RE: [Story]The difference is, a Lightbulb stops working...
03-03-2025, 07:12 PM (This post was last modified: 03-04-2025, 05:47 PM by Dartz.)
03-03-2025, 07:12 PM (This post was last modified: 03-04-2025, 05:47 PM by Dartz.)
There is more than 1 post after this. If only because I put together this short narrative to try and explain why everyone who is supposed to be sensible, is trying to be so foolish.
It's older that some world current events.
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"Nobody believed it was possible"
Up until it happens.
Crystal Osaka has settled 2 kilometres below its predicted collapse altitude. The city is now, apparently stable. The damage to the ventilation system is contained. The city engineers are pumping sewage and water overboard to lighten the city and de-ballast. The rescue operation was in full swing. The last report is that the city is expected to begin rising within the hour. She's fallen further than her builders ever expected her to, but all the little factors of safety built into their calculations have, so far, kept the city safe.
Nobody believed it was possible for a Crystal City to collapse. There is only so far the suspension of disbelief will take you.
The shuttlecraft Volkoff, operating far below its expected collapse altitude, approached the Western dock. Ten meters from the dock, the Volkoff finally implodes. Want went through the Volkoff's crews minds - aside from the shattered remains of their craft - we'll never know. They probably thought themselves as Brave and Derring - even heroic - going so far beyond their own red line, right up until the moment the hull buckled, snapped through and the assembly of biology and technology that had been the Volkoff became physics instead. Likely, they thought the Wave would save them from physics. They were so used to fooling reality.
In the end, reality is always there, waiting.
It takes 4 microseconds for the Volkoff to collapse. It takes a full second for the supersonic implosion shock to race through Osaka, such is the size of the city.
A few in IVA-equpped hardsuits escape by chance. One engineer on the ground is found a few days later. Two thousand people are gone in an instant.
---
"It's easy to blame the Boskone. It's easy to Blame Naoko Sato."
The Government of The Crystal Millennium is not one for taking the easy way out. They need to know what actually happened. Nobody wants another Crystal Osaka. They need to know How the city collapsed. Both the technical side, and the social side. How did the City's defenses fail? How was Naoko Sato able to control so much of the city's governance that she could sit undetected for over a year?
Social. Structural. Human factors. Judge Lenneth Matilda heads the tribunal of inquiry.
It interviews the few survivors from the city's own engineers. Those who were out of the city, those who'd transferred - the sole survivor. They interview survivors who had served on the city council with the previous administration. From the Sammie detachment, who might've been training elsewhere, on leave, or piloted a shuttlecraft. From the cities builders and designers in Bristol. No stone is left unturned.
The Inquisition is exacting in its detail.
The Matilda Tribunal sits for nearly two years. Longer that the city itself stood for.
The Matilda report is released in 2015, explaining the exact How, and Who brought down Osaka. The collapse is mapped out from the moment the first foundation is grown on Luna, to the final impact on the surface of Venus. Lessons are learned.
Changes are made throughout the Crystal Cities to make them more resilient. New bulkheads are fitted. The ventilation systems are reinforced and compartmentalised. Pipes which were formed from crimped polymer, are replaced by welded steel. Pressure shelters are built into the foundations to survive a collapse.
Changes are made to operating rules of the SAM. Crush Depth is now, no-longer just an arbitrary figure that can be nudged through to effect a daring rescue.
And that was thought to be enough.
---
"The Dark Kingdom"
Nehallenia had always been the Black Sheep of the Millennium. It went its own way, unless occasion required it to act as a staging ground for Tango Shoes, or a rescue mission. Nobody paid it much, if any attention.
Until Great Justice discovered Naoko Sato had moved her Thionite operation to Nehallenia - with the backing of some of the more Liberal elements of the rock's own leaders who either felt she'd been hard-done by, or felt they'd been hard done by. Or just felt like playing at criminal, without realising *what* they were messing with. Like a teenage girl with a Ouija board - they attracted some unwanted attention.
A bunch of them get themselves killed in the ensuing raid. Naoko Sato again escapes. An infomorph named Quattro Scaglietti is captured and found responsible for some horrific catgirl experiments. She *disappears* into the black soon after. She's living the rest of here life in The Vault for her troubles.
This is all a bit of a slap in the face for Her Majesty's government. Once is bad luck. Twice is starting to point to a pattern....
They come to the conclusion that something is Dreadfully Wrong with how the Bureaucracy of the Crystal Millennium functions - if one person, or one council is able to corrupt the functions of an entire settlement - and do it multiple times?
There would not be a Third.
----
"Assume good Faith."
Fenspace prior to 2012 was like the early internet. The possibility of someone being so impolite as to possibly be a bad actor just wasn't considered, was it? We're all up here. We're all fans. We're all the same, and we're so much better.
Which is bloody hilarious because we all collectively knew this wasn't true - there were always those people we talked about, who we warned our friends not to be alone with. The broken stairs - the Vic Mignonga's. Why did we assume they wouldn't come up?
We are much wiser now.
The designers of Crystal Osaka never conceived of the city coming under any sort of attack. They thought a shuttle might run into a gas cell or two by accident. They had no concept of anyone deliberately puncturing the city structure, or having a running gunfight on the main concours.
The initial framing of the constitution of the Crystal Millennium gave its officers a great deal of personal power to get things done. The first Cities are designed and built in *months*. These are projects run by a tight-nit group of people with motivation and drive. Only convention and common purpose keeps power in check.
We couldn't conceive of anyone trying to corrupt these structures for their own benefit. We all assumed each would be be a Cincinnatus, because we each knew we, ourself, would be Cincinnatus.
Conventions and custom alone, are not enough.
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"Never Forget. Never Again"
The Trauma of that day lingers in the Venusian Psyche. Most of those who call Venus their home today have come 'Up' in the years since Osaka fell. But it still looms large in their mind - taught by those who came before. The fear remains.
The 2016 constitutional convention lasts for months. The entire system is rebuilt from the ground up to make sure that This Can Not Happen Again. One engineer cannot make a mistake which will doom a city with a hidden design flaw. One rogue bureaucrat cannot turn the engines of government to their own nefarious ends. One settlement cannot go down a dark path unnoticed.
Checks and Balances are written it at every single level. The tangle and byzantine bureaucracy that is the Crystal Millennium is not a failure state - it is the entire point. It requires everyone at every level to both get approvals from the levels above them, and from those around them. It requires both consensus between stakeholders, and support between agencies. Constitutional convention is simply not rigorous enough.
It is, according to one commentator, basically Weimar-Proof.
No one office can stand on its own. The power one office-holder can retain is limited to the walls of their office. Outside those walls, aid and assistance have to be bargained for. The other offices must be convinced of the merits of the plan. The paperwork must be submitted. Everything must be above board and unimpeachable.
It is a recipe for gridlock. It is a recipe for ballooning cost. It is a recipe for a government that is meticulous and certain, that moves slow but will not break.
No new Crystal City has been built in 12 years. The construction of Crystal Cincinnati has been stalled for a decade, through redesign after redesign, as potential issues are discovered, and fault-trees find new branches that lead to disaster.
But. Crystal Osaka must never happen again. Nehallennia must never happen again. This is the one thing Venus is sure of.
