Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

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Expand Tech: Hachimoji DNA

Hive bases used artificial lights to simulate a day/night cycle for people and to cause photosynthesis in plants. The proper adjustment and distribution of these lights occupied an entire division within Hive Base Operations.

They had discovered two new nucleobases, actually. According to the Chairman, they used these new bases primarily to create more effective chemotherapies. Of course, that application was useless to us. But we saw they had increased length and complexity of instructions that could be chemically communicated to human cells. We were using semaphore; they had invented the telegraph. - Climbing the Spiral to Heaven

DNA can be thought of as a packet of instructions for the production of amino acids. The twenty acids essential to human life combine as proteins to assist in tasks such as digestion of food, tissue growth and repair, regulation of brain function, production of sugars, and immune system response. Beginning in the late 1980s, the global scientific community sought methods to increase the amount of information that could be stored and communicated by DNA. The earliest breakthroughs involved creation of unnatural base pairs (UBP), or artificial nucleobases. One resulting set was known as the Hachimoji DNA, meaning "eight letters DNA," which doubled the amount of possible base pairs. Scientists first proved that unmodified cells would reproduce the UPB, then sought to encode the new pairs to produce additional amino acids.

UBP was the basis for the body to itself produce chemicals and trigger cell behaviors that previously had been provided only through invasive procedures. When replacing traditional external medications, UBP organelles were superior by far since they could titrate release in ways that were less disruptive for the liver, kidneys, and stomach.

UBP played a crucial role in the viability of lab-grown organs, high-risk transplant acceptance, and chronic disease management. Most UBP was introduced in medical settings to counteract organ deficiencies or combat degenerative disease. In gestational and Type 2 diabetics, for example, UBP was used to stimulate insulin production. Sufferers of viral infection and cancer received UBP treatments to keep their white blood cell count up. But a growing minority of UBP fell into a more liminal realm. The wealthy wanted UBP to combat the effects of aging. Soldiers were given UBP to increase their production of adrenaline and endorphins.

When Unity left the Sol System, just over one in ten humans was thought by the United Nations to possess UBP in their genome. (Statistics were unreliable; most nations did not attempt genetic sequencing, and all were loathe to share detailed data.) Artificial DNA was highly controversial. Some Conclavists objected to use of UBP even for medically necessary interventions, holding that it constituted sacrilegious editing of Grand Design. Others urged that it be restricted only to instances where life was at stake. Among peoples estranged from the scientific community, use of UBP therapy fell under the broad scope of "genetic tampering," and there was an outsized fear that the species would destroy itself by unleashing man-made plagues. Recipients of UBP were often targeted even when the choice had not been their own. Motivated by both religious fundamentalism and the power-fantasies of conspiracism, Holnists published lists of UBP patients online, leading to numerous assassinations. Developing nations were especially skeptical of early U.N. proposals to recruit from among populations including UBP recipients, which they correctly reasoned would bias the passenger manifest against their people.

The U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri did not ban recruits with UBP, but it did decline numerous proposals from Tamineh Pahlavi, Oscar van de Graaf, Prokhor Zakharov, and others to use it to provide an additional oxygen factor or increase the amount of baseline antibodies for Red Plague. The argument over UBP began anew and then flamed even hotter after Planetfall when enterprise scientists took Chironian organisms and attempted to combine their genetic material with Terran organisms, an act that was grounds for exile among the Lord's Believers.

The University of Planet leaned heavily on UBP as a complement to chemotherapy regimes. The Ascendancy exploited the technology to encourage muscle growth and increase oxygen factors in the blood of the Vat-Born. A desperate Aleigha Cohen likewise experimented with UBP to help filter toxins from the blood as she battled Somnacin addiction. Both Yang and Pahlavi attempted to use UBP to equip certain genetic paragons with superior faculties they wanted passed on to subsequent generations.

During the Two Visits at Rosalind's Spire, the Hive Chairman revealed extensive knowledge of hybrid UBP. The Proxl Rot Plague of M.Y. 32, it turned out, had been a cruel experiment. The disease manifested in Terran crops as inedible spores--harmless to humans if ingested, but deadly to its leafy hosts. Research product shared by Chairman Yang with the Ascendancy's biologists revealed that Hive nutrient pools had been contaminated with the intention of determining whether any of the population had developed the ability to obtain nourishment from native flora.

Pahlavi, hardly squeamish when it came to ethically questionable behaviors, was aghast. Even if the experiment had been successful, it was statistically improbable that the hybrid foodstuffs would have been tolerated by more than a small fraction of the inhabitants of the target bases. Why had Yang settled on starving his own people? Had he no reliable source of prisoners? Yang calmly clarified that the experiments were carried out in locations where defense against invaders was already failing. The people could not have been saved, he said. Better that they should furnish the colony with information that would create tomorrow's advantage. Meanwhile, the incoming Pilgrims would find no ready source of labor, nor any food with which to continue prosecuting a war in the wastes.

Sources:

Picture, called "Farming Unit" and credited to "G G" in the United Kingdom is apparently from user "shards" on the CGSociety forums. I found it on Pinterest.

I learned more about amino acids from the Cleveland Clinic.

On the "genetic alphabet," see D. Malyshev, at al., "A Semo-Synthetic Organism with an Expanded Genetic Alphabet."

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The nearest Shaper base to Ascendancy territory was a mere 52 kilometers from Rosalind's Spire. Named Coldheart in an act of self-rebuke, it existed to capture, process, and control the flow of the Hyas's hyperactive ice volcanoes. During his stay as Pahlavi's guest, Yang joined her, in disguise, for a conference with the Shaper Custodian, Demis Moradi. It was at Coldheart that Yang learned that the Dune Sea was no natural marvel.

Demis Moradi, one of the first children of independent Kurdistan, watched the promise of independence spoil. Drought led his proud father to liquor, and radiation caused young Demis to spend the better half of his childhood in clean wards where he took Interlink correspondence courses and won election as a member of his country's parliament--by then, a duty almost free for the taking. Haunted by the memories of acid rain and his own frailty, Moradi volunteered (while still a seated MP) as a "picker"--one of the hundreds of thousands of liquidators supported by the international community to conduct post-atomic clean-up after the Six Minute War. Thereafter, legislating seemed beyond him. When invited to speak in session, he recited poetry grieving the loss of the Kurdish patrimony. Unsure of how else to put him to good use, the Kurdish government declared him Poet Laureate and a Person Significant to Cultural Perpetuation. Shaper mountaineers found Moradi in a crashed Colony Pod. Coordinator Nagao assigned him to Coldheart as a Radiation Control Technician responsible for the settlement's fusion-powered ice crawlers. When most of the base administration died in an ice blow, the survivors voted Moradi their leader. After suffering repeated Ascendancy slave raids, Moradi signaled his willingness to negotiate: he would forbear from drowning Rosalind's Spire in nine feet of ice slurry if hostilities ceased. Trade soon developed instead.

To offset the intense heat they generated, the Ascendancy exposed its incubation cylinders to the sub-zero temperatures of the high mountain passes. The dozen batches at Rosalind's were served by an electric tramway that doubled as convenient, albeit uncomfortable, transportation for those who wished to avoid more familiar paths.

At the end of the electric tramway, Hive Technical Sergeant Ikama Rufio gawked at what he first took for an automated mining complex. The bemused Pahlavi explained that he was actually looking at "the Mighty Mac," a city-sized supercomputer operated by the survivors of the mission's Nuclear Computing Laboratory. She was not the first to realize that the Hyas Range was an ideal heat sink. Alas, she had no communications frequency for Dr. Johann Anhalt. But she would part with another pallet of rations along with some grapnel guns and personal trolleys if the Hivemen would agree to make introductions on her behalf.

Sources:

Coldheart is Luc Fontenoy's "Mountain."

Demis Moradi is Egyptian actor Youssef El Sherif.

Third picture is Aran Quillinan's "Halo Environment."

Fourth picture is nikolayhranov's "Environmental - SciFi Mountains."

The personal trolley is a device used in Battlefield 2042 to ride ziplines and guy wires.

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If it's an oracle you wish, go consult the punch cards. - Admonishment to wayward parishoners

Yang was aghast at the society established under Dr. Johann Anhaldt and the beleaguered remainder of the Nuclear Computing Laboratory. He was not alone.

Nobody could gainsay the trauma of the Laboratory's experience. Misperformance of hibernation protocols claimed an abnormally high number of the computer scientists before ever Unity fired its engines. So many had strangled to death, orders were given to divert subsequent colonists to supernumerary spaces for sleep induction rather than expose them to the uncollected detritus of a half-hundred unsuccessful resuscitation efforts still strewn across the deck grates.

