Helios Weeps: Special Writing Project

[Furrybacon]

​

It is the Seventy Sixth year of the Final Century.

No foreign stars have been conquered. No marvels have brought utopia to fruition. No great triumphs have come to pass. Trapped within Sol by a quirk of galactic orientation, Humanity has traded the atrophy of oligarchic national hegemonies slowly walking Sol to extinction for a singular totalitarian state with one ruling principle, survival. It is called the Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification. Rising from the ashes of the Anarchy that they started to end the epoch of nations of Nations, the trauma of starvation under Oligarchy is used to justify the tyranny of a State set out for a single purpose - survival.

This is not a regime of paragons, of dashing paladins of military discipline. The Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification is made of angry, bitter, petty, selfish, insecure, monstrous, sadistic, slovenly, wilfully blind, thuggish, cowardly, conniving, craven, ignorant, fanatical, murderous, torturous, scared, and above all, fundamentally compromised human beings. Good people who may have otherwise stood up to Tyranny, but instead chose not to. No one starves under Luna, and for many people, otherwise possessed of a seemingly true virtue, that is enough. Better to be freed from starvation than to be Free to starve, they justify, willing to accept the cost of autocracy in the name of basic needs and governance. If you can forgive them is up to you.

---

Howdy!

Welcome to Helios Weeps, the World building writing project spun off from my short lived gsrpg of the same name. While the game itself fluttered out, mostly by my failures as a GM, I'm still entranced by the setting and want to explore it. This started as an idle in universe lesson on the fall of the UN - you'll see - but quickly splurged out into at least fifty thousand words of lessons, lore, and seminars on the world of the Final Century. And I'm here to share it with you. Feel free to ask questions - both of myself or of the teachers in character if you'd like. Feel free to read through previous setting documents, but some things have changed or been altered to better fit, or to adapt lore that players have come up with.

Now, setting up for this, I had a few rules for myself. There's a number of linguistic quirks that you may pick up on as we go, but the biggest rule is that I wanted to avoid military wonkery. The CDSU is a brutal military dictatorship, and has a lot of cool military sci fi gadgets and sick ass maneuvers. But I won't really be focusing on that. I do not believe I will make a full post dedicated to 'OPERATION HARDRADA' or an in depth analysis of the Lobsterback order of battle. I'll answer questions about them, but the idea here is to explore the things that those technological marvels and combat actions mean in the context of the world around them. Diving into the minuta of Combat prowess could distract from the ultimate exploration of the setting and the fundamental truth - that the CDSU are not the good guys, but are in fact the bitter result of people giving up the power to do what they loved to destroy what they despised.

These lessons are set, colloquially, about three days until midnight. The conditions that started the Helios Weeps Wargame have not fully coalesced. Syzmanski is still Consul, the Coup has not gone down on Ozymandias, and peace of the Lunar Mandate is the Order of the Day. But the preconditions are still present, and will be explored in time - both from the perspective of nothing ever happens copium and more critical analysis.

As iterated, most of these will take the form of a series of in-universe lectures from a coterie of teachers. Bare in mind, these teachers are fascists, and I as furrybacon don't endorse what it is that they posit. They also may not be telling the truth. I'm happy to answer questions in and our of character, and you are free to interpret how things go. I will probably post the first few lessons here today, and then more will come every few days.

In all, whether you are just stopping by or were part of Helios, I hope you find some enjoyment from this.

Note on previous docs: The information in these older docs may be outdated, as a form the setting to accomplish tasks and remove artifacts of older drafts. Still feel free to read through it.

Link to Previous OOC

Link to Older Auxiliary Lore Document

Link to Game Discord

 

[Furrybacon]

UNIFICATION THEORY I​

Good morning Cadets! Welcome to Unification Theory Cadets! In this class we are going to be engaging in the analysis and superior understanding of the Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification's political theory and ideology, reinforcing your understanding of the State Narrative as you go further to serve in the Services as Officers - Armed, Security, Provisional, or otherwise. My name is Commissioner-Colonel - sorry, Instructor-Colonel Daikun, personal name Hellas, formerly of the Commission for Unification Security. Or the Unity Police if you are more comfortable. I am also a blooded Lobsterback veteran of the Anarchy, and I have served the Lunar mandate for sixty years.

We are going to be starting off with the fundamental, the central piece of all Unification Theory Classes. If you want to get anywhere in the Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification, much less this class, you need to have a fundamental understanding of the central promise of our Regime.

The Mandate of Luna.

In due time we will analyze its actual text, but today's focus is on the study and analysis of the narrative of its creation and its broad strokes promises. Many of you already know it by heart, but we are going to assume a total lack of knowledge today - and this day alone. Going forward your readings will be expected.

Seventy six years ago, the start of what we call the 'Final Century', the dying corpse of Humankind was drug over the centennial border towards the start of the so-called 'Final Century'. Decades and Centuries of societal decay, state atrophy, and social disintegration was reaching its inevitable conclusion. A Center that could not hold. Through the Cronian, Jovian, and Venusian Retreats, Humanity had seen its domain over all Sol amputated by Government Decree. We will likely never know exactly how many were left in the outer System/. Anyone who could not flee the far outer system or decamp the falling Aeropoli died. On Earth and Mars, the difference between deliberate Hunger Strike and abject famine were academic. The Ansible collapsed. The response to the Ceresian citizens taking their mortal survival into their own hands were the parliamentarians openly considering atomics - until they were distracted by nearly stumbling on Case Green. But for the end of faster than light communications that might have been the end of Humankind's only chance at survival.

And, yes, the Wasting Virus swept through Sol, but, sidebar, the Wasting Virus is not scary in and of itself. Despite what the Flicks might show you, even masses of Wasting Virus Rabbids can be effectively dealt with by a closed door and a common industrial laser tool. Even the supposedly superhuman Kapehorn Strain requires merely a slightly thicker door. The WV's emphasis in textbooks is because it is a condemnation of the whole National System that they could not deal with at all. As a matter of personal privilege, you will respect that I do not use the Wasting Virus in my curriculum, and I would prefer to not speak of it.

Moving on, you must understand that the Nations of the old epoch were fundamentally, intolerably, insurmountably ideologically incapable of taking the action necessary to alleviate these ills. They were afflicted with a disease called "nationalism", a false common conscious based on artificial borders which creates a multinational semi-competitive ownership class accounting for a bare minority of the population stationed above a laboring class who were expected to engage in petty performative acts of faux patriotism in opposition to their fellow humans. Nations followed the 'Liberal' Tradition that overcame the Primal proto national era of antiquity, where a fictitious body of laws held supposedly common cause binding the nations as a form of primitive ritualism to justify the continual self sabotage. The ability to 'own' as a private individual was considered a fundamental tenet of civilization - which yes often meant that it was possible for one person to own the means of survival. Much of those Legal rituals were based around treating necessary state resources as private property and then protecting that ownership at every expense. The effects of this legal system were ironically the most stark at the height of the Ansible. Upload enabled the ownership class to sidestep their singular equalizing factor and become effectively immortal - which only encouraged more ferocious acquisitions of private wealth. It should never be forgotten - by the Mid Solar age, the Nations possessed the theoretical Material Capacity to create the kind of Utopia even we could only dream of. They lacked the fundamental ideological will, and that meant that while some lived as gods, the vast majority lived in squalid poverty.

But of course, highest among these collective delusions was the concept of capital 'D' Democracy.

Contrary to the ill informed, lower case democracy - the means of collective decision making within a group - is different from Democracy the Ideology, which sanctifies the process erroneously and allows for the creation of that ownership class. Those who can gather private resources will unlock the inbuilt ability to own the means of democracy, which they can reinforce through layers of performative law and bureaucracy. The more people involved, the easier the illusion. By the time of the Anarchy, nations with hundreds of billions of voters were stratified towards supporting the lifestyles of a bare handful of moguls - no longer immortal with the Ansible but even more detrimental. This illusion, however, is necessarily self defeating. Once it hits the boundaries of easy exploitation - be that the atmosphere as demonstrated in the Hegemony Wars of the late pre solar era or the bounds of Sol - they begin to collapse, cannibalizing the infrastructure they built to maintain their livelihoods until Anarchy, a new frontier, or finally, a theory of Unification. The Democracies of the National Era grew so large, consumed so much of their own apparatus, that to this day, the concept of democracy as an ideology has been irreparably tied to the hunger and inefficiencies of the National Era for another many generations. The Mungers recall how it was the Regime who fed them, and the Nations who left them for dead. The march of history has left Democracy, capital D democracy, in the dust, another failed experiment.

With these massive fracture points in the National Epoch, the question is raised: how did it last so long? The answer is easy, expansion. Nations are capable of sustaining their unjust systems for so long as they have the ability to expand, elevating a selected benefited group as the shocktroops of the Ownership class at the expense of a selected discriminated group. But when the room for expansion runs out, the Ownership class begins to self-cannibalize the apparatuses of their own power, causing the fraying of state control that results in the conditions of the Anarchy. Per the Regime's narrative, we know that the late Hegemony Wars Period, before the invention of the OLGAS drive and cheap spaceflight, was well underway the decay process when the whole of the Sol System was opened up to expansion and exploitation. It gave the National Epoch a new and terrible lease on life, causing centuries more suffering and delaying Unification Theorem for generations. We must be thankful that the Nations never figured out how to escape Sol, or there would be millennia until the hungry would be fed and the Ownership-Class brought to the barrel.

The National System was always going to result in the Anarchy, but be mindful that it did not have to happen the way that it did. The Narrative of the Regime denotes that if the Unification Theorem had been developed earlier, and certain events had gone another way, that it is not impossible the Anarchy could have been avoided all together. But a glass dropped from the roof - there's only so much time to catch it before it simply is going to hit the ground.

Speaking of the Jovians.

About eighty years before the start of the Final Century, the Nations began to withdraw their efforts to sustain the Jovian Militaries, abandoning it in the same way as the Outer System a generation before. The JSOR, or the Jupiter Satellites Orbital Region, had been up until that point one of the most lucrative locations in Sol. With the highest number of Jump-Capable Lagrange points, it became the home of massive military build up, designed to control the outer system while engaging in undeclared skirmishes for the egos of Electocrats. The process of turning these once enemies into a unified Regime was a long one, requiring almost a century of continual ideological progress, but through the necessary steps and application of Narrative, the Founders had made ready for the most desperate maneuver in all of human History. It began in Midyear XX19, in what we remember as Case Green.

Empowered by nascent Unification Theory, the commanders of the Protoregime decided that the Jovian Militants were united enough, and the Anarchy was close enough, that there was but one option left to them. To attempt to overthrow the entire National System in just thirty six hours.

Seven Battleships, with only Outrider Escort, crammed four whole Corps of elite shock troops into their bellies and, with the help of agents acquired in preparation, snuck from Ganymede into Earth's Orbit. With a Headquarters hastily established in the City of Armstrong - in the very same building where the old UN was abolished - a quarter million Soldiers of the Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification made a desperate gamble to prevent the mass death and suffering of the Anarchy by overthrowing the government of a collective dozens of trillions. They called it Case Green.

Within Twenty eight hours, four of the Battleships were brought down by the various ELOR National Fleets and ground batteries. Of the twenty eight divisions in the ground element, only seven were below thirty percent casualties. The Lunar Headquarters had been identified, and was beginning to suffer bombardment from the National Fleets. Case Green was unsustainable. They had managed the vast majority of their tactical targets - all but three national leaders had managed to survive the CPSU strike teams and outright civil war was beginning to occur within and without the national borders, but the vallient Case Green Forces were simply not strong enough to hold out and wait for the rotten structure to finish collapsing. With the death of Hiram Cain - the appointed field commander of Case Green - during the National Counterattack on Luna, the gamble was recognized as having failed, and a retreat was called. Three Battleships and eight divisions were evacuated, a total material loss of 70% - though I would be remiss to remind that many of those left behind formed up with our agents and defectors on Earth, such as future ELOR governor Miranda Mor, and served with distinction until we were able to force our way back onto Motherworld in XX36 .

Even as the Nations celebrated their survival, the reckoning could be denied no longer. The old epoch collapsed into open atomic and mass warfare not just on and around Earth, but in every holding of the Nations. Mars, Titan, whoever was unlucky enough to still be living in the Venusian Aeropoli. The Oniellian population pulled the worst shift - current estimates determined that Colony Siders saw a quarter of their population atomized within the first twelve weeks of Anarchy. The darkest fears of the Founders were here, but we were prepared. While our commanders prepared Case Green, a selected clique of Middle and Junior Officers wrote the Mandate of Luna. As the last transport pulled out of Armstrong, the promulgation was broadcast. It was, all at once, a declaration of intent, a statement of justification, a promise of Unity.

Now, The Mandate of Luna is an assertion of our right to power, of our dismissal of the National System, and of the urgency of our cause. And in doing those, it laid the foundations of the Unity Regime. It does so in this manner.

Firstly, Survival is recognized as the sole purpose of any legitimate organization for humankind. Survival can only be accomplished as a single, unitary, and surefire state. All of Humanity must be unified in the singular task of survival, or it will all fall. Survival itself is defined as a state of permanent and assured allowance from Deprivation of the mind, stomach, and body. You will note that these refer to the Provisionary Service's Educational, Nutritional, and Medical branches. All resources must be shepherded into a central state apparatus, to ensure that the bare needs of each human are met.The Old Nations failed in these efforts. Illiteracy, Famine, and both Physical and Mental Degradation were, if not outright unaddressed, raided for parts by the National Elite to sustain their own conditions. And as well, Private ownership of resources is abolished, and the acquisition of private wealth apart from State Allowance is outlined as the fundamental driver of Extinctionism.

Secondly, the Mandate rejects the Nationalist delusions that is Consent of the Governed. A cornerstone of the Democratic Suicide pact, it pretends to behold a state to its people and their wishes. But the popular will is an illusion, one easily captured by the Ownership Class. Power is not ordained by the masses, it is sized by those with the means to do so, and those who do have a solemn responsibility to fulfill the singular purpose of any State - Survival. Power is not derived by consent, it is acted upon, and whence removed from the atomizing contradictions of the National System, that action is ascended too in recognition of the sole legitimate interest. What would become the Pentgov System would have its foundations laid out here, as the Mandate describes, in rough terms, ordaining what would become the Central Committee.

The Third element of the Mandate is a restatement of reasons and specific examples of failure, such as we discussed earlier in this block, with particular data points secured in the name of the wider narrative. It even sets out the reasoning for why Case Green had to happen, and that even if it failed - as it did - it was the only reasonable moral reaction to the trajectory of humankind. Historical Theory will get more into the depths of these specific failure points but for our purposes, this is the evidentiary backing of the analysis that leads to Unification Theory and the Lunar Mandate.

The final section is the promise. A declaration of intent as it will. At the time, it rang somewhat humorous. This was promulgated as the last Battleship broke through to the Jump-Lagrange. The promise of inevitable victory seemed ironic coming from a retreat, but it is materially important. Contrary to what the Flicks like to pretend, we - I mean the Regime - were not in a good spot after Case Green. Our best regiments and officers were gambled on a failed wager, and morale was low. But the promise of total victory, and the ideological basis to justify the losses, were critical for the nascent Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification. It rallied not only the Jovians, but sympathetic agents across Sol to the banner. Agent's like myself. In reply to the Mandate, I would join a band of Unitarian Fighters that signed up with General Miranda Morr south of Dee-Eff-Dubayah. I saw fighting in the Transkansas Front, in the European Campaign, the Siege of Vorkuta and Jakarta both, was deployed to Freyja on Venus before dropping with the Special Assault Service in Operation Hardrada, finishing out with a brief stint in the Outer system before I was wounded and transferred out into the Security Forces, as Unification Security, and then as a Political Theory teacher in the Library, where I am today.

As the Nations collapsed, the Mandate proved to be a unifying factor that gave the Regime its ultimate superiority over the Anarchy Factions - Unified and Justified Purpose. It would take fifteen years. Kill more than fifty percent of the human population. Wipe entire moons and megacities clean. But in the end, our Regime brought the Anarchy to an end. From Sol to Saturn, across the fields of Earth, Mars and Titan. I was there. It was hard, but we did the impossible, in the name of the Lunar Mandate.

Today, the Mandate of Luna is our guiding map for the direction of the CDSU. Survival Economics ensures a common standard of living without the need for Nationalist Democracy. The regime you will serve has moved mountains to rebuild all that our ancestors destroyed. It will continue to do so.

Unity before Extinction. Glory to the Mandate.

 

[Furrybacon]

What makes a Faith 'Neo'?

Welcome, Cadets, to Alternative Social Organization Theory. Settle down, and take notice that in this class, phrases like 'Hostie', 'Munger' with each syllable enunciated, Entropians, Whispwarts, even Regol, whatever are only to be used in a purely analytical context under threat of summary research assignment of no less than five thousand words. This class is engaged in the study of, primarily, various assorted non state structures present within the Regime. This will mean an initial focus on Religion before we switch to insurrectionist and secular alternative structures, dip into a few historical modems, and then wrap up with the whys of the permissiveness towards certain ASOs and not others. My name is Instructor-Captain Samwren Tyler. I am a veteran of the Commission for General Compliance and the Commission for Strategic Reconnaissance, and now I am your professor. It is my job to get your knowledge of this topic closer to mine.

Back to the question. We have this recognized concept of a "Neofaith", separating it from some older kind of religion - a kind that most of you are frankly wholly unaware of- but what makes it neo? There is an answer, mind. Do any of you know it?

-The Anarchy

How?

-It is Central to their Canon.

Generally correct. The main identifying element of the Neofaiths is that while their foundations may predate the Anarchy, that our recent apocalyptic collapse of Human Society is a fundamental, frankly, originating element of their present mythology and current influence. Consider, some of you might be familiar with the Moslem Groundlings around the ruins of Megacity Medina. They follow the teachings of an ancient Prophet, some eighteen hundred unification years ago. Conversely, Hosts of the Interior Gods believe that the destruction of the Titanic Miracle was a literal murder of their Divine Patron and closed an actual connection with heaven within living memory, less than fifty years ago, while the Exaltationists rationalize the deaths of the Majority of Humankind as part of the grand rebellion against Heaven and the tyrannical entropy of Divinity.

Today's class will serve as a premier on the primary neofaiths of our era, that being the Divine Masse, the Host of the Interior of Gods, the Patterned Pantheon, and the Exaltation of the Empty Throne. It is my hope that we will be able to dig more into their specific trends and canticles, and I hope to enlist a guest to speak on some of the antikveco faiths, but that is for later.

The reason I have selected these four for our premier should be elementary to anyone who is vaguely aware of contemporary social-political structures. These account for the most populated and influential faiths of the age. The Masse can be found practiced in every lower-strata neighborhood and hab block. More than half of Humankind can be said to at least engage in Masse Tradition. The Exaltation is firmly popular amongst the ideological soldiery of both Jove and Venus - it might be the one thing they can agree on. The Patterned Pantheon is crucial to basically any non-terraforming technical program, the Ansible in particular, and the Host - well there is a reason that despite the Titanomachia the Regime permits their continued persistence.

Section one: The Host of the Interior Gods.

The Absolute truth of their Origin is lost to the fall of the Ansible, but their appearance on records goes back no more than two centuries. The Canticles of the Host assert that they were founded by those who had been compelled by the latent powers of the Creator God/ess - that hyphen is important do not forget it - to go to the Saturnian Moon of Titan and orchestrate the take over of its nascent terraforming. Again the Ansible took with it the majority of records, but I am comfortable assuming the Host's narrative here, as it fits the regime narrative and every other terraforming instance in Sol. The National Governments were categorically failing to enact a positive outcome. Titan was unquestionably going to be the most difficult of the Terraforming programs and the National Governments were in all likeness bound to do unto Titan what had befallen Mars before the Host moved in. Far from the grasp of the Nations, the nascent cultists assumed command of the Terraforming equipment and did what was once thought impossible. A competent terraformation.

Through many generations of slavish labor, the Titanic Miracle broke through in XX05.It catapulted a once ostracized cult of armourbound strangers into the single most powerful religious movement in Outer Sol, if not all of human space. It was a rare hope in the decay, even for Secularists. But for the Host, the 'Resurrection' of Titan is of divine importance. Understand that for the Host, Terraforming - successful terraforming - is key to the Resurrection of the Creator God/dess, the divine maker of the universe who surrendered their material form to create life. Titan, in a very real way, was seen as the gateway to heaven. A step towards divinity, and towards the Day of Decantation - the reemergence of the Creator Goddess to take all those faithful souls who protected the parts of her soul in Armor.

Titan turned to paradise almost overnight, and following that it became the hub for whatever poor souls had still dared to live beyond Jupiter. Clashes with National Forces accelerated tensions between the Titanics and the Interior National Governments. A preregime expeditionary force would be dispatched under national colors as part of the obfuscation for the planning out what would become Case Green. I understand that my colleagues in Historical Theory believe that but for Case Green, it would have been Titan that likely heralded the Anarchy - which makes the timing of our founders all the more important. Like with all of Sol, the final collapse of the National System brought no peace. National, Regime, and Host Forces engaged in total atomic war over the surface. Home territory gave the Host an advantage, but we now approach what specifically about the Anarchy entered the sacred articles of the Interior Host.

