed to have entered into the arrangement foolishly and with both eyes open, implying guilt. The work assigned to drones was stereotypically dirty and dangerous--to be avoided if it could be helped. Drones were acutely vulnerable because there were so many of them. Failure to satisfy the overseers meant loss of access to food, shelter, and physical security as well as the meager creature comforts that low-paying work could accumulate.

Sources:
Picture of future Potosi appears to be an AI (Midjourney)-generated image. Found in El Comercio.

Sending Rig is "Colony Mining facility" by PeteAshford on DeviantArt. Sea Base Alpha and Hydrolator names are homages to the Living Seas attraction at Disney's EPCOT. Mata Nui is an island in the story behind the LEGO Bionicle toy line.

Final picture is "Starcraft 2 SCV" by ArtofRagnar on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

Global Warming heralded the return of two great preoccupations of the human species: religious millenarianism and seaborne piracy.

The 2060 decennial review of The International Journal of Maritime Crime and Security explained this renaissance of free-booting as a simple maths equation. Vulnerable populations were up, state capacity was down. Sailors, divers, shallow- and deep-water engineers: from necessity, coastal nations were minting new entrants to these professions at breakneck pace. Once released into the wild, it was inevitable that some would be diverted to illegitimate ventures.

Jurisdictional clarity hit a four hundred-year low. Not since the Thirty Years' War ruined Germany had it been so difficult to "know one's prince." Islands came and went with each new storm. Even on those rare occasions that governments were certain of what was theirs' and had the wherewithal to enforce such convictions, they might find good reasons to do otherwise. Kickbacks farmed from pirate gangs underwrote municipal government for the Baratarian Commonwealth, successor to the State of Louisiana, and the same was true in Santiago de Cuba, Dakar, Constanţa, and Maracaibo. Speaking as a cabinet member, Oscar van de Graaf admitted that ARC police were sometimes stood down from interdiction runs in New York Harbor as a political pressure tactic in the federal government's bitter war with private capital. And anyway, one man's pirate was another man's freedom fighter. Vermont pirates made a patriotic virtue of raiding Quebecois river traffic, returning home to receive the approbation of local authorities.

Citizenship is a compact. If a commercial enterprise isn't going to keep their end of the bargain, why should we keep ours? Taxpayers expect more wisdom of us than that. - Testimony to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, U.S. Senate

Large battlewagons were the accepted answer to both piracy and the intransigence of the "new islanders." It hardly required to be said that they were fully capable of obliterating the very platforms and populations they protected. Pirates of course had no hope against them.

Tyral Collins ashore in the Florida Keys in the disguise of a Christian States Crusader.

One of the most successful of the American pirates, Tyral Collins, claimed to have raised the Black Flag after the drowning of his native Boston. As a member of the United States Coast Guard, Collins bore personal witness to the city's failed evacuation, a disaster that cost him a mother and four younger brothers.

At the urging of his own crewmates, Collins led a successful mutiny against the officers of his own ship, the cutter Merrimack. Their strategy was simple: avoid the feeding grounds of more successful predators. Respect for the United States Navy and the New York Naval Militia sent them scudding due south. The Caribbean was a violent sea, but like-sized challengers were fewer and farther between.

Collins came ashore in the Northern Floridas and, despite moonlighting with the Prohibition Patrols, learned to disdain the Christian States cause, which he felt dealt with esoteric problems not relevant to its own population. But if Bible study appealed little, he nonetheless consumed enough Genesis to think deeply on the situation of the Patriarch, Adam. He also explored the literary output of the New Environmentalists. Collins drew strong parallels between the two sources.

Adam couldn't keep the Lord's Garden, and was expelled. We had better keep His Pond. - Racing the Rain

Collins reported to Unity as a nominee of the Cuban government, which first issued Merrimack a Letter of Marque in 2051. With Tonkin Vraal, Collins was the chief theorist behind the emerging Harmonist creed of the Nautilus Pirates--lipstick on the more atavistic violence perpetrated by faction leader Ulrik Svensgaard.

Sources:
Battleship is "Marshal Zhukov Class Modern Battleship - Studio Renders" by Jamison Cunningham on ArtStation.

Tyral Collins is Travis Fimmel in Raised by Wolves.

[MysticWind]

The Governor’s Gate was the ARC-built western entrance to Fort Quileute, inaugurating the third anniversary of Recontact. Its subsurface arboretum featured gengineered water-efficient trees that each consumed forty liters a day

Recontact with the New Two Thousand transformed Fort Quileute. As Pilgrim trade caravans made the long trek across the sands to the jewel of the Great Dunes, the mission decades of alien artifact searching and harvesting finally yielded economic dividends. The base became a major hub in the xenoartifact trade, bringing visitors from across the known world. The ARC Moon Over Parma, the Pilgrims’ experimental cargo airship, paid a visit to the desert rose, docking at the minaret of the Golden Shah Mosque to bring forth stores of seedstock, solar panels, and seafood. It took back crates upon crates of artifacts discovered buried beneath the sands. Many were still functional, never connected to the Fort’s pseudonode. At Terra Nova, civilization, their secrets would be properly exploited to unlock technical knowledge, or sold for very profitable sums on the antiquities market.

Reunited with its faction, the Director's Council solicited investment to build paved highways and trade depots, garages full of rovers and rudimentary ‘chopper pads. As development funds poured in, the base next constructed lodgings for traders; a hologram theater, a MindMaze dreamhouse, and an entertainment center to amuse weary travelers; and a huge shopping complex that cast a shadow over the Grand Medina between the hours of 10:00 and 12:00 in the mid-afternoon. Fort Quileute had found an industry, its place in the Planetary economy, and it would milk it as long as the Great Dunes had treasures for sale.

