[Osu.]
[This is a little exercise in world-building I've been working on recently,
combining a large number of science fiction series into a single, unified
continuity. I've shown it to some of you already; however, I've added a bit
since then.]
[Alert readers may note that certain elements appear rather similar to those
discussed in stories I've already related. Kudos to the alert, and a warning:
not all will be as you may expect. Which is itself as you *should* expect.]
[Dedicated, in loving memory, to one of the few authors whose most famous
universe won't be borrowed to create this; to Gordon R. Dickson.]
Prelude to Federation
by C. Richard Davies
Part One: 2001-2041
Historians of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries were as much
prisoners of their own frames of reference as any before or after them. Just as
earlier historians blithely used "the Hundred Years War" to name the series of
otherwise nameless conficts between the kingdoms of England and France fought
from 1337 to 1453, their spiritual descendants spoke of World War III as though
it were fought from the beginning of open hostilities in April of 2001 until
the final use of nuclear weaponry in July of 2078. This was not the case,
although one can easily understand the reasons for such simplifications. To
describe every conflict fought between the great powers of that period would
consume millions of data units.
At the outset, there were two primary factions whose conflicts began the
war. On the one hand was the United States of America and its allies in the
Second North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Neo-NATO), later termed the Anglo-
Russo-American Alliance. On the other hand was the People's Republic of China
and its client states, usually termed the Eastern Coalition. However, this
faction would subsequently and more accurately be known as the Chinese
Hegemony.
Muddying the waters of the conflict from its early stages onward were
several of the most powerful multinational corporations of the day, of which
General Nippon Orbital Manufacturing (Genom) was perhaps the most infamous.
Because of the Eastern Coalition's dedication to the principles of
revolutionary
communism, one would have expected these "megacorps" to have been aligned with
Neo-NATO. In fact, most of them saw the war as an opportunity to inhibit the
ability of governments to interfere in their affairs, while also enriching
themselves, and sought to prolong it for as long as possible by playing both
sides against each other.
For example, during the Polar War (2029-2036) Genom sold arms to the
Eastern Coalition and to their Neo-NATO adversaries. As Genom held a monopoly
on certain technologies essential for successful warmaking in this period, it
is
quite plain to see why they became very wealthy, very quickly. It is equally
obvious why Genom's Chairman, Quincy Rosenkreuz (1962?-2041?) desired to avoid
the governmental interference which had shattered the similar monopoly created
by Microsoft President Bill Gates. [1]
A fourth factor in this complex pattern was the United Nations -- or, to
be
completely accurate, the New United Nations. Following the first period of open
hostilities between Neo-NATO and the Eastern Coalition (resumed Korean
War, 2002-2004) the organization underwent a number of major reforms. Many
nations outside of the Neo-NATO and ECON axes had been severely shaken by the
possibility that one of the superpowers might use nuclear weapons to resolve
the conflict. As several of these nations (Canada, France, Spain and Japan
among them) had representatives on the U.N. Security Council, while the United
States and China were boycotting it, they were able to make certain amendments
to the U.N. constitution.
The primary change was one of attitude. While the primary mandate of the
United Nations was "peace-making", they were only allowed to assemble military
forces for their secondary mandate, "peace-keeping". Under the amended
constitution, the U.N. could establish forces to create stable conditions if
the Security Council felt it necessary. [2] Predictably, this alienated both
the governments of the United States and China, as well as those of the United
Kingdom and Russia (whose representatives had voted against the proposal).
Thus, while the "new and improved" United Nations now had the authority to put
a peacemaking force into the field, the resources on which it could draw to
create and outfit that force had been severely circumscribed. It is believed
that awareness of this "paper tiger" state of affairs saved the New United
Nations from complete abandonment by its alienated members, and it's probable
that affairs might have reverted to their status quo except for an
unpredictable
chain of events.
In 2007, scientists working for Harriman Enterprises developed an
effective, sustainable fusion process. However, they soon determined that the
reaction was potentially unstable, requiring constant attention to prevent it
from going out of control with all the force of a fusion weapon. Computer
safeguards were demonstrated to be only partially effective for any Earth-based
fusion reactor. But in a startling move, Delos D. Harriman (1949-2037)
sponsored
an initiative to move his company's main fusion reactor, which also served as a
plant to manufacture the fusion process' catalysts, into orbit. There, it could
be safely monitored by computer, only requiring human workers to transport the
catalysts back to Earth by shuttlecraft.
