11.29-Liberty, Equality, Humanity

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions:

Episode 11.29: Liberty, Equality, Humanity

So we have finally come to the end.

This is the final episode of our series on the Martian Revolution, a series that has taken us from the colonization of Mars in 2114 through the Martian victory over the last OmniCore occupation forces in 2252.

The Martians had first declared independence in 2247.

Well, at least some Martians declared independence.

Then they re-declared independence in 2250 and now secured it once and for all here in 2252.

The Omnikor invasion was supposed to mark the beginning of OmniCore's permanent reacquisition of Mars.

Instead, they lasted just six months.

By the end of June 2252, all three Martian colonies were back under Martian control, and they remain under Martian control to this very day.

Mars was now for the Martians.

But while the surrender of the occupation forces answered one of the biggest questions of the revolution, Mars would be be independent of Earth, there was still one final act left to play out among the Martians themselves.

With the surrender of the OmniCore occupation forces, all three Martian colonies plugged back into what remained of the planetary communications network and re-established contact with each other.

They had been cut off from each other after the bombs went off six months ago, and only now learned what had happened in the other cities since then.

The Tharsians knew a bit more than the Olympians and Elysians, since they had access to working communications throughout the occupation, but even for them it was still mostly guesses and rumors about what had gone on in the other two cities.

The Olympians, meanwhile, had gotten plugged back into the network at the end of the occupation, but could only scrape a few facts about the outside world.

As for the Elysians, they only knew what the Polynesians passed along.

Because of this mutual isolation, the inhabitants of each city came out changed in a different way.

Tharsis was already on its way to going down in history as the city that wasn't touched.

Unlike Olympus and Elysium, Tharsis never went through prolonged blackouts, deprivations, and mechanical failures.

Aside from the damage done by a few red-capped bombs, their physical and digital infrastructure had not been destroyed.

In contrast, Elysium was still buried under a nuclear crater, and all of its upper levels had been destroyed.

The post-bomb trauma and isolation had stripped away most of the distinctions between Martians and Earthlings and red caps and black caps, so the Elysians emerged in full solidarity with each other, ready to transcend conflicts that had defined Martian politics before the invasion and occupation.

Meanwhile, Olympus had a lot of repair work to do and limited resources to get things back online.

Their main landing platforms were trashed, their principal satellites and orbital platforms destroyed.

It would be quite a while before they were fully operational again.

On the political front, the last time Tharsis and Elysium checked in with Olympus, they had been under the administration of the emergency triumvirate of Leopold, Darby, Darby, and Calderón.

But only one of those three emerged from the occupation.

On June 23, 2252, Jose Calderón issued a statement saying that we uncovered damning evidence that Leopold, Darby, and a group of other prominent Martian leaders had despaired of victory and conspired to hand the city back to Omnicorp.

They have all been arrested for treason.

Because of this emergency, I now hold supreme executive authority.

I look forward to reintegrating all Martians under the authority of the Martian Guard.

The news that the Monscafe group had all been arrested was shocking and seemed wildly implausible to the people of the other two cities.

But they were even more outraged by Calderón's assertion that as heir to the emergency triumvirate, he somehow held sole executive authority over all Martians.

Calderon would face pushback on multiple fronts trying to spread his authority beyond the confines of Olympus.

But even inside the city, he had issues.

He'd calculated that it was better to liquidate his most dangerous political rivals rather than keep them around.

By removing them from the equation, he would eliminate the threat they posed.

But he miscalculated.

The arrest and disappearance of the Mons Cafe group triggered a backlash in Olympus.

Even before the surrender of the occupation forces, there were protests and demonstrations and a lot of angry chatter on the internal networks.

Where was the Mons Cafe Group?

Where is Leopold?

Where is Darby?

Where is Zhaolin?

Calderón knew that eventually he would have to reveal that they were all dead, but he stalled, hoping to fully consolidate power before delivering that news.

There was also widespread pushback to Calderón's earthling segregation plan both inside and outside Olympus.

Segregation had initially been pitched as a security measure, but now the threat was over.

Omnicore had surrendered.

The justification for rounding people up and cordoning off areas and creating separate earthling zones evaporated.

So why are we still doing this?

But Calderón ordered the Martian Guard to continue the work because his ultimate goal was not simply surviving an occupation, it was securing the safety and independence of the Martians forever, and that meant the mass deportation of Earthlings.

The ongoing attempts to segregate the Earthlings had already triggered protests and clashes and confrontations in Olympus.

When Calderón issued orders to the Martian Guard in the other two cities to start segregating their Earthling populations, well, that's when Jose Calderón started discovering that there were limits to his authority.

Calderón's orders complicated politics in Tharsis.

There were plenty of redcap guards who reacted positively.

The chief is back online.

Yes, sir.

It's good to have you back, sir.

And they started preparing to do as Calderón ordered.

But many more Tharsians looked askance at all this.

The leaders of Tharsis resented Calderón trying to assert political power that he did not actually have.

He was stretching his authority as commander of the Martian Guard about ten clicks beyond the breaking point, especially by unilaterally issuing orders as comprehensively disruptive as segregate all the Earthlings.

Black-capped guards in Tharsis certainly were not going to follow Calderone's orders, and they had completely broken with the red-capped chain of command during the occupation.

Regular Tharsians, meanwhile, didn't really have any issue with the Earthlings anymore.

The Earthlings had never really done anything during the occupation to merit further hostility, and in fact the Tharsians had lived under Jan Gileand, who put a a Martian face on the occupation, which eroded the force of Calderón's basic argument, Martians good, earthlings bad.

So the Red Cap Guards in Tharsis found very little cooperation trying to carry out their orders to segregate the Earthlings.

The Elysians, meanwhile, rejected Calderon outright.

They were not interested at all in taking orders from Jose Calderón.

They were offended by his claim to dictatorial authority over them, but even more by what he was trying to make them do, target and abuse earthlings on a mass scale.

This was anathema to the ethos of the Elysian Commune.

