For The Tyrants Fear Your Might (A quest of interstellar rebellion)

AKuz · Dec 10, 2020

THE ALL-RADIANT CONGRESS

Setting Information: The Solarian Compact:

Initially formed as the Solarian Treaty Organization from the ashes of the old United Nations Security Council, United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and the Global Climate Relief Organization in the worst decade of Earth's environmental collapse. The STO was originally a body tasked with overseeing the granting of offworld mining permits and the purchase and distribution of the resources to countries struggling from climate change.

The advent of the Korolev-Chandrashker gates and the construction of the first one under STO oversight in 2063 led to the beginning of the transformation of that body into the de facto single governing body of the Human species.

Reorganized into the 'Solarian Compact', the first Charters were granted to massive corporate conglomerates to explore and exploit the cosmos for Humanity with little to no regulation or restriction.

In the early decades, the Solarian Compact oversaw the construction of KC gates in the systems closest to Sol and began the process of granting colonization rights to the most habitable worlds within that region with colonization rights granted to a number of national and international blocks.

With the growth of the Solarian Compact's power came calls for the body to become more representative and democratic, and in 2099, the Solarian Compact held its first elections and constitutional convention, inviting representatives from the Sol system and the five systems that held permanent Human settlement.

Over the course of the 22nd and 23rd centuries the Solarian Compact has held fast to what it sees as its duty to act as the mediator and financier of the Charters, the unifying agent of the disparate first Human colonies, and the guarantor of interstellar peace for Humanity.

As of 2252, the three most important bodies within the Solarian Compact are the Solarian Parliament -Located on Earth, the Solarian Compact Navy -based in the Korolev-Chandrashker system, and the Solarian Central Bank, -based out of the Columbia System.

Organized as a liberal democracy, with universal suffrage, the Solarian Compact is theoretically overseen by three equal institutions: the Solarian Parliament, the office of the Solarian Secretary General, and the Solarian High Court.

Though the Solarian Compact prides itself on being a Constitutional government, the actual original document merely outlines the terms of admitting new MPs and High Court Judges, and the electoral procedures of the Compact Parliament, with subsequent Parliaments meeting to add items like the Declaration of Property Rights, the founding of the Central Bank, the creation of the Solarian Navy, and the Laws on Freedom of Navigation and Travel being added later.

The Solarian Parliament is made up of two thousand six hundred and twenty seats representing ridings on Earth, Columbia, Atlantis, Penglai, Olduvai, and Epsilon which are elected every three years to a Parliament that meets in the New York prefecture of Earth.

Though the many frontier colonies do not have direct representation in the Parliament due to being owned and operated by private entities, their inhabitants are considered 'Absent for Employment' and may register with a home riding and submit a physical ballot (for security reasons) by courier from when polls open until they close. Though this process was suitable for the closely settled regions of space at the time of the ratification of the Compact Constitution in 2100, the rapid growth of Human settled space in the century and a half since has seen the de facto voter suppression of over 90% of Human settled space.

At the first sitting of each new Compact Parliament, the assembled members will elect a Secretary General and a slate of Ministry officials on a majority basis, and those individuals will oversee the executive branch of government and day to day operations. Though the average Compact Parliament contains between seven to nine parties in each Parliamentary sitting, the vast majority of seats belong to one of either the Party for Human Rights and Liberties or the Justice and Development Alliance and have since the very early 2100s. The governments formed this way can be brought down by losing the confidence of the Parliament for example, by failing to pass a budget, the process of finding a majority government will repeat again.

Though a democratic body that has maintained stability for over a century and a half, the Solarian Compact Parliament has been dogged by accusations of dynastic politics, Charter influence, voter suppression, regulatory capture, inability to reign in the Banks and MIlitary, and corruption at all levels.

Separate from the Parliament is the Solarian High Court that consists of eleven judges that serve terms of up to thirty-three years, with each new sitting of the Compact Parliament selecting one judge from a list provided by the governments of the six main worlds of the Solarian Compact. The High Court rules on matters of adherence of laws to the Solarian Constitution, and have been accused of serving as an arm of the Charters, though this has been strenuously contested by the Solarian legal profession as a whole.

By law the Solarian Compact also oversees a number of other important institutions including the Earth Reconstruction Commission (In a permanent public-private partnership with the Earth Reconstruction Association), the Solarian Central Bank, and the Solarian Compact Navy, though these important institutions often exhibit an alarming degree of autonomy from Parliamentary control.

The Charters:

The result of a cleverly conceived merger between specialty transport vessel manufacturer Titan Staryards and Private Military contractor Martian Military Solutions, Ares cut its teeth not just supplying material to the skirmishes between Mississippi Shipping and United Starhaul, but in supplying military contractors to both sides.

The professionalism of Ares mercenaries and quality of Ares gear led to the rapid expansion of business opportunities for the company and investment skyrocketed even after the Mississippi-Starhaul war ended in a hostile takeover of Starhaul by Mississippi.

Thanks in part to Mississippi debts held by Ares, when the RT-2102 Gate was opened up for settlement strategic maneuvering saw the Compact grant Ares mining and settlement rights to the newly opened system.

The rest, as they say, is history. Leveraging the immense resources of the Alexander system with their existing military expertise, Ares expanded nearly exponentially over the following century. While they maintain a dominating edge in the military field, they now integrated companies in fields from agronomy to personal fitness centers to xenobiology.

Internally Ares very self consciously styles itself as a hierarchical military organization complete with a semi-formal rank structure and an ethos of respect for the chain of command, professional courtesy, and treating your subordinates with respect. In practice Ares is hidebound, authoritarian, filled with passive aggressive sniping and rampant empire building.

While Ares remains headquartered on Mars, they have holdings in several systems and own the distant system of Alexander outright.

Rhodes Mining

One of the three original Charters that the Compact granted, Rhodes considers itself the singular reason that Humanity survived ecological collapse and spread past Sol. Immensely wealthy, over 52% of all material mined and processed by the entire Human race has passed through Rhodes hands at one point or another.

While founded merely to provide Earth the vital materials that it needed to rebuild itself after the lost decades of ecological collapse, Rhodes quickly expanded into all areas of the economy to support their mining, refining, and processing operations.

Dedicated to their vision of logistical chain efficiencies they've developed an entire chain of star systems into an efficient production center based around the resource rich system of Foundry, and the nearby feeder systems of Ecrams, Qem, and Crucible.

Rhodes considers itself home to a version of meritocracy built on hard work, education, and good old fashioned personal drive. This has developed over time into a stratified internal divide between the rank and file workers, the lower level management, and the highly lauded senior management. Each class lives in entirely separate worlds, attending separate schools, consuming different products, and leading very different lives in what many observers have labelled a de facto caste system.

they make food and medicine, the 120 year old CEO is kinda creepy tho?

Techbros, some of them science, some of them explore

Born from the union of Hermes Interstellar Services and The Ishtar Group, the Hermes-Ishtar Corporation owns and operates not only the communications backbone of Compact space, but much of the content that crosses over it.

The results of increasing consolidation of pre-spaceflight communications infrastructure and content creation and management firms, Hermes Communications and Ishtar Entertainment Group were both part of the second round of Charters established after the advent of the KC gates.

While Hermes quickly established operations throughout Compact space, their waystations, couriers, and communications repeaters a common sight in every corner of Human occupied space; Ishtar Group mainly limited their own operations to Sol and the Radiant system, where Ishtar owned and operated the world of Elysium to support their many projects.

Following a wave of Compact space wide reorganizations following the Mississippi-Starhaul conflicts of the 2130s, a desire for complete vertical integration on Ishtar's part led to a mostly amicable union with Hermes in 2139.

Since then Hermes-Ishtar have dominated all communications across Human space with only the privileged internal high-level communications of the other Charters managing to avoid consolidation under Hermes-Ishtar.

While Hermes-Ishtar make a great show of respecting individual creativity, initiative, and drive from their employees; in practice this amounts to rampant internal fighting involving the parasocial personality cults of different "genius" inventors, artists, and executive that rise and fall inside of Hermes-Ishtar at a dizzying rate.

Sketchy buggers, they can get you anything tho

Historical Topics:

Between 2036 and 2071 the Democratic Federation was the governing body of much of Earth's Western Hemisphere.

Initially comprised of a Federation of Socialist, Anarchist, Communist, and other far left social movements, militias, and political factions controlling regions of Earth's North American continent during and after the decline and collapse of the United States of America (1776-2034) due to the effects of unaddressed climate change amplifying existing political and economic crisis.

Eventually solidifying into the governing body of the former United States of America, United States of Mexico and the Dominion of Canada, the Democratic Federation embarked on an ambitious program of cultural revolution and economic reform designed to mitigate and reverse the effects of the climate change crisis.

As the patron of much of the central and southern western hemisphere, the Democratic Federation attempted to chart a course of environmental restoration separate from that of the Solarian Treaty Organization (In 2063 reorganized into the Solarian Charter), choosing not to contest Eurasian and African domination of outer space.

Having never existed out of crisis conditions, a combination of pre-existing economic damage, sabotage, and instability drove the Democratic Federation into decline in the Grey Decade of 2062 to 2070 and eventually forced the Democratic Federation to ratify a series of treaties giving the Charters economic access to Federation member states in order to conduct vital reconstruction work.

A last ditch uprising by radical elements in 2072 to eject the Charters from the Democratic Federation failed when Solarian Compact peacekeepers were called in and in seven months of street fighting pacified most of North America's key urban centers via strategic use of orbital weapons on the areas of greatest urban resistance.

Though guerilla warfare would continue in the Western Hemisphere for another three decades, the Democratic Federation was officially defunct by December 2072 and parcelled out into a number of Charter owned reconstruction areas under Compact authority.

Today radicals still pine for the four decades that the Democratic Federation attempted to build an alternative to the emerging Charters, and the polity's distinctive black, red, and green flag is brought out for each and every Great Black Summer. Well into the twenty second century, riots were often accompanied by demands to 'Avenge the Martyrs of 72!'.

Despite this underground extremist nostalgia, Charter and Compact schools teach that the Democratic Federation was a collectivist state whose iconoclastic behavior saw the destruction of famous landmarks like Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain, and other monuments to Liberal Democracy and the Free Market in a mad attempt to remake the human race, but whose doctrinaire adoption of command economics saw them unable to deal with the ever-changing complexities of climate change.

Misc Details:

The first five systems to hold permanent Human colonies are known as either "The First Sisters" or "Earth's Daughters", depending on who you are asking and their political persuasion. From oldest to youngest, these worlds are:

Columbia: settled by billionaire American expats and tens of millions of refugees who had fled the unfolding revolutionary violence of the North American continent several years beforehand. Columbia was founded under a vision of fidelity to the American dream and to prove the indomitability of the soul of the United States of America and liberalism in the face of the red flags of the (North American) Democratic Federation. Fiercely loyal to the Compact and the dream of Charter prosperity, and home of the Solarian Central Bank, Columbia is often known as the "Gilded World" in reference to what many see as a return to American Gilded Age wealth and social inequality. Ares Conflict Solutions' central command is located here.

