Genom was dead.
The destruction of the main tower in MegaTokyo should have been a lethal blow, but not a fatal one. However, in the early stages of the Boomer Revolution, the entire board of directors had been invited -- somewhat forcefully -- to take refuge in the tower for the duration of the "troubles". Similar invitations were given to most of the senior executives of the company. The explosion wiped out virtually the entire upper echelons of the megacorporation, leaving the survivors struggling without direction, and often without access to the resources they needed. Still it's plausible that Genom could have survived this, and the ferocious power struggle that was sure to follow. Most likely the corporation would have been reorganized under the control of one of the surviving executives, and scapegoats for the disaster would have been found. Indeed, Lawrence Mann (1971-2084?), a junior vice president of research and development at Genom SoCal, who'd found himself catapulted into a position where he controlled most of Genom's southwestern American holdings, was apparently making preparations to take over the rest of the tottering giant as early as December 25, 2041. "At which point," he wrote in his biting autobiography, "my carefully planned schemes for world domination were undone by yet another blow from a direction no one anticipated."
At midnight on December 25, someone uploaded a certain document to one of the last public filesharing services on the worldwide computer network, and sent pointers concerning it to several media outlets -- specifically those owned by megacorporations other than Genom. It took less than six hours for the document to propagate globally, and when it did, the wrath of the people had been aroused.
The document in question, "A Diary, 2011-2041", presents itself as the personal journal of Dr. Katsuhito Stingray and of his daughter, Sylia (2010-2041). After her father's death, Sylia and her younger brother MacKinnison (2015-2079) were supported by his estate. She eventually became a moderately successful entrepreneur while he followed in his father's footsteps at the University of Ingolstadt. The younger Dr. Stingray is one of the prime candidates when one looks for the anonymous uploader of the document, though partisans of the other suspects insist that he had no motive to reveal to the world that his older sister had been hopelessly insane, and that his father had been a monster who experimented on both children.
That argument is questionable, however, as is most of the Diary. While elements of it can be corroborated, especially many of the entries allegedly written by the elder Dr. Stingray, most of "Sylia's" words cannot. It is for this reason that her claims -- that Genom had murdered her father to prevent him from revealing secrets, that she had led the enigmatic Knight Sabers, and that boomers of almost every variety were almost, if not in some cases completely sentient -- have not been incorporated into the main text of this history, as other histories of the period have done. It cannot be demonstrated that the whole of the text is accurate, which casts doubt on every part of it, although textual analysis suggests that all the sections allegedly written by Katsuhito Stingray were written by the same author, and that a similar situation applies to those apparently written by Sylia Stingray[1].
But the truth or accuracy of the text is ultimately irrelevant, when one considers its impact on history. During the months following the Boomer Revolution and preceding the publication of the Diary, incidents of vandalism against Genom-owned properties increased nearly two hundred percent, both in frequency and in property damage. Despite desperate spin doctoring, the public remained suspicious of the corporation's role in the revolution. The publication of the diary, containing the first public revelation of the existence of the OMS, and information about incidents in the 2030s involving "street tests" of military boomers in MegaTokyo, seemed to confirm all those suspicions, and the simmering anger and fear exploded into fury. There were riots in virtually every city on Earth where a Genom tower still stood. Police forces were hard-pressed to stop the rioters, and in some cases even joined with them.
The end result was that Genom, now the most hated corporation on Earth instead of just the most feared, could not hope to survive. Within two months, the embattled Lawrence Mann was forced to sell the assets Genom SoCal still held to Genom's primary competitor, Gulf & Bradley[2] and entered semi-retirement. He subsequently emigrated to the extrasolar colony of Elenore when it was established in 2074, and which was one of the founders of the World Wide Welfare Corporation which served as Elenore's government, and later the backbone of the United Gallactica.)
