A Short History of Nuvel: The Colonization
Adapted from Materials In Early Colonial History, C. Bishins (Educo, 1781)
[[Bullshit detection by RocketScience - When it is rocket science, trust RocketScience!]]
The colonization period was a golden age of technology and prosperity for Old Earth. Humanity had left the cradle and expanded into the Sol system, colonizing the nearby moons and planets. This enormous expansion of resources, and the self-catalyzing, exponential growth of scientific knowledge, led to the creation of technologies unimaginable to us today. Guided by the sophisticated machine intelligences known as Sophonts, humanity settled into a relatively peaceful, stable economy, unmarred by the global conflicts that had characterized its earlier history.
[[This entire paragraph pins the bullshit detector all the way in the red zone. No one has the faintest clue what OE was like. Maybe it was a peaceful golden age slice of Havin -- in which case why the fuck did we leave? -- or maybe it was a rotting hellhole ruled by cyborg mutant lizard people and choked with nanosludge. I don't know. C. Bishins doesn't know. Educo doesn't know. No one knows shit from before the Passage, and no one really knows shit from during the Passage either -- or if they do they aren't telling. How long were we in transit? A thousand years at least? If we don't even know for sure what went on between OE and here, how the hell are we supposed to figure out what was going on when we left?
So repeat after me kids, and never stop repeating: "History begins at Planetfall. Everything else is fairy tales." All we really know about Old Earth is there were humans, 'cause here we are, and there was something else, 'cause the colonization project must have taken hundreds or thousands of years to get anywhere and humans don't think well on those timescales. Hell even megacorps don't think well that long term, if OE even had megacorps. So what was the something else? Guess what. No one fucking knows. Party line is that it was the "Sophonts" -- happy, good-wizard AIs in the service of humanity. But for all we really know it could have been evolved energy beings or super life-extended pod-people or the aforementioned lizard overlords or just about anything. Nobody knows. Nobody knows anything from the fairy tale times and if they tell you they do they are handing you a line. And if you like the whole Sophont idea, ask yourself this: say you're self aware, live forever, have access to all discovered knowledge, think a trillion times faster and better than any human and are linked to a few dozen others just like you. Now, how long do you keep serving the meatsacks who built you? Does anyone buy this bullshit? Do we even need the detector for this? Even if you buy the Sophonts thing, the best you can hope for a sort of benevolent dictator scenario, and even that sounds like some pretty happy horseshit. But whatever. Who cares? Fairy tales.]]
Enjoying this unprecedented flourishing, mankind eventually determined that it was destined to outgrow even the extensive resources of the Sol system and began to work on plans to find new homeworlds. So the colonization plan was born, and the research and development for this enormous undertaking began.
[[I gotta break in here and just say that this is total crap. Not even an attempt to explain who among "mankind" came up with the absurd idea to take on (and pay for) a project that would demand almost mystical-level tech, consume untold resources, and bear no fruit whatsoever for hundreds or even thousands of years. You're going to spend a few generations and a few kajillion En (or whatever) developing and building the most astounding techno-space-beast ever known to man, load a few million people on it (guessing here, again, we have no idea how many people actually got on the thing, not that C. Bishins will cop to that) and then . . . what? You're just going to launch it into the sweet by and by never to be heard from again? Sure, you know it's going someplace ('cause of the Heralds; we'll get to that) but seriously even if it gets there, you'll never know and neither will your kids or their kids or anyone's kids, 'cause it's going to be thousands of years -- thousands of years! -- before the new kids even get there and get settled in. So who decided to throw all that money away for no conceivable return on investment? Who? "Mankind" says our Mr. Bishins. And once again, the detector is pinned. Oh, and by the by, Mr. Bishins is writing for schoolkids, but dig a little deeper into the official story and you'll find . . . nothing. This little gloss we have here is about as deep as it gets, in fact. Once again, no one has the faintest fucking clue who built us, who sent us, who we really were or why we left the old homestead. Lots of handwaving. Lots of theories. Lots of weasel words like "mankind" and "humanity" and Sophonts". Not a lot of hard data. Do I need to say it? Fairy tales.]]