I could fill Volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelaine, &c. &c. &c. -- if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. - The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. - Letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780), Datalinks

A recreational psychonaut visits old Jerusalem and the Holy Land at the Seven Sleepers Dreamplex, built during the Recontact years

Firyal Kašk and her husband gradually retired from public service to focus on their growing family. Their eldest, Nasum, received an upbringing quite unlike their own- far from the traumas of repression, exile, and frontier toil, the boy grew up in the rapidly increasing quality of life that came with the Governor’s patronage of the base. Luxuries unimaginable only several mission years ago were suddenly within a caravan’s reach. Children’s clothing were no longer made of re-stitched Unity uniforms or of the clothing of the deceased, spun from Egyptian cotton only for the wealthiest scions of the colony. Aerogel fashions from Terra Nova’s consumer-facing factories upended the native textiles industry of the base.

The local food diversity quadrupled overnight as Pilgrim caravans and ARC supply runs brought forth fruits, vegetables, and grains lost to the colony’s agriculturalists, a cornucopia compared to the enriched but bland nutrient resources tapped from the monoliths of the desert. Young Nasum and his siblings grew up running through new orchards of Jaffa oranges and McIntosh apples in the fresh fruit parks that adorned the base’s green belt, destination of tourists and local poets alike. The reintroduction of the coffee plant fueled a cultural renaissance within a renaissance as cafés sprang forth like toadstools after rain. Caffeinated hookah with a coffee fruit extract base added jolt to relaxation, quickly becoming the default vice for elderly retirees and idlers. In his youth, Nasum himself became a frequenter of the hookah lounges, listening to the tales of the bad old days from the grizzled ex-scouts and laborers who had surveyed the burning seas and built the society from under the noses of the ARC Directors.

Sueraya Shaheen: You explore the shopping mall as a destination.

Al-Maria: That’s certainly an environment. It’s the future. It’s time travel that you went through, and it’s the end of the world. It’s even after the end of the world, when there’s a few ghosts of people left, people that you are not able to identify with blurred faces. The work shows the shopping mall as the haunted house. It’s frightening but it also has that deliciously scary feeling to it.

- Vogue Arabia interview, Datalinks

Skipping Jumu’ah prayer, a lazing shopper stretches in the main entrance of the Forty Thieves Commercial Plaza

Even as Recontact satiated the basic material needs of the frontier base, it also sought to enrich the cultural, even spiritual lives of its inhabitants. Nasum was the first generation of Fort Quileute to grow up with new toys instead of those recycled from the earliest days of the Stellar Lifeboat Project, carved from desert stone or scarab-snake shell. Gone were the days of simple dolls and figurines adorned in traditional garb stitched together from rags. Now were miniature robots that could sing, dance, answer homework questions, and beam holographic images onto every surface. They were joined by their elder sibling servitors, household robotics of every type that the Pilgrims had secured from the Unity or bought from the Morganites and the Children, making sweeping the Hab Complex and harvest season in the Agridome a thing of the distant past.

But most of all, the colony received widespread consumer tech, from optical datalinks to ClipCom devices, each a far cry from the quicklinks sleeve computers left over from vintage Unity uniforms. Each plugged the user directly into the datalinks, a world hitherto unknown to the Al Falah host. Suddenly, the desert seemed a lot smaller as news of faraway biomes and vendettas between unfamiliar peoples, entire factions’ worth of cultural creations, athletics and recreational games invented post-Planetfall, all became within grasp, making the endless sands a little more finite. Places to yearn to visit, if not to one day relocate to, entirely.

The clans that once safeguarded the former exiles of the Stellar Lifeboat Project no longer seemed as relevant. The rich oral histories that once thrived in the absence of mass media seemed quaint. The youth of the base, bored to tears by the conservative thrift of their survivor ancestors, drifted out into the Commercial Plaza and other ARC-oriented amenities to stare mindlessly at soap operas and sports programs displayed in electronics departments, sneaking into alcohol-vending cantinas.

You see that nice, juicy number on the bottom? That's your golden parachute. Drape it behind your pleasure foil, make the top-tals at the cabana club jealous. Fly a hot air balloon over the Uranium Flats, jump out, wave 'hi' to Chairman Groundhog, whatever you like. But know this is the payout you forgo if you reject acquisition. You walk, and I guarantee you so many Pilgrim gentry fungs will come crawling with their field hands, you'll think you built this little trade post on Plymouth Rock. - transcript from the Annexation of Echo Factory, formerly Morgan Rarities

Burgemeester Sammy Abdullahi was the Governor's eyes and ears in Fort Quileute, the face of ARC during Recontact

In contrast to the carte blanche that the overwhelmed Council had once granted the citizenry of the base, reintegration with mother faction meant more than minimal oversight. But while van de Graaf's natural move would have been to send one of his tough-talking mountain man-turned-stakeholder country squires to crack the whip and ensure the cattle trains ran on time, his CFO-CHIO pursued a different tactic. Fielding chose one of her fixer-operators from one of the New Two Thousand's few urbanized centers to serve as the unlikely magistrate of this furthest frontier. Fresh from corporate vendettas and financial destabilization campaigns against the faction's business rivals, Stadtholder Sammy Abdullahi was sent packing from his private energy fund in the New Guilderland financial district, ferried by prototype airship to Fort Quileute.

A third generation Manhattanite whose Farsi was largely acquired via data-wheel, Abdullahi had taken one of ARC's financial services spin-offs and commandeered it into a brokerage of ecological futures, sovereignty swaps, and other complex derivatives that all boiled down to betting against the sunrise. Taken to Centauri to recreate an economic system with all of the last planet's trapdoors, backdoors, dirty tricks built in from the start, he had advanced the firm's interests against the likes of Morgan and Preston, and oversaw the development of shell companies for proxy battles in the capitalist jungle of the Chiron Cartel. Through overwrought profane skullduggery, the acerbic investor had secured a not-inconsiderable interest in the Ministry of Public Information of the Memory of Earth, successfully prevailing in the courts that his shares of RoyStar Weiguo from Earth were still legally binding in this new biosphere. (The fact a government institution is subject to the opinions of an outside shareholder, never mind an agent of an occasionally-hostile faction, infuriates Commander Mercator to no end, presenting plenty of nightmarish situations for the hapless Chairman of News Programming Jerry Wobegon and his assistant Donald “Dharma” Vetter.)