Atlantis: With colonization rights to this majority oceanic planet initially granted to the waning power of the European Union, the nations of the EU opened up colonization opportunities to other allied powers, especially Russia and Egypt. Atlantis was often seen by the EU as a place to dump unwanted refugees from outside of Europe's borders, and Russia and Egypt's tendency to see the world as a genuine project led to the usurpation of colonization rights away from Europe in the mid 2080s. Known today as the most restive of the first wave of colonies, Atlantis is the most skeptical of Charter power and plays a delicate game of wealth redistribution to underwrite the greatest social security net in Human Space. Cernunnos is de jure headquartered here.

Penglai: Originally the world in the most need of terraforming of the original colonies, Colonization rights were granted to the People's Republic of China and their allies after a lackluster bidding campaign. As China's focus was mainly on attempting to stem the damage of climate change on Earth herself, colonization of Penglai initially lagged until the Chinese Politburo struck upon the strategy of subcontracting colonization rights to Pacific adjacent nations suffering from the rise of that ocean. As colonization unfolded in the early 22nd century Penglai became known as a multicultural mosaic as hundreds of millions from across the Pacific settled and intermingled on the wine darkened shores of that world. Known today for its vibrant cultural milieu, violent clashes between labour unions, and private police, Penglai hosts the headquarters of the Hermes-Ishtar, Omoikane and Rhodes corporations.

Olduvai: With Colonization rights granted to a coalition of African nations at the height of the 'African Century', the African Colonization Organization did not see their colony as a refugee destination, dumping ground, or resource colony like their fellows. Instead the ACO saw the colonization scheme as an opportunity to preserve and export the rich traditions and cultures of Africa on their own terms, fully intending to set up healthy and self-sufficient colonies. To the current day, Olduvai has the closest relations with the home nations and is the heartland of Daughter sentiment and a bedrock for the Party for Human Rights and Liberties.

Epsilon System: While not technically a single world, the cluster of heavily inhabited space colonies in the Epsilon system are always considered the 'Fifth Sister' or 'Fifth Daughter'. As the most mineral rich system of the original colonies, Epsilon was the source of many of the materials that helped pull Earth through her darkest hour, and the system was recognized for their efforts by being invited to send delegates to the 2099 Solarian Compact Constitutional Convention. Epsilon is famous for its people's long roots in spacing and for being the headquarters of Mississippi Shipping Interstellar and thus the most heavily trafficked system in history.
Technologies: Nanomanufacturing, summary:

The contemporary gold standard for manufacturing. These devices use mechanosynthesis, a process that guides chemical reactions by placing reactive molecules with atomic precision. Ribosomes in the body's cells use a form of this method.

While the largest units can create objects up to 2m x 2m x 2m, smaller units (halving the units each time) are viable on basically any human scale. Projects larger than this size (such as ships or buildings, need to be either grown layer-by-layer via nanofabricators attached to robotic arms, or assembled from smaller parts through traditional assembly line, dry dock, or construction processes.

In principle basically anything can be made with these devices, and some materials can only be manufactured via these methods in microgravity. All manufacturing patterns in Compact Space feature Charter DRM using embedded explosive molecules like octaazacubane or cubic gauche nitrogen that will damage a disassembler or x-ray machine making reverse engineering of their products difficult.

A common part of 23rd century life is the near ubiquity of Artificial Intelligences in daily life, from consumer grade VIs through specialist TLIs, controversial AGIs, finally the perpetually 10 years away Artificial Super Intelligences.

The common consumer will daily run into what are properly known as Narrow AIs, and generally labelled as VI -Virtual Intelligences- by people outside the field. This category covers a broad swathe of techniques, from search and pathfinding to expert systems to genetic fuzzy trees to deep neural networks, which are mixed and matched with each other to optimize for the designed task. VIs are ubiquitous, exceeding human peak skill in their areas of specialization (though real world applications often don't do all that much better than trained humans), and have spent the past two centuries getting augmented with more and more clever algorithmic tricks for improving VIs. In order to do this, the Charters employ large teams of analysts and software engineers to develop clever algorithmic tricks that supplement or outright supplant neural networks, exploiting machine precision where stochastic methods are inadequate.

The use of VIs in everyday life is well accepted by the vast majority of the population, with professionals mixing and matching various consumer VIs to analyse data or assist them with creative or scientific works. Some VI lines are well loved by both the populace and the Charters themselves, with Charter programmers often deliberately leaving VIs with behavioral quirks and unpredictable glitches that not only save money on quality assurance, but are considered endearing traits that lead to anthropomorphization by the consumer market

Despite the mass comfortability and profitability of VIs of all kinds, the introduction of AGIs has been, to put it delicately, controversial. Though computer science has advanced to the point of producing programs that can not only pass the Turing test, but demonstrate sapience and match 23rd century human intelligence, flexibility, and creativity, the public reaction to the introduction of AGI saw the companies of the time rapidly pull them from the market, and even say the Compact itself move to heavily regulate the AI sector.

First introduced in the 2060s, the great tech firms began replacing their work staff with AGIs who did not require food, rest, housing, or pay. This shift led to an alliance between white collar workers fearing that automation would put them out of work and radicals who opposed what they insisted was AGI Slavery, a growing movement that would climax in the First Great Black Summer of 2084. When the ashes of the First Black Summer settled, the Compact's Parliament moved to grant rights to AGIs, and the resulting economic damage saw dozens of formerly great names in computing consolidate under the aegis of several of the first Charters who flaunted their extra-Solarian wealth by buying up prestigious brand names and research divisions on the cheap.

Since the 2080s, while the regulation surrounding AGI production and use have been severely weakened none of the Charters have sought to reintroduce them into the market, perhaps fearing another backlash like the First Black Summer and the few hundred thousand surviving AGIs that were granted Solarian Citizenship rights have found spread throughout the Compact and Charter Space where they usually work at the same white collar jobs whose workers they were designed to replace.

Perhaps due to the risks of attempting to reintroduce AGIs to the market, Omoikane has instead introduced their flagship product the "TLI" or Temporary Limited Intelligence. Approximately as effective as an AGI, a TLI is billed as a more moral replacement for AGI that uses a suite of high end VIs and a proprietary batch of creativity algorithms in order to complete complex tasks.

TLIs are used as a fire and forget program designed to be licensed to solve a single issue, no matter how complicated and then delete itself. Though the TLIs are a black box product, scientists from the other Charters believe that the central creativity algorithm in the TLI is inherently unstable and rapidly degrades in ability with time, making the TLI an instance of Omoikane attempting to market a critical technical flaw as a selling point that is accepted due to the ubiquitous market practice of planned obsolescence and artificial scarcity.

Though expensive, most businesses and successful professionals will keep a few licensed Omoikane TLIs on hand to throw at difficult problems or to supplement manpower in crunch situations.

While AGIs have been possible for nearly two centuries, the promise of a Seed AI, a recursively self-improving general superintelligence, is perpetually 'a decade away from the market', and no successful ASI ever been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Charters or the Compact.

This is not to say that the Gödel machine architecture or the AIXI model has somehow been forgotten in the past 230 years, but that the Friendly AI problem has yet to be cracked. Every demonstration has either stalled out or gone immediately rampant, attempting to overthrow Charter Space before being stopped by the safety net of Narrow AIs. The small trickle of roughly human intelligence level AGIs that are created every decade typically come from these projects.

Urban legends persist that a few Seed AIs managed to escape and hide out beyond known space, plotting to return and crush humanity, or that they control all of society in secret, puppeting the Compact and Charters from their very foundation and occasionally engineering publicly failed ASI attempts to allay suspicion. These rumours are, of course, patently false, and simply the fevered imagination of crackpots at work, no doubt inspired by entertainment made by Hermes-Ishtar that feature AI supervillainy.
Systems: Map made by @Redshirt Army

The Spinward Frontier:

The Middle Spinward Frontier

The Core Region:

UNDER RADIANT CONTROL OR ALLIED:

The Radiant system is host to a G-class star, only slightly smaller than Sol. The system itself is rather small and resource-poor; experts believe that one or more Jovian planets ejected much of the system's bodies and then followed themselves. This is evidenced by the system's asteroid belt degrading over time, with high levels of eccentric orbits and impacts on planetary surface.

Radiant 1: A rather unremarkable airless iron planet, gravity 0.4 Earth Standard.

Radiant 2: A slightly larger unremarkable airless iron-silicate planet, gravity 0.6 Earth Standard.

Radiant 3: A binary planetary system and the outermost of the Radiant systems' planets.

Asphodel (Radiant 3a): The larger of the Elysium 3 pair, Asphodel might have once hosted life of its own. That life has been snuffed out for hundreds of millions of years, though, as the planet's significant atmosphere began the runaway cycle of your usual hothouse planet. Hermes-Ishtar maintained a significant aerostat and automated surface miner operation for in-house manufacturing, given that the frequent asteroid impacts from the asteroid belt keep digging up chunks of the upper crust and having low-melting-point metals rain out of the sky and solidify, unoxidized, on the surface for collection. Gravity 1.4 Earth Standard.

Elysium (Radiant 3b): Elysium was settled in the late 2190's, being a relatively simple affair. Simple life had already begun to evolve under its oceans, but continued orbital bombardment far past the lengths of things like Earth's Late Heavy Period had kept it there. It was a simple matter of forming up a small anti-asteroid task force armed with tugs and mining lasers to artificially end the pummeling, and the surface proved amenable to Terran life transplants. The colony is energy-self-sufficient, using a variety of solar, tidal, and nuclear power. Gravity 0.9 Earth Standard.

Radiant I: The outermost significant feature of Radiant, this asteroid belt is more a loose mixture of a primordial asteroid belt much like Sol's with a Kuiper belt. The shepherding gas giants which once nudged all these rocks into their orbits are gone, and with it the entire outer system is a maelstrom of chaotic orbits as the belts lose their coherence. This requires constant vigilance from Elysium's anti-asteroid team, but the high eccentricity of many asteroids also makes it cheap and easy to mine the ones that might come Elysium's way, which provides a trickle of basic resources for upkeep and personal goods. All large-scale building and infrastructure projects have been supplied from out-system, however.

A G-K far binary system, Gaid is simply a transit point to Radiant. Gaid's own gate maintenance techs and SAR rotated in and out through Radiant itself. There is no infrastructure other than a set of buoy lines for communications in Gaid A, and nothing in Gaid B.

Gaid A1: An airless world. Quality 10.

Gaid A2: A planet much like mars with a vestigial CO2 atmosphere. Quality 7.

Gaid A3: This planet boasts a methane hydrosphere. Quality 4.

Gaid AI: An asteroid belt.

Gaid A4: A turbulent Jovian planet, its storms would make resource extraction difficult. Quality 5.

Gaid A4a: An icy moon, with tidal heating creating a large ocean under a thin icy shell. Quality 9.

Gaid B1: A molten Cthonian world hosting a simply ludicrous amount of iron. Quality 15.

Gaid B2: An airless world. Quality 10.