Based on his later life, Delos Harriman seems to have had an obsession
with
space travel. [3] With public attention focused on the creation of the new
power satellite, he convinced several of his colleages to join him in forming a
Space Development Corporation (sometimes called Spaceways, Inc.) to exploit the
orbital territories. The New United Nations lent the corporation added
legitimacy by chartering Spaceways to act as a "park service" for those
territories ... a charter which proved grimly ironic when the power satellite
exploded.
The cause of the explosion which consumed satellite, factory and the
shuttle _Charon_ and all its crew, was never conclusively established, although
the investigators apparently found it greatly significant that the shuttle had
been powered by the fusion process. Harriman Enterprises escaped financial ruin
through an ingenious strategy: Spaceways became the Space Development Public
Corporation, traded on the stock market, while at the same time the corporation
organized the first manned mission to the moon in forty years. The _Pioneer_
mission was even more of a publicity stunt than the previous moon missions had
been; Harriman used every trick in the book, and invented a few new ones, to
sell the moon, and space travel in general, to the public. [4]
The scheme worked. Numerous corporations, from IT&T to Stark-Fujikawa,
licensed SDPC's launch facilities in order to begin developing manned orbital
stations, and the corporation's satellite repair squad soon found itself
working
overtime. A new space race -- a corporate space race -- had begun, and the
"park
service" realized that one of its duties had to involve policing the high
frontier as well. At the same time, the New United Nations abruptly realized
that it now had half the equation for their "peace-making" force.
Two years after the _Pioneer_ mission, the New United Nations unveilled
its
Strategic Space Defense Force -- an international militia chartered to enforce
peace. Their primary weapon in this task was a network of geosynchronous
satellites equipped with particle beams able to shoot down missiles launched
from any point on Earth. [5] To outraged protests that this contravened
national
sovereignty, General Douglas Schwartz (1982-2036) replied with the words that
became the unofficial motto of the U.S.S.D.: "A nation's right to swing its
fists must end where its neighbors' chins begin."
As it transpired, none of the members of the "nuclear club" were desperate
enough to test the U.S.S.D.'s resolve. Its commanders had chosen a fairly good
time to introduce themselves onto the scene. China was largely preoccupied with
a mild civil war in its hinterlands, while the members of Neo-NATO were still
largely flush with their successful intervention in the Hong Kong War of
Independence (2006-2010). With an enforced peace in place, affairs settled even
further, focussing increasing public attention on the drama of space. In
partial
fulfillment of Gerard O'Neill's vision, construction began on the eight
kilometre long Space Station One (later dubbed Genaros) at Earth's L-5 point.
Luna City still had more in common with Antarctic stations than with any of the
swelling cities of Earth, but it was growing steadily. Missions were launched
to Mars and Venus, and later to the Jovian and Saturnian sub-systems. Small but
measurable advances in medicine were made. And Katsuhito Stengovitch (1983-
2022) was beginning the research and development which would lead to artificial
intelligence.
As with the new space race, Stengovitch's research was a byproduct of the
exploded Harriman power sattelite. Having already achieved a number of break-
throughs in molecular engineered circuitry, Stengovitch and his colleagues at
BioEscape Corporation had been contracted to design the computers which were to
manage the orbital complex, and also won a different contract to design a small
army of maintenance drones to further reduce the need for human presence on the
satellite. The robots had not yet been manufactured when the power station blew
up, and apparently Stengovitch blamed himself for the accident. Regardless of
the truth of that, he did begin a period of extensive research into
robotics.[6]
When Dr. Bran Mason, who had been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for
Chemistry for his work in improved "memory" plastics and metals, joined the
research team, they began to make genuine progress. Sufficient progress that
the SDPC contracted BioEscape to produce a cryptically named PCBC -- Prototype
Cybernetic or Biotechnological Construct.
After nearly eight years of work, Dr. STengovitch was finally able to
construct an artificial processor similar in complexity to a human brain, to
replace the cloned human brain tissue which the project's experimental models
had used until then. The completed prototype was named Adama, as much for
Eando Binder's classic story "I, Robot" as for the first man of Judeo-Christian
tradition. It had roughly the same intelligence as a five-year old child,
without that child's freedom of action; simple programming blocks, inspired by
Asimov's laws of robotics, limited its actions. And it cost as much to build as
it would cost to train twenty astronauts to SDPC standards, without having the
ability to replace any of them.
The experiment seemed a failure, but Dr. Stengovitch insisted that with
refinements, the cyberdroids could play a valuable role in the exploration
of space. At this point, he acquired an unexpected patron in Chairman Quincy
of Genom. A deal was struck betweent the Japanese giant and the titan of the
spaceways; Genom would pay an incredible amount of money to the SDPC for an
option on any and all technologies derived from the PCBC program, allowing
research to continue.
