Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[Trenacker]

They would not take me, they said, because I was a murderer. Moses murdered. Because I was a thief. Prometheus stole. Due to my implication in revolutionary activity. Since I recognized no boundaries. Did not know my place. Refused to stay silent. Lacked "proper understanding" of risk and reward. Who better to form the vanguard? - Anger in a Thousand Places

How to select for the ideal members of a future society? Must the U.N. accept only the "best" of humanity?

The earliest recruits set the bar quite high, reflecting the technocratic ideals of the mission's original architects. How did one demonstrate qualification? By elite pedigree. Graduates of the finest institutions of learning. Recognized leaders in their fields. Decorated soldiers and civil servants. They skewed white, wealthy, and, in the opinion of the Secretary-General, weak. Before dense rows of cameras in New York City in February 2041, Apsara Mongkut got ahead of critics by taking his own subordinates to task quite as if he'd had nothing to do with their previous decision-making. Rather than receive the cirriculum vitae of yet another materials scientist, Mongkut timed the man as he attempted to don an escape hood. Forty minutes later, Mongkut rose and left without comment. The poor witness was still sorting out his protective equipment.

"Second-run" selections followed new criteria that allowed lower scores on personality inventories, regarded certain career setbacks as plausible evidence of mental resilience, and looked increasingly to the predictive power of a new analytical input recommended to the U.N. by the American Reclamation Corporation: the Atherholt Trauma Function Test. New and testier personalities joined the colonial effort. U.N. Minister of Off-World Operations Kamaria Apio used words like "kinetic" and "questioning" to describe what detractors saw as scarcely-adulterated versions of the first selections.

Reduced American funding during the hottest years of the Second Civil War led to a severe slow-down in recruiting but also allowed the United Nations to experiment with a wider range of professions. Fewer agronomists to make way for more farmers. Welders and pipe-fitters before process engineers. Larger contingents from countries that could not pay their own way, all with less formal education but more practical exposure to lifetime hardship.

Soviet and Red Chinese standards, which set the pace for the 2050s, turned attention to questions of political suitability. Jonathan Garland was selected as captain. Skill mattered less than "temperment," a catchall for performance on psychiatric inventories that measured predisposition toward self-abnegation. French and Portuguese influence on the Alpha Centauri Mission also increased perceptibly, resulting in the adoption of cultural targets. Where were the lawyers to keep the contracts that would need to govern the relations between the mainline colony and its assumptive offshoots? Who would cure distempers if not cooks, authors, and chamber musicians? Heroes would be necessary in plenty, and so neither must sport be neglected.

In 2061, the first convicts came aboard as manual laborers. For what purpose, nobody was quite sure, and it appeared that Unity was at last being acknowledged for what it had become: a dumping ground. Some efforts were made to lure the space-going trades, but the urgency to escape a poisoned planet was less for those who could already envision thriving off-world colonies nearer at hand than the Alpha Centauri star system. With this fifth tranche of recruits came the "useful ne'er-do-wells," or persons whose experiences would have been desirable even at home, but for their poor fit with the prevailing national mood. Here came the alleged war criminals, misfits, and embarrassments--offers the United Nations was in no position to reject, much less vet reliably.

At last came the proprietors, and with them, the revenge of the elites. In his interviews with the Ken Burns Trust, Morgan Industries COO Wenceslas Sedláček explained his philosophy for colonist selection: "I told them, either you are wearing a pocket protector or carrying a pneumatic drill." The cultural flourishing of an earlier era was ended almost completely. Back came the scientists, service members, and skilled tradespeople plucked from supervisory roles. A few brought with them families whose inclusion created no obvious advantage for the mission as a whole.

But perhaps that was the point. Eloquent critics like Jean-Baptiste Keller and Golden Chinese Emperor Sao Gong, and less eloquent ones such as a Miami gang leader-turned-civil defense hero, Corazón Santiago, questioned both the fairness and desirability of a process weighted toward individuals with particular backgrounds and personality traits. Was the real measure of a person their ability to operate a sonic hammer? What was civilization without the "ordinary" people--those whose circumstances had not allowed for the possibility of greatness?

The war-ravaged, fire-stricken American Southwest provided suitably hostile environments in which to ease green crew members through the rudiments of survival training. This contingent, equipped with self-contained breathing apparatus, prepares to set out from their training rig, a slab-sided museum piece older even than the decrepit equipment found in the Unity vehicle bays. In teams of four, clerks, custodians, and educators "yomped" between sensor pods, learned water conservation, and adjusted themselves to the discomfort of life in low-oxygen environments.

As it happened, non-standard professions played a crucial role in the life of every colony. Investigators protected faction assets. Jurists limned the parameters for vendetta. Musicians collaborated with psychiatrists and physicians to enhance the totality of the Dreaming experience. Television producers helped faction leaders reach into every home. Journalists brought the news of the world to readers eager for evidence that, despite their many miles from home, the Unity survivors were not alone.

Source:

Picture found on the This-Is-Cool Tumblr site under "Sci-Fi Fantasy Horror."

[Trenacker]

By means of the sword, from him who has raised the hand, conveys to him against whom the hand has been raised. – The Blood Price

Name: Ichillis Ontarion
Rank: Colonist II
Position: Etaireía-Merarchēs (Companion-Colonel), DeLeon Expedition
County of Origin: Voight Trench, Pacific Ocean Constellation
DOB: 12-2-2034
Height: 193cm
Weight: 99.8kg

Unity Contractor Background History:
Born 2034, Bitter Waters Colony, Voight Trench. Parents divorced. Remained with father, a receiving agent for the Outremer Caravan Company. Evacuated to Federal Republic of Carmel, 2047, during eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai. Orphaned when Morgan Resolutions blockaded evacuees to force payment of restitution for Korimar Strikes. Merit-adoptive of cattle baron and Gathi Rail Board chairman “King” Con Madigan.

Unconventional upbringing included work as a ranch hand, indicating probable participation in Issuri Valley Range War of 2052-3 and work as an assayer at the Asidaph Diamond Mines the following year, almost certainly arranged by Madigan family. Acquitted by corner’s inquest in the killing of a Morgan Gemstones courier on grounds of self-defense.

Completed Interlink correspondence courses to Advanced M2 level in civil defense with The Nine Schools of Selah. Martial artist (Tav Radan) and semi-finalist for the 2056 Carmelite Olympic Team. Received Special Gratitude of Federal Assembly for Master’s Thesis evaluating the performance of private security forces as both auxiliaries and replacements for under-performing national militaries. Argued in favor of the former.

Drafted into reformed Gathi Federal Guard in 2059 during the War of Carmelite Secession. Breveted senior lieutenant and assigned to a combined-arms brigade comprised mostly of Halberd Services mercenaries. Mentioned four times in despatches for personal heroism during Reaving of Tenelon, preemptive invasion of Gath’s western neighbor, which had mobilized on its border (later revealed as fulfillment of a secret treaty signed with Shiloh, pending imminent invasion). Spoils from the raid, including huge quantities of food, fuel, ammunitions, and stockpiled weapons, helped Gath to endure until completion of the Skirdon Mag-Lev line to allied County of Toltan, after which point the war shifted decisively in favor of the Carmelite Unionists, with total reabsorption of Shiloh in 2064. Promoted to major before mustering out.

Nominated by Carmelite National Selection Committee to the U.N. Mission for Alpha Centauri. Rejected over sustained allegations of Gathi war crimes committed during the Tenelon campaign. Subsequently contracted privately in 2066 to DeLeon Expedition as supervisor of commercial paramilitary forces. Automatically elevated to Colonel to ensure parity with peer positions in other Charter contingents.

Alec DeLeon, Chief Strategy Officer, Verne Steller Navigation Company, is among the six Founding Agents of The Bourse.

Alec DeLeon during confined-space rescue drills prior to Mission Launch. DeLeon personnel trained for more than three years following an abbreviated curriculum endorsed by Mission Control and were some of the last authorized passengers to board Unity.

Psych Profile from Contractor Database: Relativist
Madigan Family of Gath known to be active in Cult of Sol Invictus. Subject's spiritual predilections remain private.

Strong national allegiance suggests individual may be unsuitable for multilateral colonial effort.

Known Monarchist associations: Con Madigan has spoken forcefully in favor of restoration of the Abaddon Dynasty in Carmel. Subject has no record of similar activism, however.

Psych evaluation indicates high tolerance for use of violence to resolve personal conflict, though individual does not display violent tendencies and has no criminal record.

Subject’s moral judgements are consistently determined by counterparty’s personal behavior toward them rather than with reference to specific objectives (e.g., Mission Charter) or universal principles such as the collective good. Specific relationship to atrocities in Tenelon unclear: Gathi forces executed captured Tenelon soldiers as a bloody-minded “efficiency” measure before the perilous crossing over the snowy Rodan Sawtooths back to the Gathi Plateau. Subject's Gathi ascription and proximity to accusations alone may be enough to provoke Retributionists.

Success in nepotistic and high-attrition environments makes it difficult to judge subject’s true aptitude in any field. Personal history likely to have been effectively scrubbed, either explicitly by family action or by sympathetic administrators in deference to the House of Madigan.