Other second and third tier megacorporations snatched up other Genom assets, until Karl Wayland (1997-2074) acting president of Genom Johannesburg and de facto CEO of what remained of the corporation, negotiated a merger with the Green Food Corporation under the direction of Green president Andrew Yutani (1991-2074). The resulting corporation, Wayland-Yutani, inherited Genom's key African factories, granted them an edge in cyberdroid manufacture that would not be matched until the Conseption Corporation opened its Martian plant in the next century.[3]
The shakeups in the business community were by no means limited to those who profited from Genom's demise. It had been an open secret for many years that the SDPC essentially danced to Genom's tune, but the death of Daniel Dixon, Jr. (1997-2041), chairman of the SDPC's board of directors, in the explosion of Genom tower still surprised many. With the strings cut, the puppet SDPC no longer had much direction. The Board disintegrated into several squabbling factions, each putting forth a different candidate for the chair. Ultimately, a compromise candidate was found in the person of Linna Yamazaki, the recently installed president of Crystal Millennium Aerospace and a minority stockholder in the SDPC. From surviving journals, we know that her colleagues expected her to be easily influenced to their ends. They were in for a rather rude surprise; despite her eclectic beginnings as an Olympic athlete turned aerobics instructor, someone had clearly taught Yamazaki how to play economic and political hardball.
Despite this, her first press conference after becoming the chair (Jan 23, 2042) was viewed as a mild public relations disaster. When asked whether the disintegration of the world's premier manufacturer of cyberdroids would have any impact on the SDPC's colonization plans, Yamazaki replied, "I certainly hope so. We need to focus on getting real people out into space, not more robots." The seemingly innocent comment ignited extreme controversy on two fronts. In retrospect, this may even have been what Yamazaki intended.
The first front was a rather sizeable subculture which had begun to believe that boomers were people, or at least could become people given the opportunity. This movement had begun in the mid-2030s and gained considerable ammunition from certain revelations in the Diary. Early in 2042, an independent investigation was convened to study, for the first time ever, the algorithms and coding used to program boomer brains. Their report concluded that cyberdroids constructed using brains that followed Dr. Stingray's designs were not sentient and could not become sentient -- but that was only because of several large blocks of code that inhibited certain types of cognitive processes, in some cases preventing them from taking place entirely, despite "older" code which should enable them. Essentially, the brains were imprinted with laws of robotics which proclaimed "Thou shalt not" rather than following the more efficient route of not programming them to be able to do the things they weren't supposed to do.
Wayland-Yutani, in a desperate attempt to raise public opinion (and thus stock values) began to modify the brains of Venerian cyberdroids to remove the programming blocks. This done, the Venerians exhibited progressively greater initiative. Within a decade, many would be traveling off-world either legally, as the ultimate stage in the Venerian research project, or illegally, as escapees from the plantations who often eventually fell into lives of crime.[4]
Other, comparable incidents eventually prompted a gradual decline in cyberdroid sales, and thus a comparable decline in their design and manufacture. Economic historians have suggested that the generalized economic slump that began about this time had as much to do with it, but the era of armies of boomers, whether for military or labour purposes, was effectively over by 2043.
The other front that Yamazaki's remarks offended was the nascent colonial independence movement on the off-world colonies, to whom her remarks seemed to indicate that she (and by extension the entire SDPC) viewed the first generation of colonists as little better than robots themselves. For the most part, colonial alienation manifested itself in lengthy debates and arguments in various media, but there were also many incidents of vandalism, violence and even piracy.[5] But the directors of Spaceways were not blind to the parallels between their own situation and that of the British governors of the American colonies nearly three centuries earlier, and they had no intention of witnessing a similar revolution.
The strategy that they settled on was one which would play into the elitist mentality that the colonists often exhibited. Through education and propaganda, they sought to instill a sense of obligation and reverence towards Earth in prospective astro-emigrants. For five years Spaceways pursued this strategy with only moderate success. But in 2047, they were suddenly handed a potential tool for social change more potent than they could ever have imagined.
