11.22-Leopold's Leviathan

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.22 Leopold's Leviathan

As the refugee convoy that evacuated Lunaport in August 2250 headed towards Mars, they sped away from a planet that was falling apart and toward a planet that was putting itself back together.

The fighting around Lunaport marked the first shots in the corporate war down on Earth as OmniCorps and III Corps mobilized for the first great power war in living memory.

Both sides directed their respective security services to attack or defend key points across the globe, setting up what would become the major theaters in Africa, South Asia, and the islands.

That is what the refugee convoy left in the rearview mirror.

In front of them was Mars, which had just emerged from from the crucible of the independence days and had now declared itself the Independent Republic of Mars.

Whatever that meant and whatever that was.

But before we follow this convoy to Mars, I want to briefly touch on the mess they were leaving behind.

As I just said, after the evacuation of Lunaport, everybody started moving into position, digging in.

fortifying their defenses and probing possible weak points in each other's lines.

Skirmishes started breaking out.

Now I do not want to derail this entire project by spending the next 50 episodes talking about the fracking corporate war.

I mean Sennelise Roush's history of the corporate war, The Great Fire, runs seven volumes, the entire second volume of which covers just the events between Lunaport and the end of 2250.

But while I am not getting sucked into all that, I do want to at least cover the fall of Kamal Singh and the arrival of the competence.

Nothing sunk Kamal Singh so much as his failures.

People can forgive a lot if you win, or at the very least, ignore a lot if you win.

Had Kamal Singh retaken control of Mars, the fact that he engaged in all these clandestine shenanigans and lied his head off about all of it would have been brushed aside.

Who cares?

But because he failed, all of those clandestine shenanigans were seen in a different light.

Now that his actions had driven Mars to full independence and started a war, his conduct was egregious and criminal.

After the debacle at Lunaport, his days could be numbered in hours.

Because these were the kinds kinds of failures that turn friends and supporters into people who will quietly whisper, I was actually against him the whole time.

Inside the upper echelon of the Omnicore leadership, there was a movement, especially among A-class operational executives, to finally do something about the rot at the top.

It had only been six years since the death of the ancient Vernon Bird, and his S-class successors had driven the company into a ditch.

Timothy Warner provoked a revolution.

Jin Wong had tried to clean it up, but was too weak and had given away too much.

Now Kamal Singh had taken a fragile situation and smashed it to smithereens.

Omnicorps was now in a war they could not easily extract themselves from.

In fact, they had to win that war or it was all over.

So the Board of Directors convened and elected an Emergency Executive Committee composed of the heads of four key divisions, Security Services, Personnel, Production, and Finance.

And to fill those positions, they promoted people with genuine operational knowledge of what was going on in those divisions, as opposed to the S-class executives who merely presided over things and were now positively ruining things.

These four new division heads would be joined by a new CEO who would chair this committee.

Her name was Sophia Nunn, formerly an A-class executive in the production division.

These five became colloquially known as the Competents, and they would take over Omnicore with the single goal of winning the war.

Kamal Singh, meanwhile, was taken into custody.

Unlike Timothy Werner, there would be no golden parachute for him.

Singh would spend the rest of his life in an Omnicore security station.

But speaking of our old friend Timothy Werner, guess what?

He's still kicking around out there.

He still has supporters despite everything, people who believed in his vision, who believed that even though the new protocols were causing temporary dysfunction, in the end what emerged would be a better, stronger, and faster Omnicore.

Werner and his family watched as Jin Wong gave away the Phosph to the Martians, and then watched as Kamal Singh tried to get it back, but instead drove Omnicor into a war.

This all did nothing so much as convince Werner that he'd been right all along.

Omnicor never should have backed down.

They never should have compromised.

They never should have gotten rid of him.

And he started to think, maybe there's a way to get them to take me back.

Not for his benefit, mind you, but for theirs.

But like I said, we are going to leave all that behind for the moment, and instead turn our attention to what lies ahead for the refugee convoy fleeing Lunaport.

What in the world is this thing, the Republic of Mars?