The economic probe was to be a judge of the change over the transformation of the base into a legitimate Pilgrim city. As Burgomaster, he was in theory the new governor of the base, a viceroy with full and sweeping powers left completely to his discretion.

Shortly after arriving upon the dusty streets of the fort, Abdullahi skipped out on the elaborate welcoming ceremony hosted by the Director’s Council to sip Arabic coffee, posing as one of the many independent artifact traders who had flocked to the base. After several chats with natives and fellow visitors alike, sampling the local fried luqma- a notorious gourmand, the Burgomaster was as equally renowned for his sumptuous lavender-draped wine and cheese soirees at Morgan Riviera as he was for stealing one-erg cronuts from Queequeg's Coffee franchises back at NG - he disappeared into the crowds of the medina. Emerging hours later, a case of sweets in one hand, an exquisite midwakh carved from mindworm husks in the other, he congratulated his bewildered hosts for the marvelous little society they had built. Then, gesturing at the hazy air casting mirages down the hall, opening the box to reveal half of the Turkish delights melted, proceeded to demand the Directors upgrade its environmental control systems immediately. Dazed but dazzled by praise, the former masters of the base immediately ordered improvements to their Closed Habitat Atmospheric Production facility. Thus did air conditioning, built from mission decades' worth of advancements from the rest of Planet, kickstart the viceroy's tenure.

The Alfitr Towers were built for storing surplus resources reclaimed from Recycling Tanks. The design, an exact replica of the Swedish-built mushroom water towers of Kuwait City, was mandated by the Burgemeester to attract visitors

The arrival of Burgomaster Abdullahi marked a new stage in the hyper-development of Fort Quileute. The expansion of the mall into a bonafide Commercial Plaza modeled after the Prince Nasir Al-Subaai Supermall in Dammam, the Triplet Cities Emirate, took place under his watch; as did the construction of a massive vehicle bay for housing crawlers bound for the desert. The secondary guest Hab Complex was converted into a two-star luxury hotel in imitation of a Morgan Hilton, which was still far more extravagant than the region had ever seen. A Schreiber Project adventurer-anthropologist at the time described the looks of "mad anticipation" that greeted a troop of Sand Scouts returning from one of their artifact sweeps, beholding the gleaming edifice of the Quileute Continental for the first time. Weatherworn smacers, contracted by the viceroy to assist in the search and disarming of hazardous alien ruins, threw drunken revelries in the ultra-thread count upholstered suites of the hotel, becoming yet another sign of the incongruous progress that characterized the Recontact era. As were the increasingly expanding mega-projects replacing entire sections of the old base.

Burj Al Falah penthouse, high Recontact era

The rejoining of Fort Quileute with the New Two Thousand irrevocably changed the soul of the base as it did its exterior. While posterity would condemn the time as a “generation of weakness,” little surprise that those who were farming moisture from the desert air and gathering crumbs from deep desert monoliths would readily grasp the horn of plenty, when proffered. As the base slowly joined Planetary society, it too would take on familiar problems of drone discontent, datalinks addiction, and ecological destruction.

There were those who disagreed with change. The labor organizer who could not be bought by thirty thousand ¤ a year, the over-pious imam or priest. Movements deemed too recalcitrant or dangerous were identified with pinpoint accuracy and handled by the newly-formed Desert Regulators, largely imported by veterans fresh from vendettas back home. But for the most part, the population of the base was glad to receive the fruits of modernity, regardless of cost.

The Burgomeister had rubbed the right shoulders, paid the occasional visit to mosque, doled out gift boxes of neocoke (he was a casual user- the elites he introduced it to, less so) through the office of the viceroy itself. Over time, the senate of sheiks gradually sold to the advancing ARC authority the same properties they had so fiercely, and perhaps quixotically, protected against the previously-ruling Council. Some who had signed away entire districts under their care could expect to be compensated with sports speeders imported from the capital, racing them through the sands and on the gleaming new highways around the base perimeter. The populace was largely satisfied by Public Antiquities Fund payments even as Terra Nova exported its own set of expert artifact hunters, ruin scavengers, and transporters, leaving the natives with more time for consumption. And the Al Falah Trade Union was happy as it received contract after contract to build yet another hotel, yet another discoveries showroom, yet another monument to factional grandiosity. Firyal Kašk and her husband retired contentedly to care for their brood, confident that the future of the colony was in the right hands. Their son Nasum aspired to be an academic of history, perhaps at the burgeoning university under construction.

Whatever one’s opinion of Recontact is, all agree that it was a Golden Age for the base that sprouted as abruptly as its tragic termination. Remembered not only as a mourned lost age, but recited as a promised glorious future to come.

Casting

Sammy Abdullahi is portrayed by Arian Moayed as Stewy Hosseini in Succession

Notes

This post was inspired by Gulf Futurism, a term coined by American-Qatari author and artist Sophia Al-Maria and Kuwaiti composer and artist Fatima Al Qadiri to denote an aesthetic marked by the drastic changes brought about by oil wealth to the Persian Gulf states: the rise in consumerism and materialist excess in traditionalist cultures, the drastic increases in wealth inequality, and the authoritarianism involved.

A quick primer on Gulf Futurism from WIRED columnist and cyberpunk founder Bruce Sterling, linking to “The desert of the unreal”, the original 2012 article where the phrase was first defined.