Continue it did. For the next two years, Dr. Stengovitch -- or rather Dr.
Stingray, as he was now calling himself -- worked to improve on the basic
design
of his prototype cyberdroids -- or boomers, as he was now calling them. [7]
Advances in muscular strength, resilience, coordination and intelligence are
all well-documented. However, rumors suggested that BioEscape's Wiz
Laboratories
facility was experimenting in areas well beyond what it published in technical
journals. The most persistent tales focused on unusual applications of
nanomachinery, allowing certain highly advanced boomers to incorporate
inorganic
materials into their bodies, or change their shapes. Other accounts told of
boomers composed of almost completely biological components, indistinguishable
form humans unless surgically examined. It is uncertain how much of this would
have eventually seen the light of day, had Dr. Stingray's exploration of
robotics (and his life) ended in an explosion akin to that which began it.
Almost before the Tokyo emergency services arrived at the wreckage of Wiz
Laboratories, Genom's attorneys presented the SDPC's board of directors with a
proposal to purchase whatever could be salvaged from the PCBC project. The
board, aware that the most recent data on Dr. Stingray's more esoteric
experiments had probably been lost with him, agreed to the sale. Apparently,
Delos Harriman was paricularly in favor of abandoning the project; he felt that
sending machines into space, instead of men, would be a gigantic step backwards
in space exploration.
Genom sifted through the wreckage of the facility with fine-toothed combs,
and bought out the contracts of most of BioEscape's technical staff. The
corporation could apparently afford to apply hundreds of researchers to the
problems which had stymied Dr. Stingray and his much smaller team. If they were
less inspired than their predecessors had been, still quantity has a quality
all its own, as Quincy was prone to quote. They manged to duplicate most of
Stingray's research and make a handful of advances as well. But there was still
no real market for the expensive cyberdroids.
On May 27, 2025, an earthquake measuring 8.0. on the Richter Scale rocked
the Kantou plain, devastating Tokyo. Aftershocks ran up and down the Pacific
Rim
of Fire, causing brief eruptions from the volcanos on the remaining Hawaiian
islands, tital waves along the Australian coastline, and secondary quakes from
Alaska to Mexico. The death toll reached nearly three million worldwide, a
third
of that from Tokyo alone.
International aid was swift to come pouring in, but even the best that the
Red Cross could offer prompted more than one editorial cartoonist to compare
their efforts to a disposable bandage over the fault crack that cut through the
city. Memoranda exchanged by surviving members of the Japanese Diet and the
city
council strongly suggest that the government seriously considered abandoning
the
city to reconstitute in Kyoto. Nearly a week after the quake, however, Genom's
representatives contacted the city council with a deal they couldn't refuse.
The megacorporation had apparently been planning to move its headquarters
from Osaka to Tokyo for some time, based on certain real estate transactions
dating from 2015. They now offered to rebuild the city in a new,
technologically
integrated form, in exchange for certain degree of extraterritorial autonomy
for their facilities. Faced with a choice of surrendering some of their domain
and losing control of it completely, the council agreed to their offer.
The very next day, construction companies from around the world poured
into
the ruins of Tokyo, drawn by the extremely generous contracts offered by Genom:
very good pay, room and board, and the opportunity to use advanced technology.
The foremost examples of that technology were Genom's cyberdroids, now
officially marketed as "boomers", While most of the rebuilders preffered to use
the more advanced versions of standard construction equipment that Genom also
provided, the demands of the jobs were such that most of them had no choice but
to use cyberdroids to increase their workforce. The boomers were quite useful,
and more than a few local entrepreneurs began to investigate the possibility of
purchasing them. Genom obligingly slashed prices down to very managable rates,
taking a loss on each boomer sold to make it up in volume.
But it soon became readily apparent that these "assemblers of prosperity"
could be very dangerous if abused or given confusing instructions. In every
case, Genom was quick to present evidence that the boomer in question had been
physically damaged before it went on a rampage, and their lawyers quickly and
efficiently settled all complaints without admission of liability. Even the
most
horrific case of "mad boomer syndrome", in which a cyberdroid used by the
medical facilities of the Nerima Displacement Camp went berserk and slaughtered
nearly a hundred wounded refugees, was ultimately traced to the doctors and
nurses having overworked the boomer despite repeated warnings.[8]
As a result of incidents of this nature and of the general lawlessness
prevalent in the ruined city, a new branch of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police was
created: the Special Felony Crimes Elite Division, more commonly known as the
Advanced (AD) Police. Chosen from the best of the surviving police officers
(particularly those who had, through luck, cunning or sheer grint, survived an
encounter with a rogue boomer) the ADP Frontline Officers resembled nothing so
much as a blending of a SWAT unit with a group of hardened mercenaries,
equipped
with advanced weapons and armor. Again, the money for this was supplied by
Genom, and again, the authories weren't blind to the implications of that. But
the alternative was to let the city fall even further into chaos, and they may
justly have felt that they had no choice.