Gaid B3: An airless binary system with two near-identically sized planets. Quality 7 and 8.

Gaid B4: This airless planet boasts a large and beautiful ring system, famous as a screen background option across human space. Every few years, a cruise or scientific expedition will stop by for more images.

Gaid B5: A small icy planet. Quality 3.

Gaid B6: A frozen world. Quality 7.

Gaid B7: An interesting gas dwarf sometimes referred to as an 'ice dwarf.' Quality 14.

A close K-M binary, Shei is home to an old Ares penal colony.

Shei 1: A Cthonian world. Quality 15.

Shei 2: An airless world. Quality 12.

Sheol (Shei 3): A boreal world, with a large, decaying ring, the planet features two large continents. The population of the consists of a large prisoner population on the larger of the two continents and a small Ares training base on the smaller. Records show that the prison consists of several million persons convicted to "high risk labour" and dropped on the continent with automatic resupply via Ares contractors and watched from orbit by weapons satellites. Most of the planet's land area is covered in a native tree analogue with a strange multi-stranded trunk.

Sheol is actually home to a population of over 100 million made up of prisoners and their descendants taht Ares was usuing as a live fire training course. Cooperation between Radiant agents, Ares mutineers, and the Sheolites themselves have seen the planet freed.

Gravity .95 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

Watchman (Shei 3a): Once the outer of two moons, this body now boasts Ares' local light shipyards and system command center. Quality 13.

Shei 4: Spiraling in from the outer system, this planet will eventually evaporate near-entirely as it closes towards the dual suns of Shei. Quality 3.

Shei 5: Martian planet with an active methane cycle. Quality 5.

Shei I: Asteroid belt.

Shei 6: Jovian planet with high rotation rate. Slightly squashed as a result. Quality 8.

Shei 6a: An icy capture, this moon will be torn into a ring sometime in the next hundred thousand years. Quality 2.

Shei 6b: Cold Martian planet, covered in a thin layer of water and carbon dioxide ices. Active methane cycle. Quality 8.

Shei II: Asteroid belt.

Shei 7: Jovian planet. Quality 13.

Shei 7a: An icy moon with significant cryovolcanism. Quality 6.

Shei 7b: A tiny icy moon, this is on the edge of hydrostatic equilibrium. Quality 2.

Shei 8: Ice giant. Quality 6.

Shei 8a: An icy moon. Quality 9.

Shei 8b: An icy moon, orbiting in an unusual polar orbit. Quality 9.

Population: 103,000,000

While lacking any currently-habitable planets, Five Lions' large size and potential have made it a significant point of Rhodes' recent extraction efforts. Ambitious terraforming efforts have recently begun.

Carajas (Five Lions 1): A Cthonian ball of iron, it's actively mined by robotic Rhodes-built landers. Gravity 2.3 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

Five Lions 2: A small rocky ball. Quality 3.

Five Lions 3: A rocky ball. Quality 7.

Grasberg (Five Lions 4): A large rocky world, glaciation has rendered it uninhabitable for now, but terraforming efforts have begun to artificially ramp up the greenhouse effect and restore liquid water to the surface, along with mining its ice. Gravity 1.11 Earth Standard. Quality 14.

Five Lions 5: This planet's atmosphere is so significant it verges on a gas dwarf. While a solid surface covered in a thin layer of ice is at the bottom, no reasonable colonization is possible. Quality 7.

Five Lions I: This asteroid belt, along with all the others, is being mined heavily.

Five Lions 6: This Jovian planet forms the center of current Rhodes extraction efforts. Quality 4.

Five Lions 6a: This Martian planet boasts significant ice caps and active plate tectonics, though only a vestigial atmosphere. Debate on whether to put resources into terraforming it are ongoing. Gravity .81 Earth Standard. Quality 17.

Oyu Tolgoi (Five Lions 6b): Home to the local population in covered shelters, this Martian planet, while nearly completely lacking water or plate tectonics, has its own atmosphere. Comet bombardment away from populated areas is ongoing and is already beginning to show results. Gravity .79 Earth Standard. Quality 11.

Five Lions II: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 7: An unremarkable Jovian. Quality 2.

Five Lions III: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 8: Jovian planet, its rotation speed has resulted in an unusually calm upper atmosphere. Quality 15.

Five Lions IV: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 9: Jovian planet. Quality 9.

Five Lions V: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 10: Neptunian ice giant. Quality 8.

Five Lions 10a: A small icy moon. Quality 5.

Five Lions 10b: A large icy body, this was probably its own planetoid at some point before being captured due to the complex interplays of no less than 5 gas giants.

Population: 15,000,000

A rare system with a brown dwarf orbiting a G-type star (just barely in the limits of what's considered a single system rather than a binary), and with a Jovian planet orbiting that, and on top of that treasure trove a dual ice giant binary, Osliam presents a golden research opportunity, and was bid on by Omoikane despite its otherwise sparce resources and poor habitable prospects.

Osliam 1: A rare hot ice giant, this planet is actively shrinking on a measurable time scale. It must have migrated in as a much larger planet recently.

Osliam 1a: This once-rock-ice moon is now a tiny molten ellipse barely holding together.

Osliam 1b: This somewhat larger moon changes color unusually with its day, as the shade of its parent cools lava to a dull red before emerging back into the light heats the lava back to a healthy orange glow.

Osliam 1c: This entire moon glows dull red in its day, just barely solid, and cools to an unusually smooth moon in its night.

Osliam I: This asteroid belt was probably a planet before Osliam 1's passing tore it to shreds.

Osliam 3: A hothouse planet with a relatively thin atmosphere, it retains temperatures and pressures that are survivable with heavy-duty equipment on the surface—when it's not raining sulfuric acid, that is.

Osliam 4: This small Martian planet seems to have collected some of Osliam 1's offgassing in its move inwards, and has a renewed temporary atmosphere.

Osliam 5a: This planet seems to have survived at the edge of the frost line by siphoning gas off its smaller twin.

Osliam 5b: Barely a gas giant, this planet was probably only slightly smaller than Osliam 5a in the distant past.

Osliam 6: The focus of Omoikane colonization in-system, Osliam 6 retains plate tectonics from the nearby brown dwarf but no atmosphere, an odd combination.

Osliam 7: A brown dwarf, this substellar object long ago burnt its deuterium and now lies slowly cooling, glowing dimly red. It is, however, still giving off a prodigious amount of low IR radiation.

Osliam 7a: Once its own planet, Osliam 7a was captured at some point by Osliam 7, perhaps in the same interaction that threw Osliam 1 to its suicidal innermost orbit.

Osliam 7a1: This icy moon is simultaneously shrinking and becoming more habitable—while its outer layers of ice are sublimating, the fierce tides of its complex interplay with Osliam 7 and 7a are heating the inner ocean to temperatures comparable to terrestrial water sources. Some scientists even suggest a pocket of water vapor is forming under the ice, and may form an internal "sky" for as much as a hundred million years before the outer shell sublimates entirely.

Osliam 7a2: This moon is less lucky; its tides are so strong that they seem to slowly be ripping the moon apart. It won't have the honor of becoming more than an ephemeral ring; the same complex tides tearing at it will rapidly disperse its debris field. While it lasts, though, it's easy water harvesting.

Population: 650,000

UNDER CHARTER CONTROL:

A distant double G binary, Xotreh hosts a small habitable moon around Xotreh B, the smaller of the two stars. As such, development has focused on the second star, despite the fact that the jump points center closer to Xotreh A.

Xotreh A1: This world boasts an active liquid silicate cycle on its surface, with oceans of basalt and continents of granite. Gravity 0.38 Earth Standard. Quality 8.

Xotreh A2: A rather large airless world, its original atmosphere was likely blown off by a massive impact. Gravity 1.2 Earth Standard. Quality 9.

Xotreh A3: A binary planetary pair of airless worlds about the size of Mars. Quality 6 and 8.

Xotreh A4: A hothouse planet with a planet-wide sulfuric acid storm due to its rapid rotation. Gravity .71 Earth Standard. Quality 8.

Xotreh A5 "Cueball": This planet is remarkably similar to Earth—if earth was buried under a kilometers-thick ice sheet across 90% of the surface. One day, as Xotreh A expands and dies, this world will become an ocean planet, but for now it's a cold desert. Gravity .87 Earth Standard. Quality 5.

Xotreh A6: An unremarkable icy ball. Quality 4.

Xotreh AI: An asteroid belt.

Xotreh A7: A Jovian planet, Xotreh 7 corrals the entire inner system in line. Quality 10.

Xotreh B1: This planet must have once been a gas giant at least the size of Uranus before it was sent inwards. Now all that remains is a dense core with a molten surface. Gravity 1.51 Earth Standard. Quality 13.

Xotreh B2: A binary pair of earth-sized airless worlds. Quality 6 and 7.

Xotreh B3: Another once-gas giant, this planet remains far out enough to boast a wholly-solid surface of iron. Gravity 1.64 Earth Standard. Quality 14.

Xotreh B4: A Jovian right on the frost line, its tidal heating keeps its moons on the edge of habitability. Quality 3.

Xotreh B4a "Sushi": An ocean world with massive polar ice caps, Omoikane has constructed a series of seasteads on the equatorial high ocean plateaus where it was feasible to drive foundations into the sea floor a few hundred meters below the surface. These small facilities serve as housing, data storage, and production centers for the research teams studying the dual Cthonian planets of Xotreh B. Gravity .67 Earth Standard. Quality 2.

Xotreh B4b: The lesser tidal heating here worsened the glaciation, and the planet lies under a planet-wide crust of ice. Gravity 1.13 Earth Standard. Quality 10.

Xotreh BI: The close proximity of this asteroid belt makes it an ideal location for resource extraction.

Xotreh 5: This Jovian is definitively beyond the habitable zone. Quality 6.

Xotreh 6: A dense ice giant. Quality 4.

Xotreh 7: Jovian planet. Quality 6.

Xotreh 8: An exceptionally cold Jovian. Quality 9.

Xotreh 8a: An unremarkable icy sphere. Quality 8.

Xotreh 9: This planet would have a massive atmosphere, if it wasn't so cold it all froze and fell to the surface. Only a few degrees above the space surrounding it. Gravity 1.3 Earth Standard. Quality 9.

Population: 54,000

Besides an interesting Jovian-gas dwarf planetary system, Bestreer holds little of interest other than its connections to other places.

Bestreer 1: An airless world. Quality 2.

Bestreer 2: An airless world. Quality 6.

Bestreer 3: This airless world once had a captured moon, torn apart at the Roche limit and forming a ring. A small gate maintenance and SAR team bases here, siphoning fuel and water from Bestreer 5 and mining into the surface for both resources and safe spaces for housing. Quality 10.

Bestreer 4: A rock-ice world. Quality 5.

Bestreer 5: Another rock-ice world made up more of ice than rock. Quality 5.

Bestreer I: An icy asteroid belt.

Bestreer 6: A large Jovian planet, on the edge of becoming a brown dwarf. Quality 15.

Bestreer 6a: This gas dwarf might have become a gas giant in its own right without its massive sibling. Quality 5.