The ClipCom is a device mentioned in Outpost 2's Tales of New Terra

Quicklinks are computers built into a uniform sleeve, linked to other citizens, as described in the “Journey to Centauri” novella by Michael Ely

The fate of the Al Falah youth in the face of the datalinks is taken from the description of the Gaian-esque rustic Forest Arcology of Sim City 2000

Introductory scene of Succession’s Stewy Hosseini, the basis of Sammy Abdullahi

Queequeg's Coffee is from Deus Ex: Invisible War

CHAP facilities are from Outpost 1

Prince Nasir, of the Al-Subaai family, is from Syriana

Image Credits

The opening photo is concept art of Saudi Arabia’s Neom project, dubbed the Line.

Elevator into the Dome of the Rock is from the short film Nation Estate (2012) by Larissa Sansour, which imagines what if Palestine's statehood is confined in a high-rise skyscraper, with each city in a floor of its own. (“Ancient Aliens, Gulf Futurism, and Social Justice: The Liberating Visions of Arab Science Fiction”)

Figure laying on the marble floor is still from Sophia Al-Maria’s Black Friday exhibit, Whitney Museum

Kuwait Water Towers photo is by Al Manlangit

The opulent penthouse is album art of Fatima Al Qadiri’s Genre-Specific Xperience

Further reading

Al Qadiri & Al-Maria on Gulf Futurism - architectural and media examples of the aesthetic, Dazed Digital

'Gulf Futurism' Is Killing People - real-world repercussions, VICE Magazine

Ethnic Futurism In The Gulf - a critique of Gulf Futurism, Thesigers

Gulf Futurism: The Future Is Not A Desert Mirage, Sail Magazine

The Luxury Mall as Consumer Prison, review of Sophia Al-Maria’s “Black Friday”, New York Times

Gulf Futurism: How Post-Carbon Imaginaries Are Reproducing the Systemic Crisis, Berliner Gazette

[MysticWind]

Let the earth bring forth grass (pt. 1)

Thanks to their commitment to democratic rule and reverence for grassroots action, the Gaia's Stepdaughters host a diverse and many-voiced society that is perhaps the most multifaceted of the sedentary "civilized" factions. Among the many strains of thought and opinion that have emerged include those defined by the following leading lights-

A student came by from the College of Reeds, asking, “What is the purpose of your office if man’s relation to Chiron is so new? There are no climate refugees. There is no crisis of choosing.” I reminded that young optimist that we who have arrived from Earth are all climate refugees. It was science made intentional to save that borne us through the heavens. The choice to innovate on behalf of Planet rather than for profits is always present. So long as human beings exist in an ecosystem, our work can never finish. - Voices of the Stepchildren

Born West Berlin, West Germany, father a German science attaché, mother a Polish art teacher. Cosmopolitan childhood on both sides of the Iron Curtain, attaining conversational grasp of eight languages. Studied at Heidelberg University Faculty of Law, receiving Master of Laws with a focus on Ecological Justice. Research project at Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law during the Second American Civil War, examining the applicability of environmental standards on displaced peoples, improving the sustainability of refugee camps. Conducted humanitarian work across Europe on behalf of No-Pats; authored white papers that later became basis for the Stellar Lifeboat Project.

Entered politics as member of Alliance 90/The Greens. Elected to Landtag seat amidst party surge to majority in Rhine-Westphalia. Chaired rotating committees on Refugee Resettlement and Science Funding. Fell out over de-growth party line. Formed INTEGR - Initiative für Nachhaltige Technologien, Einfallsreichtum, Gerechtigkeit und Reformen - "Initiative for sustainable technologies, ingenuity, justice, and reform" along with other anti-Green Austerity critics. Argued for the embracing of transmodern solutions to problems of ecological damage, population displacement, and declining standards of living. Became spokeswoman of the movement, traveling across the Continent and forming local parties at the expense of traditional Greens. Third largest INTEGR following West and East German chapters was in the Polish People's Republic. Praised French efforts in the "solar revolution" while condemning their treatment of subject peoples relegated to "environmental imperialism."

Headed pro-nuclear power faction of INTEGR which ultimately lost to common vote. Subsequently selected by U.N. Alpha Centauri Mission Committee as human rights activist and environment law expert for Unity. (Possibly facilitated by lobbying from Kretschmann government.) Cryoslept through Planetfall- retroactively claims her mediation could have brought peace between the warring proto-factions- reclaimed by University of Planet search team from a supply pod. Worked in University HR at Climactic Research for several mission years before suspension for too many lenient rulings on behalf of local student judiciary. Emigrated to the Stepdaughters of Gaia after charged by the Provost's office for "popularization of pop science."

Welcomed for her Earthside activism, becoming a high justice of the Rose and Thorns Court. As the democratic Gaian society permits public activity despite judgeship, now currently heads the INTEGR strain, founding the first party of its kind on Planet. Coalition of science-focused Biorationalists, left-liberal Green Marketeers, and Democratic Ecosocialists. (Political parties in the Stepdaughters of Gaia range anywhere from thousands of members- base population-sized- to a single representative.) INTEGR franchises now present in most known democratic factions, though actively suppressed in the University of Planet.

INTEGR platform is heavy in jargon but boils down to several principles captured by name. First, the promotion of technological solutions to environmental problems, chafing against the basic Harmonism of the Gaian establishment with a soft-Supremacy ethos, even if the aims are ultimately the same as Harmony's. Under Ebner's influence, Gaian INTEGR has advocated everything from research into super-smart grids for more efficient use of renewable energy- even employing taboo AI to do so- to the development of thorium fission reactors. On the subject of nuclear power, this strain advocates for closer diplomatic ties with the Children of Atom, even as most of the faction regards the Children as asocial, alien worshippers of coldly calculating technologies. Ebner herself has met with Dr. Johann Anhaldt a number of times, the former's flamboyant and human-centered worldview received cooly by the latter.

