11.17-Opposites Repel

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.17: Opposites Repel.

We ended last time in February 2249 with the explosion of a reactor at one of the main extraction sites on Tharsis.

To this day, we do not know precisely why the explosion happened.

It might have been an accident, it might have been counter-revolutionary Omnicore loyalists, or it might have been radical Martians.

The evidence remains thoroughly inconclusive.

But though no one would ever know why it happened, we know what the impact was, that it immediately escalated tensions on both Earth and Mars, tensions that had been building since the agreement of 2248 took effect, and which would be pulled tighter and tighter by a series of incidents over the rest of 2249 until they snapped completely in 2250.

And the most immediate impact of the Tharsis explosion was that it caused the Martians to miss their oh-so recently agreed-upon Phosph quota.

They had actually been hitting their ramped-up benchmarks laid out in the Agreement of 2248, but in April of 2249 they missed quota by 5%,

which caused a great deal of frustrating debates about how everyone should respond.

The explosion and the subsequent failure to meet quota brought into starker relief the divide between those who wanted the agreement of 2248 to work and those who did not.

Both Omnicore CEO Jin Wong and Mars Division Director Mabel Dore supported the agreement.

They wanted it to work.

After all, they were the ones who brokered it.

They believed it created a peaceful and stable path for both Earth and Mars to flourish.

And even if it was an awkward compromise, it was far better than the alternatives.

When Mars missed quota, Mabel Dore informed Wong, but said, under the circumstances, i.e.

the huge explosion, this isn't going to trigger a conflict between us, right?

You're not going to try to retake Mars because of this, right?

And Wong said, right,

because neither one of them wanted to disrupt or destabilize the so recently repaired and stabilized situation.

But there were those on both Earth and Mars who absolutely wanted to destabilize and disrupt the situation.

Dorr and Wong would thus wind up with their backs against each other, as they each faced in opposite directions to fend off radical opponents of the agreement of 2248.

Wong had to deal with ravantious executives like Kamal Singh, who, remember, hated Timothy Werner, but otherwise was an Omnicore supremacist.

Singh would be saying, look, they missed quota.

It's right there in the agreement.

Why haven't you initiated the recovery of Mars division yet?

Dorr, meanwhile, faced a growing movement of Martian patriots who were opposed to the whole notion of still being a part of Omnicore.

They opposed the agreement because they wanted true Martian independence.

Their response to the missed quota was, great, I hope Earth tries to reassert control over us.

We beat them once and we'll beat them again.

And this time, we'll leave them behind forever.

Jin Wang ultimately decided the spirit of the thing was more important than the letter of the thing.

On May the 6th, 2249, she issued a statement saying that Mars Division missing quota by 5% would not trigger any action due to the extraordinary circumstances involved.

And at least in terms of general popular appeal, she made the right call.

The news that there would not be a resumption of conflict between Earth and Mars was broadly cheered on both Earth and Mars.

The only ones not cheering were those actively seeking the resumption of conflict.

On the one side, that meant the group of patriotic Martian accelerationists who wanted Earth to try to reclaim Mars so Mars could break away from Omnicore for good.

and on the other were Omnicore Revanchists who just wanted to reclaim Mars full stop.

On Earth, these guys were known as Omnicore Supremacists, while on Mars they were known as Omnicore loyalists, but they were two sides of the same coin.

And especially after Wong's announcement that she would not press the quota issue, they became more formally tied together in a counter-revolutionary network bent on restoring Omnicore's direct control of Mars, whether the CEO of Omnicore wanted to or not.

At the top of this network was Kamal Singh.

For Singh, the idea of giving up control of Mars was insane.

It was an existential disaster for the company that needed to be undone as soon as possible.

The long-term implications of losing control of the FOSS V would be nothing short of catastrophic.

The Board of Directors and most of the executives supported the agreement of 2248 as a stable compromise, but Singh drew around him a group of allies and supporters in the Omnicore executive class, who strenuously disagreed, and who were willing to put their own resources towards the cause of reclaiming Mars, whether through official or unofficial channels.

While building out this network, Singh assiduously cultivated emigré Martians now living on Earth.

As I mentioned last time, there was a group of Martian-born Martians who nonetheless opposed the revolution and sided with OmniCorps.

They sided with OmniCorp so much that they chose exile on Earth over remaining on their home planet.

The definitive book about this group was written by Pastel Abbas.