---
"Frigga was always and end-around run"
But sometimes, things must be done. Bristol needs heavy metals, and Azubajuban can’t supply a quarter of what they need.
For years, they bought straight from Greenwood. But the cost - and the reliance on another partner, led to Her Majesty’s Government looking to secure a base for its own resources. We all need a little bit of Juche Thought for the times where the supply lines break down, or when someone starts to think they're a monopolist.
This led them to 77 Frigga - a massive rock first settled by a group of people politely described as a witches brew of US Republicans and Private Equity Funds to escape the clutches of Federal Government regulation and oversight (And prosecution for involvement in the Giuliani affair), which promptly went bankrupt when they burned through their seed cash establishing the lifestyle they wanted in space for their good citizens - rather than the lifestyle the under-established rock would support.
It was promptly stripped of anything valuable which could be carted out the door, leaving only a shell, and four power reactors too radioactive to move. Jet Jaguar buys it for pennies on the dollar to try and start a training centre to teach all such rocks how to defend themselves.
The age of Frigga, and the fact that it was an established and continuously occupied settlement, would have exempted Frigga from a lot of the new bureaucracy - it could be grandfathered-in under the old regulations. That it had never been part of the Crystal Millennium, was not thought to be an issue.
The Constitution simply assumed these articles would only ever apply to the existing Crystal Cities — nobody ever assumed it needed to be stated.
And thus, the loophole that led to the Annexation of 77 Frigga came about.
In theory, it'd been kept in some level of maintenance and care. Reactivating the Friggan mines would provide all the ore and metal Bristol could possibly need for decades. The station would become - ideally - a major outpost and centre of influence for the Crystal Millenium in the outer system, and - most importantly - it would be cheap.
They're able to buy themselves cheaply out of their contracts with Greenwood by agreeing to keep Frigga's ore from the free market. Frigga will supply Bristol only.
—
“Something that could’ve been solved with a Polite tea party.”
They ran into the first problem with the Millennium constitution. It hadn't accounted for any existing settlement being annexed - the constitution assumed every new settlement would be new-founded.
An attempt to elect representatives to the Parliament on Venus - and to the small council is met by a slight catch. The constitution forbade existing subjects of the Millennium who moved to Frigga from standing for government - they hadn’t lived there for long enough. It also forbade those who lived on Frigga before annexation from standing to govern their own homes - as they hadn't been subjects of Her Majesty until Frigga joined, and hadn’t been due’s paying Senshi for long enough to stand for office.
A sensible provision against brigading, caused a nasty Catch 22.
After the ongoing delays with the VTP, and some high-profile kickbacks that gave all the impression of a government that has overstayed its welcome - Kayabuki needed a few MP's she could trust in parliament to maintain her majority. And Frigga seemed like the perfect rotten borough to feed them to.
Only Frigga said 'No'.
Something that could've been solved by both parties waiting the necessary time for things to resolve themselves, ended up in a political catfight that had Prime Minister Kayabuki trying to do an end-around run of the Station Council while half the Station Council was out of comm's range and unable to form a quorum, and the people on the station rapidly re-electing a new council in a game of musical chairs.
The end result of this is Jet Jaguar being appointed Baron Frigga - to her utter horror - and a simmering legacy. Frigga had just learned that Kayabuki could not be trusted.
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"A complete political shitfest"
By now, Kayabuki's administration is running on the thinnest of majorities and some major supply bills are coming down the line. The loyal opposition can smell blood in the water. It's already doubtful Kayabuki can herd her cats and keep them in line.
If they're able to portray the Friggan project as 'Yet another failure' of Kayabuki then chances are, the Sakura Holdfast will have a brand new resident for the first time. All it takes is one or two MP’s to cross the floor in the hope they don't get pilloried by the electorate when the government falls.
Meanwhile, Kayabuki needs the project to succeed - and without ballooning in cost from its original promise of abeing brand new industrial base at less than half the cost of settling a virgin rock. Any deviation from this cannot be permitted - it is an existential matter for her government.
On Frigga. Things aren't so simple. Equipment that'd survived having the occasional guest party for Survival Shot starts to break down when put under continuous load. Systems which'd ticked over at barely above idle speed burned out in weeks when asked to run at full load for the first time in a decade. It's quickly becoming clear it will take a lot more money to put things right - probably more than starting fresh.
To no-ones surprise, only the most miserly dribble of funding is offered. For Kayabuki to remain in power - the government of Frigga must be shown to be incompetent, to be the ones whose gross mismanagement of the affair has resulted in them having to come cap in hand for more.
That this might encourage the city residents to elect a new leadership more in-line with Kayabuki's party is lost on the Friggans. Trapped in a political Morton's fork - they take a Third Option - Foreign Direct Investment, courtesy of the Roughriders. They begin the Moxy project - to produce Blackbird engine fuel using the reactors on the station.
All helpfully solves Kayabuki's issues just well enough that she knows not to ask how the budget got balanced. The loyal opposition now have nothing to crow about because Frigga is apparently working. Ore starts to flow to Bristol.
Things on Frigga are now moving fast. Something has to break.
---
"Enter the Reactor"
Lensherr Electromotive GmBH are a german manufacturer of coal and oil-fired power plant equipment. Sensing the environmental writing on the wall, they began to look for diversification options - potentially fuelled by the wave itself. In 2011, they find something. Essentially, an upscaled X-7, the Lensherr STR 3200 stellarator is the first successful commercial application of Deuterium-Tritium fusion. It allows a theoretically safe nuclear power plant to be bolted to a turbine and generator from a thermal power plant no different than the ones Lensherr had been building for over a century.
The reactor is a star-in-a-bottle. But unlike every other reactor built in Fenspace - this sucker's neutronic. Fusing Deuterium and Tritium results in a spray of high energy neutrons which not only carry most of the energy liberated by the reactor with them - they also make anything they touch hideously radioactive.
The graphite refractory lining the reactor both shields the reactor structure, and acts as a neutron brake. All the energy contained within those speeding neutrons is dumped into the graphite as heat. And it's this heat which is used to generate steam and drive a turbine. It’s the same way every single power plant has been built on earth for decades.
Cells containing molten lithium are embedded in the refractory. Bombarding lithium with fast neutrons causes it to fission and breed Tritium, which can be siphoned off and used as fuel.
A pilot planet in Bielefeld seems to be successful. Plans for more are canceled by protestors - and by cheap Russian gas making investment in new technology suddenly a very bad idea. The only market for the reactors, are the mundane elements of Fenspace who like things that work like they do at home.
Fusion power promises cheap, safe, plentiful energy. And - more importantly - Fusion reactors cannot run away and explode.
In practice - issues with the refractory were found - many due to physics factors the boilermakers of Lensherr were never aware of. Graphite could swell under neutron bombardment, causing cracks to form. Thermal shock, could cause further spallation and cracking. Parts of the liner could fall off - potentially contaminating the plasma, and exposing the reactor structure to direct neutron bombardment.
One engineer asks what would happen if the refractory liner above the Lithium breeder cells were to collapse, and expose all that lithium to a sudden spray of ultra-fast neutrons.
His report notes the consequences might be dramatic.
With the ongoing protests against the Bielefeld plant - this report is quietly buried. This is an existential matter for the company.