More than any other individual Martian, Marcus Leopold would be the one who answered that question.

The Martian Assembly had appointed him to lead a committee to produce a draft of organizing principles that would define the legal and political structure of the Martian Republic.

How shall we be constituted?

Well, perhaps we need a constitution.

There were technically six other people on this constitutional committee, but Leopold was the principal author and architect of what emerged.

And in fact, I'm getting a lot of this from a great book by Aquin Uburu called Leopold's Leviathan, the creation of the first Martian Constitution.

Uburu makes it clear Leopold crafted and molded the original draft from start to finish, and it was stamped with his own particular vision for what the Martian Revolution meant.

And for us today, it stands as a statement of principles for what the victors of the independence days wanted for Mars.

Well, most of them anyway.

In Leopold's Republic of Mars, the Martian people were sovereign, and their voice was expressed in the Martian Assembly.

Every Martian was automatically a member of the Assembly by virtue of being a Martian.

and the decisions of the Assembly would be the first and last word in all political matters.

But Leopold did recognize that relying on the Assembly for routine matters and detail work was unwieldy.

So when he laid out the system of administration, with a cabinet of ministries mirroring the old departments of Mars Division, like accounts, personnel, extraction, engineering, trade, education, and justice, the assembly would vote for ministers to lead those departments, and then the ministers would have freedom to act without needing to bring every single proposal to the assembly for approval.

This opened up some daylight between the sovereign assembly and the functioning government and administration.

Leopold's constitution laid out the scope and responsibility of each ministry.

The Martian Guard was incorporated into the Constitution tasked with internal peacekeeping, intelligence, and law enforcement.

And as we'll talk about in a second, the Martian Navy was incorporated as the Corps of External Defense.

The ministries would be led and coordinated by a chief executive officer.

But critically, this was not itself an elected office, but rather a role that would rotate among the ministers on an annual basis.

Because of the annual nature of this position, Leopold dug way back into the history books and dubbed this office Consul.

And though the office was much weaker than the Roman consuls of old, in times of emergency the consul could be vested with emergency powers.

But when it was functioning properly, the consul and the ministers were meant to be trusted servants of the Martian people, not their lords and masters.

At its heart, Leopold's Leviathan was an egalitarian commonwealth.

The old omnicore class system, which Leopold and his comrades in the Mons Cafe had been railing against for years, was abolished.

Every Martian was now an equal, free citizen.

No longer would some Martians have rights and privileges denied to other Martians.

There would, of course, continue to be a stratification of job responsibilities, but from here on out there would be no sabs and there would be no seeds, at least officially.

The Mons Café were the creators of every Martian matters, and so it should come as no surprise that Leopold's Constitution treated every Martian as equal to every other Martian.

A drone tech was just as important, valuable, and worthy of dignity as the console,

at least officially.

To bolster this legal and political equality, Leopold's Constitution also established a general equalizing of credits and resources.

The details would be worked out by the Accounts Ministry and the Personnel Ministry, but the basic premise is that everything depended on FOSS5, and FOSS5 depended on everyone.

So the FOSS5 would be owned by all and shared by all.

FOSS5 would be everyone's responsibility and everyone's reward.

So the Constitution mandated a radical reorientation of credits with every Martian having an equal share.

Well, basically an equal share.

This was met with hooting and hollering down in the Warrens, but it was met with some grumbling among the old A and B classes for obvious reasons.

They were used to their lifestyles, and those lifestyles were about to be upended and probably for the worse.

But that said, there were also a lot of A's and B's who were ideologically committed to the project.

Leopold, Darby, and Zhao were all B's.

The Mons Cafe group were nearly all B's, with a handful of A's and Ds in the mix.

So Zhao Lin spearheaded an aggressive appeal to the upper classes to get them to buy into the idea that the privileged minority who once got way more were now going to have to accept less so that everyone could share in the Phosphide profits equally.

And it mostly worked.

Leopold also embedded in the Constitution his personal pet project of creating a private sphere beyond the immediate reach and authority of the government.