It's called Emigray Earthworms, which, as you can tell from the title, is not exactly sympathetic, but Abbas's sourcing is so comprehensive and he goes into them in such detail that there's really no better place to go.

Nearly all of these émigré earthworms were from the A and B classes, and their leading voice was a guy called Lancelot Schmidt.

Schmidt was a second-generation A-class Martian.

Born and raised on Mars, he went to the Martian Academy and graduated from the University of Olympus.

He was as pure and true a Martian as you could find.

Except that while most Martians chafed at earthling condescension, Schmidt tended to agree with the attitude that the Martians were inferior, that they needed to be run by Earth because the Martians were simply not capable of doing it themselves.

He had been a vocal opponent of Martian resistance to Omnicor through the 2240s, and after the three days of red, he faced a lot of threats and harassment.

When the agreement of 2248 was signed and people could once again travel between Earth and Mars, Schmidt made the difficult choice to relocate with his family to Earth.

He joined a group of other Martians opposed to the revolution, and they were all settled in the Mexico City dome.

They weren't exactly showered with rewards for their loyalty.

Their living facilities were fine and they were given an expense stipend, but it's not like any Earthlings were clamoring to treat them like VIPs.

They were just some refugee Martians.

And so they were pleasantly surprised when Kamal Singh came around, sympathizing and offering assistance.

Anything he could do to help, just let him know.

But one of the things Singh did say to them was that maybe they should not consider Earth their new permanent home, that together they could retake Mars and restore the old proper order.

On Mars, meanwhile, Singh was now also in contact through several levels of intermediaries with Bruno October, who was shaping a loyalist underground.

October drew first from other ex-security service personnel still living on Mars.

Most of them came from the Martian-born wing of the old security services, a group which accounted for about a third of the total security force.

Being a Martian in the security services was not exactly a way to win friends among your fellow Martians, so they tended to identify far more with Omnicor's interests than Martian interests.

Most of them had faced further embittering treatment after the revolution and were very receptive to recruitment into loyalist counter-revolutionary cells.

These cells started forming and linking and joining these ex-security service personnel to reactionary dissidents in both the A and B classes.

Martian-born executives like Lancelot Schmidt chose to leave Mars, but others couldn't make that choice, despite still opposing the revolution.

And now they were in a position to help undo that revolution.

The last recruiting ground for this Omnicore supremacist organization also turned out to be at the center of a conflict dividing the revolutionary Martians, recent Earthling arrivals on Mars.

Obviously during the period of the mutual blockade, no one had gone from Earth to Mars, or vice versa.

But right up until the moment the three days of red hit, Mars Division had always been receiving new personnel from Earth, most of them routed to the newer colony of Elysium.

When the agreement of 2248 took effect, Mabel Dorr knew that it was imperative to turn back on that stream of new arrivals.

especially given the little exodus of people heading back to Earth.

But though new arrivals of Earthlings had been a regular part of Martian life, plenty of Martians had hostile prejudices against the Earthlings.

They were dumb, they were clumsy, they were weak.

Less scrupulous Martians were always hovering around ready to exploit and degrade new arrivals.

And after the revolution, this only increased, as more Martians felt empowered to indulge their anti-earthling prejudices.

They would extort them, humiliate them, rip them off, trap them in protection rackets, or force them to work extra shifts, but log their hours under the name of a Martian, taking the day off.

So it was not hard to convince some of them to join the loyalist cause.

Just as the Society of Martians had documented all the problems with the new protocols, Bruno October's loyalist group documented the Martian abuses of Earthlings and tied those abuses to other dysfunctional aspects of post-revolutionary life on Mars.

There was a general decline in workplace discipline that was blamed on the lack of permanent supervisors.

There was also growing political conflicts among the Martians that threatened to plunge the whole planet back into chaos.

All of this information was funneled back to Kamal Singh, who compiled the dossier in September 2249, which he presented to the board of directors that made life on Mars seem broken and hellish.

It shouldn't shock you to learn this dossier was leaked and spread generally across Earth media channels.

The videos showing abuse of earthlings on Mars circulated especially in the parts of Africa and Southeast Asia where most of the new immigrants to Mars were coming from.

It was an obvious ploy to depress the amount of new workers going to Mars to disrupt Mars' chances of getting phosphide production permanently back on track.

And it kind of worked.

Mabledore and the other senior Martian leaders took the abuses of the Earthlings seriously.

And in particular, Omar Ali, longtime ally of Mabel Dore and now senior commander of the Martian Guard, believed it was his job to crack down.