Harlan "Noisy" Rhysling had been one of the first generation of new astronauts, working as an engineer's mate on several of Harriman Enterprise's first ships. He had earned a minor reputation among his colleagues as an author of risque poetry when an accident blinded him. Unable to afford cybernetic replacements, he tramped around the solar system, making his living as an entertainer and polishing his verses. His songs spread through the data networks and through word of mouth. In early 2047, Rhysling signed a contract to have several of his most popular songs recorded. But while returning to Earth for the first time since his blinding, the ship he was on suffered an accident in its power supply which the Blind Bard sacrificed his own life to repair. While dying of radiation poisoning, Rhysling sang his last ballad over the ship's intercom.
That song was "The Green Hills of Earth". Even three hundred years later, there are many Earth-born spacers who will quietly (or noisily) recite the climactic verse before departing into the sea of stars. But it is difficult for the contemporary reader to read the entire text of the song without noting, as some commentators did at the time of its composition, that it is a song that could only have been written by a blind man. Leaving aside the portrait of the solar system that seemed more influence by pulp magazines than reality, by 2047 there were few skies on Earth that could be called fleecy, nor many hills which were green, let alone cool.
Still, the song was powerful, and the circumstances of its composition seemed to be perfectly designed for the psycho-sociologists of the SDPC to exploit.[6] Spaceways paid a small fortune for the rights to "Green Hills" to Rhysling's publisher (who arguably didn't own them) and set about making it the most popular song in history. Idols from every nation on Earth were hired to record it in their native languages. Careful manipulation and outright bribery ensured that it became the most requested song from every audio-video broadcaster in the system. SDPC lobbyists used the phrase "green hills of earth" in virtually every one of their speeches in the months after Rhysling's death.
The final stage in the campaign was the most dramatic, and also the least subtle. The SDPC produced an incredibly manipulative two minute advertisement, featuring an orchestral performance of "Green Hills" directed by Minoru Saotome (2019-2068) who was even then being called one of the finest conductors of his generation. The first six repetitions of the theme were visually accompanied by images drawn from the colonies, with the Spaceways logo quietly present in each. After the pictures of Titan dissolved, the shot slowly panned through space to show a tiny image of Earth from orbit, under the penultimate verse of the song sung by Diva Spears-Aguilera (2011-2052) in what was to be her last major recording. After her high soprano closed on "up up and onward yet," the screen went black, and Rhysling's own voice, the scratchy recording of his last words, played over the blackness.
The spot was incredibly successful, both as an advertisement for the SDPC (their stock values nearly doubled after the first few airings) and as anti- independence propaganda. The hard core of the colonial independence movements were unimpressed, to the point where there were several different parodies of "Green Hills" in circulation. But the song and the ideas that it represented -- the longing for humanity's one true home -- united the opposition to these movements, allowing for a pooling of resources between several groups that might otherwise have had nothing to do with one another. It has been estimated that the "Green Hills" movement set back the cause of colonial independence nearly thirty years. Ironically, few of those who embraced the nostalgia of the song ever actually returned to Earth. Those who did often experienced extreme discomfort, both environmental and social. They often returned disillusioned, or just as often fired with determination to work for a future where Earth would be as comfortable as one of the colonies.
By the late 2040s, the planetary economy of Earth had recovered to levels comparable to those of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, this proved to be a mixed blessing. Genom's total domination of the corporate landscape in the 2020s and 2030s had kept most of its rivals in competition with it, rather than with each other. With the death of the dragon, squabbles over how to divide the horde began almost immediately -- they had resulted in the formation of Wayland-Yutani, and left a number of formerly second-tier organizations in the space formerly occupied by Genom alone. Almost inevitably, genuine corporate warfare began.
Findley's definitive study of the Corporate Wars, _Shadowar_ (2182) contains the most complete picture imaginable of this period in Terrestrial history, and this survey can add very little to it aside from a confirmation of the guide's basic thesis: no one who lived through these twenty-odd years went untouched by the economic, guerilla and open warfare of the era. Instead, a single demonstrative example, drawn from Findley, will suffice for our purposes.
