2126 – Martian Declaration of Independence is signed. Reparations were paid, but discontent over what countries footed the bill on Earth flared up. Three void charters, and massive industrial spaceships, are given. Roughly half of the asteroid belt’s mineral rights were signed over to Mars.
2127 – Humanity’s population explodes as more and more worlds are populated. Animal and floral life is found to be incredibly commonplace. Even more surprising was that all life was carbon-based and very little of it was poisonous to humans. No intelligent life is found, nor has any species that could evolve into intelligent life been found either.
2129 – The twentieth extra-solar planet or moon was settled by mankind. The colony of Procyon Majoris celebrated the milestone by largely ignoring it. Their communications systems were damaged and didn’t receive news or letters for nearly eight months. When they did find out about the accomplishment the settlers shrugged and carried on with their lives.
2131 – Scientists on Earth and Mars began work on the Extra-Net project. The goal was to produce faster-than-light communication systems utilizing computers with quantum entanglement processors. The process of entangling the processors was painful. But eventually, they were able to create paired processors. One of the paired processors was plugged into a server cluster on the moon and the other was installed on a tablet, computer, starship, or terminal.
2134 – The military finishes its Extra-Net testing, and like all militaries before it, demanded a private system for its use. Civilian testing of the prototype network began in the colonies. It was a rousing success.
2136 – Space Pirates, once only found in comic books, science fiction, and anime are now a real threat. Old and decommissioned ships begin going missing from orbital graveyards at a distressing rate. The colonies demand the UN increase the number of ships in her void fleet.
2138 – The UN disbands but is replaced by the Association of Confederated Planets. The democratic government is a part republic and part parliamentarian. Its Congress is modeled after the United States government. After a long PR campaign, the last colonies signed off on the change in governing.
2139 – The CNS Navy is officially founded. The first modern classes of warships were launched.
2140 – Artificial Gravity research begins. Prospecting in other systems has uncovered new minerals that show promise.
2141 – The galactic standard credit is adopted by the Confederate government at the request of several colony worlds.
2142 – Dissidents from Vega Prime attack the construction crew building the space elevator. Construction efforts are pushed back several months and nearly a trillion credits. The Confederate Navy dispatched a full attack wing and two marine transports to safeguard the construction and root out the terrorists.
2143 – Four colony ships were hijacked by religious zealots and departed into parts unknown.
2144 – A coup took place on two cruisers, three frigates, and eighteen corvettes. The loyalist forces were forced to abandon their ships.
2145 – A breakthrough in anti-gravity technology took place. Unfortunately, the energy required to power the system exceeded the output of the current generation fusion reactors. Another problem was the difficulty in mining, and refining, the mineral responsible for the breakthrough. A new ‘gold rush’ was started.
2146 – The Confederate Fleet Command demanded higher output fusion reactors for its ships along with newer and better weaponry. Despite the fleet being seven years old a modernization process was undertaken. Nearly two thousand new ships rolled out of the shipyards, with the Olympus Mons Shipyard above Mars becoming the preeminent shipbuilder in Confederate Territories.
2147 – Discontent continues to grow in the outer colonies. The Colony Taxation Act of 2147 decreased the tax rate in core worlds but increased them in developing colonies. Agricultural worlds were made exempt from paying taxes if a certain percentage of their GDP is exported food products.
2148 – The first Confederate battleship is launched.
2149 – The CNS Minnesota draws first blood in a renewed attack against pirate forces. The asteroid base in the Groombridge system was assaulted. The pirates, true to their word, refused to fly the white flag. Admiral Jensen, tired of waiting ordered the battleships to begin bombardment protocols on the asteroid.
2150 – Open rebellion in the outermost colonies begins. Kappa Reticuli is the flashpoint for this rebellion. All but ten percent of the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet renounced their vows and joined the colony. The Alliance of Liberated Planets is formed. Several business groups begin looking into founding their independent nation outside of Confederate control.
Long Live Ares!
The signing of the Martian Declaration of Independence was cheered on by belters and Martians alike. But this newfound freedom came at a cost. Firebrands in the various city colonies demanded retaliation. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. Both the population of Mars and their void fleet were dwarfed by the UNs. Cooler heads prevailed and the cries for revenge quickly subsided.
