Inner System Polities

Source: Moxie Harper, Firewall Sentinel

Friends & Enemies

Next overview topic: to really understand the state of the Solar System, you’ll need to have a grasp of the various ideologies, polities, and factions at play. Knowing the difference can keep you alive.

The inner system is the cradle of transhumanity, home to its largest political blocs and the only surface-habitable planets in the system.

The Lunar-Lagrange Alliance (LLA)

The LLA: your grumpy Indian dad who is also a Swiss banker. Decried as obsolete by the Planetary Consortium, derided as stodgy and out of touch by the outer system, transhumanity’s first great off-world alliance plods on like a teflon baluchitherium. A number of settlements, including the largest Lunar city, Nectar, have defected to the Consortium, but Earth orbit and the two other big Lunar cities remain staunch Alliance members. Even though Luna might be the old and Mars the new, Luna’s advantage from being settled first hasn’t totally eroded.

The Alliance Council

The LLA Council seats one representative from each member city and habitat. Voting power is proportional to their hab’s population. Settlements have a large amount of autonomy, but the Alliance is in charge of foreign policy, defense, central banking, and intelligence services. This doesn’t keep members from making their own trade deals, but the Council reserves the right to intervene in local policy if it affects the rest of the Alliance. The Council hasn’t been shy about using this power or suppressing dissent from smaller members.

Banks, Burberry, and Bollywood

Interestingly, this reputation for conservatism doesn’t hurt the demand for Luna’s creative output. Lunar fashion houses and entertainment companies are major cultural forces. The Lunar business-casual look is the white-collar style throughout hypercapitalist space. And perhaps post-Fall transhumanity finds some comfort in the homey modernism of Lunar design and the formulaic musicals produced by Bollywood’s descendants.

The Lunar Banks are the heart and brain of old-school capitalism, and they wield influence that can sometimes counter the upstart hypercorps of the Planetary Consortium. Some banks are appendages of the LLA Council. These operate under a fairly transparent regulatory framework and are some of the biggest consumer banks in the system. Others descend from the old Swiss banking system, which strongly privileges the privacy of the client. Detractors say it’s the biggest legal money-laundering operation in the Solar System, but the oligarchs have uses for black boxes like these. You won’t see the Lunars or Orbitals demanding transparency from the private banking houses any time soon. They’re perceived as a cornerstone of the economy and, to some extent, they are.

Culture and Ethnicity

Somebody on Luna actually asked me where my family came from once. Can you believe that? Normally, interactions with Lunars/Orbitals don’t get this provincial, but some of the stuff that comes out of their mouths is really off-putting to us off-worlders. Old nationalities still mean something here, and it can be confusing as hell for outsiders. Ethnic rivalries and prejudice occasonally flare up; people here haven’t gotten the memo that culture and genetics are not inseparable and that nationalism was a pretty stupid idea anyway. Language, too, is a topic of civic debate, with some habitats having a dozen official languages. Other settlements speak only one or two and are rather militant about which one should be the official one.

Biochauvinism is a big problem almost everywhere in LLA space. It’s a culture that disdains people who’ve “failed” at retaining a biological body. Despite political activism aimed at winning greater acceptance for synthmorphs, the clanking masses face classism every day and are often segregated into specific neighborhoods. Infomorphs and anyone not in a familiar human morph are treated with distrust and contempt, but AGIs and uplifts are the lowest of the low and sometimes need to fear for their own safety. If you’re visiting here, take note of those habitat travel advisories.

Reclaimers

On half of Luna, when you look up from the surface, you’ll see Earth, our scarred and smoking homeworld. To many, it’s a call to arms, to root out the TITAN remnants and take back our homeworld. Seen as odd eccentrics elsewhere in the system, reclaimers here count heads of state and hypercorp leaders among their supporters. Several LLA habitats are reclaimer home bases, and the people there chafe at the interdiction satellites that shoot down anything traveling to or from to Earth’s surface.

Decline and Resurgence

The LLA’s political influence has been in decline for a long time, but it retains one of the best military fleets in the Solar System. The remnants of many national space fleets threw in their lot with the Alliance after the Fall. Relations with the Consortium and the Morningstar Constellation are cold. There is strong pressure for the LLA to convert from its old market practices to the transitional economy, and several Lunar habs have already done so. But AF 10 is spring in the Solar System, and the Alliance is getting a new infusion of reclaimers from the outer system who want to be closer to the action. These immigrants, with their dynamic outer-system cultural values, could be the vanguard of big changes to come.