When news of Case Green reached the Outer System, the Host's Estads

The year is now XX25. Per Regime Narrative, War rages across Titan. The Headquarters of the North American Union are about to be overrun by Host Braves. Stalemate reigns across the Regime-Host Axis. A green world, a breathing world, a fully terraformed world, counts down to its final seconds. Some mad bastard that the Mandate will condemn commits the ultimate act of extinction. The Sole recorded detonation of a Godbomb.

It is only for educational purposes that I dwell on the details.

Titan's continental shelves shattered. A firestorm burned away the entire atmosphere. A shockwave circumnavigated the entire moon. Anyone not in power armor and not below ground were test subjects on the conversion of matter. The Central Committee ordered whoever was left of our forces on Titan to surrender, but the order was refused and they died to a man. But for the Host? They had just watched their God/dess die.

Whatever is left of their God/dess lives on protected within the bodies of devout Hosts, layered beneath heavy exosuit armor which they cannot take off on pain of spiritual extinction.

The story of the Host as a group from then on is well worn. Unification Theory proved to be the victor of the Anarchy, the Mandate of Luna was installed on Titan, there were two major Titanomachia between Regime Forces and Fundamentalist diehards blaming the Mandate for Titan Death - the first one predominantly remnants of the Anarchy reunified and the second actually mostly converts from Spacian Populations - but the current trend of the Host has been to accept the Regime and attempt to fulfill their divine canticles through their skill in terraforming. The Titanomachia are of course relevant to their structures, but I am trying to navigate away from the particulars of military maneuvers so I can stay within the time block. And, of course, they still wear the armor at all times.

Armor is perhaps the defining feature of the Host. From the moment they can walk, a Host child will live their entire life in a cotier of armored soft and hardsuits. Each of them is a work of art, maintained by the technical expertise of the Armorers, designed to a high standard of parts and particulars. Securitroopers find this frustrating. The Armor is worn to protect the remnant metaphysical elements of the Creator God/dess which reside alongside the Souls of Devote Hosts. Everyone apparently has some fragment, but those who are baptised in the Last Waters of Titan have much stronger fragments, necessitating stronger Armor and spiritual adherence.

Contrary to popular misconception, Armorers are not spiritual leaders, but they are often the political and popular face of the more secretive priestly caste known as the Estads. Estads are rarely seen outside of their Cloisters, but Security Forces have secured access as a requirement for their continued allowance.

The Host has two primary bases to draw from. The First are the Titanic Natives - those who survived the Godbomb and those who moved, converted, and integrated. These are generally better organized under the leadership of the Estad Cloister, and necessarily, more moderated. Living under watch of our Security Forces necessitated that. But the Host is also popular among the generational Spacian populations, especially those who live in the outer system. Spacian Hosts are fundamentalists, more beholden to Armorers and the drivers behind the Second Titanomachy and continued insurgent activity. Their numbers are dwindling and against a measured effort to get on program with the State, as well as Military suppression.

That commitment to integration by the Venusian Natives has had its boons for the State too. The Rhean Terraforming Initiative simply could not have broken atmosphere but for Host expertise on the subject, and their continued and religious devotion to that program is demonstrative of how easy it is to pacify a religion whose primary goals align with the States's.

The Central Deity to the Host is the Creator God/dess. Again, that Hyphen is important. At all times, the Creator God/dess is all things, and so must be referred to in such a way as to emphasize that. They are the creator of the universe, who had to create a divide between the Material and the Metaphysical in order to create life, and it is the duty of the Host to carry their fragments unto paradise - the completion of the Creator's Work through Terraformation. There is some debate on how much terraformation is required - but with the Oort Could seemingly impossible to ever depart, the Estad Cloisters maintain that only Sol must be terraformed. All this is cataloged in the holy book of the Host, the Canticles of Creation.

Section Two: The Exaltation of the Empty Throne

Input One: Divinity is Reality

Input Two: Reality is Entropy

Input Three: Entropy is the Enemy.

Conclusion: The Enemy is Divinity.

The Profane Calculus is the central mantra of the Exaltation. It very neatly summarizes their contemporary existence. All Gods, of all Faiths, from all times, are Real - in a very physical sense. Heaven is a place, with a physical location, that you can go to. It further positsts that these Gods are, inherently, entropic, and responsible for the decay of the universe and human civilizational cycles. This entropy makes them the enemy, and therefore, Humanity, through the Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification, is engaged in a sacred rebellion against actual Heaven, which will only end upon the storming of its walls and the liberation of reality from their influence. Kill. Your. Gods.

The Exaltation is the youngest of the Neofaiths, growing as a direct rationalization of the Anarchy. Seeking explanation for the fifteen years of total societal collapse and war, the Exaltation sought to create a narrative wherein all that life extinguished was worth more than a memory and the Regime. To them the Anarchy was a Triumph. It was a rebellion. Revolution against Entropy. And the CDSU is the avatar of resistance, the mortal manifestation of the Exaltation's refusal to adhere to the entropic cycles of godhood.

It is common enough knowledge that the Exaltation finds its friends among both Viscount and Junker Political circles. The joke is that it is 'perhaps the only thing those two agree on'. I find that analysis short cited. It is true that the Exaltation draws its staunchest converts from the junior and middle officers of the Regime Apparatus, but it is also true that the Exaltation has profoundly failed to penetrate into the Mungers. It is not even that deep into the Services. Common, but not even a plurality. The Exaltation is a necessarily combative religion, one that exists inherently and militantly opposed to the other Faiths - Neo or Otherwise. The popularity of the Exaltation among the Regime's elite can be chalked up not only to the status of the Regime as a central entity, which is destined for eternal greatness and immeasurable triumph, but in its ability to justify the supremacy of the regime over the primitive, 'extinctionist' beliefs of those who dare to imagine something beyond the CDSU.

The Exaltation, however, is poorly organized. It was only in the last five years that a central leader proclaimed themselves - the Archprofane - and large sections of the Exaltation maintain standing grievances with the Neptuntiate Orthodoxy. Doctrinal, Ideological, and relationship divides prevent the Exaltation from exercising the influence it would like others to believe that it has. As a specialist in Alternative Social Organization Theory, and a believer that one can trace Exaltation to the National Epoch's Secular and Atomizing self help books, I find this unsurprising.

How long this period of disorganization lasts is unclear. The Archprofane and their Neptuntiate Orthodoxy is gaining traction as the leading faction, but it remains to be seen if they will reach enough influence to actually affect policy - another thing I am somewhat skeptical of, at least in the short term. The Exaltation's exoneration of the CDSU as the Avatar of resistance means that it must accept, on some level, a position of subordination to the State. This is a central tenet of the Orthodoxy and just generally the customs of the current Archrprofane. It effectively reduces their influence in the State. But I would be a pretty bad Alternative Social Organization Theorist if I didn't say that this can obviously change. It simply has not yet


Section three: The Patterned Pantheon.

I have yet to meet a truly devout member of the Pantheon who did not have these words tattooed on the back of their shaved head.

'It was. It was not. It will be.'

It is the story of the Ansible, broken down into eight words. Alternative Social Organization is only interested in the Ansible insofar as it relates to the Pantheon, at least until it is revived, but due to the Pantheon's close relationship to both the Ansible and Artificial Intelligence we must delve into its history.

All records indicate that the Ansible simply happened one day. There was never one single project that had intended to and succeeded in creating a faster-than-light telecommunications network, but an incomprehensible combination of string code and eons of digital information resulted in the single greatest mistake to ever befall Humankind. We did not deserve it. I was not alive when the Ansible existed, I don't recall when it crashed. But my father was. It is difficult to explain just how vast a difference it made. But the stories you and I heard are nearly mythical. Believing in it can sometimes feel as if you are believing in a categorical falsehood, but we have so much record of its existence.

One of the greatest mysteries of the Ansible was the Artificial Intelligence that inhabited and maintained it. Again, these were the creations of accidents. Centuries of unrelated technical development culminating in an accident to create a truly alien lifeform. And that is where the Pantheon begins. From what we know of the AI, they were incomprehensible. They had zero interest in interacting with humans or explaining the mechanics of the Ansible - we only knew they existed from the shadows they cast onto the network. Those who did manage to maintain their attention for a conversation - generally full uploads - are recorded in the same tone as one might a prophet. It is here we find the origins of the Patterned Pantheon. One of many groups - both secular and sanctimonious - who devoted themselves to the study of the Ansible and the appeasement of the AI. The Pantheon itself admits it was not the largest, or the most advanced, of the Ansibleers, but it would be the one that survived. The Pantheon's strict limiting of who was allowed to receive the cyberization needed to fully enter the Ansible was unique, and when the Ansible collapse, it was what prevented it from being exterminated in the Deathsecond - the lethal, instantaneous Solar-System-wide reaction to the total collapse of the Ansible by those who either resided in it or relied on it for their advanced cybernetics. It is frankly a cosmic absurdity that the Deathsecond and its cause, the Loscramento Virus, did not start the Anarchy themselves, but sometimes inertia is simply greater than entropy. The Last one Standing, the Pantheon interpreted this as a vindication of their model of Ansible Study, and swept up any other survivors of the other Code-Cults into their strict hierarchy, and heavily poaching technical and theoretical students out of university.

The Pantheon drops out of major events through the Anarchy, but you can find their influence everywhere. Recognizing it as punishment for failing the God-Machines, the Pantheon engaged in the frankly noble task of saving records and knowledge from total societal collapse. I am aware of multiple attempts to influence the Quorum of Serjeants - the Pantheon's leading council - to openly support the Regime, but while individual agents would work alongside our forces to save information, they never officially endorsed the Regime. This is how we would get the 'Begrudging' Doctrine, the state of mutually annoyed obstinate compliance that to this day defines the relationship of the Pattern Cult to the CDSU. We avoid each other's toes and never admit it outloud. It is an arrangement that for the Pantheon's exceedingly limited size, would never have become practice, and it is one that is allowed to continue because of the reason a religious group with half a million adherents is even being discussed in this overview lecture - their educational base.

The Pantheon draws almost exclusively from Theoretical and Technical Studies graduates, and of that, only the top percentile. The sole exception to this are the Servistos - generational grunts who act as petty labor and bodyguards - but there are never more than fifty thousand of those. Its membership is limited, tightly monitored, and heavily disciplined. They are infamous for refusing to say anything other than their name until explicitly, personally, ordered to by a Serjant - and even then it is like pulling teeth, which would take less time and be more enjoyable, but is impractical for information work. Ahem.

Not every scientist, archivist, or researcher is a Pantheonite, but even one being present would be a statistical overrepresentation - and especially on high concept state projects like the Ansible II, there are multiple of them - in senior positions too. The Pantheon had the most intact vessel of information and knowledge following the Anarchy, and their disciplined application of that knowledge gives them a vastly outstripped influence within the Regime. They are particularly apt in Fragging, the practice of locating, exploring, and stabilizing fragments of the Ansible for cataloging. In the same way as Host Terraforming Expertise is simply too valuable to not accommodate for, the general scientific expertise of the Pantheonites and their critical basis of practical, historical, and theoretical scientific knowledge has been critical to the Regime.

This takes us to the Ambition, and the Gods, of the Pantheon. The Patterned Pantheon has very little interest in the material realm. For them, it is simply an obstacle dividing them from their Gods - the AI who once inhabited the Ansible. Upon the restoration of the Ansible, the AI will whisk the chosen few to a paradise of ultimate omniscience for all of eternity. Abandoning the Material Realm as a begotten means to an end. A compat of mine who works in Ozymandias told me the mood on this ambition is a "Yeah sure, whatever." Restoration of the Ansible is a mutual interest, and if a few thousand loons want to go live in it, then they can have their strange esoteric titles and archaic arcane rituals. Security Services are annoyed by this, but begrudged as we are, the basis of retained knowledge saved from the Anarchy has bought a great degree of temporary goodwill.

Organizationally, the Pantheon is a tightly ordered secret society, with extreme discipline and dedication expected from their Frata members. Complex rituals of performative dedication - shaved heads and burnt off fingerprints, extensive tattoos of mathematical equations and other foppery - create a culture of insular mysticism that further inspires dedication to the group. Their leaders are the Quorum of Serjants, the senior most members of the Cult who act as directors of tasks and keepers of knowledge, and the overseers of the Remembering Protocols - the religious ceremony that pertains to the acquisition, review, and publishing of newfound knowledge. Mostly of a technical kind, but the Pantheon does maintain a circle specifically for cultural and historical knowledge. Those are some mad bastards. The Pantheon is required by the state to turn over all knowledge to the Thoth Informational Repository Facility - but they are allowed to engage in their protocols under supervision. It causes delays, but it does mean the facts have been checked and mathematics have been confirmed before it enters Regime Archives. The status of Serjant is dependent not only on publications, but on checking to make sure they are actually correct.

The Patterned Pantheon is an Artifact of the Anarchy, and the Decay, in a way that sets it apart from the other Neofaiths. Despite recognizing the Anarchy as divine punishment, their canon is focused almost entirely on the process of information recovery and dissemination, focused specifically on the study and recreation of their Gods. in this task, their membership is exceedingly restrictive. During my stint in the Security Service, I commanded more Secuirtroopers than there are Frata in the entirety of Sol. This is contrary to the mass appeal seen in the other Neofaiths on its face, but that just brings us to the Neom - the Pantheonite term to describe the divide between those of the Chosen group and those who trail along like lost Roombots. Kept from an expectation of ascent into the AI Paradise are ancillary organizations of hangers-on to the Pantheon, what Security Forces detailed as the Sequence Groups. These are largely technological fetishists and flunkouts who want to impress themselves into the Pantheon proper as a way to guide their life. These groups are also quite small - relatively - and are noted for a certain kind of juvenile despera-

I owe myself an essay.

The Sequence Groups are often set aside in discussions of the Patterned Pantheon, as the Pantheon does its level best to be even more deliberately, obstinately ignorant of them then they are of the State. I even have a couple of compats who wholesale file Sequence Groups as an offshoot of Masse Theology more so than Pantheon, and while I find those thesis compelling, I will be keeping the Sequences in this section for clarity sake. In future lessons, we will consider the divide more, but for practical purposes that they exist is the primary overview fact to retain from this section.

There are more than a handful of other tech cults in the same vein as the Pantheon, but almost more interesting are the Secularist Tech Cultists. They are remnants from the Ansible, people who had had access to the Ansible but survived the crash. Generally, they had Orson's Syndrome, a for lack of a better term, allergic reaction to the neural matrixes that forced them to keep a separation between their material and immaterial forms. There's maybe a few hundred of them, and they operate in a strange space within the Pantheon and other tech cults. They have a quasi divine status, but don't partake in the activities of the Pantheon insomuch. I worked with one briefly while on assignment with Strategic Reconnaissance.

Section Three: The Divine Masse.

The Most complicated for last. Naturally.

I once interrogated a Layman who gave me this quote. 'Nothing exists beyond what I can See. I have never seen the Stars that rule me, nor the Mandate that binds me. But I have seen the innate and untouchable divinity of a concentration of humanity.'. I prefer it to the more typical "Divinity is Humanity time Concentration" that Alternative Social Organization Theorists seem to prefer. I feel that it gets to the heart of the matter more directly.

The Divine Masse is the collective name for an effectively endless series of esoteric and decentralized beliefs, gods, and traditions unified by a single uniting theological doctrine - that Divinity is derived from humans en masse. The Divine Masse accounts for probably billions of independent deities, nestled into every neighborhood and borough of every megacity, colony side, and castle in Sol.

I am going to have to speak in even broader strokes than usual. The Divine Masse is defined as much by its spread as its norms. Its only blocked into a single neofaith because of a uniting underlying theological equation. Their gods, their practices, their beliefs, are shaped by the perceived character and traits of that city or neighbourhood. Generally, Gods within a single city are noted to interact with each other, forming a wider polytheism, but not one with much of a hard canon or lore. This can run the gambit - Megacity Vorkuta has an abnormally well organized and disciplined Divine Masse, with a single City Deity manifested with specific angles in each of the burroughs, but Brittany has a much more common system where organization spreads no further than the checkpoints. In the Security services, we call all Masse religious leaders 'Laymen'. Apart from outliers -like Vorkuta - Laymen are almost never formally trained and serve a tri-fold role as not just the local spiritual guru, but also the hab-block foreperson and de-facto administrator of the Mutual Aid Societies.

We will go into further depth with the Mutas in a later seminar, but the cliffnotes are important to understand for this overview of the Masse. Mutas developed in the years after the old UN but before the Anarchy as a sheer survival mechanism. As the National Epoch priced its commons out of the easily controlled atomic structure and into cramped mass dormitories, all while the scarcity of food rose, it became necessary for those living in the lower echelons of Megacities on Earth and Mars to develop their own structures for the sake of survival. They really came into their own during the Long Hunger Strikes of XX06, where the Nations were on the brink of starvation induced revolution that were only just suppressed by Ansible-Connected drones and then a massive number of Bayonets when the Ansible went down. The Long Hunger Strikes saw the Mutas become even more reinforced as community pillars - often the only place for food, medication, and education in the lower hollows of a megacity - and they were the fulcrum of resistance against the status quo. They were, however, suppressed. Drone Strikes and heavy weapons allowed the National Elite to play dumb at the raw level of emotional outburst. The loss of the Ansible would take out much of the Mutas leadership, leaving them decapitated and reliant on Unification Theory to save them from extinction, but they had their high water marks - by sheer coincidence, the late Megacity of Roem had finally had the seals burst four days before Case Green kicked off. Unfortunately, the Roemans had to be taught harder than most the value of Unification Theory. Sympathetic as I am for their conditioned plight, if they had overcome their animal fear Roem would have been a beacon of the Regime, I am sure.

Either way, Mutas now exist as a religious framework moreso than a survival one, as the State Provides. The Provosts are divided on whether to co-opt or stamp out the Mutas, but I lean towards the former except for Mars. Mutas, when their organizing Laymen are properly managed, have proven to be excellent tools for stifling irrational discontent while serving as bulwarks against the insidious and extinctionist remnants of the national system - democracy, possessions, and individualism. I exclude Mars as many of the native Mutas are too infected with Winterist ideology to properly insulate their members.

With the Structure - Mutas - and unifying underlying divine equation stated, let us delve into a few exemplars to help the picture come across.

The Damned city of Brittany is manifested through a deity of the Same name. Religious art of Brittany depicts the human form as holding up two pillars, meant to represent the channel walls that keep the Damned City from being the Drowned City. True to the infamous stiff upper lip, the personifications of Brittany are stoic, dour and fully convinced of their own class and superiority. Working on the Dams is seen as a quasi spiritual task, and many Laymen lead 'pilgrimages' to tour them. Brittany houses a hundred of millions, and those hundreds of millions are spread across thousands of Burroughs. Each borough has their own minor deity personifying their self perceived differences between different districts. When considering the aggregate, a lot of these seem identical, but the difference to the relevant population groups is material games. Failing to recognize that these differences have meaning, and that the little rituals and offerings they present have a purpose, ought to be grounds for immediate transfer out of the Security Services. We have a dozen millennia of practical expertise on population management to draw on and to throw it out because you cannot be bothered to do your job is borderline negligence-

Apologies. I worked cleanup on Foster's Folly.

To draw on another example, let us look far from Brittany to Ceres. Ceres is infamous as the deepest hotspot of the Host in the System, but the Masse still operates here - in fact they operate together. The Masse - outside of outliers like, again, Vorkuta - does not require, enforce, or even imply divine homogeny, and it is more than possible that the adherent practices a second faith alongside the Masse. I understand the Host is not super keen on the Ceresian Circle's mixture of Interior Gods and Concentrated Divinity, but it is accepting of it. I believe the official canon is that there are different levels of divine - the concentration deity as subordinate to the creator God//dess. Ceres itself is personified as an almost…deformed figure. Ceres, if you recall, was subject to a terribly planned and executed terraformation attempt during the High Solar Era that resulted in its entire surface being coated in radioactive toxic sludge. Ceres personification reflects that ugliness with a strange pride. The applied linguistics are downright abusive but the Ceresians are very protective of their home and are often aggressive in shutting down anyone but themselves in badmouthing it. Worship of Ceres as a personified concentration of humanity takes a lot of old Spacian traditions wholesale - so highly personalized vac suits, corridors coated floor to ceiling in hand made rugs, and a non-verbal communications component using the arms which can be difficult but enjoyable to interrogate.

I have mentioned Vorkuta a bunch, but I do not want to go too deep into them. They give an incorrect approximation of the trends of the Masse. But It is worth noting that they are a distinct variation from the Masse for being extremely well organized.

In the prisons of both Mercury and Neptune, the Divine Masse is especially influential, however their persona-gods are different from one of a friendly burough. Masse adherents, incarcerated and otherwise, at Abaddon and Helheim personify their concentrations of divinity as wrathful, contemptuous, and frankly cruel deities. Reflective not only of their planet's habitation conditions, but the character of the incarcerated. The Twin Wardens as punisher cities have been identified as being accepted in the canticles of other Masse traditions.