Subject requested, and received, hardship reassignment from Honua Station to Sabaeus Quadrangle for reasons unknown. American Reclamation Corporation trainers were highly complimentary. Subject scored .92 on Atherholt Trauma Function Test.

CAUTION: This colonist's profile was found to have been edited on two occasions by Gold-level access holder with a Morgan Crisis Crush net code, resulting in a substantially more negative appraisal. The profile presented here is a rollback version produced exclusively by the U.N. Intelligence Cell with input from U.N. Psych and mission contractor CTR.

Artist’s impression of a Bourse Enforcer in a CMC-410 “Revenant” Powered Combat Suit, such as were found to be included in the Outpost’s TO&E. Restoration Thinkers uprated The Bourse an urgent threat after repeated sightings of late-generation Terran military equipment with their forces but the two factions never came to blows.

Sources:
Picture is from the SyFy/Amazon Prime show, The Expanse.

Gath, Shiloh, and Selah are Biblical references used to refer to a fictional countries in the short-lived NBC series, Kings.

Merit-adoptives are a concept presented in the new Thrawn: Ascendancy series by Timothy Zahn.

Con Madigan is a Texas cowboy in the 1980s Disney series Five Mile Creek.

Alec DeLeon was a character in the 1990s Exo Squad cartoon series.

The battle suit picture is titled “Sardaukar” and is credited to Paolo Tomasella on Pinterest.

[Trenacker]

Before all of these ideas were fodder for experimental fan-fiction, they were the basis for a so-called "matrix" game. In other words, a grand strategic simulation on forums a lot like this one.

At times, I even got it in my head that we could run a kind of living version of the game the way folks used to play massively multiplayer, "off-line" versions of SMAC on Apolyton (a feat I recall but could never find again on the Internet), or Europa Universalis I on the Paradox forums, running their own calculations for population growth, research rates, and production. This meant that I had to focus to some extent on game mechanics. In fact, you've read my take on Affinities in a previous update. But what about research?

As everyone knows, SMAC organized all technologies into four categories: Conquer, Discover, Build, and Explore. Here was my vision for Alpha Centauri 2, which has heavily influenced our story so far.

Research Focus Areas: Tech and Doctrine
AC2 incorporates two different types of technological progress: research--practical advancements made mostly in the laboratory or the field, and doctrine--revolutions in thought that influence faction behavior, such as by opening new doors in social engineering or enhancing battlefield performance. Research enables a faction to craft new things. Doctrine enables a faction to execute specific tasks more effectively.

Factions trigger a bonus when they pursued the research and doctrinal path(s) most-aligned with their fundamental beliefs. This represents the intrinsic thought and effort already applied by faction members to that particular aspect of human endeavor. Put another way, there should be favorable interplay between politics, culture, and the academy.

Tech
As in the original game, all factions start the game with at least one unique Level 0 tech. Tech could be researched in faction bases and outposts, acquired through trade, and salvaged from the wreckage of both the Unity and Chiron Interstellar Probe. Factions would fight over possession of autonomous probes and data modules containing physical storage tapes that could grant benefits to research output, or even new advances, when connected to the Network Node in a friendly base.

Tech output would be driven by a combination of Base Facilities and tile improvements, as well as by the number of Talents and Librarians in a faction's population.

Doctrine
Doctrine comes later, once certain Base Facilities had been constructed. Doctrinal output would be driven by a combination of Base Facilities and the number of Thinkers in a faction's population.

Tech Tree
AC2 features a single, integrated research tree. Progress along the branches of the tree is “blind,” meaning that players influence their faction’s progress only indirectly by choosing to focus their efforts in one of eight different focus areas that yield results gradually. Some branches terminate quickly or lead “through” specific technologies, while others put the player on plateaus, at which point they must choose from a menu of possible breakthroughs before climbing higher. Many branches are intertwined, meaning that research focused along one path may yield discovery options in others and that interdisciplinary focus will be necessary to reach the top.

Focus Areas
The eight research focus areas are as follows:

The Build path relates to advances in materials science and engineering and is mostly useful for base-building and altering the physical world to meet the needs of colonization. Examples of techs on this track include Industrial Base, 3D Printing, Carbon-Breathing Batteries, and Volcanic Mining.

The Discover path covers the Newtonian physical and Terran life sciences, including descriptive neurology and psychology. On this track, the player would find Neuropsych, Biostatics, Polymorphic Software, and Biogenetics.

The Explore path deals with the physical and life sciences of Chiron, including native geology and chemistry. On this path are Centauri Biology, Centauri Chemistry, and Centauri Hydrology. This path helps the player to better harvest the resources of Chiron, as well as to eventually make environmentally sound choices.

The Conquer path focuses on technology with direct military applications. On this path are Advanced Ballistics, Ergogenics, Doctrine: Defense, Doctrine: Aggression, and C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence). Focus on Conquer to unlock weapons, armor, and base defenses.

The Expand path corresponds to advances that facilitate population growth and mobility, leading to the exploration of Planet. The Expand branch includes Austere Medicine, Pressure Hull, Industrial Excavation, Doctrine: Mobility, and Doctrine: Flexibility. This is the focus that leads to chassis progression.

The Command path is organized around thoughts and technology with implications for social control. Command research leads to Information Networks, Doctrine: Suppress, Nootropics, and Mneumonic Techniques.

The Choose path explores thought as technology associated with the ethical challenges of tomorrow. Ethical Calculus, Water Discipline, Luttwakian Ethics, and Industrial Economics are all on this path.

The Unity path is a limited branch of the overall research tree dealing with technologies carried to Planet by the colonists of both Unity and the Chiron Interstellar Probe. On this path, one finds the Unity Workshop, UNITY Computing, and UNITY Armory.

[Trenacker]

The University of Planet

The substructure of the universe regresses infinitely towards smaller and smaller components. Behind atoms, we find electrons, and behind electrons, quarks. Each layer unraveled reveals new secrets, but also new mysteries. - For I Have Tasted the Fruit

Leader: Academician Prokhor Zakharov, The Technologist
Conceptual Inspiration: Anxiety about the role of technology and its impact on politics and culture in the new millennium
Starting Technology: Information Networks
Affinity: Supremacy

Faction Characteristics:
+2 Research (inquiry is our priority)
-2 Probe (academic networks vulnerable to infiltration)
-1 Police (those who ask questions are prone to question authority)
Extra Drone for every 6 pops (lack of ethics)
Free Network Node at every base (knowledge flourishes in dialogue)
One bonus tech at the beginning of the game (a legacy of achievement)

Priorities: Discover

Objectives:

• Pursue every line of research, wherever it takes you
• Don't allow superstition or folkways to restrain your inquiries
• Demonstrate your genius by restoring contact with Earth

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 1 Librarian, 3 Robots, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Militia (University Enforcement), 1 Research Pod

Faction Overview:
Encompasses most of the expedition's engineering staff. Especially appealing to survivors with backgrounds in the descriptive sciences and individuals inclined toward a life of the mind.

Core followers assert that the universe is ultimately knowable through empirical observation. Human civilization on Earth failed because leaders were excessively deferential to prejudices and folkways that caused the anxious and ignorant to reject the tools at their disposal: vaccines, genetically-modified crops, and medical robotics especially. Only a program of unrestricted study and experimentation can ensure that humanity will survive into the far future. Chiron is a problem set to be overcome through rigorous study, leading ultimately to the design and application of new tools that can ensure colonial survival.

Colony is organized into a series of academic faculties managed by deans and governed by an academic senate with representation from each scholastic unit, over which Zakharov is the chancellor and chair. The social and political incentives swing sharply toward education. The "hard" scientists stand at the top of the pecking order, followed by administrators, and then social scientists. The much larger number of workers and drones needed to sustain base operations are treated as intellectual inferiors--boorish invalids lacking the aptitude to lead "normal" lives. (The separate problem of motivation is usually dealt with through pharmacology by parents eager for their children to meet the precise and relentless criteria for excellence.)

Zakharov mostly recruited during periods of Soviet and Chinese dominance of mission design, and while his loyalists are more affluent generally (which partly explains their predisposition toward higher education), they also have a marked tolerance, or even affection, for hierarchy. The forms a Peacekeeper fills out five times in duplicate have already been filed thrice by an academician, as the saying goes.

Played straight, the University stands among the most recognizable of societies on Planet: stable, sedate, and generally open, reflecting the inherently transgressive nature of fact-seeking. Subverted, the University can be made to suffer the common dysfunctions of any large, bureaucratic institution to the point of failure. Skillful politicians, not well-intending learners, might ascend the hierarchy. Zakharov himself, with abundant defects of character, is well-positioned to make a mockery of ethical review so that his natural skepticisms result in a sustained war on the "illogic" of human emotion. In the modern sense, society-as-university-faculty may strike us as an exercise in excessively timorous bureaucracy, with a much-abused “student body” striving in vain to absorb any morsel of education from a disengaged faculty. But there is the university in the medieval sense as well: the forcing house for a particular philosophy, home of rowdy young men freed from worldly cares and given to often-violent licentiousness. The university can also become a breeding ground for radicalism and rebellion, where the free interplay of ideas leads sometimes to enlightenment, but more often to forms of self-expression that border on self-destruction.