There was of course a smattering of Calderon's supporters in Elysium, but the command structure of the Elysian Martian Guard was all with Alexandra Clare now.

They heard Calderon's orders, but they did not obey Calderon's orders.

Instead, Alexandra Clare issued a statement to the people of Olympus that completely ignored Calderon.

She said, The Elysian Commune is thrilled to find our fellow Martians are alive and well.

We look look forward to rebuilding all that has been lost, and most especially reconvening the Martian Assembly to speak as the true voice of the Martian people.

Then she moved on to listing all the things the Elysians would need for the recovery and rebuilding of their city.

A wild card in all this was Booth Gonzalez and the Martian Navy.

Now that they had liberated Mars, the main thing the shippers wanted to do was return to Earth to find out what had happened to their homes and families in Lunaport.

Booth Gonzalez absolutely planned to lead them back to Earth, but Calderón claimed that his authority as Supreme Executive of the Republic of Mars meant he commanded the Martian Navy, and he ordered the Martian Navy to stay put and prepare to take loads of Earthlings ready for deportation.

Admiral Gonzalez acknowledged receipt of Calderón's message but told him to please stand by.

which infuriated Calderon as his assumption of planet-wide power was not going as smoothly as he hoped.

While he made Calderón wait, Gonzalez and his fellow officers used their own personal and professional contacts down on the surface to give them the true lay of the land.

And it looked like Calderón had indeed set himself up as a dictator, arrested all the Mons Cafe people, they were most likely dead, and now he was rounding up Earthlings en masse.

Gonzalez was himself eager to get back to Earth, but he did not like the idea of taking off and leaving Mars to fall under a xenophobic dictatorship.

That did not sound like a Mars he would ever want to come back to.

Then on July 5th, news started breaking that all the Mons Cafe people were dead.

Black Caps had gotten a hold of one of the operators who'd processed the executions and forced him to spill his guts.

With this eyewitness report spreading, Calderone jumped in front of the story by publishing a vid saying, Yes, it's true they are dead, but the rest is a lie.

Unfortunately, the earthworm traders tried to escape.

instead of waiting for the steady and impartial hand of the people's justice.

So yes, they are dead, and that is unfortunate, but they brought it on themselves.

If anything, it proved they were guilty, because if they were innocent, they would not have felt the need to escape.

It was all a great tragedy.

Out on the networks, the spawn of GRU backed Calderon's line to the hilt.

But despite the all-out propaganda blitz, the revelation that the Mons Cafe leaders were all dead sparked fresh waves of outrage.

Lots of people at every level, leaders and regular Martians alike, had known and worked with and loved and fought alongside Leopold, Darby, Xiaolin, and the rest.

They were names, faces, and voices who'd guided them for years.

It was nearly impossible to believe they were really traitors who'd been killed in a prison break.

In Elysium, Alexandra Clare was not just outraged, she was filled with white, hot anger.

She didn't believe a word Calderon said, and while she was upset about everyone who'd been arrested and killed, Xiaolin's death obviously hit her hardest of all.

It hurt that they had left things as they had, that after all they'd been through the last time they saw each other, they'd gotten in a fight, and she had stormed out.

Zhao's last work, No True Martian, had gone a long way towards laying the foundation for reconciliation when she got back to Olympus.

But then Omnicore had invaded and they'd been cut off from each other.

Claire writes in One Red Life, which she had begun drafting during the Siege of Elysium, I loved Zhaolin.

Zhao was a great artist, a passionate soul and a tender partner.

He was ten times the man Jose Calderón was, a hundred times the man Jose Calderón was.

I knew he was lying, that he had murdered them all not because they were a threat to Mars and the Revolution.

All that they had ever done was for Mars and the Revolution.

No, he had killed them because they were a threat to Jose Calderón.

Her ideological and political opposition to Calderón was now joined by a deeply personal vendetta.

After all these revelations, Booth Gonzalez contacted Claire directly.

They knew each other from a few banquets and parties they had attended together when Gonzalez was being feted after one shot in Convoy Group 11 back in 2250.

And while they had never engaged in much more than friendly small talk, the vibes had always been fine between them.

And so though he was facing internal pressure to depart for Earth at once, Gonzalez was farsighted enough to know that it was worth making sure Mars was in good hands before they left, and Jose Calderón's hands were not good hands.

Calderón did himself no favors by coming off arrogant and a little bit delusional.

It's not like he had any way of compelling the Martian Navy to follow the orders he issued.

So Gonzalez and Claire got to talking about what to do about Jose Calderón.

They agreed that before the Martian Navy left, they were going to force Calderón from power.

In Olympus, auxiliary landing platforms on the periphery that had been inaccessible and damaged because of the EMP were slowly being brought back online.

Black caps in the city determined that one in particular was vulnerable to capture by a relatively small number of partisans.

If they captured that platform, they could use it as an entry point to bring in reinforcements from outside the city.

And more importantly, if they captured that platform, they could bring Alexandra Clare into the city.

So Clare, Gonzalez, and the black cap leaders in Olympus worked out a plan.

Claiming the need to deliver humanitarian assistance to Elysium, Gonzalez commandeered all functional surface shuttles from all remaining functional orbital platforms.

This was easily accomplished because the Martian Navy commanded space.

Calderón fumed and raged, but dared not order Gonzalez to cease operations because he now knew Gonzalez would ignore the order and Calderón couldn't expose himself to that level of public defiance.

So Elysium was now under a crater, of course, and its surface installations were wrecked.

But the OmniCorps occupation forces had built up a little landing platform installation adjacent to the crater and erected temporary corridor troops from that installation down to the still intact parts of the city.

On July 19th, shuttles started landing in Elysium.

But they were not there to deliver humanitarian aid.

They were there to load up the most dedicated cadres of the Elysian Martian Guard.

These cadres were joined by companies of Earthlings, most especially from the Polynesian Battalion.

For them, it was a simple choice.

Jose Calderón clearly means Earthlings like us nothing but harm, but our friends, the Elysians, want to remove him from power.

That sounds great.

Let's go get him.