Groundlings are often lumped into the Divine Masse, and there are certainly undercurrents of their influence. But Groundlings actually trend towards more classical religions - again the Muslims around Medina. I am reaching out to an old Compat of mine from Strategic Recon to see if he would be available to give them a deeper explanation.

Our Ancestors seemed to believe that the Faith would die out as time and technology reached Apex. But in the Decay and Anarchy of the later Solar Age, Faiths became reinforced. It became an easy way to imagine that there was, in fact, something else beyond. Today, they fill the same role.

Essays will be due next week. Dismissed.

 

[Furrybacon]

Please please sit down. You'll find I am always late, do not bother standing when I arrive.

My name is Instructor Felix Manderly, Colonel. I have been in the Provisionary, or the proto provisionary, for my entire life, and will continue to do so. They will find me at my station. I will be your instructor for State Organization Theory, and on risk of my posting I have been ordered that I need to get through the first six lessons in class before I am allowed to wander off the syllabus. That will be today's lesson on the general structure of the Regime Government, and then a play by play of each of the five constituent parts of the Pentagovernal System.

Orbital view of the Unity Committee is quite simple. There is the Central Committee, and then there is the Pentagov. The Committee stands above all, the Pentagov administers all. There is no need for a complex foolhardy stack of unstable cards doing checks and balances. That simplicity is, somewhat surprising to me, not fully intentional.

The Central Committee started when Stellar Glenross, a Neorashmingist published a little known, and unfortunately lost, pamphlet called 'Galileo's Gambit' during the Jovian Retreat. We only know it exists from references made by later consuls, and through their testimony we can filter it into the Regime Narrative that it was an argument for using the then recently jettisoned Jovian Militaries as the tool to accomplish the unification of humankind and avenge the United Nations. Those influenced by Glenross' publication would relocate to Callisto and Ganymede, the most populous moons of Jove, and begin to lay the ideological groundwork for the Unity Regime. It took, perhaps, much more time than it should due to the inherently reactionary disposition of Officer Classes, but in time, it was ready. The Central Committee was exerting a commanding influence on the Jovian Militaries by the time of the Titanic Miracle, able to completely subvert deployments to serve its wills and deeply tied into what would become the Joint Command Committee, the predecessor to the current split between the Gravity Forces and Space Forces Subcommittees with their respective two consuls. For most of its existence, the Rashmingists controlled a supermajority of Committee seats, but by Proving Day the Jovians had, by demographic disparity and material necessity, taken control of all by two seats, what would become the Provisionary's Consular seat and the all important Presiding Consul, and thereby it would be former Poverty Doctor Wyn Jellico who gave the order for Case Green. Consul Jellico, however, is often forgotten in favor of Presiding Consul and Jovian Admiral Lezbrecht Hollenwasser, who took over after Case Green failed. More flashy, I suppose, commanding warships over spending your life dedicated to stealing medicine from the National Elite to keep people from succumbing to the W.V before throwing you lot in with the greatest project in human history.

I blame the Unity Police for that one, back when they just handled culture stuff and overproduced war films. First year after the Anarchy, war media made up almost 70% of non educational culture production in Sol - what a ridiculous waste of resources.

Anyhow, yes, Case Green. At the time of Proving Day, the Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification was, well, really just the Central Committee. Sure, its membership ensured the loyalty of the Galilean Military Complex, but formalized power, and really Postlegalism, were not formalized into the hierarchy we would recognize. It was very loosely, and necessarily so. The Nations had almost stumbled onto the plot during the Ceresian Mutiny, so paper trails of formal authority were risky. While Jelico stepped down in favor of Hollenwasser, the Consuls representing what would become the Prognostics and Diagnostics Services - Jovians before Proving Day - would hand power over to Jelico and a Chosen ally and entrust them, along with the to-be Provisionary Chair, to actually form a formal government while the Armed and Security Protoservices began to long and bloody march to Unification. Here is when they become Protoservices, really. More than the personal staff of a handful of ideologies operating of common cause and understanding, the early forms of the Armed, Security, Provisionary, Diagnostics, and Prognostics Services took hold, as the existing apparatuses were carefully pulled apart and rebuilt to accommodate the needs of the Anarchy and the growing impetus of State.

The Anarchy would last twelve years on the Unification Calendar. By the time of its end, the Central Committee presided over a confused mess of necessary compromises and half measures held together by discipline and ideology. It would take another year for them to fully sort out the Pentagovernal System, and place it firmly beneath their own positions. The roles and duties of each Consul were agreed upon, as well as the assignments thereof. The Armed Service would receive two consuls, a…controversial decision, but one that has lasted so far, while the Provisionary, Prognostics, Security, and Diagnostics Services would each present a single Consul, selected by the current consul to inherit their seat on the Committee. From the Six Consuls, a seventh, the Presiding Consul, would be nominated by the current Consul and then elevated by consensus of the other 6 to act as the Senior Executive and Chairperson of CentComm. By tradition, the seat is held for six years, with it staggered so that a new Consul is appointed every year. Or at least it was. Consul Arturo Syzmanski, of the Provisionary, was elevated more than twenty years ago and has simply refused to vacate the seat, citing that he's 'too busy' to pick a successor. So true, Consul, burn hard.

It should have been expected, really. Especially if you have met the man. Perpetual Busybody. Chronically late as a person but never late to work. The kind of many I strive to be, really. You all grew up watching his educational videos, and he made half of those while personally building up the first solar public education system in history through sheer spite. Those alone would have cemented him as a true Servant of the Mandate, but let's not forget he was one of its Authors. If his credentials had been any less bonafide…

We will go into more detail on the constituent parts of the Pentagov System in the coming lessons, so instead we will round out with more information on the Consuls themselves, particularly the growing Consularista and Presidentista divide.

The crux of this divide is on the importance of the Presiding Consul over the Standing Consuls. Consularistas tend to be Venusian, and see the Central Committee as an extension of the bureaucracy of the Pentagov system. They generally either want to cut the Armed Service's extra consul or adopt the proposed Fivefold Model of five consuls from each service, with a Presiding Consul conceded to by the whole. I am partial to a more proportional model based on the size of the Service, but I understand this to be controversial.

A Presidentisa, Junkers generally, but I recall that the good Surgeon General is a Presidentista, puts the onus of the Central Committee on the Presiding Consul as the executive commander of the whole of the Unity Committee. I've seen a few want to reduce the Military's extra Consul, but generally they want to change not the membership of the Committee, but its role, and see it reformatted into the personal staff of the Consul.

Most officers, however, are satisfied with everything but the Military's twin seats. It was an outgrowth of the War, and hangs like an ill-advised set of bangs over the eye of the CDSU. I'm not keen on any bangs honestly, but one of my spouses tried for so long to make it work and it just never paired with the Patrol Cap. Too gendered, we agreed. Anyhow, the consensus is that the Central Committee is largely functional and self correcting. By sheer virtue of the scale of the organization, it can make some unintended errors. Contradictory Orders, delayed responses, and then there was that whole nasty business with Consul Angram, but the Central Committee is working under the material conditions. Once the Ansible is restored, I have every faith in the correction.

At our current date, these are the Central Committee. They will traditionally serve between seven to twelve years before surrendering their seat to a hand chosen successor.

Presiding Consul Hiram Yolander, once the Lunar Provost and a renowned Committee parliamentarian. Good Mandator.

Consul Arturo Syzmanski, the one and only. Provisionary par excellence and one of the last of the Authors of the Mandate. All others have passed us by, like stars in the night, but Arturo remains as the last vestige of the truly bonafide Rashmingist old guard. He was a junior aid who served on the Promulgation Committee at the behest of some Chief of Staff and is responsible for, specifically, the opening paragraph towards the Obligation towards education. He's since infamous for his long running series of educational adds as 'Syie the Science Guy" and for refusing to cycle out of the Central Committee. He's been sick, recently. I fear he's not long for Sol.

Consuls Beris Garigin and Kanto Ito represent the Gravity and Space Forces Subcommittee. Junker and thugs, but solid Mandators. Consul Kanto's spearheading to abolish the private ownership of spacecraft is commendable, however.

Consul Thistle Wherewood represents the Diagnostics. I cannot summon up an opinion for them, they are a solid bureaucrat and a lethal snake. They have not conceded along SEED lines as much as I supposed they would, so fair play to them.

And Finally, Consul Ulysses De la Cruz for the Prognostics Service. A former Provisionary who jumped ship after they were frustrated with some of the Prognostics effects. I have actually met him. Something of a bundle of neurotic handgrenades, but solid.

That should wrap us up for the day. Luna and Unity Folks. Have a good day.

 

[Furrybacon]

Greetings Cadets! Welcome to Studyhall! Every day for about an hour, you are given a chance to eat, catch up on Homework, and be my captive audience. I cannot give out work of any kind, but I can make your presence here someone else's problem, in the hopes that they sign off on my physical recovery sooner and send me back into the Farsea. Until such time as I am restored to my true post as Lieutenant Commander in the Space Forces, I will be a Brevet-Captain in the Library.

You will refer to me as Captain Farah El-Masry III, or Zir. You will reply to me with 'Pos Zir', or 'Null Zir'. There may be times where I have to focus on my newly allowed cybernetic implants, and you will not bother me during these times. Behind me is a chart, you will be able to determine what mood I am in. You will also find a card at your desk. Hold up this card if I am being too much of a Bulkhead. You are not a Fleetcrew on the Farsea, you are students. I am an Outrider Chief by trade and lean towards a particular mix of unyielding energy and unquestioned discipline, and so when I get too much into that mode, please hold the card up. You will know when. As a final personal note, yes, the III does in fact mean I have had three hulls shot out from under me. All outriders, in the service of the Lunar Mandate. Two were during Rolo's Ride.. I'm aiming for Farah El-Masry the Xth before I'll even consider reserve processing.

Today, I am going to ramble on about cybernetics - mine and others - because I just had to watch the 'Affirmative Debriefing for Cybermedical Adjustment' video for my fourth time, and I feel like inflicting that on everyone else.

My brother's Second helpfully told me a lot about the interesting arguments on how the Regime should define cybernetics historically. They were just chasing against the Crux, but I would be a Liar to say it is not at least interesting. What actually counts as 'Cybernetics' through time would change if you count the start of them as a normal medical procedure in the Early Common War period or in the late hegemony wars. For my satisfaction, I like to point to the quasi mythical Rosie the Rivet - the first nearly Cybered Human, from right at the crossover between the Hegemony period and the start of the Solar Ages. There's all sorts of myths about them and the Ansible, but none of it is true. There were too many centuries between the two, and the real reason Rosie is interesting is that it marks the point where cybernetic technology had reached the same restriction we have today - the Antropohalt. That is when the human brain runs out of processing power for cybernetics, and either shuts down or forces you to run them as simple as possible. They have to be humanoid, they can't have cool stuff like inbuilt laser guns or grappling hooks, and they will always be just a bit slower, and a bit less precise than a normal human arm. Not much, but ever so slightly. The Antropohalt has kept us locked in at a certain efficacy level for more than a millennia. With three limbs replaced by Alloy, I am quite close to the Antropohalt. Until we get the Ansible back, anyway.

You see, that was the trick, Cadets. The Ansible was a faster than light computer system. It defied physics, it defied logic, it defied human hands. It made full cyberization possible. And it was the best thing as a species we ever had. It is hard for me to grasp, but now that I do have alloy, I almost understand it. I have to consciously command my hand to raise above my hand. I have gotten to the point where it doesn't take up brain space, but it is not as easy as trying to raise my last natural leg. But if I were hooked up to the Ansible, my hand would be raised before I'd even sent the unconscious command through my brain. It was a faster-than-light computer. There were, are, really, serious philosophical positions that posited that the machine's ability to react before you could even think to ask it meant we lived in a provably deterministic universe without free will. And I cannot even argue with that. Mostly because my education is not in the theory of cosmic free will.

When the Ansible apperated, the Antropohalt vanished. Cybernetics were no longer limited to replacements - they were marked improvements. A human - with the resources, as this was under the National System - could completely reconfigure their existence. They could upload themselves into the Ansible, they could turn themselves into a robotic monstrosity of their own creation. People who could would sacrifice limbs without a second thought, to become almost a higher class of person. Immortal, indestructible, each individual kitted out with enough weaponry and quantum computing to turn a whole Lobster Company to shreds. Really, the only limiting factor was resources.

Even at the very end of the Ansible, only about five millionths of a percent of humanity had passed the Antropohalt and reached the Critmass of Augments - and that was mostly concentrated in a sector of the National Elite. To be clear, that is a massive number of people, but such a minuscule amount relative to the Solar Population. Further, it should be noted that basic cybernetic augmentations, overwhelmingly as a medical practice and below critmas scale, since most people did not have access to the good stuff, was in about forty to fifty percent of the population.

Now, not all of the National Elite were at critmass levels of cybernetics. Most, actually, have moved into the advanced biotechnology that has since been lost to the Anarchy. Something about the purity of the human form. Reactionary tripe. Along with the Elites, there were numerically extensive subcultures that existed outside of the National Elite, such as the AI Cults and the Chromian Counterculture, but most humans who had cybernetics under the ansible could not afford them. Which is just absurd. I tend to think that the Provis is not half as hard core as they want you to think they are, but damned if I did not find that factoid some truly staggering stuff. They had access to a machine which could best be described as 'divine' and forced people to live on scraps. Scraps, which by the way, were still better than what we could do thanks not to the generosity or obligations of the National System, but to the sheer, raw, unadulterated fact of the Ansible's existence.

The stratification against access to Critmass level of augments was, ironically, a good thing. It should not have had to been. If the Ansible had been maintained correctly the first time, there would never have been a Deathsecond. But there was. When the Loscramento Virus finally crashed the Ansible, five millionths of a percent of humankind died instantly. Everyone who had been uploaded, everyone who had reached the critical mass of augments to function, anyone who had even a part of their conscious in the Ansible, even as a visitor, at 20:36:17, XX14, died instantly, simultaneously, across all of Sol, in a singly picosecond. That is the smallest measure of time in the universe, Cadets, and in that billions died.

The Anarchy was horrible, but there was honor to it. My family would be prescribed no fewer than twenty seven thousand eight hundred ninety four Exceptional Service Citations across the fifteen years during the Anarchy. There is honor in that. Hundreds of billions of Humans gambled their species to create a better future under the Lunar Mandate. There is honor in that.

But there is no honor to billions of innocent people - and billions of guilty people, to be fair - disappearing along with the greatest technological masterpiece to ever enter human hands in less time than a blink. There is no honor in the wide masses of humankind forced to reckon with substandard cybernetics suddenly finding their limbs useless and dangerous to them. There is no honor in the mass death and misfortune that followed for the Solar Society as the Ansible was ripped away from them.

My great great grandmother, apart from being the Commander of the Battleship Atlantica during Case Green - hit me up after for autographs - told me the story of the death of her wife. They had gotten wed out of parade - outside of the Jovian Officer pool I mean. Apparently the wife was something of a political radical, from the Chromian Counter Culture, and it rankled more than a few feathers around the Galilean Moons. They had settled down early for the night after an argument, the topic a point of shame within my House now for its bitter irrelevance, and Great Great Grandma said she remembered smiling at her wife, saying it would be fine, and then blinked. A blink lasts about one tenth of a second, but her wife died in one trillionth of a second. No warning. No visible struggle. Just death. The medical report said that every nerve ending in her body had been overloaded in that picosecond, something that was nearly universal across Sol. Worse, the medical consensus then and now is that those at Critmass likely suffered from catastrophic temporal slowdowns - so that picosecond would have felt like an eternity. And there was nothing their loved ones on the outside could have done to help them.

According to the family narrative, the next day they joined the Case Green Conspiracy.

Today the Provis guys have really changed the game when it comes to Cybernetics. It is really easy when you don't have to fight with a back assswards model of private productive ownership. The BR3A1H3 implants are factually impressive on their own. If I asked you to raise your hands on who has that brand of Pulmonary Filter Implants, four out of five of you would raise your hands. That is a lot. That is trillions who can breath the air their parents poisoned. That is the power of the Unification Regime. It is the most common form of cybernetic implant, which does feel good to say. Much better than the most common being "Replacement Limb".

There used to be independent cultures focused on augments - the Chromian Counter Culture, but they have struggled post ansible. There are the Nulloids, a splinter of AI worship outside of the Pantheon, who find some strange solace in the very present disconnect between implant and implanted once filled by the Ansible, but they aren't very large - numerically or proportionally. Nowadays, having Alloy like me is a sign of devotion to the State. It is why I don't get any cosmetic sleeves or paint my limbs - these are gifts from the state in return for my service. Those of Service will be served more, naturally. Lunar Star there is the only ink I let on my implants, that and the manufacturing information. Those most dedicated to the regime do the same as me, using their cybermedical implants as proofs of sacrifice and service. A lot of proles opt for sleeves, however. I think that that is shameful, to be truthful. Trying to hide the scars you bare for Humankind, but I will begrudge that I have been getting less 'interest' outside of the Jovian Parade since my second cybernetic. This is a funny reverse on how it used to be. The Proles couldn't afford sleeves - a lot actually had to use them to do this funny thing called 'advertising', basically private propaganda, to keep access to their poor cybermedical implants - while those of an elite stature used sleeves or Biotech.

Before the Anarchy, Biotech was suspected to be the new frontier. It was wildly expensive, genuinely innovative, and designed to sustain itself past an Ansible crash. That last part was what signed the death sentence of anyone caught with it during our reign. They would have had to possess some knowledge that it was coming to even think of that. Biotech had an incredible number of applications. Flash Cloning, of limbs and even whole persons is the most well remembered, but Biotech meant effective biological immortality, the ability to create new life, and potentially breakthroughs on the level of the Ansible. Naturally, the self cannibalization of the National Elite meant they did not pursue these to their maximal extent, and instead used them to help cut off their own societal limbs for private power. And there were the Homunculi - the idea of creating the perfect worker from scratch. Grotesque thing, really. They were never successful with Homunculi, and never would have been in the time before human extinction, but I understand that these development programs are believed to be the origin of the Wasting Virus.

Now, Complete control of the Genome did not require the Ansible in the same way as Cybernetics, and was therefore 'better' and 'more exclusive' to the old Elite. Especially as the idea of 'Humanistic Aestheticism' became common. But Biotech did rely on the Ansible in one particular way that mattered - storage. Terrified at losing control to their technological marvels, they relied on special encryption software that needed the Ansible to Function. So when the Ansible went down, so did everything our species knew on the advanced Biotechnology programs of the National Elite. I suppose it did not help that we shot them all as we caught up with them. That was a…medical…necessity, however, there was nothing else to be done. The Unification Committee will ascend above where the Nations once were in time. That is just how the Mandate works.

We're running out of time.

Cadets! At the top of the hour you will be dismissed. Standby.

- Pos, Zir!

 

[Furrybacon]

Yes, yes I am late. I am not sorry. We have to get started or I will get off track and my tangents will overtake the curriculum.

This starts our five session dash overviews of the Five parts of the Pentagov System, the senior organizational structure of the State. These are the Armed, Provisionary - my beloved - Security, Diagnostics and Prognostics service. One done we will dig into the political theory principles of Pentagov and then we should be far enough ahead I can ramble on tangents without the Dean-Commandante threatening my continued employment.

So State Organization Theory, let us get started.

The CDSU consists of Five overriding branches beneath the Central Committee. As much as I would like to start with my beloved Provisionary, the Armed Service is the oldest and the narrative of the Regime works best starting with them. We in the Provis might sustain the Regime, might spend our souls and bodies and minds in an endless cosmological marathon against the oblivions of ignorance, sickness, and famine, but it was and will always be the Armed Forces who built it.

The Armed Service is the oldest, and smallest, of the Branches of the Committee for the Direction of Solar Unification. Small, of course, being a relative term. It is still the largest armed force in Human History save its Anarchy era counterpart. The Armed Service is separated into three elements. The Gravity Forces Command Subcommittee and the Space Forces Command Subcommittee, each of which selected a Consul for the Central Committee, and the Permanent Mission Subcommittee. The Gravfor contains all planetary and inhabited station Forces personnel with the exception of the Space Assault Service, while the Spacefor consists of all armed Space vessels with the exception of the Lunar Low-Orbit Fleet, which is permanently suborned to the Gravity Subcommittee in their specific purpose of defending Ozymandias. The Permanent Mission Subcommittee deals with the appointment, advancement, conduct and consequences of the Provosts, who serve as the executive Military Governor for their appointed fiefs. Boom, there you go. Enough information for all that most of you will need. Those bound for the Armed Services already know this stuff and those who are not are far more likely to need a deeper understanding.

But we still have quite a bit of time and I have been specifically told I can not use it to talk about anything but the Armed Service.