In 2049, a young scientist was employed by Wayland-Yutani's Propulsion Physics Research and Development division. While working after hours at their main laboratory, he witnessed a break-in by saboteurs (or possibly by burglarizing industrial spies) and promptly called in security. Not only did the scientist narrowly escape death at the hands of the intruders, he became the company's scapegoat for the failure of security to apprehend or eliminate any of them. Despite the fact that he had been ordered to take unpaid overtime in order to finish a project, the Disciplinary Board found his presence in the lab to be highly suspicious, and all but accused him of being the intruders' inside man. The scientist was immediately fired and unofficially blacklisted throughout the aerospace industry, until Linna Yamazaki defied the blacklist and hired him for Crystal Millennium Aerospace, at less than half the salary he'd made at Wayland- Yutani, and with significantly fewer benefits, but without granting the corporation title to anything developed on his own time.
The scientist was Zephram Cochrane (2030-2366). What makes the account even more intriguing is the evidence (discussed completely in Chapter 11 of _Shadowar_) that the raid which cost him his job at Wayland-Yutani was orchestrated by the director of CMA's small covert operations division, quite possibly for that purpose alone. Apparently, Yamazaki had expressed a mild interest in some of Cochrane's university writings, and her aides seized the opportunity to "head hunt" him at surprisingly little cost.
In any event, Cochrane's reduced administrative duties at his new position with CMA gave him a greater amount of personal time than he would have ever enjoyed at Wayland-Yutani. (Furthermore, not sharing Yamazaki's extremely liberal views on personal time, they would certainly have claimed anything he developed during it.) He began to take a greater interest in the theoretical side of his discipline, engaging in a lively correspondence with Charlotte Richards-Summers (1998-2078) and several other visionary physicists. Despite this, according to Cochrane's own notes, it wasn't until 2052, with only a few months remaining in his three year contract with CMA, that he realized just what his independent studies had uncovered.
Taking an enormous risk, Cochrane declined to extend his contract with CMA for another three years, and spent his life's savings on a one-way trip to Christopher's Landing, Titan. There he met with another of Dr. Richards-Summers correspondents, tycoon Micah Brack (2001?-2076?) and convinced him of the feasibility of his theory. The independent, eccentric trillionaire financed the next eight years of research and development as Cochrane worked to turn theory into fact, working largely in secret.
Some historians of science have asserted that the development of the Cochrane superimpellor would have taken only half as long, if that, if Cochrane and his small team hadn't worked in secret. These arguments smack of hindsight, and in any event the secrecy was vitally necessary. Quite apart from the dozen or so megacorporations who would have ecstatically taken the technology Cochrane was developing and turned it into a monopoly, a much greater threat had begun to blossom in the mid-2050s.
Despite any claims to the contrary, no one knows the true name or origin of the man called Colonel Green (2016?-2078?). As stated earlier, the best guess places him as an enlisted man in the U.S.S.D. who participated in the abortive Towers coup. But if so, he apparently had major reconstructive surgery before his first televised appearance in 2054, for the man who appeared then resembled no one in the extensive Patrol databases.
Green spoke, in his first appearance, of his strong, personal conviction in the infinite perfectibility of the human species, and how it was imperative for humanity to achieve its optimum potential -- immediately, by any means necessary. Those who failed to do so were worse than cowards or fools, they were traitors to humanity's manifest destiny. It was a song as old as the hills themselves, and the only genuinely new element of the Optimum Movement was the way that it managed to unite so many divergent, apparently opposite brands of extremist elitism. At times, this lent Optimum broadcasts a surreal quality. Ultra-African Optimate spokesmen stated that of course their leader, Colonel Green, was African -- an exiled prince of the Wakandas, in fact -- and that the man who appeared on broadcasts was nothing but a showman to trick the foolish Europeans; Nordic supremacists asserted that these were nothing more than the lies spouted by slaves desperate to deny their slavery, and that Colonel Green was of course as White as the driven snow -- an exiled albino aristocrat from Denmark, in fact; and Colonel Green spoke glowingly of each group whenever he pirated the airways. Despite this confusion, there was definite and decisive coordination between the various Optimum groups in the early stages.