The Morningstar Constellation

The habitats making up Morningstar voted for independence from the Planetary Consortium five years ago. It was a political circus that ultimately coalesced into an independence movement and then, against long odds, succeeded. The Planetary Consortium was caught napping, which is pretty sad given how many of their analysts keep up with their workload by sleeving into hibernoid morphs. The powers that be on Mars still view the referendum that lead to Morningstar as a fluke and expect its members to rejoin the Consortium. Even a thin atmosphere can cloud vision.

The independence referendum is usually understood, at least on Mars, as Venus saying “no” to the Consortium’s vision of fully terraforming the yellow planet. The reality is much more complex. For one thing, the idea of fully terraforming Venus is far from dead. Its proponents are locked in a war of ideas with the opposing camp, the Aerial Terraforming Initiative (ATI). The ATI’s vision is to preserve the planet’s surface conditions while raising oxygen levels in the upper atmosphere and seeding the atmosphere with aerial life. Both camps in the debate are going full steam ahead with R&D, and there are half a dozen sub-factions on each side. The full terraforming faction is constructing proof-of-concept orbital mirrors that would cool the planet’s surface if deployed en masse. ATI advocates have been developing biomorphs designed to survive in the upper atmosphere and animals able to roost on the outsides of aerostats.

So no, forget what your politically opinionated drinking buddy on Mars opined between pitches during the last Cubs-Hanshin Tigers game. It was never about terraforming. Most of the oligarchs running Mars were originally either American or Chinese. Their opposite numbers on Venus were either born off-world or came from Europe and Brazil. Venus is just different than Mars, and its nascent power structures were born out of cultural, political, and economic interests that don’t follow Martian logic.

The Star Council

Is it politics, or the ghost of an Italy-Brazil football match possessing a chamber full of otherwise skilled and articulate transhumans? I’m gonna go with the latter, but then, I have a guilty addiction to watching highly qualified people scream at each other like Martian mud shrikes during brooding season. The Star Council, as hot-blooded as its debates run, does a credible job of governing Venus, from conducting off-world diplomacy to allocating scientific and military budgets (the latter being mostly for payments to mercenaries). It guarantees the Venusian libra, which is pegged in value to the Planetary Consortium credit. And it controls the agencies that grant and verify Venusian citizenship. Each habitat sends one member per 100,000 citizens. The current prime minister of Venus is Arisa (yeah, one of those one-name people), an Italian-born XPorn star, athlete, and psychosurgeon who was one of the leaders of the independence movement.

Culture and Policy

Venusian habitats provide a basic income and nanofab allotment to all citizens, as well as offering full citizenship to AGIs and uplifts. Non-humans and synthmorphs face less prejudice and have more protections in Venusian habitats. Etiquette in public spaces is the most striking cultural difference here. If a Venusian is in their tiny-ass apartment, it’s generally for sleeping, shitting, or sex. They’re always out socializing. Venusians have small personal bubbles and an incredible ability to politely ignore people around them, sometimes with the help of AR illusions.

External Relations

Who tries to found a major political bloc with virtually no military assets? Dreamers, you might say. Idiots, someone more savvy might think. The math works for Morningstar so far, though. The Constellation’s members have ready cash to pay for mercenary protection, and they spend a ton of it. Hence the joke that “MC” is short for Mercenary Cashcow.

If one thing could tear the Constellation apart, it’s the nascent debate over ownership of land on the surface. With only a handful of permanent settlements, the policy so far remains, “If you can exploit it, it’s yours for as long as you’re using it.” But that situation can’t persist forever, in part because Consortium hypercorps continue to exploit the surface without the Constellation’s consent. If a full terraforming op does begin, some of that land is going to become valuable real estate, and the long-term planners are already occupying territory based on landscaping projections. So far, Morningstar doesn’t have muscles to flex about this. But once they do, things could get ugly fast.

The MC also differs from the Consortium on intellectual property. IP protections last only years, not decades, and do not apply to remixes or derivative works. This remains a major stumbling block with Consortium hypercorps that take strong anti-piracy stances.

The Planetary Consortium

The Consortium formed during the Fall through organized networking, propaganda, and coercion by its founding hypercorps. It is a business alliance dedicated to networking and preserving hypercorp interests. Today, the Planetary Consortium is the most powerful economic and political bloc in the Solar System. It controls Mars via the Tharsis League and has outposts throughout the system. Half of transhumanity lives under its oversight.