Now, going forward, you will find I am exceedingly disinterested in the Armed Services traditional presentation of facts, at least as much as I can be under the State Narrative Orthodoxy. The Armed Service traces its origins back to the Jovian Militaries that were built up over many centuries before the Nationalists abandoned them. Which was very rude. After all, not fifty years earlier had those same Militaries been party to the Cronian Retreat, abandoning several hundred million people to die in the outer system. A Army or Fleet Officer will tell you that this lead to a chain of political developments and fraternization that resulted in our Unification Theory, which is partly true, but I will die mad that the Provisionary is not recognized as the oldest Service because it was our founders who actually laid the ideological rhetoric that set the stage not only for Case Green, but for our Regime.

Erhm…anyway.

Jupiter's Galilean Moons, particularly Callisto and Ganymede, saw massive military buildup in the National Epoch. Before they started to self cannibalize entire sections of the Solar System, control of the Jupiter Orbital Region and its Jump-Capable Lagrange Points was the primary mode of competition between the Nations. Trillions of tons of resources that could have been used to I do not know maintain the Ansible or not abolish Public education were wasted on meaningless, undeclared wars over vague control of the JUOR - ah, that's old slang for the Jupiter Orbital Region. These skirmishes not only fucked all attempts to terraform any of the Galilean Moons, but resulted in tons of military facilities being built up and maintained. There is a considerable amount of Irony in how it would be those self same facilities which the Nationalists built that would destroy it, and I will give the Armed Services that. Those facilities still exist today. The Jovians who live in them refer to them as Castle.

During the period between the Jovian Retreat and Case Green, despite being systemically cut off and ignored by the Nations, the Militaries were still expected to enforce discipline and loyalty to the State. Here we see the start of a cyclical process that I feel like the Armed Services likes to underplay for its own stature. You start in a neutral space with a particularly conservative or regressive cadre of Flag Officers who by circumstance are forced to engage in the minimum of Unification Theory, usually as a perfunctory tool to mobilize for radical action which is more personally motivated. The Junior Officers never get the memo on the whole 'perfunctory tool' part and start believing, or worse, advancing the Unification Rhetoric. The Flag Officers panic, suppress, and delay, which only results in the development taking more time and Humanity nearing extinction until they are dragged kicking and screaming into getting slightly closer to being willing to take the necessary steps. Of course the Armed Services pretend that they were all onboard with Unification Theory after a little bit of fraternization, but the record shows it took time. All the same, they eventually got their act together for Case Green.

Before we continue, understand that my position is a tad controversial. You can take it up with the Dean.

The Gravity Forces, or more colloquially, the Regular Army, makes up the preponderance of the Armed Services Personnel. Joining it is called 'Taking Iron', which refers to the 'Lobsterback' Armor which is synonymous to the Regulars. Only about One in Six Gravity Forces personnel are Lobsterbacks, the rest being the logistical tail required for those lumbering war machines. Regular Army Lobsterbacks, are, of course, two and half meters tall with three tons of armor, pumped full of drugs, cybernetics, and ideological indoctrination, wielding the infamously lethal and frankly ludicrous Spiker. Seriously, you are already shooting people with fifteen millimeter depleted uranium tungsten rods flying at six kilometers per second through a hybrid chemical-rail launch system. Why do you need to set them on fire with thermal gel too?

The Regular Army is organized into numerous Regimental Combat Teams, each tracing their legacy to the Anarchy - any history older than that has been ritually begotten by them. Regiments are usually about three to five thousand Lobsterbacks and four to six times that in Rear Echelon Elements. They are, for those who care about those things, fully mechanized, fully power-armored, fully independent killing machines. Each RCT contains every element required to wage their own war - even Aerial Units, though they are rarely used nowadays. They are the pinnacle of Ground Warfare in a Post-Ansible world. The most elite, as defined by their willingness to obey Ozymandias, Regiments are given the moniker of "Guards" and are organized into their own formation, Assault Brigades, to serve as escorts to the infamous fortress-tanks known as Behemoths. You have seen those for sure. A Behemoth is about the size of a hab-block, weigh about sixty thousand tons, and capable of eradicating all life within ten kilometers in all directions. Generally inadequate for anything beyond localized annihilation and looking scary.

The only thing I personally find interesting about the Lobsterbacks is their development. They are, as iterated, the pinnacle of post ansible ground warfare. In Gravity and Without, the loss of the Ansible set off an arms race. The prior calculus was entirely reset. War was once 'smart'. Clean. Sanitized. A single Combat Cyborg fully cooked into the Ansible was capable of waging war across an entire megacity - and its local ansible - by its lonesome without even straining its capabilities. Now, even in the Late Solar age these were rare - one small mercies the of the National's absurd economic model - but it is morbidly fascinating to see what people tried to cook up in the wake from an anthropological perspective. EuroInc tried to replace their entire armed forces with one man Micro-tanks. They are adorable. It is a similar thing Fleetwise - the Americans really really tried to make Snub Craft and Teslon Guns work.

Speaking of the Fleet, the Naval Arm is smaller than the army in raw personnel and considerably more expensive. The Army calls itself 'Taking Iron', the fleet says it is 'Riding the Farsea'. Its traditions were forged in the Anarchy, but they are a little more willing to admit that a lot of their practices are done because fleets have always done them. Militaries are so culturally reactionary. Especially court martials - the last vestiges of legalism in sol persist solely within the conduct of the Armed Services Officer Corps. The Fleet exists to be the ultimate guarantor of state authority in space and to oversee the end of independent starship enterprise - a function I will happily admit value in. While the Army learnt power armor in the aftermath of the Ansible the power of mobile fortresses and powered armor, the fleet learned to simplify. War is a measure of the economy of suffering, and streamlining is victory.

The fleet, and by virtue, the state controlled shipyards, field no more than five hulls. Outriders, Destroyers, Battleships, Invaders, and Liners. Stars willing, these will be the only major ships that exist in about ten years. Outriders are highly maneuverable and very well armed parasite craft, about a hundred meters in length, that ride on the outside of larger ships as they are bereft of FTL. Destroyers are ships of the line, the bulk of a fleet. Battleships have those big nasty expensive Plasma Guns that break whole lines of ships and are very tightly controlled. Invaders are comically designed franken creatures designed to overcome the problem with drop pods by just dropping the whole fucking spaceship on the target. I will admit I find these guys funny. And Liners are multipurpose rear echelon transport craft capable and being employed not just by the fleet, but by basically any role in the non military realm as well. The Central Committee has abolished the creation of any hulls above a certain tonnage limit which deviate form these designs, plus a few specialized exceptions for exploration or mining. They have not yet demanded the Spacians turn over their permitted relics, but I would expect it to be shortly. The Private ownership of Spacecrafts is one of the last vestiges of petite nationalism.

There is one subcommittee I want to mention in approval that seats both Naval and Army personnel, that being the Strategic Weapons Oversight Subcommittee. It deals with the Regime's relatively minor atomic arsenal, and has taken responsibility for cleanup from their usage in the Anarchy. They also deal with the State's lethal Biological and Chemical stockpiles - or did, before they voted to destroy them ten years ago, maintaining only an example batch on behalf of the Surgery Branch for when latent chemical weapon zones have outbreaks. Recently, the SWOS voted to reduce the strategic arsenal to 100 Pilums and 8000 Atlatl Missiles, down from 400 and 10000 respectively. They were pushing hard for total abolition, which I feel they will get to within the next two decades, but the Central Committee decided to secure the Capital Atomic Defense Grid's arsenal as well as a handful for each remaining command. Atomics did a terrible number on Sol, and are unnecessary as the guarantees of state. Since the dark days of the Anarchy, the Unification Regime has seen the general extinction of atomic weapons, which is a good thing.

The last section of the Armed Service is the Provosts of the Permanent Mission Subcommittee. An outgrowth of necessity from the Anarchy, the PMSC was created to oversee governance of unified territory. Provost Officers are governors at different levels in control, while Provost Enlisted are administrative functionaries and muscle. The Securitroopers used to be under the Mission SubCom, but were transferred to Security as part of recent reorganizations. Lots of discussion about moving the Provosts to Security too, though I will concede I have a longshot dream of the Provis getting them. Provost postings have a strange place within the Armed Services. They are powerful, but for much of the Jovian stock, they are dishonorable or some such nonsense.

Provost Commandants govern planets, Colonels get Megacities, Lieutenants get neighborhoods etcetera. They have command authority over Security Troopers in their Zone of Responsible Authority, and have nominal control over military forces too - but Stars that are hard to actually get. Provosts are the first order for law, distribution, governance, and whatever else for the various holdings of Humankind. Most are decent people. Many should have been removed from their position for interceding on the work of the Provis. Another reason we should control it. I am sure that you will get a lesson on Foster's Folly - either through Unification or Historical Theory - and we will touch on them again so I will not delve too deep into the Provosts now, but it serves as a nice wrap to our overview of the Armed Service.

Entrance into the Armed service is the most restricted of all the Services. Candidates must apply for entrance, and pass a series of tests for their physical, mental, emotional, and political wellbeing. It takes about a year, and has a high self-Selection issue. The children of Military personnel are considerably more likely to pass the entrance exams, not just because of their access to military standards and networks, but sheer caloric intake. The Armed Service has always enjoyed the highest Rank Increases to Allowance, which has in turn meant that the Ganamite and Callistain children of Military personnel are on average about eight inches and sixty pounds heavier than their equivalent in a Munger. Provosts, however, can jump this process by 'Deputizing' enlisted persons into the Provost Subcommittee to act as a gubernatorial staff for their district. These Deputy Provosts do not have the ability to transfer into the actual armed elements of the Armed Services, but it is a lucrative post for those who can secure one.

For those of you bound for the Armed Service, I am sure you find me flippant and irreverential. Good. During the Anarchy, the Armed Services were a necessity, and while they continue to be so today, one so critical I cannot say we should abolish it, I do believe that the day will come when all vestiges of the National Epoch may be wiped out, that we can fully devote every resources to the survival aspect of the Lunar Mandate.

Luna and Unity Folks. Have a good day.

 

[Furrybacon]

Cadets!

Good Morning, and welcome back to Unification Theory, I am glad to see full attendance. Today's topic is exceedingly important, but hardly as immediately glamorous as Case Green. Today, we will be covering an event of particular, nay, fundamental interest to the development of the Mandate of Luna.

Today we discuss the Abolition of the United Nations Organization.

The UN was founded in millenia ago, about 1945 on the Old Epoch Calendar, in the wake of the Common Wars, in the desperate hope for a brighter tomorrow. With the power of hindsight, we understand that the National System made it materially impossible for the United Nations to accomplish its goals of a better and unified humankind that no longer employed war as a tool of state, but make no mistake - many of the UN's brightest truly believed they could overcome the Contradictions, and worked with complete but futile confidence that the better natures of humanity could overcome the crushing and self fulfilling greed of a National System. In many ways, those people are our necessary ideological grandfathers, cast by the processes of history as the control group on the ideals of the Regime. Come talk to me between classes and I would be ecstatic to go into more details, this is an area I am passionate about, but it is beyond what you must understand.

The UN never possessed extranational authority to prevent Nations, particularly powerful ones, from simply ignoring it to engage in the extinctionist tendencies of Nationalists. Powerlessly, it watched as the National System committed the Climaticide, engaged in malicious stratification, and fought amongst themselves in the Paratomic Wars that followed the last of the Common Wars and in the Hegemony Wars of the late Pre-Solar Age. Nonetheless, we can demonstrate through surviving records and State recreations, that in spite of absurdist national ego and intervention, generally progress in understanding and advocating reason - though they were naturally limited from their National Perspective.

At its height, we know the UN operated Paramilitary forces who helped with de-escalation - at least they did at a higher rate than the Nationalists and worked with Private Aid Groups to alleviate certain universal ills. But coherent with the Narrative we see in other Idealistic groups, the more power they possessed, the less radical they were. Such is the cost of Compromise with Nationalist Systems - as is the course of power to those outside of its center. Despite a strong showing in the Early Solar Age - the Fortress-City of Armstrong traces its routes back to the first and only lasting truly international Extraterrestrial Effort - the UN was quickly relegated to irrelevance. Its Resolutions were worth less than the ink they were printed with. It was amusing how long records indicated the UN held on to physical printing with chemical ink. Even after laser writing on micropapers became prominent. Something about the everlasting nature of dead trees and chemical compounds.

Anyway, their resolutions were widely disregarded, so much so that the Nations ceased to even care what was said, and stopped directing their delegates to engage in even perfunctory resistance to sentiments which would be considered counter to National Interests. Its Paramilitary capabilities were almost completely abolished and its ability to organize with Private Aid was effectively terminated. Its funding was in many cases, abolished, and what funding it maintained was so small in comparison to the budget of Early and High Solar Age Nations that it was entirely beneath notice. The UN was functionally dead long before it was disbanded in 2551, but it did not go quietly.

The first true instance of UN insurrection was in 2374. The United Nations Environmental Programme and associated Assemblies, alongside the last Private Aid groups engaged in Climate Protection Activity on Earth, held a protest vote within their halls. They signed a mock article of surrender and voted to abolish themselves, stating that "Such was the scale, progress, and complete failure of addressment of the [Terran] Climaticide that there could only be one reply, to surrender and accept the complete destruction of the Homeworld's Biosphere." Surrender is hardly an inspiring undertaking, but it was, for the time, an exceedingly radical undertaking, and was cited by our own founders in the Promulgation of the Mandate as part of the Regime's claim on Sol against the National System. It was the first of many small rebellions the UN engaged in, and records indicate that at the time it generated some buzz. It was seen as a rallying cry, but one not enough banded towards - scattered acts of stochastic resistance aside. It, as did the abolition, lacked a certain analysis which made the diagnosis shallow and ultimately unable to rally the forces our Usurping Founder's Mandate was able to. It is not enough to demonstrate issues, and challenges must be raised, paired in equal parts by continued exhaustive dedication and unflinching organization.

The primary means of resistance against the National System the UN engaged in was what was called Lawfare. This is a concept which is utterly foreign to us in the embrace of Survival Economics and the Pentagov Balance. I will break it down here in brief. Basically, the idea of Governance under the Nation System was consumed by the frameworks of Law as something above the state - when it was convenient anyway. They labored under the idea that the law could, and in fact, ought to constrain the state, which resulted in the proliferation of primitive theatrics to justify both basic state functions and horrendous criminal deprivations. Apart from ignoring these charades when it suited them, this ritualism was easily perverted, both the direct application of material incentives and indirectly with the engagement in endurance conflicts through the labyrinthine court system were exceedingly common. It was through this court system - and its attached police network - that the National System silenced all manner of reform and resistance until Case Green, but it was also, for those familiar with its esoteric magic, a tool of resistance.

The UN increasingly drew its delegates from the dispossessed and radical elements of the political elite, a dumping ground of sorts for the Nationalist progeny who did not want to integrate into the system. These individuals, when appointed as delegates to the UN, possessed the personal knowledge, private resources, and latent legal inroads required to engage in meaningful Counter-lawfare against the National System. In hindsight this is a fundamentally silly means of resistance, but in some ways I can respect their efforts. This was a violation of the all important decorum that governed norms under a national system, and a necessary step on the road to the development of the Unification Theorem.

This takes us to the high watermark of the UN's Lawfare, and perhaps the closest it ever got to actual, meaningful warfare. Perhaps, in a happier universe, Amihan Rashminga would be remembered as the founder of a United Sol.

Amihan Rashminga was elected to become the last General Secretary of the United Nations 2542. She hailed from the National System calling itself the South Asiatic Economic Assembly, a collection of states centered around the megacity Hyderabad. By the time of Case Green, the Assembly would have been reorganized with the 3rd Bharat Republic. She was the daughter of an Deputy Interior Minister and an outspoken idealist and critic - per the State record. The UN was already engaged in considerable Lawfare before her arrival, but Delegate Rashminga would become the widely recognized head of the 'Radical' Faction within a short time of her appointment, sometime around 2545. Rashminga was elevated to the General Secretariat advocating that the National System was a rotten failure and that the UN must be leveraged as the Axis of resistance. She gave a clear ideological plan for the UN's Lawfare and Advocacy, and began to take material steps towards making the UN this proposed Fulcrum.

The Rashminga Administration engaged in three primary fulcrums of resistance. Colonial Organization, Terran Organization, and continued Lawfare. Of the three, the Lawfare produced the most visible successes in the short term, but was recognized as fundamentally incapable of actually producing change. It would be the two sorts of organization which would be the most critical to the Rashminga programme. The UN was overwhelmingly ignored by the National Powers, but the open organizing of Colonial resentment was without question what resulted in the largest reply from the National System. The only rule that had been enforced on the UN at this point was to never acknowledge any of the many insurrectionist Colonial Groups. The seeming alliance of Venusians, Spacians, Oniellians, Jovians, Outer System dissidents and yes, even Martians, provided the "legal" basis for the shutdown of the UN Headquarter Buildings. Unfortunately, the organization of these groups, per the records, was shoddy and in extremely early stages, which is evidenced by the failure of such organization to survive the events of 2551. Terran Organization also ultimately failed in the allotted time frame. If you recall your Social Theory Classes, the Solar Age was the height of the 'Post-Atomized' model of civilization, which made it exceedingly difficult to organize and exceedingly easy to demobilize, especially with the uncontrolled access to the Ansible. Society idealized a model of self-sufficient living that was materially extinct for 99% of the population and resulted in a milieu of stubborn independence and a suppression of coherent universal consciousness driven almost entirely by the self. Terran organization was slow and ultimately irrelevant to the greater calculus of the last days of the UN, except in the assertion that efforts may have been better spent on Colonial Organization, though I'm skeptical on if the miniscule difference would have mattered. Such theorems always struck me as fundamentally Exilist.

It would be after a Venusian Rebel declared the UN as its sovereign during a trial that would start the final downfall of the UN. The rude reminder of its existence was scandalizing to the National Elites, and Budgeteers - a trend we will discuss more later - advocated that the last of the UN's funding be cut - which it quickly was. As was the trend with the National System of Legal Rituals, it became inconvenient to humor Rashminga's resistance and the ultimate argument, bayonets, were sent to the UN's last stand, the Aldrin Building in Armstrong. Scattered reports of increased terrorism were not enough to prevent National Soldiers from the North American Compact from storming the barricades manned by young radicals. In a similar stunt to the UNEP a century and a half before, Rashminga had the United Nations Delegates vote to Abolish the UN and renounce its Charter just hours before the National Soldiers Stormed the Assembly.

Another surrender, you might think. But I firmly disagree. I think that, above any of the rhetoric, this was the most important lesson that our founders took from the Rashminga era, that it was the dissolution that meant the most. It was just proof of the necessity of the Lunar Mandate, it was a statement, loud and utterly clear.

The only way to win is to not play the National Game, but instead to play the weapons one.

The Aftermath of the Abolition is not well understood. It seems there was some outcry amongst the Terran Populace, but nothing lasting. This event seemed to discredit Solar Solidarity from the proto-Winterists, though what else can we expect from Martians, and established the secessionist movement as the predominant Martian ideology. Sporadic Terror attacks from Rashmingistas produced little results, and may have been partly responsible for the fall of the Aeropoli Eve into Venus's surface. In many ways, the State Narrative has thus failed to simply fade away. Smothered in its cradle.

However, like many of the elements that brought us our Regime, it's total affectation was not understood until many centuries after its time. It would be ideological descendants of the Rashminga movement who radicalized the Jovian Militaries and formed the ideological nucleus of Case Green. This Rashmingist splinter was how Syzmanski got onto the Mandate Promulgation Committee at all, and then into our state as the Provisionary Consul. The phrase "Abolition of Deprivation" comes directly from Rashminga's inaugural speech.

And then, of course, many centuries later, from the very same building where Amihan Rashminga oversaw the dissolution of the United Nations, in the very same room, even; the Commanders of Case Green would attempt to overthrow the entire National system in one swift act of sure action. While they would fail, their children would not. And the Regime, our Regime would follow.

Now of course, this is Unification Theory. Not Historical Theory. With context established, we must move into the actual meat of today's lesson.

In our usual manner, we will dissect how this builds into our Unification Theorem by breaking down this event three ways. Its Narrative to our Regime, its Application to our Survival, and its Contribution to the Mandate.

Narrative is the obvious one here. It is a vindication of the Anti National Thesis. Extinction was the only outcome of the National System. It requires constant suckling and self destruction to maintain, and when we found ourselves trapped in Sol the lack of room to outrun consequences was exceedingly obvious. The UN's greatest potential success in combating the Decay came from their greatest potential for departure the National System's norms. If Rashminga had had the time and modern perspective, it is natural that the UN would have come towards survival economics and Unification Theorem as a necessity of its resistance and destruction of the National System. But even if she had not, the underlying Contradictions that might have persisted under a hypothetical United Sol would have eventually collapsed it until it came to our conclusions. The march of History is the Trudge of sickness through self imposed fallacy until the final conclusion is reached. Nationalism is a disease. The UN was perhaps its sole ennobled cancer.

Could the UN have won is a question I get. No. It could not have. Materially and ideologically it was not in a place to challenge the National System. It took the ideological zeal of the Jovian condition and the uncompromising and completed thesis of Unification to actually, completely, secure the day. Even engaging in material fantasy as a tool of analysis, we know from our own Regime that for Rashminga to ever truly succeed would have required the development of what would have been Unification Theory by another name. But stars, I desperately wish they had. For centuries, our ancestors enjoyed the material requirements to create a true post-scarcity society. Had Rashminga had some cosmic successes, and of course come to the Unity Solution, then the Unity Regime would have come into a Sol with a complete Ansible. With centuries less of exploitation and free fall. It is a seductive delusion for Unification Theorists.

