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Post by Narrator on May 16, 2010 0:26:24 GMT -5
Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities, has the power to make you commit injustices. Voltaire This briefing has been prepared by Galt Operations Company.
When global governments failed to attain world peace during the Global Disarmament War, four companies including the European ICARUS and American Global Munitions succeeded in privatizing it. Their activity kept the world economy moving in the post-war depression and their new single-unit armies, consisting of armoured mech units called SPRWs, had enough potential to deter warfare before it could start.
Nationality became an obsolete and often detrimental idea and slowly began to corrode as land and resources were sold to the companies. The workforces already in place remained although immigration laws were a thing of a bygone age. This meant they could reap the benefits fully of whatever resource, be it manpower for a factory or the agricultural holdings of a bank of vertical farms, that they were working without government interference.
But the pollution strangling the planet was taking its toll on health and quality of life. So the companies worked together to create huge floating cities called Aeropoli, that could carry millions of people up above the poisonous air. These took heavy tolls in time and resource, however, and only a small percentage of the population has so far been carried up above the clouds.
The companies continue to look for a more permanent solution. They consider this planet dead and useless and strive to find and populate a new one. But terrorists and insurgents fighting the new economic regime hinder their progress at every turn. Reactionary group Ain Soph Aur recently poached genius enginseer Johnny Bai from TIANLONG and with his help have developed a new form of energy that could help propel the human race into space: but they withhold it, demanding social reform and naïve ideals.
The SPRWs built to fight during the Black Armistice and the Black Armsrace have not lost their usefulness – the companies fight each other to keep the world economy moving, vying over resources. The companies protect their holdings not just from each other but also from terrorists, mercenaries, and hack governments that spring up in the name of a return to nationality. [/size]
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Post by Narrator on May 16, 2010 0:32:09 GMT -5
Hello, I represent Ain Soph Aur; we have prepared this briefing for you.
50 years ago during the Global Disarmament War there was a shift in power from the state to private hands when a group of multinational corporations instigated what history calls “the black armistice”. They unveiled the obscenely powerful weapons we know today as SPRWs - Self Propelled Robotic Weapons, one-unit armies that put a stop to any war or conflict, often before they started, giving these corporates the sort of political heft many governments could only dream of.
They bought up everything, during the Black Armsrace that followed: not just weapons and resources and smaller companies but whole countries. They abolished nationality, eventually, even proud China surrendering to TIANLONG, patriotic America to the might of Global Munitions. It was a time of violent upheaval – a worldwide coup. By the end of it, all that remained was a planet smothered by the twin poisons of pollution and corporate greed.
The companies and a rich elite could escape the pollution in flying cities called Aeropoli, built to float above the poisonous clouds. They are a new nobility, while what remains of the human race lives on the ravaged surface of the planet. They are bound to the land they work on, in mines or in farms, municipal councils answering to whichever company controls that land – and the balance of power shifts daily as the new royalty fight amongst themselves over vertical farms or oil rigs or SPRW manufacture facilities.
But where there is a legal economy – however hack that legality may be – there are black markets, and out of these underground flows of weaponry and supplies, freedom fighters and rebel organizations like ourselves have been able to grow and fight back. With the help of conscientious defector Johnny Bai, we have developed a trump card for the underprivileged. Gevurah energy, although unfinished, is what the companies need to reach other planets. But we don't want to see the poor left to smother on Earth while our brightest terraform planets with names including Incorporated, or Registered Trademark. We'll give them Gevurah when they give the poor equal seats on their spacecruisers.
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Post by Narrator on May 16, 2010 1:27:31 GMT -5
This is what your world looks like.
The Atlantis Effect brought on by climate change and rising sea levels means some cities are under between two meters and twenty of sea water. Some are still inhabited despite the blanket of water that covers their streets and ripple as Sparrows launch on submerged runners and tracks – there are dozens of new Venices all over the world. In other places, the opposite has occurred. Deserts sweep over towns so that only the top few meters of skyscrapers still show – until the dunes shift again and fill them, too, with sand and grit.