Loaded up with armed enemies of Jose Calderón, the shuttles then departed Elysium.

To decrease suspicion, the shuttles first docked with the orbital platforms above Tharsis.

But then on July 21st, they abruptly disengaged and headed back to the surface.

Now obviously this was an auspicious day.

It was the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Three Days of Red.

And despite the post-occupation hardships and deprivations, the Martians in all three cities still planned celebrations and commemorations.

When the shuttles launched, the Olympian Black Caps staged a takeover of the peripheral landing platform and the adjacent corridors and levels.

Taking advantage of the celebrations of the Three Days of Red, they pulled this off without a hitch.

When Calderon learned what had happened, he ordered red caps to go take the platform back from the treasonous earthworms.

But the black caps held their position as the shuttles landed and offloaded all the Elysians and Polynesians.

The first person off the first shuttle was Alexandra Clare, who now put herself at the head of an armed vanguard to overthrow Jose Calderón.

So this goes down in Martian history as the Last Uprising.

Now it was not the last uprising in Martian history, obviously, but it is the last uprising of the Martian Revolution, and remained the last uprising for quite a while after that, so the name stuck.

The last uprising started there at that peripheral landing platform and snowballed.

Clare released a vid saying, My fellow Martians, this is Alexander Clare.

I have returned to Olympus.

We have suffered together through abuse and deportations and blockades and bombs and invasions, but we have survived, together.

And now the emergency is passed.

and the time for emergency measures is passed.

It is time to reconvene the Martian Assembly and restore the Republic of Mars.

Anyone who attempts to resist this reconvening is an enemy of the Revolution and everything it stands for.

Please join me in the Prime Dome.

This has gone down in Martian history as Claire's declaration.

Calderón prepared to resist Claire, but he was undercut still further by a broadcast from Admiral Booth Gonzalez.

Gonzalez was universally beloved on Mars.

He was more popular than even Claire.

He had now twice saved the Martians.

First, the miracle run against Convoy Group 11 at the Battle of Phobos, and then again just now, forcing the Omnicor fleet to surrender.

He was their liberator.

Gonzalez broadcast a message that said, People of Mars, this is Booth Gonzalez.

Together, we have defeated Omnicor and set Mars free.

I now call for the restoration of the Martian Assembly.

The Martian Navy does not recognize the authority of Jose Calderón, but we will recognize the authority of the Martian Assembly.

So we call on Jose Calderón to resign, return power to the Assembly, and we encourage all of you to demand the same.

Mars is not for one man.

Mars is for the Martians.

From the peripheral landing platform, Claire and her vanguard advanced horizontally through the upper levels towards the Prime Dome.

taking over corridors and levels and five ways as they went.

Claire's declaration and Gonzalez's broadcast resonated, and wherever Claire and her vanguard appeared, Martians greeted them with spontaneous exuberance.

As the armed vanguard pushed forward, a procession of unarmed Martians followed them, and they were all soon moving as a mass towards the Prime Dome.

Calderón would have loved to use the central servers to initiate quarantine procedures for the entire colony, but the Sistecs weren't even close to repairing the connections to local systems which had been severed during the occupation.

With the city rising up at Claire and Gonzalez's instigation, Calderon ordered Red Cap Martian Guard units to consolidate in the A levels under the Primedome.

This was the area that had just been the front line during the recent resistance to Omnicorps, and the Red Caps re-occupied and re-fortified all those positions.

As they braced for Claire's arrival, a whole second front opened as Black Caps started coming up vertically from the Warrens.

On July 23rd, they converged on the fortified Red Cap positions.

On this, the fifth anniversary of the last day of Red, fighting between the Martians began in earnest.

Combat during the last uprising was as intense as combat during the three days of Red or the Independence Days.

During the fighting, Claire's anti-Calderon forces searched for little ways to sneak through ducks and passageways to get around Red Cap barricades and fortifications.

Occasionally, they blew up a non-load-bearing wall.

Aside from this main fighting, there were also clashes down in the Warrens between Third Society of Martian stalwarts and black cap and Mons Cafe sympathizers.

There were lots of casualties and lots of damage.

Too many casualties, too much damage.

But neither side would give up without a fight.

The soul of the revolution was at stake.

Though the heavy fighting in the A-levels began on July 23rd, it did not stop on July 23rd.

In fact, it kept going day after day for a full week.

But with each passing day, the red caps were forced to retreat bit by bit, abandoning a level here, pulling out of a corridor corridor there.

Finally, on July 30th, Calderón ordered them to abandon the A-levels entirely and pull up into the Prime Dome.

He'd already had teams reactivating all the explosives the Omnicor occupation had put in place to stop the Olympians from getting in, and he now warned Claire not to attempt to enter the Prime Dome, or they would all be blown to pieces.

And this warning, I should say, did not help Calderon in the propaganda war.

as he was now portrayed as hiding behind Omnicor's explosives.

And in defense of of what?

That was a question now spreading across Mars.

What were the Red Caps fighting for?

Jose Calderon's personal dictatorship that wasn't even legitimate and one established by killing incredibly popular revolutionary leaders?

And now he was blocking the reconvening of the Martian Assembly?

So while the core of the Red Caps remained loyal to Calderon, they were increasingly unpopular.

and clearly losing the war.

Calderón issued repeated broadcasts broadcasts calling on the Martians to liberate Olympus from these earthworm insurrectionaries who surrounded him.

But these broadcasts were falling on less and less receptive ears.

The stalemate went on for a week until Alexandra Clare broke Red Cap morale completely on August the 8th.

She announced that she was going to lay down her arms and lead a procession of unarmed Martians into the prime dome.

They were going to the fields of Earth.

They were going to reconvene the Martian Assembly.

We have the right to do this, and we are going to do this.

Disarm the explosives, take down the barriers, and let us pass.

And she was serious about this.

She was not bluffing.

On August the 9th, she walked out into the central A-level atrium and towards the base of the staircase that led up to the main entry gate into the Prime Dome.

All this had been constructed when the Primedome had been built as an architectural showpiece.