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"Amateur Hour at the Nuclear Power Plant"
On Frigga, we have a bright spark who looks at the Lithium blankets and wonders what would happen if some Uranium is stuck in there. Depleted Uranium is added to Reactor 4 as a test - to see what might happen. It's not expected to undergo fission - but to breed Plutonium to be used as engine fuel. This is where the Moxy project truly begins.
All goes well for the first few months. The first samples of Plutonium prove the Moxy project will be a success.
Meanwhile, the Station’s engineers finally begin to catch up with their repairs and maintenance. They decide to conduct a safety test on the reactor, requested by the manufacturer.
The first three reactors pass.
In the middle of the fourth test, the graphite liner above one of the cells containing Uranium collapses. Uranium is exposed to a spray of fast Neutrons more intense than anything outside the core of a nuclear weapon.
It explodes like the tertiary stage of a hydrogen bomb, blowing the reactor and its containment shell apart. The blast is true nuclear explosion - estimated at over thirty tons of TNT. The curtain wall separating the turbine hall from the main landing bay is kept from collapsing by a fortuitously placed crane. It still shifts by nearly thirty centimetres and throws hundreds of tons of crane and the spacecraft it was carrying off its rails.
Radioactive smoke billows through, pegging meters at either 1000 microrentgen per second, or 65535 nanosieverts per hour.
There is no handwaving their way out of it. The reactor fire is all too real. The radiation is real.
They have moved fast. And now things have broken.
Rather than issue a distress call and try to evacuate, or try to shelter in place and hope to ride it out, they take the risk and fight Godzilla. It's a big gamble - either a rescue or sheltering guarantee at least *some* people on Frigga will survive the fire - or choosing to try save their home.
It’s the sort of hard decision hard men get hard over. Who lives, who dies? How do we decide? Keldar fen sweat over such things. Instead of taking the hard decision and trusting the cold equations that promise life to the majority at cost to the minority, they take the fight to the fire itself, risking everyone and everything for a chance at life.
Two days of cautious courage and daring engineering bring the resulting fire under control.
Everybody lives.
But like all nuclear accidents, that’s just beginning.
The day after comes. The wreckage still smoulders. Radiation decays. The loss of one power reactor leaves Frigga in a dangerous place. The energy requirements on Frigga are massive - far more than a similar Greenwood rock. This is mostly taken up by environmental systems having to manage the use of so many combustion engines to keep the station mobile, and the sheer size of the place necessitating the use of combustion-engined transport as a stopgap.
The loss of a quarter of their generating capacity can be ill afforded.
Even the idea that the station had been contaminated by the smallest iota of artificial radiation - rather than the all-natural radiation we are subject to every day - threatened to collapse the economy.
More dangerously, the explosion of the reactor threatens to upset the delicate balance of ignorance which has allowed Frigga to begin to prosper.
An exploded reactor demands action. It demands investigation. It’s the perfect excuse for Kayabuki to come and peel apart all the little bureaucratic shortcuts and fabrications keeping Frigga going, while demonstrating exactly how incompetent station management had been.
After all - Fusion reactors do not explode. Unless you’re a complete moron. This is the generally accepted wisdom.
The Station council are left with the vague sense that maybe having everyone die of radiation poisoning would’ve been the least agonising outcome.
At a council meeting a week after the reactor fire was put out - the decision is made to try brush the entire thing under the carpet. At least, to the point where the potential fallout has cooled off or somebody manages to blow something else up even more spectacularly.
A code of omerta settles across Frigga.
The rule is simple. Don’t make Big Sister come here.
Everyone’s home is at risk.
Everyone believes their home is at risk.
—
“The real danger is that we no longer recognise the truth.”
By the time the truth comes out - what there is of it - there’s a full blown crisis going on. Jet has apparently gone mad and is chasing the murderer of her younger brother across the solar system.
The details of the accident are slipped out while Asmodeus Grey gets arrested and the Galactic Republic has to explain why a small settlement with 50 people living in it merited an inadvertent introduction to the Inquisitor Kryptmann school of policing after the Stormtroopers botched a landing and got some weekend warriors killed.
It takes months to unravel the resulting mush of information - winding the truth out like a guinea worm, step by step. It is agonising. It is frustrating. It is tiring. It morphs from an incident, to an accident, to a near complete disaster.
In the end, all we have is the story to content ourselves. And even then, the heroes and villains shift and change depending on who tells it.
The three remaining reactors are now suspect. Lensherr tries to save its project in Bielefeld by proclaiming the operators responsible. Frigga tries to blame her majesty’s government for underfunding their repairs, Her majesty’s government try to blame the mismanagement of the station. Her majesty’s opposition try to blame her majesty’s government…
It’s a polyfuck.
On ray of light emerges from it all. Anika Daini is proposed as Sailor Frigga for piloting a motoroid into a burning reactor core.
Baron Frigga quietly begins a new project to both replace the damaged reactor, provide a way to keep the Moxy project on track, and maybe solve Frigga’s building energy crisis once and for all.
A graphite-moderated light water fission reactor. Three of them. Two would be the largest nuclear reactors ever made, with nuclear steam superheating. The proposal document mentions that there have been no core damage accidents with this design of reactor in thirty years.
It doesn’t mention that the one in 1986 was a doozy.
You may have heard of it.
---
"The guy's got an aluminum shower in his future"
Jet Jaguar first comes to the attention of the Community as some loon with a hardsuit, making videos of herself (Him, at the time) doing ever more dangerous stunts and flights, egged on by a building following of thrillseekers hoping for that one episode where the live feed ends with a still image of the front of a turbofan engine. She breaks into stadium concerts and football matches, watching from the roof, flys formation with airliners and screams under bridges at transonic speeds. The approval of the commenteratii eggs her on. Fans donate to her paypal to encourage her to take on ever more dangerous stunts. Just another fan with main-character syndrome, she chases trains, plays with traffic and finally manages to irritate the most milquetoast and harmless of European states into trying to arrest her.
This results in her escaping to orbit, and coming to the attention of Fenspace at large when she removes her helmet in open vacuum in orbit above Earth - proving she's something for more interesting than yet another fool in a hardsuit.
A race amongst the leading lights of the cyberconfederacy ends when A.C. Peters finds her happily working on Genaros as part of the weather control team, servicing the rain systems. Fifteen years later, we learn that Asmodeus Grey came in second place. The universe may have been a very different place.
Somewhere deep in the core of Jet Jaguar is still the same person she was 15 years before, sending things out into the void, desperate for people to comment. To be grateful to her. To be interested in her. To answer her and prove she exists. And so long as she keeps being fed that reward, she will keep going.
To a career politician - because politics is a career and skillset all of its own, Jet comes across a politician of the parish pump, with eyes only for those who need to give her the aul scratch when election time comes near. She is a Trump. On outsider, unintentionally elevated to a station she is ill-suited for through connections, or accident - and then running roughshod over rules and convention that all career politicians have agreed to abide by.
To the people of Frigga, she is trying. Jet works the system for us. Jet got us the funding for steam locomotives and all our other little pet projects. Things get fixed when brought to her personal attention, bypassing the usual process. Jet makes Frigga work. Jet speaks for Frigga. Jet, for all her foibles, genuinely tries. It makes her even dangerous - going further and further off the reservation to avoid saying 'No' to people.