These are the extremes, of course. In most places, there has been a flood of industry and construction. Although new buildings turn grey-brown from the pollution haze that blankets all but the most remote areas of the world, nothing can stop progress. Small town life has become a thing of the past as people flood into cities, or new cities spring up around vertical farms and any available agricultural land not poisoned by pollution. Every city, half the buildings are shrouded in scaffolding. Buildings that don't make economic use of space are pulled down and replaced with highrise offices or apartment blocks. Rivers disappear beneath bridges and water filtration plants, hundreds of them – naturally occurring fresh water is the stuff of legend, now. Even the rain is acidic enough to eat stone. Giant television screens provide most of the illumination in these places – and the lights are always on – selling the life you should have, courtesty of GM, or TIANLONG, or Galt.
Cities survive only if they have a valuable resource. For many this is salaried workforce. Monkeys at typewriters. For others, it's acres of factory space, or a nearby scar in the landscape where a mine sinks in terraced layers down into the earth. Some are half skyscraper and half vertical farm, with hundreds of people employed in plumbing alone for these giant agricultural buildings. Some, those deep enough in company territory – this is the new country, whoever owns your resource at the time – are miles of laboratory and testing facility.
The further into company land your city is, the more stable its leadership and legal, education, police systems. Most companies leave these alone, recognizing the importance of their stability, but a new corporate governor every week or month can't help but upset these places. Many places are protected by Knights – mostly these are Sparrow pilots who have retired from active service into the job of making sure company holdings are held. Sometimes they double as governors, other times simply as landowning bullies. Often they fade away when their land is no longer under direct threat, Sparrow sold.
Wars over resources are supposed to be fought where there are no civilians. They usually are. It isn't uncommon for travellers to come across the looted skeletons of SPRWs rusting where they fell. Everything that can be recycled or sold on in the White Markets is collected. There are subsidiary companies devoted entirely to salvaging rubbish from the old world order to rescue whatever resource can be recycled. But it is the White Markets that spring up under railroad tracks, or in abandoned SPRW bunkers, that truly makes the old new again. Mercenaries purchase dead Sparrows and rebuild them, selling their services as freelance killers.
Floating above the tangles of power cable and the deep ruts in the world where nuclear-powered lasers missed their intended targets, the bustling industry and belching factories, the Aeropoli are a different world. They are serene and tidy, almost sterile, and old familiar faces like Coca-Cola and Microsoft still live here. Each one is like a shot of a time before the Global Disarmament War. The rich and the talented and the genius live on them, above the clouds, with the CEOs and boards of directors.
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Post by Narrator on May 16, 2010 1:29:22 GMT -5
Although far from comprehensive, this timeline should give some historical context.
2014: Global Disarmament War 2015: First manned landing on Mars 2018: SPRW released by original four 2019: End of Global Disarmament War 2020: Start of Black Armistice 2020: American Dollar adopted as currency in 70% of the world 2020: TIANLONG formed 2021: Glasslyn formed 2022: Global currency “Credits” introduced to replace dollar 2024: Hoshino Heavy Industries formed 2026: Cursed Founding – Pathkey, Maxim formed 2029: Beginning of Black Armsrace 2029: Phalanx Mars Base “Progress” construction begins 2030: Gulbrandsen formed 2031: End of Black Armistice 2031: GM Founder Ezra J. Banks dies mysteriously, TIANLONG implicated 2034: First Aeropoli fleet launched 2034: First official DOLPHIN action 2037: Aeropolis 03 destroyed by unnamed dissident group 2037: Hoshino Heavy Industries CEO Hoshino Makoto commits seppuku over A03 2038: Last countries sell to Phalanx 2038: End of Black Armsrace 2038: Second Aeropolis Fleet launched; subsequent launches private 2039: ICARUS CEO Geert Jansink assassinated by DOLPHIN 2040: Phalanx Mars Base “Progress” completed 2043: Pathkey routed by Glasslyn & TIANLONG 2046: ICARUS split, Vulperion formed 2046: DOLPHIN leader Aaren Ó Madaidhín removed 2046: DOLPHIN destroyed by Maxim Specialized Unit 2048: First official Ain Soph Aur action 2048: Maxim destroyed by Ain Soph Aur 2050: Akhtar, Gulbrandsen merged to form Taluqdar 2050: Johnny Bai defects to Ain Soph Aur 2051: Lullaby epidemic kills 3% surface-dweller population, 0.001% Aeropoli population 2053: Eulalia Stavros joins Ain Soph Aur 2053: Svalbard declares new nationality 2055: Small scale Mars terraform proves successful 2057: Ain Soph Aur reveals Gevurah Energy 2057: Present Day
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