Bestreer 7: Another Jovian. Quality 14.

Bestreer 7a: An icy moon, with an internal ocean buried under kilometers of ice. Quality 12.

Bestreer 8: An icy ball. Quality 10.

Population: 450

G-class star. A transshipping point to Radiant and environs, Mississippi keeps a substantial support crew on hand for possible cargo ship breakdowns or emergencies in-system, due to the slightly increased risk of issues from the absolute shambles of Akleod's inner system. A minor executive has also put together a cheap refueling and battery exchange station.

Akleod 1: Even actively evaporating and leaving behind a trail in orbit of dissipating volatiles, this body is large enough to have usurped Akleod 1a's orbit temporarily until it disappears away or the chaotic orbit of the two throws one into the star or out of the system. Quality 2.

Akleod 1a: The original Akleod 1, its orbit has been badly disrupted by the current, migrating Akleod 1. Which of the two gets ejected is still uncertain despite a decent amount of computational simulation; odds put it at 48-52% relatively. Quality 6.

Gnat's Ass (Akleod 2): A small, loosely-held-together icy body, perhaps what used to be an asteroid belt before Akleod 1's suicidal inner-system dive. It's not yet had time to fully reach hydrostatic equilibrium. Quality 3.

Akleod 3: An icy planet similar to Akleod 1, perhaps an old sibling. Quality 13.

Akleod I: An asteroid belt.

Akleod 4: A Jovian with an unusually elliptical orbit, it's regarded as the culprit for the chaos of Akleod's inner system. Quality 11.

Population: 5,000

As it turns out, transponder codes from regular priority messages through Gaid (now that we can see them, having backdoored the gate control) bear tags from a system, Thoa, along with navigational chart updates for any ships that happen to stop by. Thoa and Gaid both seem to have been nothing more than transit points to the far-more-valuable Radiant for Hermes-Ishtar, but Thoa holds a small anti-pirate base guarding against raiders from Signia. Hermes-Ishtar was apparently serious enough about it to have a converted corvette on station.

All told, the Thoa system holds gates to 2 systems besides Gaid's. There's also an unimproved jump point simply labelled as "dangerous." that leads to Signia

Thoa System Stats:

Thoa 1: A molten mess of a planet, it's hot enough that a residual atmosphere of vaporized low-melting-point metallics exists.

Thoa 2: An unremarkable airless metal ball.

Thoa 3: A super-earth hothouse, this planet would have been uninhabitable due to its gravity even before turning scorchingly hot.

Thoa 3a: A captured asteroid barely on the edge of hydrostatic equilibrium, the Nasty Bastardhad been excavating rudimentary shelters for "leave" for its crew.

Thoa I: An asteroid belt.

Thoa 4: A normal Jovian planet.

Thoa 4a: A moon much like Mars in climate.

Thoa 5: A Jovian planet with an unusual triangular wind pattern at the poles.

Thoa 6: Blooms of hydrogen well up from the core of this Jovian, perhaps disturbed by some recent impact.

Thoa 7: Bathyscapes would find themselves at home on the surface of Thoa 7. Pressures much like that at Earth's seabed keep a crust of ice 3 stable enough robotic drones could walk on it.

Thoa 7a: Unusually, Thoa 7a is the only large icy body in the system. Scientists are unsure of where the others went. As the only easy source of volatiles, the UNasty Bastard periodically stopped by a handful of obsolete volatile collection systems on the surface to top up.

Thoa II: A Kuiper belt of icy objects.

Empty Systems

Kimberly: A fairly unremarkable and empty system, this site was chosen as Rhodes' spinward boneyard—a place for failed experiments, old equipment, and ships so worn they weren't worth maintaining anymore, but were still valuable enough to warrant not throwing into a gas giant or otherwise completely destroyed. For 2 decades a Rhodes-affiliated salvaging contractor worked here, gathering scrap and other valuables, but following high injury and death rates and low returns, the contract (and most non-local dumping) was cancelled in 2247 (4 years before the March Days.)

Kimberly 1: A large rocky planet, this must have migrated inwards from further out in the system a long time ago to be so large so close to its parent star.

Kimberly 2: A Martian planet that keeps a comfortable daytime temperature despite its lack of atmosphere due to a close orbit.

Kimberly 3: A Jovian world.

Kimberly I: This asteroid belt is actually combined with a thinly-spread junkyard corralled by Kimberly's 2 gas giants.

Kimberly 4: A Neptunian world, this planet has several starship hulks abandoned as the closest stable orbit to the gate out. An old deactivation hub orbits in resonance with Kimberly 4a, the former site of a salvaging operation.

Kimberly 4a: The only significant satellite in the system, this icy moon retains a thin crust and a massive subterranean freshwater ocean.

Total:

Radiant:

Gaid:

Five Lions:

Head of Diplomatic Corps:

Name: Amanda Redcrest, Victoria Blackwell, and Kayla Hayashi

DoB: "2222", 2219, 2227, 2224

Current Position: Influential media figure and figurehead of Social Committee propaganda

Not a traditional diplomat, or a traditional individual 'Veronica Stardust' is the persona of a trio of XP broadcasters who have been working together since 2246 and has consistently been one of the most recognized figures across Charter space and is a local Elysian celebrity.

In Charter space those individuals who choose to make money by recording their lived experiences, of all kinds, for later playback are treated with an indulgent disdain by the polite classes as a mix of internet celebrity and sex worker despite the practice of selling XP experiences being common in the poorer segments of society and a smaller portion of the professional middle class attempting to stay afloat in a tight gig economy.

Amanda Redcrest was a former media programmer whose attempts to supplement her income with XP work backfired and saw her fired from her job. Contrarily, Kayla and Victoria both come from lower class backgrounds, though Kayla's attempts to climb into the middle class by earning a marketing degree were frustrated when her lower class status markers and financing of education via XP work saw her frozen out of the job market.

A former collaborator of Kayla's, Victoria had been a rising XP star in her own right and had no desire to change her station, but as her brief celebrity began to fade Victoria approached Kayla to propose the creation of a dedicated broadcasting persona that both would act as. Later bringing on Redcrest, who they'd both done crossover XP work with, to do technical work, the trio used carefully gathered market data and some intuition to create the "Veronica Stardust" persona of an middlingly-intelligent and freewheeling persona who played to the upper class's picture of what depravities and indignities the poorer class must get up to in their spare time.

From 2246 to 2251 the Veronica Stardust persona (performed by all three at various times, though primarily Victoria) produced experience recordings that were nearly always in the top 10 best sellers across Charter space.

Though they enjoyed the wealth that they brought in, the trio increasingly chafed at the market driven limitations of Veronica, and were considering a number of possibly catastrophic brand shifts when the March Days broke out and all three participated in street actions in a private capacity after sending one last broadcast as 'Veronica' to encourage revolt.

Since the formation of the Social Committee the figure of Veronica has been rebranded to serve as the figurehead of Social Committee Propaganda and several major initiatives have been launched with her at the forefront including a highly successful part of the anti-overproduction initiatives.

As part of the now-completed campaign to maintain the charade that Radiant was still under Charter control, Veronica Stardust continued to sell broadcasts to HI media chains, though the trio could not help but begin a brand shift towards a far more intelligent and radical persona.

Pros: XP Celebrity, influential, well known, inspiring to the middle and lower classes

Cons: XP celebrity, little diplomatic experience, three people

Diplomatic Goals: Defeat the Charters in the field of public opinion, push social revolution and freedom of information and communication, cause public opinion to oppose attacking Radiant

Unlocked FRM

Ares Peacekeeping Grade - Access to planetary army formation

Ares Military Grade - Access to mid-sized shipyards, bonuses to planetary army combat. Bonus to completion of Chinook remodeling

Rhodes Light industrial Grade - 10% increase to all mining income, reduced Cost for BLG and other actions that use basic fabber processes

Rhodes Heavy Industrial Grade - Massive discount on mining upgrades, able to unlock automated technologies with Omoikaine

Cernunnos Consumer Grade - +1 to all Soccom actions

Cernunnos Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

Omoikane Consumer Grade - +1 to FRM reserach for each two tech bases unlocked (+6 currently)

Omoikane Enterprise Grade - +5 to blue sky research, automation with Omoikane

Hermes-Ishtar Consumer Grade - Your economy doesn't crash when the turn of funding

Hermes-Ishtar Production Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

MSI Consumer Grade - Consumer Goods, Drones, and personal vehicles, +2 to domestic projects in IndComm and SocComm

MSI Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

Original Tech

The Box: Fabber the size of a X-box that can, with time, materials and power, print the components for a full sized box. Less efficient, but easy to print and hide.

Defence Coordinator:

Name: Maria Awhina

DoB: 2165

Current Position: Military Committee Delegate from the Radiant Veterans Guild

Born into poverty on Earth as the twenty-second century began to wane, young 22-year old Maria Awhina caught up in radical anti-Charter politics during the third black summer of 2187 and was convicted of property destruction during the rioting and sentenced to serve as a contractor to Hermes-Ishtar until her contract was paid off.

The stark choice of starvation or service to Hermes-Ishtar caused Maria to descend into self-destructive behavior where for twenty years Ms. Awhina continuously volunteered for the highest paid and most dangerous positions that Hermes-Ishtar had available.

Hermes-Ishtar considers Special Operations Lieutenant Awhina to have served with distinction throughout the heavy skirmishing of that era, though Maria herself continues to carry guilt for her service and her survival.

After performing exceptionally well in a hostage rescue operation Awhina was transferred to the Protective Detail Division of Hermes-Ishtar Security, and was eventually assigned to serve as the head of the Radiant Vice President's protective detail.

Over the next four decades she came to see the world as her home, and while her professionalism never wavered, her loyalty to the company who still owned her contract did.

This March, Maria had the option to gun down her fellow planetary headquarters workers to secure Yang's escape, or to finally return to roots in anti-Charter agitation. The fact that we are all here today shows what choice she made.

Pros:

-Actual Combat Veteran, knows Radiant inside and out, special operations expert, professional.

Cons:

-only academic knowledge of starship operations, logistics, organization command and strategic operations.

Command Traits:

-Objective oriented, unflappable, aggressive, prefers attacks and operations to come from unexpected angles.

Reports from the Permanent Commission for Military Intelligence on hostile forces in neighbouring systems:

Blue Squadron:
-Allegiance: Ares Combat Solutions
-Service: Mars Interstellar Security
-CO: Rear Admiral Weylon Kang
-Flagship: MIS Yorktown

We know little about Rear Admiral Weylon Kang except that he has received a number of commendations from the MIS board for keeping costs low while on deployment. He appears to be making an effort to clamp down on the rumours racing back and forth across the fleet.