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“Real life applications of Stanislavski's method.”
At its core, the Wave is a mirror to its rider, and the rider becomes a mirror to the wave. Their hopes. Their dreams. Their fears and nightmares. How they see themselves, and how the galaxy sees them. It’s all of it at once - a psychokinetic miracle that immanentizes the dreams promised to us by a thousand science-fiction author's cautionary tales of doom.
But it's more than that.
It's a contract between reality and ourselves. We agree be a part of the narrative that creates the shape and form of the world we want, to take our required place in the story and perform the roles needed. It means making your life the story. It means, never breaking the spell - never violating the geas that binds it all together and exposing reality beneath.
This is why the wave so rarely works for mundanes. They just want the thing to work, without embodying with the necessary belief that it will happen. They want the cargo, without the cult.
Jet's brother, Mackie, on some level that neither ever confirmed to the world at large, was an AI initially created from her. Jet Jaguar became his sister. Mackie became her brother - with all that was required from both of them to play those roles. This is an arrangement both seemed quite pleased at. It's as if they'd always been brother and sister, and he hadn't been created ex-nihilo. Both are empowered by the pairing, becoming more than either would be alone.
This lasts until Mackie is killed.
Jet breaks the expected narrative. There is no funeral - and she doesn't attend the memorial Mackie's friends eventually put on. There is nothing public that anyone would expect from anyone playing Brother and Sister. Or is there? She seems to go mad from it, charging across the universe being chased by half of Fenspace convinced they were preventing a disaster.
A week later Jet arrives at Odyssey station with the responsible person in tow. The universe learns that Jet has been a troubleshooter all this time. She has been working with AC Peters. And they've arrested Asmodeus Grey.
Afterwards, she never talks about Mackie again - and rarely acknowledges that he ever existed in the first place. The spell has been broken - and things which would've been easy beforehand, suddenly become very hard.
She's stopped playing the role.
But still she needs to keep working.
The Moxy project still needs to be completed. Baron Frigga still has duties to perform.
----
"Under the Table. Serving the Table. Everything is under the Table."
Jet realises she controls the means of production - no matter what Venus might say. She starts selling metals on the side to a number of mines having trouble meeting quota, filling the slush funds, creating a black budget unseen by any outside Frigga's council chamber's. This is used to cover a lot of civil and technical expenditure that can be funded any other way.
This also violates the agreement Her Majesty’s government had made with Greenwood - To get out of their supply contracts early, they had to guarantee Friggan ore wouldn’t appear on the open market.
So long as it's laundered through other mines, nobody will know. Technically, it's not on the open market. It's keeping to the letter, rather than the spirit Most of it, ends up keeping a number of the old United Belt Alliance rocks just out of reach of foreclosure. Some who would've been borg'd by the Greenwood collective are able to stay independent for a few months longer before succumbing to inevitability.
Meanwhile, official procurement processes are bypassed with a ruthlessness that would appall the most corrupt oligarch. Projects are half-finished before the paperwork requesting authorisation for them has even been fully filed. Funding is pushed around from where it’s available and can be authorised, to where’s it’s necessary.
The station council pick the equipment they want and order it up, or salvage from a scrapyard. It’s usually installed before the first tender bids arrive - if they haven’t just been gundecked out of nowhere to match the reality the Government on Venus expects.
Nobody has their face in the trough. Nobody on Frigga gets rich. It’s using the tools of corruption to grease the wheels and get things done.
Imagine the surprise the Sales Director at Mars Metalworking and Mining Machinery Manufacturers got when an automated email arrived to his account advising him a bid he’d never submitted had been rejected by Her Majesty’s Government. Other problems start to occur. Small cracks start to appear.
An order of charged particle sensors delivered to Nekomi Institute of Technology are found to be registering background counts far beyond what would be expected from standard asteroid steel. An investigation points to a high background count coming from the steel itself.
The metal had come from Haephestus. The Ore had supposedly come from Greenwood, who tracked it back to a shipment from a mine named Myrkheimr, where the Offworld Installation Manager was found to had bought Friggan ore under the table to meet a production target and earn theirself their quarterly bonus.
What followed afterwards is not recorded - but at least five other OIM's changed their LinkdIn status to 'Searching for Work' within weeks.
----
"A defendant should never take the Stand"
An old lawyer's adage. But this is not a trial.
Nobody ever accused Jet of being wise or eloquent. But she is also not stupid. This is no Giulianian meltdown. She’s had help from a barrister to prepare her statement. She shows up cleaned up, wearing her decorations from the Boskone War - conspicuously among them 'Serenity's Thanks' from Crystal Osaka. Jet was there when the city fell.
She makes her statement. It is as dry as a Great Justice after-action report which has been stored in a desert for a century. This was the situation. These are the options we knew were available. This is why this course of action was necessary. These are the options we could've used, if we'd known better. She talks about the concept of counting life - of weighing how much life is lost by a certain action, against the risk to life by not taking it.
The easiest option is to evacuate and abandon the asteroid to its fate. To call in the Blue-Blazers, Starfleet or anyone else with the capacity to make such a thing happen. It means abandoning Frigga and all the effort that went in to creating it. It means leaving behind a Crystal Pripyat that will need to be guarded against pillaging. It means the Crystal Millenium would lose another city to accident. The Shadow of Crystal Osaka looms over this option - the city collapsed while being evacuated. There are full water tanks beneath the reactor, which may explode when burning metal drops into them, bringing down the damaged curtain wall.
And some people may not want to leave what has become their home that easily.
The logical option is to rely on Frigga's force of firefighters. They could fight the fires, or be sent to drain the water tanks which threatened an explosion. This would come at the cost of the lives of many of the firefighters, but would save everyone else. One life is risked to determine the fire itself cannot be fought - sending men into the reactor chamber would be a waste of life. Three lives are risked to determine how radioactive the drain pools are. The radiation is extreme - anyone who goes in will not survive the experience. And it may take more than one team to complete the task.
But it will work. The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few. And Frigga will become yet another cold, Campbellian place like so many corporate-owned places in the belt where the cold equations are totted up and the solution applied with machine-like callousness. The phrase Jet uses comes from the Warhammer universe - Life is the Emperor's currency.
But that is not the way of the Crystal Millennium.
Nevertheless it seems like they've reached the limits of their imagination. Nobody wants to be the one to making that damning call - not when they know there's another option just outside their mind's grasp. Inevitably, they'll have to give in to their own failure, but they delay as long as they can.
A third option finally comes from the stations miners. They can dig through from the neighbouring reactor hall, under the burning reactor and drain the pools from beneath. Everyone lives. Cold probability stacks against it - it will kill at least all of those involved if they fail, and likely many more - but the miners insist they can do it in the time available. They insist that they can drill and blast precisely enough not to bring the roof down on top of them, and quickly enough to make it before the ruin of the reactor explodes.
The third option is chosen.
As Jet put it, "They had faith. They wanted to trust to hope. They believed it was possible, so it was. We didn't cross a line to do it. We didn't run away."
But why the coverup?
Why the desperate rush to complete the Moxy project?
These are all questions to be asked at followup sessions, since they clearly reach directly to the heart of Jet's motiviations.