Martians had previously been subjected to Omnicore's all-pervasive, all-intrusive system of infractions, violations, and punishments.

Now there would be times, places, and activities where Martians could just live their lives without being constantly monitored.

He resurrected ancient rights like freedom of thought, speech, and assembly.

He wrote in real checks to the government's ability to censor ideas and ban content.

He put in protections for people accused of violating the law.

Most of the recreational drug use that had been forbidden by Omnicor's corporate code, mostly as a means of harassing people, would now be allowed, as long as it didn't interfere with work.

Mostly, Leopold wanted to create a space for Martians to be more than just employees.

He wanted them to be citizens who just went to work.

And when they were not at work, they should be given the space to go about their lives without constantly looking over their shoulder.

While Leopold was inserting all these limits into his new constitution, Jose Calderon was busy paying them no mind at all.

How could he?

As commander of the Martian Guard, he was busy saving Mars and the Revolution from its myriad enemies.

Many enemies had been exposed and were in custody, but many more were presumably still on the loose.

Spies, saboteurs, fifth columnists, omnicorps sympathizers.

He formed a special intelligence branch inside the guard whose job it was to cultivate networks of informants who could keep him appraised of suspicious activity.

Rewards were offered for information.

Threats were issued for harboring, sympathizing, or hiding loyalists.

And while you can see how obviously this isn't trending in a great direction, the events of the Independence Days proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it wasn't paranoid paranoid to be worried about subversion and treason.

And what Calderone's red caps uncovered in the first few months after the Independence Days sure did not convince him to be anything but aggressively suspicious of everyone.

What he was doing, he was doing to save Mars and the Revolution.

And Calderon would come to see some of Leopold's rights as downright suicidal.

Where Calderone really pushed the envelope was the treatment of Earth-born Earthlings.

Calderone neither liked nor trusted them.

As we've discussed before, when he heard Mars for the Martians, he heard Martian-born Martians.

He would frankly prefer to be able to snap his finger and send all Earthlings back to Earth.

For sure, he thought every single one of them was a potential enemy of Mars and the Revolution.

He believed the way to deal with all the prisoners in the stockades, for example, was to execute the leaders and deport the rest.

He rather bluntly advocated for mass deportation of Earthlings.

During meetings of the stewards, which is to say, Ivana Darby and the other old department heads now administering Mars during this political interregnum, Calderón said Leopold's plan for equal citizenship was great, as long as that was limited to Martians, true Martians, Martians born on Mars.

He suggested to Leopold that incentives for Martians to have more Martian-born children be written into the Constitution, as well as tight restrictions on further immigration from Earth.

Mars is for the Martians now.

So as Leopold drafted his Constitution, Calderone and the Red Caps pursued an aggressive policy of surveillance, detainment, and interrogation of Earthlings for as long as they would be allowed to do so.

Calderone's aggressive anti-earthling bias was already causing friction with some of the other stewards, but it also caused friction inside the ranks of the Martian Guard.

Sure, a lot of the officers and rank and file in the Guard eagerly supported Calderon's tactics and worldview.

He was charismatic and persuasive.

But others were increasingly unhappy with what they were being asked to do.

And those members of the Guard looked not to Calderon for leadership and direction, but Alexandra Clare.

Now before we talk about Alexandra Clare here in this moment, I do need to go back and insert something I somehow managed to miss but is very important.

When I was talking about the slate of speakers who rose to denounce Mabel Dorr and call for her removal as director of Mars Division, I failed to mention that Alexandra Clare was not just among them, but one of the key voices.

Though she had initially supported Dorr both privately and publicly, by the end of 2249, Claire had grown disenchanted.

Dorr's disastrous reaction to the Gemini vid sealed the deal.

Claire's speech was a bitter blow to Mabel Dorr, who had once tried to cultivate Claire as a protégé, and now felt not just politically, but personally betrayed.

Claire's ongoing romantic relationship with Zhao Lin kept her in the orbit of the Mons Cafe group.

and that's for sure partly why she followed them in denouncing Dorr during the independence days.