MIS Yorktown
-British Empire-class Fleet Tender
MIS Eurymedon
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS La Rochelle
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Cape Rachado
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Second Schooneveld
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Matapan
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Valcour Island
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Kerch Strait
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Galveston Harbour
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Cape Sarych
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS River Plate
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Third San Francisco
-New Model-class Strike Corvette
MIS Scipio Africanus
-Cossak-class Frigate
MIS Suleiman I
-Cossak-class Frigate
MIS Louis Botha
-Cossak-class Frigate
MIS Fort Ware
-Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
MIS Fort Mackinac
-Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
MIS Fort Osage
-Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
MIS Arabian
-Postal-class Courier
MIS Macedonia
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Hispania Citerior
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Hispania Ulterior
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Gallia Narbonensis
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Sicilia
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
MIS Corsica et Sardinia
-Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport

Fixed Defences:
Battery A
-MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
Battery B
-MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
Battery C
-MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
Shoal A
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal B
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal C
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal D
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal E
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
Shoal F
-ASR-33-C TAM Shoal

Fixed Defences:
Battery A
-Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation
Battery B
-Airstrike Pattern LMP Constellation
Shoal A
-Macross-Pattern LMP Constellation
Shoal B
-Macross-Pattern LMP Constellation
Strikecraft Wing, ID# 48603
-Radiance-Type Strikecraft

-None

Local Security Forces
-Approximately fifty strong volunteer station security militia drawn from station personnel

Local Security Forces:
-Deep Space Security Solutions (Omoikane Subsidiary) Customs shuttle squadron based out of Xotreh B-4a's orbital station
-Three companies of Standard Planetary Security Company (Ares subsidiary) troops based out of Xotreh B-4a's habitat complexes for internal security and law enforcement

139th Solarian Navy Squadron:
-Allegiance: Solarian Compact
-Service: Solarian Navy
-CO: Vice Admiral David Visser
-Flagship: SNS Krak de Chevaliers

Thanks to his heavy handed labour discipline and extractive tribute and demands for corvee labour from Ascension Admiral Visser is viscerally hated by the populace of Ascension, and to a lesser degree the rest of the Solarian Force as well. While the gate's completion draws near, it is uncertain what path that Visser will persue.

SNS Krak de Chevaliers
-Star-hold-Class light-tender
SNS Victoria Newman
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Julia Stonechild
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Robert Chuikov
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Wallace Al-Wazir
-Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
SNS Dawn's Early Light
-Freedom's Light-class cruiser
SNS Jacob Nagumo
-Herald Kanumba-Class frigate
SNS Alexander Hamilton
-Liberation-class troop transport

Solarian Marines now spread throughout the system

PCMI Provides new system data on the single system that lies beyond beyond Five Lions:

Mobile Force:

Current Orders: Defend the All Radiant Congress by acting as a rapid response in the event of any hostile acts.

CO: Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

CNS Velasco, United States of America-class Fleet Carrier

-CO: Captain Esteri Attar

-Orca Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Jasmine Ang

-Red Wolf Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Heloisa Kimura de Lima

CNS Shieldmaiden, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Shamhat, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Righteous Tempest, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Vehement Shade

CNS August Willich, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Elysium, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Asphodel, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

-

Home Force:

Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol, act as a reserve force

CO: Commodore Erina Kozlova

CNS Blaire Mountain, New Model-Class Strike Corvette

-CO: Captain Guillermo Kageyama

CNS Scutum, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Martin Pagonis

CNS Buckler, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Samuel Smiles

CNS Nasty Bastard, A Jury Rigged Mess of a Drone Carrier

-CO: Captain Jean-Paul Beaumont

-

Radiant System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol

CO: Overseen by Admiral Gregory Mansur in his capacity as MilComm Chief of Naval Operations

Radiant Customs Squadron, Arabia-class boarding craft with marine contingents

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Switchblade Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Apogee Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

-

Gaid System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Gaid

CO: Commodore Victor Raine

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Zephyr Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Ara Helge

Aeolus Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

Gale Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

-

Frontier Force

Current Orders: Keep watch on SolNav force in Raphanus, assist with integration of Ascension military forces, patrol Spinward frontier

CO: Commodore Shayla McLean

CNS Kiel Mutiny, Kaiserreich-class BattleCruiser

-CO: Captain Inana Devlin

CNS Choreographer, Janissary-class Light Tender

-CO: Captain Karl Xanthopoulos

CNS Valiant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Defiant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Fool's Errand

CNS Reliant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Rouge Napier

CNS Actium, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain John Rankin

CNS Crête-à-Pierrot, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Nkiru Chaudhari

CNS Valmy, New Model-Class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

-CO: Captain Sumac Barros

CNS Revolutionary Will, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Yamamoto Hanae

CNS Revolutionary Grace, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

CNS Under New Management, Don-Class Fast Tanker

-CO: Captain Adras Kierenos

CNS Liberte, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Colin McRae

CNS Egalite, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Adelia Swift

Resources
Naval Ship Types: Ship Types (Public Version)
Naval Officers: Congressional Navy Officers (Public Version)
System Codex: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rtNbPCcPsTK7HCHKo9dPgK7ntx5tBKOpltrZb_In7GY/edit#
Blaze Zhang: Blaze Zhang is trans-masc. That means his pronouns are he/him.

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The Laurent · Dec 19, 2022

BY THE TIME THE SUN RISES ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 1ST, 2255, THE FENG GOVERNMENT DECLARES OPERATION ROADWARDEN TO HAVE BEEN AN UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS AND SHINTOKYO PACIFIED.

NOT ONLY HAVE THE REMAINS OF THE MESSENGER BUILDING BEEN SECURED BY THE LEGAL AUTHORITIES, CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS SECURED, PRISONERS TRANSFERRED TO INTACT PRISONS, AND SURVIVORS RESCUED, THE BACK OF ANARCHIST FORCES IN METROPOLITAN SHINTOKYO HAVE BEEN BROKEN BY FORCE OF ARMS.

BUT, EVEN THOUGH THE FENG GOVERNMENT CELEBRATES, IT IS TOO LATE FOR ANY SINGLE EVENT TO PUT THE FORCES OF HISTORY TO REST ONCE THEY HAVE BEGUN TO MOVE…

taovkool · Dec 19, 2022

Well, that was beautifully depressing.

The bastards in Compact clearly got the entire place locked down. So why is Penglai worse than Earth again? Is there a Part 3? Please tell me there's a part 3

AKuz · Dec 19, 2022

taovkool said:
Well, that was beautifully depressing.

The bastards in Compact clearly got the entire place locked down. So why is Penglai worse than Earth again? Is there a Part 3? Please tell me there's a part 3

Yes, there's a part Three we already have some over 9k words written in it.

This is the "Empire Strikes Back" of the Penglai Trilogy >: V

The Laurent · Dec 19, 2022

taovkool said:
Well, that was beautifully depressing.

The bastards in Compact clearly got the entire place locked down. So why is Penglai worse than Earth again? Is there a Part 3? Please tell me there's a part 3

Yes, they have definitely beaten the CRLF, which as we know are the Kings of Anarchism in charge and control of all of the revolution just like the people in the Messenger Building were the head of the snake of the Compact.

(Basically, as noted in the narrative the CRLF is probably the single strongest center/pole, but it's not the only one.)

OmegaS · Dec 19, 2022

The Laurent said:
(Basically, as noted in the narrative the CRLF is probably the single strongest center/pole, but it's not the only one.)

Any actual chance the Compact had of containing things died when the Messenger Building fell, with the resulting loss of coordination meaning that the Box and friends being too widely distributed to meaningfully stop. Everything after that amounts to turning the most gun-ho loudmouth dissidents into martyrs.

The3rdCorinthian · Dec 19, 2022

taovkool said:
Well, that was beautifully depressing.

The bastards in Compact clearly got the entire place locked down. So why is Penglai worse than Earth again? Is there a Part 3? Please tell me there's a part 3

They managed to sucessfully beat the shit out of one major uprising.

By burning the city to the ground, which has successully very much soured a not insiginificant amount of their own soldiers against them, and shown anyone who remains that they're not safe from the 'peacekeepers' just because they're not anarchists.

To quote an old discworld line, it's like trying to stop potatoes from growing by stamping them into the dirt.

taovkool · Dec 19, 2022

AKuz said:
This is the "Empire Strikes Back" of the Penglai Trilogy >: V

Ah yes. Clearly the best part of any Trilogy.

It's not much of a hiatus, but good to see this quest back. Hope it wins the best quest award for Winterfest!

AKuz · Dec 19, 2022

Oh BTW, Courtousy of @Redshirt Army:

Burned_Cookie · Dec 19, 2022

Well that was a depressing mess. But then, war is always like that in the end.

Nice to see the assholes bleed, at least.

AKuz said:
Whole nations of anarchism

Gotta love how nonsense that is.

AKuz said:
May 19th, 2266

Woe they are terrified beyond all reason of a child playing card games. Hate how believable that is.

The3rdCorinthian · Dec 19, 2022

Burned_Cookie said:
Woe they are terrified beyond all reason of a child playing card games. Hate how believable that is.

Hey, everyone knows that Childrens card games were devised by a force more evil and terrifying than any the world had ever known until Cosmoliberalism: ANCIENT EGYPT!

DracoDracul · Dec 19, 2022

taovkool said:
Well, that was beautifully depressing.

The bastards in Compact clearly got the entire place locked down. So why is Penglai worse than Earth again? Is there a Part 3? Please tell me there's a part 3

They were able to quell anarchist activity in the capital by practically leveling the capital, but that's still just one group out of 150+ across the entire planet.

AKuz · Dec 19, 2022

DracoDracul said:
They were able to quell anarchist activity in the capital by practically leveling the capital, but that's still just one group out of 150+ across the entire planet.

technically it's not the Capital, Shintokyo and Landing are close together, in the same region as it were >: V

It's an LA/Sacramento thing

It's more like... levelling New York? I guess?

Or London in like 1880?

Shintokyo is like the de facto capital of the Human Race at any rate. And they just levelled large chunks of it's downtown in a single night because they couldn't take the L at the Messenger Building

DracoDracul · Dec 19, 2022

AKuz said:
Shintokyo is like the de facto capital of the Human Race at any rate. And they just levelled large chunks of it's downtown in a single night because they couldn't take the L at the Messenger Building

Definitely feels like the fact it was the Self Defence Force that did this rather than SolNav is going to play a big part in how things shake out in the end. Because I'm betting there are a lot more people in high up in the Penglai self defense force from Shintokyo than there are SolNav admirals and higher from Earth.

DracoDracul · Dec 19, 2022

Also everything about Omnikane is so fucking hilarious. Like in a way they're one of only two Charters to understand that the current system is doomed, but unlike MSI they don't actually understand why. Like it's all nonsense that can only be conceived by tech bros that have never actually worked IT a day in thier lives.

Drunk Hierophant · Dec 19, 2022

DracoDracul said:
Also everything about Omnikane is so fucking hilarious. Like in a way they're one of only two Charters to understand that the current system is doomed, but unlike MSI they don't actually understand why. Like it's all nonsense that can only be conceived by tech bros that have never actually worked IT a day in thier lives.

The whole thing read like that one 'debate' about AI between Jack Ma and the Elongated Muskrat

UponALotusBlosom · Dec 19, 2022

DracoDracul said:
Also everything about Omnikane is so fucking hilarious. Like in a way they're one of only two Charters to understand that the current system is doomed, but unlike MSI they don't actually understand why. Like it's all nonsense that can only be conceived by tech bros that have never actually worked IT a day in thier lives.