Before Jet can answer these questions herself, she's found unconscious in what's left of her own home - apparently, as a result of a training accident. She nearly takes her secrets to the grave.
She's only found by someone looking for an update on a network outage, after an email went unanswered.
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It's older that some world current events.
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"Nobody believed it was possible"
Up until it happens.
Crystal Osaka has settled 2 kilometres below its predicted collapse altitude. The city is now, apparently stable. The damage to the ventilation system is contained. The city engineers are pumping sewage and water overboard to lighten the city and de-ballast. The rescue operation was in full swing. The last report is that the city is expected to begin rising within the hour. She's fallen further than her builders ever expected her to, but all the little factors of safety built into their calculations have, so far, kept the city safe.
Nobody believed it was possible for a Crystal City to collapse. There is only so far the suspension of disbelief will take you.
The shuttlecraft Volkoff, operating far below its expected collapse altitude, approached the Western dock. Ten meters from the dock, the Volkoff finally implodes. Want went through the Volkoff's crews minds - aside from the shattered remains of their craft - we'll never know. They probably thought themselves as Brave and Derring - even heroic - going so far beyond their own red line, right up until the moment the hull buckled, snapped through and the assembly of biology and technology that had been the Volkoff became physics instead. Likely, they thought the Wave would save them from physics. They were so used to fooling reality.
In the end, reality is always there, waiting.
It takes 4 microseconds for the Volkoff to collapse. It takes a full second for the supersonic implosion shock to race through Osaka, such is the size of the city.
A few in IVA-equpped hardsuits escape by chance. One engineer on the ground is found a few days later. Two thousand people are gone in an instant.
---
"It's easy to blame the Boskone. It's easy to Blame Naoko Sato."
The Government of The Crystal Millennium is not one for taking the easy way out. They need to know what actually happened. Nobody wants another Crystal Osaka. They need to know How the city collapsed. Both the technical side, and the social side. How did the City's defenses fail? How was Naoko Sato able to control so much of the city's governance that she could sit undetected for over a year?
Social. Structural. Human factors. Judge Lenneth Matilda heads the tribunal of inquiry.
It interviews the few survivors from the city's own engineers. Those who were out of the city, those who'd transferred - the sole survivor. They interview survivors who had served on the city council with the previous administration. From the Sammie detachment, who might've been training elsewhere, on leave, or piloted a shuttlecraft. From the cities builders and designers in Bristol. No stone is left unturned.
The Inquisition is exacting in its detail.
The Matilda Tribunal sits for nearly two years. Longer that the city itself stood for.
The Matilda report is released in 2015, explaining the exact How, and Who brought down Osaka. The collapse is mapped out from the moment the first foundation is grown on Luna, to the final impact on the surface of Venus. Lessons are learned.
Changes are made throughout the Crystal Cities to make them more resilient. New bulkheads are fitted. The ventilation systems are reinforced and compartmentalised. Pipes which were formed from crimped polymer, are replaced by welded steel. Pressure shelters are built into the foundations to survive a collapse.
Changes are made to operating rules of the SAM. Crush Depth is now, no-longer just an arbitrary figure that can be nudged through to effect a daring rescue.
And that was thought to be enough.
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"The Dark Kingdom"
Nehallenia had always been the Black Sheep of the Millennium. It went its own way, unless occasion required it to act as a staging ground for Tango Shoes, or a rescue mission. Nobody paid it much, if any attention.
Until Great Justice discovered Naoko Sato had moved her Thionite operation to Nehallenia - with the backing of some of the more Liberal elements of the rock's own leaders who either felt she'd been hard-done by, or felt they'd been hard done by. Or just felt like playing at criminal, without realising *what* they were messing with. Like a teenage girl with a Ouija board - they attracted some unwanted attention.
A bunch of them get themselves killed in the ensuing raid. Naoko Sato again escapes. An infomorph named Quattro Scaglietti is captured and found responsible for some horrific catgirl experiments. She *disappears* into the black soon after. She's living the rest of here life in The Vault for her troubles.
This is all a bit of a slap in the face for Her Majesty's government. Once is bad luck. Twice is starting to point to a pattern....
They come to the conclusion that something is Dreadfully Wrong with how the Bureaucracy of the Crystal Millennium functions - if one person, or one council is able to corrupt the functions of an entire settlement - and do it multiple times?
There would not be a Third.
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"Assume good Faith."
Fenspace prior to 2012 was like the early internet. The possibility of someone being so impolite as to possibly be a bad actor just wasn't considered, was it? We're all up here. We're all fans. We're all the same, and we're so much better.
Which is bloody hilarious because we all collectively knew this wasn't true - there were always those people we talked about, who we warned our friends not to be alone with. The broken stairs - the Vic Mignonga's. Why did we assume they wouldn't come up?
We are much wiser now.
The designers of Crystal Osaka never conceived of the city coming under any sort of attack. They thought a shuttle might run into a gas cell or two by accident. They had no concept of anyone deliberately puncturing the city structure, or having a running gunfight on the main concours.
The initial framing of the constitution of the Crystal Millennium gave its officers a great deal of personal power to get things done. The first Cities are designed and built in *months*. These are projects run by a tight-nit group of people with motivation and drive. Only convention and common purpose keeps power in check.
We couldn't conceive of anyone trying to corrupt these structures for their own benefit. We all assumed each would be be a Cincinnatus, because we each knew we, ourself, would be Cincinnatus.
Conventions and custom alone, are not enough.
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"Never Forget. Never Again"
The Trauma of that day lingers in the Venusian Psyche. Most of those who call Venus their home today have come 'Up' in the years since Osaka fell. But it still looms large in their mind - taught by those who came before. The fear remains.
The 2016 constitutional convention lasts for months. The entire system is rebuilt from the ground up to make sure that This Can Not Happen Again. One engineer cannot make a mistake which will doom a city with a hidden design flaw. One rogue bureaucrat cannot turn the engines of government to their own nefarious ends. One settlement cannot go down a dark path unnoticed.
Checks and Balances are written it at every single level. The tangle and byzantine bureaucracy that is the Crystal Millennium is not a failure state - it is the entire point. It requires everyone at every level to both get approvals from the levels above them, and from those around them. It requires both consensus between stakeholders, and support between agencies. Constitutional convention is simply not rigorous enough.
It is, according to one commentator, basically Weimar-Proof.
No one office can stand on its own. The power one office-holder can retain is limited to the walls of their office. Outside those walls, aid and assistance have to be bargained for. The other offices must be convinced of the merits of the plan. The paperwork must be submitted. Everything must be above board and unimpeachable.
It is a recipe for gridlock. It is a recipe for ballooning cost. It is a recipe for a government that is meticulous and certain, that moves slow but will not break.
No new Crystal City has been built in 12 years. The construction of Crystal Cincinnati has been stalled for a decade, through redesign after redesign, as potential issues are discovered, and fault-trees find new branches that lead to disaster.
But. Crystal Osaka must never happen again. Nehallennia must never happen again. This is the one thing Venus is sure of.
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"Frigga was always and end-around run"
But sometimes, things must be done. Bristol needs heavy metals, and Azubajuban can’t supply a quarter of what they need.