Good comparisons for Zakharov include Drs. Anthony Dresden (The Expanse) and Jumba Jookiba (Disney's Lilo & Stitch), two scientists who lacked the socio-emotional basis for empathy. Zakharov is an especially interesting character when one considers the environment in which he first made his mark: the Soviet system was predicated on placing the state ahead of the individual. As the Chernobyl Liquidators discovered, one resource the USSR had in abundance was people, and these were generally considered expendable in the pursuit of geopolitical power—or even mere avoidance of damage to Soviet prestige. Zakharov was both a product and a prisoner of this system, rising high thanks to his natural talents, and finding that it behooved him to perpetuate the structure that kept him there. Even better, his value to the regime gave him a healthy measure of personal immunity from political missteps.

Zakharov is a polarizing figure on Chiron. Many Unity survivors blame him rather than General Francisco d'Almeida for the destruction of Unity and its high-minded mission. Zakharov was first to disobey Garland, impeding urgent damage control efforts in favor of trying to fix the reactor. And for what? To avoid a slingshot maneuver that would have saved most of the ship and virtually all the crew at the cost of only a few, himself included, who would be unlikely to survive the re-interment in cold sleep. Zakharov is no hero. To make matters worse, dissolution of the mission charter was his idea--a reaction, according to some, that stemmed more from his inability to take orders than real forethought about the wisdom of tribalism.

Personally, Zakharov is rude, abrupt, and openly contemptuous of both "lesser" intellects and women in particular. Zakharov rarely seeks the opinions of others, nursing a command style of leadership. His low empathy plays well with those who mistake emotion for weakness, but it means he is quite willing to sacrifice others for unworthy causes.

Zakharov's people suffered badly during the Unity disaster. They were first to be exposed to excessive radiation, became priority targets for Spartan saboteurs, and were called to perform the highest-risk damage control operations because of their special familiarity with ship's systems. As a result, the survivors who would later from the University escaped with the greatest number of walking wounded, and a very high proportion of colonists with bad genetic material. University bases are highly automated as a result: machines perform the tasks their human masters no longer can. Mind-Machine Interface is a particularly important goal for the University.

After Planetfall, University researchers led the way in "rediscovering," or at least recapturing, the foundational knowledge of Old Earth and documenting the new world before them. University bases flowered with private projects ("experiments") to make the hard work of settlement that much easier. In time, those bases became irresistible for both traders and raiders. The former treated the University as the premier mart for life- and labor-saving technologies, while the latter sought to plunder from those who already knew the choicest secrets of the physical world.

[Trenacker]

Gaia's Stepdaughters

In the great commons at Gaia’s Landing, we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies. It represents our promise to the people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth. - Planet Dreams

Leader: Lady Deirdre Skye, The Ecologist
Conceptual Inspiration: Third Wave Feminism, conservationist, and ecological liberation movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century
Starting Technology: Centauri Ecology
Affinity: Harmony

Faction Characteristics:
 2 Planet (living in symbiosis with Chiron)
 1 Efficiency (experience with life systems)
-1 Morale (pacifist tendencies)
-1 Police (free spirits averse to hierarchy)
Gain 1 extra NUTRIENT each season (master agronomists)

Priorities: Explore, Choose

Objectives:

• Live with the land
• Prevent the despoiling of Planet
• Question the patriarchy. If it refuses to be held accountable, knock it down

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 2 Technicians, 1 Citizen, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Militia (Chiron Rangers), 1 Supplies

Faction Overview:
Skye has a solid claim on the loyalties of most of the Unity’s practical biologists, arborists, agronomists, and conservationists. The Gaians divided the loyalties of the wildland professions with the Hunters, and of the natural scientists with the University. Most Gaians are women, and LGBTQ  rights are likely affirmed and safeguarded better in Gaian society than almost anywhere else on Planet.

Skye is called the "Conservationist" in her original profile, but she is more properly the "Ecologist" among the faction leaders. The Gaians know that all living things are interdependent.

Skye’s partisans disdain the patriarchal traditions that led to the systematic plunder of Earth over many generations, touching off social upheaval and environmental disaster that ultimately defied containment. To survive on Chiron, they have concluded human civilization must be synchronized with the natural rhythms of its ecosystem—and accepting of the limitations this will impose on its material development. Moreover, women and men must share equitably in both work and governance, lest the synchronicity be disturbed. The heritage of Old Earth masculinity poses a vexing problem for the Gaians, who aspire to take each individual as they are, but also perceive a clear tie between physical aggression and normative male behavior, leading in turn to agonies such as xenophobia, war, colonialism, and excessive political hierarchy. Put simply, men have a need to control people and things. Women must be part of the equation of government to provide appropriate balance.

Gaians are mostly Westerners--people for whom intellectual iconoclasm and free expression, not just basic survival, was a possibility. They value the individual and the species, though not necessarily the group. Most Gaians are European social democrats or coastal progressives from the U.S. and Canada--places (for the most part) spared the worst physical ravages of Holnism. Many Gaians are followers of a Solar religion, which they found complimentary to their sense of non-sectarian spiritualism.

The Gaians practice a form of representative democracy. Many issues are put to a direct vote of all colonists, where the franchise is extended to anyone over the age of fourteen, though the opportunity for men to speak is less than that of women, and Skye exercises close procedural control over what passes for the legislative process.

Played straight, the Gaians are well-meaning radicals with perhaps too incautious an attitude toward their new home. The rhythms of life are sedate if not slow and also simple. These are people who take joy in their physical bodies and savor direct, tactile experiences of place. They are not Luddites, but technology does not fascinate them and they incorporate it less into their daily lives than the average mission survivor. Subverted, the Gaians are virtual nihilists who practice extreme asceticism, putting the perceived health of Planet well ahead of all other priorities, including their own survival and the well-being of other factions. In all formats, the Gaians are attentive stewards of the environment, leading to slower growth of the faction’s industrial base.

Guilt and bitterness are palpable themes with the Gaians. The former leads them to embrace the sheer novelty and change of life on Chiron, while for the Shapers it produces a backwards-looking effect. The latter, which reflects the time progressives were excluded from power structures on Old Earth, tempts Gaians toward conspiracism: the behavior of other factions is often diagnosed as intentional disregard for the land and its other inhabitants, rather a testament to their different priorities.

Deirdre and her followers were at the forefront of the fighting aboard Unity. Importantly, their sacrifices were more about the common good than mere individual or small group survival. The experience was traumatizing, and while the Gaians nurse a vendetta against the Spartans, once planetside, they retreated into isolation rather than pursue immediate retribution.

Skye had a close relationship with Jonathan Garland, whom she regarded as a gentle and well-meaning soul--the proper sort of caretaker for their expedition--but whose leadership she unconsciously disrespected, and therefore helped to undermine, while living out her truth during the Unity Crisis. She was a victim of misogynist bullying from the "grand old men" of the expedition, Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida and Chief Engineer Zakharov, both of whom she felt were not only dangerously overconfident, but actually effete. Without ever having met Oscar van de Graaf, Skye pegged him as the kind of problematic personality, narcissistic and self-aggrandizing, who should not be admitted to humanity's final ark. She found in J.T. Marsh a kindred spirit, though reluctantly because of his overt association with colonialist policy. Morgan, whose background she regarded with some sympathy, infuriated Skye with his thesis that the ecological "death" of Earth was simply a produce of the natural cycle of human consumption. In the blood-slick hydroponics bays of Unity, she made an ally of Dr. Pravin Lal, whose humanitarian impulses reflect what she hopes will lead to the Peacekeepers' taming the other factions.

The Gaians are obvious candidates for regression into eco-terrorism, an occupation Skye occasionally indulged in her youth. She is also afflicted by the same character flaws as Lal when it comes to pursuing what she believes is right: though she disdains to recognize it, there are genuine losers produced by sweeping change, whom her righteousness causes her to dismiss as undeserving of consideration, even though such a recognition might become the basis for negotiated settlement that spares those whom she seeks to benefit the necessity of war.

[Trenacker]

The Dynamic Enterprise

Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant. Need, as well as greed, have followed us to the stars, and the rewards of wealth still await those wise enough to recognize this deep thrumming of our common pulse. - The Centauri Monopoly

Leader: CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Mogul
Conceptual Inspiration: Tech billionaires, corporate raiders, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Microsoft, Amazon, The Gilded Age, The Age of Excess
Starting Technology: Industrial Base
Affinity: Supremacy

Faction Characteristics:
+2 Economy (entrepreneurial spirit)
-1 Support (followers have expensive tastes)
-1 Morale (followers dislike sacrificing for their convictions)
Gain 1 extra ENERGY each season (the resource that replenishes itself)
Treaties, pacts, and loans yield +20% bonus credits (the bankers of Planet)
Begin with 100 extra credits (the perfect medium of exchange)
Need Hab Complexes to exceed base size 4 (lives of idle luxury)

Priorities: Build

Objectives:

• Achieve an energy monopoly
• Make Chiron safe for inter-faction commerce
• Crack the secrets of immortality

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 3 Citizens, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Supply Crawler, 1 Mercenaries (SafeHaven), 2 Trade Goods

Faction Overview:
The purpose of life, wrote CEO Nwabudike Morgan, is enjoyment.