Ali believed the Martian Guard was there to maintain order, uphold justice, and defend the revolution.

So of course he had the Martian Guard spending a lot of time and resources jousting with Bruno October's loyalist organization.

But he also believed the Martian Guard should defend the rights and dignity of everyone living on Mars, including newbie Earthlings.

Both he and Dorr agreed they needed to prevent abuses of the Earthlings, both because it was the right thing to do, but also because they needed to firmly establish Mars could govern and police itself, and that people choosing to relocate to Mars would be welcomed and taken care of, not abused and exploited.

So not too long after the dossier exposing all these abuses surfaced on Earth in September 2249, Ali investigated a specific racket inside the Martian Guard, where vital supplies were being systematically denied Earthlings and routed to Martian hands.

This left that group of earthlings malnourished and sick.

It was pretty appalling, frankly.

So Ali opened an investigation and found that the behavior of the guards involved was pretty brazen and easy to prove.

With it being such an open and shut case, Ali dismissed 22 members of the guard who were implicated and then proudly announced that Mars took the rule of law seriously and Earthlings would be protected, not abused.

But the 22 guards he dismissed had all fought during the three days of Red.

They had now spent their time risking their lives trying to stop loyalists from retaking control of Mars.

Their only crime here was prioritizing the needs of Martians over Earthlings, which many Martians didn't actually have a problem with.

For example, Jose Calderon, who started piping up with criticisms of Omar Ali's leadership of the Martian Guard, criticism that never failed to generate sympathetic murmuring among the Red Caps.

Meanwhile, Mabel Dorr publicly supporting Ali and the dismissal of the 22 generated among the Red Caps disgruntled murmuring.

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Because of her public support for the Earthlings, Mabel Dore was now going to start having trouble with Jose Calderón and the Martian nationalist wing of the revolution.

At exactly the same time, though, she was also dealing with sharp criticism from the Mons Café group that was fast becoming the radically egalitarian wing of the revolution.

To frame their positions, They revived ancient themes from pre-modern Earth revolutions, specifically the themes of liberty and equality.

By liberty, they meant Martian independence, a demand that only increased in volume with each passing day.

On the second anniversary of the Three Days of Red, for example, they held a big ceremony in the commissary at headquarters in the Prime Dome, where several speakers accidentally went off script and said, actually, we don't need to call for independence.

We are already independent.

We already declared independence.

All we need to do is recognize something that has already happened.

But while the question of independence had been contested from the start, the Monscafe group was breaking new ground in pursuit of equality.

Because by equality, they meant the abolition of the class system.

In the build-up to the revolution, during those infuriating days under Timothy Warner, the injustices inflicted by the class system took a backseat to injustices inflicted by the new protocols.

But now that Mars was for the Martians, what did they want to do with their newfound liberty?

What kind of society did they actually want to live in?

How should people be treated?

What should their rights be?

What should their responsibilities be?

And here they turned to a scathing critique of the whole idea of employment class defining a Martian's existence.

Zhaolin's next video project was called Every Martian Matters, and it documented all the different jobs Martians performed, from the lowliest tech all the way up to the offices of Mabel Dore herself.

The point was that all of them were essential to the collective functioning of the colony.

Every Martian matters.

And from this came the spreading belief that if every Martian mattered, then no one was worth more than anyone else.

What's the point of continuing the class system?

Weren't they all in this together?

Remember, we did this thing, we did it together?

The rising call for the abolition of the class system put them at odds with Mabel Dore and most of the current department heads.

Dorr was not opposed to reforming the class system.

She just wanted to make it more meritocratic.

But it would be far too disruptive and chaotic to abolish the class system entirely.

For the colony to function, there needed to be a hierarchical decision-making structure in place.

Every Martian matters, sure, but not every job is the same.

Anyone can operate a janitor boss.

Only a few people can properly plan and oversee an entire phosph extraction site.

So it was not unreasonable that people doing the jobs that only only a few people could do would get better pay and privileges than people doing the jobs that anyone could do.

But that said, Dorr did not want to alienate those calling for the abolition of the class system, because the last thing she needed was further conflicts that would make the agreement of 2248 fall apart.

Now I said that most of the department heads were opposed to abolishing the class system.

It was really all of them except for one, Marcus Leopold in the legal department.

Leopold was still plugging away rewriting the corporate code book for Mars Division, and one of his big focuses was ensuring that all Martians would be treated equally regardless of their class.