Colonization took place in two phases: first the Heralds -- small, autonomous starships carrying terraforming technology -- were sent out among the stars to seek out promising new worlds on which to begin anew. [[Okay, sorry, just let me break in again. Let's unpack that little aside. "Small": By which we mean, fucking huge. At least the size of the Ganymede Complex, maybe twice that size, from what we know from the stuff on Undernet and the Recovery Project. "Autonomous": Nice little throw-away word by which we mean, starships that navigated and piloted themselves through deep space and close space and knew how to look for decent planetary candidates and, when they got there, terraform them. This is not technology we have. This is not technology we can even imagine. Drones, we got. Drones these ain't. "Starships": Yeah. I'm not even going to bother going there. "Terraforming technology": Again, a nice throw-away. Lots of theories, lots of fairy tales, no idea what this was. We know Nuvel was a probably a pretty decent place when Herald got here, but it wasn't as decent as it is now. We know Herald did something to make it better and it took a long time, during which time we were en route from OE. How long? What did it do? What technology did it use? Where's that technology now? For that matter where's Herald now? No. Fucking. Clue. And they sent out hundreds of these things, each one costing whatever insane amount it cost and each one total fucking crapshoot. And we have no idea why. Just keep that in mind. Now back to your regularly scheduled . . . wait for it . . . fairy tale.]] One such Herald, after many years among the stars, located the planet that would one day become our homeworld of Nuvel. After sending a message to Old Earth, it landed on this new world and began the process of transforming it into a planet more hospitable to human life. Little is known of the technology required to accomplish this task, [[a rare moment of candor]] but it is believed that the process was not as difficult as it might have been on some other worlds, as Nuvel was already a fairly good match.
During this time, the people of Old Earth had begun the second phase of the colonization plan [[which they were still working on hundreds of years later, having not forgotten or given up on the Heralds or run out of money or wiped themselves out or just gotten bored]] which entailed the building of the actual colony ships. It is not known [[fancy that!]] how many such ships were built, or how many were sent, but one made its way through the stars, following the guidance of its Herald, and eventually arrived at Nuvel. That vast ship, which carried our ancestors to this world in the Twelve Cities, was Ouroboros. Ouroboros was an enormous space-faring structure the size of a small moon, built in orbit around Old Earth, into which the Twelve Cities were loaded. Each City was constructed and encapsulated on Old Earth or one of the Sol colonies to be a fully self-sufficient city-world populated by thousands of people. Each was loaded with volunteers from its home planet, flown to Old Earth, and docked into Ouroboros for the long journey to the new world. That journey, called the Passage, took hundreds of years, at the end of which the Cities were released from Ouroboros to land and take root in the soil of the new homeworld, Nuvel. Only nine cities flourish today, but Ouroboros itself remains in orbit, a feature of the night sky as the second moon Ouro.
[[I'm not even going to talk much about this. Just think about how much of that brief description of the building of Obie and the Twelve is, frankly, magic. Mr. Bishins could just as well have written "and then a good wizard came along and caused nine cities to appear on Nuvel and Ouro to appear in the sky" and we'd have all the same useful info we have now. Yeah, I know, it's a gloss. Bishins is writing for schoolkids, but it's not actually his fault. You go to the official sources, you dig and dig, hell you even scout Undernet, there's not much out there. Obie is a deep mystery kids. None of the tech we're talking about for that baby is anything like what we have today. We don't have that stuff, we don't have anything like it, we don't have any precursors to it. At current rates of discovery, even with the benefit of what OE tech is still around, we'll be able to build our own colony ships . . . never. Anyway, someone or something built it, loaded it and sent it here to drop its load on our little world and here we are. That's about all we have that you could call "history" -- you know what the rest is by now. Let's look at some other little gems: "thousands" of "volunteers" in the original Cities. Well, maybe. Or maybe millions. Certainly millions by the time of Planetfall. And volunteers? Well maybe. Or maybe exiles, criminals, mutants, lepers, religious nutcases, outcast megacorps, disgraced Houses, the great unwashed . . . who knows? Someone, maybe, but no one is telling.
And the Passage took "hundreds" of years? That's not even the official line. Well, it took some number of hundreds of years. At least ten hundreds, probably twenty, possibly fifty. A hundred generations maybe. Shame on you Mr. Bishins. But forgive and forget. Bishins' "history" of the Passage is even funnier than this stuff, but that's for another day.
And let's close on that last little sentence. Well we all know about that. Nine cities left. All that tech, all that magic, but no fairy tale endings. Two Cities dead, dark, ghost ruins before they even finished the Passage. Never even released from Obie. Still up there in the cold and dark. And then there's one that, well, we just don't know, do we? Vibrant, flourishing, full of people among the stars. Come Planetfall . . . what? Crashed, maybe? Landing failure? Burned up on reentry? Fell into the ocean? Oh well. Few million less mouths to feed I guess. That's what you get for using magictech. Sometimes the bad fairies get in. Or sometimes, somewhere in the passage, some of those pesky humans decide a little advantage can be gained in exchange for a few million lives, and a little knowledge, even a little knowledge that's a few millennia old, might be enough to shift things around a little come Planetfall time. Maybe confuse a sensor here or change an electronic mind there. No one thinks the Passage was a bed of roses -- there was a lot of struggle for power in the years before Planetfall, that's for sure, and maybe, just maybe, a few million people got offed on the way down. But that's all rumors and speculation. Fairy tales. -- RocketScience out.]]