But by by 2250, Claire had stopped passively receiving a political education from Zhao and the others.

She had developed her own ideas and now joined their debates and tried to steer them towards her way of thinking, not the other way around.

Unlike them, Claire came from the D classes, down with the lowest ranks of the old class system, deep in the Warrens.

She identified with the most exploited and least compensated population of Mars.

Those were her people, and always would be.

And that meant anyone who was being exploited.

So though she was a fourth-generation Martian and no more thrilled with newbie earthling bungling than anyone else, that did not mean those earthlings did not suffer the same conditions she did.

Nor were they exempt from the abuse and trauma of Timothy Werner and the new protocols.

All the injustices, the contract annulments, the deportations.

It had come for them too.

When it came time to organize and resist in 2247, there were absolutely Earthlings ready to fight for Mars.

There had been earthlings inside Stockade 7 who fought and died right alongside her.

And so, for Claire, the idea that being an Earthling meant that you shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else just meant they were creating a new designated group for exploitation, this time not based on employment class, but place of birth.

And for Claire, it was not class or identity that concerned her.

but exploitation itself.

That is what she abhorred, and that is what she wanted to end.

As she had a direct relationship with Marcus Leopold, she implored him to make rights and citizenship universal and not give in to Calderon's narrow-mindedness.

Leopold tended to agree with her, but both he and Zhaolin did have some notion that even if citizenship did not have to come with a birthplace, there might be a different component that needed to be taken into consideration.

Just as earthlings who fought for Mars in the Revolution did not deserve to be excluded from the Republic of Mars, what about Martians who betrayed Mars?

Not just the likes of Lancelot Schmidt on Earth, but Martian-born Martians were sitting in the stockades because they'd joined Bruno October's loyalist uprising.

Did they deserve to be included in the Republic just because they had been born on Mars?

They weren't so sure.

Many in the Martian Guard, meanwhile, shared Claire's sympathies and worldview, and were not comfortable with orders like, go get five Earthlings and bring them in for questioning.

Doesn't matter who you grab, just grab five and bring them in.

This, frankly, frankly, did not seem right.

And in the months after independence, some of them started marking their red caps with a little black line right above the left eye.

It was a black mark that was small enough to escape notice, but would be instantly recognizable to those who knew what it meant.

And it is from these little black lines that the black caps were born.

On October 15, 2250, the refugee convoy finally arrived in the environs of Mars to a great outpouring of sympathy and support.

Shippers who had been involved in the Battle of Phobos, or those who had recently sorted themselves towards Mars in the aftermath, reunited with friends and family.

Booth Gonzalez tearfully welcomed his brother Marco and sister Victoria, but their mother and three other siblings never got off Lunaport, and their whereabouts were unknown.

Also emerging from this convoy were a group of high-ranking Omnicorps container fleet officers led by Commander Cartwright and Commander Way.

After the agreement of 2248 was signed, both had been reassigned to non-essential desk jobs, and so both were at fleet headquarters in the San Jose dome when the crisis over the Gemini Vids got going.

When Kamal Singh staged his little coup, Cartwright, Wei, and a group of 17 other officers who were leaders in the mutiny of 2247 recognized that this change in management was a threat to them all.

After the Battle of Phobos, Cartwright signaled his long-cultivated contacts in Bicor and said, you have to get us out of here, now.

So they were smuggled out of the San Jose dome, taken to Bicor's spaceport in Delhi, from there transported to an orbital platform on the eve of the evacuation of Lunaport, and from there joined the refugee convoy that sped away from Earth.

When they arrived, they were the highest-ranking shippers in the environs of Mars, and they were pretty universally known and respected by the Martians thanks to their good work during the mutiny of 2247.

And the ships around Mars had increased their organizational alignment between container ships, security ships, and cargo ships, both before the Battle of Phobos and during the rescue and recovery operations in the aftermath.

Cartwright and Wei would now take over command of what the Constitution of Mars was about to formally incorporate as the Martian Navy, and Cartwright and Wei would become the Martian Navy's first two admirals.