For years, they bought straight from Greenwood. But the cost - and the reliance on another partner, led to Her Majesty’s Government looking to secure a base for its own resources. We all need a little bit of Juche Thought for the times where the supply lines break down, or when someone starts to think they're a monopolist.
This led them to 77 Frigga - a massive rock first settled by a group of people politely described as a witches brew of US Republicans and Private Equity Funds to escape the clutches of Federal Government regulation and oversight (And prosecution for involvement in the Giuliani affair), which promptly went bankrupt when they burned through their seed cash establishing the lifestyle they wanted in space for their good citizens - rather than the lifestyle the under-established rock would support.
It was promptly stripped of anything valuable which could be carted out the door, leaving only a shell, and four power reactors too radioactive to move. Jet Jaguar buys it for pennies on the dollar to try and start a training centre to teach all such rocks how to defend themselves.
The age of Frigga, and the fact that it was an established and continuously occupied settlement, would have exempted Frigga from a lot of the new bureaucracy - it could be grandfathered-in under the old regulations. That it had never been part of the Crystal Millennium, was not thought to be an issue.
The Constitution simply assumed these articles would only ever apply to the existing Crystal Cities — nobody ever assumed it needed to be stated.
And thus, the loophole that led to the Annexation of 77 Frigga came about.
In theory, it'd been kept in some level of maintenance and care. Reactivating the Friggan mines would provide all the ore and metal Bristol could possibly need for decades. The station would become - ideally - a major outpost and centre of influence for the Crystal Millenium in the outer system, and - most importantly - it would be cheap.
They're able to buy themselves cheaply out of their contracts with Greenwood by agreeing to keep Frigga's ore from the free market. Frigga will supply Bristol only.
—
“Something that could’ve been solved with a Polite tea party.”
They ran into the first problem with the Millennium constitution. It hadn't accounted for any existing settlement being annexed - the constitution assumed every new settlement would be new-founded.
An attempt to elect representatives to the Parliament on Venus - and to the small council is met by a slight catch. The constitution forbade existing subjects of the Millennium who moved to Frigga from standing for government - they hadn’t lived there for long enough. It also forbade those who lived on Frigga before annexation from standing to govern their own homes - as they hadn't been subjects of Her Majesty until Frigga joined, and hadn’t been due’s paying Senshi for long enough to stand for office.
A sensible provision against brigading, caused a nasty Catch 22.
After the ongoing delays with the VTP, and some high-profile kickbacks that gave all the impression of a government that has overstayed its welcome - Kayabuki needed a few MP's she could trust in parliament to maintain her majority. And Frigga seemed like the perfect rotten borough to feed them to.
Only Frigga said 'No'.
Something that could've been solved by both parties waiting the necessary time for things to resolve themselves, ended up in a political catfight that had Prime Minister Kayabuki trying to do an end-around run of the Station Council while half the Station Council was out of comm's range and unable to form a quorum, and the people on the station rapidly re-electing a new council in a game of musical chairs.
The end result of this is Jet Jaguar being appointed Baron Frigga - to her utter horror - and a simmering legacy. Frigga had just learned that Kayabuki could not be trusted.
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"A complete political shitfest"
By now, Kayabuki's administration is running on the thinnest of majorities and some major supply bills are coming down the line. The loyal opposition can smell blood in the water. It's already doubtful Kayabuki can herd her cats and keep them in line.
If they're able to portray the Friggan project as 'Yet another failure' of Kayabuki then chances are, the Sakura Holdfast will have a brand new resident for the first time. All it takes is one or two MP’s to cross the floor in the hope they don't get pilloried by the electorate when the government falls.
Meanwhile, Kayabuki needs the project to succeed - and without ballooning in cost from its original promise of abeing brand new industrial base at less than half the cost of settling a virgin rock. Any deviation from this cannot be permitted - it is an existential matter for her government.
On Frigga. Things aren't so simple. Equipment that'd survived having the occasional guest party for Survival Shot starts to break down when put under continuous load. Systems which'd ticked over at barely above idle speed burned out in weeks when asked to run at full load for the first time in a decade. It's quickly becoming clear it will take a lot more money to put things right - probably more than starting fresh.
To no-ones surprise, only the most miserly dribble of funding is offered. For Kayabuki to remain in power - the government of Frigga must be shown to be incompetent, to be the ones whose gross mismanagement of the affair has resulted in them having to come cap in hand for more.
That this might encourage the city residents to elect a new leadership more in-line with Kayabuki's party is lost on the Friggans. Trapped in a political Morton's fork - they take a Third Option - Foreign Direct Investment, courtesy of the Roughriders. They begin the Moxy project - to produce Blackbird engine fuel using the reactors on the station.
All helpfully solves Kayabuki's issues just well enough that she knows not to ask how the budget got balanced. The loyal opposition now have nothing to crow about because Frigga is apparently working. Ore starts to flow to Bristol.
Things on Frigga are now moving fast. Something has to break.
---
"Enter the Reactor"
Lensherr Electromotive GmBH are a german manufacturer of coal and oil-fired power plant equipment. Sensing the environmental writing on the wall, they began to look for diversification options - potentially fuelled by the wave itself. In 2011, they find something. Essentially, an upscaled X-7, the Lensherr STR 3200 stellarator is the first successful commercial application of Deuterium-Tritium fusion. It allows a theoretically safe nuclear power plant to be bolted to a turbine and generator from a thermal power plant no different than the ones Lensherr had been building for over a century.
The reactor is a star-in-a-bottle. But unlike every other reactor built in Fenspace - this sucker's neutronic. Fusing Deuterium and Tritium results in a spray of high energy neutrons which not only carry most of the energy liberated by the reactor with them - they also make anything they touch hideously radioactive.
The graphite refractory lining the reactor both shields the reactor structure, and acts as a neutron brake. All the energy contained within those speeding neutrons is dumped into the graphite as heat. And it's this heat which is used to generate steam and drive a turbine. It’s the same way every single power plant has been built on earth for decades.
Cells containing molten lithium are embedded in the refractory. Bombarding lithium with fast neutrons causes it to fission and breed Tritium, which can be siphoned off and used as fuel.
A pilot planet in Bielefeld seems to be successful. Plans for more are canceled by protestors - and by cheap Russian gas making investment in new technology suddenly a very bad idea. The only market for the reactors, are the mundane elements of Fenspace who like things that work like they do at home.
Fusion power promises cheap, safe, plentiful energy. And - more importantly - Fusion reactors cannot run away and explode.
In practice - issues with the refractory were found - many due to physics factors the boilermakers of Lensherr were never aware of. Graphite could swell under neutron bombardment, causing cracks to form. Thermal shock, could cause further spallation and cracking. Parts of the liner could fall off - potentially contaminating the plasma, and exposing the reactor structure to direct neutron bombardment.
One engineer asks what would happen if the refractory liner above the Lithium breeder cells were to collapse, and expose all that lithium to a sudden spray of ultra-fast neutrons.
His report notes the consequences might be dramatic.
With the ongoing protests against the Bielefeld plant - this report is quietly buried. This is an existential matter for the company.
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"Amateur Hour at the Nuclear Power Plant"
On Frigga, we have a bright spark who looks at the Lithium blankets and wonders what would happen if some Uranium is stuck in there. Depleted Uranium is added to Reactor 4 as a test - to see what might happen. It's not expected to undergo fission - but to breed Plutonium to be used as engine fuel. This is where the Moxy project truly begins.