Second, INTEGR is focused on addressing human welfare within an environmental context. In practice this can involve everything from public energy spending on programs that improve colonist psych, to development of Planet-friendly accommodations and social improvements within bases, to opposing "colonialism" abroad. This, too, presents certain differences with the traditional Gaian consensus. Rooted in Earth-era notions of universal human rights more along the lines of the Peacekeeping Forces' paradigm, its priority of human concerns often rubs against the deep ecology views subscribed to by many Gaians. The spiritual, even mystic, dimensions to Gaian belief, not officially endorsed by the Lady but promoted by her just the same, consider such views not transmodern but hoary, maybe even chauvinistically anthropocentric and speciesist. Additionally, the INTEGR strain's openness towards potentially waging vendettas against high-polluter factions that engage in human oppression is quite shocking to the pacifist faction, though Ebner has not yet put this theoretical scenario to the test.

Too technocratic for the Gaian mainstream, too concerned with the affairs of the heart and human spirit by the scientific factions, INTEGR has proven to be a passionate niche strain, but niche nonetheless.

Casting

Lena Ebner is portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis as Linda Drysdale (neé Thrombey) in Knives Out

Notes

Lena Ebner is the leader of the sponsor INTEGR from Civilization: Beyond Earth: Rising Tide. Here some of the words behind the acronym have been altered, as well as their support for "Green Austerity." I challenge anyone to explain what exactly the teaser lore is actually trying to say.

Super-Smart Grids are a future technology from Fate of the World

[Trenacker]

Rest is for the Lord, not His creations. - Chronicles

Name: John Moraine
Rank: Warrant Officer
Position: Xenohydrologist
Assignment: Aquatic Operations Divison
Country of Origin: Mobile Experimental Deep Foraging Object 4 (MEDFOR)
DOB: 02-17-2028
Height: 181.9 cm
Weight: 80.4 kg

Service Record:
Vault-born. (Released, age two.) Child of American parents, both seismologists affiliated with Dr. Emyr Flinting Oceanographic Laboratory. Raised aboard a roving research platform operating on the ocean floor. Early education by Interlink Correspondence.

Raised as a First Conversant. Taught that mankind has a positive obligation, documented in the Book of Genesis, to find and study all God's creations, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and the cosmic rules (physical laws) that govern them. Followers of this sect chose professions that fitted them to participate in oceanic and space exploration, leading to over-representation among crew of U.N.S. Unity.

Graduated U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD. Posted to research submarine U.S.S. Lantern Fish as diving superintendent. Accumulated significant experience with very-deep sea dive rescue and ship's husbandry. Participated in Ballingwrath Expedition to study mud volcano located in Puerto Rico Trench. Recommended against construction of the Sea Base Echo habitat near same location. Testified before Congress when habitat dome cracked from structural overloading. Afterward, regarded as protégé of Congressman Jabez O'Comry.

Organized collection of ice cores from above Arctic Circle while Lantern Fish provided ship-to-shore power for City of Anchorage from 2060-62. Reassigned to U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri by American National Selection Commission in 2065 on O'Comry's recommendation. Assisted in final review and approval of mission emergency management protocols.

Taken from cold sleep during Unity Crisis on the orders of Psych Chaplain Miriam Godwinson. Assisted her entourage to make safe progress from hab bays to landing pods. Tactical leader during skirmishing with charter colonists from CNR Corporation, a subsidiary of Struan's Pacific Training Company. Persuaded Godwinson to include watercraft among the faction's take of expedition supplies. Singled out for special recognition by Godwinson at Great Convocation to acknowledge his "coolness under pressure," but forced into exile the following year by faction elders who accused subject of poor judgement (the boats were taken in lieu of additional seed, fertilizer, or foodstuffs).

At subject's own request, dispatched on long-range overland reconnaissance. (Elders had lobbied for subject to be placed in command of raids on neighboring settlements, which were expected to suffer very high casualty rates.)

In a hollow chamber below Chip Rock Pass, John Moraine observes a planet pearl governed by physical forces unknown to human science.

First Conversants were often compared to Hunters of Chiron. The former's "spinner" colonies were made up of those who wished to conduct geological and archaeological inquiry at Sunny Mesa. It was a violent existence: Hivemen were constantly tunnel through the interiors the rock formations to destabilize the Believers' habitats and pursuing anyone who came down to ground level.

The bridge structures were mosaics of innovation, from turbines placed to harness the canyons' wind tunnel effects to the sloped roofs that prevented accumulation of standing rainwater and siphons that diverted it to cliffside gardens.

First Conversants had much in common with the University of Planet. Moraine shared Academician Zakharov's belief that knowledge was the toolbox in which the solution to every one of Mankind's problems could be found. Yet if Zakharov wanted to engage in what Miriam called "petty creation" of his own, Moraine stopped short of that. Adam was not to add robots to the litany of fish and birds, cattle and wild animals. And as the University cloistered itself away from the physical world of contaminants and turned over ever more of its problems to machine intelligence, First Conversants learned by moving through Creation physically and experiencing its wonders firsthand.

Psych Profile: Adventurer
Classified as "soft" believer by Federal Bureau of Investigation--one whose convictions do not have immediate political implications for duly-constituted government or authority. U.S. Navy personnel record contains no contraindications.

Parents selected for participation in Vault Program by U.S. Army as part of Project: Aftermath, an attempt to cache millions of carefully-vetted soldiers and civilians who could reemerge from hibernation to rebuild the United States following a nuclear winter. Vault was re-opened early due to mechanical problems.

Very high physical fitness and mental resilience; .91 score on Atherholt Trauma Function Test. Long exposure to vault and submarine environments makes it highly likely that subject will thrive in high-density living conditions.

Veteran of numerous actual emergencies aboard MEDFOUR. Close attention to detail and safety matters.

Apparent aversion to violence except in clear cases of self-defense.


Sources:
Moraine is Robert Patrick from Last Resort.

The concept behind First Conversants is from David Brin's Earth. Credit to MysticWind for bringing it to my attention.

Vault Program is from Fallout universe lore.

Picture of the planet pearl is "The Black Pearl" by ATArts on DeviantArt.

