Mech Legacy
Through a Force of
Arms
The History
of the Future
What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
--T.S. Eliot
Welcome to the 34th century. I know you have a lot of questions, so I’ve provided this dossier to help you acclimate to your new reality, as many things have changed in the 1300 years that have passed between your “now” and when this story takes place.
I wouldn’t normally offer this much detail, but the science fiction you were raised on hasn’t prepared you for the journey you’re about to take. Oh, I’m sure the daring adventures of man conquering the galaxy, using grit and logic to outwit nasty space aliens bent on the destruction of humanity seemed very entertaining, but they were just awful when compared to what really happened, and they made humanity’s real transition to a true HyperLight society more difficult than it needed to be. Everyone had impossible expectations and unjust fears about aliens, time travel, federations and empires, little green men, and all manner of preconceived notions that turned every new discovery we made into an eco-social-moral nightmare.
The fact is, there are no peaceful explorers, no infinitely curious humanoids that want to experience the joys of brotherhood with their newfound intergalactic soul mates, and no secret power within you to unlock and use for good or evil. There are certainly no intergalactic do-gooders who’ve learned how to control their emotions, collective intelligences, or omnipotent blobs of energy, upset because we’ve hunted whales to extinction. That was never science fiction, it was political science mixed with social engineering, meant to prepare you for an eventuality that never came. At least not in that way.
With that said, let’s take a few minutes and get you up to speed so you can enjoy the rest of your time here. The more you know about your new reality, the less likely you are to be confused by what you thought you knew. (Yes, I know that sounds strange right now, but you’ll get used to it.)
First, just forget the “aliens as a benevolent species” crap. There are no alien species that have evolved “just like you.” There are similarities, of course, but stop fantasizing about how wonderful it will be when we finally make contact with ancient, space travelling races. It wasn’t. There was a terrible price to pay for our transcendence to enlightenment, and it was almost more than we could afford.
What I need to impress upon you is that there are no alien species you should ever trust. Like most of us, they only care about themselves, but they’ve had hundreds of thousands of years to become very efficient at things like manipulation, greed, and dishonesty. They want you to conform to standards that benefit them, or they want to destroy you. Or both.
Given your 21st century perspective, all this talk about life outside our solar system probably isn’t sinking in real quick, is it? It must have been nice to be so arrogant to think that out of the billions and trillions of stars and planets out there, Earth had the only goo that crawled up out of the ocean and learned to dance. It’s been a part of my life for over 300 years, so far, so forgive me if I move over this stuff a little quickly.
No, you are not alone. Not even close.
There, I’ve said it. It’s real. Does that surprise you? Why? You can’t tell me that after all the cow mutilations, crop circles and abductions going on you still think you’re alone? Yes, there were hoaxes, misinformation, and government cover-ups designed to protect you from things you weren’t ready to consider, but do you realize how many people would have had to be lying their pants off to make that misinformation true? When healthy teenage girls in Colorado “lost” their ovaries for no apparent reason, was it easier to believe they were simply unsophisticated rednecks looking for a few bucks from some gossip rag and their fifteen minutes of fame? The truth was right before your eyes, and it didn’t look anything like swamp gas or a weather balloon.
Actually, we’ve never been alone,
and my life wouldn’t even be interesting if we were!
The entire galaxy was formed under the same exact set of rules that
guided our own ascendance from the goo, and life (in various stages of
development) is literally everywhere a
planet exists that will support it, just as scientists in your time are now
discovering with their primitive telescopes and propellant driven space probes.
You’re living in the era of “flat space,” just like
There are (and/or were) hundreds of thousands of sentient civilizations out there, and quite a few that had created societies beyond imagination! Most of them, even some that had been around for millennia, died out long before we came along (for a host of reasons), and this is where your science fiction and our reality began to part ways.
The future belongs to free enterprise and profit margins, not swashbuckling heroes defeating hordes of bumbling space aliens. Oh, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of action. Didn’t you ever wonder who paid for all those extravagant, planet-sized spaceships? Or how they were built? If it were real, someone had to get up every morning and mine the materials, and someone else had to smelt the ore, and yet someone else had to figure out how to craft it all… Well, you get the idea. That’s what’s so much fun about the story I’m about to tell you! This is your future, and it really happened this way, which is why it’ll make so much sense.
Life in the 34th century revolves around exploration, colonization, mining, and archaeology, discovering the remains of those who came and went before us, and grabbing the resources they left behind to extend our own understanding of the universe. When possible, we examine what they’ve left behind to see how, when, and why they left the scene, in hopes that we can keep the same thing from happening to us. Of course, there is a lot of money to be made in space, and what good story doesn’t have the intrigue of money and power?