Ironically, while the Tokyo AD Police inspired the formation of similar
police squads in cities worldwide, by 2027 they had acquired a very poor
reputation on the home front. Historians generally concur that a major factor
in this was the passage of a law in that year: the Bionic Enhancement Control
Act. Prior to that point, bionic modifciation had been extremely common in
Tokyo; at first due to the thousands of wounded in the quake, later as a
fashion
and status statement. A number of incidents, however, persuaded the Diet that
matters were getting out of hand. [9] The Bionic Enhancement Control Act
established that anyone who had replaced over seventy per cent of his or body
with mechancial parts no longer qualified as a human being. If found in the
commission of a violent crime, such a "boomeroid" could be executed -- or
rather
destroyed -- on the spot by the AD Police.
Centuries later, in an age where such modifications are quite obsolete, we
can still imagine what public reaction to such an ordinance must have been.
They
would have wondered why and how the figure of seventy per cent had been chosen,
and whether or not it was subject to revision downwards. The ancient question
asked whenever a group within a population is singled out -- "Who's next?" --
must surely have been on their lips. Bionics became unfashionable, then
unpopular, and hidden. Those who looked for someone to blame could easily find
the AD Police. [10]
Eventually, in late 2027, urban Tokyo was declassified as a disaster area,
although reconstruction efforts continued in some parts of the city for more
than a decade. The new heart of the city was the kilometre-tall Genom tower
located at the heart of the old Shinjuku district. To own a boomer was seen as
the height of chic by most businesses, even those whose businesses weren't
actually helped by a cyberdroid presence. Genom explicitly and unashamedly used
the reborn city, dubbed MegaTokyo, as a showpiece for their products; the
ultimate multimedia commercial, a Disneyland of the twenty-first century.
Boomer
sales took off all over the world.
All over the world, that is, except in the United States. From 2026
onward,
Senator John Connor (Lib., CA) (1985-2043) had been waging intense battles in
the senate and in the media to outlaw the importation of cyberdroids. While
his arguments were initially based on the reports of berserk boomers, they
gradually took on a far more disturbing tone. If the articficial processors
used by the cyberdroids were in fact as complex as a human brain, then they
could possibly be as sentient as a human being. The programming blocks which
generally forced boomers to obey orders given by human beings were compared by
Connor to lobotomies and other means of keeping certain people docile.
Essentially, he compared the sale of boomers to the slave trade.
Connor's initial arguments cost him the support of much of his party, but
he eventually developed a broad base of multipartisan support from all four of
the major political parties active in the U.S. Congress and Senate. A
moratorium was passed on the construction of boomers on U.S. soil and the sale
of boomers to private citizens. Furthermore, any cyberdroids purchased by the
government for military purposes would be carefully observed for signs of
sentience. Senator Connor was unsatisfied with this result, and continued to
campaign for further, independent study of cyberdroid psychology, with the
intent of demonstrating that many boomers already were sentient.
The United States Armed Forces were necessarily more pragmatic in their
attitudes towards cyberdroids than the civilian government could be. They
needed them, for the same reason that their allies in Neo-NATO needed them:
because their enemies in China and its client states already had them, and were
willing to use them, as they were already demonstrating in the Antarctic.
In 2026, massive oil deposits had been discovered on the frozen continent.
While most of the population of developed nations had gradually switched to
non-
fossil fuel based automotive mechanics over the the previous two decades, there
was still a substantial demand for petroleum-based products of other kinds, and
for fuel oil in less advanced nations. Several nations, including China,
announced that they would not renew the Antarctic Treaty banning exploitation
in 2041, and began moving military forces onto the territories they claimed to
protect them from "jumpers".
While skirmishes between these forces began almost immediately, open
warfare didn't erupt for nearly three years. In hindsight, it should have been
obvious what would happen from the fact that the United Kingdom's Antarctic
claims bordered those of Argentina. The leading citizens of both nations were,
by and large, the children of those who had fought the Falklands War (1982).
Many issues still remained to be settled between the two nations, and the
Antarctic seemed as likely a battlefield as any.