"Spinner" colony picture is "Wind Turbine Bridge Colony" by ATArts on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

The architect has much to teach the overseer, for what is more ruthless than a human colony? - Centauri Reflections

The Castle Spires were impervious to the best tricks of the Shapers of Chiron. Bitter losses had taught the Believers to site all new settlements well above maximum flood levels. That these two factions--Conclave and Shapers--should become such bitter enemies was not an obvious consequence of their respective politics. Psych Chaplain and Terraformer were just three years apart in age, both ascetic, both prone to fits of melancholy. In Planet they shared a mutual adversary, wanting nothing but that it should cease to be an encumbrance. Guilt was second-nature to them--the kind that only a survivor can experience. What caused them to quarrel was more elemental than any idea. It was water, cool and clear.

Barnacle cities were studies in economy. Miriam's used ground source heat pumps to moderate temperatures in a land of extremes. Vanes in the base superstructure harvested the abundant static electricity.

Desperate lieutenants suggested that the Lady Skye should take instruction from the subrid, which carried its home on its back. Cracks and fissures within the creatures' shells, which on a large specimen might be five meters across, were known to host miniature ecosystems similar to bottle gardens when plugged with organic matter.

Skye called them blasphemers and refused to build an industrial base capable of construction on the scales required to flatter such notions.

A simple tower--height--could mean the difference between life and death for an isolated settlement. This Pilgrim roundhouse is twice blessed.

The tall tree standing beside the water tower is a carniverous Bildant. Hollows within the trunk lure nest-seeking prey, which in turn are overcome by digestive chemicals secreted from the phloem. Also harmful to humans, the trees were tolerated and even cultivated because their greedy root systems created conditions hostile to the spread of xenofungus.

Sources:
First image is "Hidden Desert Cities on Alien World" by lestrium on DeviantArt.

The phrase on encumbrances is inspired by the entry on aborigines in Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary.

Second image is "Arcology Walker" by theNo7er on DeviantArt.

Third image is "The Farm" by Abiogenisis on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

Living systems cannot be fully described in mathematical terms. Successful examples have a value greater than the sum of their individual parts. - A Comparative Biology of Planet

Morley Towers, like this example in the Memorialist base of Neu Union, were early engines for mass conversion. They were named not for their inventor, a forever-anonymous Shaper engineer, but for a brand of British cigarette.

The noise was deafening. The waste output, highly carcinogenic. Ominous thunderheads formed above any productive stack, from which violent electrical storms always followed. Mindworms were never far behind. Yet for factions that lacked access to resources of a higher grade, Morleys were a favorite addiction.

University engineers cannibalized and refashioned larger terraforming machinery into multiple smaller vehicles, sacrificing speed and efficiency at a single task to be able to colonize with greater scope and depth.

University programmers developed the computer code for Autonomous Herd Intelligence through trial and error with groups like the one formed by these surveyor rigs.

On the frontiers of science, we should wish for audacity more than for brilliance. - A World Upside Down

Destruction being a coarser art, the code behind the Vulcan Vivonics Brawny Man sentry was a study in eloquence--just 77,000,000 lines on a spool approximately half the size of a Frigidaire.

Sources:
First image is "Terraforming Station" by Matthew Burke on ArtStation.

Morley cigarettes are a prop brand used in movies and television. They were the preferred choice of the Cigarette Smoking Man on X-Files.

Second image is "Snow scape robotic machines" by AIFLOWART on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Concept art AI generated" by AIFLOWART on DeviantArt.

[MysticWind]

The herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind (pt. 2)

This world is mystical and intelligent. If you truly think that, why aren’t you terrified? - Who’s Out There

Among the more curious of afflictions that have affected the Unity diaspora since the Planetfall disaster is sudden memory loss. Hundreds if not thousands of cases have been reported in the early years of Planetary colonization. Personnel forgetting everything from where they are and what they are doing  to the fundamental question of who they are. Spontaneous Atmospheric Shock Amnesia - SASA, whimsically nicknamed by Sinophone colonists as 傻傻 - occurs unpredictably, both among those who have personally witnessed great trauma during the violent dissolution of the mission, to those who have remained in cryosleep for years until retrieved from a supply pod.

This seemingly random phenomenon has been attributed to PTSD, cranial damage from pressure fluctuations during reentry, radiation poisoning, difficulty adjusting to latent high nitrogen levels, xenofungal spore allergies, chemical weapons attacks, microwave weapons attacks, and even preternatural mind control, whether alien or Kavithan. However, a folk explanation is most widely-accepted: faced with an overwhelming and hostile environment, some minds have simply chosen blissful ignorance. Perhaps SASA is a disguised blessing, one of the explanations for why rates of suicide and psychosis have been lower than expected.

Some stricken by amnesia have nonetheless gone on to make significant achievements, even if they may never remember their past lives again. The founder of the Ecological Malcontents strain of Gaia’s Stepdaughters is such a rare example. Several mission years after Planetfall, after the human settlements had grown, carving a new world out of the chaos of Planet’s surface, a Chiron Ranger walker crew found a solitary woman stumbling through a tangled fungal patch several klicks south of the new Gaian outpost Harmony Valley. Having been time-released from a supply pod laden with supplies but bearing only a solitary cryotube, she was confused, if still possessing sufficient wits to have donned protection before stepping out. She had no memory of who she was or what planet she was even on.

Disheveled and lost, Jean Fox was found wearing nondescript office clothing under her spacesuit, instead of a uniform

By chance, the base’s resident Librarian matched her face to an old file photo in truncated datalinks fragments. It gave her a name, and a rank and position- Jean Fox, macrodatatech, infosystems expert at the Unity main pharmacy. When tested, she did possess a familiarity with bioinformatics and intuitive handling of the macro, which corroborated the profile. The rest of the personal details had been corrupted by various data purges, both digital and physical, during Planetfall. Not as exotic an origin story as a certain famous fellow computing specialist who experienced a dramatic shift in consciousness during Planetfall, but no less mysterious.