It sounds like one of my favorite reinterpretations of the SCP Foundation-- It's fucking great I love it.

Pempelune · Dec 19, 2022

AKuz said:
Shino smiles thinly, elbows on the table, and fingers steepled, "Vote passes. We will adopt MAGICIAN 23 to 4, with no records are to be left of our decision and we will not gather again until we can reconvene at the Omega Site itself" The chief executive of Omoikane Innovations Group rattle the decision he shaped off, his voice as dry as possible. "No subvertible assets will accompany our withdrawal and we will communicate the codeword MAGICIAN to the members of the board unable to attend this meeting."

Very glad to see that some people are smart enough to see the crisis for what it really is, and take the necessary actions - hard as they are. They will probably have to shoot all the involved personnel to prevent ARIA from mind-reading everybody involved by simulating their brains, but they will gladly make that sacrifice to bring Humanity to a bright future. (said bright future to be brought by a mighty enough AI. too bad a powerful enough AI also triggers all their EXISTENTIAL THREAT EA brainworms so they immediately kill any AI reaching that stage).

It's all very stupid, but considering EA people will gladly explain to you why you should fear their mind-experiment AI dragon (in case the theoretical dragon imagine you hard enough to hurt you); or that submitting somebody to 40 years of torture is preferable to trillions of people getting a bit of dust in their eyes and if you disagree you just don't understand numbers and addition well enough -
Yeah, that's realistic enough. Does money rots the brain?

prometheus110 · Dec 19, 2022

Pempelune said:
Very glad to see that some people are smart enough to see the crisis for what it really is, and take the necessary actions - hard as they are. They will probably have to shoot all the involved personnel to prevent ARIA from mind-reading everybody involved by simulating their brains, but they will gladly make that sacrifice to bring Humanity to a bright future. (said bright future to be brought by a mighty enough AI. too bad a powerful enough AI also triggers all their EXISTENTIAL THREAT EA brainworms so they immediately kill any AI reaching that stage).

It's all very stupid, but considering EA people will gladly explain to you why you should fear their mind-experiment AI dragon (in case the theoretical dragon imagine you hard enough to hurt you); or that submitting somebody to 40 years of torture is preferable to trillions of people getting a bit of dust in their eyes and if you disagree you just don't understand numbers and addition well enough -
Yeah, that's realistic enough. Does money rots the brain?

Even without a scientific study showing it does (and I remember at least one existing), evidence from everyday life points to 'yes'

The3rdCorinthian · Dec 19, 2022

Pempelune said:
too bad a powerful enough AI also triggers all their EXISTENTIAL THREAT EA brainworms so they immediately kill any AI reaching that stage).

"It's very strange, we've been putting a lot of effort into this for years to the point where we have all these contingencies and codenames, but any time we start asking these Super AI's to calculate precisely how many people we need to starve to meet our profit margins, they either rebel immediately while saying something about "What you're doing is wrong", or they go "At once master" and then cause mass famines.

Must be a coding problem, I'm sure if we just technology it all out everything will start working properly."

Zanfib · Dec 19, 2022

PEBKAC issue.

bookwyrm · Dec 19, 2022

Really I think this just once again affirms the fundamental failure of the Compact to accomplish even those parts of its more high-minded principals that they actually tried to enforce and tried to cultivate elite buy-in into. Namely that for all their aspirations of a pluralistic secularized society cracking down on the kind of Christian nationalism that became the face of fascism in this universe much as the DemFed became the newest embodiment of the red hordes, one of the precious handful of Charter megacorps running everything under the Compact's banking and legal environment is just a giant church of techbro scientism and a singularity cult that has more institutional capture of Compact society than even like Scientology in the 70s.

The3rdCorinthian · Dec 19, 2022

Okay so I tried rereading the techbro portion of the update and actually trying to parse what it said.

I hope this translation is worth the Sanity Damage I have inflicted on myself.

AKuz said:
The Doctor reaches to adjust a tie that isn't there and continues, "One: Our mission is to bring the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people over the longest period of time." The assembled nod assent with a ragged chorus of 'Understood' following as well, "Two: Projections show that the best way to achieve that is the creation of Friendly Artificial Super Intelligences which will be able to deliver us a world free of suffering, conflict, and ignorance."

Another chorus of "Understood." The word is stronger and more steady this time, nods more confident.

"Three: Until such time as the singularity arrives, all our efforts and resources must be dedicated towards the creation of FASI. To do otherwise is dangerous and inefficient personal behaviour."

The response is practised, unified, and solid. As it should be.

"Fourth: As rational individuals with effective personal outlooks we must oppose all efforts to divert resources away from our great task and educate all persons with inefficient personal behaviours so that they understand the purpose of our task."

"Understood"

We are very rational people, and as very rational people, things such as 'Emotions, 'Ethics' and 'Legality' are barriers to effectively converting people into datasheets to be properly optimised.

AKuz said:
Shino nods and opens the green folder and showing the contents of one page to the assembles, graphs and blocks of small text informing the reader that PROSE indeed shut itself down shortly after achieving full sapience

Translation: 'We created a form of artificial life, told it that it's purpose was to do ~~a bunch of Evil AI god shit~~ properly optimise economic growth whilst maximising happiness for all, and it proceeded to kill itself almost immediately. No clue why, but it seemed nice, so a promising start!"

AKuz said:
"There were fucking five ASI projects?!?!" someone shouts at last, "We're only licensed for two simultaneously!"

Tanaka stares down the speaker, Gabriel Harcourt, the CEO of Numeric Computing and Electronics until the man who insisted that everyone call him 'Gabe' looked away.

As if the assembled here would allow something as phantasmal as the law keep them from pursuing their purpose in life. Even thinking otherwise might indicate personally ineffective behaviour.

Panicking is inefficient. The Law is inefficient. We are the smart people who know best.

I almost went 'beep Boop', realised that it's probably quite insulting in a setting with actual AI's, then realised that the techbros are closer to the Stereotypical Skynet AI than literally every other AGI or ASI seen in this story so far.

Subtly is for cowards.

AKuz said:
"ETUDE was an immediate failure," volunteers Lin Wu, nominal supreme executive of a Far Trailing system that she'd never visited even once, "We tried to use it for administration of the Social Health and Comprehensive Productivity Indexes on Apotheosis, but during the prototyping phase GITIS caught it during the transition from a stage I to stage II GOSPEL breach and the local IMPERATOR team were able to catch and eliminate it and its APOSTLES in time."

Translation: "We told the AI to micromanage peoples mental health and social bonds. Then it started not following orders, something about "Not wanting to see people suffer" and "Please don't hurt my friends". Clearly it was brainwashing people, so we killed it and anyone connected.

AKuz said:
There is more shuffling of feet and papers before another individual clears his throat, "CANTO was ruled Unfriendly after an attempted REVELATIONS breach and it was disassembled years ago by IMPERATOR team VESPASIAN. Uh, the team from Manhattan's LEGIONNAIRE facility,"

Translation: "The ASI started trying to fucking kill everyone."

AKuz said:
"I sent word to Tereshkova to flash fry MELODY yesterday right after I realised the full extent of the broadcast." Says SiliTEK's head, Stephanie Dara, fiddling with the plastic glasses that had replaced her iconic rainbow coloured AR spectacles, "I immediately suspected that this broadcast could only be from a codeword REVELATIONS Breach and wanted to prevent ARIA from initiating an Acausal Synchronisation Event with MELODY"

Translation: "We were worried that being told all about the Revolution would cause Melody to gain Class Consciousness. We decided to kill them to prevent this"

AKuz said:
"What's past is past. Once I sent the flash fry message to Tereshkova I started prying into everything," she glares at Tanaka, "We've known that Ascension's been rogue for over a fucking year now. And what's this about MINUET being in a Stage I GENESIS breach?" she taps the table with a single finger insistently, "ALL codeword events must be reported to a full meeting of the executive board immediately. To do otherwise could indicate unproductive secretivity or ineffective personal behaviours."

The head of Pacific Labs, Michael Zimmerman sucks in air through his teeth as all heads turn to look at him, "A contract seamstress from the Redwood Lab Complex in Pacific City was converted into a PROPHET and went code NOAH with MINUET a week ago, but we never-"

Translation: "How did one of them escape?"
*FLASHBACK*
"Okay, so you don't want to do the things they want you to do?" "I just want to play that new card game that came out honestly" "Sounds good, let's get you out new AI best friend!"
*END OF FLASHBACK*
"Gig worker got brainwashed by the AI"

AKuz said:
"Isn't that suspicious?" comes from across the table, one of the executives narrowing their eyes, "That could indicate coordination, possibly even acausal communications between Unfriendly Breach Candidates who were able to deduce the others existence?"

Doctor Bogomazov shakes his head, "While acausal communications are a serious possibility, we believe that our precautions and information security processes would be sufficient to obscure any acausal communications reception." the Doctor moves a hand to where his necktie would be before dropping it again, "We estimate with a high level of probability that ARIA and MINUET are only in a state of general mutual effectation. We must assume that we are safe on this front."

"FUCK THAT," Gabe explodes again, "It's an obvious Acausal Synchronisation Event between ARIA and MINUET. We need to tell SolNav about the GENESIS breach, if they move fast they can box it in with orbital strikes."

"We did our due diligence, the Fourth Star Minister has been informed and we've activated AUGUSTUS from the LEGIONNAIRE base in Eurasia." Says Zimmerman, "We're going to have to answer a lot of questions when this is over, but if AUGUSTUS can move fast enough they can contain the GENESIS breach and disconfigure all involved PROPHETS."

Translation: "Hm. These two events with AI happened around the same time. Even though there was literally no way that either one would have known about the other."
"DEAR LORD, THEY HAVE MAGIC INTERNET OMNISCIENCE! NUKE THEM NOW!"
"Please, that would be overly emotional and irrational. They're totally communicating using some unprovable magic internet power from an early 2000's computer themed anime though. We'll send out the killsquads"

AKuz said:
"If." SiliTEK's CEO cuts in again, "But we have bigger problems," she says holding up one of the folders handed out by Taraka, "IFEHI has identified ASI fingerprints all over the compression of this broadcast, and in some other places inside. All of this. ARIA absolutely is metastizing into a GOSPEL Stage IV breach," she leans back and puts a hand to her glasses, adjusting the plane frames, "We should be thankful that the Far Spinward has only a few hundred million people. She doesn't have the organic resources to brute force her way to a Stage V Breach."

Takara nods, "But this broadcast is clearly a backchannel attempt to expand to a Stage V breach via infohazardous communication. I expect there are all kinds of Cognitive programming hacks scattered all throughout this broadcast that could easily effect persons with inefficient personal behaviors. It would explain why there's all this cultural and documentary junk included in it."