What could probably never have been predicted was the alliance between the
ultra-right government of Argentina and the People's Republic of China. But on
the other hand, it might have been anticipated from speeches by the Argentine
President denouncing "European imperialism" during Neo-Nato's intervention in
Hong Kong's revolution. In any event, after the shooting war started between
the Argentina and the United Kingdom, the Chinese openly moved to support the
Argentines. That action brought in the rest of Neo-NATO. The United Nations
sent in several units of peacemakers to insure that none of the the combatants
violated the Antarctic Treaty before it expired, and to keep other ecological
damage to a minimum. The U.S.S.D. monitored the battle for any signs of weapons
of mass destruction. And Genom, easily dealing with all sides, grew richer all
the time.
Such was the state of the world at the start of the 2030s. The war was far
away, and it was poorly covered by the media when compared to previous
conflicts, but most people still couldn't quite keep it out of their minds.
Genom and other, rival megacorporations continued to wax in power, and it
seemed
that there was nothing that anyone could do to oppose them. To be fair, many of
the products they introduced greatly improved the quality of life, but only for
those who could afford them. The great adventure of space travel was waiting,
but only for those sufficiently fit, physically and mentally, to meet the
SDPC's standards, defined in the Space Precautionary Act. And even space seemed
dangerous to those on the ground, if one reflected on the hundreds of particle
beam satellites hovering overhead.
For those who could meet those standards, there was the new frontier of
Mars. The red planet was permanently settled in 2018, although none of its
settlements achieved the same population as Luna City until 2042. Yet despite
the forbidding cold and the unbreathable atmosphere, Mars drew more tourists
than the Moon, in the early years of its colonization, because of its
unimagined wonder: signs of intelligent, non-human life. The first signs had
been uncovered in the previous century, but it wasn't until unaided human eyes
first saw the pyramid (or rather, the monument) and face on the Cydonian plain
that the immensity of the discovery came home. Furthermore, beneath the shadow
of Mons Olympus, the first team of of Martian explorers found a valley (or
canal, as it was most commonly termed) that showed clear signs of having been
constructed. There were obviously artificial towers and other buildings,
fashioned from glass-like polymers unkown to science, lining the sides and
floor of the so-called Grand Canal.
Von Danikenites and other crackpots had a field day when this was finally
revealed. Dozens of old theories were revived (sometimes knowingly, sometimes
not) to prove that this culture or that people had been influenced by the great
space brothers of ancient Mars. Sober xenoarchaelogists, however, were quck to
point out that the buildings showed no resemblance to any Terrestrial archi-
tecture. For example, the Cydonian monument, when examined at close range,
looked little like the Egyptian or Mesoamerican pyramids, or the Sumerian
ziggurats. (Hence the reclassification.) The newest of the Martian ruins had
apparently been constructed around 20,000 years before. Finally, when examples
of Martian writing were discovered in 2038, cooler heads spoke over the clangor
that proclaimed it as the ancestor of Futhark runes and Chinese pictograms,
stating that it was entirely alien and probably untranslatable.
One thing never discovered were any fossilized Martian remains, or indeed
any sign of what had become of these "faerie towers'" inhabitants. Nor did the
later discovery of markedly similar constructions on Neptune's moon Triton,
dating from between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries of the common era,
do anything to clarify the mysteries. [11] In any event, the xenoarchaeologists
were soon left with only photo- and holographs of the Martian ruins; most of
them were quickly dismantled for building materials, while others were
converted
wholesale into new, pressurized structures.
While the colonization of Mars was difficult as such things go, the effort
to claim Venus might be considered the greatest feat of engineering attempted
by
humanity to that point, except that humans were only involved in the planning
stages. In 2026, Genom had approached the SDPC with a proposal to use several
hundred of the megacorporations cyberdroids to create a base on the boiling
world. The particular model of boomer specified in the plan had been
specfically
designed to function under volcanic conditions, and independent analysts felt
that the the plan had a good chance of success. Though pleased that the plan
would involve no risk to human lives, the SDPC's board was still rather
grudging in their approval of it, guessing (correctly) that Genom intended to
develop Venus into yet another private fiefdom.
Nonetheless, the cargo carrier _Behemoth_ (one of the mighty _Megaload_
class of vessels, at that time and for many years after the largest ships in
service) set out for Venus, operated by a computer only a bit less than an
order of magnitude less complex than Genom's own private mainframe, and
carrying
a "cargo" of 687 Bu-84V mining cyberdroids. A few months later, it grounded
itself in Devana Chasma, the great rift valley in the center of Venus' Beta
Regio. With only a few modifications, _Behemoth_ was converted into the "base
camp" for the operation. It remains the heart of Venus' capitol, Adonis, to
this
day.