He wanted all the groundwork laid in advance for what he himself had concluded would be the next step of the revolution, abolishing those classes entirely.

So like any prohibition on certain classes being barred from certain areas of the colony were eliminated entirely.

Anyone could go anywhere.

All infractions would now come with the same punishment regardless of class, and then he started leaning heavily on the finance department to form an equal salary structure so that nobody was getting paid more than anybody else.

But above all, they started pressing Mabel Dorr to commit to abolishing the class system.

Ever since the three days of red, Leopold's position had been to not do anything to cause a breach with Dorr.

But now he started to feel more comfortable challenging her particular vision of the revolution.

Mabel Dorr may have been the loudest voice at the beginning, but that did not mean she had to remain the loudest voice forever.

And here, they finally got Mabel Dore to trip over the fine line she had been walking.

She didn't want to infuriate the D-classes, who were really starting to enjoy the idea of abolishing the class system, so she really didn't want to say she was against abolishing the class system.

But at the same time, she didn't want to abolish the class system.

Frustrated with Dorr's vague platitudes and resistance to abolishing the system, Leopold and his comrades orchestrated an ambush in the Martian Assembly.

On November 13, 2249, Dorr was presenting a plan on new education initiatives in a session of the Martian Assembly.

When her presentation ended and the Assembly was invited to comment, she was led by a series of carefully crafted questions to say testily that she had never said abolishing the class system was unthinkable, that she had always and would always be open to all possibilities.

Except she had said that.

Back in May of 2249, Dorr had responded to a chat memo written by Angeline Coles.

Coles, you may remember, had drafted Restructuring Mars, a blueprint for a better run, more humane, more independent Mars division.

And though Coles had been in the society of Martians, she had long been on the more conservative end of things.

She opposed independence.

She wasn't even wild about autonomy.

But she did believe that a better run, more humane, and more independent Mars division division was possible.

In a chat memo written May 28, 2249, Coles outlined how the class structure needed to be maintained to preserve order and stability.

And in response to this chat memo, Mabel Dore had responded, you guessed it, quote, abolishing the class system is unthinkable.

A copy of both Cohes' chat memo and Dorr's response had been leaked, and it was now waved in front of the Martian Assembly for all to see.

Mabel Dore had said exactly what she said she had never said.

Getting caught out like that was a rare mistake for Dorr, and by her own later assessment she was tired and had simply forgotten she had ever said that.

But her credibility took a huge hit, especially down in the Warrens.

Growing dissatisfaction with Dorr linked the Mons Cafe wing of the Revolution, who wanted liberty and equality, with Jose Calderon and the Red Caps, who were aggrieved about the treatment of their comrades and just Dorr's general earthling sympathies.

Both wanted Martian independence, which Dorr seemed determined to deny.

As those two wings of the revolution came together, they also linked with Omnicorps' rival corporations back on Earth.

Ever since the three days of Red, both Bicorp and T Corps had been salivating at the chance to break Mars away from Omnicor's control.

Above all, they wanted to undo the contract that gave Omnicorp monopoly rights to the solar system.

It was with understandable disappointment that they saw the agreement of 2248 get signed, which seemed to permanently entrench Mars inside Omnicore.

But they continued to have an interest in cultivating true Martian independence.

So they continued to work with and talk with and plot with those on Mars who wanted to keep pushing for independence.

And what was on offer from these corporations was material and financial support when Mars broke free of Omnicore.

They also said they would pay a higher price for FOSS-5 and promised that Mars would not become one of their corporate subsidiaries.

They would be free and independent.

So by the end of 2249, there was a pretty active conspiracy forming that linked agents on Earth with agents on Mars.

It operated in parallel to that Omnicore loyalist organization we talked about, even as they each pulled in perpendicular directions.

In November 2249, Kamal Singh got hold of intercepted transmissions proving that executives at Bikor were in contact with Martians and plotting actions to break Mars away from OmniCorps.

Singh took this to the board of directors saying, this is outrageous.

One corporation supporting the internal sabotage of another corporation was a clear violation of several contracts all the corporations had signed.

And that's how Singh portrayed it, that Bikor was trying to wreck Omnicor's internal operations.

This revelation put Jin Wong in a position she did not want to be in, because this violation called for immediate retaliation that could not be avoided, and if Bikor persisted, it might ultimately be the cause of something that had not happened in a very long time, and that was war between the corporations.

But nobody wanted that, so it was very unlikely to happen.

With the latest evidence in place, Kamal Singh could paint a pretty damning and alarming picture.