It now served as the backdrop for one of the most dramatic moments of the revolution.

As Claire walked up the stairs, she had no idea whether she would live or die.

Each step could literally be her last.

But when she got to the top of the stairs, no one had taken a shot at her, and nothing had exploded.

As Claire approached the entry gate, the captain of the red caps guarding the door lost her nerve.

They'd been fighting a losing battle for weeks, and grim fatalism gave way to the realization that they were going to lose.

So the captain of the red caps did not want to go down in history as the woman who killed Alexandra Claire.

So she ordered her guard to stand down, disconnect the explosives, dismantle the defensive barricades, and let Claire pass.

When Claire reached the entry gate unharmed and the red caps stood down, she signaled for the rest of the Martians behind her to follow.

But they were to follow her unarmed and peaceful.

They would not enter the Prime Dome as soldiers in a civil war.

They would come as citizens of a restored republic.

As this procession entered entered the Prime Dome and advanced towards the fields of Earth, many red caps accepted that it was over and laid down their arms.

When it was a fight, it was a fight, and we fought.

But now they aren't fighting, so why should we keep fighting?

They didn't want to massacre Alexandra Clare and a bunch of unarmed Martians.

And besides, what's wrong with reconvening the Martian Assembly anyway?

So disarmed red caps merged with those coming up behind Clare, and they all walked towards the fields of Earth together.

Those red caps who refused to reconcile themselves to this fell back to the headquarters of the Martian Guard.

There, Calderon holed up with his last loyal supporters.

These headquarters had been his base of operations since first becoming commander of the Martian Guard after the assassination of Omar Ali back in 2248.

Now it was his fortified citadel of last resort.

He'd stockpile weapons and supplies over the years because you never know.

But though he and his last loyal red caps were prepared for a siege, the siege never came.

Calderon's political situation was increasingly hopeless.

The people of Olympus were flocking to Claire's banner, not his.

Even his most loyal officers advised him that while they would follow his orders to the end, the end had come.

So Calderon had a couple of options to choose from.

He could resign and face the music, or he could stubbornly hold out and make his enemies come get him, which would involve significant casualties.

But if he surrendered, his enemies would surely revenge themselves upon him, and he had no interest in giving them the satisfaction of that.

And it was clear that even those most loyal to him didn't really want to die for a lost cause.

Faced with this dilemma, Jose Calderón instead chose option three.

He went into his office, put on a classic Martian Way-era symphony, and took a fatal concoction of stems, feels, and drags.

His officers found him fifteen minutes later dead on the floor.

They surrendered immediately.

Jose Calderon was not an aberration.

He represented and led a powerful strain of the Martian Revolution.

Channeling anger at Omnicore into generalized hostility against Earthlings was a message that resonated and could very well have been the final direction the Martian Revolution took.

Jose Calderón was a patriot.

He had spent his career in the Martian Guard defending and advancing the revolution in his own way and to the best of his ability.

He'd been right about the loyalist plot to take back control of Mars.

He'd been right about treachery and betrayals from earthworms like Kinder James.

But he seemed to be working from a theory of justice that it was better for a hundred innocent people to suffer as long as one guilty person was punished.

And he never was right about his basic equation, Martians good, earthlings bad.

That framework never fit the events of the Martian Revolution.

And then finally, he made the mistake that so many people in history do.

He conflated his own personal interests with those of the group as a whole.

The execution of the 27 plus 1, and then this ongoing resistance to Alexandre Claire, prove that in the end, Jose Calderón was not fighting for Mars and the Revolution so much as Jose Calderón.

And for all of these reasons, he is generally regarded to this day as a villain in Martian history.

Although, you will also find to this day, neo-redcaps, who celebrate Jose Calderon's memory and believe that his vision for a Mars free of earthlings should one day come to pass.

Meanwhile, in the fields of Earth, Alexandra Clare reconvened the Martian Assembly and reconfirmed the continued existence of the Republic of Mars.

The Republic, she said, never ended, even if the first Constitution had been suspended and power handed to three emergency triumvirs.

But now the emergency was over, the triumvirate was no longer necessary, and it was time to restore the regular order of things.

But the regular order of things was a murky concept.

Most of the ministers who'd been elected before the invasion were prominent Mons Cafe leaders who'd been killed in Calderon's purge.

So at a minimum, the assembly needed to vote new leadership.

But as I said earlier, things had changed.

The citizens of each of the three Martian cities had been transformed by their ordeal, and parts of the first Martian Constitution were no longer compatible with their new outlook and and identity.

But we'll get into all that.

The death of Jose Calderón and the reconvening of the Martian Assembly is one of those places people say marks the end of the Martian Revolution.

And it makes a lot of sense to say that.

Now some run things through to the establishment of the Second Constitution, but the death of Calderón and the reconvening of the Martian Assembly here in August of 2252 certainly marks the end of the action.

The last uprising is called the Last Uprising for a reason.

And though it involved some of the heaviest fighting of the Revolution, in the end, it was an unarmed procession of peaceful Martians who brought it to a close.

And indeed, brought the Martian Revolution to a close.

But before we get into the early stages of post-revolutionary Mars, we simply must find out what happened back on Earth.

This is certainly what the officers and crews of the Martian Navy were thinking.

So following the victory over Calderone, Claire gave her public blessing to Gonzalez's plan to head back to Earth.

Once again leaving all the Phosph containers behind to keep them safe, because who knows how many are left in existence, Booth Gonzalez fired up the Dapple on August 15, 2252, and led the rest of the Martian Navy back to Earth.

Every officer and crew member had friends and family back in Lunaport that they'd been out of contact with for years.

All they could do was hope that they were still alive.

When the Martian Navy departed, they departed for the unknown.

Earth was still a complete blackout.

Long-range scans weren't particularly helpful.

So it was only after nine weeks in space, when the fleet finally pulled into the environs of Earth five months after the blackout began, that they got some sense of what had gone on.

What they found in space was a field of wreckage.

It was an empty and derelict wasteland.