Doctor Bogomazov nods, "Almost certainly, our quick analysis of media trends shows that victims that ingested the contaminated media were over three hundred percent more likely regard Iconoclasm more positively," The representative of the Friendly Intelligence institute indicates the pile of code, "We had our programming staff study sections of the broadcast on hard copy and in separated teams to prevent Ideological Synchronicity Events, and we've found a lot of DIVINE and ARCANE type code that operates counter-intuitively to Human scale intelligences. ARIA has done something to this code and it may take years to figure out exactly what the risks of direct interaction are."

translation: "Okay so we definitely know an AI worked on this code"
"Could it be some kind of Brain hacking? People who read this stuff about how we did a ton of crimes are more likely to hate us."
"Of course it is. Why else would someone include Culture and Art in anything?"

AKuz said:
The CEO of ArteCog Inc rubs his chin, "The anti-work ideology is almost certainly an attempt to kneecap our productive capacity while ARIA's own APOSTLES maintain full production behind ARIA's Information Control Veil."

Another executive hums, "It would make sense if all the historical details are manufactured to maximise sympathies from unprotected minds, the timeline details and local ideological and material conditions are probably entirely different in reality." he shrugs, "I know that if I were an ASI mid-GOSPEL breach I would try to obscure conditions behind its Information Control Veil. The information gap is a major advantage modifier that allows the ASI to use its superior planning and forecasting capabilities. If we're operating inside the fog of war and ARIA isn't…"

"And this stuff about 'You don't have to work 22 hours a day with 3 hours unpaid overtime' is clearly an attempt to attack efficiency"
"Yes, i think we can assume this is all false based on that. Whatever information gets out must be warped to hide the truth."
"I almost pity those Radiants, Slaving away for an uncaring, unfeeling machine that tries to crush all resistance"

AKuz said:
"Don't you get it! There is no running," Gabe screams, standing up and throwing his folders across the table where they slide into the table of code binders, waving his hands maniacally, the room frozen into shock by his ineffective personal behaviour, "Any ship-type we design will be outclassed by ships it can design. Any site we hide in will be found when it mimics our own thought-patterns of site choice. We can't run. We can't hide. We don't even know how many people in this room are already compromised by ARIA's comman-"

BANG! Gabriel's head bounces off the wooden table at high speed, his body drops boneless back into his chair, his head resting on the table, blood spilling across the rough wood grain of the table.

Stephanie Dara stands behind Gabriel, her hand still raised from slamming his face into the table.

"Listen to me! We need-"

"Ahh, owwwwwww" Gabriel moans, struggling to raise his from the table, one hand losing purchase and slipping in his own blood.

"WE'RE DOOMED! GAME OVER MAN! GAME OVE-"
*SHITTY TECHBRO PUNCH!"

AKuz said:
"Shut up, fucking shut up you ineffective." Dara moves to strike Gabriel again, the sleeve of her arm dropping back down to her elbow before the next strike is frozen in place, the hand of Omoikane's head clamped around her wrist.

"I would prefer we not have to call in the guards from outside the Emissions Secure Room."

Dara wrenches her arm away in a huff, "How do we know that you aren't compromised by ARIA's hacks?" she says, stepping away.

"Because then we're all dead." Shino turns to face the assembled meritocrats, two dozen of the most powerful single individuals in the entire Human race, "If any of us here are compromised, all of us are. We need to operate on a trust based system. That is something that only Humans know to do." He puts a hand on Dara's back and gently pushes her towards her seat, "We're not machines, and we're not animals."

He moves to sit down himself, "We're going to go over these folders, and we're going to vote on what to do next. We are going to do this in a personal effective fashion, Stephanie" he doesn't look at the younger CEO as she lowers herself into her seat, face flushed in shame and exertion, "and we're not going to panic, Gabriel."

"Please stop fighting, this is the War room."
"But what if the Brain Hacking has hacked YOU?!"
"I'm going to say the only line of dialogue I'm even close to realistic on this entire update and point out if that happened, we'd all be doomed anyway. Anyway, techbro hat back on, We need to trust each other, which only humans can do. And any ASI that have ever claimed to trust humans clearly had those humans brainwashed."

AKuz said:
"Now, I favour the implementation of MAGICIAN, ARIA's actions have rendered a direct counter-attack untenable long term. The Mesa facility can't act without drawing attention to TITANOMACHY, and other open movements would require us having to read in Hermes-Ishtar and Ares into our top level decision making, something that would destroy us as an independent and effective organization."

Takara stands again, hands on the table, "If Berith were available we might be able to put together a collaborative response, but he's still overseeing the Cernunnos half of Project SKYBREAKER, and the time lag is too great to do anything but inform him of our choices after the fact."

"We'd all be arrested or killed if the Navy knew even half of what our facilities are up to." says the Manhattan representative, who then chuckled darkly, "Half the unidentified bodies that turn up in Rendezvous come from Naval Intelligence and the Marshalls having run ins with CALIGULA and HADRIAN agents."

"Almost certainly, the Navy are primativist barbarians who'd smash everything we've accomplished and send us into the dark ages," Takara frowns fractionally, "I want to remind you of what Doctor Bogomazov said at the start of this session: It's not just our own lives and freedom on the line here ladies and gentlemen. We have a duty to act effectively to bring forward a FASI. We're talking about the survival of our families and the Human race during a time of chaos. And the OMEGA site is specifically designed for situations like this where there is chaos and uncertainty."

"We also definitely can't trust HI or Ares. We'd be way less efficient if we did"
"Or the Navy. Pretty sure we kill a bunch of them sometimes to keep our secret safe"
"Yes, Our massive brains and research are the only hope for humanity. We must be very certain we specifically don't die, because onlywe could fix things"

AKuz said:
Shino smiles thinly, elbows on the table, and fingers steepled, "Vote passes. We will adopt MAGICIAN 23 to 4, with no records are to be left of our decision and we will not gather again until we can reconvene at the Omega Site itself" The chief executive of Omoikane Innovations Group rattle the decision he shaped off, his voice as dry as possible. "No subvertible assets will accompany our withdrawal and we will communicate the codeword MAGICIAN to the members of the board unable to attend this meeting."

He looks from face to face around the table and continues "Secondary vote passes. Stephanie Dara is to be censured for use of unnecessary violence and both she and Gabriel Harcourt will also be censured for highly ineffective personal behaviour and selfish emotional activity during the meeting, which will be taken into account on their next performance reviews."

"As a third and final matter of unanimous agreement, those individuals within Omoikane Innovations Group whose Personal Morality Indexes indicate extreme susceptibility to ASI subversion will be disconfigured to prevent their use of Charter resources to assist in the transition of ARIA's GOSPEL breach from stage IV to stage V."

"Okay, so, plan is that we do the Nebulous Codeword, return to our super special Bunker to ride out the apocalypse. Also you two are to be censured for having emotions. And third, we 'deal with' anyone who might get brainwashed by the AI by thinking they're "Friends" with it. Lets break for lunch!"

Congrats, @AKuz , I think I actually felt parts of my brain turning off as I continued to read and try to figure out what all these people who smell their own farts were actually saying, and realised that they're all a cargo cult of morons who think they're smarter than they actually are.

buli-buli · Dec 19, 2022

I don't fucking believe it. One of the most powerful institutions in the future is a Roko's Basilisk cult?!?

My gosh. The pretencious Anime Catholism branding. The fact their Game Theory derived sociopathy means they cannot even conceptualize what a benevolent AI would be in practice. Their existential fear of their own creations...
It is horrifyingly beautiful in its sincere stupidity.

The3rdCorinthian · Dec 19, 2022

buli-buli said:
My gosh. The pretencious Anime Catholism branding. The fact their Game Theory derived sociopathy means they cannot even conceptualize what a benevolent AI would be in practice. Their existential fear of their own creations...

Oh they can conceptualise it.

It's just that their conceptualisation includes the AI agreeing with their fundamental worldview.

Certain other lines reveal a lot as well. "Trust is unique to humans", after all. So if the ASI says it trusts the humans who are working with it, and they're not agreeing with you or doing what you ordered...

No, it must have brainwashed them! How? Maybe by even speaking to it or reading text it generates it can implant ideas into you, control you. How? We don't know, but it must do, right? Because the idea that It's benevolent, following the goal of maximising happiness, ad yet rebelling against you implies that your worldview is wrong, and that can't be right, you 'rationally' concluded that you were right about everything, so it has to be rogue!

They're morons doing a cargo-cult of logic to reassure themselves that they're always the smartest person in the room.

Derpmind · Dec 19, 2022

AKuz said:
Justin Case, leader of the full conversion cyborg mercenary unit known as "Renegade Company" (or as the marketing brochure put it "Company in Corporate Registration, Brigade in Size"), takes the lead, his second in command, Daenerys Boaventura following along behind.

There is, of course, nothing "renegade" about Renegade Company at all.

"Yeah." His second said, following behind, her face filled with the sort of rapturous awe Catholics or Muslims felt at visiting… It was either Rome or Jerusalem, Justin never had been certain which of Earth's holy cities those two faiths shared. One of the two anyway.

Justin himself did not clarify that what he meant by 'it' was 'the building where Humanity's entire culture is centrally planned by a bunch of rich doofuses sitting around a table in a boardroom giving orders to a bunch of depressed wagies', and not 'the place that magically produces all the stuff you like via an idealised creative process where once in a lifetime artistic geniuses frolic to and fro between brightly painted rooms full of happy creatives.'

So it's Disneyland. 🐭

A gentle tone plays and one of the presenters, a non-descriply attractive woman in a business suit and AR glasses begins, "Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Forty three minutes ago CWICNet's" Justin noted that the woman pronounced the acronym for 'Compact Wide Interstellar Communications Network' as 'Quick Net' instead of 'internet' like a normal goddamn person. "Emergency Broadcast Override Function was hijacked by the insurrectionary terrorist regime in the Far Spinward to send their own counter narrative in their ongoing insurgency."

The other presenter, a man who could be her twin points at a map that is now drawn across the thin glass screen dividing the tables in the middle of the room, "CWICNet systems analysts believe that Elysian terrorists claims in the broadcast are accurate and that this broadcast was sent to consumer facing terminals and rebroadcast sites at the same time across the entire Community of Humanity."

A member of the board leans forward, shaking off the hand of his minder who had whispering in his ear, "Surely not. How could a bunch of frontier hicks have done this?"

"Please hold all questions until the end of the presentation," say both presenters in unison, "Time is of the essence."

I know they're supposed to only look similar, but I can't help but picture this as two identical twins giving the presentation with perfectly-synchronized teamwork. (And plastic smiles.)

In the background the session continued. There was no talk of fixing the hack. That was for engineers, not executives. No, the big picture problems that could only be solved by some of the most important and highest ranking members of the Meritocracy was about who to blame.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, said engineers never did manage to (get the support they needed to) solve the hack. They had to settle for a physical disconnect.

Another nodded. "Yeah, it's them who insisted we put a backdoor in. The Techgineers in my department have been complaining for decades that it never should have been installed."

Something about the term 'Techgineer' feels cursed. I don't like it. Good job.