The industrialists cheered when mineral rights to asteroids were granted. Though many were annoyed that they didn’t have the rights to all asteroids. And it was noted that asteroid 21B-14H0 wasn’t on that list. Martian prospectors largely ignored the treaty and mined wherever and whatever they wanted, which led to no shortage of lawsuits and void fighting.
Asteroid 21B-14H0 was a different beast altogether. Estimated to have no less than six hundred thousand tons of gold, palladium, and platinum were estimated to be contained within. Prospectors demanded access to the lifeless rock, and many lost their lives as they tried to land on the asteroid’s surface. The UN Navy’s defense of the asteroid was best described as over-the-top.
This was in part because they coopted ownership of the asteroid by the mineral rights owner, though an agreement was given where a portion of the mineral’s revenue would be shared with the man’s estate in perpetuity. The UN was deeply concerned about that amount of gold flooding the stellar markets, crashing them entirely. Mining was done slowly and methodically. The Martian Government tried to interject itself into the conflict, but they were told numerous other asteroids, which did have sizable stashes of platinum group metals, exotic elements and gold were available to them.
They were ultimately unable to wrest control of that asteroid from the owners and the UN. No less than fifty ships and hundreds of lives were thrown away in a mad quest to fill their ship’s hold with the rich material.
Other prospectors and miners utilized the new void charters to refine the minerals they were mining. By the end of the first month of mining, there were twenty new supercorporations based on Mars and hundreds of newfound billionaires. Those numbers would rise rapidly over the coming years, especially when the Martian economy switched its focus and expertise to developing and building spaceships.
A Galactic Empire Rises
Humanity’s control of the solar system expanded as more and more colonies on the different moons was built and populated. More and more extra-solar worlds are inhibited as well. Nearly one-quarter of Earth’s population, or about four billion people, left the cradle of civilization for new opportunities elsewhere.
Animal and plant life was found to be fairly commonplace. Some animals, like on Earth, were not edible or ranged in poisonous severity. It was an odd curiosity how many animals tasted like chicken, and there were several other sources of honey on other worlds.
These new worlds that were settled were generally treated kindlier than we had treated our birthplace. Technology was largely responsible for that. With fusion reactors being commonplace and easy to produce, the need for fossil fuels was non-existent.
Colonies were clean, growing exponentially, and the people were happy. Families with four to six children were commonplace everywhere, including on Earth at this time. Part of that was out of necessity as the colonies needed as many people as they could get. Most of these colonies were heavily focused on agriculture, which increased the pressure on having enough people to do the necessary work.
Scientists scoured the worlds they were on to find evidence of intelligent life. World after world they were left empty-handed and disappointed. Not even a ruin or hint of life in the distant past was found. Each new world that was investigated increased the growing disappointment that humanity was truly alone.
The Super Internet
One of the biggest complaints of colonial life was the inability to get current news back home and how long messages took to be transmitted from site to site. Substantial space on the Confederate ships was taken up by immensely dense server clusters. Data was transmitted to the colonies upon docking and then data from the colonies was loaded onto the ship’s server.
Inefficient was one word to describe it. Ineffective was another. The colonies demanded a faster-than-light communication service, whether that was possible or not. The civilian and military government didn’t require much pushing back home. Not only did they want the same but there were enormous benefits to having such a system.
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For the colonist, it would enable their access to the current movies, news, and all sorts of hot celebrity gossip that they could handle. Even in the 22nd century, gossip about celebrities, not to mention reality TV shows, continued to rot people’s minds. Demand for trashy television seemed eternal.
For the civilian government, an FTL communication system would allow them to perform governmental services from a centralized location. The process of tax collection would be sped up infinitely compared to the hot mess that it was now. The stock markets and businesses would also benefit from a system.
The list of military benefits was frankly too long to list. The civilian government, in a rare moment of budgetary excess, gave the assembled groups what was effectively an unlimited budget. The insistence from the military leaders parroting all of the civilian benefits aided in that vote.
It didn’t take long, less than twelve months in fact, for the scientists to craft paired quantum entangled processors. The initial plan was to install one processor in a device and another on a server at Armstrong Base on the moon. While the initial military tests were a bit cumbersome, they were able to transmit and receive text, video, and more instantaneously irrespective of how far apart the paired processors were.