Satellite grids, orbital installation, the ships, they were all destroyed, abandoned, or non-functional.

If you'll recall, right after the disaster, OmniCorps mercilessly wrecked all three Corps' holdings in space.

By the looks of it, something or someone had evened the score.

For the first time in centuries, Earth appeared to be without a satellite grid.

As if that wasn't ominous enough, they also could still not get reliable communication signals from Earth.

at least not anything on any of the normal channels.

They could see there was activity down there, they could pick it up, but they couldn't talk to anyone.

It would honestly be years before anyone really understood what had happened on Earth during the last phase of the corporate war.

At this point, the shippers and the Martians didn't even know about the Nairobi Revolution, let alone anything that had happened since.

But there was one happy surprise, literally buried in all this.

When they approached the Moon, they saw that it had been hit by several large explosions, craters, where there had not been craters before.

The surface buildings of Lunaport were all heavily damaged, but they did pick up traces of an intact power grid beneath the surface.

So landing parties were sent down, and they discovered that just like the Elysians and the Olympians, the people of Lunaport had withdrawn into the deepest recesses of their underground city and remained there, just trying to survive until someone, anyone, came to rescue them.

And in one critical way, their ordeal had been even more froth than the Martians, because the Martians could at least count on access to unlimited Phosph.

The people of Lunaport had to conserve and ration energy as best they could.

Now I won't get into a full accounting of the ordeal of Lunaport, but if you want more, there's a great book called The Ordeal of Lunaport by Kala Estrada.

But the shippers had to endure a grueling period of hoping and trying to find their loved ones, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.

Booth Gonzalez and his two siblings, Marco and Victoria, found out that while their mother Val and brother Dorn still lived, their sisters, Shan and Betsy, had both been killed in the immediate wake of the evacuation of Lunaport.

They'd been dead for years.

Eventually, they would piece together some broad outlines of what had happened.

The Nairobi Revolution, the collapse of the Omnicorn networks, the detonation of several nuclear devices, and the mass failure and subsequent destruction of Omnicorn's spaceships and installations.

Life on Earth, meanwhile, had become positively post-apocalyptic.

The networks that tied everything together had all gone dark.

Things like global food and resource supply chains collapsed along with the networks.

Supplies of Phosph ran out, flex cells stopped working, domes failed, famines and epidemics spread.

The corporate war ended not with one side winning, but with everyone losing.

All that remained of that conflict was recurrent fighting between the remnants of the corporate armies, which would reforge themselves into an assortment of different post-corporate authorities.

Those authorities would emerge in many different shapes and sizes from the ashes of the corporate apocalypse, and honestly gives way to one of the most fascinating periods in human history.

There are lots of works about this.

The End of the Corporate Age is the most encyclopedic on the last days of the mega corporations.

After the apocalypse is a gripping read on the first decade after the corporate war.

And then From the Ashes is great for the basics of the incredibly confusing political arrangements and alignments that emerged from the catastrophe.

But Now we are starting to project years and decades into the future, and I still haven't even gotten to the funniest part.

The abrupt collapse of OmniCore's networks after the Nairobi Revolution spelled the end of the competence, the group that had led Omnicore since the overthrow of Kamal Singh.

Riven by internal discord and external criticism, they were voted out in a contentious meeting of the board of directors held amidst the collapse of their corporate empire in August of 2252.

And you will never guess who they elected to be the next CEO of Omnicore.

Can you guess?

Go on.

Guess.

That's right, Timothy Werner.

Can you even believe it?

There had always been a pocket of Werner loyalists who believed that everything had gone wrong because Werner had been forced out back in 2248.

Many of them had come up with Werner in the late 2230s and early 2240s and believed he was the visionary leader Omnicore and the world needed.

And instead of recognizing his genius, the board of directors had stabbed him in the back and scapegoated him for everything.

Now we know that's not what happened, but the goings-on of the inner circle of an intersolar megacorporation is opaque to outsiders.

So it was easy for Werner's supporters to tell a story of a great hero thrown out by treacherous snakes, a story divorced from the actual facts.

They pitched Werner as the only one with the strength and the creativity and the expertise to fix everything that had gone wrong since his ouster.

Werner had spent his years in the wilderness mostly in Switzerland, but he and his his family maintained a dozen properties across the globe.

He paid close attention to current events, even though he could only watch and not control anything.

He thought the agreement of 2248 was a huge mistake.

It was the first step towards Martian independence, obviously.

Werner thrilled at Kamal Singh's attempt to reclaim full control of Mars in 2250.

He thrilled at the news of Bruno October's uprising and the imminent arrival of Convoy Group 11 to Mars.

And then he had been bitterly disappointed when it all fell apart.

His wife wrote that Werner didn't have dessert for a week after the Battle of Phobos.

But when Singh's antics triggered the corporate war, Werner began to sniff a way back into the game.

He was still a young man, he was only 47 years old, and a crisis like this would come with a lot of opportunities for advancement, or comebacks.

Werner was paradoxically frustrated by Omnicor's early success in the corporate war.

Werner looked for a way back in, but it's hard to sell yourself as the answer to a problem that doesn't exist.

And the competence were actually doing a pretty good job.

This is, in fact, right when they start getting called the competents.

Though publicly an omnicore patriot, Werner privately winced at the Battle of Lunaport, aka the disaster.

With that battle, the Competents achieved total strategic and tactical superiority over all of space.

It is hard to overthrow people who do that.

Werner was on the verge of giving up hope when the Nairobi Revolution broke out.

The chaos it caused filled him with a mix of dread and excitement.

It was certainly a crisis big enough to overwhelm the competence, but it was also big enough to swamp the entire company.

With Omnicore rapidly collapsing on all fronts and global communications practically non-existent by the summer of 2252, Werner stepped forward to rail against the gross incompetence of the competence.

And in case you're wondering, yes, he took the lowest-hanging fruit in the history of low-hanging fruit and started calling them the incompetents.

With their corporate empire collapsing, the last remaining board members met in Switzerland and threw the incompetents out.

And in their place, they invited Timothy Werner back in.

