User:Logomancer/Isolation (BP)

This is based off of written works of the Blue Planet team, but has not been approved by them and is not necessarily BP canon.

The Isolation is the Sol system's colloquial term for the time between the Lucifer cataclysm at the end of the Great War and the arrival of the GTVA 14th Battlegroup. During this fifty-year period, Sol was cut off from the rest of the subspace gate network, effectively isolating the system from the rest of interstellar space.

A Farewell To Arms

At the time of the Lucifer cataclysm, the Sol system's economy was unprepared for peace. While Sol's infrastructure was bigger than the rest of the GTA combined, that infrastucture had been on a full-tilt war footing for almost 15 years. Some 60% of Sol's population was somehow invested in the massive military-industrial complex that existed at the time, either working directly for the GTA's armed forces or for one of Sol's many defense contractors. The biggest defense contractor, Han-Ronald, employed 15% of Sol's entire population, either directly or through subcontractors. Resources that weren't directly supporting the war effort went toward supporting the GTA's colonies among the stars. 40% of Sol's Gross System Product (GSP) was geared toward providing the colonies with food, water, shelter, consumer goods, and other supplies.

When the Sol-Delta Serpentis node collapsed, Sol lost both means of sustaining her economic expansion, creating a devastating demand shock. Dependent on massive levels of government funding to remain solvent, the defense industry began to implode as contractors laid off hundreds of millions of workers to keep afloat. Within a year, the war economy was in a shambles. Coupled with the end of the colonial trade, this caused the failure of many smaller companies indirectly involved in the war effort, which rippled to smaller companies still. By the end of 2336, billions of people among the GTA's three remaining planetary members -- Earth, Mars, and Jupiter -- were unemployed, and soon became restless as their plight worsened.

Fifteen years of full-scale war had taken its toll on the civilian populace. To better direct the production of goods for the military, the GTA had established an authoritarian command economy during the Terran-Vasudan War. The GTA enacted strict controls on wages and prices, a low cap on the production of consumer goods considered "luxuries" by GTA Command, and the rationing of staple civilian resources not seen by many humans since Earth's Second World War. Coupled with this was an intentional lack of employment opportunities not directly related to the GTA's goals; for example, civilian research and development jobs were almost nonexistent by the time of the Great War. As long as the GTA provided its citizens with the infrastructure needed to survive, it was able to stem the unrest caused by such policies. In the face of economic collapse, these policies would prove to be the GTA's undoing.

The Collapse of the GTA

The GTA's twofold response to the floundering of its biggest civilian partners was typical. First, it bailed out or nationalized the failing corporations and tried to restore them to stability, if not profitability. Second, it put these newly acquired resources to use in a massive government project -- in this case, Project Bifrost, an attempt to open the Sol-Delta Serpentis subspace node. For months, experts on subspace propulsion from the GTA's nationalized conglomerates scrutinized sensor logs of the Lucifer's destruction and the subsequent node collapse, looking for ways to allow the node to be restored. However, the GTA's experts had concluded that reopening the node was not possible with Sol's current technology. In the spring of 2338, Project Bifrost was shuttered and the GTA redoubled their bailout efforts, nationalizing entire sectors of the economy.

The reprioritization of the GTA's resources toward Project Bifrost had dire consequences for its off-Earth holdings. Money that had been used to maintain habitats on Mars and the moons of Jupiter were instead being used to bail out corporations largely based on Earth. As maintenance budgets fell short, shortcuts had to be taken to keep the habitats livable. While Martian habitats were relatively well-off due to their partially-terraformed home planet and culture of self-sufficiency, Jovian habitats lived on a razor's edge, sacrificing citizens to maintain the integrity of the habitat for the rest of the populace. The hardest hit, however, were the habitats beyond Jupiter, which often received no supplies at all, causing a permanent humanitarian crisis at the edge of the solar system. In most of Sol's off-world holdings, the crumbling infrastructure soon gave way to famine, disease, and environmental disasters.

As conditions worsened, the cracks caused by the wartime government erupted into protests, riots, and other forms of civil unrest. The GTA's response was predictable; martial law was declared throughout Sol, and troops were dispatched to Mars and the Jovian system to restore order. But it swiftly became evident that the GTA military, after 15 years of fighting wars of ship-to-ship combat and naval boarding actions, was ill-prepared for the massive groundside police actions required to keep the peace. The marine detachments of the 1st Fleet were overwhelmed as entire nations rebelled against GTA rule, and funding for additional troops dried up in favor of attempts to stabilize the economy.