There, still struggling to make sense of the rows of darkened cryobeds, a thousand more had died--were executed, in fact. The killers were Kellerites, and they fired without bothering to ask the names of their victims. As if to inflict an ironic vengeance, the survivors did precisely what the cultists feared: they brought thinking machines down to the new world and then did precisely as they were instructed.

A Kellerite raises a sonic projector in anger. Though made to disperse targets rather than kill them, it would do just that at close quarters.

How can it be, Yang asked, that there is such obedience without compulsion?

In an uncharacteristically intimate letter to explorer Vinchenson Parke, perhaps judged a safe outlet for confession because he was far beyond the influence of the internecine skirmishing that so fascinated her synod, Sister Miriam Godwinson wrote that she had come to describe the emotion she'd felt in Anhaldt's presence as fear.

Firmly bent to one task at the top of the hour, they are equally as happy to be turned toward another pursuit at the bottom, never reflecting on which was the more valuable work. And they have yet to perfect the algorithms, so the work changes constantly. Their bases resemble the aftermath of a groundhog invasion: a thousand starts, but nothing completed.

Children of the Atom perform manual switching operations for a base supercomputer. Anhaldt's people used powerful mneumonic techniques to enable switchers to remember and repeat up to the last hundred motions. This allowed them to implement minor "roll backs" whenever one of the senior data scientists detected potential faults in the supercomputer's logic. Of course, these were difficult to diagnose: what was the difference between an artificial mind that could think beyond the capacity of a human, and simple inanity?

Sources:

First picture from the Netflix movie "Blasted."

Second picture from the movie "Sleep Dealer."

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And Cain went out from the presence of The LORD, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, east of Eden, and though beloved by The LORD, he was an exile for all time, and all his people with him. - The Conclave Bible, Datalinks

Iqbald Tariv, called "Baba Igbald" by friend and foe alike, was a power unto himself in the Cashton Sprawl south of Adam's Agony.

He was one of the "Undetected," a child conceived so close to the time of final departure that neither his mother nor ship's medical staff were aware of her pregnancy. She survived the Catastrophe of Arrival, though as an unvested laborer among The New Two Thousand. On her second day Planetside, she was judged to have an unwanted skill set, assessed a debt of ¤5,000,000, and remanded to servitude.

Ssihash Tariv, an atmospheric chemist with Roscosmos who had spent a quarter of her life in high Venusian orbit, could do little of immediate value in a frontier economy with only rudimentary sensing technology and no immediate need for deep climatology. Acute calcium deficiency and compounding cardiovascular damage caused by years in zero- and micro-gravity left the twenty-six-year-old non-ambulatory on Chiron. For these reasons, despite her compounding obligation to the faction that continued to clothe and feed her, she could not be auctioned. On the orders of Governor Oscar van de Graaf, Base Operations accepted the young woman for service as a safety specialist while faction envoys added her name to a list of personnel judged "saleable" to other factions. She spent her days preparing meteorological reports from the observation dome of a Colony Pod.

The infant Igbald was taken at the moment of birth and placed in the household of Stakeholder Siran Agenid, a Greco-Hungarian power systems engineer. Before contracting with van de Graaf, Agenid, an escapee from behind the Iron Curtain, had worked for Franco-Belgian firm Telegisse-Barrette designing the battery back-ups for deep sea laboratories.

With no intention of settling into domestic life, the unmarried Siran left Igbald and other such unfortunates in the care of a tutor, Canában Rå, best known for having discovered five additional plays of William Shakespeare in the sub-basement of Oxford's Radcliffe Camera in 2012. Rå, a naturalized British citizen, had been the Royal Household's nomination to the Unity Project at its outset. Despite rigorous screening that suggested reasonable safety margins despite his age, complications of very long cold sleep induced a stroke, and Rå was paralyzed on his left side. (It is rumored that van de Graaf disciplined the pathfinders who discovered Rå among the passengers of a surfaced Hab Pod and chose to release him rather than disconnect his battery back-up.) Judged largely useless like Ssihash Tariv, his purpose among the New Two Thousand was merely to ensure that orphaned Drones did not die by misadventure before they reached profitable adulthood.

Young Igbald Tariv responds with characteristic rectitude as he receives a rare admonishment from Canában Rå, probably over a missed assignment. An Agenid household Subduer stands by in case Tariv or another pupil becomes unruly during correction.

The House of Agenid held fast to the Czerkban School of child development. The correction baton, a low-grade psi-whip, was used to inflict positive punishment for even minor infractions such as scoffing or idleness. Siran urged that educators should use it intermittently, even on the well-behaved--a reminder of his own conviction that life was mostly the unmerited experience of pain stimuli. Yet whenever possible, Rå spared the rod, and so spoiled the child. Under his careful intervention, Iqbald grew into a tall, serious young man with a pronounced wild streak and a hawkish attitude toward preemptive self-defense. Resentment boiled his blood hot, and he struck dead another Drone over a pilfered bowl of porridge at age sixteen, landing a single, fatal blow to the temple. Siran fined Igbald to replace the value of the dead boy's future work, but was otherwise impressed.

I like a certain rambunctiousness in the Drones. If they aren't healthy enough to plot escape, they're probably not healthy enough to work very hard. - Rebuke to Stakeholders

Pilgrims of every social rank enjoyed hoverbike racing. These high-speed, no-rules fracas were open only to expendable Drones. Only leading citizens were permitted the vice of gambling, and they wagered huge sums on their stables. Drones of the House of Agenid received bounties of ¤10,000 for every equal or subordinate of a rival House they bested in the street, and ¤1,000,000 for every racetrack win. By custom, to kill the rider of another House was instant fulfillment of the Terms of Indenture.

By eighteen, Igbald regularly stole Agenid hoverbikes for long peregrinations in the Dune Sea. There, he saw his first Hive base, suffering potshots from their inexpert sentries. On another jaunt, he joined a rally as an outrider to champion House Sprinter Shadrach LeFevre, coming in fourteenth place overall but protecting his principal from being unseated for three circuits. Siran arranged a barbecue in his honor.

In M.Y. 26, Igbald slashed dead the two Subduers posted outside the workers' barracks and fled the Agenid homestead with his sweetheart, another Drone named Sokkanon, and many followers in his own age cohort.

The renegades had previously consulted the faction Network to triangulate the position of a recently-fallen Supply Pod. Taking their masters' hoverbikes, they beat both the understaffed Pilgrim militia and Agenid family guards to the crash site, loaded onto crawlers everything found inside the hull, and set out cross country. Behind them, a paid Hunter scout team led pursuers astray.

Within weeks, Igbald Tariv was leader of a functioning outpost complete with defensive berm, water, shelter, and intermittent generator power. To round out a diet of unsatisfying E-Packs, they inflated greenhouse tents where they raised Terran crops and roasted Rodgier's Rats, a pest released onto Chiron from infested grain bins carried aboard Unity. Gormands among them added juvenile subrid to the menu.

It was, in many ways, a simple life, and by some standards, idyllic. Survival hoods were unnecessary in the oxygen-rich Sprawl. There were also few enough of Tariv's people that the contents of their single Supply Pod might as well have been a treasure hoard. The pod was an over-pack job. From it, the refugees rolled a fleet of construction vehicles and prime movers, pop-up wind traps, long-falling parachute flares, spherical flares that could be rolled ahead of the wary, air hatchets, crank antenna, and a racked arsenal.

Tariv automated as much as possible. His people mostly limited themselves to piloting and riding herd while their self-guided devices performed most inconvenient tasks. The 'Formers set up automated mines, dammed rivers to create reservoirs, and erected leaching tents to draw carbon dioxide from decomposing foliage, which they processed into liquid fuel. In less than a year, they turned the trees, which had an interconnected root system, into a natural aqueduct and water filtration system by screwing in a few positive-pressure taps. Tariv even released bees, heedless of the ecological risk. They thrived.

Their original settlement had a ramshackle and uneven personality. A crude wooden waterwheel provided cooling for an industrial grade 3D printer. Wooden parapets and ramps linked corrugated steel and formacrete structures. Live power cables doubled as clothes lines. Rather than use camp stoves or electric furnaces, Tarsiv and his people cooked over open flame.

A few of the runaways learned survival out of interest, fishing the streams for sylph-eel and stripping their scales to make a kind of leather for patching their garments, or crushing dendrel leaf for a powerful light-absorbing dye. In the evenings, Tariv organized stage performances. After many bowls of munga beer, brewed from fungal germ, he might signal for the hallucinating audience to interrogate the players, who would break the Fourth Wall to explain their motivations. The Hunters of Chiron, who valued Tariv's settlement as a permanent break on Pilgrim expansion, recognized his rights in the Cashton and purchased the hardwoods felled by his offspring.