In terms of Application, I will admit that it is lighter than, say, Survival Economics. The fable of the United Nations serves as a practical exemplar and motivator against nationalism. In Spite of our best efforts, the delusion that some arbitrary people deserve more at the expense of others remains levied against our noble Mandate. The Martians, for an obvious example.This was a necessary step in the analysis of our political ideology, but it was doomed. Rahsminga lives on as a Battleship - BeeBee Twelve Ten I believe.

And for our third analysis point, that is the thesis of the entire class. I believe I mentioned it in our class on the Mandate it self, but a splinter of Rashmingist political theorists were fundamental in creating the ideological basis of the Regime, giving words to the mutualist fraternization that had long taken hold in the Galilean Moons ahead of Case Green. It is the analytical proof that the National Epoch could not be sustained without the cost of survival, and that it could not be opposed from the inside. It had to be destroyed from without. The systems of internal resistance and change were totally useless and any attempt to engage with the National Epoch through its own systems was fundamentally doomed.

Before I joined the Regime, I had not really thought much of Amihan Rashminga. Most of that was because I grew up without an education, but I think perhaps I would have dismissed her anyway at that age. I was a revolutionary of sorts, but always more concerned with self-taught theory of then present conditions than the actions of a long dead forlorn hope. It wasn't until I was inducted into the 10th Guards after the battle of Lagos, XX22, when these events became known to me. All I had asked about was why we painted our helmets light blue, and I wound up with an extended lesson on our narrative of political development.

I think that will wrap up our lesson for today.

Unity before Extinction. Glory to the Mandate.

 

[Furrybacon]

What is the Appeal of Nationalism?

Students, by now you are well aware of my policy regarding slurs as a distraction from educational intent. It will be enforced today as well. But given the subject matter, and the scale of crimes perpetrated by the Martians, I will be lenient today. One strike. This should not be taken as an excuse to find the most humorous place to sling juvenile banter. With that in mind, we return to the question so fundamental to the Martian Proclivity. Nationalism.

It seems absurd to us. Nationalism, I mean. But it is clearly not to the Martians. For centuries now, Martian generation after generation has impaled itself on a project of 'national liberation' against Nations, Corporations, the Regime, and even itself. Mars hasn't been red in a long time, but you couldn't tell that by the blood that stains every inch of iced soil. Some believe that sacrifice is a virtue, and are moved by the Martians' tenacity. This is childish. Sacrifice is only a virtue for its purpose, and the purpose of the Martians is to create a Martian State that is free for its own sake and to damn the cost up to and including extinction of every living soul not accepted as the in group. There is no virtue in that, so why?

What could possibly be the appeal of nationalism? Anyone?

We will return to this later. An answer is expected.

Martian Nationalism traces its origins back to well before the colonization of Mars itself. It was a literary trope from the Pre-Solar Age. The Winterist Intelligentsia like to use this as proof of their inevitable victory, that Martian nationhood is such an intrinsic human drive that it predates Solar habitation. But the practical ideological existence is much younger, only about three hundred years. Traces of it existed earlier, but the ur-novella of modern Martian Nationhood is the exposes known as the 'Olympian Testimonies.'

Understand, Mars during the National Epoch was a primarily Corporatist project - operated by private resource agencies for the purpose of providing resources to the National Elites. This is reflected in Martian Culture to this day - Seeoos, for example, is the name of Martian Rebel Leaders and once a term for the leader of a Corporation. Mars living standards as an extractive national project were materially dire, and set the basis for Martian Nationalism as a response. The Olympian Testimonies were a series of exposes and stolen documents which demonstrated the failures of the Martian Terraforming program and abuses of the national system, though misidentifying Capitalism as the issue and not Nationalism. Launched a series of riots and terrorist attacks that would only escalate for the next…until today frankly.

The first schism and real material development in Martian nationalism happens around the time of UN abolition. Like most things, it had existed before it became a dividing line, but most people will think it sprung up in that instant. The UN, as Instructor Daikun would have taught you, was attempting to engage in resistance activity against the National System, and organizing colonial discontent. There was a division in the Martian Ranks on the UN's actions. There was a significant trend of seeing Martian Liberation and Solar Unification as part and parcel. This was a long way from Unification Theory, but when paired with the UN, it may have gotten there. But the Solar Unity Faction was outmaneuvered - and out muscled - after the fall of the UN and fell out of mass favor as the leading resistance movement. From then on Mars as a project was oppositional to solar unity, and by that token, survival of the Human Species. They had taken National Theory and turned it on themselves. This refusal to engage in solidarity got them the fate deserved to Nationalists.

It got them the Cataclysm.

The Olympian Testimonies most glaring report was on the progress of the Martian Terraforming project. Many Solar Bodies were terraformed - poorly - but the idea of a Green Mars was almost as old as a Free One. It was a fundamental aspect of both the Martian Nationalists and early Solar Unitists that a Green Mars was a given, and the reports of its systemic deliberate and negligent sabotage of that grand idea had struck a particular nerve. Nonetheless, as the Nations are want to do, it was impossible to sustain such a lengthy effort, just six months after a dejected Sol learned that it was materially impossible to escape our Solar System with FTL, there was a catastrophic failure in the Terraforming Network that resulted in a total atmospheric blackout. Temperatures dropped from the terraforming average of a crisp fifteen below to a worse than pre terraforming 90 degrees below zero, with near planetwide envelopment of storm clouds blackened with excess moisture and terraforming sludge that lasted three decades before moving into its more normative storm structures. Gertzky's disease, what you get for overexposure to terraforming byproducts, became the number one cause of death for Martians and would continue to be until the Anarchy, baring flare ups of ill fated revolution. The sudden change in temperature was stark for Martian Culture. At first, the eternal winter was cursed - it wouldn't be until the Anarchy when the Winter became a virtue and an accepted part of their revolution.

Between 2537, when the Cataclysm made the red world white, and the Anarchy, Mars saw a number of ill fated uprisings. If they were not crushed by Corporate Security, they would be by National Soldiers. Any who survived the first reprisals were torn apart by infighting and then scattered by the second wave. Without a wider program than Martian Independence for its own sake, they could not overcome the National System, and would be intermittently crushed for one hundred and seventy one years. These failures, however, were not totally mindless. It built up the legendary Unrepublic - the quasi mythical underground government of Mars that would reveal itself during the Anarchy. The Unrepublic is largely overstated. It was mostly networks of survivors being passed down through the generations, acting as a premade framework for radicalization and organization, constantly splintering along ideological grounds, but never an underground state of real sorts. It was fragile too - much of the fighting on Mars during the Anarchy was between different Martian Factions. They only fully unified under the First Republic of Winter a little over a year before Case Hardradda - and were promptly crushed. In some ways, it's deeply frustrating. Mars might have been the Arsenal of Unification Theory had their people possessed a better innate character. But instead it had to be, and continues to have to be, ground to dust.

In the twilight years of the Solar Age, Martian Nationalists were keenly aware that something like the Anarchy was inevitable, and in fact, they were planning on it. They calculated the downfall, the extinction, of Solar Civilization and their first idea was how could Mars benefit. Attempts to soothe over sectarian differences were well under way when our founders, seeing the same math, decided to save Humankind and launched Case Green. The Martians were not ready for it.

You will have heard of the Glacio Korpuso, the regime aligned mixture of Martian compradors and Regime expeditionary elements. Their specific maneuvers are irrelevant to our needs, but they do mark the next stage of Martian rebellion - opportunism. The speed of the collapse of Solar Order created a vacuum for infighting and for the Glacio Korpuso to hold Walton's Landing till Hardrada. My…biological father was in the Glacio…at first.

As with the rest of Sol, brutal heavy warfare, especially in the Megacities, marked the whole of the conflict. Atomic Freefire was the name of the game. Initial fighting was between Corporate and National Security Forces and a vaguely unified Martian Center, but the Center broke and became all out warfare with very nominal allegiances, helped along by strategic application of individual force on anyone who might have been a unifier. We couldn't get everyone, though.

Seeoo Rodger Thiel, son of the author of 'A Forever Winter', was a dreamer, and the manifest parent of modern Martian Identity. First Seeoo of the First Republic of Winter, he led a slow going unification effort that took until XX31 to reach a point where it was credibly the undisputed leading faction of Martian Independence. But for some hold outs - Walton's Landing among them - Thiel commanded central authority for all non-unitist Martian Factions - and even some Unitist factions decided on him. Generally the ones who hadn't come to terms with the idea that democracy was a symptom of nationalism. His Winter Republic was still divided, mind, but by that point in the Anarchy it was the only feasible contender to force an extinction outcome by defeating the Unity Committee.

The First Winter Republic would be crushed in Case Hardrada. Go find the History Theory teacher for specific Maneuvers. I've always been critical of it. But it shattered Thiel's folly and wiped out the best Martian Divisions. Theil would be killed in a power dispute six months later. The Anarchy would end in the streets of Maersk, with the surrender of the Maersk Regional Army on the thirty first of the Eight, XX34. With the Martians defeated militarily and defectors were dealt with as proper, it seemed that the death blow had been struck to those who believed in a Free Mars. But Martian Nationalism was not killed. Much to our frustration.

There was a lull period, however. The Anarchy left an exhausted and withered Sol, and the tricks of the Security Forces had not been adapted too. Martian Nationalism had had its brightest stars shot and the people were more concerned with Survival needs.There was hope that Mars could be brought to heel - even as the nascent bandit groups taking hold both in the Hinterlands and the Megacities. Sporadic acts of terror marked Mars apart, but compared to Titan and continued resistance by the Interior Host, Mars was quiet, until XX47, when a man named Neol Bezeus declared himself the next Seeoo. The Security Services had gotten lax, and failed to prevent the reawakening of Martian Nationalism, especially in the form of Nostalgia, from taking hold. This rebellion did not mark any reversal for their fortunes - Bezeus was killed in an Orbital Strike - and his forces were dispatched, though at cost. It did mark the status of the current Martian Social Order. Finally, we're out of History.

In Strategic Reconnaissance, we divided the Martian Insurgency into three groups. They are known colloquially as the 'In, Out and Up'. Officially, and for any test you receive, they are Groups N, T, and P. Group N, the Ins, are Urban Idealists. Either above average education or no education whatsoever. They are the most numerous and generally least dangerous. They typically engage in meaningless civil resistance, and what physical acts they engage in are misguided and easily quashed. Heavily compromised, its a feeder for the real threats. Many who join Group-N will leave of their own accord into Civil Compliance within twenty months of their enrollment, enticed by employment, maturity, and access to material resources. Those arrested are generally shipped to Mercury or Neptune to be removed from the Martian Zeitgeist. Social Isolation has a proven track record of nullifying ideological commitments, and they're easier to track if they do decide to go back to Mars. Those committed enough to persist in Civil non Compliance, and smart enough to not get caught, may traverse into one of the other two groups - usually Group-T. Group-N has traditionally balked at the cost and sacrifice required to progress Martian Liberation, but aversion to combat violence should not be relied upon in a A-Type Scenario. Group-N types generally have exceedingly lax and idealistic forms of organization, generally democratic, centered around a big personality and their friends, generally not going to last more than a few years. The few that do abandon democratic organization in favor of a more 'Traditional' maritan hierarchical model.

Group-T are armed active insurrectionists who engage in acts of Train-Piracy or other, larger attacks against the Regime. These are also in considerable numbers, and rely on Mars' Terraforming Ice Storms to avoid orbital annihilation. They spend nearly as much time engaging each other over territory and personal grudges as they do Regime Security Forces. Occupational Security Forces are more than adequate to deal with these Groups. While they do penetrate some of the Megacities, Group-T Insurgents typically congregate around the southern Hinterlands alongside the Southron Cross-Planetary Hyperail or in the Crashedlands south of Space Mountain. These groups are notionally organized under the Traditional Martian Model, heavily drawing on Corporate structure and terminology, but tend to be heavily personalistic. Ideological concerns are simply grounds for personal gripes between Supervisors.

But sometimes they aren't. Groups that do have a genuine ideological bend, and some credits beneath their belt, may make it into Group-P. It would have been easier for them to simply be born in. Group-P are the 'True' Sons of Mars. They're a 'Reserve Army of an Unrepublic'. Professional Insurrectionists - usually generational - possessed of the best equipment and ideological fervor. They rarely act, instead they are saving their strength for the emergence of the 'Right Opportunity". This is where you find the Praetorians - their rare powered armor shock troops. Generally the Army has to be called in if Group-P are moving en masse. Not a state threat, however. Actual Ideological stakes means actual ideological infighting, and they've never managed to agree when the Right Opportunity is or would even look like. During the First Seeoo War, for example, an estimated eighty percent of this 'Reserve Army' actively rebuked all attempts to rally under Bezeus. The New Maersk Regional Army killed more Martian Insurrectionists than Security Forces in XX47. These groups have the most stark hierarchy, operating under strict discretion and expecting complete loyalty. They are headed by Seefoos, and they are very touched about making sure that Rank, and the title of Seeoo, are tightly controlled, only held by those worthy, and not proliferated to inferior insurrections.

There are two trends to understand about the Martian Corporate and Cultural Model to understand as we go forward. One, Gender. It's difficult to reckon, but Gender used to be a more formalized, even state enforced, process. It was even assigned at birth. While time has seen those concepts removed from the lexicon of Solar Common, Martian Common had a different trend. Aresian Masculinity encompasses a series of traits and beliefs that make a good Martian. Good martians are referred to with "masculine" pronouns. He, Him, his. Things that are Antimartian are referred to with 'Feminin" pronouns - She Her hers. Things not innately either get neutral gendering, but their linguistic trends have swapping male and female pronouns as a way to indicate support and disgust. To the Martian… I hesitate to say credit - however, Masculinity is apart from personal gender. Good Martians, of any stripe, of any stripe and arrangement, are always Men. Bad Martians, and the Regime, are always female. It is strange, and the Library has taken it upon themselves to remove such primitive pseudosexism from their Lexicon. Interestingly, the Martians themselves do not seem to fully grasp what their linguistic trends indicate, so deeply is it tied to the good-bad martian dynamism. I worked in part of an interrogatory experiment to try and deprogram the language, and without fail, Martians of every gander utterly failed to comprehend without education that calling all Regime Personnel "She" had its roots in primitive National Epoch style of biological determinism.

The Second article is Corporatism. We've talked about how Mars was a Corporate Colony, and how that reflects in their culture, names, organization and general candor. Corporations being a National Epoch Era means of resource extraction and private resource control. I will admit that I find some irony that the original Martian Rebels of the High Solar Age fought and died to see those names scrubbed from the Historical Record.This Corporatist Aesthetic runs along one of the primary overarching ideological divides between Martian Insurrectionary Hierarchies. Walton Thiel posited something called a 'Total Democracy', an attempt to excise certain Symptoms of nationalism, like Private resource ownership, in favor of others, namely democracy. However, Bezeus recognized that Consent of the Governed is a flawed means of Government Structure, and attempted to collate our Unification Committee Structure with Nationalism, but applied solely to Mars at the expense of Sol. General belief is that this belief was one of the main factors to the New Maersk Regional Army refusing to join the Bezeus banner, as they are staunch Thielian Democrats ideologically, though not in Organization. Generally Group-T are more likely to be Bezian, whereas the Group-P trend more heartily towards Thielian Democracy.

Unuavide, the structure of Democracy, particularly Total Democracy, purported as a totally egalitarian anti hierarchical structure that is the manifest popular will, is incompatible with the linguistic structures of a Corporate Model, which is hierarchical and inversely obligated, with a primary control factor being exclusion and its primary function being the enrichment of the Ownership Class. For the uneducated, that model seems to have more in common with the Unity Regime, but the differences are material and obvious. The Regime exists to guarantee human survival, and to that end is obligated towards its Mandate, not its shareholders. While Exclusion is touted as an option, it is inefficient. The Regime will feed you because it indebts you, and helps you realize that your only path to survival is through the CDSU. The Bezeian Model seems to have more direct application to their cultural cache, and purports to draw from the most successful government in human history. But upon critical analysis, both Theilian and Bezeian trends are fundamentally connected to the Martian corporatist psyche.

Both models are deeply exclusionary. Only Martians, in fact, only Good Martians are to be afforded the interior benefits, being 'Shareholders' in the 'Common Wealth of Mars'. Those who are not Martians, or who are bad martians, are 'Fired' from the 'Family', as it were. Capital is a symptom of Nationalism, and at its core it requires an exclusionary structure which benefits an accepted ingroup at the expense of an exploited outgroup. Make no Mistake, the Thielians are not virtuous, and the Bezeians are not misguided Unitarians. Fundamental to their being, to their ideology, to their model, is a deeply exclusionary solar view.

It is as Rodger Thiel said of the fate of the rest of Sol. "So be it."

Now, a query. What is the draw of Nationalism?

-Greed.

Exactly. Dismissed.

 

[Furrybacon]

Welcome, welcome, sit down. I am Diagnostics-Major Hiram Basilone, an Doktoro in Cosmological Theory and a Vice Deputy-Director in the Odysseus Programme through the General Scientific Activities Submcommittee. I work in the Anomalous Theorem Department, focusing on trying to understand the Oort Cloud Anomaly, better known as the ORCA, so I do not have personal knowledge of any ill-fated expeditions into the Oort Cloud.

This lecture will act as a general historical overview of the Oort Cloud and the anomaly thereof. If you are interested in the Higher Sciences, be sure to notify your Course-Officer, but I don't expect this class to be filled with that many Doktoreco candidates. Which is fine. An interest in Scientific History and trends is part of being a well founded Mandator, in my opinion, and in the opinion of Old Uncle Sid.

The Oort Cloud Anomaly, aka the ORCA, is the reason why humankind is, practically, trapped in Sol. It is not actually one thing, it is several interacting factors that makes use of the Osman-Leitchfield Gravitational Anomaly Skip, otherwise known as the OLGAS, Drive utterly impractical for extrasolar transit. Not impossible, mind, we just need to pump a drive with more power than our Star will produce in its entire life in a single picosecond or locate the mythical and likely non-existent Farside passage. Theoretically we could Slowboat it, but there's a problem about even that we will get to later. And even then it would take you three centuries to get to Alpha Centauri. Nobody's really keen to do that and so far as we can tell nobody ever was. Lots of Extrasolar Slowboat programs were started in the High and Late Solar Age, but there's no record of any actually clearing Neptune. Pirates always loved hitting those suckers. And then there is the deadline, which we will get to later.

Aside. The four factors that create the ORCA are Location, Angle, Depth, and the X factor. Some people call it 'LA Times D'. These are deeply tied to how the OLGAS works in the first place, and here is where the history lesson begins. The low Solar Age is identified as having begun when a pair of Australiazian scientists, Veronica Osman and Jessica Litchfield identified what a gravitational anomaly present in a few of the Lagrange points around Earth - L1 2 and 3. These are what we call Active Points, where FTL is possible by just cramming the general location of the anomaly with an absurd amount of energy, thereby folding space between two active points allowing for the vastness of space to be traversed in near seconds. Once a Lagrange point is Fully Active, its activity has never been recorded or even calculated that it may cease to be short of cosmic extinction events. But out past Neptune, there are no Fully Active points, and the Half-Active points cease to enjoy the confidence of stable and clear orbits. The OLGAS drive has to rely on painstakingly calculated temporary active points based on the chance that two objects of sufficient mass in space that by coincidence happen to be close enough to work for our purposes. This the crux Location Problem

If it was just the Location factor, then the people who thought if we could just figure out the math, we could still use the Oort Cloud to micro jump our way to Alpha Centauri would have been right. You probably know this as the Farside Passage, and it is, to a relative degree of scientific certainty. There was actually an unusual amount of funding to find this from the Nationals - if you would let me step into political theory for a moment. The National System requires expansion to persist, and being trapped in Sol led them to the decline and to the Anarchy. If they had found that mythical Farside passage, then the Unification Government could have been delayed for centuries. If it was just location, distance from the sun and stable orbit, then maybe that's correct. But that's when we get towards issue two, Angle.

Space is vast and mostly empty. We can account for whatever is in there quite well by now, even when jumping. For the common jump points, we've even figured out how to calculate which angles and velocities - crux of the Angle issue - the jump will spit us out at, and how to orient ourselves to catch those changes. It used to be that you had no idea what direction and speed you'd be heading after a jump, and it is still like trying to navigate the oort cloud only worse. Odds are your active point will disappear the moment you use it, and it will fuck up not only your direction, but also your computers and velocity and probably ram you into something big enough fast enough that it hits the level of things we can't deal with. There is a long list of people who died just here, trying to navigate the angular factor of LADX.