As the GTA began losing control and legitimacy after the failure of Project Bifrost, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter began to pursue their visions of postwar Sol. The Jovians, angered at the loss of life and revenue by the GTA's mismanagement, wanted to declare independence and set up an anarchocapitalist regime based on free trade. The Martians and their worker's unions started an eco-Marxist movement with a focus on democratizing the means of production while remaining conscious of one's impact on their greater environment. On Earth, there emerged a new class of oligarchs not seen since the early 21st century, the product of both the GTA's bailout program and massive profiteering exploiting the needs of the outer colonies. By exploiting regulatory loopholes and the GTA's feeble enforcement power, several of the oligarch's corporations grew explosively in power and resources, and by the end of 2339, they had control over most of Earth's national legislatures. On March 29th, 2240, on the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the Lucifer, Earth declared her withdrawal from the Titan Accords, seceding from the GTA, and declared an end to the state of planetary emergency enacted twenty years before. Mars and Jupiter were quick to follow suit, reinstating the Martian Concordia and the Jovian Systems Republic, largely along the lines they had envisioned.

After the abandonment of the Titan Accords, the GTA still existed in Sol; however, her authority was reduced to that of a large corporation, limited to the land on Earth it effectively owned through the companies it had nationalized. Even then, the GTA was ill-equipped to manage what it had purchased, due to its lack of political control and its dwindling finances caused by its radically shrunken tax base. Faced with insolvency and eager to cut expenses, the GTA started a re-privatization program, selling off its assets wholesale in order to maintain control over its own holdings. Most of these assets were bought up at drastically reduced prices by the oligarchs the GTA had previously made rich, and it still wasn't enough. In the autumn of 2342, the GTD Washington, once the flagship of the GTA 1st Fleet, was sold to a Jovian scrap dealer; the rest of 1st Fleet had been similarly disposed of earlier in the year, as the GTA lacked the funding to fuel them.

By 2343, the GTA was virtually defunct, with a few squadrons of Valkyrie fighters to its name, patrolling the skies of rural China and India, lacking the authority or the means to do much of anything else.

A Means of Restoration

As the GTA faded into irrelevance, Sol was in dire straits. Six months after Earth and Luna declared an end to the wartime state of emergency imposed by the GTA, it declared a peacetime emergency due to its continuing economic crisis. Earth's national governments struggled to provide for their large populations after years of the GTA's mismanagement, and deprioritized interplanetary trade. This, in turn, impoverished the Jovians, who were dependent on trade with Earth. Meanwhile, the Martians were critically short of experts to maintain their fragile ecosystem. Sol was in the midst of economic congestive failure.

In the summer of 2339, a previously unknown species of rice pathogen ravaged Southeast Asia. Ultimately, 70% of the rice crops in that region were lost, causing massive famine in China and India. As hundreds of millions faced starvation, the Alliance ordered the rationing of all food while it scrambled to source food from elsewhere. However, while the Chinese and Indian governments were nominally controlled by the GTA, in practice they did very little to prevent the local elite from buying up large amounts of food, either to sell at largely inflated prices or to hoard amongst themselves. Eventually, the oligarchs' behavior led to widespread and vicious food riots. The GTA was trapped -- either they spent most of their resources to put down the food riots, thus protecting a tiny minority at the expense of the majority, or they let the riots burn themselves out, and risk an overthrow of their leadership in the region.

While considering these options, they ran out of time; national governments were toppled as the rioters stormed the capital cities, and GTA power in the region was eliminated. Soon after, the oligarchs moved in with private military contractors and established control over the area, killing millions in their wake. While order was nominally restored, most lived in crippling destitution, and riots against the oligarchical "Free Republics" were commonplace.

Many email lists on Earth buzzed with discussion about the so-called "Rice Revolt". For a few of these lists, the discussions were more than idle chatter. The members of these lists were alumni of the GTA's Human Future Project, established in 2330 to "foster the next wave of human leadership and innovation". Part symposium, part think tank, the Human Future Project pushed the envelope of human research on many levels with breakthroughs in linguistics, scientific modeling, psychosociology, logistical distribution, and many other fields. While most of these innovations were directed to serve the war effort, some had large impacts on civilian life as well.

These people, a loose collective of philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, historians, educators, scientists, and spiritual leaders, recognized that the Rice Revolt was more than just an extreme example of civil unrest; it was an example of the oligarchs' disdain for representative government, a product of living under the GTA's thumb for so long. What would be born from this disdain, however, was less clear. Recruiting computer scientists formerly employed by Han-Ronald's simulations division, they constructed a predictive model of the sociopolitical situation in Sol.