Perhaps the most disturbing form that the Optimum took could be found in the United States, where the movement, normally atheistic and even contemptuous of "superstitionism", marched hand-in-hand with violent, reactionary form of Christianity preached by Nehemiah Scudder (2011-2078?)[7]. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that Colonel Green (or the man who appeared as Colonel Green) had met with Scudder in the form of a photograph of the two men together. If it is a fake, then more than three hundred years of progress in the detection of fakes has not sufficed to reveal it.
A bit more is known about Nehemiah Scudder's background than is known concerning his partner in crimes against humanity. He was born in rural Tennessee to an unwed mother who insisted that "the Lord Almighty Christ Jesus our Savior" be placed in the blank for the father's name on his birth certificate. After a drunken and dissolute youth and early manhood, he experienced a revelation of some sort in 2037, after which he exhibited an awesome talent for inflammatory preaching. (Despite his usual appellation of Reverend, he was not associated with any branch of the Christian faith, even the most radical Fundamentalist sects.) His preaching was, again, nothing new: a melange of "return to traditional values", "America alone against the evils of the world", and "technology as the Devil's great tool". But Scudder's preaching was more potent than any previous example of the type; even those who went into see his tent revivals or watched his broadcasts fully intending to mock the hateful little man came away feeling terribly uncertain, and hungry to hear more.
Into this disturbing period came a wonder: the second major piece of evidence for the existence of life elsewhere in the galaxy. Midway through 2058, an odd piece of space junk drifted into scanner range of an SDPC cleanup crew in the vicinity of the asteroid belt. When they realized that the vector of the junk, which was obviously a manufactured object, suggested that it had originated outside the solar system, people sat up and took notice. The object was recovered and brought to Earth. There, the descendants of the twentieth century's SETI enthusiasts rejoiced to discover that it was, in fact, an unmanned space probe of extraterrestrial construction. Designed for one purpose, shielding a single computer chip from the rigors of vacuum, it had been voyaging for over three hundred thousand years.
The "chip" had a data capacity slightly larger than any contemporary super- computer, and it was almost completely full. Unfortunately, the enormous amount of data had become slightly corrupt over the duration of the voyage, until it was thought that more than 20% of the data was completely unrecoverable. Even the interpretation of those sections which were salvageable would be the work of decades. Within the first year of the project, though, it was known that the probe had been created by a species which apparently called itself "Solenoid", which was engaged in a war of mutual annihilation with another species called "Paranoid". (They were not the strangest false homophones discovered in the translation, but they became the most well-known.) With the final battle approaching and both species on the verge of extinction, the Solenoid had uploaded the whole of their species' accumulated knowledge onto the chip, and sent it into space in hopes that another intelligent species would discover it and inherit their legacy.
Perhaps in another time and place, the possibility of uncovering such a treasure of knowledge would have set the world on fire, but perhaps not. In this time and place, the Probe Interpretation Project, which included such luminaries as Charlotte Richards-Summers and her partner, Michael Samms (2001-2078), were viewed as basically harmless eccentrics engaged in a quest that couldn't have any practical value. More skeptical observers wondered how the data produced by the project could be independently verified, with a handful doubting the authenticity of the probe itself. The Reverend Nehemiah Scudder incorporated the Project's revelations into a famous sermon he delivered in Washington, where he baldly stated that both Solenoid and Paranoid had deserved their fates for failing to heed the self-evident gospel.
On July 17, 2060, Zefram Cochrane determined that the superimpellor was as safe as he could make it, and board the small, one-man shuttle christened the _Bonaventure_. She was launched from the Oort cloud and shot on a course for Centauri at a velocity of Warp 2.3, or slightly more than twelve times the speed of light. Four months later, Cochrane turned off the superimpellor and found himself just outside the Centauri binary star system. Navigating the remainder of the distance on ion impulse thrusters, the _Bonaventure_ landed on Centauri B-2, one of two Earthlike planets in the system and the one which spectrography had indicated might have life.[8] On December 5, 2060, Cochrane became the first Terrestrial to set foot on a planet outside the solar system. He spent only two days, taking holographs and soil samples, before returning to the Sol system on March 18, 2061. In two hundred forty-three days, he had traveled a distance greater than any human before him.