Tariv's people called him father, Baba, and he treated them as he thought he ought to have been treated--as he imagined his mother would have treated him. They fed their hungry, nursed their sick, and, fatted on the riches of their original efforts, cared nothing for personal wealth.

Dignity is the best bandage, and a swinging fist solves more problems than it creates. - Your Prodigal Son

Tariv's outpost traded with the Hunters of Chiron on liberal terms, providing larger quantities of fresh water than they could purify themselves and the protection of a firm stockade. Weapons were in constant demand, as was intelligence.

Tariv and Sokkanon had eighteen children who survived to adulthood. The other escapees were similarly prodigious. By the dawn of the third decade of the colony's independence, in M.Y. 55, Tariv was ready to seek out Ssihash at Adam's Agony. After a week of slipshod drill, the assault force set out.

The campaign of putative liberation ended in total disaster for Igbald and his tiny force. Thanks to watchful patrollers, the alarm was raised before they could cross the fields, and the parapets manned by militia. Well-aimed fire from the settlement blockhouse did for most of the attackers even before they dismounted to find cover and van de Graaf ordered his militia to fire strangle gas. Still at the head of fewer than one in six of his original force, Igbald plunged back into the forest.

After spooning the bitter soup of a hundred small defeats, the hard core of the Pilgrim Militia began to learn its business. Chasers like this one made contact with Tariv's raiders long before they left the familiar safety of the Sprawl.

In time, Baba Igbald accepted his place as an irritant on an elephant's flank. The colony at Cashton became a checkpoint for runaways, absorbing them into its own population or aiding them to continue further south. The Hunters stayed in regular contact. Eventually, Hivemen appeared, as did Gaians, the first to discuss their mutual enemy and the latter to learn from their fellow forest-dwellers.

Sources:

Adult Igbald Tariv is Werner Herzog as The Client in Disney's Star Wars sequel series The Mandalorian.

Teenage Igbald Tariv is Alec Newman from the Dune miniseries (2000).

Picture of the racer is "Hoverbike" by Mnoloconic. Available on the website Mercenary Garage.

Found the outpost picture on Pinterest from Aaron H. It appears to be credited to Fantasy Flight Games, but more specifics than they, I do not have.

Gun trading picture also found on Pinterest, here.

Strangle-gas is a weapon from the steampunk fantasy setting Iron Kingdoms.

Chaser is "Tracker on Her Hoverbike" by Brian Matyas.

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Comparison is the source of all misery. A drone counts himself a king to dine on thin gruel so long as he feels certain that his companions have only water. - The Book of Twenty-Six Princes

Nearing the bicentennial of human settlement on Chiron, Librarian Sawenna Omruds thought to collect entertainment clippings from each of the factions major. The results of her survey, published in a series of widely-read updates on the Peacekeeping Forces' Datalinks, caused hysterical laughter in White Rabbit's Refuge, gnashing of teeth in New Jerusalem, and hours of work for tabulators in The Core. Prisoners at The Core rioted after learning what they were missing. Moranites demanded new entertainment packages for their money. Censors yanked the cables in Atlantis.

Damsels frequently questioned whether one-time merchant sailor Arvn Gym had rocks for brains, but poor test scores never seemed to stop him from saving the day.

Though they pretended to enjoy the educational program piped free into their kitchen terminals, University tastes in entertainment were strictly low-brow. Callow undergraduate and mad scientist alike preferred to unwind with a bit of slapstick. They would go as far as serialized adventure in the style of Commando Cody or Space Patrol--a romanticized rendering of what could be done with the wondrous tools they created by people far more worldy than they--but anything more serious struggled to gain an audience. Walt Disney animation also took hold in Zakharov's territories. This form of escapism showed on long loops in the faction's crowded anti-radiation clinics.

Gaia's Stepdaughters gravitated toward overwrought telenovelas, the heroes and heroines of which were sure to be hobbled by debt and perpetually unlucky in romance. CEO Nwabudike Morgan naturally used this information to taunt the Lady Skye as an unstable leader, though more incisive takes wondered at the cynical throughline: the futility of trying to hold on tight to that which one loved.

Hive Drones craved sport, the bloodier the better. Commentators for Chironian rules football found their way into public service audio. The same voice shouting, "Foul!" with unrestrained enthusiasm also reminded one to don their eye protection if venturing to the surface levels. Curiously, another popular programme followed the Kafkaesque journeys of Itilan Gann, a relentlessly cheerful Drone who repeatedly failed his merit exams for lack of study and arrived at his workstation each morning to find bizarre instructions dispatching him to distant service tunnels. Never would he finish his journey: at the bottom of the half-hour time slot, an urgent cable summons always saw him recalled, though not before he'd finished drawing the double ration for overtime work. The show consisted of hours of feed from Gann's point of view. Enthusiasts searched with relish for "his" stickers.

Lavatory attendant Itilan Gann relishes a rest. Naturally, the Hive's huge workforce encompassed no such assignment.

Milk-fed Spartans attended their history lessons. Commissioner Pravin Lal remembered in his diary that the informational content and even-handedness of the material "struck me doubly." He wondered at the accuracy of the reputation surrounding the Spartans in light of "this refreshing honesty that would not have been the least objectionable coming from our own terminals."

Tribals did not watch; they listened. Radio was an obsession, hearkening back to the olden, "golden" days of yore when flu-addled, flood-stricken Midwesterners used the very last of their battery power to tune in for the latest diagnosis of the nation's plight from a man they imagined to be very like themselves. Each base had a different stable of disc jockeys, and only a minority bothered to rebroadcast sermons most listeners knew by heart. Better to blast the Rock n' Roll.

Dreamers tried "digital drugs," using binaural beats to cause the brain's sound processing center (the superior olivary complex) to alter the brainwaves to compensate. Adjustments in frequency could stimulate or inhibit different psychological conditions, some therapeutic, some potentially problematic. Many addicts claimed that the sensory input that could be got from their home terminal was an inextricable aspect of the high, as essential as the tube that delivered the Somnacin itself. When sober, Dreamers tended to search for a news feed, usually the trusted World Restored service run by the Peacekeeping Forces, through which they could learn information that their own faction was incapable of providing to them. By M.Y. 194, the Peacekeepers reserved whole blocks of daily programming for audiences in other societies. Some Hivers followed the radio signals to freedom. Dreamers soaked up storm tracks, wormsign reports, and news from active military fronts. Morganites (and interested SAMCERs) noted the comings and goings of caravans.

Sources:

Pulp sci-fi art by Bob Larkin.

Lunching still is from the fifth season episode of Babylon 5, "A View From the Gallery."

On binaurual beats, I consulted WebMD, which I'm not sure is scientifically valid.

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Unity Tech: Ceremonial Burial

The corpse we dismember, but the broken man we complete. - Essays of Mind and Matter

Pravin Lal built a monument to war he hadn't fought, and managed to lose thirty souls in the doing. The size of the edifice staggered newcomers seeing this frivolity for the first time, like the Gaian refugees in this impression.

Bare survival instinct and the weakness of personal bonds between survivors claimed many of the cultural signifiers of Terran humanity. University custodians sealed up their earliest dead, too heavily irradiated for burning or simple burial, in cliffside caverns. Caring for patients still clinging painfully to life banished all idea of mourning any whose grip had failed. In the frantic opening battles of the Slowwind campaign, both Spartan and Kellerite left killed or injured combatants for the evening tides to claim rather than risk sending out litter-carriers. All factions followed rigid burn discipline for Red Flu.

Hive surgeons learned to prepare the dead body for moisture reclamation in a sequence of as many as 12,749 precise cuts, harvesting every healthy organ system before entrusting the flensed remains to the dehydrators. Drones could be casually maimed by the Monitors, then rebuilt before the next shift. Starving Believers stripped the bodies of the dead, then dragged them outside their tents and left them in the deep snow, anticipating a season less hungry in which they could pray their souls properly to Paradise. Ascendancy cloning vats simply incinerated their "failures."

I will see you in the eyes of the next generation. - Datalinks, Traditional

Ceremonial burial signifies material as much as social abundance. Gravediggers plant nothing that will grow. Celebration of the passage of life implies the tribe's certainty that it shall endure when the individual has gone. Desperation made a virtue of being selfish. What would it yield a man's work-mates to bury him with objects for which they might yet have some use? Should the thirsty waste tears, or the downtrodden sing in remembrance?