Earth has always been driven by capitalism, but I don’t think anyone was prepared for the sheer volume of technology and wealth that would be created by the exploitation of space. Hell, I don’t think we’ve really got a handle on it now, but things are just starting to get back to normal after… Well, I should tell you about the business end first. It’ll make more sense that way.
Space, and newfound access to unbelievable quantities of resources made corporations extremely wealthy, incredibly agile, and more powerful than you could ever imagine. More powerful than could be contained by traditional forms of government…
That was because mining was simple in space, compared to how it was done historically. In your day, minerals had to be discovered at great expense, then extracted from the Earth and smelted before they could be used, leaving behind a hideous scar where beauty once stood. Governments asserted regulatory authority over those activities by characterizing the environment as a victim of capitalism, rather than society as a benefactor of technology that improved extraction methods over time, in turn reducing the impact on the environment.
You see, while the people before you destroyed vast areas of the environment to extract a small amount of usable material, technology improved over time to reduce the mess because efficiency equals profit. While governments had a hand in mandating improvements, they were always pushing for advances before they were ready, adding cost and complexity to the bottom line. Businesses will naturally migrate to more efficient systems when the technology is available, but being forced to comply with nonsensical governmental regulation or bowing to unwarranted oversight has been proven to retard that migration. That was a good deal for governments. They appeared to care about the environment and collected extra revenue from the increased prices of goods and services, but all they did was slow down the natural order of things.
Once we started harvesting materials in space, government regulation made little sense because there was no apparent victim with which to empathize. With the ability to slice up any one of a billion asteroids that are 99% nickel, iron, encrusted gem, or other precious metal in zero gravity and not have to worry about any of the traditional environmental concerns, regulation was no longer a concern because there was no artificial victim to protect.
The ability to produce building materials in space, rather than having to boost them to orbit from Earth fueled a boom in corporatism and propelled humanity’s expansion into a space-based race.
Eventually, corporations got quite large. As time went on, they merged into larger and larger super-national conglomerates with economies that rivaled even the largest nations of the time. It didn’t take long for them to grow tired of the hegemony of corrupt governments that continually had to be poked, prodded, and bribed to get out of the way of commerce.
Somewhere along the way, it became very clear that governments were the natural enemy of corporations. At election time, socialist politicians would gain popularity by demonizing corporations and their management, while extorting millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the same people, quietly, in exchange for secret promises to never enact their campaign promises. Some did anyway.
After winning an election, a politician stayed in office by continually extracting ever-increasing amounts of capital from producers to give to consumers and, after taking their cut, fund the bureaucracy itself. Not only did this decrease profitability and inhibit innovation, it created a lazy, demanding workforce that decreased productivity and morale.
Candidates promised the people hope, fear, or change, depending on what people wanted to hear at the time. Most only delivered more of the same old malaise, regardless of their intent, because the entrenched bureaucracy thrived on a steady diet of hopes and dreams. Unelected, career bureaucrats had far more power than any single elected official, and the entire establishment became more and more socialistic over time in an effort to protect itself from the government it was supposed to serve. Or maybe that was the plan all along?
Historically, democracies become more socialistic over time, and socialistic governments have always met a tragic end, either running out of money to spend, or out of people willing to tolerate murderous regimes bent on creating a utopian fantasy. Combine that with wasteful spending, confiscatory taxation, and knee-jerk, feel-good regulations that just didn’t work, and societal evolution nearly ground to a halt. When the age of governmentalism finally passed, nobody shed a tear.
But, it didn’t happen overnight. As I give you a brief rundown of how that happened, keep in mind that history is still written by the victors.
Things began to change from the governmentalist society you grew up in when Joseph Zuranski (Chairman of Genoma Aesthetics, an Italian company) invented the Extor machine, a device that cured most of humanities ills with a “healing ray.” Extor provided relief for things like baldness, obesity, cancer, or paralysis, and could even halt or reverse the aging process to a certain degree, but only for a short time. It somehow altered the genetic makeup of the body (with dramatic efficiency), but over time, most alterations faded, and the unwanted disorder returned. Quite convenient from a business standpoint.
If you thought the leap from solid state to the transistor was peculiar, the inception of Extor from nothing would have blown your mind. Did you ever hear the old saying that any technology, sufficiently advanced, appears as magic to societies of a lesser technology. That was a big hint, and we missed it. The device was so complex in its operation that Zuranski never bothered to patent it, and it was never successfully reverse engineered.
