Mercy Please is 104, and today she receives news of a great tragedy.
It’s an ordinary day for her. Aboard her craft, drifting along in the Main Belt, hard at work searching for resources to sell to a hungry Earth.
The report arrives at full override, screaming past all polite wait&see and filtersets.
The United Council For Integrated Absolutism has nuked New Chicago. The Free Symbolists refusal to bow to regulated data procedure has led to dire action. The news is reported as tragic but necessary by the UCIA biased medianets.
Her family, and every childhood friend left on Terra. Dead. Burned away in an instant for refusing to comply with what they saw as slavery. Refusing to step backwards into an age of controlled information.
The rage that Mercy feels is indescribable. For long moments she ponders the power at her disposal. The sleek but vital fusion engines that power her craft. The detailed maps of already near proper orbit NEOs. She considers what would be the work of a few spare months: nudging those waiting hammers into proper position. She imagines the havens of the UCIA — New Washington, Denver, San Francisco and Boston — destroyed by screaming mass from above.
But she shakes that off, and weeps instead. Such rage induced action would avenge no one, would bring no one back. All it would do, in the end, is place the blood of innocents on her own hands.
Instead, she feels a long put off decision being made.
For the past twenty years Mercy has been separated from the Terran symbolflow by sheer distance and the limitations of light speed. She has become a part of a different grouping. They call themselves the Transreach — the integrated human presence between Mars and Jupiter. They are the new pioneers, the prospectors of the great solar Reach. They have traded the simple and safe lives of Near Earth connection for the sparse glory of tiny ships with massive engines. They pan the dark troves of the Reach not for riches but for adventure.
And, among them, is a sizable subculture dedicated to moving even further. To crossing the greatest Reach of all: the gap between stars.
"We’ve seceded, sure." her friend and occasional lover Quire Denis says often. "But it reminds me of kids in a tent in the back yard, pretending that they’re camping. We have a minor lag in the symbol flow, but — as annoying as that is — it’s merely inconvenience. If Terra wants us, it knows where to find us."
Not for long, Mercy thinks. Not any more. She has a great deal of influence among the Transreach.
An hour and a half later she is in connection with over two hundred of her closest compatriots. Her sudden swing towards the Starbound is a shock to many, until they see the vids of devastated New Chicago and realize that everything has changed. That the second Com revolution has begun and the very survival of the Symbolflow might be dependant on their making themselves scarce.
Several important things are agreed to in this initial meeting. A physical conference is called for, and Ceres is chosen as the rendezvous point. A total and complete boycott of Earth is instigated amongst the connected Transreachers. An information embargo is also agreed upon. A mutual defense pact is sworn to. No Transreacher will attack the motherworld, but any ship or fleet sent against the Reach will be destroyed with no lack of prejudice. The Terrans are likely to underestimate the skill and raw power of the Transreach, seeing themselves as the peak of civilization and their far flung cousins as provincial miners and common folk. They had no clue that the Transreachers jolly community had completely overturned the art and science of the fusion engine from sheer necessity. The slowest and simplest Reach boat could out maneuver and outgun the best Terran military vessel by an order of magnitude.
After connection is broken and new courses plotted, Mercy spends the rest of this awful wakeperiod in solitary mourning for her dead friends and family. It seems the entire planet has died in her heart.
We are here, she reflect, and they are there. The dead. The living. The great trunk of connection and the heart of the Symbolflow. How shameful that we must abandon that connection in order to safeguard it for future generations.
Yes. How shameful, and the tears do not stop for quite a while.
But they do eventually, and a smile replaces them. A smile and the first stirrings of a universal excitement, a deep primitive need for the new and the distant.
How shameful, yes.
But oh, how exciting as well!
NEXT: Integrating The Obvious (Human Action Goes Digital)