Terran funerary practices persisted most completely in the New State, whose ship's captains read previously-marked passages from the Marian Bible as they consigned their dead sailors to the Deep.

As late as M.Y. 80, factions commemorated events more comfortably than they did people. Chiron's largest memorial, a four-legged arch set astride the Slowwind, remembered the battle, not its participants.

Sources:

Ceremonial Burial was a technology introduced way back in Sid Meier's Civilization I.

Monumental landscape by artist Espen Olsen Sætervik.

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Vehicle Chassis: Hopper

Only the old can beget the new. - Legacies

Distant descendants of the Lunar Lander and close cousins of the much larger single-use Landing Pods, "Hoppers" were short-range, jet-powered vehicles capable of repeated trans-atmospheric travel. In low-gravity environments, they could reach space; in higher gravity, they represented the nearest thing to proper flight before the needlejet and lift-fan, barring choppers too small to have more than situational value. Hoppers attained 7g of lift on liftoff, rising to altitudes as high as 120,000 feet. They traveled in parabolic arcs, "springing" upward on reinforced hydraulic struts.

The horrified crew of Flight Ҡ42 at first protested being assigned Lander 4, a relic of twentieth century moon exploration easily as iconic as the Mayflower. To their joyous astonishment, it still flew. As the ultimate expression of its continued airworthiness, Academician Zakharov had himself filmed aboard during a cargo leap between University Base and Higher Function.

The Hopper filled a unique gap in Unity's load-out, and, later, the order of battle of many a human settlement on Chiron. There were many reasons for this. Hoppers were cheap and easily sourced. In return for tax brakes, companies like Tin Star and King Priam Mining pitched thousands of their older surveyors and transports in-system toward the Lunar Cradle from as far away as Venus, Mars, and the Main Belt--a bargain compared to travel up the space elevators. They could also be "packed"--that is, broken down into easily-reassembled components as a space-saving measure during transport. Many Hoppers were small, designed for crews of between one and five. Since awkward geometry was no issue for a vessel that didn't have to contemplate take-off from within atmosphere, Unity carried its Hoppers bolted to the exterior hull (in fact, dozens were lost to the micrometeorite and subsequent internal explosions), but their good man-scale portability made them a favorite tool of Probe Teams that would others have to "leg it" out of enemy territory. Hoppers were also notoriously rugged. They'd acquitted themselves handsomely in the hostile environments of the Saturnian moons, operating in ammonia seas, acid rains, and under intensely radioactive conditions. As Belt-rated transport, they had hermaphrodite reaction chambers capable of taking even the most rudimentary fissile injects if C-grade fuel pellets were scarce.

A Believer foray into the Dune Sea is cut short by activity on the horizon. From "cold" condition, Hoppers could take off in less than thirteen minutes under the ministrations of a competent crew.

Under the primitive conditions experienced on Chiron, Hoppers made fearsome weapons of war. At the apogee of its a leap, they could deploy parachutes and loiter for hours in the sky, performing long-range surveillance and conducting wide-scope electronic warfare missions. Unless slowed by the counter-thrust of a landing burn, a Hopper could also become a direct-strike weapon. Pilots trained to bring the craft down in a controlled free-fall that struck with force equivalent to 0.5 tons of TNT, about the same power as a 2,000lb. bomb, reliably gouging craters fifteen meters wide and eleven deep.

Despite their generally sturdy construction, Landers could and did fail, particularly when attempting combat "stomps." During the Relief of Elektrichestvokupo, the University lost twelve of thirty-two vehicles to pilot error.

Typical weapons systems for Hoppers included banks of incendiary launchers and directed-energy weapons fed directly from the fuel pellet supply.

The prominent cabin strongly suggests that this Hopper was used for intelligence-gathering or artillery spotting. Note also the many attitudinal thrusters used to correct spin and drift.

Sources:

This post inspired by the "Hopper" war machines found in the 1979 SPI hex-and-counter wargame Titan Strike!.

First Hopper is art by Mike Trim.

Second Hopper is art by the aptly-named Hopper. No joke.

Third Hopper is by a NASA artist. Here's the citation from Wikipedia: "Artist's conception of the Mars Excursion Module (MEM) proposed in a NASA Study in 1964. Dixon, Franklin P. (June 12, 1964). "Summary Presentation: Study of a Manned Mars Excursion Module". Proceeding of the Symposium on Manned Planetary Missions: 1963/1964 Status. Huntsville, Alabama: NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. p. 470. NASA-TM-X-53049; 64N-26979."

For Hopper weapons systems, I continue to be inspired by Dennis Villaneuve's depiction of Harkonnen vehicles in Dune.

Fourth Hopper found on Flickr. James Vaughn's page.

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New Ideas for Discussion

I've begun a new analysis of the factions. It's a combination of laying out the leader and society information in a spreadsheet format. This lets us look at their philosophies, as well as their game pieces, in juxtaposition to one another.

Some preliminary conclusions are emerging.

The more factions we add, the sharper and narrower each one gets. That's inevitable. But has it gone too far?

I love the Hunters. I think they'd be a popular faction from a gameplay standpoint. As a successor to the "-ization" series games, SMAC focused on base-building. But what if a faction didn't bother with a base? And what if the diplomacy was deeper so that you could have an intermediary faction that did deals with everyone?

It's in the lore that the Hunters become a bit more problematic. Not their ideology. If anything, the meditation on masculinity and the questions raised by Marsh's philosophy have become more relevant, not less, to our contemporary day-to-day. But in terms of faction design.

When the game released in 1999, the Spartan Federation was probably the faction I'd associate most closely with physical conditioning. Readiness of mind and body are paramount to war. When you start with just 7 factions, their collective philosophies have a lot of ground to cover. So you stretch them, like the membrane over a drum. The 5-color "pie" used in Magic: the Gathering illustrates this problem nicely. Red is not just the chaos color, but also the color of industry--of striving and ambition and risk. (One can almost see the tie to capitalism.) Black, which is all about death and exploitation, naturally encompasses necromancy, and it's just a short skip from there to the creation of lesser copies of things. But if you add a few more colors to the pie, it makes sense to combine industry and artifice into another color altogether, usually Brown or Grey. And once you make that addition, some of the original lore, or even the ways we might have once thought about the factions (or might still think about the factions) become warped.

In my fiction, the Spartans are warriors who want to practice war as a kind of self-improvement project. But the implications of their original "Keep and bear arms" philosophy, at least in the stereotypes sense of a freedom one "imposes" on others, got pushed to the Hunters, who are all about ignoring territorial boundaries and asserting their right of access to resources. Deep thinking about the link between health and survival gets offloaded to the Hunters, too. And the desperate grasp for "our fair share" of things that comes of making Santiago more a true stowaway than a mutineer proper is divided between the Spartans, Tribe, and Pilgrims (New Two Thousand).

The same happens with Morgan. The New Two Thousand crowd in on classic Morganite turf. They're all about free enterprise and the cross-over into banditry.

It makes me wonder if, the next time I tell this story, I should go with the idea that the new 7 are cadet branches of the original factions. This would meant that their leaders become prominent lieutenants, not necessarily founders of wholly independent societies. Thoughts?

What about my personal take on the factions?

Let's use Lal as an example. My Lal is much more an homage to the Kafkaesque caricatures of the U.N. popular circa 1998 than he is an ardent proponent of Net Neutrality. And while I don't think the original lore does that aspect of him any more justice than I do him injustice, that unexplored aspect of his design becomes very obvious when you take his quote and compare it to the other faction leader musings.

In my story, Lal is the guy who is guilty of staying his hand to avoid revealing an impotence that is already obvious to everyone but himself. It's like the old joke about the Soviet leaders stuck on the train. After trying to haul the engine with cables and shooting the mechanics, Gorbachev suggests the Politburo pull the window shades and simply pretend the train is moving. Combined with Lal's reflexive self-doubt, I think it makes for a good character. One tortured by his past and unable to confront bullies from the self-righteous high ground. In a narrative story I told elsewhere, Lal's subordinates loved him for his awareness that he had growing to do, and so they worked to imbue in him the steel of his own convictions. But we didn't talk about propaganda, or censorship, as bigger ideas.

Which of my versions of the leaders do you like best?

The discard pile.

I'm struggling with the Watchers of Chiron. Sardul Singh and his prisoners are interesting enough to sit at the top of the "bits box" I reach to for new inspiration, but I have so much more to say about everyone else. And the Labyrinth and Dreamers together can cover most of the stories about dystopian surveillance it's possible to tell.