The consensus among the shippers, and confirmed by Cartwright and Way, was that the fight was back on Earth.

Now they would obviously never leave Mars defenseless, but Omnicore was calling all its ships back to help defend their positions around Earth and Luna.

They did not appear to have any intention of sending another fleet towards Mars.

So in the shippers' mind, they needed to organize themselves into a fighting fleet as soon as possible and go back to Earth to help III Corps break Omnicore once and for all.

Mars would be safe and free free when Omnicore was broken.

And that fight was not here on Mars, but back there on Earth.

Plus, they all had friends, family and loved ones who had been left behind in Lunaport, and now face God knows what kind of treatment, to say nothing of the dead, who needed to be avenged.

As Cartwright and Way started organizing the Martian Navy, The Martians down on the surface waited for Leopold to present his draft constitution to the Assembly for debate and ratification.

While they waited, the Martians were rocked by a scandal that would have profound effects on the early history of the Martian Republic and dire consequences for one person in particular, Mabel Dorr.

Ever since the Independence days, Mabel Dore had been held in custody by the Martian Guard, first at their headquarters in the Prime Dome, which she was assured was for her own safety.

And then, after the immediate violence receded, she was transferred to house arrest at a suite at a luxury hotel.

And there she sat.

She protested to anyone who would listen that she had never betrayed Mars and would never betray Mars.

Whatever her mistakes had been, the idea that she was involved in a plot to hand Mars back to Omnicor was ludicrous.

As for the events at the fields of Earth, she had been attacked first, and her guards had acted in self-defense.

Jose Calderón was not convinced by any of this.

Her coddling of the Earthlings and inexplicable reaction to the Gemini vid suddenly became explicable if the answer was treasonous conspiracy.

And she could not have been alone in that conspiracy.

So as the guard fanned out through the corridors and fiveways hunting for loyalists among the Earthlings, Cal Darone directed his most trusted lieutenants in the intelligence branch to make a thorough investigation of all of Dorr's aides, associates, plus all the former department heads, their aides, and their associates.

Nearly all of them were veterans of the Society of Martians, and they had risked their necks fighting Werner and and the new protocols, and then risked their lives during the three days of red.

All of them were deeply offended at the implication they would ever do anything to betray Mars.

But then the Guard opened their investigation of Kinder James.

Kinder James had been there right next to Mabel Dore in the director's suite debating what to do as they now stood at the head of a violent revolution.

After that, you may recall, he had been appointed head of personnel and was the main architect of the job-sharing program during the mutual blockade.

But at some point, James had grown disenchanted with the course of the revolution.

James's biographer, Paulin Joss, writes in their biography of him, which is called Earth Snake, Kinder James and the Betrayal of Mars, that James was moved by a mix of real concern for the Martians if they actually broke away from Omnicor.

Had it even occurred to anyone that Omnicore was the only company with the facilities to process and distribute the Phosph we extract?

No, anyone?

But there were also several personal slights he apparently couldn't get over.

In particular, he resented Mabel Dorf for getting all the credit for everything anyone ever did.

So these fears and resentments festered as the influence of the Mons Cafe group and the Red Caps grew.

And in November 2249, he entered into treasonous correspondence with agents of Omnicore and tipped them off to a vulnerability in the Martian firewall.

That's right.

That was him.

Now no one at Omnicore knew it was him.

He took several steps to hide his identity, but it was him.

You can imagine his frustration when Jin Wang got this information that would allow her to retake Mars and did nothing with it.

Then you can imagine his brief delight when Kamal Singh suddenly tried to use it.

And then finally you can imagine his horror when that attempt failed.

Kinder James would now have to live the rest of his life worried about being exposed for his treason.

Now the good news is that he would not not have to live long under this cloud.

The bad news was that was because on November the 6, 2250, he got caught.

Calderone's intelligence unit eventually cracked a set of encrypted files that contained the residue of James' communications, residue that could not be scrubbed.

Within hours of this discovery, James was arrested and charged with treason against the Martian people.