All goes well for the first few months. The first samples of Plutonium prove the Moxy project will be a success.
Meanwhile, the Station’s engineers finally begin to catch up with their repairs and maintenance. They decide to conduct a safety test on the reactor, requested by the manufacturer.
The first three reactors pass.
In the middle of the fourth test, the graphite liner above one of the cells containing Uranium collapses. Uranium is exposed to a spray of fast Neutrons more intense than anything outside the core of a nuclear weapon.
It explodes like the tertiary stage of a hydrogen bomb, blowing the reactor and its containment shell apart. The blast is true nuclear explosion - estimated at over thirty tons of TNT. The curtain wall separating the turbine hall from the main landing bay is kept from collapsing by a fortuitously placed crane. It still shifts by nearly thirty centimetres and throws hundreds of tons of crane and the spacecraft it was carrying off its rails.
Radioactive smoke billows through, pegging meters at either 1000 microrentgen per second, or 65535 nanosieverts per hour.
There is no handwaving their way out of it. The reactor fire is all too real. The radiation is real.
They have moved fast. And now things have broken.
Rather than issue a distress call and try to evacuate, or try to shelter in place and hope to ride it out, they take the risk and fight Godzilla. It's a big gamble - either a rescue or sheltering guarantee at least *some* people on Frigga will survive the fire - or choosing to try save their home.
It’s the sort of hard decision hard men get hard over. Who lives, who dies? How do we decide? Keldar fen sweat over such things. Instead of taking the hard decision and trusting the cold equations that promise life to the majority at cost to the minority, they take the fight to the fire itself, risking everyone and everything for a chance at life.
Two days of cautious courage and daring engineering bring the resulting fire under control.
Everybody lives.
But like all nuclear accidents, that’s just beginning.
The day after comes. The wreckage still smoulders. Radiation decays. The loss of one power reactor leaves Frigga in a dangerous place. The energy requirements on Frigga are massive - far more than a similar Greenwood rock. This is mostly taken up by environmental systems having to manage the use of so many combustion engines to keep the station mobile, and the sheer size of the place necessitating the use of combustion-engined transport as a stopgap.
The loss of a quarter of their generating capacity can be ill afforded.
Even the idea that the station had been contaminated by the smallest iota of artificial radiation - rather than the all-natural radiation we are subject to every day - threatened to collapse the economy.
More dangerously, the explosion of the reactor threatens to upset the delicate balance of ignorance which has allowed Frigga to begin to prosper.
An exploded reactor demands action. It demands investigation. It’s the perfect excuse for Kayabuki to come and peel apart all the little bureaucratic shortcuts and fabrications keeping Frigga going, while demonstrating exactly how incompetent station management had been.
After all - Fusion reactors do not explode. Unless you’re a complete moron. This is the generally accepted wisdom.
The Station council are left with the vague sense that maybe having everyone die of radiation poisoning would’ve been the least agonising outcome.
At a council meeting a week after the reactor fire was put out - the decision is made to try brush the entire thing under the carpet. At least, to the point where the potential fallout has cooled off or somebody manages to blow something else up even more spectacularly.
A code of omerta settles across Frigga.
The rule is simple. Don’t make Big Sister come here.
Everyone’s home is at risk.
Everyone believes their home is at risk.
—
“The real danger is that we no longer recognise the truth.”
By the time the truth comes out - what there is of it - there’s a full blown crisis going on. Jet has apparently gone mad and is chasing the murderer of her younger brother across the solar system.
The details of the accident are slipped out while Asmodeus Grey gets arrested and the Galactic Republic has to explain why a small settlement with 50 people living in it merited an inadvertent introduction to the Inquisitor Kryptmann school of policing after the Stormtroopers botched a landing and got some weekend warriors killed.
It takes months to unravel the resulting mush of information - winding the truth out like a guinea worm, step by step. It is agonising. It is frustrating. It is tiring. It morphs from an incident, to an accident, to a near complete disaster.
In the end, all we have is the story to content ourselves. And even then, the heroes and villains shift and change depending on who tells it.
The three remaining reactors are now suspect. Lensherr tries to save its project in Bielefeld by proclaiming the operators responsible. Frigga tries to blame her majesty’s government for underfunding their repairs, Her majesty’s government try to blame the mismanagement of the station. Her majesty’s opposition try to blame her majesty’s government…
It’s a polyfuck.
On ray of light emerges from it all. Anika Daini is proposed as Sailor Frigga for piloting a motoroid into a burning reactor core.
Baron Frigga quietly begins a new project to both replace the damaged reactor, provide a way to keep the Moxy project on track, and maybe solve Frigga’s building energy crisis once and for all.
A graphite-moderated light water fission reactor. Three of them. Two would be the largest nuclear reactors ever made, with nuclear steam superheating. The proposal document mentions that there have been no core damage accidents with this design of reactor in thirty years.
It doesn’t mention that the one in 1986 was a doozy.
You may have heard of it.
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"The guy's got an aluminum shower in his future"
Jet Jaguar first comes to the attention of the Community as some loon with a hardsuit, making videos of herself (Him, at the time) doing ever more dangerous stunts and flights, egged on by a building following of thrillseekers hoping for that one episode where the live feed ends with a still image of the front of a turbofan engine. She breaks into stadium concerts and football matches, watching from the roof, flys formation with airliners and screams under bridges at transonic speeds. The approval of the commenteratii eggs her on. Fans donate to her paypal to encourage her to take on ever more dangerous stunts. Just another fan with main-character syndrome, she chases trains, plays with traffic and finally manages to irritate the most milquetoast and harmless of European states into trying to arrest her.
This results in her escaping to orbit, and coming to the attention of Fenspace at large when she removes her helmet in open vacuum in orbit above Earth - proving she's something for more interesting than yet another fool in a hardsuit.
A race amongst the leading lights of the cyberconfederacy ends when A.C. Peters finds her happily working on Genaros as part of the weather control team, servicing the rain systems. Fifteen years later, we learn that Asmodeus Grey came in second place. The universe may have been a very different place.
Somewhere deep in the core of Jet Jaguar is still the same person she was 15 years before, sending things out into the void, desperate for people to comment. To be grateful to her. To be interested in her. To answer her and prove she exists. And so long as she keeps being fed that reward, she will keep going.
To a career politician - because politics is a career and skillset all of its own, Jet comes across a politician of the parish pump, with eyes only for those who need to give her the aul scratch when election time comes near. She is a Trump. On outsider, unintentionally elevated to a station she is ill-suited for through connections, or accident - and then running roughshod over rules and convention that all career politicians have agreed to abide by.
To the people of Frigga, she is trying. Jet works the system for us. Jet got us the funding for steam locomotives and all our other little pet projects. Things get fixed when brought to her personal attention, bypassing the usual process. Jet makes Frigga work. Jet speaks for Frigga. Jet, for all her foibles, genuinely tries. It makes her even dangerous - going further and further off the reservation to avoid saying 'No' to people.
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“Real life applications of Stanislavski's method.”