Over the next ten years, the cyberdroids painstakingly carved out a cave
nearly thirty-four kilometres long and a kilometre deep. Installing shock
absorbers identical to those used by Terrestrial facilities intended to survive
nuclear attack, they also covered the cavern's entire surface with heat-
resistant polymers. The polymers also served as a sealant for the cave,
allowing
Earth atmosphere to be pumped into the cavern and maintained at Earth-normal
pressures. The next phase saw the cyberdroids importing and desalinizing enough
Venerian soil to cover the floor of the cavern to a depth of nearly twenty
metres, engineering what the geologists on Earth hoped would be an effective
farmland after they added water and air.
In this, they erred. Unknown to the planners, Venus' topsoil contained a
number of incredibly hardy microscopic organisms totally alien to Earth. They
endured the desalinization process and took to Earth atmosphere and water like
incipient alcoholics take to liquor. When terrestrial crops were introduced,
they were in immediate competition with a nascent Venerian ecology. The
conflict produced a swamp-like atmosphere through much of the cavern. Still,
other areas remained viable farmland, and the project was otherwise without
incident. [12] The "flooded jungles,/crawling with unclean death", like much
else described by Harlan Rhysling (1989-2047), only existed in this mind, but
the project was not nearly as successful as had been hoped.
Genom, as it was prone to do, adapted. Instead of the carefully selected
and trained colonization team specified by the original plans, they initiated
a "cattle call" hiring procedure, recruiting from the lower classes of almost
every nation on Earth. Their contracts were carefully written to obfuscate
the actual meaning of the agreements: that the signatory was essentially
signing him- or herself into chattel slavery. Even so, one would have expected
the SDPC to put a stop to such blatant violations of the Space Precautionary
Act. But Genom's quiet hold over the SDPC's board of directors had become
rock hard in the wake of D.D. Harriman's death in 2037 and the massive sale of
his shares of SDPC stock which preceded it.
Genom also secured the support of various intellectuals for the venture
by promising not to disturb the Venerian ecosystem unnecessarily, and to allow
it to develop in their proposed second and third colonies. Largely biological
androids, the Bu-64V series, were engineered and released into the Venerian
wetlands. Amphibious, they thrived there while quietly broadcasting data on
their habitat back to base. What was usually left out of the data packets
released for public consumption was that the operators of the Venerian
plantations exploited the "natives" just as much as they abused their workers.
As Ken Shonnora wrote about this era, years later, "It was as though one
were living on the surface of a bubble, one that was getting bigger every day.
At the back of your mind was always the question of when it was going to pop."
That was the status quo, and while many other things -- from fashions to
technologies -- changed with almost blinding speed, the fundamental things
always applied.
Perhaps that was why, when global terrorism returned, it did so with such
incredible violence. In May of 2033, terrorists led by someone using the alias
"Maximillian Largo" [13] managed to seize control of one of the U.S.S.D.'s
particle beam satellites. Largo used it to target Genom's regional twoers in
Sydney, Chicago and Berlin, killing thousands, allegedly while in conference
with Quincy himself in the main tower in MegaTokyo. Exactly what Largo was
trying to extort from Genom remains a mystery; the terrorist was apparently
killed by the enigmatic mercenary vigilantes known as the Knight Sabers. No
body
was ever recovered, however, and some barely plausible rumors tie Largo to an
attempted attack on the MegaTokyo fusion reactor a year later, also foiled by
the Knight Sabers.
Genom was apparently more seriously weakened by this attack than an
observer would have anticipated. Possibly certain unrevealed projects, critical
to the corporation's immediate future, were wrecked in the destruction of the
three towers. Alternatively, the company may have decided to deliberately lower
its public profile in order to feign weakness to its competitors and encourage
them to overextend themselves. Because of this weakness, whether feigned or
genuine, sales of battle boomers and other military technology dropped off
dramatically in 2034. It's thought that this may have been a key factor in the
slow down and conclusion of the Polar War two years later. On the other hand,
Genom also sold a great number of easily-manufactured, "cheap" boomers in the
year following the attacks, often through front corporations, which may have
more than recouped any shortfall.
This new status quo endured much longer than the previous one. The end of
the Polar War came without any particular celebration on any side; the most
common remarks involved gratitude that the U.S.S.D. hadn't had to intervene in
the conflict. The Patrol (or Solar Patrol) as the organization was more
frequently termed, had been very quick to modify and improve the security locks
on all their satellites after Largo's brief reign of terror, and publicly
proclaimed that no outside force could do so again.