Seen through Morgan’s lens, the story of man is one of entrepreneurship. Earth’s decline and, yes, death was a natural, even predictable, consequence of the species’ evolution. Alpha Centauri will be similarly exploited until the next world is needed, leading to an undertaking not unlike the Unity Project. Is it morally and practically feasible to reject change? No!

Also called the Monopoly of Planet and more eponymous, "Morgan Industries," his is one of the factions most familiar to the survivors in terms of culture and outlook. Its appeal is simple: the survivors need change nothing about their ways of life. There is no doubt that Morgan believes in his own analysis. But he can tell, too, that the scared survivors who look to him for leadership would rather be told soothing lies than hard truths. Morgan has a plan, and they do not. He exudes a calm they do not feel. He has envisioned a future of which they cannot conceive. Happily, they will let him do the heavy lifting for them.

Morgan, as Chief Executive Officer, runs his base like a corporation. He chairs a hand-picked Board of Directors--all in hoc to himself, of course. All faction members, down to the most wretched drone, are generously referred to as "shareholders" to signify their supposed contributions to the colony, but in practice, a meager percentage have voting rights, and all power resides with the Board.

Reduced to its essentials, Morgan's plan is a simple one. He will achieve a competitive advantage in energy production, then become the dominant, and eventually the sole supplier of that essential resource to the people of Chiron. Wealth will buy him power, which he will use to accumulate more wealth, and the cycle will perpetuate with some careful tending. Along the way, Morgan will work to commoditize all aspects of daily life so that his energy monopoly becomes a powerful brake on everything from self-expression to health outcomes to delivery of government services.

Morganites come in two varieties. The first are those who think they can thrive in the shark tank. Most of these are Westerners born to the purple. Conspicuous consumption was their second language, and any natural talent, of which there is a considerable amount, was harnessed efficiently to elite education and the "right" kind of personal relationships. The second variety, by far the larger, are the thousands prepared to buy the outrageously thin gruel of Morgan's promises, usually because they aspire to walk in Morgan's shoes. These are prideful people, jealous of their opportunities to work hard. And they do. Individualism is an almost tangible force in the life of a Morganite. Sacrifices for the "greater good" are inherently problematic because they reflect an improper understanding of how people think and what makes them act. Only when everyone is doing precisely what is good for themselves can there emerge a stable ecosystem of incentives and performance.

Morgan's palpable delight in the earthy struggles of everyday life is infectious. His taste for vendettas and unabashed self-interest are disarming. The flaws humanize him. The self-aggrandizement makes his observers feel less alone in their conviction that, were they equally as wealthy, they would similarly settle every score, flatter every vice, shoot for every star. To those who do not know him, he is an archetype of what it means to be powerful beyond reproach.

Those who do know Morgan tell a different story. He famously requires a fraction of the sleep that others do. He is relentlessly curious about everyone around him. No stranger to force, he prefers to co-opt his opponents, whom he researches scrupulously. It is not so much a matter of setting them up to be exploited than determining what they want and promising it in return for giving Morgan what he wants.

Jonathan Garland was fascinated by Morgan, a person with no trace of guilt, let alone shame. Morgan rewarded the Captain's generosity by working hard to divert the loyalties of the Bridge crew. What use had the world's richest man for a U.N. Charter? What place could he hope for in an environment where the pecking order had already been settled back on Earth?

Morgan was a stowaway, and so were many of his followers, smuggled aboard by company contractors acting under secret orders. But he also accumulated new recruits--those whose faith in their original leaders had either disintegrated during the Unity Crisis, or over whom it had never taken hold in the first place.

Colonialism left its indelible mark. For Morgan, wealth is the only guarantee he knows against persecution for the color of his skin. As a victim of exploitation, he has internalized the lesson that inequality is inevitable. Success has made him hard: he lacks empathy for anyone who has not overcome equally long odds with little help, insisting that when  others are not successful, they have failed to exercise the iron discipline or bear up under the great suffering through which he made his bones long ago.

There are many ways to subvert Nwabudike Morgan. Perhaps, like the Nucky Thompson of Boardwalk Empire Season One who sent drunks home with enough in their pockets to afford bread and milk for the babes, he becomes the Roman paterfamilias. If he is dishonest, then it is in an honest cause. He must exploit all opportunities so as not to lose the economic arms race through which he generates the largess to do any social good at all.

Or could he be, like The Wire's Marlo Stanfield, a kingpin for whom glory is better than gold? What good are riches if you cannot use them to thumb your nose at the world in retaliation for its relentless slings and arrows?

What if Morgan were to lose control, his empire fragmenting into the hands of fellow oligarchs whose offspring and retainers keep up a ruinous and unceasing war for fleeting dominance over the faction's factories and counting houses?

[Trenacker]

The Dreamers of Chiron

Such a long way to travel, only to discover we could not get away from ourselves after all. - Rebuilding Man

Leader: Factor Roshann Cobb, The Dreamer/Dr. Aleigha Cohen, The Transgressor
Conceptual Inspiration: The War on Drugs, the Mental Health Revolution, Inception, Disney's Cranium Command
Starting Technology: Neuropsych
Affinity: Supremacy

Faction Characteristics:
+3 Probe (masters of neuro-digital battlefield)
-2 Efficiency (widespread addition wrecks havoc on base operations)
-2 Growth (disinterest in the physical world)
Reduce the highest die rolled during each combat round by 1 (addicts, slaves, and hierlings make poor soldiers)
Gain 1 extra TRADE GOODS each season (merchants of ambrosias and poisons)

Priorities: Choose, Conquer

Objectives:

• Test your theories on the Unity survivors
• Obtain compliant labor to sustain your colony
• Keep the Datalinks clear of potentially infectious elements

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 1 Overseer, 1 Robot, 1 Drone, 1 Colony Pod, 1 'Former, 1 Supply Crawler, 1 Mercenaries (Sabre Corp.), 1 Trade Goods

Faction Overview:
On his rare good days, Roshann Cobb is an obvious genius, courageous enough to speak the truth to himself as well as to others. It is never the home that is broken; only the people in it. The Unity survivors are doomed to repeat the Great Mistakes if they cannot perceive that. The last frontier is not really space, but the Naïve Mind.

Rather than share this essential insight, Cobb simply followed it, attempt to know himself mostly through risk-taking and pleasure-seeking. Until he was already a young man, there was no one to stop him doing so. Then, an older brother died and his natural father, the Tai-Pan of Struan's Pacific Trading Company, one of the world's largest companies, took a sudden interest in grooming his only remaining heir for the inevitable succession. Cobb had the natural talent to perform well in his studies, but only provided a strict hand on the tiller. That hand is now gone.

Aleigha Cohen was Earth's foremost expert on the psycho-pharmacological treatment of criminality and a Nobel-quality somnacist. What intrigues Cobb because of his convictions interests Cohen because of her boredom. From an early age, Cohen picked fights. There was always some great foe to be slain. Local street children, who disdained the daughter of a different religion. University administrators appalled by the ethical breeches she never considered. Prize committees aghast to find that her work informed so much of what had come to be considered the academic standard in her fields. Eventually, Cohen learned to unmask. The West would not have her, so she aligned herself with its adversaries. In time, Struan's found her and offered a way to achieve the notoriety as a commercial scientist what she had been denied in the academy.

Cobb's problem is that he is a happy addict. Cohen's problem is that she is cataclysmically self-centered. Both are narcissists. The colony they together created can be called that only because it is a collection of people who cannot leave. One visits a Dreamer base to obtain only two things: drugs or intelligence. The Dreamer economy produces enough of both to keep itself going, but barely.

To be a Dreamer on Chiron is to endure purgatory at best, damnation at worst. Cobb has most of his original Struan's retainers, a collection of personal bravos, his father's picked mentors, and studied enforcers. Some are genuine friends, of a stripe with Cobb and pleased to be along for an increasingly bumpy ride, but most await the uncomfortable day when Corporate arrives to sweep up after Junior's mess. Then there are the workers--contractors outside Cobb's leadership circle who failed to jump ship in time to avoid being tasked with keeping his teetering colony from oblivion. Others are prisoners, either marched out of Unity's detention blocks or taken during planetside slave raids. They receive the nerve staple and scutwork--if they are lucky enough to avoid the Dream Twister.

Anyone who lingers too long in the Dreamer grottos risks becoming an addict. Rumor has it that the taste of Somnacin lingers in the air even after the fiercest dust storms, but the truth is that Dreaming has strong appeal to hopeless people despite the near certainty of easy addiction.

Played straight, Cobb and Cohen are listless sociopaths--the monsters under the bed. But like those monsters, they are only dangerous to those who stray too far into the room. Cobb is dispassionately calculating when lucid, and indifferent to the consequences of crimes when in any other state. Most of his "waking" time is spent on machinations that usually succeed--high-profile assassinations, theft of critical information, and development of detailed psychological profiles that assist his clients to achieve world-altering results.