All Jean could remember were faint glimpses of walking through a dense forest back on Earth. Oak trees, maple- the unknown wood looked like any in North America, perhaps even- Delaware? Her Gaian hosts called this vision auspicious, but the involuntary placement with their faction was uneasy from the start. She was baffled by what her past self had signed up for. The mission seemed like an ill-organized misadventure, the ship sounded like a death trap, and she found it difficult to understand what exactly had happened during Planetfall. And most of all, she could not comprehend why the survivors were now living in factions separated by ideological pique.

Jean questioned the very convictions of the people who had rescued her from the fungal fields. Their Luddite embrace of primitive living, their masochistic devotion to the landscape that wished to devour them, their unquestioning acceptance of the goodness of Planet, even when their own Lady deigned to weigh in on such petty human concerns as morality when it came to the force of nature, - all caused the lone survivor to agitate against her found society.

The metrics were… unsettling. A razor to your throat, a blade over your fingers. You had to be there. You had to sense it for yourself. - session notes of Harmony Valley Psych Chaplain Saylor Greenbriar

Each new assignment gave Macrodatatech Jean Fox more details of her pre-SASA memory, until work on the Kiel Object completed it

The Gaians being a free society, accommodated Jean’s outbursts on fungal vegetarian diets at the commissary and irate posts about the governor’s “gentle reminders” to attend daily Green Minutes on the base intralinks. Provided with abundant counseling, the iconoclast was encouraged to search for her lost past, rather than meddle with the lives of people in the present. Drawing from the semantic memories she did possess of her former position on the Unity, she returned to that forgotten career, and buried herself in it. Avoiding the dirt worshippers, she gravitated towards the rationalists among Harmony Valley’s scientific staff, who enlisted her in the refining of all sorts of statistics, from molecular levels in the chemical samples of Planet’s atmosphere and air to natality and mortality rates in the new colony. Aided by friendly new coworkers, she dove into the material, learning a little more about this new world one macrodata set at a time.

As the days went on, Jean began to experience vivid episodes during work. She would be deep into the numbers accompanying a report on razorbeak migration patterns when her sole memory would come flickering back in greater detail. She could now see the foliage clearly, the stone-bordered trail she followed. While nosing through RNA sequences of mindworm boils, she would suddenly see herself sprinting along the trail, stopping by flower patches and outcroppings looking over water. In time, she would come to know all the paths that ran through these nameless woods.

She could not withhold these happemimgs for long. Jean told colleague in her department, some who betrayed her confidence and resulted in psych intervention. Yet she was not taken off the roster. Every decurn she would regularly speak to a psych chaplain who nodded and smiled and wrote down her visions in copious detail. Later, she would discover that this was intentional.

Then one day, while tabulating the full-spectrum analysis of an artifact discovered east of the river by the base’s scouts, Jean finally arrived at memory’s end. In the vision, night had fallen, and the forest was dark. Unease had settled. No creature made a sound. She had left the trail and was pushing past trees and vines. Finally, she emerged into a clearing bathed in ethereal light. There was a massive Chironian monolith bearing the indecipherable etchings of some unknown race. A stone platform at the base bore a bizarre shape of non-Euclidean swirls and swoops. It glowed.

Only days later, after confiding with a xenoarcheologist on her experience, she was granted access to the complete report and saw that the object was identical to the very artifact that the scouts had retrieved from the field. And, nonexistent forest aside, it was found near a monolith bearing identical carvings to the one in her vision.

Base managers called Jean hysterical, but her immediate supervisor and her team vouched for her. She was permitted to accompany a follow-up mission to the discovery site. Mission days of fording a speedy river and dodging smacer raids through hostile terrain after, she reached the location: a vast xenofungus field leagues across, the monolith off its center, at the southeastern focal point. The team arrived just in time to see the fungus rapidly expand, great blood-red tendrils rising up to blanket the ancient ruin like vines over Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the roots on the other end grasping at the ground so fiercely as to pull chunks of soil up like an earthquake. In a matter of minutes, the entire monolith had been consumed, leaving nothing behind but bits of alien rubble. After repeated pleas from her team to flee from danger, Jean finally departed, but not before sighting the stone altar that had held the artifact. As they boarded the surviving rover, she caught a glimpse of a single mindworm crawling out of the fungus, staring at her.

If Planet can give us memories and then eat the real thing, what's to stop Skye from figuring out how to do that? Who's to stop us? If we can figure out how to control this power, we can commandeer it. Humans don’t have to be the victim. We don't have to bow and scrape. - Who’s Out There

The founding cell of the Ecological Malcontents prepare their escape from Harmony Valley

The expedition was the last straw for the Gaian authorities and for Jean Fox alike. They had nearly lost an entire scientific scout unit, indeed several scientists and rangers did perish on that fateful trip, and had to endure only more feverish ravings from a known troublemaker. The amnesiac, for her part, had had enough of the inflexible faith of her hosts, the apologetics they gave to that hidden presence that haunted her dreams and ate her friends. Even as the base administrators removed her access and conspired to arrest her, debating the faction’s previously unshakeable proscription against nerve-stapling, Fox and her coworkers made plans to leave.

They did so less than eighteen hours later- an ally at the base's CHAP life support structure flooded the Biology Lab with nitrous oxide, tranquillizing security sent to apprehend her. Before they departed, Fox sent a faction-wide transmission over the Communications Tower, detailing the events of what had happened, and what they had discovered- Protocol Cobel, the base’s Secret Project to retrieve her memories through repeated exposure to memetic hazards, and the revelation that she was not the only SASA patient who had received the same treatment.

Fox's News reverberated all the way back to Gaia's Landing, and to the new capital. For past mission decades, there had been growing discontent with the establishment Planetary idolatry. There were those uncomfortable with blind faith placed in a savage Mother Nature. Those who had lost friends and family to her wrath. Pseudoculturalists who wanted to be like the Shapers and introduce more Earthborn species in intentional terraforming. Pro-marketeers who wanted to empower more commerce and development instead of being so deferential to the mindworms that swarmed their formers and supply convoys. All of those who were scared and appalled by this alien wasteland they were forced to call home, and could not openly express such views.