I also wonder about the New State. Not because I would do away with them, but because the topic of aristocracy might be better addressed by a whole faction. But I appreciate that the New State, as described heretofar, has more going for it than just an "underwater" vibe. And I think they have crucial things to say about the tension between safety and liberty that is often at the heart of aristocratic societies. Of course, Yang's Hive already makes the case for despotism to counterbalance the tendency of the masses to panic and make unwise decisions about where to vest their trust. Just looking for feedback.

Where to see more

For those that want to see some of my notes and analysis, remember that my Google Drive AC2 file is open for comment.

Our Discord channel welcomes you.

[Trenacker]

More game design musings.

Mystic Wind recently turned me on to a project by an individual named space-commander on DeviantArt who came up with a new Social Engineering construct for SMAC. See here. I've taken this work, along with a look at that of _gravity_ on the Everything2 forums and come up with a slightly revised version. I also appreciated some critique shared by nweismuller.

Note that the tables are not intended to be read top-to-bottom as progressions. For example, it does not necessarily follow logically that an a Theocratic society would adopt Green economics or that representative politics is a stepping stone to planned economics, much less stability values. Rather, the table as a whole represents various directions for in-game factions to take humanity, and each concept is grouped under the heading most conducive to it.

	Frontier	Libertarian	Classical	Digital	Enlightened	Romantic	Technocratic
Politics	Democratic	Oligarchic	Autocratic	Representative	Theocratic	Anarchic	Meritocratic
Economics	Barter	Mercantalistic	Command	Planned	Green	Post-Scarcity	Free Market
Values	Survival	Wealth	Power	Stability	Truth	Welfare	Knowledge
Future Society	None	Eudaimonic	Thought Control	Computer-assisted	Transcendent	Retrospective	Caste

I was inspired by some discoveries made by MysticWind, who turned me on to a table created by space-commander (DeviantArt). I also studied an analysis of the original SMAC Social Engineering concepts by _gravity_ on the Everything2 forums. I further appreciated some critique shared by nweismuller.

[Trenacker]

Geography Is destiny. - Datalinks

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5

University of Planet: Zakharov's people were a spent force at Planetfall. Radiation sickness acquired during the doomed effort to repair the damaged fusion drives or prevent reactor meltdown killed more than 60% of them. They landed in the foothills of the Daimones Peaks on Shamash, founding University HQ, the most northerly of the human colonies. There, they turned themselves at once to two tasks: the care of their wounded and the scientific interrogation of the strange and terrible paradise all about them. Zakharov at first organized his people according to their occupational purpose but soon amended this to discriminate by area of educational specialty instead. The change added slight occupational variation to the final combinations of colonists and crew--a boon, he said, to interdisciplinary thinking. The University escaped Unity with a huge cache of fissile materials, most of the mission's complex laboratory equipment, and all the data tapes, mainframes, and terminals they could find. Frantic salvage teams sank to tearing some computers from their sockets without bothering to first disconnect the wires.

The University experienced a quiet Planetfall. A thinker rather than a fighter, and well aware of his group's deficiency in that department, Zakharov pursued a studied neutrality when it came to the affairs of other factions, sharing or trading without regard for their politics. With the endorsement of a rubber stamp faculty senate, he also quickly excised those he felt would be a poor fit with his social agenda, exiling more than three hundred "excessives," by which he meant anyone from soldier to lunatic. The University was unique for its homogeneity: Zakharov had been careful to surround himself with protégés and other familiar faces from the moment of waking, and hadn't enjoyed the luxuries of time or opportunity to rifle through the Hab bays for a well-rounded "take," or to make prisoners of other stunned survivors.

Naturalist T. Lange discovering the Chironian subrid while seeking shelter from an oncoming electrical storm. Attempts to woo the creature failed. The tracker beacon on his hoverbike led University Security to the nest two days hence.

An amphibious, ice-crawling Juggernaut deposits a Research Outpost on Eurydice Float. The fifteen-person station staff circled the Northern Pole over a three-year period, gaining important insights into the geology and climatology of Planet.

Gaia's Stepdaughters: The Gaians came down in swamps in the southwestern reaches of Shamash, far south of the Slowwind Delta. Most of Lieutenant Commander Deirdre Skye's subordinates fell in Hydroponics, killed by Santiago's Spartans. The Green Thumbs could rightly boast of having made a courageous defense, although many had been slaughtered before they could take cover and return fire. Victory was possible thanks only to the timely intervention of Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal and a scratch force of mission loyalists. Afterward, Skye and her followers gathered what foodstuffs they could from the wrecked greenhouse block, collected certain farming equipment from storage, emptied the ship's Seed Vault, and moved for the exits.

Coaxing life from hostile mediums was a specialty of the biologists and agriculturalists under Skye's command, and they set to their work with confidence. They build bubbletent growhouses to obtain fresh food and dried the noxious swamps with water-absorbing organics and deep-soil aerators. While their base of general knowledge about Planet did not grow as quickly as that of the University, they practiced an even more fanatical form of anti-contamination protocols that limited complications from the local ecosphere.

Once bitten, the Gaians became twice shy, concealing themselves from outsiders with the same furtiveness as the Hive. In theory, the faction's Chiron Rangers were armed and trained for force protection, but war-making was hardly in their mental vocabulary.

A Gaian Protector explores the faction's first landing site at Hylonome Bog, where trees could grow to heights exceeding 120 meters. The U.N. Marine Crops left Skye's mauled coterie with Spartoi Defenders, bipedal robots designed for the Unity mission by the trans-Saturnian Autumnal Foundry after the Chiron Probe sent back evidence of problematic megafauna on Chiron. Despite this scout's futuristic-looking weapon is a sonic projector, useful against most Chironian predators.

Human Labyrinth (a.k.a. Human Hive): Sheng-ji Yang's first commandment was to dig. Overseers recruited from the Golden Chinese contingent used force to compel their newly-captured "workforce" to dig. Yang had consulted the central mainframe computer to identify the choicest crew compartments for his press gangs to pick over, but didn't stint from capturing damage control teams wholesale wherever he found them.

Inspired by his many years in Xinjiang and armed with survey data collected by the Chiron Probe (thought corrupted by the U.N. Data Sciences Unit but intercepted and cleaned up by Chinese intelligence), Yang brought his convoy of Landing Pods to the shelter of the Planctae Upthrust, a massif in the deep desert called the Dune Sea. As noontime temperatures in the shade soared past 125°, work parties were subjected to harsh "light and water discipline," told where to walk, when to swallow salt pills, and how much to drink from survival pouches fed by moisture-thirsty body gloves. Yang ordered medicos to insert intravenous tubes in each laborer's forearm and had 11-litre bags of Ringer's lactate solution duct taped to their hips. Dead bodies were baked for their water content, then dumped into vats of nutrient-absorbing slurry to become organic root-paste, used in the production of rope, animal feed, and laboratory growth medium.

The Hive delved into the dust, dragging all evidence of their arrival down the hole behind them.

Yang's followers launched coordinated assaults on shipboard caches of terraforming equipment to obtain the necessary ingredients for his master plan. Terraforming machines like this ARC-surplus H₄ Harvester were high on the list.

Spartan Federation: The mutineers crashed down in the Slowwind Delta in central Shamash, a crowded neighborhood in M.Y. 0. Santiago immediately sent scout patrols in every direction. After founding Sparta H.Q. on high ground, she moved to secure the coast through occupation and expansion of natural erosion tunnels at a place she called Xerxion.

The Spartan battle plan had fallen apart about Unity. Santiago was unnerved by the enthusiastic and indiscriminate violence perpetrated by her Holnist allies, whom she had believed could be led by the nose. About a quarter of the self-styled Colonel's command were genuine adherents of the Spartan Creed. Most were North Americans and Australians who had fought Holnists out of a sense of patriotic obligation. They counted themselves survivalists and worried about becoming reliant on impersonal and disinterested government, but wanted no truck with anarchists. The rest were effectively pirates sourced from post-war prison camps or the large underground networks of demobilized "statesmen," the wishful term that American leaders gave to those who had risen in rebellion once it was time to prioritize healing over justice.

Santiago had condoned what she felt were an unavoidable number of assassinations among the crew to help effect her mutiny, but the Holnists had used the insights gained from crew manifests to expand that killing a hundredfold. They also engaged in wanton destruction, venting or obliterating critical supplies that the "mainline" Spartans had viewed as their rightful measure. Too late, the Spartan leaders realized that they had made a pact with nihilists. Paranoid in the extreme, the Spartans chose to continue the vendettas begun on Unity, spilling first blood on Planet, just as they had above it. The result would be a grueling war of attritional annihilation that eventually spread to three continents. Their first victims were Kellerites, the familiar enemy.