The key to Extor was that under a recurring revenue model, payments were required to maintain its effectiveness. When people could no longer afford the wildly popular treatments that had made even modern medical procedures archaic, governments were forced to pay the maintenance fees on behalf of their citizens or face a pitchfork rebellion from a new breed of addict.
Of course, that only lasted until
governments ran out of money. They racked up unimaginable debts to Genoma
Aesthetics, who gladly extended credit.
When Genoma eventually called in its debts,
A Corporate is defined as a society governed by a corporation under international business law, driven by profit, where all citizens are essentially treated as employees. It isn’t that bad, and we have a great dental plan…
Earth is now dominated by four universal corporations that arose from the ashes of Governmentalism, and you’ll need to understand the subtlety if any of this is going to make sense to you. I’ll give you the short and sweet version here:
Genoma showed the world that a
business could run a society much more efficiently than a government, through a
system that combined elements of capitalism and communism known as the
Chindia (and most of eastern
The younger generations saw their lifetimes expand by centuries, but it was claimed that Extor could not help the older set, and they were allowed to die of natural causes. As they faded, their wisdom was replaced by a class of people who redefined societal evolution with their grasp of technology and eagerness to innovate. Just imagine Einstein having an extra 200 years to work on special relativity, and then multiply that by a few billion souls who no longer felt the compulsion to have children until they were in their twilight. Productivity soared, and innovation became rampant.
But not everyone was enamored with the idea of having their sovereignty taken over by a predatory business entity, and still others recoiled at the immorality of subjecting themselves to genetic manipulation, no matter what the benefit. New Corporates were formed to protect against the all-powerful Genoma as old friends banded together, utilizing advances in nano-technology and cybernetics to wean the people off of Extor and removing Genoma’s influence from their societies altogether.
We succeeded, and eventually equaled their efforts through technology, but we got a late start.
A constitutionalist society formed
from Western style, democratic nations with a much smaller population than the
new monolith across the seas, but a much better grasp on finance, capitalism and
production.
A big plus to all this change is that “race,” or our perception of it, has changed over the years. What you consider American, Asian, or European no longer exists. Corporate culture has replaced indigenous culture, and people identify themselves by the Corporate flag they were born under and their rank within it. There are Genomans, Senkans, Lukronians, and the ZekComs; all people, no color.
The changes came swiftly. In the end, governments were simply unable to act or react with the speed necessary to compete (much less govern effectively) against the dominant Genoma, and it wasn’t long before the Senka Corporate was formed from a conglomerate of home grown industries. Although operated as a business, most people thought of it as a benevolent dictatorship. Some still do.
Two smaller specialty Corporates came along a bit later, taking the unwanted scraps of land left behind in the race to fill the power vacuum created by the big mergers. Lukron came forth from the energy producing nations that had remained neutral, since they produced resources that both Senka and Genoma required. Later came ZekCom, a progressive corporation that dominated the market in electronica, specifically communications, hardware, and software. They’re a strange lot, with gadgets and gizmos coming out of their ears. I try to keep my distance from them.
With the territorial lines settled and drawn, ideological battles began (they always do) as races were realigned and assimilated into the new corporate culture. Society actually improved for a while, but it wasn’t meant to last. Corporations had never been in charge of militaries before and they were clumsy with diplomacy. The planet was just too damned small, and getting smaller by the day. Global tensions rose and war began to look inevitable.
It was just then that advances began popping up from nowhere, each one a quantum leap over current technology that couldn’t be explained by natural discoveries made using traditional scientific research and development. Some say this period of renaissance brought us back from the edge of annihilation, while others say it only delayed the inevitable. It seemed natural at the time, but in retrospect, it was a little peculiar that everything happened so fast.
A series of inventions that made space exploration simple came about almost overnight. The space elevator, useful nano-technology, fusion propulsion… All of these were projects that man had worked on for hundreds of years without a major breakthrough and all were solved with leaps in technology that were 180 degrees from conventional wisdom. That put us into space, allowing the Corporates easy access to much needed resources. The Moon and Mars were set up with mining colonies that processed ores and sent the finished products to Earth, or used them to expand our presence in space. Most of it was used to build up intrastellar navies, a continuation of human paranoia and territorialism.
With populations on the rise, urban living became a challenge. Self-contained cities built from nano-age polymers quickly surpassed the 1000 floor mark, with footprints sometimes measured in kilometers. Similes, sort of an advanced robot with mature human characteristics, began to do most of the menial labor when the Corporates started to run low on manpower. Don’t worry, they’re not self aware, and I’ve never met one that wanted to become a “real boy.”