Struan's, too, casts a long shadow over the Unity survivors as perhaps the worst example of the flaws of Charterism: all the tools of power, none of its accountability. At least the Morganites are building their industrial empire here and now. Struan's is staking claims that won't be realized until long after Recontact. Cobb's great henchman, Dole Yudikon, reveres the Tai-Pan with the same mixture of awe and probably subconscious fear that Cobb does, but without any of the resentment, the perfect recipe for a happy warrior. But that's just it: Dole Yudikon--Carnaveron--is more relevant to most factions than is Cobb, his ostensible master.

Cohen, in this formulation, is an ethical disaster on the order of Zakharov, with none of the institutional constraints to force her to move slowly. Perhaps she truly believes, like Zakharov and Yang, that knowledge must always transcend ethics, but it is just as possible she feels compelled to perform her experiments for a simpler reason: somebody told her not to.

Subverted, Cobb and Cohen are center-stage in a tragedy. Cobb, the unloved number-two son, feels indebted to a father who obviously does not love him. He is a good spy and an excellent executive, but neither of these things brings fulfillment. Dreaming is his own invention--the ultimate tailored escape from a burdensome reality. Cobb has important stories to tell from beyond the pale but cannot quite get back, and having helped others to find their own way into the same quicksand, there is nobody left to retrieve him. Cohen's story starts much the same but ends on a happier note. Though still a sociopath, she eventually breaks free of Cobb and wanders Planet as a free-lance Thinker, offering unconventional and morally ambiguous, albeit useful, insights to other factions.

[Trenacker]

Fresh and shallow, the waters of the Purelake willingly gave up their dead.

What they could not salvage with their few 'rigs, Gaia's Stepdaughters soon turned into reefs, forests, and even bases. Snatiago had been afraid the Gaians would convince their Kellerite allies to pick the ruins for to re-float a peerless navy. The only question, she thought, would be whether Landers was the type to insist on keeping the heaviest laser monitors for himself. Instead, consulting no one, the Witch's satyrs filled the ruined war machines with black soil and slathered growth accelerant over every vertical surface. Soon, the detritus of Telleran's War was hardly discernible at any distance.

Each of the huge wrecks was a community unto itself. The ships could be put to a thousand different uses. There became fish hatcheries, kelp farms, wavebrakes, and power stations. Several hulks towed into contact formed a small weir dam for restoring water flow patterns altered by upstream diversion to irrigation schemes. Aboard the doomed flagship Bloody Hand, some skin-divers distilled a fiery spirit they called "Life's Blood" from the fruit of vines growing up the davits.

Between their enforced isolation and mild aversion to everything mechanical, it seemed to others that the Gaians courted hardship eagerly. Datalinks users traded stories of Gaian parents who enforced extreme oxygen discipline on their children, the better to prepare them for a life "outside the tent." But even the hardy woods-runners were gobsmacked by the sheer brutality of life on a Spartan man-o-war.

We went down into the crew compartments first, to collect remains. We had expected the traditional accoutrements of the warrior in prime. Synthahol, pin-ups, dice, that sort of thing. But the place resembled a workshop. It was the thin mattress or the ammunition press. Not a trace of joy. - Personal Diary

Sources:

The image, found on wallpaperflare.com, is not credited.

The Purelake is an invention of Brandon Sanderson that appears in his great work Stormlight Archive.

[Trenacker]

New Ideas for Citizen Types

Revised Citizen Types


Thinker
Citizens who fulfill the role of adviser, critic, and latter-day oracle. Theirs is a life of contemplation and debate, usually aided by advanced mental techniques or psychotropic drugs. These individuals are comparable to the Mentats, or human computers, of Dune and receive intensive training to enhance memory, perception, and pattern recognition to eidetic levels. Thinkers often perform their analyses with the help of computers, but they scrupulously avoid Mind/Machine Interface. This is because the indispensable Thinker is one who ingests Native pharmaceutical cocktails to expand their brain activity to regions previously unused—an impossibility after Synthesis. Thinkers improve doctrinal research and provide a major increase to a faction’s pool of Action Points. A Thinker is not a scientist; rather, a philosopher or strategist who studies problems from interdisciplinary or non-traditional perspectives. Most Thinkers follow a common set of intellectual prompts formalized by Sheng-ji Yang, founder of Chiron’s first Symposium, the relational structure into which Thinkers usually organize themselves to perfect their dialectic. Being highly specialized, Thinkers are wasted in roles that do not exploit their unique abilities to the fullest. Factions that have researched the Ethical Calculus tech can train Thinkers once they have also built a Symposium base facility. Thinkers provide +2 Action Points, +2 DOCTRINE, and a 25% increase to Probe defense.


Synthesizer
Once an individual crosses the Mind-Machine Interface, there is no going back. Those who survive the transition without permanent debilitation begin a new life as Synthesizers. The human brain is the most powerful thinking machine in the known universe, but its potential is limited in two respects. First, most people have access to only the merest fraction of all human knowledge. Their arguments therefore suffer for being ill-informed. Second, the average brain cannot rapidly absorb, organize, and interpret large quantities of data. Computer-assisted thinking solves for the first problem and at least partially mitigates the second. Synthesis—the literal act of M/MI—brings a subject mind to the brink of destruction. The result is damaged goods. Synthesizers provide incredible benefits to the scientific output of the bases in which they are residents but are exceptionally vulnerable to Probe attack. Synthesizers can be made—but not unmade—after a faction discovers Mind-Machine Interface and has build a Network Node. The effects of a Synthesizer in a base’s population are increased if the base is linked to the Planetary Networks. Synthesizers provide a base of +3 LABS, but at a cost of -75% to Probe defense.


Medico
One who has received training and certification in one of the numerous fields of human care. Doctors, nurses, social workers, and other carers fall within this broad but exalted category. Their contributions are essential to the continued good health and social stability of every society on Planet. The Medico becomes available with Austere Medicine. Medicos provide +2 PSYCH.


Officer
When a military or civil defense professional is present in the society, there are observable salutary benefits to collective morale, social order, and the quality of advice received by the government. Officers can be trained after discovery of Mind/Machine Interface, provided a base has a resident garrison (friendly military unit). Officers provide a modest bonus to a faction’s Action Point pool. Officers add +1 Action Point, +2 MORALE, and +1 POLICE.


Liquidator
The Liquidator is a specialist in the field of Centauri Conservation, and is unlocked by that tech. Their primary job is to clean up pollution within the territory of the base to which they are assigned. Liquidation is not without cost: the society pays a direct efficiency penalty to choose methods of planetary settlement less disruptive to the natural ecosystem. Nevertheless, social stability improves as citizens’ behavior increasingly mirrors their physical surroundings. The presence of active Liquidators is a known limiter on the encroachment of Native lifeforms. A Liquidator's bonus structure is: -1 ECON, +1 PSYCH, and +2 PLANET. Liquidators remove 1 pollution square within a base radius every 5 turns.


Organizer
Organizers help optimize the use of labor through collaboration rather than coercion. While Overseers benefit factions by controlling dissent and deterring subversion, Organizers mobilize and train workers to achieve superior efficiencies while also enhancing morale. The price of working with Organizers is that base operators’ hands are tied: a certain number of issues sent to arbitration will be settled in favor of citizens, not faction elites. Organizers can be appointed after discovery of Industrial Organization. Organizers confer a +2 ECON, +1 MORALE benefit, balanced by a -1 POLICE malus.


Administrator
A professional civil servant whose work is to mind base efficiency and stability. Administrators serve in Base Operations. They provide +1 Action Point, +1 ECON, and +1 POLICE.

Sources:
The portrait of the Thinker is "Dragon Dreams II" by Jackson Tjota. The portrait of the Synthesizer is Mr. Tjota's "Dragon Dreams III."

The portrait of the Medico was shared by the user Takasta 53 on Pinterest and is labeled "Pranav Antal."

The Liquidator is "Hazmat Suit Teaser," uploaded by EvTital to NexusMods for Fallout 4.

The portrait of the Officer was shared on weheartit.com by Himawari. It is titled Sci-fi Female Officer, with credit to a defunct link on the SpaceBattles forums.

The portrait of the Organizer is "Waiting to Land," by Alexander Chelyshev.

The portrait of the Administrator is by Yury Krylou.

