In 2182, the Terran Federation consisted of six Continental Directorates, although in that election year twenty-four member states of them had sponsored a proposal to reorganize, seeking to leave their parent directorates and unite to form a seventh. Every Continental government opposed the resolution, but the Federation’s constitution, adopted at the end of the Unification War a century ago, gave power over such reorganization proposals to a popular vote.
None of the twenty-four states behind the reorganization proposal could be found on any map of their respective continents. They were the twenty-four offworld states, consisting of Copernicus on the surface of the Moon, along with the twenty-three O’Neill Colonies in various orbits around the Earth-Moon system.
Star City, the 18th completed O’Neill Colony, in 2150 shortly after the end of construction.
Named for a twentieth-century scientist who first speculated about offworld cities of a similar design, the O’Neill Colonies were constructed to consolidate the burgeoning offworld population, providing advantages both technological and political. By the dawn of the twenty-second century, the majority of Earth’s industries had relocated offworld, both in order to spare the planet’s ecosystems from the harmful effects of pollution and also to take advantage of the engineering benefits of operating in a freefall environment. Consolidating the offworld population into the larger O’Neill Colonies provided greater stability, safety and economies of scale both to the industries, and to the ecological balance of humans, plants and animals that made up offworld lifesystems.
The Colonies themselves served as capitol cities for state governments which held jurisdiction over 486 smaller platforms that still retained permanent populations, ranging from tiny outposts with only a few rotating crewmen up to industry towns of a few thousand, including families.
The Continental Directorates had paid for the massive, fifty-year construction project that began immediately after the war, and as they saw it they were entitled to bring the productivity of the colonies back to their own economies. Debate over the reorganization proposal was heated throughout the year, but even as election day approached not even the most ardent supporter of independence from the Continental Directorates wanted, or even imagined, independence from the Terran Federation itself.
In 2182, the total offworld population was roughly forty-six million. That of the Earth itself, over ten billion.
For the past twenty years or so— the onset was gradual enough for the exact time to be debated— the Sun had shown chaotic fluctuations in its brightness. Despite constant study, astrophysicists still had no hypothesis to explain the phenomenon or predict how long it might last. Essentially trivial on an astronomical scale, the fluctuations were enough to wreak havoc on Earth’s sensitive ecosystems. Famines had gripped the planet, growing more severe over the last decade, and had led to a disastrous collapse of the Terran economy.
The Colonies, able to adjust their solar energy collection and with enclosed, artificial ecosystems, were largely unaffected, and over that same period of time their industrial economies had thrived while those of the planet below collapsed.
An undercurrent of resentment among impoverished Earthbound populations toward the wealthy Colonies, hanging in the sky overhead, fueled the political controversy over the proposed reorganization as the election year proceeded. Opponents painted the Colonies as greedily trying to hoard their wealth, keeping it away from the suffering populations on Earth. Supporters argued that removing the artificial division of the offworld economy across six different continental directorates would produce economic growth for the benefit of all. Or— with more subtlety— suggested that a vote to “kick ’em out of our continent” would actually punish the Colonies. The measure was controversial among the offworld population as well, where many people still felt strong ties to their continental heritage.
A fringe political party, “Born to the Earth,” had gained some political traction in that year by blaming the Colonies, rather than the Sun’s irregularity, for Earth’s ecological disaster. It was due to shipping vital air and water off-planet to support the Colonies, their party platform claimed. Without those shipments Earth’s natural ecosystems would have endured the Sun’s natural variation without harm. Scientists pointed out the claim was nonsensical, but Born to the Earth could broadcast images of spacecraft lifting off with massive consumable shipments and give desperate people a scapegoat.
In 2182 Colony ecosystems were almost self-sustaining, but not quite. They still depended on regular consumable shipments from Earth to survive.
In 2182, no permanent human settlement yet existed outside the Earth-Moon system, although manned expeditions had followed behind waves of unmanned probes to explore the Solar System at large, and in the Colonies there were plans to explore mining opportunities on Earth-grazer asteroids.
By October of that year, Born to the Earth’s candidate for president, Alexander Monroe, was polling around twenty percent— the highest his formerly fringe party had ever achieved. Enough to be a factor on election day, if his supporters drew more from one major party than the others, but he had no chance of being elected.
In the Colonies, Congressman Charles Safreth was running for governor of Star City, then a state under the North American continent, and he had already announced his intention to run for Continental President if the reorganization passed and the Offworld “continent” came into existence. He was caught in a tight race with his rival, incumbent governor Charles Taylor, who opposed the reorganization and had run a campaign invoking North American history and comparing the reorganization movement to the secession that led to the US Civil War.
In October 2182, Admiral Richard Gali commanded the Terran Orbital Navy, charged with interdicting smuggling between Earth and the offworld settlements. His second-in-command was Warren Armstrong. Within a few years they would be opponents, commanding opposite sides in what might be the last war the human race would ever fight.
In October 2182, Eric Ivanov was a technician with Star City’s power systems. He graduated Star City University in the class of ’75 with an electrical engineering degree and academic credentials good enough to propel him to a position with R&D at any corporation in the offworld industries, but he had not managed to achieve the success that his university years seemed to foreshadow. For the last several years he’d been content with a mid-level technical job in the Colony power systems, more interested in pursuing his hobbies than his career. No one who knew him would have predicted where the coming years would take him.
And in October 2182, Linda Ryder was a twenty-year-old junior at Star City University, a physics major already looking ahead and trying to decide whether grad school would interest her, who in twenty years would be the most famous scientist the Offworld Colonies— and perhaps all of human history— ever produced.
Within twenty years, the entire shape of the Earth-Moon system would change, both its natural conditions and its political ones. The greatest upheaval in human history would take place over those two decades, and on the morning of October 24, 2182, no one had any idea that it was about to begin.
Astronomers call what happened that day “The Hiccup,” showing a bit of dark humor in applying so lighthearted a name to something that foreshadowed so much.
Historians call it “The Warning,” the signal that the world was about to change forever.
TO BE CONTINUED