Early Spartans spent their first years in trenches and blockhouses, or afloat on brown-water patrolcraft. Every available tool was turned to war. Years after other factions had moved on to bubbletent agriculture, Spartans continued to dine on irradiated ration packs and drink reclaimed water. Their engineers extended the service lives of the faction's two Landing Pods far beyond Grumman's specifications, but they stayed on the ragged edge, half-starved and rarely able to spare a thought for anything but the most basic aspects of colonization. Most of their "progress" in medicine, manufacturing, and computing came from the capture and study of enemy bases. Standing orders prohibited troops from plunder--as much out of concern to prevent demoralizing discoveries about their own sad condition as to protect viable assets.

A Spartan Controller repels a beseeching Holnist detainee in Fort Legion. Santiago was forced to parole and reabsorb even the most problematic of the Holnists as the Siege of Xerxion reached its obvious denouement.

Dynamic Enterprise (a.k.a. Morgan Industries): Nwabudike Morgan had promised comfort, and he meant to deliver. A CEO is paid to think in five-year increments. Morgan Industries secreted hundreds of company employees aboard, and tens of millions of tonnes of off-manifest equipment. Despite severe losses to secondary impacts from disintegrating sections of outer hull, much of Morgan's contingent survived to land with him, their numbers much enlarged with a clamoring throng of colonists and crew who were desperate to believe that they could fast-forward through the coming time of hardship.

Morgan landed alone and unmollested on Outremer, a small continent due west of Shamash across the New Sargasso Sea. Many hands made light work, and Morgan improved an already good hand by trading surplus goods for what his people didn't already have. Many of these expeditions, mounted across very long distances and focusing in particular on the more technologically advanced Chiron Probe survivors, paid handsome dividends despite a very high loss rate to worms, raiders, and misfortune.

To help ensure access to capital, Morgan imposed a curious practice unique to his colony: the energy accrued to each worker was paid in company stock. In other words, every worker granted Base Administration an involuntary low-interest loan without conditions. If the colony prospered, so did they. When it faltered, they received less than the worth of their labor. Morgan used the money held in this way to fund a flurry of base improvements and Secret Projects.

To boost morale, the colony's Board of Directors also encouraged his people to partake of amusements, turning a blind eye to heavy drinking, gambling, and other activity considered unacceptably "antisocial" in most other societies. On a darker note, this gave the Morganites a useful outlet for Probe activity. Internal regime opponents were frequently ruined or discredited by vice, while overindulgent visitors from other factions might have to finance their release from Holding by telling the Morganites what they wanted to know.

A Morganite hopper loaded with fish-bearing saltwater awaits rendezvous with their Spartan buyer.

Morgan converted an upper garage of one of his Landing Pods into a casino. Workers could take extra shifts to earn hourly admission. Hours could be converted to credits for those who didn't have possessions to stake.

Sources:

Subrid encounter by Kait Kybar.

"Juggernaut" picture is by Rob Watkins.

Bog scout is art by Wadim Kashin.

Water discipline is a concept from Frank Herbert's Dune.

"Sci-Fi Excavator" credits to acharyapolina on PoserContent.

H₄ Harvester, dubbed "Harvester," is the work of Orest Tsypiashchuk.

Holnist prisoner is a still from the TV show "Colony."

Morganite hopper is "Expedition" by Martin Parker.

Gambling hall is a picture of the old Las Vegas Star Trek Experience.

[Trenacker]

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5 (continued)

Peacekeeping Forces (a.k.a. Peacekeepers): They landed in the Southern Ocean on a mineral-rich continent about the size of Australia, dubbed "Garland." Low average temperatures kept fungal activity to a minimum. Sweetfishing was good along the coasts. They encircled their lone Landing Pod with a berm, called the resulting stockade "Warm Welcome," then set to pitching bubbletents. Not long after, they spread rain catchments for water, dug suspension pools to aid in physical recovery, and created open reading rooms. Citizens enjoyed a robust civic life: weekly gatherings, loosely proctored, settled most questions of priority and schedule.

Lal's people were an eclectic mix of his own surgical team; assorted mission loyalists, including constables and soldiers who had become detached from their U.N. Security Forces or Marine Corps commands; prisoners taken in battle, and lost or injured responders collected en route to the launch bays. Their number included artists who dashed base interiors with violent neons and prize-winning authors who turned themselves into ersatz data librarians. Lal was continuity to them--a tangible reminder of the Charter under which they had expected to live, and the hierarchy set to govern them with fairness and competence to spare.

There were shortages of everything. Unlike the stowaways, there had been no prior planning for the terrible emergency at the edge of the Alpha Centauri system. But the principles of compassion and democracy were well-known to his followers, and Lal, like Morgan, was spared, at least, the difficulty of articulating an essentially alien way of life to people already hungry, wounded, and scared.

Beyond base-building, the other difficulties encountered by the Commissioner were typical of his peers. At 66, he had a past, and his internal security apparatus was constantly at work trying to determine which of his constituents was out to settle old scores. Spartan he had chosen not to execute after the battle in the Unity hydroponics bay? Ibo victims of the Federal Army? Canadians who remembered how the U.N. had greased the skids for Soviet weapons to reach St. Pierre and Miquelon? Enemies of Apsara Mongkut? Shilohne? Danites? Sehlans? An American who remembered how the U.N. had given the Holnists top cover with dire warnings about the ethical evils of mandatory vaccination? Advisers worked in vain to keep the Commissioner moving too rapidly toward the induction of new colonists. Perhaps, they said, the search for other survivors should take lesser precedence? And what if they built an exclave for persons whose identities could not yet be verified?

Eventually, the Peacekeepers did set up a second encampment--at a place called U.N. Relief Station, once a triage center for the injured rescued from a crash-landed Colony Pod. As it happened, the Pod contained contractors affiliated with Struan's Pacific Trading Company. Under the leadership of their overseer, Dole Yudikon, they professed a prior allegiance to their employer, and begged to be recused from the obligations of citizenship. Lal acceded, though he also allowed the newcomers to integrate with his main settlement in anticipation of the day when it could be determined whether any Struan's representatives had survived to make Planetfall. Tensions flared when Yudikon questioned the basis for Lal's government. Yudikon and his lackies poked around the Spartan chain gang and prepared to launch a coup. They were added by one Colonel Kruse Martius, another post-Planetfall recoveree disillusioned by Lal's decision to parole Gathi war criminals discovered aboard Unity. Before the shooting started, an accord was reached: Yudikon was cast into exile. Along with fifty volunteers, he marched out the gates of the Peacekeeper base at Warm Welcome carrying a generous share of the colony's total wealth as his consolation.

The Peacekeepers and their Struan's neighbors now fell into a Cold War. Saber Company mercenaries employed by Struan's patrolled the outskirts of the exiles' little settlement on Garland's northeastern tip. The place, constructed mostly of repurposed cargo containers and plating torn from the skeleton of the half-submerged Pod, was as cold and miserable as an antarctic whaling station. The Peacekeepers put U.N. Marines on a nearby peak and dug in a heavy mortar. Lal also laid sensor fields between his territory and Yudikon's.

Meanwhile, Lal understood to retrieve the biggest remaining prize. The Peacekeepers had rescued a sky crane from the Unity's stores, and now they prepped it for an extraordinary long-range mission: to the Dune Sea, where their telemetry told them the Unity Data Core had landed. Armored marines recovered this storehouse of all human knowledge, killing suspected Hivemen in carload lots to do it. More enemies.

Notwithstanding the difficulties with internal subversives, the Peacekeeper position was much-envied. Lal had at his disposal the elite fighting force on Planet, and others dealt him injury at their own considerable risk, for every time, he gave better than he got.

Warm Welcome in winter. The base obtained most of its energy from solar collection, allowing it to harvest Chamomile's limited supply of fissile pellets for hopper flights. The egg-shaped structures at left are hab units; the domed structures at center and right are master control stations for various base facilities. The squad, disc-shaped modules with the red-striped roofs are greenhouses with warming domes spread.

Lord's Conclave (a.k.a. Lord's Believers): The Faithful made Planetfall in southern Shamash, well south of the Gaians. Miriam had gathered to her the largest number of Unity survivors, and the least-organized. Many had failed to face their own demons in the darkness, unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifices demanded of them by the imperious Chief Engineer Zakharov or the tinny-voiced sphinx, Francisco d'Almeida. They wanted absolution for their sins, and the Sister was prepared to give it.