Four years after being forced to resign, Timothy Werner was once again the CEO of Omnicore, though what precisely would be left of Omnicore when all this was over was anyone's guess.

No one on Mars had any idea any of this was happening as they knit themselves back together.

After the fleet left, the Martian Assembly continued to convene on the fields of Earth.

Now the easiest thing for them to have done would be to simply restore the First Constitution.

But as I said, a lot had happened since it had been enacted, and certain changes, amendments, and revisions seemed to be in order.

Much of Leopold's Leviathan would be kept in place, but the judicial system, for example, was thoroughly overhauled.

as was the functioning of the Assembly itself.

Now right now, I'm just going to hit a couple of the key points, but if you want all the details, the best work on all this is the Second Constitution and the Re-Founding of the Republic of Mars by Zeno Hamamoto.

The Elysians heavily influenced the crafting of the Second Constitution.

They really put their stamp on it.

The Second Constitution cemented the post-revolutionary verdict that there would never again be legal or social distinctions between people based on their place of birth.

The egalitarianism of the Mons Café group and the black caps triumphed over the red caps' nationalistic xenophobia.

Any person who was present on Mars was entitled to exactly the same treatment as everyone else present on Mars.

When you were on Mars, you were subject to Martian law, but you were on equal standing with everyone else.

Whether you were just visiting or here to settle, you instantly enjoyed the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of everyone on Mars.

That's what it would mean to be a Martian, being present on Mars.

Now this would cause some controversy in the particular case of all those captured Omnicore security service personnel.

There was nothing left on Earth to send them back to, so they just remained on Mars.

Were they all citizens of the Republic of Mars now too?

The fate of the stranded occupation personnel would be one of the early political controversies of post-revolutionary Mars.

But the answer in the end was yes.

Everyone present on Mars was a Martian.

The particularly thorny case of the ex-occupation forces did not disrupt the the general egalitarian spirit of the Second Constitution.

And one of the parts of Leopold's Leviathan that was kept in place was the mass leveling of income and wealth distribution.

Credits and resources would be distributed as evenly as possible.

Everyone was entitled to the same facilities, medical care, food, entertainment, whatever.

And while some Martians primarily did former D-class work and other Martians did primarily A-class work, they all earned the same as everyone else, because every Martian matters.

This was an ethos that had sunk deep into post-revolutionary Mars thanks to the final victory of the Elysians, the Black Caps, and the heirs of the Mons Cafe group.

No one was more important than anyone else.

Every Martian matters.

FOSS 5 was still expected to be the main driver of the Martian economy, even though when the Constitution was adopted, it wasn't clear whether there was anyone back on Earth to give it to.

But assuming contact in trade was re-established, the second Constitution confirmed Phosph was owned by the Martians collectively, and everyone would share the benefits equally.

But while the Martians would share equally in the benefits of Phosph, they would also share the responsibilities.

After the revolution, everyone had to spend time doing Phosph extraction work, no matter who you were.

This service work requirement was written into the Second Constitution.

and it obligated Martians to complete a certain number of shifts working the extraction sites.

Everyone pitching in, everyone benefiting.

That is the true Martian way.

But though service work was compulsory, this obligation actually gave the Martians even more time to just live life.

It spread the work out and gave everyone more free time.

If you'll remember, one of the first and most enduring legacies of the revolution was the concept of the day off.

Having more time to simply live life was one of the greatest of all the revolutionary triumphs.

Just six years earlier, the Martians had all been working seven days a week.

Time off was limited, days off unheard of.

But what's the point of living if not to live?

To spend time with friends and family, to make music, play games, watch vids, whatever you want to do, all the things that make life fun and pleasant, all the things that make life worth living.

There was a lot of work to be done in the months and even years after the occupation was over, but as time went on and Mars became more stable and more settled, the Martians finally worked to live, instead of living to work.

The Second Constitution also federated a lot of powers and responsibilities.

Neither Tharsis nor Elysium wanted to open themselves up to a regime of Olympian supremacy.

The Elysian Commune voted not to disband and continued to sit as the functional government of Elysium.

The Tharsians, meanwhile, saw their own city as the richest and most intact of the three, and thus the natural new seat of power as Olympus was still being repaired.

But both Olympians and Elysians objected to that.

Eventually a compromise was reached where the seat of the Martian Assembly would remain the fields of Earth in the Prime Dome, but in functional structure each city would have latitude, though matters concerning FOSS V would be decided collectively by all of them together.

As a part of this process of federation, the second constitution also overhauled the Martian Assembly.

The Assembly had always been an unwieldy thing.

Every Martian was technically a member of the Assembly, and everything technically had to be approved by the Assembly.

Assembly.

In the First Constitution, ministers had been granted some latitude to carry out their jobs without having to check back with the Martian Assembly all the time, but there was still room to make the whole legislative process a bit easier to manage.

So the Second Constitution created a tiered system of delegate assemblies from the lowest level of local assemblies up through larger sectional assemblies, then delegate assemblies for each of the three cities, and then finally, the Martian Assembly representing all of Mars.

That assembly would then appoint executive ministers and the consul, the new senior executive office that was no longer held on a rotating basis, but would instead be elected or removed by the Martian Assembly.

The overhaul of the legislative system also brought to a close the freewheeling days of every Martian being able to speak in the Assembly if they wanted.

But to preserve some of that spirit, the Assembly set aside days where any Martian could put their name on a list to come down and speak.

These speeches were usually incredibly banal and boring.

It's tourists, students on a field trip, but every so often you get something wild and unexpected.

There are some great supercut vids of the funniest Martian Assembly speeches out there and there is really funny stuff in there.

Please do go check it out.

The Second Constitution also reorganized the Martian Guard.

They put checks in place to prevent the commander of the Martian Guard from wielding the kind of dictatorial authority Calderon had accrued.

As As the months and years passed without the return of revolutionary emergencies, the primary purpose of the Guard shifted from defending the revolution to just general public service operations.

They were still an armed militia, but they mostly focused on emergency response, crisis management, and day-to-day law enforcement.

