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