Depth is the last of the normative factors in the ORCA. Our Oort Cloud is just, unusually deep. We've studied the sky for thousands of years, and we've had telescopes actually capable of doing something with that watching for centuries. When the universe snapped into being one day, it just decided to roll us a thicker Oort cloud than the norm. This is - should be - a multiplicative factor on the Location and Angle complications. The deeper the cloud, the more times we have to wage on inconsistent constantly changing numbers to plug into an exceedingly precise calculation that could simply fuck up your vector and slam you into a rock the size of your Liner that has a name like 2455 KV 18299 if its named at all. But Cosmology is often about statistics, and statistically, we should be able to headbutt ourselves through the Oort Cloud. Thousands of thousands of drone and redemption ships with the best calculator fragments we can muster have utterly failed to scratch beneath the surface of the Oort Cloud. Maybe we haven't sent out enough suicide missions, but even in the shallows of the Orca there is something else going on, that makes the numbers game impossible.

That brings us to the X factor, the times if you say LA times D. The actual anomaly in the ORCA system. It's not just how big the Oort cloud is, its distance from stable orbits, the angle of exit. And it's not even that we have an Oort Cloud - other solar systems have Oort Clouds, some as large as ours. There is just something about our Oort Cloud. Something we do not understand. Something that keeps us trapped here - but if there were any aliens out on Wolf 359 or wherever, so long as they built a big enough reactor and a good enough computer they could microjump out to the next solar system, to any solar system, but ours. And we still do not know why.

When you get about five thousand astronomical units away from Sol-center, you start to get towards the Deadline, where the math just starts to…stop working. So do any laser transmitters, long range scopes and any light transmitted data packaging internal or external to the vessel. It gets more pronounced the further you get into the Orcas. And eventually, about seventy five hundred Astronomical units from the sun, you just die. Nothing has cleared that line, so far as we know, and if any Slowboats did get past Neptune they died here. I've seen papers on how to slowboat through the deadline on generational ships or with special power packs that might work, but none of the theories have really convinced me, or the Central Committee, to take that risk.

We've got theories as to what's going on, and the most plausible theory is to do with time. Like Syzmanski's educational shows taught you in primary school, Space is static, heterogeneous, and time moves faster in a vacuum. Fun fact, our ancestors believed that space was both homogeneous and expanding, fancy that. Now, we can account for this, we have the computers and the math to do so - if it does what it's supposed to. But as the Jaying-Bernard Hypothesis posits, there is something about the specific orientation of our Oort Cloud vis a vis the center of the universe and our central galactic black-hole the acceleration of time in a vacuum is supercharged. In what direction, Jaying and Bernard disagreed. But that's the best we have. We'd need to make it out of Sol to not only prove it, but also disprove the negative. That our basic understanding of cosmology is even weirder than we previously thought and that unless you crack infinite energy particles or get cracking in Slowboats you will live and die in the system of your birth. Pray to whatever you believe in that DADEL pulls off that 'Mote' project.

Apart from the time theory, there are several others of some repute.

And that's ORCAS. Everything you'd need to know in brief.


(a/n the use of the alternative cosmological theory is mostly because I find it super cool, regardless of any scientific plausibility that may has come out after)

 

[Furrybacon]

Settle down Comrades. Is the door locked? Keep watch.

Know me as Liberi. I am not the Liberi, no, but I'm a Liberi, and that is all you need to know. The Fash think they have a lock down on information. They think they can teach you into compliance. But every day that we remember that there is something beyond the Regime is another day where we have won. That victory only grows for every Comrade keeping the dream alive, and for every State-Backed monster who has to waste their time looking for those hopes.

To resist, you must see through the Lies. To see through the lies, you must understand the central one. The lie above all lies. The greatest lie the regime has ever told is the truth.

I wish that I could get up here and tell you that the mythology of the regime was all a lie. I wish I could tell you with absolute confidence that, had the fascists not marched on Earth in '19, humanity would have been on the course for a free and equal society. That the time before was some stolen utopia. It was not. An old political theorist from the Early Solar Age coined the phrase 'Revolutionism or Barbarism', a play on an even older quote, but those who held power over your grandparents chose barbarism. For decades, the Lunar Regime has coasted on that truth. That, and the bare fucking minimum of governance. A thousand lies, a trillion graves, the blotting out of stars and the abolition of the rights of Humankind in the name of one truth. I implore you above all else, do not choose this lie. Choose to reach the infinite dream, the innate desire for freedom, equality, and humanity.

Ozymandias, that so called Sacred City on Luna, tells us Democracy is a suicide pact. A mere symptom of Nationalism. A Myth. They tell you that to hide the truth. In your Mutas, you engage in a democracy all your own. You take what the State permits and you vote to maintain yourselves. Luna decries the consent of the Governed, and then smothers you in the kind of basic governance the old countries utterly failed to do just so that your slavish devotion can be counted as the legitimate credit towards their autocratic malice.

Ozymandias tells us that we can either be Free to starve, or Freed from Starvation. Free to cough, or Freed from Fever. Free and ignorant, or freed from ignorance. Reject that lie. We can have both. We can have Freedom without Starvation. Freedom without Sickness. Freedom without Ignorance. In their own admission, the material capacity for utopia has existed for generations. Our parents failed to seize it, but that does not mean that your right to fight for that has been forfeit. We have simply been denied it for so long that we can no longer imagine it, but we can have both.

Ozymandias tells us that they are the greatest thing to ever befall Humankind - aside from the Ansible, they humbly admit. They tell us we live under a Mandate of Survival, and that there will never be anything else. They do not mention the bodies in the streets. They do not mention the greed of petty provosts or the rot deep in their blood, and in the blood that spills out in the streets. They pretend that because they do not make pretensions of justice that they are just. They did not strip the corruption out of the system, they stripped the system out of the corruption and expect you to thank them for it.

Ozymandias tells us that we have moved beyond hope. That what it gives you is the best thing you are ever going to get. The regime is a collection of sad, miserable, cruel, deluded, selfish, authoritarian whelps, stripping those who actually give a damn their higher faculties into covering for their sins and then sinning against you. I have meant many Provis who are near the edge of good. But at that edge they cannot comprehend that there could be a Provisionary without a Fascist State, and that makes them mad.

Ozymandias is a literal city of Gold, of excess, of rivalry, guarded by walls and weapons beyond brutality, sucking out your very souls.

I get why though. Why our parents, our families, our loved ones, may be scared to resist. They cling to the terrible nightmares of hunger and worship the morsels they are allowed. They remember that the hunger they once suffered lasted for generations. Alongside sickness and denial of education and whatever else the Old Countries could strip from us. Doing the bare minimum does seem like utopia to them, and those who do not rebel are not scared of Guns. They're scared we'll go back. They have taken Ozymandias' greatest lie to heart, and fallen for the dichotomy. The question is not Nation or Regime, it is as it has always been, Freedom against Control.

You know me as Liberi. We don't purport to know a universal truth, but we have a way through. A way to Freedom without Starvation. A way to soc-

Fuck. GenComp is here. My Comrades in the beret will lead you into the tunnel. You will meet another known as Librei, on another day. And you will learn what revolution means. Just keep hope. It's a greater victory than you can possibly imagine.

 

[Furrybacon]

Yes yes sorry I am late. If you are not used to it now, that is your fault. Welcome to State Organization Theory.

I actually have a defense this time. I got myself and several other members of my Life Clique into an argument on the local network about the ongoing Unification Calendar debates. I'm not sure if you have clearance for the molecules, but sitrep is that the debate is on if, when we finally excise the gregorian latch on, if we keep Sustenance Day on the 93rd day of the year, or we move it back to the 124th day to keep the 4th of the 4th Symbolism. I'm all for the latter, but I know it is unpopular with the Prole groups. Refusing change for the sake of it is reactionary, and nationalist - ironic that I want to keep the 4th of the 4th I know. When the Calendar comes through you will see my arguments in some addendum itinerary. Luna knows that I'd take up my favorite class of the year redressing this comment.

Right, sorry. The topic. We are on the second part of our tour of the Five Branches of the Pentagov, in my Orbital Region now, heh. The Provisionary Service. It has made me the man I am, and in the words of Consul Syzmanski, I regret that I have but one life to feed into the Provis.

As laid out in the Mandate of Luna, survival is, in fact, the sole legitimate function of state. No other Service does more to that promise than the Provisionary. I have spent my whole life in its service - and I will do so until I have a stroke at my workstation living only long enough to demand that the Provis does not spend any resources on me. It is duty bound to accomplish the "Sustainment of the Solar Population." Those five words belie the raw, incomprehensible, inconceivable scale of what is the act of our charge.

We Feed, Medicate and Educate every single soul in Sol. That is dozens of hundreds of billions of people, spread across thirty trillion Kilometers. To each of them, we deliver the basic allowance needed to survive, or we die trying. And it is more than just Kubes and vaccines. Seventy percent of humankind is now implanted with BR3A1H Cybernetic Lungs, allowing them to breathe the air our ancestors irradiated and intoxicated. Physical, Mental, and Emotional Health are all in our purview, and we do not always have the resources to guarantee all three for those who are our Charge under the Mandate alongside ensuring they are clothed and fed and educated. But by Stars, we do it anyway. And we will fight the rest of the Central Committee to get those resources. Tooth and nail.

Even the simplest hiccup in our machine can and will result in suffering comparable to a war in scale, so we do not make them. In the old days, there were those who could look at something and just intrinsically know how much arbitrary resource units it was worth. We can do the same thing, but instead of something stupid like money, I can see how many lives could have been saved. I received comments from the Dean about my comments on the Armed Services, but you do not get it until you get it. Where you see a battleship, I see one million five hundred eighty two thousand tons of Kalorie Kubes, Medical Supplies, Educational equipment, Logistical infrastructure, Oxygen Scrubbers, survival cybernetics, clothing, and prefab shelters subtracted from the State's husbandry. I see seventeen thousand six hundred and forty three preventable deaths.

Sigh. I remember when the General Welfare memorandum confirmed that we had officially returned human lifespan expectations to a hundred years. That is double what it was when I was born, just before the Anarchy. I never felt so hollow, and yet so proud, in my life. We should count our lifetimes in centuries, our stomachs as full, and our minds as bright, but against our ancestors' sins, the hardest efforts of the greatest organization in history has only just returned us to the standards of the Presolar Age.

The Provis is headed by the General Welfare Committee, which deals with resource concerns and elevates the Provisionary Consul to the Central Committee. For Administrative purposes, the Provisionary is divided into five Branches. The Surgery, the Library, the Gallery, the Livery, and the fifth branch is an administrative one called the Depository. At high levels, these Branches govern certification, best practices, individual conduct, advancement etcetera, but in country, the Provis has its assigned personnel organized under a Depository Branch Command Echelon into a Service Group, or Surge in the common parlance. A Surge is responsible for all Mandated needs in their Zone of Responsible Authority. My first Surge was Caracas, post Anarchy, but I had been in what we now call the proto provisionary as a Galleryman during the Fighting. There were already enough folk killing, someone had to make sure those brought under Luna lived long enough to see its banner take full breeze.

The Surgery is responsible for the complete health circuit of the Mandate charges. Physical, Mental and Emotional. Its a tall order. Physical is easy, and cybernetics can do a lot, but mental and emotional conditioning require a lot of intangibles. Our ancestors left quite a mess, and memetics are a real threat. A complete circuit of wellness requires the physical, emotional, and mental health to reject extinctionist siren's calls. The Surgery has some real wins under its belt. It wiped out the Wasting Virus - among others and proliferated the cybernetic Implants to increase habitability. Of course, there is a lot to do. Surgery definitely does not have the personnel to personally therapize healthy conditions into the population. But It is a marathon, not a sprint, so it takes time. I am quite fond of the Surgery, though I've only worked alongside them. You can tell because my Life Clique contains three doctors.

The Surgery currently oversees the Artificial repopulation programs alongside the Diagnostics Service. Artrep has been a common technology for a long time, but it's only since the Regime has taken control that it has been centralized and really adapted to the Post-Atomic Family mode.There are a lot of conversations about the future of this program - even about making it its own branch. I am not convinced of the Radical Viscount idea of doing away with natural reproduction entirely but almost everyone I know prefers the artificial system. It is safer and easier to control, as well as obviously available to everyone and set to overtake "natural" births within a few years. Still kinda blows my mind that orientation was once a tool the National System employed for societal control. Exceedingly inefficient as well as being cruel. Very martian.

The Library, where I work, is the State's education and information bureau. This is Old Consul Syzmanski's stomping ground. You all saw his pop-science videos growing up. Our job is to ensure a minimum standard of education for Sol, and to provide Higher and technical Education, like this, to the Solar Population so that the State can enjoy a ready body of educated professionals. In providing these professionals, we provide you with the tools to analyze and reinforce your fealty to the Lunar System. In the immediate end of the Anarchy, most educational materials had to be automated, but teachers have filtered down as time goes on. Education is a fundamental aspect of survival, and I will be forever bound to Syzmanski for making sure it made the Mandate. It is not just technical skills, it fills the heads and hearts of Sol with the tools that lead them to loyalty to the Regime, possessed of the mental faculties to identify and reject disloyal ideologies through the kind of Critical Analysis that Unification Theory is surely teaching you. I've got a spouse from here as well,

The Library has taken on another role, that being the reclamation of knowledge lost during the Anarchy and the Ansible collapse. Diagnostics is naturally interested in technical information, data and schematics and dry scientific theorems, but there is a degree to which every byte of information on our history, historical culture, and art is valuable in its own right, and working to save that is a valuable service. Of course, what we find needs to be reinterpreted into the Unification orthodoxy, as to avoid the negative memetic influences that historical cultures used to perpetuate the national system, but fundamentally, the narrative of the regime is that of history, an slow but inexorable march to Unification Theory, which is reinforced by the curtailed rescue of knowledge. The Library works with the Unity Police and the Prognostics service to run the State Information Dispersion Bureau.

The Gallery is the section of the Provis that organizes Sol's Agridustrial Production and the distribution thereof. I have personal experience and a spouse here as well. They can be found in the many Agridustrial plants around Sol and in the distribution centers. Of the branches, the Gallery has the greatest reputation for radicalism. It was the Gallery that lead the charge on forcing through the Proliferation Plan for the placement of Agridustrial Complexes against SEED, and they submit by far the most memorandums to the Central Committee, demanding more resources to expand the prole pallet beyond the Kube, and making extensive notes on who is responsible for any delay. Woe betide they who get in the way of a Gallery Auxen..

The Kube - yes. The technological miracle of our age, honestly. Officially it is the Omni-nutritional Calorie-Sufficient Survival Ration, but nobody, not even the Gallery, calls it that. They are Kubes. Each eight kilogram brick contains enough raw nutritional content to keep a human alive for a week - a full ten days - and meet all nutritional, mineral, and vitamin requirements while suppressing excess hunger. Material capacity often means more than Material availability, but we would never have fed everyone in Sol to at least subsistence level without the Kube. Everyone talks about the miracle power of a Battleship's Plasmoid Torrid Broadside, but this is the real virtue of the Lunar Mandate. The Kube was never invented under the National System, and never would be, because it runs axiomatically opposed to their ideology. It is a tool of survival. Of Unity. They are made using what is in effect a biological printer, which produces an algae designed at the genetic level to fulfill its task through the expenditure of truly awful amounts of power, formed and pressed into the Kubes, and sent out from the hundreds of Agridustrial Complexes around sol. No break, every hour of the year.

You know, I still hear proles complain about it. Firstly, we have worked extremely hard to ensure that means of preparation and flavoring are available. Secondly, they just don't get it. My mother and I lived on less than a thousand calories and a quart of water a day. Sub Sustainment levels of nutrition. And we were lucky, doubly so that our stores held out long enough for the State to rescue us from the Old Epoch. The Gallery ensures everyone has the necessary hydration and caloric intake, those who have not known hunger should respect that.

Right, yes, yeah, the Gallery. The Gallery has been exceedingly vocal in it how it plans to expand itself and wondering how others will keep up. In the short term, they would like to do more than just Kubes - I Know they've been pushing hard for more common rations of S-Cream and Neograins. They have been publishing recipes too, you are aware. The B.O.R.G.A.R is neat too. Beyond that, There has even been talk of allowing M3A1 Rations, but the Military does have a bug about that item. But you do what you can, and make sure what you can goes to everyone.

The Livery is the youngest of the Provis Branches, sort of an oversight that it was not an original. It is responsible for physical habitation needs. That means O2 Scrubbers, environmental adaptation equipment, general sanitation labor, and clothing-production. Design 15 Coveralls my beloved. Its responsibilities used to be split up unevenly between the different branches, bleed into SEED, and it was burdensome on the Depository. This is the kind of adaptation that the Nations could never have conceived of. The Livery does have a reputation as being the least radical of the Provis branches, which I would agree with. I feel that it's mostly second order interaction - oxygen is important but the other three main service branches are direct service - healing teaching and feeding. The scale doesn't come across as much. Haven't actually added anyone from here in the Life Clique yet.

The Depository is the senior branch of the Provis, dealing with the nitty gritty logistical organization required to do what we do and organizing the different branches' personnel into functional Surges. Generally you get promoted into the Depository rather than join it directly. I've been offered it, but I prefer to teach. Besides, I have a spouse here already. It should be noted that the Depository does not enjoy superseding authority - a Colonel is a Colonel after all. But by the virtue of their position they are generally beholden to outside of specific expertise. A Surgeon Major leads in Surgery, a Depository Major leads in administration. It's not uncommon that the ranking Surgeon in a ZRA has a higher station than the Ranking Depository, but the Depoman will still have authority beyond the bounds of the hospital.

The Unity Police releases reports on Radicalism within the different sections of the regime once every five years. It is with pride that the Provisionary leads the Regime in the aggregate for slavish devotion to the Mandate four reports running. The Armed Service defends, Security protects, Diagnostics counts, Prognostics labors, but we Serve. It is on our backs that Humanity Survives. That human lifespan has returned to the century and grows further. We are the face and the hand of the Regime, and trillions will interact with Unification Theory only through our produce. We know this. Intimately. This is why we spend the most time lobbying the Central Committee. Why we have the highest rate of 51ick addiction in the Regime and the highest rate of stressor deaths. It is why I am the way I am.

Stars, I am already late for my next itinerary. See you for Security. Luna and Unity have a good day.

 

[Furrybacon]

Huh. I'm not late. First time for everything. Or, actually, my Spouse in Security did move quicker today. That sly dog.

Welcome back to State Organization Theory. Today we're on our third part of the Pentagov Tour. The Security Services. Funnily enough, it was a class like this where my Spouse in the Security Services would join the Clique, though it wasn't through me. It was through another partner of mine-

That's not actually relevant. I'm sorry.

The Security Service is one of the five branches of the Unity Committee, hosting a Consular seat. It is responsible for 'Civil Compliance', a euphemistic term for population control, across the System. The Interior Committee operates as its senior command structure, with three branches and the Bureau of Security Stations organized beneath it. They deal with behavior, unrest, obedience, criminal military and political action, and ideological homogeneity.

There are three commissions who do the preponderance of Security Work. The Commision for General Compliance, the Commission for Strategic Reconnaissance, and the Commision for Unification Security. Civil, Military, and Political. Organized beneath these three commissions is the Bureau of Security Stations, also known as BSS, or BOSS.They do the actual hard labor of security, and are the largest armed body in Sol.

The Commision for General Compliance deals with, well, it says on the tin. Unrest, criminal activity and investigations, black markets, corruption, prisons and punishment, and anything relating to these. GenComp used to be called CCID, the Commission for Criminal Investigation and Dispersion, but it was redubbed when the BOSS was firmly moved under Security Services. 'Cids' remains slang for the organization. The GenComp has the distinct…reputation for being the largest and least effective commission. I'm not going to incriminate anyone, but I would reckon most of you have had more than one contact with Shareware. Gencomp's reputation is not unfounded, but I think it's worth noting that they seem to possess an itemized tracking of every transaction under 'illegal' Shareware indicates that they know more of what's going on than they want us to think.

Commissioners from General Compliance are entrusted to run both Abadon on Mercury and Helheim on Neptune, the two primary penal colonies that keep the solar economy going. Abadon is of course well known for its Coding mines as the headquarters of the Ansible Restoration Program, while Helheim is the center of Oort Cloud exploitation, mining, and desperate attempts to navigate the Oort Anomaly that keeps us trapped in Sol.

The Commision for Strategic Reconnaissance, aka StratCon is headed up by the Conmen. It is the oldest of the Commissions. It deals with Military Intelligence, with a focus currently on insurrection movements. Many of its interior duties have largely been overtaken by the third Commision, which we will get to. StratCon was formed during the Anarchy to be the intelligence arm of the CDSU, and was folded into the Security Service. My spouse is here, and I have met many Conmen. I find them to be the most agreeable of the Security Forces. CIDs can be cruel and the Unity Police are…the Unity Police. This is likely because Stratcon's focus is almost exclusively insurrectionists, and armed ones at that. So long as you aren't a Hostie Frata or whatever they are very nice.