And of course, they served as the honor guard at every revolutionary anniversary or holiday.

The Guard was also put under several layers of oversight by the various delegate assemblies, and it goes without saying that the Second Constitution eliminated that bit, exempting investigations into treason from having to adhere to the civil rights guaranteed by the Second Constitution.

That exemption had been thoroughly abused, so

never again.

But as they worked out the Second Constitution and prepared to hold the first set of elections, the Martians still had no idea what was happening on Earth.

It was not until the shippers arrived and started relaying signals back that the size and scope of the apocalyptic catastrophe was understood.

They knew there were still humans down on the surface, but they were difficult to contact.

Everything seemed like one gigantic mess.

And this was not great news for the Martians because there were still things they could not manufacture for themselves.

They were getting by on improvised modifications or cannibalizing some machines to keep other machines working.

But really what they needed was parts, equipment, and materials that could only be found on Earth.

And they knew for sure that the Earthlings needed Phosph, probably desperately.

So there had to be someone down there they could work with to trade what the Martians needed for what the Earthlings needed.

Now I know what you're thinking, but no, that person is not Timothy Warner.

Instead, the Martians made contact with the leaders of a post-megacorporation manufacturing consortium.

Basically what happened is the manufacturing divisions of Bi-Corps, CalCorp, and T-Corps had been brought into uniform alignment when they merged into the 3-Corps Alliance.

When things started falling apart, the manufacturing division successfully isolated some of their computer systems and managed to keep a lot of their operations functional.

With headquarters completely dysfunctional and falling apart by the beginning of 2253, the manufacturing division suborned a good chunk of the three core security services to protect their operations, even as their former parent companies crumbled and collapsed around them.

The manufacturing consortium would wind up becoming one of the major players in the post-corporate political stew, in part because of the deal they are striking right here.

In April of 2255, after nearly two years of anxious waiting, the Martians brokered a deal to start delivering Martian Phosph to the consortium, Phosph which the consortium desperately, desperately needed.

In exchange, the consortium would manufacture grav units, oxygen scrubbers, parts, and equipment for both the Martians and the shippers.

This marked the first reconnection.

between Earth and Mars.

Winding back the clock, though, after the shippers successfully reconnected with Lunaport, the Martians asked Gonzalez to send some of the transport vessels back to Mars.

In all the years of revolutionary chaos and upheaval, it had never been forgotten by the Martians that they had lost contact with all the Martians that had been deported to Saturn.

Now that things were settling down, they wanted to finally send ships to retrieve their unjustly deported friends and family.

to find out what had happened to them, to bring them back.

Gonzalez agreed, and a convoy of transports returned to Mars, where they refueled, resupplied, and then set out for Saturn, which had itself been a black hole of information not just for months and years, but decades.

But to follow that convoy is to open up a massive can of worms that is best opened another time, because that's the prologue to the story of the children of Saturn.

When things really settled down and stabilized, the manufacturing consortium sent a representative to Mars to represent their interests, and and that guy turned out to be none other than Apollo Tanaka.

The once beleaguered head of Omnicore's Mars Division left the company when he was fired, but he caught on at Bicor's Manufacturing Division.

Since he obviously had experience with the Martians, the Manufacturing Consortium tapped him to be their representative.

His arrival would stir up some controversy, but by the time Tanaka got there, records and chat logs from his era of Mars Division were published and disseminated, mostly by those campaigning for the rehabilitation of Mabel Dore.

And it was clear how much Tanaka had tried to stop Werner from implementing the hated new protocols.

And then when Tanaka arrived, he gave a fine speech lauding the Martians for their revolutionary victory.

They were right.

Omniquor was wrong.

It really was that simple.

When his tenure as representative of the manufacturing consortium ended, Tanaka in fact chose to remain on Mars and settle there permanently.

If you want more on the life of Apollo Tanaka, I highly recommend Apollo Tanaka, A Life, by Ivan Ivanov.

But once again, we're pushing the limits of the scope of our series, so let's bring it all back around and bring things to a close.

As I said at the beginning of the series, the Martian Revolution is one of the most important events in human history.

It changed the trajectory of colonization and settlement and expansion of the human species inside the solar system.

Prior to the Martian Revolution, OmniCorps claimed everything beyond the line of lunar orbit.

The Martian Revolution ended that monopoly and opened space to anyone who could build a spaceship.

The Martian Revolution also obviously sparked a chain reaction that had huge implications.

It knocked over a series of ever larger dominoes until they tipped over the last one, which is the end of the corporate era and a decades-long collapse of civilization on Earth.

Now, it was not the permanent end of civilization, and within a generation, Earth would once again be revving back to life.

But it would be in a wholly different and reorganized way.

The Martian Revolution did not just overthrow one megacorporation, it overthrew all the megacorporations.

Omnicore continued to exist, of course, and it still exists now, but as merely a teeny, tiny remnant, more of a curiosity than anything else.

It's really just some offices in Switzerland mostly dedicated to preserving the memory of Timothy Werner, if you can believe it.

It's a very silly, but a very fitting end for both of them.

On Mars, the memory and legacy of the revolution is preserved in the myriad memorials, museums, and holidays that proliferated in its wake.

There's a permanent memorial and annual service at the site of Bloody Sunrise.

There's a shrine to the memory of the 27, plus one, in the chamber where they died.

There's the museum and gift shop at Stockade 7, which is a must-visit tourist destination.

And then there are holidays for everything.

the anniversaries of the Day of Batteries and the Battle of Phobos.

Each city had its own day to mark the surrender of the last of the occupation forces.

There was an ongoing, though not bloody fight over whether to celebrate the first Declaration of Independence in 2247 or the re-declaration of independence in 2250.

There is a week-long vid festival of works either from the revolutionary era or about the revolutionary era.

Zhao Lin's work remains the centerpiece of this festival.

But the biggest celebration of all is the anniversary of the three days of red, which is a big three-day party.

Nobody works during the anniversary of the Three Days of Red.