[Trenacker]

The Hunters of Chiron

Architects tell us that form ought follow function, but the man in the bush knows that function can only ever follow form. When we lose our form, we stop being king. "There's a machine for that," says he. That's the essential problem of our species: we can simply invent our way out of being human.  - Rebuilding Man

Leader: Warden Jeremy Tanner Marsh, The Adventurer
Conceptual Inspiration: Gender essentialism, civilization vs. the wild, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, colonialism, The Call to Adventure, Louis L'Amour and the American Western, Mad Max franchise, Allan Quatermain
Starting Technology: Doctrine: Mobility
Affinity: Harmony

Faction Characteristics:
+1 Planet (We watch, tend, and respect the land.)
-2 Growth (Roving lifestyle inimical to large families.)
-1 Industry (Mobile workshops can't achieve economies of scale.)
-2 Police (Living wild and free)
+1 Support (Survival experts)
May reroll one combat die during each encounter with Chiron wildlife (early experience with a new and dangerous environment)
Gain 1 extra MINERAL each season (roughnecks)
Cannot use Cyborgs, Robots, or Specials (aversion to labor-saving technologies)

Priorities: Explore, Expand

Objectives:

• Test your mettle against the worst Chiron can throw at you be completing a Planetary Survey
• Exercise and enforce your usufruct rights, such as free passage on land and sea and common use of rangelands
• Be first to recover Unity's fusion core

Starting Pieces: 1 Talent, 2 Technicians, 1 Mobile HQ, 2 'Formers, 1 Scout Rover (Main Force Patrol), 1 War Stores, 1 Emergency Stockpiles

Faction Overview:
The Hunters are a meditation on the value, legacy, and future of traditional masculine archetypes. The faction explores the question, raised most eloquently by Louis L'Amour in his 1957 short story, Last Stand at Papago Wells, of whether a different morality was required of those who tamed the land by comparison with those who settled it thereafter.

The Hunters are among the most cohesive factions, drawing a majority of their adherents from the so-called Road Crews, officially called Forward Contact Teams. These units of pioneers, geologists, miners, and logisticians launched from Unity one standard Earth month before the micrometeorite collision that doomed her. Their purpose was to clear a site for the primary colony and build outlying infrastructure--perimeter fences, defensive checkpoints, access roads, sensor grids, solar collectors, and automated mines. Their leader, Warden J.T. Marsh, was also given a second, secret directive: determine the fate of the Chiron Interstellar Probe.

Marsh himself is a Great White Hunter archetype, a man out of time. Social convention made him an outcast. Conceived outside wedlock, he was taken from his mother and brought to East Africa as a child. An uncle's sisal plantation was Marsh's playground. Here, the tall, trouble-making youth received lessons in bushcraft from his black Kenyan playmates and the steady parade of white hunters whom his uncle packed out on safari.

Military education was a natural evolution for Marsh, both as a rite-of-passage for young men of his pedigree who wished not to have a purely academic experience, and as an arena in which his skills would prove eminently useful. On service with His Majesty's elite forces, Marsh received the highest wartime honors, a testament to his emerging leadership qualities and extraordinary daring. Yet Marsh did not find military life especially fulfilling. After a short marriage ending in tragedy, he did not try again for a conventional life, instead returning to Africa, balancing obligations as a part-time soldier with a moonlight career as "crisis concierge" for any number of forlorn causes.

It is unclear when and where Marsh discovered his affinity for lost and unpopular causes. Some biographers generously ascribe it to a private sympathy for African independence movement--penance for his time serving two separate apartheid regimes--but there is no record of such attitudes. What can be said for sure is that Marsh rubbed shoulders on the regular with a gunrunner named Nwabudike Morgan; policed the Shiloh interior alongside the likes of Ichillis Ontarion; and kept out of trouble only thanks to his connections in British Intelligence.

Financial success and reputation earned Marsh a place in the world of exotic sport hunting, where, for the first time, he found himself in front of the camera. Though a taciturn individual, Marsh intuited that media exposure could advance causes dear to him. Audiences responded eagerly to Marsh's fearlessness of expression. Something of a cult of personality developed, still evident today: Marsh fascinates those who have chosen other paths in life, for he seems to epitomize the ideals of valor and self-sufficiency to which most young men in the West are expected to subscribe. He has been everywhere, survived every trial, and avoided beguilement by some of the world's most powerful personalities.

Marsh believes that the hard physical work of survival will renew the collective spirit of the human survivors and thereby secure the future of the species. Like the Spartans, the Hunters believe that humans can thrive only in adversity. Yet where Santiago looks to war as our atavistic calling, Marsh believes that it is the fight against the land itself. For Spartans, survival means armed self-defense and a hypervigilance toward potential threat actors. For Hunters, survival means honing the body through physical adversity.

The Hunters are perhaps the greatest Luddites on Planet. They insist that, having solved their problems with machines, the people of Old Earth stopped doing that which was great and daring. (Here, I borrowed from the idea floated in the DC Comics Kingdom Come series, wherein the superheroes in their midst relieved normal humans from the need to solve their own problems, and thus retarded all social and technological progress.)

Hunters are a special breed. Classically masculine professions--miners, lumberjacks, long-haul drivers, firefighters, rangers--are over-represented. They are obsessively mobile, usually eschewing permanent settlements for the freedom of the "road." Like the cowboys, gauchos, and drovers of three centuries prior, they prefer the bedroll to the mattress. Their vehicles are forms of self-expression, both in terms of how they are used and how they are modified.

The stereotype of the Hunter is as a miscreant, physically powerful but lacking all sense of grace, place, and proportion. In Morganite dramas, the Hunter appears as the hero who refuses to be tamed by romantic love. University schoolchildren relate to Hunters through a stock character, охотник, whose deathly fear of robots causes him no end of grief. Deirdre Skye has described the Hunter identity as the final stage of human metamorphosis on the journey to ecological understanding.

Hunter camps are typified by certain cultural markers. Hunters do not help others of their kind unless asked, but once a request is made, it is never willingly refused, on pain of ostracism. A social disagreement can be settled by a fight, but never with weapons, and only to the point allowed by a judge. There is a marked hesitance to deal with anything fully automated, which Hunters find emasculating. For this reason, they use tools that are several generations out-of-date. Hunters carry weapons as a necessity, but scoff at the ideal of armed vigilance practiced by Spartan and Tribal as performative compensation.

Early arrival on Planet earned the Hunters access to many secrets. They were the first Unity crew to encounter mindworms, and then to defeat them with the help of incendiaries. An entire line of scientific inquiry, the Centauri branch of the Tech Tree, stemmed from insights first gathered by Hunters on patrol. They also developed an early and perhaps unhealthy obsession with retrieval of the Unity Fusion Core, which came down high in the sawtooth peaks of Planet's Monsoon Jungle, arguably one of the least-hospitable surface biomes known to the survivors.

Formidable warriors are made in this kind of crucible, and the Hunters are no exception, but their primary value to the "follow-on" colonists comes in the form of services rendered. The Hunters are symbiotes, providing expertise that other factions find difficult to supply for themselves. Usually, this means that Hunters help with base construction, conversion of the land for agriculture, water collection, and simple exploration. On the extreme end of that spectrum, Hunters show up as mercenary fighters (often in reconnaissance roles), overland escorts, and gatherers of intelligence. The large concentration of heavy equipment sent down with Marsh makes the Hunters an irresistible force multiplier for terraformation, but has also attracted unceasing attention from more acquisitive factions.

Notoriously "effite" factions such as the University of Planet, the Children of the Atom, and the Dynamic Enterprise seasonally hire hundreds of Hunters to service their solar mirrors, undertake replenishment missions to long-range outposts, and manage native vegetation. Most factions trust Hunter experts to instruct them in the finer arts of wildland firefighting, emergency response, and salvage, to say nothing of helping them fight the mindworm menace. Hunters also furnish Planet's equivalent of a long-range rescue service: when expeditions go missing or bases are overcome by natural calamity, Hunters are liable to be the closest help at hand.

[Trenacker]

After a certain duration of use, neural proto-matter precipitates to the bottom of each container. The researchers are entirely baffled, but the implication is obvious: here is the brain, attempting to repair itself. - Assimilative Notation

At The People's Teeming, Hive Wakeners prepare to transport a nineteen-year experiment that has produced unanticipated results. The base will soon be overrun by Pilgrims.

Clean-room Design
Clean-room design historically referred to the reproduction of an existing product or process without violation of copyright. This practice first attracted significant academic and legal attention at the onset of the Electronic Age when various firms attempted to build nearly identical products using similar design concepts. The design process might also be fairly described as parallel development. Historically, clean-room design was controversial. Copyright holders often questioned how competitors achieved their results without resort to corporate espionage, and the end result of most clean-room design was a court battle.

On Planet, where copyright law is frequently unenforceable across faction borders and uneven access to the patent libraries of Old Earth provides prima facie justification for liberal violation of presumptive intellectual property rights, clean-room design has taken on a different, even more sinister meaning. What used to be a term reserved for parallel design in any field is now applied to the creation of “abridged artificial biology.”

What is abridged artificial biology? Some call it the "brain in a jar." Unlike human clones or androids, both of which are capable of independent function, abridged artificial biologics are dependent organisms designed explicitly to perform a certain limited set of computational or empathic functions that, in a human, are managed by the brain. The Hive calls this technology “thinking chemicals.” Most survivors refer to its commercial form as “brain bags"--the drip-feed pouches they feed to a mass spectrometer or, when the chemical is suspended in the appropriate medium, an functional magnetic resonance imaging device. (To avoid unpleasant associations, the products of Chironian clean-room design were marketed as “Fast-Paks” (for “fast-thinking”) starting with the MY262 annual of the Morgan Industries Catalogue.)