For reasons that baffled observers at the time, Brock and Cochrane published the complete specifications of the superimpellor to the systemwide dataweb, forfeiting the estimated billions in licensing that it could have made for them in favor of allowing its construction by anyone who could to raise the money to purchase the raw components. The reasons behind their decision became abundantly clear when an agent of the Optimum attacked Brock's estate on Titan, killing dozens of those gathered to celebrate Cochrane's achievement, but failing to capture or eliminate either of his primary targets.
Cochrane later stated that Brock had hoped to begin a tidal wave of extrasolar colonization, aided by the recent developments of artificial gravity and inertial dampening pioneered by Dr. Ben O'Neill and owned by General Services Inc., a company in which Brock was a minority stockholder. The inertial dampener allowed for incredible accelerations and decelerations, making "normal" space travel faster, safer and more comfortable. Combined with the superimpellor, it could open up the universe.
But it didn't happen that way. By 2079, there were only ten colonized extrasolar planets, significantly fewer than the dozens Brock had envisioned. Despite the increased safety and comfort, space travel retained a mystique of danger that kept many people ground-bound. And despite the rapidly worsening situation on Earth, which was neither safe nor comfortable, the majority preferred to stay on "our lovely mother planet" and hope that things would get better.
And the superimpellor was actually less safe than it originally appeared -- or rather, it opened the door to a whole new set of difficulties. Fully three quarters of the first generation of FTL spacecraft encountered fatal difficulties, most often ascribed to the superimpellor field's tendency to be catastrophically affected by encounters with hyperspace phenomena such as unstable wormholes. Some were tossed millions of light years away from their intended destination, such as the ill-fated Robinson expedition of 2069, while a lucky few went nowhere in space, but vanished for a period of weeks or months before reappearing in their original coordinates -- the first documentable cases of time travel in history. Cochrane's initial, immediate successes came to be seen as proof of his almost inhuman luck instead of being viewed as proof that the technology had matured. Those who followed in his footsteps had to work to get the bugs out of a prototype which had functioned flawlessly on its first operation, in contravention of every law of engineering.
One of those who did follow in Cochrane's footsteps was a Russian-American engineer named Ezekiel Cherenkov (2005-2078), whose efforts focused on improving the field so that it could function without disaster deeper inside a star system's gravity well. He made some key strides toward this goal in 2063, though he is better remembered for his other major accomplishment in that year ... and he is also the most unfairly maligned figure in recent history.
In 2396, Starfleet produced a documentary drama concerning the 2373 Borg attack on Earth, and the subsequent attempt by the Borg to time travel and change history by provoking the assimilation of the Alpha Quadrant in the 21st century. For reasons known only to the producers, this "docudrama" asserted that Zephram Cochrane had been involved in these events, attributing to him the actions undertaken by Ezekiel Cherenkov.
Such egregious calumny! Totally inaccurate, obfuscatory! Nearly 31 per cent of those surveyed believed that _First Contact_ was a completely accurate representation of these events! Even aside from the marginalization of a significant historical figure, the portrayal of Zephram Cochrane as a greedy addict verges on slander -- or to more accurate, a triumphalist degradation of the past. "Look at how far we've come!" the drama crows, "Look at how worthless everything before us was!"
In any event, Ezekiel Cherenkov's experiments in 2063 attracted the attention of a Vulcan science vessel which had recently arrived in the Sol system to conduct routine maintenance on a monitoring station in the asteroid belt. Judging by the human invention of warp drive (and the therefore inevitable development of warp drive detectors) the captain of the Vulcan vessel felt it best to begin first contact procedures before Vulcans and Terrestrials began to meet under much less formalized circumstances.