But then, in contrast, there's also a long and solemn day of remembrance to mark the anniversary of the bombs.

So to this day, the Revolution remains an active part of Martian life, not in the past, but in the present.

The Martian Revolution has also spawned a vast historiography that began shortly after the Revolution ended.

The first great work was the History of the Revolution by Astor Colfax, which was first published in 2257 on the 10th anniversary of the Three Days of Red.

The most enduring legacy of Colfax's book was the permanent rehabilitation of Mabel Dore, as he argued persuasively and conclusively that while she had made mistakes, none of the charges leveled against her were true.

She should not have been convicted, she should not have been killed.

You will always see Mabel Dore in 44 shirts at any commemoration of the Revolution to this very day.

Now since Colfax, a vast corpus of books, vids, archival collections, and documentaries have been produced that altered, augmented, revised, celebrated, or criticized the revolution.

I mentioned in the very first episode some of the biggest and most influential of these works, Anya Brownstone's Red, White, and Blue, Robin Ibarra's Mars in Revolution, Jabari Conrad's History of Mars.

Though one person cannot hope to read and watch them all, I've done my best over the course of this series to bring in works that cover the ideological and intellectual gamut.

Now, as I just said, it took a full generation for Earth to get back on its feet, at least to the point where humanity was once again fully reconnected.

Not just Earth and Mars, but all the little outposts and colonies that existed before the revolution and which proliferated in the decades to come.

Binding them all together would be the spaceshippers.

The spaceshipper's ancestral home would always be Lunaport, but spaceshipper colonies spread to wherever humans went, and naturally a large number of shippers, mostly veterans of the Martian Navy, resettled on Mars after the Revolution, Booth Gonzalez and his family most prominent among them.

From his new home on Mars, Admiral Gonzalez oversaw the decommissioning of many Martian Navy vessels, returning them to civilian transport and shipping duties.

But the Martian Navy would remain intact.

They would act as guardians and escorts for the shipping convoys, which was especially needed after the space pirates start showing up, but again, that's a story for another time.

Booth Gonzalez himself remained one of the most popular figures in Martian history.

He never failed to receive the most thunderous ovations at whatever ceremony or memorial he attended.

The anniversaries of the Battle of Phobos, or the anniversary of the final victory over the Omnicor invasion fleet, were positively embarrassing in the rapturous glorification of Gonzales.

Descriptions of these events became more over-the-top with each passing year, as the events ceased to be recent events and became the stuff of myth and legend.

Gonzalez served as Admiral of the Martian Navy until his retirement in 2288, and he died in Olympus seven years later in 2295.

His death was marked by a period of mourning, and I can tell you the most embarrassingly rapturous glorifications you've ever heard, but I think he earned it.

Finally, we come to Alexandre Clare.

When the second Constitution was adopted and the first elections were held, Alexandra Clare could not avoid election into the Martian Assembly, nor could she avoid being named the first executive consul of the restored republic.

It was not a job she wanted.

In truth, she didn't want to be anyone's boss.

But she knew her presence would help guarantee stability, as all the various groups had reason to trust her.

And so she did what she could to get everyone to buy into the new system, while never losing sight of the fact that she did have a position in all this, and she played a huge role in making sure that red cap ideology was buried.

Mostly.

Her tenure as console really set the tone and tenor for the future of Martian political history.

And while she knew this work was important, knew that there was no getting away from it, she also wanted to set down her burdens as quickly as possible.

Claire had been going non-stop since she first canvassed for shareholders in the run-up to the election of 2244.

She was tired.

Most of her closest friends were dead.

And she yearned for a more peaceful and simple life.

So in 2262, the earliest she thought she could get away with it, Claire announced that she was stepping down as consul.

But even though she stepped down, Claire could never simply quit public life.

She was always being called upon to give interviews and attend ceremonies and weigh in on current events.

She mostly tried to keep all this at bay and only proactively thrust herself back into politics in the 2270s when immigration from Earth to Mars once again became an issue.

The catastrophe on Earth had all but shut down the pipeline of Earthlings to Mars, but after 20 years, it started up again.

Neo-red caps and the spawn of the spawn of GRU started raising a ruckus to block the Earthlings from coming.

But Claire used the full weight of her popularity and influence to welcome and support the new immigrants.

The minute they step foot on Mars, they are Martians.

That's the deal.

And as Martians, they will help Mars rebuild, expand, and thrive.

Her campaigning carried the day, and the Martian Assembly voted down a proposal to ban immigration from Earth.

As the years went by, Claire pulled back further into private life, settling down in the Warrens where she had been born and raised.

And though she never had children of her own, Claire became the presiding matriarch of the community.

She always worked her extraction shifts, and even as an old woman did a better job than anyone.

She'd been doing it her whole life.

She also became an avid corridor hockey enthusiast and always supported the Omegas, one of the last lingering factional artifacts from her days as a black-capped partisan.

Through all of this she kept working on One Red Life, her memoir which became a magisterial account of her life before, during, and after the Revolution.

One Red Life is full of the tragedies and triumphs of the Revolution, of course, but it speaks volumes for Claire's outlook on life that when she reaches her resignation as consul, we're only two-thirds of the way through the memoir.

The final third is devoted to her post-revolutionary life because that life was the life she had been fighting for all along.

And though some ignore the back third, they're really missing the point.

Claire's life was not in service to the revolution.

The revolution was in service to her life.

And it mattered to her that she got to live that life.

Alexandra Clare died in 2320 at the the age of 98.

She was the last of the great revolutionary leaders to die.

Befitting the pattern of the revolution, she helped lead.

When she died, the Martian Assembly declared a period of mourning that would last for three days.

And that is where we will end things.

It has been my great privilege to tell you about the Martian Revolution.

I hope you have found it as fascinating as I have.

I wouldn't be here talking about all this if I didn't love it.

I'm passionate about these events and these peoples and what it means for us here today, wherever we are in the solar system.

And who knows?

Maybe I'll come back, because there's still the Nairobi Revolution to talk about.

And of course, we cannot forget the children of Saturn.

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