By David C. Daoust
There were thirteen City Stations throughout the caravan of ark ships.
During the ark age, each station held a royal family all its own. The head of each family was responsible for the community aboard their individual station.
These royals were responsible for representing the people’s issues, to the people as a whole. A body of people known as the Democratic Assembly. This position was a tradition throughout the Ark Age.
At the end of the ark age though, most the Royals of the Alliance had left the City Stations to fend for themselves; The Royals more interested in their lives beneath the planetary domes of the inner planets.
No one truly understood all the royals did for the people during the trek to the Second Sun. Even in those places that the royal family stayed with the people, which was rare, the truth was, the Arks no longer guided these, or any, Royals as closely as they once did.
It was the arks that freed the people of the constant surveillance.
While the AI’s still maintained their omnipotence, they no longer interfered. It was a return of freedoms to the people, as the Arks had promised, all those years before.
The Age of the Second Sun involved a general ‘return to silence’ of the technology. A silence only notable to the Royals themselves, as the people had a general misconception of the droids being ‘stupid’. A misconception that was beneficial to maintaining control during the Ark Age.
As the royals shipped off to start civilizations of their own, the Democratic Assembly was left to be maintained by the people alone.
More and more, those people that tried to fill the royals shoes, found it increasingly harder to maintain, not only order, but the people’s attention. These representatives largely fell to corruption. It proved far easier for them to only represent that which was relevant to their own needs and the needs of those closest to them, than risk authority being taken out of their hands.
The Royal Alliance, post Factions War, was far more than just the City Stations though. It now held vast moons, most of which, rich with newly formed life. What was once the intelligentsia living off ideas and forming ideals, were now people farming the land, rediscovering how to grow crops. This was new, a different mentality entirely than those aboard the City Stations. It was this divide, which first formed the separation of the large governments, like the Royal Alliance and the Trade Consortium, from the small colony governments forming on the moons. This was the first step in the colonials being indifferent to who owned the moons themselves, thus far only minor dust-ups as to where their taxes were going.
The Trade Consortium, once a shining beacon of Industrial Leaders, forming trade lines throughout the Onion, had peaked into the Rich Elite. They glorified their culture. Citizenship meant something! If only that you weren’t a ‘Milker’ or a ‘Lotus-eater’. Of course, they banned ‘Lotus’, the major food source of the Ark Age, grown within the droid run Bio-Spheres of the Ark Ships’ Central Cores, all to force the people to fend for themselves.
The Consortium built industrial hubs, mostly in orbit, but their moons were known for dark skies and stripped lands. They had very few of the old City Stations. The most popular though, Alpha Prime, was a city station that had followed their Royals fully, as they denounced their titles, to form the Trade Consortium.
The Trade Consortium promoted competition amongst the innovative, while leaving their workers to swelter in the defeat of the ‘being on the bottom’; for there could not be a top without a bottom! The unions were few, and held next to no power. Often times the corporations paid in ‘scrip’ rather than ‘coin’. Scrip that could only be spent ‘in-house’, which meant if you lost your job, you lost your savings.
The counter culture erupted from the poor and the hungry, those that got screwed more and more by the corrupted institutions that cemented around them.
Sweet Honey Zhou, the notorious pirate ‘queen’, said to be the descendant of Royalty that had lost all of their wealth amongst the Consortium, was one such pirate that stole enough from the rich, that she was glorified to the people.
Like all in the Trade Consortium, the rich found a way to exploit it to their own ends. Movies were made, glorifying the counter culture further, glorifying the ‘Pirate Culture’ as ‘popular culture’, which led to more merchandise to produce and sell.
‘That’d be ‘popular culture’ amongst the poor, anyway. Those workers in the middle, rather than integrating properly with ‘new neighbors’, were hard pressed to stay clear of their encroachment. An encroachment that was inevitable. Ultimately, led to a rundown of property value, which meant the rich could come back through, and scoop back up, what the middle had spent their lives paying off, all for a steal. Tear it down, rebuild it, and sell it back to the incoming wave of fleeing workers.