It has been stated (notably by the authors of _First Contact_) that meeting with the advanced, peaceful Vulcans was the key event that led the planet Earth out of the dark ages of the twenty-first century. While there is an element of truth to this assertion, it ignores the fact that the process not only did not happen "overnight", but took took four decades -- and that for twenty of those years, what united a substantial minority of Terrans was hatred, especially for the not-so-little green men. The revelation that the Vulcans had been spying on Earth for nearly three hundred years won them no friends. Paradoxically, neither did their voluntary surrender of all the observational data which had been collected, as its revelation of a large number of covert extraterrestrial presences in the Solar system over that time left many with a deep suspicion of all aliens. The Optimum Movement took this as one of their core tenets, of course, and there were several attacks on the Vulcan embassy to the New United Nations that bore their mark.
All in all, the thought of a already heavily populated galaxy was another key factor in the overall "stay-at-home" tendency of Terrestrials in this period. And from what the Vulcans revealed, the galaxy was not only filled with life, it was filled with chaos as well. The Karsid Empire had disintegrated late in the twentieth century, and the Klingons were engaged in a prolonged war with the Orion Pirates for control of its remains. The Andorians were only slowly spreading out from their homeworld, though they had scored a vital coup in their non-aggression pact with the Vegans -- who had destroyed almost every other species they ran across. The Jurai and their allies in the Beta Quadrant were engaged in a war with the Oniboshi that kept their attention out of the Alpha Quadrant.[9] The Romulans and the Cardassians were still planetbound as were -- at this stage in their history -- the Bajorans, as well as the Ferengi (although in their case, accurate records are hard to come by.)
So instead of a tidal wave of emigration, there was a trickle. On Earth, the Optimum Movement grew in power, and began to encourage imperialist attitudes towards the colonies. As more and more Optimates usurped control of governments and corporations -- and seized several seats on the SDPC's board of directors -- the colonial independence movement underwent a quiet resurgence. It proved especially forceful on Venus, where human colonists and Venerian cyberdroids found themselves united in common cause for the first time in the short history of their world. Eventually, this alliance managed to declare that the cities of Venus were independent of any Terrestrial authority in 2068.
The colonies on Mars had a harder time of it, largely because of the Utopia Planitia shipyards which had been built there in the 2040s. Roughly 40% of the ships which crisscrossed the Solar system every year were constructed there, along with virtually every interstellar craft in service. The wealth generated by this single outpost far exceeded that produced by every plantation on Venus, and the owners on Earth had no intention of letting it go. Despite the signing of the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies in 2071, Earth retained a stranglehold on Mars.
In 2072, Nehemiah Scudder was elected President of the United States of America. It wasn't even a remotely fair election; only ballots from the fifteen states with Optimal majorities (such as Florida) were considered, with the rest termed "spoiled" automatically. Scudder immediately declared a state of emergency, suspended the Constitution (with a puppet Congress' full approval) and began calling himself the Prophet Incarnate. There was resistance -- very potent resistance -- but the Optimum protected "their" President, though he also exhibited astounding luck in avoiding numerous assassination attempts, some of which were clearly planned by his "allies".
Similar situations prevailed in Great Britain, in France, in Scandinavia; in Nigeria, in Israel, in Thailand. Other governments were under siege. But success was slowly poisoning the Optimum movement, as coordination began to turn to competition and conflict. Colonel Green kept making his glowing pronouncements, especially in the wake of every new atrocity, but the stress fractures in the Movement were beginning to show. The New United Nations began to seriously consider evacuating from its Swiss headquarters (it had been evicted from New York in 2067) to Centaurus. All that remained was for a single spark to ignite the gasoline in which the world had been doused.
It happened in June 30, 2078. Prophet Incarnate Nehemiah Scudder was delivering yet another televised sermon against the enemies of God and His Agent on Earth, when there was a sudden disturbance in the anteroom of the Oval Office. Before Scudder could say anything further, a young woman -- no older than fourteen, according to witnesses -- sprang into the room, bright pink hair flowing behind her, and ran him through with an sword, pinning him to his chair. Immediately, the President's bodyguards seized her and began to beat her to death in front of the camera, but the signal was immediately cut off. The bombs had already begun to fall.