That the Martians were incapable of governing themselves, that they were suffering from internal political conflicts that would plunge the planet into chaos, that they routinely abused earthlings, driving down immigration numbers and threatening the workforce, and thus overall Phosph production, and now proof that the Martians were implacabed to independence and in league with our biggest rivals to strip us of our most valuable commodity.

Singh started to gain more adherence to his more aggressive program of taking back Mars now before it was lost to them forever.

Back on Mars, meanwhile, the uptick in loyalist activity allowed more patriotic Martians to themselves paint a damning and alarming picture.

That Omnicore was never going to to let them be free.

That all they were doing was biding their time and waiting for the right moment to come back.

The Martians knew a loyalist organization existed, though they could not nail it down nor identify its leaders.

They knew that there was a whole group of OmniCore executives back on Earth who wanted to take back control of Mars.

This caused the Martians to step up their own calls to be more aggressive.

That we can't wait.

They're coming for us right now.

And indeed, the Martian Guard was picking up bits of evidence that something big was being planned by the loyalists.

So, if Mabel Dorr was going to support Earthlings, punish patriotic Martians, refuse to abolish the class system, and refuse to lead the Martians to true independence, maybe she wasn't the leader Mars needed.

Maybe she was just in the way.

So, both sides used the existence of the other as justification for their own increasing radicalism, stridency, and willingness to take bigger and bolder risks to achieve their goals.

Not because either side was paranoid, not because the other side didn't exist.

The threats were real.

Kamal Singh and Lancelot Schmidt and Bruno October really were engaged in an active operation to take back control of Mars.

The Mons Cafe Group and the Martian Guard really were in active talks to declare independence from OmniCorp and divert FOSS5 to their corporate rivals.

It was all real.

And their mutual hostility and diametrically opposed endgames meant the tenuous hold the agreement of 2248 had over Earth and Mars was simply not sustainable.

And I think we can finally date the real unraveling of the agreement of 2248 to December the 20th, 2249.

Why can we pinpoint it so specifically?

Because that's the day Omar Ali was assassinated.

Ali was leaving his office in the prime dome, flanked by several officers and aides, when he was approached by a man wearing a Martian Guard uniform.

This man said he had critical information that he could only share with Ali, so Ali said, Okay, what is it?

And the guy walked up, pulled out a neutron gun set to max, and fired on Ali at point-blank range, killing him instantly.

The surprised officers and aides with Ali dropped the assassin, but he had done what he'd come to do.

Omar Ali was dead.

Now, unlike the Tharsis explosion, where we don't really know who did it, we know everything about Ali's assassination.

The assassin's name was Tala Batista, a D-Class Martian who happily left an extensive account of why he was going to do what he then went off and did.

He briefly referenced the dismissal of the 22, but was mostly fixated on the fact that he himself had been denied a place in the Martian Guard because he'd been busted as a part of a price-gouging scheme taking advantage of Earthlings.

So when he applied to serve in the Guard, he was denied.

because of his involvement in that scheme.

So Batista nursed this grudge for months and eventually decided he needed to do something about that earthling lover Omar Ali, who was not worthy of leading the Martian Guard.

So the funny thing about this is that we have all this.

Obviously Batista did it.

It's all on video.

And we know why.

We've got this whole little manifesto laying it all out for us.

They also conducted interviews with co-workers and friends confirming that Batista had said all kinds of menacing things in the months leading up to the assassination, but they just thought he was blowing off steam.

So, So, Tala Batista did it, and he did it for exactly the reasons he said he did it.

But that did not stop conspiracy theories from immediately taking hold.

Martian patriots convinced themselves Batista was a loyalist stooge trying to undermine Martian solidarity and sow chaos.

The loyalists, meanwhile, could not believe Batista was not put up to it by radical Martian patriots who were angry at Omar Ali for getting in their way.

Neither could believe it was just some disgruntled guy with a chip on his shoulder acting alone.

But it was.

Unless it wasn't.

But no, it was, I promise.

The assassination of Omar Ali was a huge blow to Mabel Dore personally.

Omar Ali had been one of her closest allies for years.

They were close friends, and it shook her badly.

And with the conspiracy theories flying around about who was really behind the assassination, the fragile stability that had prevailed under the agreement of 2248 started to permanently shatter as they all headed into the fateful year of 2250.

The Martian Revolution was not over.

The period of the agreement of 2248 was simply the Martian Revolution taking a deep breath before plunging back into the maelstrom.

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