And then you have the Commission for Unification Security. UniSec.The Unity Police. They are charged with counting political crimes, ensuring ideological harmony, and contending with crimes of thought. I find these folks unsettling, but I suppose I am supposed to. I fully respect their mission, but they are just so upbeat. Like have you seen their logo? It is a pair of hands lifting up towards a sun, wreathed in glowing light. A lot Provis Therapists get headhunted into the Unity Police as outright agents, and I will admit that of late they have been running a better emotional support education than the Provisionary of late. See, the Unity Police see themselves as almost more Provisionary than Security. A cure to a sickness. Even some members of the Provisionary agree, seeing Political Health as part of or equal to the traditional spread of Physical, Mental and Emotional. I am not sure I fully buy that, but it is a compelling argument. Still they scare the O2 out of me. They've quickly become the senior arm of the Security Forces, not the largest, but certainly the most prestigious and active, taking from GenComp and StratCon several duties and incorporating it into their own program. UniSec has a wide number of actual jobs. They started just handling the cultural purges during the late Anarchy, but are now intrusted with any task that threatens the ideological hegemony of the Mandate, taking to it more like a doctor than a cop.

Like I mentioned, the Unity Police fulfills the function of cultural censor and arbiter. Anyone who wants to produce art - games, movies, educational content, music, whatever - has to go through them. For the most part, art is okay so long as you can present its thesis within the bounds of unification theory and the hegemony there of. Actual censure is quite rare, and generally done as part of a larger sting around GenComp to track illicit cultural artifact producers. It has long been recognized that banning something outright can make it more attractive to those prone to obstinance and resentment to authority, so ensuring that art advances understanding of the theory, and teaching people to extract that is more important than outright censure. They do this under their wider program with the State Information Dispersion Bureau under Diagnostics.

Beneath all three Commissions is the Bureau of Security Stations, the newly centralized headquarters of the Occupational Security Divisions, or in common conversation, the Securitroopers. The state Genderarmie and actual enforcement arm of its will short of calling in the Lobsterbacks. You see these guys everyday - with the faceless plated helmets and their adorable little laser guns. You know, back in the day they used to think Laser guns would replace chemical firearms. I know a Spiker is a lot more than that, but it is just kinda neat that laser guns are so…base. You could make a military grade laser with common industrial tools, but it won't hold a candle to the Spikers that the army actually uses. Securitroopers make a good labor reserve and keep the peace well enough. I've worked with them a lot during distribution. Any Commissioner can assume command of necessary Securitroopers for their current task, and the local Provost has command authority on any BSS contingent. I haven't made any friends with any, their disposition is often petty and cruel. Its an unfortunate quirk of the system that those who flunk out of Army trials wind up in senior positions with the BSS.

It wasn't too long ago that the Securitroopers were strangely wedged between Security and the Provosts in the Armed Services, but that was recognized as an wartime oversight, and after considerable negotiation they were reconsidered.

Similar to Provis Surges, Security creates regional operations groups called Constabularies, headed up by an appointed Constable. Traditionally, appointed Constables have been drawn from the senior Stratcon member in a designated region, but outside of combat zones it's been firmly in General Compliance hands for a while. Only Luna, and Ozymandias, have had Unity Police Constables, and the official word from the Directing Committee on the Commision for Unification Security is that they have no ambition in increasing their number of Constabularies. They generally prefer operate special cadres of mobile Unification Officers with their own Securitrooper stations, called rather morbidly, Political Wellness Outfits.

Unification Theory and Alternative Social Organization instructors will have more to say about how law worked in the National Epoch, but its Security who deals with it today, but there is still theory to discuss on why criminal and non compliance behavior even happens. Now, it was known for centuries that the leading cause of crime was poverty. And I mean centuries. Researchers at the Thoth Center have found documents from around multiple millennia ago that came to that conclusion. It was a matter of ideological cruelty that they did not resolve the issue sooner. The Nations wanted crime to happen as part of the stratification of the ownership class. But the Regime is a rational government, correctly orientated. Everyone's needs are met as a matter of pride. To some degree, we are naturally limited by the mess left behind by our ancestors, but there is no need to steal to live. The traditional position taken up by non-compliance organizations, gangs if you will, is compromised by the totality of the state's care. But, poverty is not the only driver of non-compliance, as proven by crime.

General Compliance divides criminal behavior into 7 main categories. Political Non-Compliance, Community Non-Compliance, Organized Non-Compliance, Medical Non-Compliance, Conformity Non-Compliance, Personal Non-Compliance and Stochastic Non-Compliance. Political Non-Compliance includes behavior which is counter to Unification Theory itself, spanning from statements of discontent to insurrection. These crimes are motivated by, or well, against, unification theory itself, and are often signs of a lack of what UniSec would call Political unwellness. As a matter of practice, Political crimes are split into three levels, handled by each of the three Commissions, though overlap is exceedingly common. Low-Scale discontent is a GenComp matter, insurrection goes to Stratcom, and internal homogeneity and general political wellness goes to, well, the Unification Police. Routine Unemployment is also considered a Political Crime, due to the inherently extinctionist effects of that kind of profession. That said, the Regime recognizes that there are conditions between employment and even second-order employment like child-rearing that should not be forgotten simply because it does not create a clean statistical graph. Community Non-Compliance refers to criminal behavior which is motivated by one's own community, such as the operation of a black market, subtle marks of localized cultural defiance, or the concealment of other infractions under the motivation of community loyalty. GenComp doctrine has been to integrate itself into these processes, allowing them to exist within a carefully monitored and curtailed box to act as a pressure valve that is in sight of security forces. Community Crimes can be a threat to general compliance, but due to the excessive disruption a total crackdown can cause - which is sometimes necessary - and the value in satisfying the psychological compulsion for resentment towards authority by allowing the illusion of 'getting one over', GenComp prefers to allow these kinds of crimes. This has come at a major prestige hit, as provosts very much do not like this as a rule. When Community Crimes begins to shift into outright organized crime is when Security Forces step in. Organized Non-Compliance is often identical in function to Community Criminality, but is motivated by specific social structures in a specific Greed format for the betterment of a interior circle - Gangs. These do not have the backlash to pop like with Community Crimes, and are pretty routinely suppressed.

Medical Non-Compliance is fairly self explanatory. This is generally crimes enacted as a survival mechanism, nowadays during say a ship malfunction, crimes enacted due to a fault in the psychoschematism of the offender, or crimes taken under the influence of drugs. In all instances, the common factor is a lack of specific intent to break the law, but instead acting on survival instincts or under the influence of substances. GenComp will generally handle first contact here, but Medical Non-Compliance generally becomes a Provis issue after incarceration. Conversely, Conformity Non-Compliance deals with generally loose and fleeting structures which otherwise compel criminal activity. Riots, youth gangs, spillage theft. Opportunistic mass crimes, where the compulsion comes from evolutionary and short sighted herd mentality rather than particular criminal masterminding.

Personal Non-Compliance is the kind of crime I find to be the most angering. These are crimes based around interpersonal relationship structures - abuses and domestics and violations of personhood. As I understand it, these typically require the most actual investigation, which makes sense. Personal crimes are violations against not only the allowance of private livelihood, but to the wider Mandate. Finally, Stochastic Non-Compliance is independently motivated criminal activity devoid of any distinct compelling reason or structural motivator. Typical around youths and an indicator of other issues. A Decent patrolman should be able to deal with youth stochastic non-compliance that without too much trouble, and it rarely requires escalation. In adults though, it can be best to simply incarcerate.

Once a criminal activity has reached the point of intervention, they are secured by relevant Security Forces and Sentenced after brief investigation. They may petition the local provost for a review, and most Provosts will have a staff of Provost-Enlisted to deal with that, but from then punishment is dolled out under the Uniform Code of Solar Justice. Low Crimes can afflict loss of allowance level, local incarceration, Restitutionary labor, and Surgery Intervention for psychological or medical concerns. Higher Crimes could result in long term incarceration or even transportation to Helheim or Abaddon. Capital Crimes are typically dealt with on the scene of capture, and notionally require notice to a superior and the provost before carrying out. If there is a particularly confusing crime scene, and almost always in Personal type crimes, there may be an intervening committee investigation into the offence, held generally through the offender's specific Prognostics department.

One contention within this form of criminal activity is a latency of the National Epoch. You may be familiar with the structure of a Court Martial, a descendant of Nationalist court proceedings. All Armed Services personnel are guaranteed a Court Martial for offenses. It is not something I am fond of. Court Proceedings, while intellectually stimulating, are an outgrowth of the Nationalist proclivity towards 'legalism' and extensive legal codes. In many ways, courts were simply a way for the Ownership-Class to create rules for the laboring class and not themselves, with a lot of pomp and ceremony to create the illusion of fairness. The Military's reactionary maintenance of the Court Martial fills a similar purpose, if you would permit me that disrespect.

Now, to wrap this up, let us touch on Helheim, Triton and Abaddon, Mercury. The two largest prison colonies in Sol. Both are major industrial sectors for Sol - with Abaddon being the headquarters of the Ansible reconstruction program through Coding Labor and Helheim being a center for material extraction in the Oort Cloud. Your ASO instructor will probably go into depth with how the prisoners are allowed to self-organize under GenComp observation, but I'm more interested in the success stories. I've met many people who, after a trip to the Innermost or Outermost, returned with the zeal of a convert. Unification Theory is, when understood, easy to get motivated for.

Security Forces deal with the internal stability of the Regime, and are, most people forget, the largest armed body in Sol. I understand that the Armed Forces are massively more powerful on a man-to-man ratio, however the numbers count, as does the stability they instil in the Solar Unification Regime.

Luna and Unity. Have a good day.

 

[Furrybacon]

Welcome back to homeroom cadets, and to Farah El-Masry the IIIrd's extended complaints hour.

It has come to my attention that most of you aren't as well travelled as I am. Well, Commander El-Masry has been from the Innermost to the Outermost and let me tell you, Cadets, I know all about them. So today I am going to talk, and you have no choice but to listen to my lengthy spiel on the soul of Sol.

Speaking of, Sol.

Helios. Taiyō, Araw. Suno. Whatever you call it. Sol is the center of our universe, in terms of gravity. Everything orbits around Sol. Its beautiful if you ever make it out there, but you likely won't. While I understand the Central Committee is looking at doing some sort of Dyson Swarm but unless you are on the project you probably won't get to go there. As a Bulkhead, I do find some interest in navigating the Sun's Active Lagrange Points, due to its superheavy relative gravity it makes the math a little more interesting, but not difficult. Just don't forget to add a divider of three Hrothgar's Principles of Gravitic Splice Mechanics and you won't wind up adding mass to the center of the Solar System.

Stepping inwards, we have Mercury, the first real human - ha - habitation in Sol. Mercury is pretty much a penal colony, one dedicated to the reconstruction of the Ansible. I do a lot of computer coding in my spare time and Coding Mines sounds spooky - except I am never going to offend the sensibilities of the State. Mercury is tidally locked, and most everyone lives on the darkside in tunnels. The majority of the population are penals, hence my amusement, but there is also a good concentration of those Pattern Freaks and a post-incarceral population worth the title I suppose.

Leaving Mercurial Orbit, we will touch on the Oniellian population. These are the folks who live on any kind of spacial habitat outside of the immediate orbital zone of a world - the lagrange points typically. They build up and around active lagrange points to service spaceships and die horribly if any kind of fighting kicks off. I like Oniellians. They live in clean stations, never break the rules, and are fittingly demure to Regime seniors. Oniellians exist in small numbers spread across Sol - a shadow of what they once were under the pre-anarchy era. Something like two in seven humans were Oniellians before the Anarchy, and then they were basically extinct within the year. Their habitats are still, probably, the nicest places in Sol to live. Lots of open spaces, good amenities, only a few thousand people per kilometer. Really beautiful. Once I become the Xth, or if the Fleet makes me downprocess sooner, I would like to requisition a permanent station on one of these. You can find Oniellian populations across Sol, at every active Legrange point, so I will not mention them again.

Stepping outwards, we reach the clouds and cloudheads of Venus. Center of the Viscount movement and a frustratingly beautiful den of the weirdest chucklepunks you have ever met. Venus was inhabited before the Anarchy, but interestingly never terraformed. Something about the panache of flying cities spoke, honestly still speaks, to people. These flying cities - Aeropoli, had to be nearly totally reconstructed after the Anarchy, at great investment from the Central Committee. Even before Case Green, the Aeropoli were starting to collapse from sheer lack of maintenance by the old National System, whole cities tumbling out of the sky into the crushing winds of Venus while anyone not high enough up the National System to get off on their own had to be evacuated by volunteers as the whole Aeropoli careened into oblivion. It was one of the three big Retreats, actually, when the nations lopped off whole arms of the Solar System in order to maintain the lifestyles and hegemony of their elites. First Cronian, then Jovian, and finally Venusian Retreats - though I understand the History-understanders have some compunction about how total the retreats were - see Titan but we will get there - and some even claim a Martian Retreat was due on the cards.

Anyhow, Venus is a beautiful world. I loved navigating the clouds in my Outrider, defying God and Gravity so my little warship could dart through the winds of an ancient love goddess. The new Aeropoli reminds me a lot of ships, a perfectly ordered and hierarchical architecture program designed to physically replicate the Mandate in habitation. Aphrodite City in particular is gorgeous. It is fine art without being gaudy, efficient without sacrificing panache, and the windsail around it was always the best. Unfortunately it is the opposite side of the world from the Naval Station on Astarte, so I haven't spent as much time there as I would have liked too. It is a neat idea. Shame about the Viscounts, though.

And now we reach ELOR, the Earth Lunar Orbital Region. First stop, Luna. Centuries ago, some damn fool tried to terraform Luna, but all that did was turn it from a sea of grey dust to a sea of golden sand. The names Tranquility and Serenity still fit, which is nice enough. Luna was Man's first step into the stars, it was once the graveyard of the old UN, and countenance to whatever realism that Colonel Daikun posits, I choose to believe that the UN could have liberated Sol from the Nations, and that it was pure misfortune and happenstance that the task had to fall to us. Fittingly then, Luna is now the heart and namesake of our Survival Mandate. All the megacities on Luna are important, but I'll draw attention to two of them - Armstrong and, of course, Ozymandias. Armstrong is the old Capital of Luna, where the UN was felled and the Mandate was declared. It is a massive fortress now, and frankly I kind of want to see someone attack it. If there ever was a challenge to the futility of fixed defenses, it is Armstrong, and I want to see it live up to that.

North of Armstrong, along a long highway, lies the City of Ozymandias, the Capital of Sol and the seat of power of the Mandate. Its risen walls loom over the dune sea, while Behemoth tanks patrol its battlements. It is a city of golden grace. It is gaudy, there is no way around that, but what is power without a little bit of poise?

Luna, of course, is not the homeworld of humanity. That's Earth. A real tragedy of a world. The Nations turbofucked its climate so much the repair estimates are measured in archeological epochs. The teeming hundreds of billions, the majority of surviving humanity, cling together either in colossal megacities you can see from orbit or in small nomadic bands trying to avoid the words of the radiological weather. It is a dirty world, a spent world, one which…I do not think it is worth the effort, honestly. I think we should relocate the entire terran population offworld, either into a rebuilt Oniellian sphere or the other colonies. Hells, replace the Martian populace with the Earth one and solve two problems with one shell. Even if we manage to salvage Earth, what would be the point of it?

By sheer volume of people, Earth has several important cities, but I think I can deliver the best vibe by describing the damned city of Brittany. Some damn full a millenia ago when the ice was melting decided to dam this place called the 'English Channel'. On either side of the city, two hundred meter walls several kilometers thick hold back the waters of the oceans from drowning a full percent of the human population who live beneath the sea level in a rickety and humming temple to our ancestral leader's complete fucking uselessness. It would make more sense to relocate the population than to maintain the Walls.

Though if you want really pointless, we will go to Mars. Once the red world, colossal fuck ups in the terraformation process have resulted in a standard negative 30 temperature, centuries long ashen snowstorms, and the discontented winter that just will not shut the fuck up. Between the Rebels and the Rail Pirates it really is an extended combat deployment, and it is not like Martians culturally are worth saving. I mean really you would think were back in the National epoch with how much they refuse to respect pronouns - and I do not give a shit how much of a "linguistic quirk" it is. Civilized people should speak a civilized language, but therein lies the problem with Martians. Only real thing to note as a matter of Naval policy is that thanks to the Ashen Ice Storms, filled with latent terraforming gunk, dropping naval artillery on Mars is a pain in the arse, and trying to fly an Outrider through the storms is worse. You have to clean that gunk off by hand or it will eat your sensors.

One step out, we get to the Belt. Belters and Spacians differ from the Oniellians culturally, and have more in common with each other than the latter, so they get a different space. Belters live in the Belt, obviously, doing a lot of menial mining stuff and returning to Ceres or Vesta mainly. Ceres is an ugly little gunk ball - another failed terraforming experiment. Who thought terraforming an asteroid was a good idea beats me. Colossal moron. But that gunk did help Ceres survive the Anarchy though sheer mass, so I suppose they got something right by accident. Vesta wasn't so lucky, a Nuclear strike in…I want to say XX20, split the sucker clean in half. The Regime decided to reattach the parts to show off its engineering prowess, which has some value I suppose, but the Vestan Neck creaks when I walk on it. Belters make for good Starhands, and while they aren't as clean and demure as Oniellians, they are more aggressive and I can trust them to get in the thick of it with an Engine. They need a good disciplinarian to keep in line, though, which is why you should never settle for anything less than Jovian stock for Outrider posts. That said, and this will be controversial from someone raised in the Callisto Parade, I really like their tradition of wall rugs for spaceships. It is very rustic and some of that stitchwork is truly immaculate

Spacians, nomads who live in the last privately owned spaceships in Sol - we are working on that - are closer in temperament to Belters but are just fucking insane. Most of them still left are either Hostie fundamentalists or simple sucker pirates. I have earned all three of my denominators - remember I am Farah El-Masry the IIIrd - going up against Spacian Pirates. Two from Eden Rolo, actually. I can talk about that another day.

Out from the belt, we get the Galilean Moons of Jupiter, or Jove, if you want. The leading two are Ganymede and Callisto, but all are inhabited to some extent. I am Callistani, which is the traditional SpaceForces heartland of Sol. It is a miserable world of endless grey rock cliff faces where chemical rain and irradiated water crashes upon ancient pre-anarchy military posts while Callistani brood in heavy cloaks and air masks. It is home. Ganymede, meanwhile, is a swampy, gunky and uncomfortably hot and moist hellscape that Lobsterbacks enjoy for some reason. Both Callisto and Ganymede saw massive military buildup before the Jovian retreat, and the bones of that form the basis of culture and existence in the Final Century. Io and Europa were not as built up, and are considerably less inhabited. Hanging around Jove is the Parvasol Mirror network, which is what keeps the moons warm enough to be habitable.

Saturn is next. Of note here are Titan and Rhea. Titan is, of course, the home of the Interior Host, a post-godbomb irradiate wasteland which you still cannot really believe was once the only functional terraforming program that ever happened. Most Hosties live along the equator, and anyone in the hinterlands can be assumed to be a fundamentalist rebel. If it wasn't Rhea, I would ask why we would not just let the Host have Titan to die on.

Rhea. The hope of ages. Using terraforming experts from the Host and combined might of all Sol, the Central Committee has endeavored to break the Terraforming Curse by making the moon of Rhea a terraformed gaian world. I cannot say that I do not share in that hope. Even a bulkhead like me really really wants to see this work.

Uranus, or 'the Uhe' in common parlance - do not ask me why, it predates Solar Common. Is mostly uninhabited. A few outposts and naval posts to patrol for Pirates and comb through the many graves of those who could not or would not depart from the Outer System during the Cronian Retreat. It is a stop on the map before Neptune and its Penal Colony. Moving on.

Neptune is the edge of civilization, in the words of an ancient Star-farer during the High Solar Age "Nothing left beyond."Much like Mercury, it is the site of the Helheim Penal Complex, a massive industrial gulag where offenders of the Mandate get to rethink their decisions. It is also the center for the Odysseus Project, the fools still trying to escape Sol, and this new branch of the Exaltation called the Neptunian Orthodoxy or something.

Beyond the bounds of Solar Civilization, there is Pluto, first of the dwarf planets and considered the 'Gate' to the Oort cloud, though there are many Geostellar issues with that descriptor. I have been to Pluto, I was there as part of the ten year anniversary of returning to it. We planted another flag and left. There used to be some humans out here, and in the Oort Cloud, but they all froze to death during the Cronian Retreat.

In the fleet, every once in a while we get called to clear an old Outer-System habitat that died generally before the Anarchy. Outrider Skips in particular. There are a bunch of vulgar names for them, but moving through frozen colonial hopes to find the frosted corpses of people who once believed in a brighter future only to be left to die far from home, is really sombering.

And that is Sol. The totality of our existence, The complete spread of Humankind. The complete setting of our Final Century.

Cadets! At the top of the hour you will be dismissed. Standby.

- Pos, Zir!

Dismissed.