Thus, the attempted coup d'etat of Colonel Dennis Towers (1995-2039), the
executive officer of Luna City's U.S.S.D. base, came as a total surprise to the
organization as a whole. Recruiting agents throughout the Patrol's fleet, he
managed to disable every nuclear weapon in Earth's orbit except for his own
cache. Any weapon launched from the planet's surface against his base would be
intercepted by the satellites. Conventional attacks on Luna City would run the
risk of killing civillians held hostage to Towers' ambition. It could have been
the beginning of the most powerful tyranny in the history of humanity, but
Towers' plan was completely halted when Lieutenant John Dahlquist (2013-2039)
essentially killed himself by manually destroying the nuclear weapons. Towers
followed him in suicide when it became clear that his plan had failed.
During the court martials that the U.S.S.D. held in the wake of the
Towers
affair, the single factor that came out most clearly in all the defendants'
testimonies was that Towers had appealled to his people by referring to them as
a "scientifically selected group". This caused a stir at both the U.S.S.D.'s
Bureau of Personnel and the SDPC in general, prompting an independent review of
their selection procedures. The review confirmed SDPC's worst fears: Towers had
not been a chance anomaly which slipped through the safety net, and it was
quite
probable that there were several other potential traitors of similar abilities
serving in the U.S.S.D., waiting to make their moves.
The key psychological features which the SDPC sought in ever astronaut
candidate or space settler were intelligence, adaptability and self-reliance.
The difficulty arose from the fact that these traits weren't necessarily
associated with loyalty, and were often associated with ambition. The people
going into space viewed themselves as pioneers. What the SDPC failed to recall
was that in any group of pioneers, there will be those with a vision which they
are willing to do anything to make real.
The U.S.S.D. and SDPC were faced with the same problem that every
effective space agency faces. They could lower their standards, welcoming less
intelligent, adaptable or self-reliant astronauts, but to do so would be to
increase the risks that all spacers faced. Furthermore, it wouldn't do anything
to keep out the dangerous ones. The U.S.S.D. ultimately settled for permanent
grounding and dishonorable discharge for every spacer who had participated in
Towers' uprising, with prison sentences for those whose activity had been
particularly violent. In retrospect, this was a terrible mistake; the most
plausible arguments concerning the identity of the man later known as "Colonel
Green" suggest that he was an enlisted man who was discharged and grounded at
this time.
In any event, they soon had larger problems than personnel, as did the
entire world. On May 27, 2041, sixteen years to the day after the Second Kanto
Earthquake, every cyberdroid on Earth, in orbit or on the Moon paused in its
tasks, and then went berserk. There had been boomer revolts before, but nothing
of this magnitude. In less than an hour, MegaTokyo was in flames ... except for
Genom Tower, standing serenely untouched by it all.
Later, a high-ranking executive who surrendered to U.S.S.D. forces in
exchange for immunity and protection would tell an incredible tale about how it
happened. According to her, Quincy had placed himself in a form of cryogenic
suspension sometime in the late 2020s, after being diagnosed with an inoperable
cancer. The suspension method he used allowed him to cybernetically control
various android doubles and create, with the most advanced graphics software on
Earth, a believable video avatar of himself. But in 2041, his condition had
entered an irreversible decline. Quincy had always intended for Genom to become
the sole master of the world; if he couldn't live to see it happen, he was
ready
to destroy it instead. Thus, he activated a program hidden in Genom Tower's
supercomputer: the Over Mind System. Hidden in every Genom-built boomer was a
bit of code which could override any orders or pre-programmed instructions in
favor of signals coming from the OMS. The boomers went berserk because that's
what Quincy wanted.
It was an unbelievable tale, but nothing else fit the facts. The U.S.S.D.
prepared to fire two of its particle beam cannons at Genom Tower, hoping that
the destruction of the OMS would stop the boomer rampage and justify the
terrible collateral damage. Before the order to fire was given, it became
academic. A mushroom cloud blossomed out of the top of Genom Tower, completing
its resemblance to volcanic Mount Fuji, even as the blast ripped out its sides
and tore through the surrounding district. Someone, somehow, had smuggled a
nuclear weapon into the tower, and then activated it.
At the very moment that the blast consumed the tower, every boomer
stopped
dead in its tracks. A small number never moved again, but the majority just
paused and then attempted to resume whatever tasks they'd been performing
before
the rampage. Again, that fit with what the executive told the U.S.S.D.
But the embattled people of Earth knew none of this. All they knew was
that close to a million people had died in the last few days, and that the
damage to property exceeded nearly a billion dollars. All that they knew was
that an age had ended, a new one begun, and that nothing would ever be the
same.
But then, when was it?