For the first three years, the Believers sowed and reaped in peace. Their enemies were the rain, wind, and fungus. They gloried in the abundant nitrates that made farming possible in the too-dry, alkaline soil, and cursed the cloud layer that meant they saw the sun not one day in ten. Some sought refuge in the Good Book, which the Sister taught was timeless, and all enjoyed the simple secular fellowship for which the Modern Vulgatians were both famous and notorious.

Later, starvation set in: despite willing labor, the Believer colony was short on experts in every field, complicating the creation of a system to treat the nitrate-poisoned groundwater and grow nutrients in the abundance required. Raiding north brought little relief. Though the Gaians rarely made difficult targets even for Miriam's unskilled militia (how she sometimes longed for the warriors once in her father's service!), they had little enough of their own to surrender. The Pilgrims were a tougher foe altogether, and successfully resisted. Miriam sank to the low of hiring her people out to do the supervised work of tilling other factions' fields in return for a fraction of what that labor was worth in potable water and packaged rations easily obtained by their better-skilled rivals.

Geography spared the Believers, at long last. Several bumper harvests in their fertile valley helped stabilize the colony from M.Y. 4-5, allowing construction of granaries and a trade in surplus food that returned necessary heavy equipment from factions across the waters. Miriam got on well with the Contre-amirale St. Germaine, who at least pretended obeisance to the Church in most of its forms and urged his followers to donate to the stricken in Miriam's care.

A Believer Follow-on drops safely on the River Asterion.

Human Tribe: The "Pete" Landers crew had unity, and not the kind that crossed starpaths. The Kellerites, though very few in number--merely one-tenth the size of the Believer colony--shared a single vision for their future society. Their armed "retaliation" against the Unity, though it often descended into pogrom-style violence against enemies real and imagined, had got them much plunder--enough to make up, in a way Miriam could not, for the limitations in their training and education, both severely lacking from long decades of self-imposed exile from the world.

Kellerite bases were barracks with children. To "take the view," families lounged on what were in effect the base parapets.

The Tribe found no relief when they splashed down on the beige sandy bottom of the Slowwind. They were at war with the Spartans before most had seen the red sky of their new homeworld. None had yet breathed its air unassisted, and like the Spartans turned themselves to it with relish and abandon so that their overall development of administration, industry, economics, and other facets of the colonization process was severely arrested.

Home lay just over the wall for a Tribesman. Dwellings backed up to the encircling stockade as if to protest the crush inside, and they ran to their roofs to find the gun ports at the shrill of a central alarm. When they required something they did not have, they asked a neighbor. If it could not be had, they visited a common terminal and searched out the manufacturing process on confiscated datatapes. To do one's neighbor a small favor was the acme of citizenship, and it was unheard of to take a meal alone. Equipment crates were unsecured. "We were in and out of eachother's spaces so much," one remembered, "I could not have hid anything had I tried." Such sharing was practically an indictment of the Morganite way of life, and their CEO ghoulishly resurrected the ancient charge that Kellerites were fellow travelers of the Maoist Movements.

As stowaways, the Tribe had laid in guns, ammunition, and their own families--three advantages on Chiron, where weapons were always in short supply and, most of the ship's company being complete strangers, the natural birth rate was at first very low.

Nobody could be trusted who was not also a Kellerite. Spartans were the Near Enemy, but the Kellerites knew they had received the sentence of pirates. By blooding their swords aboard the Ark, they had become enemies of all nations. Naturally, they ambushed and gutshot and dry-gluched without remorse. Tribals were exceptional fighters, their battlesense honed by lifetimes of persecution. The firearm was an extension of the body none would be caught without.

Sources:

Peacekeeper Base picture from Feng Zhu at FZD School of Design.

Planetfall for the Believers is from a NASA's artist's conception hosted on Earthly Universe.

Tribal base is a Star Wars scene by Kevin Jick.

[Trenacker]

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5 (continued)

Human Ascendancy: Struan's Sabre Corporation mercenaries discovered Director Tamineh Pahlavi's people in the midst of making the ice in which to pack the mission's collection of genomic databanks, freshly disconnected from the Data Core (now ejected) and still scalding to the touch. Canisters of knockout gas lay expended on the decking, along with the corpses of a half-dozen A.R.C. private security men. Each had been dispatched with a bullet to the forehead. Realizing that they were unlikely to pull off a second tactical coup, the geneticists wisely genuflected. Pahlavi declared that she was relinquishing her claim to the dead men's equipment. While the Dreamers were still absorbing the idea of receiving as gift what they already implicitly possessed by virtue of force, the good doctor hastened to offer even headier wine: the last recorded neuroimages of all supervisory mission personnel, recently imprinted to datatape.

The Genetic Research Division (GRD) was an incidental addition to Prokhor Zakharov's contingent. In fact, they'd fought for the honor. Pahlavi herself had been woken automatically when Pete Landers's hackers tripped fail-safe the protocols for her hab bay. It took her scarcely two hours to retrieve all the surviving personnel of her small pre-flight command. They soon acquired weapons in a similarly serendipitous fashion: passing U.N. Security teams, recognizing unprotected crew, apologized at their inability to stay and handed out self-defense weapons to ease the sweet sorrow of parting.

The University's early decision to focus its intellectual work on "Chironian problems" frustrated Pahlavi. She was a passionate--and widely-resented--advocate for thorough analysis of the genomic information collected during Unity's voyage. Realizing that Zakharov could not be lured away from the temptations in every direction, the GRD requested self-exile.

Crossing the Daimones Valley, they reached the base of the mighty Hyas and immediately began to ascend, knowing they would find year-round water in the high passes along with total relief from the danger of fungus. They were few enough in number. World-class experts who had once dubbed their canteen the Ambrosia Club ate survival bars for much of M.Y. 3. Their big break came when a Hunter caravan rolled through a tunnel cut in the ice shelf. The scientists set off plastique that blocked either end, repeating their old trick with the gas. Pahlavi had a vendetta on her hands, but also the makings of a menial workforce.

An early view of manufacturing bays at The Pinnacle. Huge semi-voltaic windows gathered sunlight by day and held off the frost at night. Here, two Laser Rovers complete a morning patrol route. The 6x6 "Kord" chassis was a Turkish contribution to the Unity Mission. The lasers' high amperage meant huge heat buildup. Inefficient cooling foiled early attempts to mount the weapons in protected ball turrets. The Ascendancy found a solution in outrigger pylons. This limited the big 600kW projectors to a frontal art of just 10° each, and their Skunk Works compensated with additional turreted weapons in the 250kW range. Standard anti-infantry support, crucial during the first century of warfare, was a chin-mounted autonomous weapons turret. Crews were fond of liquefying the battlefield from a distance.

These Kords appear sturdy but the rear shells and cockpit were made of heat-reflective Kevlar fabric.

The real work behind the one-two punch of a Laser Strafe was accomplished by jump pack-equipped infantry. These latter-day paratroopers were ubiquitous in rough terrain, where the added mobility let them advance unimpeded and utilize more of their environment as practical cover. The devices were easy to make but difficult to master. Armorers knew better than to give their troops the means to an early death by misadventure. The striker button had a choke that limited fuel uptake, preventing too-rapid consumption of the small tank and strictly reducing jump range to lengths and heights manageable for the human body on landing. Jumpers often used pistols or grenade guns as a first resort. Rifles took too long to ready.

Sources:

First picture is Zongmeng Zhang's "Frozen Planet Base."

Proevenance of the second picture is uncertain. Probably a NASA concept picture.

[Trenacker]

Colonial Developments to M.Y. 5 (continued)

New State: Though their pickets rarely ventured past the delta barrages laid by both Tribal and Spartan in their first years on Planet, the New State made splashdown at a place on the same latitude as the river Slow Wind, approximately equidistant between Shamash and Outremer.

The Aquatic Operations Division escaped Unity fully intact, and the Contre-amiral had every intention of exploiting his monopoly on the expedition's precious few submersible hull forms.

The "Kasatka" was large indeed, but a builder, not the fighter implied by her name. Daesung counted itself fortunate to find a buyer in the U.N. after the destruction of the Bitter Waters Colony that had commissioned her. She was not yet a third paid off. Her sister ship, Hadúr, was built alongside Unity in the Lunar Cradle and eventually worked to build research habitats beneath the seas of Saturnian moon Enceladus. The two vessels were motherships. Their operators used them to tend fleets of much smaller, tactical submersibles like the Oculus Multi-Purpose Pods (MPP) seen in this artist's rendering.