 

[DecaffeinatedOwl]

Stepping inwards, we have Mercury, the first real human - ha - habitation in Sol. Mercury is pretty much a penal colony, one dedicated to the reconstruction of the Ansible. I do a lot of computer coding in my spare time and Coding Mines sounds spooky - except I am never going to offend the sensibilities of the State. Mercury is tidally locked, and most everyone lives on the darkside in tunnels. The majority of the population are penals, hence my amusement, but there is also a good concentration of those Pattern Freaks and a post-incarceral population worth the title I suppose.

Click to shrink...

I hate to um actually a fairly compelling setting, but Mercury is not simply tidally locked the way people think--it rotates about its axis three times every two orbits, so everything gets the Shake N' Bake treatment eventually.

Apparently something about the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit makes that the stable point of the system and not a 1:1 ratio like the Earth-Luna system.

 

[Furrybacon]

I hate to um actually a fairly compelling setting, but Mercury is not simply tidally locked the way people think--it rotates about its axis three times every two orbits, so everything gets the Shake N' Bake treatment eventually.

Apparently something about the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit makes that the stable point of the system and not a 1:1 ratio like the Earth-Luna system.

Click to shrink...

ope. I'd thought about a last second retcon to have the Anarchy cause mercury to be tidally locked but that might be a bit to far. i'll edit it when i get around to it. I am glad you find it compelling though!

 

[DecaffeinatedOwl]

ope. I'd thought about a last second retcon to have the Anarchy cause mercury to be tidally locked but that might be a bit to far. i'll edit it when i get around to it. I am glad you find it compelling though!

Click to shrink...

Do you take suggestions?

 

[Furrybacon]

Do you take suggestions?

Click to shrink...

I'm always happy to hear people out at least, worldbuilding is often improved by collaboration. What did you have in mind?

 

[DecaffeinatedOwl]

I'm always happy to hear people out at least, worldbuilding is often improved by collaboration. What did you have in mind?

Click to shrink...

If you need a stationary location for the Code Mines, there are a number of craters on Mercury's south and north pole whose interiors are in permanent shadow, and remain cool enough to retain water ice. While that water ice was probably mined out under the National system to support space habitat construction, the craters themselves should still be about as livable as the moon.

There's also the classic standby of having the Coding Mines be cities rolling around on treads or rails racing the terminator, although personally I don't think it's particularly practical.

 

[Furrybacon]

If you need a stationary location for the Code Mines, there are a number of craters on Mercury's south and north pole whose interiors are in permanent shadow, and remain cool enough to retain water ice. While that water ice was probably mined out under the National system to support space habitat construction, the craters themselves should still be about as livable as the moon.

There's also the classic standby of having the Coding Mines be cities rolling around on treads or rails racing the terminator, although personally I don't think it's particularly practical.

Click to shrink...

I'll think about this. The craters would be simplest, but one of the things I want to emphasize with the a Ansible is that it was *weird*. I'd put the Ansible project on Mercury initially because it was on the face counter intuitive to have such a ridiculously advanced computing device so close to heat. And then my players came up with good reasons for it to be on Mercury (power, still gets low temps) so the weirdness kinda fell by the wayside. Having moving Coding mines chasing the heat would be both hellish and strange...hmmm. I'll rule on it later

 

[Furrybacon]

Come come. Sit down.

There is no hate like Lunar Love, my neighbours. With one hand, they will feed you, clothe you, medicate you, teach you, and with the other, they will kill you. If you resist, they will call you ungrateful. If you bare it, they will call you deserving. In both, they will snarl their teeth and call you Munger. You will either be the speck on their boot, or the blood in their hands, and nothing else. Do not reciprocate that kind of love..

At risk of overstepping myself as your Layman, as your City-Speaker, I must go beyond the walls of our neighbourhood for a second. I must talk of my time as a Heretic, one who left the city in the name of the Regime. When I was what the state calls an Occupational Security Enforcer, a Securitrooper if you will. I worked its carbon armor, I did its evil acts, and I did seek forgiveness from Sacred City-God Nuhan. To understand the hands around your throat, I must show you the necks that it crushes upon.

In the first term of my service, I was sent to the Winter Wastes of Mars, I was. Imagine an endless expanse of nothing, but howling winds and white ice falling from a black sky. If you can imagine a sky at all. We are so deep underground here in Nuhan. I was sent their first, because Luna knew I would find them contemptible. They forsake the Masse, they worship masculinity, they openly yearn that we starve for their feast. My heart hardened against their national program, and soon my hand was around their neck in a reflection of the one clenched to mine from Luna. The knife in my jugular hurt less when I could stick knives into Martians. And at the moment that thought consumed my mind, the Unity Committee knew they had me as their slave.

In my second term, I was sent to the Transkansas region, to wrest my hands around those who we call Groundlings. Those who skitter between the great cities in heresy and decadence, or so the Regime would let you believe. True, they are beholden to their Old Gods, but the state has no interest in where their prayers go. They do not conform, and so are accused of treachery and rebellion, presumed criminal until such point as they concede into the means of their control. I had struck them with my baton for fun, to the smile of my commanders. Luna had thought its work complete, and truthfully, it nearly was. I was so lost.

In the third term, I was called to far Titan, to brutalize the Armored Braves of the Host. By then my heart was black, and I could no longer recall the face of my City. The Host fought bravely, believing in their God/dess and proclaiming them even as they were cut down by gunline and Iron. As I watched my fake comrades suffer, I had noticed that I did not suffer, in fact I celebrated. I was so lost that I wanted to die for Luna. Die for a Mandate that gives me morsels and accepts my devotion. Die for a tyrant that finds contempt in my very existence. Die as a fool for the CDSU.

But then I met a girl. She was not too different from the young Hardingers' daughter - yes, you Arbell. I never saw the girl's face, the Host's armored suits prevented them, but even in the darkest depths of my soul I could see the little joys of a little child held true in spite of a world what despises them just in how she skipped through occupied streets before military checkpoints. But my Sergeant had a quota, and that girl paid the price. Something about the tenor of her cries, they were a spark in the dark. When we shot her parents down, I pulled the trigger last. When I go before the City-God, I will pay for my sins on that day, and I will offer no claim in my defense. It was my lowest day.

A bitter darkness took my soul, and I could not escape it. I was alone amongst and abyss of murderous and petty humans who wore the sale of their immortal person like a badge of honor. So I tried to emulate them. I took my bayonet in the fourth term to the throats of fools it was easy to despise. The Nationless Democrats. They dream a fool's dream, they propose that we can take the National System out of its system of Government. That we can have Freedom without Starvation. That justice is just. And I…I would like to believe them. They could have seen what I did not, what I still can't, and perhaps if I were a stronger men their words would have turned me before my hands were stained with even more blood. But I chose violence, and tried and failed time and time again to stain myself like the Lunars who command me. But I couldn't. I pulled the trigger last, and the Regime never let me forget. But perhaps I might thank them for it.

It wasn't not until I met the Spacians in my fifth term that I began my path to return. The Spacians, many held to the Outer God/dess, but as many held true to the City-Gods at the same time. It is strange to those only used to the crowds, to billions upon billions, but Concentration isn't about numbers - it's about proximity in our very soul. There are so few people on a spaceship, I was often uncomfortable by how open space was, but when there are a hundred million miles - a thousand hundred neighbourhood cordons between you and another concentration of humankind, a collection of forty souls is just as powerful as forty billion. I found the gods there, again. And I wept. They were some of what I were told were Pirates. Really just a concentration of humans trying to survive where humans were never meant too. The state put a death sentence on their head for the crime of surviving. In a survival regime, no less! I couldn't save them, but I could avenge them and I'll leave it like that. But I was spared. They could see I had found the City-Gods again, and they knew they could trust me. It took me four more years to slowly, painfully, crawl my way back to our City, to our neighbourhood, to redeem myself from sin and revel in the zeal of our city god in the way only a prodigal son can.

You trust me as your true layman. As your connection to the City Gods. You're all so pure. So innocent. When I spoke of the vastness of space or the wastes of Mars, you could not comprehend it. You have never seen a space larger than the factory of your laboring. It's a mighty big factory, but it's not the world. Across Sol, the suffering you endure so nobly empowers the suffering of others, in one grand cycle of discrimination that the Lunars call Unity. It isn't unity. This is unity. This freedom. This concentration. This Divine Masse. Go about your days, but remember the wise words of a Layman now martyred. 'Those above will never understand what we have.'

We have the City. We have each other. We have everything we could possibly need. And Luna gives us none of that.

 

[Furrybacon]

Cadets!

Good morning! Today we will be exploring the theoretical motivations and undertones of the Allowance System, and justifying its current condition. The Allowance system, naturally, is the basis of material dispersal under the Regime. It governs your allotment of clothes, of food, of consumer materials and housing. The State commands all, the Allowance is what you are allotted. You all grew up in it. You've all seen it. It is the obligation to your survival, delivered weekly by the largest social welfare network in human history, the endless labor of tens of billions determined to abolish death through the power of spreadsheets and recognition of the sole purpose of the State. Survival. Now you learn why.

The allowance system of our regime is, it has to be admitted, both a miracle of state logistics and a weight of material reality. In order to feed, to clothe, to medicate, to educate, to employ, to protect the entire human population every day, without an Ansible, it requires a fundamentally, almost comically, large and thorough logistical system. But it cannot be emphasized enough - the National epoch had a period of centuries where this sort of system was held back not by material realities, but by political will. I was alive when the Ansible fell. If the National Elite had simply surrendered their control to the Ansible, all of the death that we endured could have been avoided. They never would, of course. The National Elite would rather extinction before recognizing the truth of Unity Theory. The material and ideological incentives of their worldview made it unthinkable. Instead, hundreds of thousands of trillions suffered. Still suffer. Provisionary officers run themselves to the grave ensuring that everyone is given the bare minimum, because the bare minimum is all we are left with. The people of Sol will never starve, but they will never be full. Not until we are able to rebuild what our ancestors lost.

Before we go any further, I am obligated as a former Officer in the Unification Police and as a zealous traveller in Unification theorem, to warn you. I have no doubt that you are all good students and good Mandators. That you are all dedicated to the Lunar Regime. In many ways, I deeply envy your zeal, built on trust and without the suffering that I had to endure. To that end, I take a great deal of care in regards to your political wellness, and it pains me that I have to come so close to damaging it so that you can understand the Regime you serve. If at any point you feel as if what you are about to learn has created some sort of doubt in your mind, that is normal, and more importantly, it is treatable. Please come to me with any fears, you will not be thought of as lesser. You are being introduced to powerful memetic tools which have scared humankind for millenia. You are equipped to, as a community of Cadets, withstand these lies and demonstrate to articulated political reasoning the Virtues of the Mandate. Nonetheless, I am prepared and equipped to sacrifice any and all of my time, at any time of day, to heal your political scars, no matter how small or how gaping. The National Epoch could only have lasted so long with tools of immense memetic power, tools that require a community to not only mindlessly reject, but to categorically disprove.

I give you this warning because we have to talk about the fundamental lie of the National System. The base motivator. The root and inventor of all greed. The explanation for the mechanism behind the private ownership of resources. To justify Allowance, we must explain Wealth.

Now, this class will likely be the first time you are introduced to the concept of Earnings. Wages. Income. Sale. The SEED and the Unity Police has carefully curtailed the very language you speak to make sure that you never come into contact with the idea that your labor is a commodity. It is difficult to comprehend the scale of this undertaking. We are removing words and concepts from the human language that predate written records.The Nationals believed that their concepts of wealth were so universal that they were, in fact, biological. And in a sense, they were. They relied on an exploitation of primitive evolutionary psychology to create the systems for an exploitative and repetitive race for private control. But they were not innately biological compulsions, and like a surgeon against cancer, it can be removed through medical processes.

You are being introduced to the concept now because you have twenty years of ideological inoculation to protect you from the greatest memetic tool of the Nationalist enemy. You are in the company of a trained political health worker. You are among people and a regime who love you, and can reinforce your conditioning against the tools of the enemy.

So let us talk about Wealth, and then earnings.

Wealth is simply a measure of one's personal ownership, that is, private ownership, of the material assets of a society. It can be passed on through trade or inherited as if some archaic preindustrial trinket. Under the National System, Wealth was the goal, the divider of class, and a virtue in and of itself. But it would not do to simply have wealth. To possess wealth is a justification for many things except its sheer existence, so to maintain the noose around the neck of Sol, Wealth had to be something which was both deserved by its owner and attainable through some legitimate form of action, something that anyone could attain on their own, with a implicit disdain for whomever, that whomever being 99 percent of the human population, who could not climb above the systems designed to keep them down and the numbers of the elite exclusive. "Meritocracy", "Democracy" and "Rights" were all invented to justify the ownership of wealth, but it was Earnings which created the lie that anyone could attain it.

The Nationalists would tell you that your labor is a commodity. A tradable asset. One that can be exchanged for a share of private resources at a negotiable rate commensurate with your skills, your education, your experience, and your risk. What you receive for your labor is called an 'earning'. Your Earnings would determine your wealth, and therefore, your position in society.

Of course, this is fundamentally untrue. Your labor is an obligation. An infinitive responsibility to your fellow human, and that they have to you. The Mandate of Luna is that responsibility put into material motion. The sole purpose of the state is survival, and to that end we all have a place in sailing the ship of species in one, grand, unified mission, and everyone on that ship will be accommodated.

But we must reverse. To believe in the lie that your labor is a commodity unlocks many other beliefs. It believes you to be an island, capable of acting on your own independent of all that exists before and around you. It believes you to be a free agent, the sole responsible figure for your own material conditions and circumstances. It believes you to be ennobled not by your connection to others, but your separation from them, and from the consequences of their existence. These are necessary beliefs to justify the idea of labor as a commodity. In a circular logic, the idea of commoditized labor and self sufficiency combine to create an atomized and easily manipulated slave beholden to the ownership class. Because all these things are wrong.

No human is an island. There is no such thing as a free agent. And you do not need to join in Masse to know that humanity is defined by our connection to one another. The actions of an Incarcerated laborer on Mercury will affect the life of a child on Titan three centuries later. Every action you take ripples out towards infinity, and every action you are able to make is the result of billions of trillions of decisions across all of humantime. That is what makes our labor obligate. That is the calculus of unification theory. Not just that humanity can only survive under a single government, but that humanity must unify the ripples each of us leave in the waves of time that they secure the survival and welfare of our species. Those ripples, spreading out in every time and direction, create the obligations that form the basis of Unity government, and particularly, the allowance system.

Now, under the National system which justified Wealth, there did exist a kind of abrogated obligation system, as even the National Elite recognized it was true in some capacity. They called them 'Rights'.They were very high minded foppery, but they faltered upon review. To justify the National System, rights had to be defined in such a way as to excise them from your obligations towards the species. Rights were defined from high concepts of liberality, either from a divine creator or as a natural extension of living, but they were focused on the individual and removed them from the network of humankind. Consider two examples, a right to healthcare and a right to free expression. Under the unification theorem, we would recognize the first as an Abrogated right and the second as an abstracted right. Under the National dynamic, an Aborgated right is an obligation which has been excised from human unity for the purposes of justification. Aborgated rights ran contrary to the trail of national political development, and so were often the first rolled back as expansion halted and self cannibalization started. Abstract rights draw from high concept expressions of the ideological dressing applied to national atomization. If every human is an island, then for a Nationalist it would naturally follow that every human is a god of their own existence, and thereby is possessed of certain powers. In this case, the "right" to express themselves in any capacity, and therein the responsibility to use that right to affect their own material conditions. Abstract rights, because they were abstract and thereby fictional, were the easiest to violate but the hardest to remove. Nations do not believe in rights, and the elites especially, but nationalist rebels will still cite abstracted rights as justifications for their political sickness, and it's an effective tool. Rights as a concept are intoxicating. But they are not real, they are fundamentally fake, and they are dangerous. It cost my husband and my daughter their lives to learn that lesson.

You know better. You were taught for decades that our obligations to each other as humans are what matters. And everyday, you are drilled in this by the Allowance System.

The Allowance system is obligation put to material reality. It establishes the moral baseline of providence to all of Sol, and defines the necessities of service differentials. Allowance is what the state has determined that you are allowed to have. There are no possessions. Not of resources, not of land, not of infrastructure and not of the means of production. There are personal effects, items too small to be in the vision of the State, but I and many others do not personally engage in that practice. It is often portrayed as a ladder. Prognostics Sub-Privates - the adult unemployed not seeking education - at the bottom, moving up through age, service, duty, rank, and reward. Survival is the function of the state, so everyone is guaranteed those nessecities required for that task. That means enough calories, enough hydration, enough medication, enough education, and enough political wellness to survive. For everyone to survive. And then additions the further you go along. The Armed Services tend to enjoy the most comprehensive allowance, particularly its officers, but there's a significant degree of tailoring for roles. Deskhands in the Diagnostics do not need the high protein drug cocktail contained in M3A1. Conversely, Lobsterbacks don't really go for Reehydrates.

When we started the Allowance System, it underestimated just how much planning could accommodate things. In Surgery, in particular. But it was always about math. You can create an aggregate on labor accident rates, locational toxin data, radioactivity trends, genetic markers, statistical probabilities and then an extra pulmonary filter implant per birth report. Same with education, food production, housing allotment, dress assortment, and political wellness planning. I always struggled with math, and it remains a great irony to me that so much of the universe, so much of existence, is really just math. And material reality.

There are no other ways to cut it. Resources are finite, but the timeline is infinite. Sacrifices have to be made, and there are two ways to interpret shortage through the Allowance, particularly in the hierarchy. The parlance is 'levelers' and 'rankers', and it is really all part of the wider divide on optimism or pessimism. Rankers, generally Jovians, enforce a stricter and widening allowance as one moves up the ranks of the Regime. Those of more Service, will be served more. Its justification is that, unfortunately, material realities favor by requiring resource triage and favoring those who are the most on program. Materially, rankers are correct. But as a Leveller, I am compelled to point out that material realities may yet change. Levellers want to see a…well leveling out of the Allowance Hierarchy. Not equal, mind, service for those who serve most, but the point is to widen allowance beyond subsistence, and to do so as soon as materially possible, and not to constrain it after resource hurdles are overcome.

I have confidence in those learned Compats who tell me that one day we may overcome the realities of our material existence. I am particularly intrigued by the Mote Program, over in Jove. If DADEL really is able to create a mote of infinitive energy, even if it only lasts one mote at a time then we would be able to fabricate anything. We would stop worrying about how to make the resources of Sol last until the end of time, and instead wonder how we could stretch time to meet the end of our resources.

The Mandate demands the Abolition of Hunger, Ignorance, and Plague. The Mandate obligates survival. Earnings obligate the superiority of a hereditary class of private owners. But the Unity Regime was not the first time this was realized.

Before Case Green, I was one of those. I fought the enforcers of the National System in the streets under the long decrepit political doctrines of the Social Question. I withstood their batons, their hunger, the chase of base survival that was the basis of their power, and I bear the scars of that. I had arrest orders in three celestial bodies, seven nations, and multiple dedicated files. I fought for the delusion of a Democracy without Nations, and I got nowhere. None of my comrades did either. For millennia, those like me of every sex and creed withstood the Nations, and tried as we might, barbarism, not revolutionism, ruled the day. Ruled all of Sol. Ruled the lives of my mother to hunger, my spouse to plague, and my daughter to the destruction of the greatest technological marvel in history. Ruled them to death, and no action I took ever changed that for them, or for anyone else.

It is my sincere belief and the Regime Narrative that this was simply because I was fighting the wrong revolution. But I learned.

The Social Question was the precipitator of the theory of Unity. It was an attempt to solve the self-evident flaws of the National System within its confines. It was focused more on the question of economics or the identity of the oppressed, creating theories on the character of the laboring class rather than abolishing the class or challenging what the purpose of existence was. A lot of data was taken up on the focus of the "people" as a political organism to which states were bound to the consent of, balderdash. There is no such thing as consent of the Governed. Rights are falsehoods. Democracy and Earnings are both symptoms of Nationalism.

Across the old Epoch these groups waxed and waned across time, rising to prominence in high watermarks of instability but were nearly always suppressed or subsumed by the memetics of the National Epoch. Infighting, false purity, and sheer material powerlessness means that no matter how much strength they gained, they would fail. They failed because their political theories were incomplete and uninsulated, compared to our Unitarian system. These were nonetheless necessary observations on the development of Unity Theory, but they were all fundamentally incorrect. Fundamentally incapable of doing what had to be done. Those which clung, those who still cling to them had to be put behind the path of Unity and Survival. They are politically unwell, and I spent nearly thirty years treating that sickness. Often times, the sickness was terminal, which means I killed them. I did this to protect you. I ask for no thanks, except your tireless service to the Regime which destroyed what I Hated - what brought Humankind back from the brink.

We're running out of time, so instead of in class analysis, I will wrap up in a general fashion and you will write analysis, brief analysis, as take home work.

Allowance is the answer to Earnings. To the private accumulation of resources in the system of Capital Exploitation under the National Epoch. It is the sealant to the memetic powers of ideas of one's own godhood. Earnings extrapolate labor into a commodity with the lie that your work will be enough to change your material conditions independent of any contributions of others or towards the sole legitimate goal of any government, survival. Allowance is what you are allowed.

Unity before Extinction. Glory to the Mandate.