The results, delivered two months later, were frightening. Within a decade, the oligarchs would consolidate power, overthrowing all governments on Earth to establish direct rule, like the feudal lords of old. Most of the programs currently enacted to restore Earth's infrastructure would be curtailed, as would most regular spaceflights to Mars and the Jovian system, to enrich the oligarchs even further. As Earth's infrastructure broke down from lack of maintenance, billions of people would die, devastating the labor force and skill sets available and making any hope of recovery impossible. On Earth, human civilization would backslide and enter a Dark Age; on Mars and Jupiter, it would simply cease to exist from lack of support, as it would for colonies in the Kuiper Belt.

Galvanized by the report's grim outlook, the Human Future alumni formed the Restoration Project in 2340, and set to work to avoid the coming darkness. Unable to stand for important offices due to a lack of corporate sponsorship, the Project went grassroots, recruiting humanitarians, aid workers, and spiritual leaders to its cause, and running for local office, which were not highly contested. By 2341, the RP had gained a foothold in some of the most strife-ridden areas on Earth, and started setting up homeless shelters, food kitchens, and trade schools, most of them converted from surplus munitions plants or GTA barracks. During the GTA's fire sale, they acquired, for a very low price, most of Han-Ronald's computer archives, including its cutting-edge tactical simulators and the computers to run them. These simulators were soon adapted to make models of social and economic growth, and they were deployed in areas where the RP had power. In areas where they didn't, like sub-Saharan Africa, they made microinvestments to local businesses with potential based on advice from the simulators. In many areas, the simulation program was successful; where it wasn't, the data was shared and the model refined.

The Outcomes Doctrine

In May 2343, the Restoration Project began its next phase. Members of the Project met in Hong Kong to produce a statement of their principles and ultimate goals. The document produced was called the Outcomes Doctrine, and its summary was the following:

• Above All Else: It is our solemn belief that no human shall be unable to achieve her full potential, and it is toward this end we pledge ourselves.
• Politically: We strive to maximize free speech, minimize government power, and work behind the scenes through the gradual adjustment of social and economic trends. In the long run, we seek to unite mankind, end armed conflict, and develop new technologies that will allow a return to the stars.
• Economically: We intend to use sophisticated models to regulate and maximize the output of the free market, through subtle controls rather than by regulation or intervention.
• Socially: We wish to promote understanding, open-mindedness, and peace; to eliminate physical and mental illness through scientific treatment; and to establish the equality of all human beings. Finally, we stand to promote individual moral autonomy and freedom.
• Philosphically: We seek to move mankind towards a state of enlightenment, where human beings will function as a coordinated, competitive/cooperative system in which each individual human is actualized to maximize his or her own output. We believe that every person should have the means, the drive, and the hope to make him or herself better.
• Spiritually: We believe that all faiths should be allowed to coexist peacefully.

It was a very idealistic document, especially during a time when megacorporations controlled 90% of the Terran Assembly, which was no longer Galactic in scope. Most oligarchs dismissed it as collectivist nonsense. But to many in the underclasses, it was a refreshing viewpoint compared to the GTA's grim predictions during the Great War and the contempt of the oligarchs after the collapse. Coupled with the quiet success of their modeling efforts -- most recently, in sub-Saharan and southern Africa -- it was enough to give people a sense of hope they had not found in years. By November, the Restoration Project had gathered enough petitions to be recognized as a political party in the Assembly.

Much of the following year was spent organizing local party structures, refining and evangelizing their predictive models, and making inroads in other regions. Sub-Saharan and southern Africa were the next regions to see the RP's presence; some local groups used the name "Ubuntu Party", after an African political party organized along similar lines. Central and southeast Asia were soon to follow. In the elections of 2344, to the surprise of everyone, the RP gained 68% of the seats in the Assembly. The vision of hope that the Restoration Project had given a crushed generation had given them the means to put that vision into practice.

The Rise of Ubuntu

In the months following the RP's political victory, the tempo of their exploits increased significantly. Their supermajority in the Terran Assembly gave them the opportunity to implement global policies that would speed recovery along. While implementation dragged in some areas -- the oligarchs held fast to their fiefdoms -- they further accelerated the recovery in areas where the RP had greater influence. Investment in clean energy, mass transportation projects, and just-in-time manufacturing facilities for consumer goods increased mobility and demand. Asian countries were experiencing a new economic Golden Age, and Africa was well on its way. Meanwhile, projects in Australia and the Americas began to pay dividends.

In the midst of all this came a revelation that would reshape the Restoration Project's mission and, with it, the future of Sol.

Martin Mandho was a Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Lagos. An alumnus of the Human Future Project and a former high-ranking analyst for Galactic Terran Intelligence, he had kept informed about the development of the Restoration Project. In 2342, he allowed himself to be drafted as an RP representative for Nigeria after a paper he published on neo-consensus decision making went viral on local RP email lists.