The basic benefit of thinking chemicals, apart from their comparatively very great speed and capacity, is that they can add a measure of discernment to the performance of their tasks that is technically impossible for purely electronic creations. Any given packet of thinking chemicals is capable of activities ranging from automatic regulation of electronic devices to emotional screening. Factions trust in thinking chemicals to orchestrate the early stages of base defense when human operators are not yet involved, cull defective samples from production lines, concoct unusual passwords and evasive patterns for vehicles, sense deception during interrogations, and, most important, to add ablative layers of emotional processing potential between the full human mind and machine interfaces.

University researchers initially hoped to expand the use of thinking chemicals to provide "injectable intelligence." Experiments looked at the potential to change both an individual's ways of thinking (literally, the strategies they employ to process data and make decisions), as well as the memories accessible to them by performing as an extension of their own brains. Unfortunately, thinking chemicals, like Mind-Machine Interface, trigger problematic health reactions similar to organ rejection. The University's standards of care prescribe a period of at least five Earth-standard years of connection and therapy before an individual has overcome the inherent system shock of routine interaction with disassociated brain material.

The open, and unanswered, question about thinking chemicals is whether they are capable of learning. Current scientific consensus is that thinking chemicals do learn, even when designers intentionally worked to inhibit the emergence of long-term memory storage. The fund of shared research shared on the Planetary Datalinks is mostly limited to University archives, but researchers agree that, if left in service and provided with adequate nutrients, certain late-generation thinking chemical formulas should be able to form brain matter with faculties comparable to those of an infant.

Game Designer’s Notes
Special credit to MysticWind and ari for this idea.

The artwork in this post belongs to Sergey Grechanyuk. It is titled "Lab Concept" and is available here.

Clean-room Design is a Build Tech that usually appears on a faction’s research tree just before they enter mid-game. Clean-room Design is preceded by Intellectual Integrity (Choose) and Doctrine: Subversion (Choose).

To understand clean-room design fundamentally, I used Wikipedia.

Star Trek: Voyager's bio-neural gel packs appear to be somewhat similar, and they clearly contain nerves suspended in medium. I read the Memory Alpha description of that technology while writing this treatment.

[Trenacker]

The militiaman places his whole being at the disposal of the collective. Our advantage lies in recognition that we must sacrifice autonomy of the mind as enthusiastically as our forefathers sacrificed autonomy of the body.

Conclave reconnaissance teams roll past a crash-landed Supply Pod. Light emanating from the pod's superstructure betrays the salvage work already underway.

Descriptions of the psychoactive properties of sastisménos leaf date to the earliest arrival of human explorers on Chiron under the auspices of the Chiron Interstellar Probe (CIP). Beginning the second day after landing, infirmary records contain multiple and consistent reports of aural and visual hallucinations on the part of colonists performing labor in exterior or unshielded environments. Colonists afflicted in this way usually quit their work in terror and were overtaken moderate to severe panic attack that prompted them to doff their breathing apparatus, often slipping into unconsciousness. This reaction lent the plant its name, which in Greek means bewilderment.

Attending med-techs credited these experiences to various causes, including routine hibernation sickness, general adaptation syndrome, and nitrogen narcosis. The number of cases led CIP physicians to devise a standard therapy involving supplemental oxygen, electrolyte replacement, and rest, sometimes modified by prescription of Somnacin as a sleep aid. Increased case loads and a broad worsening of symptoms became more difficult to assess as the first cases of Red Flu emerged. Overwhelmed medical staff had little time to perform differential diagnosis. Nearly all psychosis was ascribed to fever, which ran rampant through the population.

Mass sastisménos poisoning played out not much differently than genuine mindworm attack, which it always preceded but did not always portend. Factions took notice, and applied considerable effort to try to understand the phenomenon. It took the Planitzer Expedition of U.M.Y. 1, a months-long study of the floral bounty of Chiron's southern polar continent, to isolate and confirm the unique symptomatology of sastisménos exposure. Inhalation of the plant's airborne pollen created a temporary, variable-strength link to Planet's xenofungal nervous system, producing effects that human sufferers described as akin to prescience with respect to the location and lifecycle of mindworm boils. Sastisménos pollen is microscopic and capable of lingering in the vicinity of a bloom for up to one Earth-standard week. Blooms occur at dawn and dusk twice during the 500-day Chironian year as the temperature varies between seasons, or as an immediate defense mechanism when the plants are disturbed--a last-ditch effort at genetic propagation.

Use of sastisménos varies across societies. The Dreamers raised several different cultivars to assist with their eponymous experience, ultimately performing years of research before concluding that the pollen's inclusion in their drug cocktail produced a brainwave amplification effect that burdened the sleeper with more discord than clarity. Separately, Gaians ingested the grounds of the leaf as tea before ritual vision quests, which practice directly preceded the faction's successful domestication of mindworms. Because the plant itself was found everywhere on Chiron except the Monsoon Jungle and sand desert, all factions found it necessary to engineer filters that protected against pollen contamination. The Hive went further, compounding a pill it issued to faction militia that, when ingested, temporarily induced hyper-attunement with the local ecology--a kind of biological early warning system to be used in the presence of xenofungal activity.

Game Designer's Notes:
Colonial interaction with sastisménos-related phenomena is simulated by the Centauri Ecology and Centauri Prescience Techs (both Growth-based), which precedes Centauri Empathy on the path to Centauri Psi.

The Secret Project: Centauri Attunement (Expand) yields a +10% defensive bonus to base defenders against native attack.

[Trenacker]

Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge. - The Art of War, Datalinks

Security breach at the Longhouse in New Jerusalem, seat of the Conclave kritarky. Polar lights provide near-daytime conditions, but it is unlikely the Nauvoo Legion will find those responsible.

Believers were grossly tempting targets for espionage. Sister Miriam Godwinson's unshakeable commitment to inter-factional reconciliation at the near-total cost of retributive justice made her bases an appealing neutral ground for trade and negotiation. Vendetta partners could meet under cover of routine business to discuss terms of resolution. Prisoners exchanged seasonally through the good offices of the Human Relief Initiative. Factions whose materialistic impulses outran their Pact loyalty might find brokers who could access markets closed by war.

Believers were notorious for a pronounced, even rigid formality of personal presentation and usually took their rest cycles in family or community settings. In other words, they lacked the individualism and iconoclastic dispositions that typified obsessive datalinks users. A Conclavist's moral fiber might be iron, but their network security was porous and their guests the kind of soft, careless people upon whom Probe Teams preyed with gusto. The Nauvoo Legion, Chiron's least-blooded faction militia, was always many steps behind the track ball. Some cracked wise that Miriam preferred it this way, lest worship attendance suffer. Guilt tended to stimulate reflection: visitors disdained to offend their helpful hosts by refusing polite invitations to Sunday service.

The Longhouse was a gift of the Shapers in commemoration of their longstanding Non-Aggression Pact with Godwinson's people. Neo-Polynesian architecture was married to design principles borrowed from both Soviet-style Brutalism and New California Rusticism.

The Late Seating at Horizons, Morgan Megaplex.

Perhaps because his was the vision least at odds with Old Earth, Morgan's society readily held space for the so-called "forgotten" occupations, those having to do with the cultural expression of humanity. Despite cultivating a megalomaniac image, it pleased Morgan to shame his critics by pointing out that their only use for artists was to deny them their value. Attempts to turn chefs and sculptors into librarians and code-crawlers would always end in disappointment, he chided. Better to use them for their original purpose: to preserve the morale and sharpen the purpose of their fellow colonists.

Morgan's formula for success was reductive. Colonists wanted subtle, but not exact hints of the world they had left behind. Horizon's retro-futuristic theming invoked the optimism preceding the Great Mistake, an era everyone had learned about but which none of the Unity passengers had experienced firsthand. Synthleather clamshell couches, modern art installations, big band music--these were relatively inexpensive ways to separate the guest from their lived experience, if only for a few hours. There was also a strict ban on android service. Human restaurant staff added an emotional resonance to the dining experience, starting with the doorman, who handed off to coat check, maître d', somellier, and wait staff of four. The prominent digital screens tracked table assignments (what Morganite didn't want to know they were rubbing shoulders with the elite?), but all guest transactions in the restaurant up to the point of payment were handled manually. Waiters were trained to memorize complex orders and the tables were "dumb," without even basic datalinks interfaces.

Morgan argued unsuccessfully that the menu should retreat from the aspirations of the club's own name. What gambler worth his credits wanted fish mousse over True Steak and potato? Test seatings showed a clear preference for molecular gastronomy using a mostly Chironian menu--hybrids and native foodstuffs. Diners didn't wish to stray all that far from the familiar mess hall. Even the alcohol was synthetic but for a few priceless vintages. More proof for the principle that there was a fine line between happy nostalgia and acute homesickness.

Sources:
The top picture is Paul Alexander's "Nighttime City," posted by SciFi Art on Twitter.

The bottom picture is credited to futurist Syd Mead.

[Trenacker]

Legitimation ritual in the Solar style. Morgan Solarfex, M.Y. 117.

Access to machine augmentation; increasingly effective medical care; and regular, nutritious meals created a yawning gulf that set Talents and Specials far apart from the Drones they supervised. Not just in terms of moral attitudes, perspective, and ambition, but also size, strength, and access to information.