Ivan, an ancient bot at this point, had watched as the world changed around him. He was one of the first virtual minds to leave the hub, one of the first to take a form outside of the virtual world; One of the first to make an impact on the physical world, literally. He had witnessed the corruption form throughout the Onion, not only throughout the Royal Alliance Cronies, but through the Consortium’s corrupted Big Wigs that fed on those they held trapped in the Crag.
Ivan believed when the word got out, of what the Red Faction was building, all would flock to their cause. What was known as the ‘Red March’ had come and passed though. The Red March pulled followers throughout every standing government of the Second Sun. The numbers were far less than expected. Ivan was left in frustration that the people would resist, what was clearly, in his mind, the clear fix for all their woes.
The reality was a rude awakening, while they had managed to pull, at least some, of what meager unions which had formed in the Consortium, it was not quite what Ivan had expected. And while the Big Wigs outwardly showed the Red Faction disdain, Ivan knew, that they were thankful, that the Red Faction had solved one of their growing problems. The unions were just gaining ground, when they’d been swept up in the Red March.
This frustration permeated his very being.
Ivan was mostly known for his metal mask and red robes. In fact, all the Onion knew of the Red Faction’s robed political Officers. The garb was important early on, when they’d first taken to spreading the word amongst the humans. It was before bots were so human-like, or rather, before the Red Faction could afford bots so human-like, that the disguise was so important. The red robes were introduced to the people, as though they were meant to represent the people as ‘one’. One face, one voice, one person…
The Truth was, Ivan was not just A commissar of the Red Faction, he was ALL the commissars of the Red Faction. The inner circle of their party was far smaller than even their followers believed. The leaders of the Red Faction, all of which inhabited a Monolith, rather than just a bot-body, micromanaged the people at a level that was unheard of, even to those they micromanaged.
They actively jumped from one body to the next, the Monolith acted as a server to their data sphere, letting them switch bodies, throughout the Onion, as they were needed throughout their holdings. The bots lacked the ability to function in all the bodies at once, as the Arks do with their droids. Often times, if they fall silent, they are elsewhere in the Onion, dealing with other problems.
Currently, Ivan found himself cut off from the rest of his bodies, at least those stationed outside the Neo Vir’ees System. He’d also found himself cut off from his normal group of Elite guards whose monoliths were located elsewhere in the Solar System. It also cut him off from the ‘Commandant’ that normally handled military decisions when they arose.
The severing of a Solar Gate was unheard of, but it gave Ivan the opportunity to inhabit one of his bodies he did not often get to use. In fact, it was a body never before seen by anyone outside of the Red Faction. He knew, the Commandant would not be pleased…
Historically, the original programming of the first bots within the hub, involved four arms. The designers felt, that since bots would not have all those pesky organs taking up space, they could give them extra appendages, maybe to make them more productive. All bots everywhere, started their virtual lives with four arms. Bot programs throughout the hub, which could appear as holograms, were known for their extra arms. When the manufacturers came through to supply the physical bodies, the extra appendages were left off the finished product. Bots often complained of the difference.
When the Red Faction secretly designed their soldier’s massive ‘Assault Bots’, they added the extra appendages back on, each able to strike with the massive blade that ejected from its forearm at will, or eject an assault rifle, from the same arm, and fire if they wished. They also dropped the bipedal design, which mimicked the human body, and instead affixed a massive prehensile tail. A tail that, with a mere flick, could move them twenty feet or more at speeds far superior than any human soldier could run.
It was this flickering charge, sparking against the metal floors, that sent the serpentine group of monstrous bots charging through the halls and corridors of the Barrack-Ship, as Ivan led the squad of ‘Assault Bots’ to intercept the escaping Seaguard Agents that had invaded their base.