There was a problem with this solution. The size of the server farm could, in the future, be too large to manage. It was easy to identify which pairs were no longer functional and simply remove the processor. But something else had to be done to improve the process, but at long last faster than light communications weren’t just science fiction, it was a reality. Thought it was only for the military at this time.
Three years later, on the eve of the official civilian rollout of the Extra-Net, that size solution was finally released. The mechanics were little understood by most, quantum mechanics tends to cause most people’s eyes to glaze over, but they no longer needed to make entangled pairs. Processors could be entangled in broad sectors of a server farm.
That didn’t mean that the core server farm for the extra-net wouldn’t grow over time, it absolutely would, but it wouldn’t grow exponentially as they had once feared. Improvements to quantum cores would increase the efficiency of the extra-net and also reduce the size constraints.
The rollout itself was successful, but a disappointment at the same time. The first thing downloaded on Alpha Centauri was a tentacle hentai porn video. By a young man that would later be called Tim the Tentacle Johnson. His name was known far and wide across UN space.
Old timers in the colonies would recall the time before FTL communications. The younger generation that had grown up with it couldn’t understand how they handled it. How they managed has been lost to the passage of time. The likely reason for not worrying about it was that they had bigger things to focus on, such as laying the groundwork for the very colonies the aghast youth now thrived in.
The Association of Confederated Planets was Formed
The UN realized it can no longer manage things in the way it is organized. It decides to reform the planetary and colonial governing division into a galactic congress. Mirrored after the American style of a republic, a house and senate were formed. Unlike what is found in a republic a High Chancellor was elected from amongst the members of the Galactic Congress. The Vice-Chancellor was the highest vote count from the non-winning party.
Colonies were immediately put off by this arrangement because the UN didn’t share sufficient information about the changes. A PR campaign of epic proportions was launched to explain how and why this was done. Slowly, but surely, public perception of this change was accepted, but great concerns were still raised.
Core planets, those worlds where the human population exceeded one billion, would receive ten seats for every billion people living on them. Colony worlds would receive between three and six depending on their population. New colonies would receive a single seat for at least five years and not more than ten.
The house had one thousand three hundred and fifty-nine seats upon its conception. They were distributed based on population. The only mandate from the central government was that a free vote is made. The colonies or worlds were free to draw voting maps as how they saw fit, but those district maps were subject to federal oversight. The number of seats could also be increased as the overall human population grew to certain limits.
No single world would be allowed more than two senators and ten house members. But some solar systems, such as Earth, held such vast populations that they had outsized representation and those members seemed to vote in lockstep. The outer colonies saw that and grumbled at this arrangement.
Spin, Spin, Spin Again
A year after the UN disbanded its governing the colonies the Confederacy was created. The military began building its new modernized Navy. Three classes of ships were produced. Annapolis class for frigates, Aakre for destroyers, and Excelsior for cruisers.
Each class had at least one but not more than three spinning sections of the ship which were used to simulate gravity. The cruisers looked like three donuts spinning around an old Saturn booster. Ten frigates were made for every four destroyers and one cruiser.
At this point, the political snafu, or idiocy from the military’s standpoint, had not occurred. Frigates were the smallest mainline class of starship. In the future destroyers would be the smaller class because a politician said as much.
The drawback to the spinning ships was keeping them on course and the absolutely necessity for keeping the spinning areas free of debris. More than one of these newly launched vessels was lost because of damage to the control surfaces of the spinning section.
That led to a need to build an artificial source of gravity. Fresh off their success of the extra-net, scientists threw themselves into the problem. Five years later they had a working prototype. But the power demands were excessive. As was the cost of generating the artificial gravity plates. It would be nearly eight long years later before the process became both power and cost-efficient enough to be widely released in void ships.
Galactic Standard Credit
What started as yet another cryptocurrency had curiously morphed into the new legal currency for the fledgling empire. The currency was designed as many others had, to make money for the creators. But the colonies bought into the currency at a surprising rate and managed to convince the creators to tie the currency to the U.S. dollar. Stablecoins were anything but stable, but this one proved the exception to the rule.
Colonies demanded a change because they were upset at the difficulty of trading goods and services. Too often a currency was traded to them but by the time they could convert it to dollars or precious metals, it was worth much less. It seemed that everything they purchased was more expensive than it was out to be and everything they sold less expensive than it should be.