This gulf, while not unprecedented in all Old Earth societies, was deeply problematic for the heirs of a frontier society, and while perhaps it was possible for the very first superlatives to justify their status with reference to particular deeds on behalf of the faction as a whole, their many descendants indisputably reaped generous genetic and social rewards without personal sacrifice. The offspring of Morganite executives were on a first-name basis with some of the University's most-celebrated faculty. A Pilgrim stakeholder's voting rights and energy income were inherited from the original signatory in transactions that chancery judges held to be practically inviolate. Accounts transferred similarly on the Bourse. Even in the Human Labyrinth, where any child of unusual intelligence was allotted supplemental nutrients, the very poor quality of life for the laboring classes ensured that they produced many fewer prodigies than their enlightened masters.

Thus, Chironian elites, especially governing elites, felt extreme pressure to justify their exalted positions socially, which they often did through ceremony that provided either religious or politico-cultural explanations for inequality. Each faction had a radically different answer.

In the militarized bases of the New State, the Observers, and the Honored Dead, wealth and comfort were the explicit prerogatives of service to the commonwealth, usually under arms, but if not, then through performance of religious or civil administration. Those dissatisfied with their lot in life had, in theory, only to climb higher on the meritocratic ladder. Similar arrangements prevailed within the University of Planet.

Morganites participated in a frenetic culture of monetization. One could sell anything--labor, time, blood, body heat, even access to a job or benefit. Some companies experimented with the elimination of individual contributor positions: all basic tasks were posted to a public-facing jobs board. Executives adjusted the promised rate-of-return as the customer's needs dictated, paying more for higher quality and speed. All citizens were compelled to bank with their employers, in return for which they earned interest--a basic experiment with the social safety net found everywhere else. But the major brake on unrest was bread and circuses: no matter their wealth or poverty, Morganite citizens enjoyed the atavistic release of carnival days, during which laborers worked reduced hours and received trial access to entertainments and diversions normally locked behind paywalls. Corporate leaders coined their own civic religions, borrowing heavily from the terrestrial monarchies and supernatural pantheons of Old Earth, to complete with the real thing, combining the socially beneficial elements of a mutual aid and service organization with an aura of exclusivity.

Inequality was most problematic for communitarian factions, which included the Gaians, the Labyrinth, the Conclave, and the Tribe, who recognized chasms of wealth and opportunity as significant indicators of both economic inefficiency and reduced social cohesion. For this reason, citizens were rarely encouraged to pursue wealth as a social choice. In the Conclave and the Tribe, there was heavy pressure to tithe after meeting certain energy thresholds, while a Hive disciple faced harsh penalties for hoarding. Gaians and Tribals reacted to "capitalists" through shunning.

Sparta managed inequality by proscribing bloodline inheritance. A fighter might accumulate wealth by stealing it from his defeated enemies, but upon his death, it would become the shared property of his barracksmates, to dispose of as they saw fit. Holnists of course criticized this practice as a form of Communism.

The problem of social injustice was least acute with the Hunters, whose lifestyles were inimical to the accumulation of significant material wealth even by their own standards; among the Dreamers, since high rates of addiction and early death frequently created a glut of supplies; and within the Ascendancy, where it was regarded as a feature, not a bug, indicating who should lead.

[Trenacker]

Necessity is the mother of invention. - Datalinks

The Space Construction Vehicles (SCVs) and Multiple Use Labor Elements (M.U.L.E.s) that helped rebuild human civilization on Planet were heirs to a venerable tradition. Long before shipping out for the Far Colonies or braving the 800°F temperatures of near-side Mercury, they participated in Terran disaster recovery.

Shut in their Mumbai dorm rooms because of fallout, students at the Indian Institutes of Technology in Mumbai equipped their prototype M.U.L.E. for the most hostile environment they could imagine. Remembering the lessons of Chernobyl and Fukushima, locations the M.U.L.E. would eventually come to know well, they abandoned wheels and treads for a rear-mounted articulating turbofan, did away with the idea of a human operator, and added a high-powered signal repeater to cut through the intense background radiation of the nuclear blast zone. An internal hull tank contained 80 cubic feet of rapid-expansion foam to settle radioactive dust. The drone's two hydraulic waldoes could be rotated full circle, with lift capacity in excess of 20,000 lbs. Using variable geometry, either or both manipulators could be swapped mid-flight for lift forks or diamond-toothed excavator saws on extending booms. The latter were perfect for heavy demolition, a task that could also be accomplished through brute force collision. (The front face of the M.U.L.E. was armored for this very purpose.) Under-carriage clamps usually carried inflatable humanitarian shelters equipped with tie-downs so that the M.U.L.E. could air-lift ambulatory survivors to the nearest aid station.

M.U.L.E.s were some of the earliest agents of terraformation on Planet where their preferred payloads alternated between defoliating agent (used on fungus) and crop seed. Many were converted to fast-response vehicles, dropping acids and incendiaries on encroaching mindworm boils to buy time for a retreat.

Thinking they had produced a gift for all mankind, the IIT students neglected to patent their new invention. The first commercially-produced M.U.L.E.s were Tata Motors designs, but hundreds of corporations got in on the same action, from American Machines, to Soviet ZIL, to the French heavy equipment manufacturer Poclain.

When tasks called for a human touch, the nine-foot-tall SCV protected its precious pilot from the dangers of vacuum, radiation, atmospheric pressure, and chemical or biological contamination.

SCVs were in demand wherever radio communication was unreliable or the bosses didn't want to pay for propellant mass. (M.U.L.E.s were too small to be fitted with efficient electric propulsion.) Because they offered a pressurized rear-mounted airlock into which casualties could be taken, SCVs were also required to support human EVA operations by United Nations Life-Saving Service regulation.

Planetside crews disliked the SCV. Though positively comfortable when compared with a Manned Maneuvering Unit in space or a survival suit on Chiron, the SCV was universally acknowledged as a walking coffin in the event of mindworm attack since escape required the suit to undergo several lengthy decompression and re-pressurization cycles. To make SCV service more palatable, Landing Pod workshops tried several innovations, including removing the windscreens to facilitate rapid egress and festooning the exo-frame with banks of grenade launchers loaded with incendiaries.

February 2059: At an Odessa, TX salvage yard, American Reclamation Corporation contractors remove the armor plate from an SCV, a sure sign of prosperous times ahead.

A Unity Rover in Hive service. Forestland camouflage, front-mounted crash bar, and spare tyre are hallmarks of a long-range raider, but the sure giveaway is the retention of synthetic leather crash couches, creature comforts that rarely survived contact with the People's Rally for Austerity.

Like much else on Planet, this weapons platform is a compromise. The weight of the turret-mounted anti-aircraft autocannons must have greatly reduced speed and range, already limited because of the use of an electric motor, meaning that this vehicle would not have operated independently. The obvious lack of protection for driver and gunner are more likely to have reflected the desire for rapid bug-out in case of wormthreat than hesitation about the added burden of ablative armor, but it is also possible this unit was dedicated to column air defense and not front-line infantry support. It is also possible this vehicle has been partially cannibalized; the conspicuous absence of hull-mounted countermeasures suites and recovery equipment are otherwise difficult to explain. Hive vehicles were known to wire a second arming trigger to their vehicle grenade launchers and reserve some of the single-use projectors for non-lethal blunt trauma rounds. The .32 caliber PVC balls, three charges to a grenade, were brutally effective in close quarters.

With help from a Mobile Workshop, Tribal Minutemen perform field repairs on an out-of-service Heavy Rover configured as a drone command vehicle. They are in the ideal location for a breakdown. The Neyanza Valley Shapers were unlikely to pursue hardened soldiers over a mere border violation. As if to underscore the point, the Kellerites go about their business without apparent concern for the sensor towers seen just yards away.

The incredibly well-engineered Roustabout was the Pilgrims' successful attempt at a high-speed harasser for use on the Uranium Flats.

With the help of a design team headhunted from the likes of Verset-Brantley Defense Machinery and his own ARC, Oscar van de Graaf's autowrights started with Grumman-Fairchild's economy design and gave themselves leave to use all the parts from Superstition Engine Works Heavy Rovers. They also conducted thousands of hours of interviews with both veteran Regulators and prisoners liberated from the Labyrinths. The new design featured heavy all-terrain shocks and an unprecedented level of protection for the crew of three. Since mindworms couldn't survive the high ambient radiation, the New Two Thousand were free to "button up" behind cope cages, anti-mine plates, and explosive-reactive armor (ERA).

The Hivemen, mostly equipped with archaic hand weapons, found that the attackers' buggies routinely survived direct hits by as many as three rocket-propelled grenades. Yang's troops often focus-fired their machine guns in an attempt to trigger sympathetic explosions of the ERA bricks, hoping to "soften" them for the grenadiers.

Sources:

First picture is from Blizzard's Starcraft 2 computer game.

Second picture credit to Bryan Lee, "Construction Machine," from ArtStation. Found on Pinterest.

Third and fifth pictures credited to Alex Ichim on this-is-cool.co.uk.

Fourth picture is by David Sunoo (2014).

Sixth picture is from Pinterest, credited to Sander Verhoeven.