To Be Continued
Footnotes
[1] Quincy and Gates had been associates during the late 1980s and 1990s, and
there is some anecdotal evidence which suggests that Quincy may also have been
an ally of Khan Noonien Singh. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence provides
almost the entirety of Rosenkreuz's biography. He was apparently born in Japan,
and made his first fortune in electronics. Masterminding the merger which
created Genom in 1991, apparently with assistance from the mysterious Kaze
Group, he proceeded to reign as Chairman of Genom's board of directors for the
next half century.
[2] Fragmentary records indicate that these major changes to the U.N.'s
policies
may have also been prompted by the disappearance of a covert operations group
which had until that point acted on the U.N.'s behalf. Without the support of
this agency of "special talents", the U.N. had to consider operating openly.
[3] Harriman's death, in 2037, was caused when he ignored SDPC health
regulations and chartered a private rocket to the moon, which made a botched
landing.
[4] There are apocryphal accounts which state that Harriman persuaded a major
diamond cartel to purchase a large block of SDPC stock by producing geologist's
reports which suggested that there were potential diamond mines on the moon.
Harriman then had Leslie LeCroix (1983-2018) the pilot of the _Pioneer_, take a
bag of diamonds on the mission with him to perpetuate the hoax. Some accounts
go
further, stating that LeCroix did find diamonds -- or at least large crystals
--
on the moon.
[5] The question of how the nascent U.S.S.D. managed to launch these
satellites,
or construct them in orbit, without alerting SDPC authorities to the nature of
their payloads remains a mystery. The most commonly accepted rationale -- that
the U.S.S.D. conspired with one of the megacorporations to send up the
satellites under cover -- fails to account for all the facts. Wilder
speculation
suggests that the network wasn't constructed, but rather discovered already in
orbit, and then expanded by new construction after the U.S.S.D. had formed.
[6] As with almost every visionary scientist since Archimedes, a small body of
myth has grown up around Katsuhito Stengovitch. While we know that he did
correspond with Dr. Ikari Yui (1980-2025), her claims of scientific knowledge
far beyond the standards of the day (related in her autobiography _Gehirn: The
Truth Behind Evangelion_) are hard to take seriously. Likewise, accounts of
Stengovitch studying the remains of the Golem of Prague, examining the work of
one Professor Ten Brincken, or pursuing the research journal of Victor
Frankenstein, are almost certainly facetious.
[7] The name was apparently an example of Dr. Stingray's increasingly eccentric
sense of humor. He regarded the cyberdroids as his children, coming into this
world as a new "baby boom".
[8] It was this incident that claimed the lives of the parents of Yamazaki
Linna (2012-2079), and which she recounted in her autobiography _Knight Moves_.
[9] It was generally thought that the Diet was influenced in this course by
Genom, who was quite notably not a producer of bionics. In point of fact, a
fair
number of black market bionic components were cannibalized from boomers, and
the
corporation may have been acting to suppress such activities. On the other
hand,
they may have been acting to prevent the public from realizing that "cyber-
psychosis" was several times more likely to victimize users of such
"boomerware"
bionics.
[10] In fact, the majority of ADP officers polled at the time of the act's
passage were in favor of it. This continued even after the disastrous failure
of the ADP's combat cyborg program, inspired by an earlier and more successful
program based in Detroit.
[11] After the revelation, in the early 22nd century, of the presence of agents
of the Karsid Empire on Earth in the 20th century, there was a renewal of
interest in the Martian and Tritonian ruins, then thought to be Karsid in
origin. Subsequent examination of the ruins of Karsid settlements on Rigel-4
and Zeta Reticulus-6 demonstrated that the greatest enigmas of the Sol System
bore no resemblance to any structures, no matter how transient, used by Karsid
colonizers.
[12] Or at least, without adequately documented incident. There were reports
that while excavating the Adonis cavern, one group of cyberdroids uncovered a
previously existing cave system, within which they found "entities". Nothing
more was ever reported to the base computer concerning these entities. However,
the Venerian androids somehow learned of this incident, and became convinced
that their caverns were haunted by surviving entities, which they named
"shambleau". (Folklorists consider the creature to be a syncretism of the
gorgons of Greek myth with elements of other, faerie creatures.) When the
Venerians began to leave their homeworld in large numbers in the early 2040s,
tales of shambleau entered general spacer lore. There were several incidents
of "shambleau panic", in which a woman would be accused of being shambleau
and assaulted. The last major case of shambleau panic occurred on Mars in
2051, but smaller incidents have continued in the Earth system to the present
day.
[13] Whoever Largo actually was, he does not seem to have had any connection to
Emilio Largo, an agent of SPECTRE active in the mid-20th century. Overwrought
conspiracy theorists have tied him to every major villainous figure of the
previous two centuries, from Count Cagliostro to Khan Noonien Singh, and
several
who came later as well.
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