by Max Barry

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DispatchAccountDrama

by Cbg-palisade. . 425 reads.

Introduction (OOC)


INTRODUCTION

You should have seen it, my friend. What we had. It was beautiful.

And now it is broken. And I fear it will never be whole again.

The year is 2995- anno domini, common era, whatever. Humanity stopped caring to keep count of anything but the number long ago. It cannot bring itself to care. The clocks have all been changed.

They changed when, in the 2200s, humanity in all its foolhardiness looked around at a world it had exploited beyond repair and resolved to try again- when humanity in all its bravery looked to the stars, to a moon its boots had once walked on, to a sun its probes had once orbited, and said in one voice that it would not go quietly. When the leading superpowers of the new order, nestled firmly in the grave of the old, created an AUTHORITY to go to the stars and exploit the cosmos for them. Under one banner, a globe crested by the guiding North Star, the Colonial Authority set out into the sky on a blazing pillar of fire, smoke, and radionuclides- Atlas' pillar now humanity's escape from damnation.

The Colonial Authority cast its net broadly indeed, riding the blank cheque Earth had given it as long as it could, and by 2400 it had achieved its mandate- and much, much more. It had cast countless millions into space, a new breed of humanity sundered from the teeming billions left behind on Earth, and it had set them on hundreds of worlds and orbiting habitats around hundreds of stars, riding the tunnels its gate network carved through space to new frontiers and new material wealth to feed its eternal growth. From Goddard, Luna, the nerve centre of the new order, it prosecuted a war of conquest against the cosmos, and against all odds, it prevailed.

But it did not fight a safe war, or a humane one. Humanity had in its conquest been wracked by the total prosecution of its goals and the harshness of a frontier completely alien to what man had come to expect from life. Even if the stars were dead, and no foreign society reached out to clasp hands in friendship with the explorers of old Earth, nonetheless they struggled onward. Humanity itself was shaped by its directing AUTHORITY, and as it grew it became more and more adapted to its setting and divorced from its old bride. The disparaged ideas of "liberty" and "enlightenment", spat on since the time their descendants destroyed the old world, were cast aside, unsuited as they were for the new. In their place rose a new Renaissance to replace the old, a Stellar Renaissance, and in the place of the old ideologies were birthed new ones, chiefest among them Colonial Bureaucracy, or simply colbureau. Its tenets were simple- expand at all costs. Keep the macro-organism of STATE thriving. And, for a time, it did.

But the line cannot go up forever.

And so, in the 2700s, when the first cracks in the system laid as early as three hundred years prior began to widen and to split, there was nothing the powers that be could do to prevent them from tearing AUTHORITY asunder. War, strife on a cosmic scale, concepts that humanity had not known in full since it had abandoned the Earth under its new guiding banner, were all reintroduced in a fashion far more violent than anything even the harsh frontier could muster. But though AUTHORITY would for a time perish, its body split into thousands of shards scattered across the thousands of stars it called its own, its ideas lived on.

That infectious idea of the eternal bureaucrat lived on- and so did its competitors. Humanity in space squabbled and fought once more in the shell of its hatching, unsure whether or not it should clutch to the egg-shards of AUTHORITY longer still or leap away from the nest into the hostile void entirely. That battle endured for a while yet- and indeed is still being fought. If the past has taught man anything, it is that that particular battle is unlikely to ever end. Time, though, yet marched on, as it is wont to do.

And then so, in this shell of a cosmos, amidst the scattered dreams of spaceflight and utopia of generations past, and the corpses of those who died for that dream, rose a power at last in the scope of our lens of setting- the Confederacy of Liam's Reach. its spatial neighborhood named for the first surveyor to explore there, one Sarah Liam. Hardly more than an impromptu alliance for common-defense, forged out of the crucible of the wars of the 2700s, steadily it crested the wave of chaos to form something more- a state. A great power in its local space, the 98th Corridor of gate-lanes, over half of the Reach's two-hundred-plus stars brought more or less underneath its diamond-star banner.

And with its success, it grew bold- its ideals, it assumed, had made it strong. Its freedom. It was a superior successor to the dead AUTHORITY. The hard forge of totalitarianism could now be cast off, and humanity, glorious humanity, could rise free to better itself. The trials were over. Earth, the polluted cradle-world wracked by unchecked climate collapse, overpopulation, and resource-depletion, had been an excellent springboard, and the bureaucratic state that had furthered humanity into the stars had served its purpose in turn. Now it was liberty's time to reign once more.

It was wrong.

Its neighbors, led by the 93rd Corridor's Colonial Network in an impromptu supranational alliance, decided after years of abuse, posturing, and mutual saber-rattling that their boisterous housemate in the 98th had grown too onerous to tolerate. Too violent. Too powerful. And so, in 2987, the Reach was set ablaze. A Coalition of twelve powers, some willing fighters, others strong-armed into war, stormed down its northern border on an axis straight through its capital, and Liam's World was skewered by a force it could not hope to match. The Confederacy's honored diamond-star was cast into the dirt and trampled, then bombed from orbit for good measure.

In the vacuum left by its passing, the Coalition did its best to establish new AUTHORITY. With the aid of the Confederacy's old admiralty, surrendered to save themselves, their profits, and their people from a total war at their masters' behest, it wrought the Interim Military Government of Liam's Reach, the Network's attempt to civilize the 98th in the name of colbureau and ordered society. And in disgust at its new masters, wracked by the chaos of civil war and societal collapse, the Reach convulsed.

In its convulsions, we find our setting.

That Interim Military Government and its ruling Committees for Security and Stability, Organizational Affairs, and Naval Affairs today struggle to maintain control over their borders, facing extremist remnant Confederacy forces like Supreme Commander Nathan Bishop's Free League of Liam's Reach, hosts of raiding privateers under the Rudin banner and yet many more still, other, more... independent successors, and mercenaries like Sacha's Valkyries with a vested interest in remaining open for business. It has to contend too with the odd Cult of Eternal Prosperity slowly migrating through its territory, the Van Heerden Development mercantile company attempting to expand its business from the 95th into the 98th Corridor, and its unruly partner in the Gang of Twelve- the very alliance its predecessor was pitted against- the Stepanovist anarcho-syndicalist Assembly of Free Unions. Its sub-organs like Project FREERANGE, working alongside- and occasionally against- the State, struggle too to clean up certain... objective errors of the Confederacy's old guard.

It has been eight years since the Confederacy fell, and things have hardly begun to look up since then. In fact, considering the rampant warlordism, rogue battle-fleets prowling at its borders, opportunistic tendrils of other powers worming their way into the Confederacy's corpse, cults- of personality and of faith- popping up at its fringes, and general strife remnant from even the Colonial Authority's two-hundred-years-removed collapse, it would be an understatement to say that it's gotten quite worse.

Once more, dearest friend, welcome to Liam's Reach. You'd be right to think that things are a bit chaotic right now.

THE CONFEDERACY IS DEAD.
LONG LIVE THE CONFEDERACY.



Cbg-palisade

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