The overwhelming majority of St. Germaine's people were submariners who adapted quickly and well to their predicament. And why not? Their fortunes were least-affected by Unity's loss, at least in the short term. They began patrols immediately, just as their training had led them to expect. They built tidal dynamos, nutrient sieves, and heat sinks as planned. High gravity was a problem in confined spaces, especially ones that demanded the fine care of a submarine, but muscle-controlled technologies and robotic servitors provided satisfactory answers.

St. Germaine's considerable civilian population was more difficult to please. They could be subjected to military discipline but were not reconciled to it. In so many words, they complained. Loudly and often. About the unappetizing food, the confinement, the sour notes in the recycled air, or the exhausting vigilance demanded of them with regard to leaks. St. Germaine was confounded by it. Had he not made them safe from their enemies? Did they want for anything that was not also in short supply on the surface? He bade the Psych Chaplains and Organizers among his contingent solve the problem, which they did with their customary summons to worship and service. New Staters were made thereby into an extraordinarily active people, notorious for a need to occupy their hands no matter the company or the occasion.

Sturdy fungal toadstools could be piled with centuries worth of nitrate accumulation. Beneath their canopies, oxygen-rich waters secreted ecosystems that thrived in complete darkness. New State scientists supervised clearing operations that exposed these habitats to sustained sunlight, stimulating gigantism in organisms that had developed hyper-efficient responses to UV radiation.

A Spectator MPP observes the slyke eel menace lesser denizens of the lumicoral, itself included. As a last resort against aggressive sea creatures, the pods could shed electrified scratch-wire netting. They were built tough by Bolton-Defiant Industries, shrugging off hard contact with underwater rock formations made by unskilled skippers. St. Germaine urged civilians to take rotations in the pods, hoping they would stumble across something edifying. External cameras were always recording to double-length datatapes in series banks.

Sources:

First submarine picture is widely available on the Internet, but the provenance of it is unclear.

Second image found on WallpaperFlare. Original artist also unknown.

Third image is Art Latkowski's "Beneath the Waves - Underwater Forest."

"Lumi-" as a pre-fix for light-bearing objects inspired by Planetside 2.

[Trenacker]

Mankind first set its heart on a one-way journey to Alpha Centauri at the dawn of the twenty-first century. A primitive electrostatic drive bore fifty thousand colonists across the interstellar medium with the collective blessings of both superpowers and a healthy dose of commercial largess.

They were refugees, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, Arabs and Jews, whose lives had been upended by the two nuclear tragedies of the new millennium. Though every mind and hand were missed in the Terrestrial reconstruction effort, habitable soil was at a premium and harvests were failing. Better to send the cream of the crop away than that they should spoil while awaiting the plate.

For to lead them, there came a man from the bottom of the world: Joralamon Hardacre, a non-patriated Israeli climatologist who had administered Antarctica since 1999. Drink and the odor of financial scandal had seemed poised to chase him from the post, but the accidental death of his replacement during an ice climb and the unheralded arrival of a French helicopter carrier off McMurdo made room again for a man who hadn't sense enough to stand clear of trouble. Hardacre stalled the French by sheer force of will, bashing core samples with a golf club and threatening to torch the research station around his ears before he would surrender it. The French admiral blinked and wired Paris for instructions. This short delay provided just enough time for the Soviets to get a cruiser on-station.

Hardacre's paymasters on the board of the Arkan-Wellington Company entrusted him with a simple instruction: send back data. As compensation for risking his uniquely serviceable neck and those of every soul aboard, the expedition received generous subsidies. Stable funding and clarity of purpose did in five years what for Unity required decades of painstaking effort.

No element of the Chiron Pathfinder went to waste. Her 1,000m tall heat dissipation fins were refashioned into the six Pillar Cities of the Euphrosyne Plain where early terraformation efforts had gone as far as the sowing of Terran anchor grasses.

Trust was not prominent among Joralamon Hardacre's qualities. He recognized that the Unity survivors were hungry, which made them dangerous. Whatever J.T. Marsh expected from the previous expedition, it was not the parsimony on which Hardacre insisted as a matter of principle, hiding his inhospitality behind the strictures of infection control.

Learning the full story of Unity's troubles only strengthened the old Administrator's certitude in the wisdom of his position. Unity road crews marked the comings and goings of Pathfinder patrol convoys with trepidation. The sturdy, ambush-protected battlecars at Hardacre's disposal showed up Unity's equipment for the pathetic inheritance it was.

Sources:

Probe by FZD School of Design.

Convoy by Darius Kalinauskas.

Titus Welliver, seen here in his role on The Last Ship, is Joralemon Hardacre.

[Trenacker]

The power to hurt -- the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief -- is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. - Datalinks

By the 2060s, the world's richest man had a problem. Only an army of K Street lobbyists, French citizenship, and round-the-clock security spared him the wrath of the United States, Canadian, and Mexican governments.

Though they also supplied all three federal armies, Morganite businesses nonetheless played a key role equipping, training, and advising those states and provinces in insurrection. Sabotage and knowledge loss from the withdrawal of federal garrisons or the refusal of loyalists to serve secessionist causes often meant that captured equipment was unusable. Morganite mechanics replaced missing or damaged components and trained new operators to use unfamiliar weapons systems. Often, the mercenaries fought alongside their students. Company-level formations of Morgan Armored Security served openly under the banner of the Missouri State Guard, unashamed to draw handsome pay from the state's near-empty coffers even when the local fighters went without. Hundreds were captured, and dozens executed, by the U.S. Army upon the fall of the secessionist stronghold at Jefferson. Morgan Resolutions troubleshooters literally stood behind Governor Herrick Guidry of Louisiana during each of his many media appearances, including when he announced his state's unilateral declaration of independence in conjunction with that of Texas, where SafeHaven helped plan the coordinated seizure of federal properties, to include Forts Bliss and Hood. At a Morgan Industries quarterly earnings call in 2051, the firm's Chief Financial Officer shared out a list of the seventy-two plots against rebellious politicians and generals by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and Dirección Federal de Seguridad supposedly foiled thanks to the handiwork of watchful company assets.

When the Holnists and their fellow travelers failed, Morgan found himself persona non grata in North America. Unionists blamed him for prolonging their country's nightmare. The disloyal complained that the price of his help had impoverished them. Morganite companies continued to receive federal contracts, but their market share shrank steadily as all three countries explored a newfound taste for fully domestic and parastatl production. At the start of the weeks-long hearings preceding the vote to nationalize the American Reclamation Corporation (ARC), Senator Jerkins Benvenuti quipped that, "Oscar van de Graaf is corrupt and a patriot. Nwabudike Morgan is just corrupt." His contemporaries agreed. Republican, Democrat, Conservative, and Unionist came together in a landslide to grant the ARC charter. Some admitted to biting the hand that had fed them. "More than anyone else, he got me here," Minority Whip Halos Harrison confessed to rolling cameras in the Capitol Rotunda, "but I guess this is where I get off the train." The following year, his constituents returned him to Congress by a ten-point margin despite being outspent by his challenger, who of course was funded by Morganite interests. Similar logic led to renewal of the monopoly on space governance previously granted to Comprehensive Transport by international treaty, which Morgan had also hotly disputed.

An ex-Soviet airborne officer reads learns that his time with the Texas State Guard is drawing to a close. As the federal drives east from El Paso and north from Corpus Christi put Texas on the back foot, Morganite men "in-country" found themselves withdrawn to take contracts on more hopeful fronts. The Morgan men protecting Governor McReedy in Austin, Texas in the sweltering summer months of 2052 went up the pandhandle to seek their fortunes in Tulsa that Christmas.

By this time, the effect of Morganite involvement in global conflict had come to be associated with a particular branch of international relations theory known as Luttwakian Ethics. The premise was simple: weapons embargos favored the already-stronger of the parties to any conflict, but, by indiscriminately starving all combatants of the means to fight, tended to lengthen those hostilities. The best way to end a war was to fight it. Morgan seized on the idea, which he promoted through the endowment of university chairs and funding for institutes of war and peace. Day and night, his pamphleteers cried out for the relief of subject peoples and the righteous victory of right causes. Rebel armies infamous for atrocity could be taught a proper respect for humanitarian strictures, given the right instruction. And could not the United Nations, with the help of private enterprise, not care for the beleaguered while political matters were put to the test of arms? Did the world really benefit from a hundred frozen conflicts? Was the U.N. trying to keep itself afloat through the manufacture and sustainment of human misery?

Morgan fled defeat into the waiting arms of the United Nations, increasingly tying his company's fortunes to work on the Unity megaproject.

Sources:

African conflict zone picture by Darius Kalinauskas.

Individual soldier picture found at this website for what appears to be a personal Twilight 2000 RPG campaign.