Then came Molexium, the room temperature superconductor that gave us tremendous control over gravity. Sub-light ion drives pushed us to Mars and beyond, quantum communication replaced radio waves, and in turn made fiber optics almost obsolete. The Internet was replaced by the Quantum Net, and all knowledge was instantly available, worldwide, and beyond. Fusion driven spacecraft were developed that made getting around up there a whole lot cheaper and easier.
There were biological advances,
too. Nano-fiber muscle enhancements
and osseous composites made human muscles and bones stronger than steel, and helped us equal any genetic
enhancements enjoyed by the Genomans.
And then came surges in bionics, robotics, chemistry, astrophysics,
metallurgy, quantum physics, mathematics, and the list goes on and on.
Every advancement made things smaller, faster, and cheaper, enabling us
to make something else even smaller, faster, and cheaper.
For the record, we stopped using
Those advances did ruin a few things, though. After spending a few years trying to keep competition “pure,” most sporting leagues made augmentations and enhancements mandatory. The rest went broke. Spectators lost interest in games where men took four seconds to run forty meters, or could only jump a meter or less off the ground. Augmented human memory made games of chance a lot less chancy, so casinos joined the ranks of the Dodo. Actors, singers, and dancers couldn’t compete with Similes that didn’t require pay, never missed a note, and never broke a leg that couldn’t be replaced in a few short minutes.
On the military side, the Mech was born. Huge, man-controlled robots, invented to manipulate ever-larger containers of commodities coming back from space based mining fleets; these behemoths became to us what gladiators were to the ancient Romans, or what Olympians are to you. Up to 10 meters in height, some weighing over 100 tons, it was inevitable that someone would attach a weapon to one (especially once energy screens were developed), and it all but replaced the main battle tank in warfare and later became a means through which we would avert all out war.
All this and much more than I can tell you now came along with such speed that it could not have been done without help. Nobody gave it much thought at the time because there was more work to do than there were people to do it for the first time in human history. Things couldn’t possibly get any better.
But they did! A breakthrough was made in faster than light (FTL) theory that gave us access to the stars beyond our own.
A Genoman scientist discovered how to make a Casimir cavity, giving humanity access to the unlimited power of Zero Point energy. In total secrecy, Genoma built and tested the HyperLight Warp Core, the first engine capable of propelling a ship through space faster than light. Well, okay, it wasn’t really propulsion, more like a mathematical shortcut that tricked light into moving faster than normal.
With that kind of advantage, the Genomans made plans to keep the technology to themselves, and eventually use it to eliminate the other Corporates. Apparently, there was some dissent from within Genoma, and late one evening the “inventor” dumped his work (all of it) on the Q-net for the entire world to see. Our scientists were able to duplicate it, but like Extor, nobody knew why it worked, it just did. As we would find out later, Genoma had no clue how it worked either.
The HyperLight Warp Core took us to Alpha Centauri in a day. A single day, and with several hours to spare. We arrived there more than 20 years before our fastest fusion probes would make it, and nobody saw this development as unusual. They were right about people living through periods of historical significance not recognizing how significant times actually are. We didn’t have a clue.
What a great day that was for humanity, but what a better day for the secret hand that gifted the technology to us. In hindsight, we should have known we were being manipulated. We wanted it to be real, and so it was. After all the science fiction about humanity traveling the stars, actually doing it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. The whole galaxy was open for business at that point, and we didn’t even slow down to ask how, or why.
So why tell you all this? Because this is where the real story begins, and where our luck began to change. One man made a difference, and saved us all from... Well, I’ll let you find that out for yourself. And if you don’t believe me on any of this, I put the unabridged version of your future history at the back of this transcript. Future history... Now that’s funny.
Oh, don’t worry about how you knowing all this is going to change your future or alter your timeline. That paradox stuff is junk science they used to increase tension in the plot. If something I give you changes your timeline, it’s already happened anyway so I’m just doing my part.
Nobody would ever believe you anyway. Truth is, after all, stranger than fiction.
I’d tell you more right now, but you need to experience this for yourself. I’ll check back on you later, just keep in mind:
Verdan was just a kid who wanted to be a Mech pilot, but his father had bigger plans for him. All young men dream of life after dad, but Verdan’s experience proved to be more complicated than that. This is his story, and the story of those brave men and women who would stumble across one of the most shocking deceptions ever foisted upon mankind, and how they helped reclaim our celestial birthright, through a force of arms.
Every great story has humble beginnings, and this is no exception…
Back to Portfolio And thanks for reading! If you have any comments or suggestions, send them to webmaster (at) jeffnewcomb.com. I especially like constructive criticism that challenges my assumptions because it makes the writing even better! -- Jeff