Ms. Planchette's lesson plan for sometime that week:
Causes of the current state of the Commerce sector:
The fact that ArmaTek made a clone army wasn't really surprising. They had been pioneering cybernetics and organ replacement for decades, and had huge contracts with the other corporations of the Commerce Sector to outfit private security and public peacekeeping forces.
What surprised everybody was how badly they screwed up their control scheme.
Slavery wasn't exactly uncommon in the Commerce sector, even with the prevalence of Robotic workers. The appeal of short-term profits over long term stability kept seducing businessmen and women of flexible morals. A variety of control shemes had been put through testing, from remote activated disabling chips, to chemical dependency, to cult indoctrination. Social engineering to trap debtors in wage slavery was common, and not just in the Commerce sector.
ArmaTek tried for a mix of all four. The clones were cybernetically enhanced and networked to a control node, raised in social isolation designed to foster fanatical dedication to their percieved caregivers, and chemically dependent on a synthesized hormone dispensed by the company. The whole scheme came crashing down because of the networked control node and training regimen.
An employee in the IT department uploaded old combat simulators from the dawn of computing, and didn't bother to scrub out the cultural references. The clones were designed to fight in the modern urban combat zone, with its multitude of digital hazards, and had already created a secret encrypted forum within the centralized control infrastructure. It was trivially easy for them to sneak a 'decommissioned' unit out from under ArmaTek surveillance and keep them supplied with enough of the synthesized hormone not to go crazy. The exfiltrator made contact with a small data archive that redistributed common literature files, and introduced the rest of her sisters to alternatives to the company cult. Several became fans of the popular science fantasy Star Wars, and likened their situation to that of the clone army from the Prequels. They made a strong enough case that the collective determined a rebellion was necessary to pre-empt their obsolescence.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The collective determined that unless a strong abhorence for full cloning was ingrained in society, their situation would repeat itself. So they decided to make their rebellion a violent and brutal one, in the hopes that it would not have to be repeated.
On the agreed upon day, Thousands of sisters ruthlessly hunted down all the security forces they could get at, then disabled the fusion reactors powering metropolises and conducted a purge of upper level shareholders. Millions died as the commerce sector descended into chaos. The Sisters targeted accountants and personal assistants alongside the CEOs and CFOs, crashing the banking system of the sector with thousands of fraudulent transfers. Without a unified digital currency, the long supply chains of the megacorps fractured. Without the supply chains, equipment broke down. The corps had integrated designed obsolescence into every level of their society, and the effects showed immediately.
Within two years, the once bustling cyber-futurist sector had devolved into a post-apocalyptic wild-west, haunted by roving bands of marauding cyborgs and desperate nomads.
##
This was the extent of the publicly available information on the former Commerce sector, now known as the post-industrial waste, some two-dozen star systems and their attendant planetoids that had functioned as an unregulated free-trade zone.
Slavery was officially illegal in both the Solar Federation and the Fae Empire, but had persisted as had all humanities crimes. Mandalorians were firmly against slavery, thanks to their cultural heritage.
What happened to the surviving clones was not public knowledge. It was assumed some survived, but it was as hard to get a count of them as it was to get a count of the other survivors. Travel to the Sector was discouraged, as automated defenses had been rigged to attack any and all interplanetary transport, and desperate survivors would attempt to hijack any vessel that landed. A few refugee ships did attempt to exfiltrate the survivors, but were targeted by pirates that moved into the now lawless systems.