The Four-Point Plan

Announced shortly after its formation, the Consortium’s slickly produced agenda includes:

• Establish a New Homeworld: With Earth gone, the Consortium has designated Mars as transhumanity’s new capitol. This serves to separate people from old interests and longings and embrace a new era and a new home — one conveniently under their control.
• Improve the Human Condition: This point reads as an endorsement of technological development and change, with a specific push towards genetic engineering, neuro-enhancements, nanotech, and other transhuman technologies. This is, of course, what most Consortium hypercorps want to sell you. Though you gives lip service to morphological freedom and other technoprogressive ideas, the truth is that the Consortium still lags behind on incorporating uplifts and AGIs into its vision.
• Safeguard Transhumanity: Written as a warning against extinction threats like the TITANs, this point is also subtly spun to promote a law-and-order mindset, painting outer-system autonomists as a threat to the Consortium way of life. It also provides justification for restricting nanofabrication access — for safety purposes of course.
• Grow and Prosper: Hypercapitalism requires new markets and unending growth, continually pushing the Consortium to expand its economic influence. With the pandora gates, this plan now also incorporates extrasolar colonization and becoming a dominant force in the galaxy.

The Hypercorp Council

The Hypercorp Council is the ultimate governing authority in the Consortium. Its membership, thought to comprise the 20 or so most powerful hypercorps and conglomerates, is partly secret, and it meets behind closed doors. The Consortium exists to ensure stable conditions in which its members have the opportunity to profit. The governance of half of transhumanity is only a side effect of this goal — one sometimes deemed annoyingly unprofitable.

The known members of the Council are Cognite (neurotech), Direct Action (security), Experia (media), Fa Jing (energy/mining), Fujizo (robotics), Invatch (morphs), the Lucky Star Group (electronics), Nanosys (nanotech), the Pavonis Infrastructure Authority (space elevator), the Prosperity Group (food/drugs), Solaris (banking), and Stellar Intelligence (intel). The Consortium subsidiary Pathfinder, which manages the Martian Gate, is given a seat at the table due to the importance of extrasolar colonization to the Consortium agenda, but it has no voting power.

Governing Corporate Citizens

The civic infrastructure of the Consortium is designed for one thing: to promote a healthy business environment. The hypercorps need happy consumers. Governments are a regulatory pain. So the hypercorps run the government themselves, treating it as a necessary cost of doing business. Government services are therefore thin to keep costs low, providing a pretense of democracy to keep everyone distracted.

For Consortium citizens, a decentralized cyberdemocracy promises representation in the Planetary Congress. In reality, candidates for office are tightly vetted. Some are drawn from hyperelite families. Others are longtime operatives elevated for loyal service. Still others are media icons who’ve converted fame into office.

The Consortium Ministry, peopled by appointees allotted to the hypercorps based on share price, is the executive branch. Notable offices include the Planetary Stock Exchange Regulatory Ministry, the Oversight Ministry, and the Foreign Trade Ministry.

The Assembly, appointed by Congress, is the judicial branch of the Consortium. Its arbitrators are rarely involved in criminal or civil law, leaving that to individual habitats, but instead arbitrate disputes between hypercorps.

Oversight

Oversight is a data-driven corporate intel agency specializing in statistical analysis, industrial espionage, and what’s politely termed “suppressive ops.” They’re an independent agency of the Hypercorp Council, though they act with some impartiality. Their access to privileged hypercorp data enables a constant scan for “anomalies,” be they fiscal malfeasance by execs, collective action by workers, or resistance from a potential market in opening its gates. Oversight gets misunderstood as a combined foreign and domestic intel service for the Council. This is wrong. Oversight stalwarts see themselves as agents of Adam Smith’s guiding hand, a cooperative regulatory framework to deter attempts to game the system, invisibly righting conditions that could upset transhumanity’s hard-won prosperity. Oversight is cold; it does things by the numbers.

In its quest to maintain free-market stability, Oversight also has the authority to counter threats to the security of the Consortium. This has quickly expanded from policing TITAN tech and espionage to immigration controls and a “counter-terrorism” role against perceived enemies of the Consortium, particularly autonomist agitators. Oversight’s secret police are especially busy on Mars, due to the growth of the Barsoomian movement.

Oversight approaches their projects with arrays of AR spreadsheets, charts, and slides, so it is easy to discount them as overzealous accountants. They may be boring, but they have the weight of the Consortium behind them. Oversight’s General Secretary, Gia Norne, is an elemental force. So if you catch wind of Oversight sniffing around, keep your cranial storage down.

Project Ozma

We don’t really know what Ozma is, other than a high-level blackbudget operation. It operates at the Consortium’s highest levels — or perhaps even above them. What we do know is that decades before the Fall, Ozma was some sort of collaborative SETI project, searching for alien life. Now, they seem to have a lot of similar interests to Firewall: the TITANs, the exsurgent virus, the Factors, dead aliens, x-risks, all that fun stuff. There’s a lot of speculation about who or what their bosses are, and what their real agenda is, but it’s all guesswork. Assume the worst and act accordingly.