At its core, the Wave is a mirror to its rider, and the rider becomes a mirror to the wave. Their hopes. Their dreams. Their fears and nightmares. How they see themselves, and how the galaxy sees them. It’s all of it at once - a psychokinetic miracle that immanentizes the dreams promised to us by a thousand science-fiction author's cautionary tales of doom.
But it's more than that.
It's a contract between reality and ourselves. We agree be a part of the narrative that creates the shape and form of the world we want, to take our required place in the story and perform the roles needed. It means making your life the story. It means, never breaking the spell - never violating the geas that binds it all together and exposing reality beneath.
This is why the wave so rarely works for mundanes. They just want the thing to work, without embodying with the necessary belief that it will happen. They want the cargo, without the cult.
Jet's brother, Mackie, on some level that neither ever confirmed to the world at large, was an AI initially created from her. Jet Jaguar became his sister. Mackie became her brother - with all that was required from both of them to play those roles. This is an arrangement both seemed quite pleased at. It's as if they'd always been brother and sister, and he hadn't been created ex-nihilo. Both are empowered by the pairing, becoming more than either would be alone.
This lasts until Mackie is killed.
Jet breaks the expected narrative. There is no funeral - and she doesn't attend the memorial Mackie's friends eventually put on. There is nothing public that anyone would expect from anyone playing Brother and Sister. Or is there? She seems to go mad from it, charging across the universe being chased by half of Fenspace convinced they were preventing a disaster.
A week later Jet arrives at Odyssey station with the responsible person in tow. The universe learns that Jet has been a troubleshooter all this time. She has been working with AC Peters. And they've arrested Asmodeus Grey.
Afterwards, she never talks about Mackie again - and rarely acknowledges that he ever existed in the first place. The spell has been broken - and things which would've been easy beforehand, suddenly become very hard.
She's stopped playing the role.
But still she needs to keep working.
The Moxy project still needs to be completed. Baron Frigga still has duties to perform.
----
"Under the Table. Serving the Table. Everything is under the Table."
Jet realises she controls the means of production - no matter what Venus might say. She starts selling metals on the side to a number of mines having trouble meeting quota, filling the slush funds, creating a black budget unseen by any outside Frigga's council chamber's. This is used to cover a lot of civil and technical expenditure that can be funded any other way.
This also violates the agreement Her Majesty’s government had made with Greenwood - To get out of their supply contracts early, they had to guarantee Friggan ore wouldn’t appear on the open market.
So long as it's laundered through other mines, nobody will know. Technically, it's not on the open market. It's keeping to the letter, rather than the spirit Most of it, ends up keeping a number of the old United Belt Alliance rocks just out of reach of foreclosure. Some who would've been borg'd by the Greenwood collective are able to stay independent for a few months longer before succumbing to inevitability.
Meanwhile, official procurement processes are bypassed with a ruthlessness that would appall the most corrupt oligarch. Projects are half-finished before the paperwork requesting authorisation for them has even been fully filed. Funding is pushed around from where it’s available and can be authorised, to where’s it’s necessary.
The station council pick the equipment they want and order it up, or salvage from a scrapyard. It’s usually installed before the first tender bids arrive - if they haven’t just been gundecked out of nowhere to match the reality the Government on Venus expects.
Nobody has their face in the trough. Nobody on Frigga gets rich. It’s using the tools of corruption to grease the wheels and get things done.
Imagine the surprise the Sales Director at Mars Metalworking and Mining Machinery Manufacturers got when an automated email arrived to his account advising him a bid he’d never submitted had been rejected by Her Majesty’s Government. Other problems start to occur. Small cracks start to appear.
An order of charged particle sensors delivered to Nekomi Institute of Technology are found to be registering background counts far beyond what would be expected from standard asteroid steel. An investigation points to a high background count coming from the steel itself.
The metal had come from Haephestus. The Ore had supposedly come from Greenwood, who tracked it back to a shipment from a mine named Myrkheimr, where the Offworld Installation Manager was found to had bought Friggan ore under the table to meet a production target and earn theirself their quarterly bonus.
What followed afterwards is not recorded - but at least five other OIM's changed their LinkdIn status to 'Searching for Work' within weeks.
----
"A defendant should never take the Stand"
An old lawyer's adage. But this is not a trial.
Nobody ever accused Jet of being wise or eloquent. But she is also not stupid. This is no Giulianian meltdown. She’s had help from a barrister to prepare her statement. She shows up cleaned up, wearing her decorations from the Boskone War - conspicuously among them 'Serenity's Thanks' from Crystal Osaka. Jet was there when the city fell.
She makes her statement. It is as dry as a Great Justice after-action report which has been stored in a desert for a century. This was the situation. These are the options we knew were available. This is why this course of action was necessary. These are the options we could've used, if we'd known better. She talks about the concept of counting life - of weighing how much life is lost by a certain action, against the risk to life by not taking it.
The easiest option is to evacuate and abandon the asteroid to its fate. To call in the Blue-Blazers, Starfleet or anyone else with the capacity to make such a thing happen. It means abandoning Frigga and all the effort that went in to creating it. It means leaving behind a Crystal Pripyat that will need to be guarded against pillaging. It means the Crystal Millenium would lose another city to accident. The Shadow of Crystal Osaka looms over this option - the city collapsed while being evacuated. There are full water tanks beneath the reactor, which may explode when burning metal drops into them, bringing down the damaged curtain wall.
And some people may not want to leave what has become their home that easily.
The logical option is to rely on Frigga's force of firefighters. They could fight the fires, or be sent to drain the water tanks which threatened an explosion. This would come at the cost of the lives of many of the firefighters, but would save everyone else. One life is risked to determine the fire itself cannot be fought - sending men into the reactor chamber would be a waste of life. Three lives are risked to determine how radioactive the drain pools are. The radiation is extreme - anyone who goes in will not survive the experience. And it may take more than one team to complete the task.
But it will work. The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few. And Frigga will become yet another cold, Campbellian place like so many corporate-owned places in the belt where the cold equations are totted up and the solution applied with machine-like callousness. The phrase Jet uses comes from the Warhammer universe - Life is the Emperor's currency.
But that is not the way of the Crystal Millennium.
Nevertheless it seems like they've reached the limits of their imagination. Nobody wants to be the one to making that damning call - not when they know there's another option just outside their mind's grasp. Inevitably, they'll have to give in to their own failure, but they delay as long as they can.
A third option finally comes from the stations miners. They can dig through from the neighbouring reactor hall, under the burning reactor and drain the pools from beneath. Everyone lives. Cold probability stacks against it - it will kill at least all of those involved if they fail, and likely many more - but the miners insist they can do it in the time available. They insist that they can drill and blast precisely enough not to bring the roof down on top of them, and quickly enough to make it before the ruin of the reactor explodes.
The third option is chosen.
As Jet put it, "They had faith. They wanted to trust to hope. They believed it was possible, so it was. We didn't cross a line to do it. We didn't run away."
But why the coverup?
Why the desperate rush to complete the Moxy project?
These are all questions to be asked at followup sessions, since they clearly reach directly to the heart of Jet's motiviations.
Before Jet can answer these questions herself, she's found unconscious in what's left of her own home - apparently, as a result of a training accident. She nearly takes her secrets to the grave.
She's only found by someone looking for an update on a network outage, after an email went unanswered.
----------------
Oh sweet meteor of death
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.