Many questions remain unanswered about that night. Did Nehemiah Scudder actually die? (With the White House atomized within the hour, it is almost certain that he did, but doubt remains.) Who fired first? (The question is academic; the various silos opened fire with disturbing synchronicity.) Why didn't the orbital particle beam satellites shoot down the weapons before they could reach their targets? (They sid shoot down several missiles, but nowhere nearly as many as the planners predicted they could; sabotage is suspected.) What became of Colonel Green? (None of the surviving Optimum leaders, when captured, would confirm his death.) And most importantly, why did an assault on the figurehead leader of the American Optimum provoke such a massive retaliation, if the strike was orchestrated by them, or such an opportunistic response, if by their enemies? (No one knows.)
What was definitely known was that thirty-seven million men, women and children perished in that single night of fire.[10] And in the opinion of this historian, all else concerning the episode, when considered in light of that fact, becomes trivia.
It has been said that the single night of World War III -- the true World War III, as recorded by the Vulcans -- marked the end of the dark ages, just as it has been said about first contact. But that claim also seems premature. The twenty-one years of the American Interregnum were yet to come, for example. What the night of June 30, 2078 actually represented was the Winter Solstice of that age -- the darkest moment, after which things had to improve.
To Be Continued
Footnotes
[1] Some argue for three different authors; one continuous voice writing as Dr. Stingray, a second writing as Sylia Stingray from ages six to twelve, and a third distinctive voice for Sylia after age twelve. Others, who admittedly accept the Diary at face value, cite the immense mental breakdown that Sylia Stingray apparently suffered after her father's death as the source of personality changes resulting in the "third voice".
[2] To describe Gulf & Bradley as Genom's competitor actually misrepresents the largely symbiotic nature of their relationship. A descendant of twentieth century oil giant Roxxon, by the 2030s G&B had largely converted their oil refineries into factories for the production of gasohol, the synthetic fuel which powered virtually every car that Genom produced. Gulf & Bradley is probably the second most successful megacorporation in history (after the Coca- Cola/Deneva Fizz corporation); it still exists today, having relocated to Deneva.
[3] The Tyrell Corporation, founded by Eldon Tyrell (2014-2119) and other members of Lawrence Mann's R&D division, retained the edge in cyberdroid design, however.
[4] One of the most infamous of these was Yarol (2039-2064?), boon companion of the notorious smuggler and outlaw "Northwest" Smith (2013?-2064?).
[5] Although the term privateering might be more appropriate, given the likelihood that most of the "pirates" were actually employed by one of the megacorporations.
[6] This has provoked speculation that Spaceways had deliberately caused the accident which claimed Rhysling's life. The arguments for this position strain credibility.
[7] Despite occasional claims to the contrary, no comparable Optimum movement appeared in any Islamic state. Some historians of the Optimum suggest that Green viewed the Islamic world in the twenty-first century as sufficiently extremist that no more intensely fanatical position was practical. (Others note that green is the traditional color of Islam, and develop excruciating conspiracy theories based on that fact.)
[8] Ironically, Cochrane was in such a hurry to land on Centauri B-2 and replenish his oxygen and water supplies that he neglected to conduct even a cursory examination of Centauri B-3, or he would have discovered it was inhabited by the Centaurians (or Rannites, as is the preferred name of that humanoid species for itself). Centuries earlier, before their advanced civilization began its decline, a scientist whose name is lost to history erected an electromagnetic screen that caused long distance astronomers to see Rann as a barren wasteland, to discourage interstellar conquerors. As it happened, the Centaurians would not be discovered until 2065.
[9] The war ended in 2082, when Jurain Emperor Azusa (875-2107) conspired with radical members of the Galactic Union to set off annihilation weaponry on the Oniboshi homeworld, virtually exterminating the species. The public revelation of this toppled Azusa in favor of his great-grandson Tenchi (1977-) and broke up the Galactic Union, leaving the Beta Quadrant in as much chaos as the Alpha.
[10] As it happens, casualties were much less than had been projected by military theorists of the twentieth century. This is probably more due to the reduction of nuclear weapons as a factor in military strategy in the twenty- first; had any of the nuclear powers been maintaining their arsenals at twentieth century levels, it is likely that there would have been at most thirty -seven million survivors -- if that many.