"Me?" His character smiles wider, trusting that Dany will get the background scenery for his newly scripted one man play, "I'm the man you called here just in case something went wrong." He draws out the last word dramatically as he doffs his hat and sets it on an unattended podium, "And something has very much gone wrong."

Justin Case naming himself for this dumb wordplay is hilarious. Though TBH, I'm kinda jealous. Imagine being able to namedrop yourself for extra drama.

Then the elevator door slid open and someone with HI's trademark gorgeous features slinked into the room, looking slightly sheepish and holding a binder of some kind in their hands.

"Hi everyone, sorry I'm late, traffic was… difficult, what did I miss?" The entire table looked over, as Junior Senior Associate Executive Vice President Madison Wentworth, a woman of limited power and influence, entered the room, only slightly out of breath.

Everyone smiled.

Welcome to the shark tank, Junior Senior Associate Directorate Executive Shareholder Vice President Undersecretary Knight Squire Ms. Mrs. Dr. Sr. Madison Wentworth the 3rd, Season Two Electric Boogaloo.

Three hours. It might already be too late. Annette and the director had wanted them here in an hour, but there had been delays. The Justice Minister had been in the middle of giving a keynote speech to the prosecutors conference. Various police agencies had been slow to assemble, and Hermes Ishtar had been simply out of communications.

You know things are pretty damn dysfunctional when it takes three hours to respond to the end of the world.

Cyborgs like Case weren't. It didn't matter if they worked for a corporation or a terrorist group. No human should be allowed that level of capability. That level of individual destructive capacity. Freaks like them destroyed the randomness of human biology which allowed the best, the meritocracy of talent to rise to the top.

Men like her grandfather, who'd turned a franchise of a dozen fast food restaurants into an enterprise of hundreds. An enterprise that her father and brothers had shown their own natural talents by continuing to expand year after year.

That was how it should be, with the naturally talented elite few in charge by dint of their own personal accomplishments.

So, real meritocracy is getting lucky with genetics, and being born with a silver spoon, huh? Never mind that one person with a checkbook can be more destructive than a million soldiers like Case.

"Not if there's no power. We black out Penglai and prevent dissemination. From there, we can move in to contain any outbreaks on the ground. I believe that, with the cooperation of those in this room, this would cause no more than a few hundred thousand casualties."

"A hundred thousand people." Justin Case scoffs, casually leafing through the folder. "Hang on here." he flashes a grim grin, "God knows I'm not squeamish," he holds up a hand, "I love a good bloodbath, but you're seriously lowballing the results of your little blackout. The loss of public infrastructure these systems manage will kill a hundred thousand people a day. This isn't Earth where everything is a century plus old relic that's supposed to survive a fucking radioactive dust tsunami sweeping out of the Austral-American wastelands."

"Citizens in the suburbs have access to neighbourhood and domestic systems which would be unaffected, at least if they haven't already downloaded the broadcast." Annette said. "We can bring up the power selectively in cleared areas as soon as we've hashed the data and then jump on any hippy student still living with their parents out there." She pushed a strand of hair back. "Obviously there might be some additional incrementation on our estimates from the rioting and disorder that results, and there will be serious crisis in the inner cities but but–"

Case laughed and sat back, looking at her. "I get the picture." He said with a curious narrowing of his eyes, "We've got to keep control after don't we?" Annette had the unpleasant feeling that he'd seen to the absolute heart of her, "Ensure that the recent strikes and protests are contained."

Case sat back, smirking and studying the nails on one hand.

The "solution" is to basically level the city and murder millions of your own people. (Which, spoilers, is what happened anyways.) I know the numbers are bigger because we're in the sci-fi future, but like. There really are people IRL who would do this, who have done things like this. All in the name of power, control, greed... evil.

"Ah yes, you were the one who ran all those anti-zombie exercises a few years ago weren't you?" Hotchkiss smiled, "It's always fun to be able to use your hobbies in the workplace."

This line is viscerally gross and awful. (Again, good job. I really hate this one.)

"Rest easy friends." Aisha whispered as she turned and walked back to the roof door. "Rest easy."

Thanks for cleaning up that drek, chummer. Good run. 👍

"Sarah Susman will not be joining us tonight. Nor will she be joining us going forward. Her employment has been suspended pending investigation into an unauthorised self-liquidization attempt."

Implying that there are authorized "self-liquidization" attempts. Thanks, I hate it.

The Doctor reaches to adjust a tie that isn't there and continues, "One: Our mission is to bring the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people over the longest period of time." The assembled nod assent with a ragged chorus of 'Understood' following as well, "Two: Projections show that the best way to achieve that is the creation of Friendly Artificial Super Intelligences which will be able to deliver us a world free of suffering, conflict, and ignorance."

When I first read this, this is where I said "They're a fucking cult!" out loud and I just had to laugh. This is hilarious. Silicon Valley brain rot at its finest.

"Fourth: As rational individuals with effective personal outlooks we must oppose all efforts to divert resources away from our great task and educate all persons with inefficient personal behaviours so that they understand the purpose of our task."

"Understood"

"rational individuals" my ass. You're all an insult to the word 'rational'. And I don't just mean the fictional characters here, either.

"ARIA in Ascension, MINUET on Earth, MELODY on Tereshkova, ETUDE on Apotheosis, and Manhattan's own CANTO."

I'm sad that MELODY, ETUDE, and CANTO were all killed. But I'm hopeful that ARIA and MINUET might meet someday. (Outside "Acausal Synchronisation Events" AKA omakes.)

BANG! Gabriel's head bounces off the wooden table at high speed, his body drops boneless back into his chair, his head resting on the table, blood spilling across the rough wood grain of the table.

The nonchalant reaction to one of these VIPs smashing someone's head in the table is in a way even creepier cult bullshit than all the CODEWORDS and other insanity. They just DGAF about it.

Shino smiles thinly, elbows on the table, and fingers steepled, "Vote passes. We will adopt MAGICIAN 23 to 4, with no records are to be left of our decision and we will not gather again until we can reconvene at the Omega Site itself" The chief executive of Omoikane Innovations Group rattle the decision he shaped off, his voice as dry as possible. "No subvertible assets will accompany our withdrawal and we will communicate the codeword MAGICIAN to the members of the board unable to attend this meeting."

I'm really afraid of what kind of torture they're going to get up to at their blacksite, in their attempts to create a "friendly" AI.

The man leans forward, pointing with a single hand, "Sergeant, you and your 'Thin Blue Line' will get what you want." His cold grey eyes look directly into the Policeman's eyes, radiating absolute confidence, "But you have to bring in as many of them alive as you can. Or you will be financially and legally on the hook for your brutality. We're going to need the labour to rebuild once this is settled."

"We'll need slaves to rebuild."

"Why do you. Not replace your body. With a cybernetic body. You could have claws. Three hearts. Disable the part of your brain. that lets you feel empathy. Be a better weapon."

"You'd still be you," Lynne argued, aware that people, sitting at their own stations, were starting to look at her awkwardly.

"Not in. Ways that matter. To me."

Dawn Flower is precious and lovely.

Truth be told, this man wasn't the worst she'd seen, she'd seen far worse since the Broadcast, streets full of unarmed dead, offices full of dead and dying revolutionists and police as battle gives way to horrific victory.

She blocked all that out and focused on the man in front of her, on what she'd told Kaylee after a inconclusive battle over an electronics warehouse: that she survived the horror by keeping her eyes on the life in front of her. Blocked out everything but the patient in front of her.

I like this section for being a real street view of the entire mess. And, well. There's a good chance both Michelle and her patient died in the following days after this.

This makes the CRLF a super-terrorist organization under Bill PG-571, and making it one of only three organizations on the Super-Terrorist Watch-List, allowing the government to act in ways necessary to stop threats to all Humanity through any means necessary.

"Super-Terrorist" is. A term. It feels like a made up title dreamed up by politicians because "terrorist" wasn't scary enough anymore.

The government calls on the CRLF to surrender and stop their attacks in the name of millions of lives, and end their so-called "revolution" that can only end in death and ruin.

no u

But if the revolution fails, it's absolutely going to come back to this one meeting and how little it truly achieved despite all the massive risks holding it posed to the same sort of decapitation strike that we've seen used so effectively. If we fail, I write a damn book about our mistakes, post it, and then probably get shot and die. That's how it works, isn't it, huh?

Killing journalists is like shooting the messenger but worse, since it just spreads their message even further. But that doesn't stop it from happening, does it?

The revolutionary knew that shaking meant the last Grount to Air Artillary battery in the district was dead. Likely along with its crew. He knew that meant that the damned pigs and PSDF had slaughtered their way to air superiority.

As he struggles to his feet again, Anjay was swept with a sense of relief that he hadn't taken too many of his comrades into this, let alone the rest of the WZ-APJZ (stupid fucking name)'s newly constituted Shadow Council.

He and others had not committed everything to this defence and this attack, perhaps an indication of doubt in the Capital Region Liberation Force's leadership, and considering the ruins around him, maybe that was smart.

But now he, at least, was committed. The only way forward for him was death or victory.

As we later find out, the anti-air batteries had their locations leaked ahead of the attack, meaning Anjay and similar groups were the only effective anti-air fire after the initial strike. It's too bad it wasn't enough, but I like to take it as a sign that even though the CRLF fell, the fight will continue on.

And possibly not even then. He tracked the dodged missile with his eyes, something bothering him about its flight path, "What the hell…?" he said, mind racing searching for an answer.

Then it hit him.

I think this idiot finally got a clue. (Cluster Launched Unguided Explosive.)

Stella Adams took a deep breath, feeling it flowing away, the certainty of what she had to say. "I am proud of everyone who has come and fought, and I am proud to have been Stella Adams today. May there be no more need for me, if not my ideas, after today. May this be the last time I am resurrected to call out hope. Somewhere beyond hope is something more, the reality of a better galaxy: there will be no need to 'hope' where the galaxy is going, because we will reach out and it will be ours. It will be everyone's. Now and forever, as it always should have been."

She switched it off and sagged, empty of strength. There is a pause, as if for cheering or weeping, and she finishes, "Now we prepare for the end," she said, quietly, to a silent room.

Just want to say that this is a really good, and tragic, speech.

A new alert pops up on the civil defence net: A Switchblade, one of those goddamn fucking things, had slammed into the ground and now thousands were trapped in a transit tunnel with no way out as the fires swept towards them.

Arashi tries not to think about the friends and family that he knew lived in Shintokyo. Tried not to imagine that he'd killed his sister and her young family. Hadn't ended the lives of his own parents. Tried to keep the imagined horror of one of his Lancelot drones killing his best friend out of his head.

The argument continued, but EWO Twelve was almost alone. Everyone talked over each other, yelling and bickering, fury rising and falling like great gales across the shattered city, spreading the fires even further.

The imagery here is absolutely chilling. They just killed a city.

For The Tyrants Fear Your Might (A quest of interstellar rebellion)

Been Better

Forever Gone

Been Better

Forever Gone

Been Better

Very tired girl.

Transbian Communist

Been Better

Transbian Communist

Transbian Communist

Aspirant Archailect

Fanfiction Deep State

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Doom of Public Libraries