This was a shocking turn of events, and apparently when Mabel Dorr was informed, she simply stood motionless for five minutes without saying a word.

Not only was she processing the personal betrayal by James, but she herself was being accused of complicity in a conspiracy she swore did not exist.

But it now

existed?

If Kindred James had betrayed them, how would anyone ever believe her now?

The first person outside the stewards to find out about James's arrest was the Mons Cafe adjacent poster named Kenji Grew.

Grew had become a prolific and influential poster by writing and then guiding anti-Door sentiment in 2249 and 2250.

His influence only grew when his attacks on her over the Gemini vids were so thoroughly vindicated.

Calderone leaked the details of James's betrayal to Grew, who published them in a damning expose.

He tied together the thread of events and revelations both before and after the Independence Days.

into a single coherent narrative that placed Mabel Dore at the center of a treasonous ring to hand Mars back to Omnicore.

He dismissed the idea that James had acted alone.

He was one of Mabel Dore's closest friends and allies.

None of it made sense if she was not the ultimate puppet master.

James's betrayal caused an angry fervor just as Marcus Leopold was ready to present his Constitution to the Assembly.

And in one sense, the betrayal helped him, and in another sense, it hurt him.

In the end, Leopold had rejected Calderon's limit citizenship, and instead listened to Claire.

He wrote into the Constitution that everyone on Mars when the Constitution was ratified would become a citizen of the Republic of Mars.

And in the debates that followed in the Assembly, the fact that Martians were guilty of working against Mars helped deflate the simplistic formulation of Martians good, earthlings bad.

Especially as Alexandra Clare led her Earthling comrades from Stockade 7 out so they could deliver dramatic testimony about their experiences and their commitment to Mars.

It would be crazy to deny them citizenship while handing it to the likes of Kinder James, who had betrayed them all.

Despite Calderon himself giving an impassioned speech in defense of true Martians, universal citizenship would be approved.

But Calderon was more successful challenging the limitations Leopold's constitution put on the Martian Guard's ability to identify and investigate the enemies of Mars and the Revolution, who were obviously still out there and obviously still a threat.

Leopold's vision was a pleasant fantasy that might work in the future, but would clearly be disastrous if implemented now.

This the Assembly agreed with.

So though Leopold's language about limiting the government's reach into the private lives of Martian citizens remained, further language was added granting an exemption to the Martian Guard if they were investigating crimes against the Republic.

And who would decide what was a crime against the Republic?

The language, helpfully, did not specify.

But other than these two contentious issues, the rest of the Constitution seemed fine.

Now during the debates over the Constitution, the Assembly did have to endure a run of individual Martians getting added to the docket who suggested their own ideas and edits, and in a few cases offering completely alternate constitutions that they had written themselves.

But the general will of the Martian Assembly was with Leopold.

So, other than the Crimes Against the Republic business, the draft he submitted just kind of became the Martian Constitution.

On December the 11th, 2250, the Martian Assembly gathered, and a ceremony that started out solemn and ended up boisterous, they ratified the first Martian Constitution.

Well, sorry, they just ratified the Martian Constitution.

They had no idea what they were enshrining that day would go down in history as the first Martian Constitution.

With the Constitution settled, the Martians could now turn their attention to what to do about all the prisoners they had in custody.

all these earthlings and earthworms.

They may have been granted citizenship, but that did not mean they were innocent of crimes against the Martian people.

And so, next week, the Martians will deal with these internal enemies, and they would also approve Cartwright and Way's plan to lead their newly constituted Martian Navy back to Earth to help III Corps press the space theater of the corporate war, which was now heating up across the globe.

And though that heat was felt everywhere, it was perhaps nowhere more consequentially felt than in the server farms of Nairobi.

Hoyerman, 23?

What are my

voice?

Here we go,

but

two other

people.

Check out the internet.

Video, as I said, obtain Wi-Fi and Mazarin with the local con ATNT Fiber with Al-Fi.

ATT connected location.

ATT Fiber has responsibility.

So I want to see the covert Wi-Fi extended ATNT connection.