For a cycle, a fierce debate raged among the Gaians over those who sympathized with these rebels’ Planet-skeptic views, and those who dismissed them as lunatics. The Lady herself issued assurances urging peace and calm. Several rousing debates and ceremonial votes were held, resulting in the Ecological Malcontents concluded as suffering from the stress of living on the frontier, who should receive more psych treatment should they come back into the fold. Then came concerning reports of potential vendetta waged by aggressive neighbors, and all was forgotten. The issue blew over, but the strain remained.

Fox sympathizers covertly exchange information at Greenhouse Gate

The Ecological Malcontents has a silent minority of those who oppose the party line. Ultimately, they are all characterized by a rejection of Skye’s ironclad faith in the Planet’s ecosystem as one to be trusted in and appeased. Rather, the strain believes humanity’s relationship with Chiron must be worked out with fear and trembling. There is more, much more that the world lets on, abilities that tear asunder not just the bodies but the very minds and souls of human beings. Careful study of this alien biosphere must be done with intent and urgency. Walk with Planet as you might with the mindworm boil you see in the distance. Warily, respectfully, but with your finger on the flamers.

Fox and her compatriots remain separate from the Gaian main body, even as Skye has officially ordered her Environmental Police to grant them amnesty. (Though the governor of Harmony Valley continues to plot to take them back.) Some say they filter from base to base, receiving aid from sympathizers. Others whisper that they had taken an entire colony pod and fled for another frontier, blasting Defiant Jazz over their rebel frequency. But for Fox, there is no true escape, neither outside nor in. Other factions are of no help, as all upon Planet are subject to its whims. And inwardly, she cannot flee from knowing her past, from understanding exactly what was done to her by the world itself.

From her perch atop the mammoth rocks of Gaia's High Garden, Lady Deirdre Skye herself sighs at the disharmony as reports arrive of the Malcontent strain persisting in her bases. She could emphasize with their anger, and their anguish. Every life snuffed out in service of her faction, or simply lost to random locust swarm or freak fungal bloom, chipped away at her soul. Yet man is but one species among countless, and an uninvited one at that. The lives of her own sat pitifully small against the full array of an entire world. And so when her security advisor Goldman recommends more stringent scrutiny of the rabble-rousers, she permits him with no reservations.

Then again, for all of her focus on collaborative power within ecologies, she was well aware of competition as a powerful force of natural selection. Its ability in the long run to increase species diversity, broadening an ecosystem's ability to shoulder many niches, promoting specialization and divergence. In the same way, so does ideological diversity- for all of their zeal, the Gaians remained an open society allowing free thought. Even permitting dissident strains.

So she stays Goldman's hand from outright persecuting the Ecological Malcontents, at least for now. Only Planet knew if they might be the ones to unlock its secrets. And she keeps an eye open towards her economic advisor Simper's financial reports, the snidely coded statements speaking approvingly of the Gaian dissidents' position on pulling back on worshipfulness for the sake of industrial competitiveness. On keeping an open mind towards free market policies, because maybe man exists to test Planet just as Planet constantly tests man. On becoming just a little bit more like the likes of Morgan. And Skye reasons that if this strain is toxic enough to be worth extinguishing, for now it can at least draw out similarly sickly cultures.

Meanwhile, in a faraway xenofungus field, a woman gasps as she gives birth during a battle...

Casting

Jean Fox is portrayed by Britt Lower as Helly R. in Severance

Notes

Jean Fox is a Gaian background character, a named extra, who appears in a single scene in Dragon Sun by Michael Ely (available on the Open Library)

The Ecological Malcontents are a splinter group that appear in a particular faction profile.

(Fun fact, the GURPS sourcebook calls them the Environmental Malcontents, yet another way that supplement contradicts preexisting SMAC material.)

Introductory scene of Severance’s Helly Riggs, the basis of Jean Fox.

Helly at the computer picture is by @mikeybbruh

Goldman is Deirdre’s serious and protective top advisor from Dragon Sun. Simper Pol is Deirdre’s foppish and trade-minded top advisor elected by a “vocal minority of citizens” with more materialist concerns.

Design Notes

This strain leader was originally meant to only have the Severance character's likeness. I had thought there was a general conception of the Stepdaughters of Gaia as a bunch of redheads, or at least there was a mistaken Mandela Effect-esque belief from some people that Deirdre is one. (She isn’t, though her initial character design by Michael Haire actually was.) Either way, no harm in imagining the Gaians as a coven of witchy gingers.

But I then realized that the character’s scrappy resistance makes her personality a good fit for this named-but-never-explained SMAX splinter proto-faction. And as I developed this bio, I actually realized some of the story beats from the show are applicable, too:

The original Ecological Malcontents are clearly meant to be Green extremists who split from a faction (most likely Gaians, though it’s not actually specified) and stumbled upon their prophet in the fungus. Zealots who happen to find their messiah. A natural fit.

In this reimagining, they have a more complex narrative: they are skeptics, heretics, and opportunists who leave because they reject the Gaian consensus. But despite fear and revulsion, they still seek to understand the terrible swift world they are trapped in, leading them to engage with the wild. This quest for understanding will inevitably lead to most of them becoming thralls of the Voice of Planet. Which, I think, gives that ensuing faction more of a tragic Lovecraftian feel. The truth-seekers will be devoured by their own journey, unknowingly gazing upon the face of an alien god. Planet psi is pretty crazy stuff.

In this context, Jean Fox is not only a charismatic splitter faction founder, but one motivated by intense personal convictions and whose arrival catalyzes preexisting social tensions, surfacing them and causing rupture. Sort of like what Martin Luther did to the Holy Roman Empire and Catholicism.