Hi folks, K so I'm not sure if this is the right sort of place to do an extended story for my own character, with a general aim of turning it into a broader story later? I'm just doing background atm, keeping to existing in-game lore as far as I can as it's to do with Eranin, and might be up for opening it out a bit once I've got that done.
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An Eranin farm boy's tale
Frederick Engels shot my Eagle, and that’s not the strangest thing that’s happened to me recently.
I only recently got my “commander” status - apparently it’s what you can pay rather than whether you can fly that’ll get you the badge of entry - and bust out of Federation space when the fighting broke out around “communist” Eranin.
Communist, what a joke.
The tiny population and massive agricultural output of Azaban means that for sure, you don’t starve around there, but most of the really interesting luxuries are scooped up by a bloc of unaccountable bureaucrats who jealously guard their gatekeeper status on the trade hubs, particularly Azaban City. And with the Federation’s vultures always sniffing around, they have plenty of justifications to put out on the net to explain why they have to stick their own noses in all the time.
It’s always been a bit dodgy on Azaban, a bit corrupt, but things have gotten pretty hairy in recent years, especially once the federalists started causing trouble and sparked a load of paranoid scaremongering about fifth columnist Whites. Anyone could and did end up under suspicion - including my family and I.
As a child I was mostly unaware of any problems, and the way the government's cack-handed efforts helped open Eranin up to Federation interference. I grew up in Kruschev Town, on the west coast of Marx - that’s Marx the island, rather than Marx the man, whose remains are as far as I know still mouldering somewhere in labyrinthine crypts miles below London’s glittering Highgate skyscraper estate. Kruschev’s distance from everywhere else meant that I was pretty insulated from what was going on in New Fresno (which Galnet insists on calling a “provincial city” even though I’d be surprised if it had a population in six figures), and led a fairly idyllic life.
Far from the beaks of the bureau, we probably did live close to a truly communist lifestyle. Certainly my parents were influential in making sure that was the case. They never said it outright, as even before the conflict it was looked down on by the regime, but they and most of the other Kruschevites were basically anarchists, meaning they never really believed the state’s protestations that it would “wither away” after a suitable period in power and did their best to create their new world within the shell of the old.
In the end that was what got them arrested. And it was my fault.
It’s hard, talking to people from urbanised planets, to explain how small a population of 450,000 actually is. With such a tiny number - even fewer on the planet itself - it’s a community rather than a nation, albeit one with a small set of unpleasant overlords and some enormous physical distances between settlements.
Kruschev has - or rather had, since the refugees started flowing it’s difficult to keep track - a population of maybe 8,000, most of whom worked overseeing the endless, mostly automated coffea fields which surrounded the town. Every morning the town secretary, at the time a gregarious silver-haired sot nicknamed Old Soak, would tune in on the announcements wire like a 20th century DJ, cracking jokes as he passed on the vital news of the day. In the Leninist hierarchy he was basically like a commissar with wide-ranging and theoretically quite scary powers, but the townspeople had long ago defanged him and power really lay in a directly-democratic system administered through the sector officers, who we quietly elected on recallable mandates.
On this particular week my dad Stacey was one of those officers, at least for the hydro teams, and at the daily conference was told he’d need to organise a refurb for one of the massive pumps which control flow to the western fields. This is more complicated than it might sound. To get any equipment, luxuries and the like we had to either order it in or take the long hauler ride out to vast warehouse parks on the edge of Fort Bradley and talk to a government logistics suit. If we wanted it quick, we might even need to grease a palm or two, though we rarely had too many problems raising the necessary.
This time it couldn’t wait for a delivery, and would be a two man job. Dad was partial to bringing me along on such jaunts on the grounds I should keep my horizons broad, so I was co-opted for the trip. I never minded, dad was good fun to hang out with. He was a wiry man with a superb line in woodworking and a reasonable reputation as a scattergun lyricist, which may surprise people used to the so-called “work ethic” of Federal capitalism who seem insistent that only working a couple of hours a day on pumps should lead to laziness. In my experience the opposite is true, free time is there to be filled and people usually do. More interestingly for me however, he was also a reader of restricted tomes, a rarity on a planet where a self-serving definition of “communism” is constantly blared out by the bureaucracy (much to my amusement, I recently found out that the Federation does the same thing from a different perspective).
On the day-long trip out he’d often recount and analyse the latest books he’d read, maybe an adventure story such as Black Wing by The Durruti Collective, or on this occasion the classic 21st-century anarcho-syndicalist book Fighting For Ourselves.
“The government’s not as strong as it thinks,” he boomed cheerily, leaning back as we cruised over countless miles of untouched landscape. “They may have the orbital, but it’d only take a united workforce to shut them out and push us into full communism, rather than this pretense they have on at the moment. They need us more than we need them.”
We landed late in the morning, having slept in the hauler’s stuffy overnight pods while the autopilot got us the rest of the way to Fort Bradley. I’ve seen the giant conurbations of LHS 331 since and now know it to be little more than a big town, but at the time I was awestruck by it, stretching away and shining in the sunlight, a single organism made up of hundreds of thousands of my kind.
As dad trundled off to get his parts ordered out of the warehousing complex, I got a few hours to myself in the biggest city on the planet, which is always a grand thing for a young adult from a small community. And one of the things about modern life on a sparsely-populated planet is that you really do end up knowing almost everybody who’s your own age. Being constantly connected through the net, everyone runs into everyone else either through games or interests or education. So with that in mind, I hunted through my friends list and saw a half-dozen people I knew who were hanging around just a little way off in Rosa Parks, one of the beautifully-maintained green spaces that proliferate in Fort Bradley.