It would be cute if Firewall could have a fun rival? You know, like cartoon Jovian biofascist crucifix-thumpers, or the vampire cyborgs with impossible cheek bones lurking in the dark Swedish forest of the grandfather clauses governing Titanian Intel? No. We get Project Ozma. No cheek bones, no Latin imprecations from flint-eyed Dominicans, just unlimited resources and impeccable intel. They have an unnerving way of showing up completely prepared for situations that no one else should know about. With nicer weapons and cute accents to boot. They have pulled the rug out from beneath us more times than we count. The one good thing about them is that they are very good at covering their tracks — often erasing evidence of Firewall involvement as well. They don’t like attention, even from Oversight or hypercorps.

Tharsis League

The League is like an elephant with five different handlers on its back, all trying to make it do different work. Its size and power mean nothing, because it’s prodded in circles. Every so often, though, one of the riders manages to make it stomp something or flail its trunk the right way. It’s proof the elite of the Planetary Consortium have perfected the art of keeping a liberal democracy in a medically induced coma, stuffed and mounted for a late stage of capitalism that never quite expires.

On paper, the League is the government of Mars, with representation from the major settlements, regions, and orbital habs. It guarantees the currency, makes and enforces the law, plans and oversees terraforming, appoints judge-magistrates, and builds and maintains civil infrastructure. It has sprawling science and education ministries, and its defense ministry controls a small army and space force.

Bureaucratic Hell Zone

In truth, most of the Tharsis League’s officers, including members of parliament, agency heads, professional civil servants, and local department chiefs, owe their jobs to some form of patronage. Flat-out bribery is rare, but office holders are there because of reasons like family connections, local machine politics, or the Consortium strong-arming a favored candidate into office. In spite of this, the Consortium is unable to completely dominate the League. Officials more beholden to the Barsoomian movement, the glitterati, or particular oligarchs hold down some important offices.

The factions making up the League cut across agency lines, and they vary a lot in mindset and modus operandi, so much so that each is better thought of as a constellation of memes. You’ve got authoritarian versus libertarian conflicts in the Martian Rangers, corporatist versus militocratic factions in the Space Force, trade unionist versus corporatist in the Martian Department of Transit (MDOT), and authoritarian versus regionalist scuffles in the Tharsis Terraforming Office (TTO). The Barsoomian movement is autonomist flavored, and wherever its members carve out a niche for themselves, anarchist or socialist memes quickly come into conflict with the CivicNet status quo.

Terraforming

Terraforming Mars is the greatest engineering project in transhuman history. At the center of this effort are a number of Consortium hypercorps and a smattering of independents, like the worker-owned upstart TerraGenesis.

Terraforming is the political hot potato. The League Congress has carved appointments to the Tharsis Terraforming Office (TTO) into a zillion sub-offices. The TTO Executive Director is a spokesmodel with nominal rule over a fractious staff of department heads whom they neither appointed nor can dismiss without approval from the deadlocked Terraforming Committee of the League Congress. Sound like a shitshow? It is. The Chief Planetologist, Chief of Ground Ops, and Chief of Orbital Ops all hate each other and the other department heads. This results in revolving-door appointees, non-stop budget-grubbing games, alliance shifting, and related treacherous fuckery. Martians living on the ground aren’t given much consideration by the people who decide what land gets blackened to absorb heat, where ice melters are planted, what locals get displaced, and most frighteningly, where comets get dropped.

An even bigger kicker is that some hypercorps are now touting this Red Eden project idea, which is essentially a plan to privatize all of the TTO’s terraforming operations and unite them under a single corporate entity. The idea’s been gaining traction, though of course not all of the hypercorps are keen on it either.

Military and Security

League forces are small but can be quickly augmented with mercenaries. On paper, the League Army and Space Force have ready-to-go contracts that would enable them to respond to a major TITAN-related incursion from the Quarantine Zone with massive force. Firewall has run a lot of simulations on incursion scenarios, and we’ve concluded that their response force would be big enough — but it’d also be a disorganized mess, prone to rout before TITAN terror tactics or unfamiliar technology.

The Martian Rangers are the other planetwide security force. The Rangers protect everything that’s not in a city or major settlement. (Major population centers have their own police, run by the city government). Their beat includes the TITAN Quarantine Zone, where Ranger perimeter patrols are a first line of defense against stray Zone denizens. The Rangers are the best prepared force on the planet to fight TITAN war machines or exsurgents — from a psychology and training standpoint. But Rangers are too lightly armed and too few in number to beat back a major incursion on their own. They’re cops, or at best, a militia. In a real TITAN attack, they’d act as scouts, target painters, and skirmishers for the military