While the colonies did not wield excessive control in the new congress, their demands could not be unheard or ignored anymore. Votes within each solar system began to be split. The cryptocurrency was then federated, making the original creator an overnight trillionaire.
The First Coup
It wasn’t technically fair to say the colony ships were hijacked, every member onboard them was from a divergent sect of Scientology. Communications and trackers were shut down on the colony ships. Their destination was unknown and no traces of them were found. A general message was broadcast before their disappearance: ‘The Union of Xenu rejects the yokes the government places on us. Do not seek us out.’
A year later the unheard-of happened. A mass coup onboard an entire squadron of military vessels. The Union of Xenu took responsibility for the action and once again told the military to not seek it out. One of the frigates was later found with a lone survivor, an engineer. One hundred and eighteen dead crew members were also onboard.
Security measures were updated across the fleet. While it was technically illegal to investigate what religion each officer and enlisted belonged to, a full review was regardless because of the recent loss of ships. While complaints were registered they went nowhere, and the civilian government and courts saw no reason to interfere.
Fourteen more ships had an unusually high number of Scientologists onboard them. The sect to which they belonged wasn’t known for these members, but no more than five percent of the crew was allowed to be a Scientologist of any kind. A directive that still exists to this day.
Fleet Modernization… So Soon?
To the great annoyance of the new government, the Navy demanded that its fleet be modernized once again. Several new classes of vessels were designed, but none included the spinning rings on them. Artificial gravity was now a necessity for all parts of a ship. While the prospectors had searched far and wide for the minerals used in gravimetric plating, the Navy was aware of, and in total control, of a substantial reserve of the precious mineral.
At the same time, the Navy also demanded a marked increase in the output of its fusion cores. These new vessels needed nearly five, and up to twenty times, as much power as the previous generation of ships. That requirement would come down in time, but the immediate need was for the largest increase in power output generationally that had ever been seen. Part of this was because of the energy the artificial gravity system generated, but the newly designed weapon systems were power-hungry as well.
The CNS Minnesota, the first proper void battleship is launched. Unlike the smaller three classes of ships, this ship had two massive rotating sections capable of housing a total crew complement of fifteen hundred sailors. Another thousand marines could be transported as well. The Minnesota class was the first with a ringed array of turreted rail cannons. A total of nine ships were planned, each being named after a state in the Midwest of America.
Discontent in the Outer Colonies Leads to Open Rebellion
Thirteen years after humanity had created the twentieth colony it had added seventy-five more. Between then and the midpoint of the century another four hundred had been created. The population was booming everywhere, including on Earth.
The problem with this booming population was that a large percentage of it was simply dissatisfied or felt disenfranchised. Opportunities were few and far between or entirely time-based which felt unfair to a great many.
More colonies were green-lit, people signed up for them and they were shipped off to a new place in the galaxy. But the Confederacy did a piss-poor job of reviewing who was going where. Whole colonies were formed and entirely made up of malcontents and ne’er-do-wells.
Vega Prime was the first, but far from the last. The government didn’t learn the appropriate lessons. Colonies inside a sphere of roughly one hundred and twenty light years were largely loyal. Some complaints were obvious, especially over the Colony Taxation Act, but the complaints were generally fairly mild, and their loyalty was beyond reproach.
The new colonies though were anything but loyal. They were openly hostile to their perceived overlords back on Earth. Mars was spoken of in most hostile terms as well. All it would take is a spark and the outer colonies would openly rebel.
That spark occurred in the Kappa Reticuli system. The flashpoint for this rebellion was started when a Martian commander ordered his ship to fire on a ship that was descending to the planet’s surface without proper authorization. A common occurrence out here but not one for a great many in the Navy. Within three months one hundred eighty systems joined in open rebellion with the Confederacy.
The attempted attack resulted in all but ten percent of the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet renouncing their vows and joining with the colonies in their rebellion. This group of colonies called themselves the Alliance of Liberated Planets. The Navy learned another painful lesson at the onset of rebellion. The fleets, wings, and squadrons were generally made up of members that came from the worlds they were protecting. Loyalty to the Confederation wasn’t as strong as their loyalty to their homeworlds.
At this time several business groups and corporations begin looking into founding their independent nation outside of Confederate control. The genesis of the Mercantilist Union was founded in rebellion, but they were resolved to create their empire without the assistance of any other military attacks. Plans were formed so that they could create their empire and emigrate en masse.