Hailing a cab, I set off to say hello.
...
=============
An Eranin farm boy's tale
Frederick Engels shot my Eagle, and that’s not the strangest thing that’s happened to me recently.
I only recently got my “commander” status - apparently it’s what you can pay rather than whether you can fly that’ll get you the badge of entry - and bust out of Federation space when the fighting broke out around “communist” Eranin.
Communist, what a joke.
The tiny population and massive agricultural output of Azaban means that for sure, you don’t starve around there, but most of the really interesting luxuries are scooped up by a bloc of unaccountable bureaucrats who jealously guard their gatekeeper status on the trade hubs, particularly Azaban City. And with the Federation’s vultures always sniffing around, they have plenty of justifications to put out on the net to explain why they have to stick their own noses in all the time.
It’s always been a bit dodgy on Azaban, a bit corrupt, but things have gotten pretty hairy in recent years, especially once the federalists started causing trouble and sparked a load of paranoid scaremongering about fifth columnist Whites. Anyone could and did end up under suspicion - including my family and I.
As a child I was mostly unaware of any problems, and the way the government's cack-handed efforts helped open Eranin up to Federation interference. I grew up in Kruschev Town, on the west coast of Marx - that’s Marx the island, rather than Marx the man, whose remains are as far as I know still mouldering somewhere in labyrinthine crypts miles below London’s glittering Highgate skyscraper estate. Kruschev’s distance from everywhere else meant that I was pretty insulated from what was going on in New Fresno (which Galnet insists on calling a “provincial city” even though I’d be surprised if it had a population in six figures), and led a fairly idyllic life.
Far from the beaks of the bureau, we probably did live close to a truly communist lifestyle. Certainly my parents were influential in making sure that was the case. They never said it outright, as even before the conflict it was looked down on by the regime, but they and most of the other Kruschevites were basically anarchists, meaning they never really believed the state’s protestations that it would “wither away” after a suitable period in power and did their best to create their new world within the shell of the old.
In the end that was what got them arrested. And it was my fault.
It’s hard, talking to people from urbanised planets, to explain how small a population of 450,000 actually is. With such a tiny number - even fewer on the planet itself - it’s a community rather than a nation, albeit one with a small set of unpleasant overlords and some enormous physical distances between settlements.
Kruschev has - or rather had, since the refugees started flowing it’s difficult to keep track - a population of maybe 8,000, most of whom worked overseeing the endless, mostly automated coffea fields which surrounded the town. Every morning the town secretary, at the time a gregarious silver-haired sot nicknamed Old Soak, would tune in on the announcements wire like a 20th century DJ, cracking jokes as he passed on the vital news of the day. In the Leninist hierarchy he was basically like a commissar with wide-ranging and theoretically quite scary powers, but the townspeople had long ago defanged him and power really lay in a directly-democratic system administered through the sector officers, who we quietly elected on recallable mandates.
On this particular week my dad Stacey was one of those officers, at least for the hydro teams, and at the daily conference was told he’d need to organise a refurb for one of the massive pumps which control flow to the western fields. This is more complicated than it might sound. To get any equipment, luxuries and the like we had to either order it in or take the long hauler ride out to vast warehouse parks on the edge of Fort Bradley and talk to a government logistics suit. If we wanted it quick, we might even need to grease a palm or two, though we rarely had too many problems raising the necessary.
This time it couldn’t wait for a delivery, and would be a two man job. Dad was partial to bringing me along on such jaunts on the grounds I should keep my horizons broad, so I was co-opted for the trip. I never minded, dad was good fun to hang out with. He was a wiry man with a superb line in woodworking and a reasonable reputation as a scattergun lyricist, which may surprise people used to the so-called “work ethic” of Federal capitalism who seem insistent that only working a couple of hours a day on pumps should lead to laziness. In my experience the opposite is true, free time is there to be filled and people usually do. More interestingly for me however, he was also a reader of restricted tomes, a rarity on a planet where a self-serving definition of “communism” is constantly blared out by the bureaucracy (much to my amusement, I recently found out that the Federation does the same thing from a different perspective).
On the day-long trip out he’d often recount and analyse the latest books he’d read, maybe an adventure story such as Black Wing by The Durruti Collective, or on this occasion the classic 21st-century anarcho-syndicalist book Fighting For Ourselves.
“The government’s not as strong as it thinks,” he boomed cheerily, leaning back as we cruised over countless miles of untouched landscape. “They may have the orbital, but it’d only take a united workforce to shut them out and push us into full communism, rather than this pretense they have on at the moment. They need us more than we need them.”
***
We landed late in the morning, having slept in the hauler’s stuffy overnight pods while the autopilot got us the rest of the way to Fort Bradley. I’ve seen the giant conurbations of LHS 331 since and now know it to be little more than a big town, but at the time I was awestruck by it, stretching away and shining in the sunlight, a single organism made up of hundreds of thousands of my kind.
As dad trundled off to get his parts ordered out of the warehousing complex, I got a few hours to myself in the biggest city on the planet, which is always a grand thing for a young adult from a small community. And one of the things about modern life on a sparsely-populated planet is that you really do end up knowing almost everybody who’s your own age. Being constantly connected through the net, everyone runs into everyone else either through games or interests or education. So with that in mind, I hunted through my friends list and saw a half-dozen people I knew who were hanging around just a little way off in Rosa Parks, one of the beautifully-maintained green spaces that proliferate in Fort Bradley.
Hailing a cab, I set off to say hello.
...
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