11.16-Mars Autonomous

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.16: Mars Autonomous

The agreement of 2244 seemed to close the book on what people were now already calling the Martian Revolution.

The Martians and spaceshippers saw the agreement as a great victory, and indeed it was.

When the first anniversary of the Three Days of Red came along in July 2248, the celebrations were joyous, rapturous, and pretty continuously intoxicating.

Five years ago, this would have been unimaginable.

Five years ago, Vernon Bird was still alive.

Five years ago, change, any change at all, seemed impossible.

Things would just stay the same forever.

It had always been thus and would always be thus.

And now, here they stood, no longer under the thumb of the Earthlings.

They were free and autonomous.

After the celebrations wound down, however, one thing remained in front of their faces that was totally unchanged, the unavoidable fact of their lives, Phos V.

The Martians still needed to to extract Phos5 and ship it back to Earth, and that meant going back to work.

During the long months of the mutual blockade, the extraction work had basically ground to a halt.

After the holding stations were filled to capacity, there was nowhere to put anything new anyway.

A minimal line was kept active to cover Mars' own Phosph needs, but that was a tiny amount compared to what Earth demanded.

And now they had to go back to meeting Earth demands.

The good news for Earth was that deliveries of Phosph could resume immediately.

Because all those holding stations were filled to the brim, the Martians could start sending loads up into orbit as soon as the agreement was signed.

Commander Cartwright's Convoy Group 9, meanwhile, was already fully loaded with FOSS5 when they mutinied in July 2247, so all they had to do was plot a course for Earth.

Now a lot of nervous tension surrounded the initial resumption of these deliveries.

What would actually happen when Convoy Group 9 reached Earth?

Would the Earthlings really just let them deliver the load and then go back to Mars to get more?

Or would there be surprise shenanigans?

And on the other side, any one of the ships now arriving at Mars could turn out to be some kind of counter-revolutionary Trojan horse.

But these moments of possible early derailment of the Agreement of 2248 never materialized, mostly because in the wake of signing the agreement and the forced resignation of Timothy Werner, the Omnicore Board of Directors voted for Jin Wong to succeed him as CEO.

The tides had now shifted, and Wong had been among those early to the notion that Werner was a problem, not a solution, even when that was an unpopular and unwelcome opinion.

She grew her support and influence leading the negotiator faction on the board of directors after the Martians and spaceshippers rebelled, and though initially defeated, her support only grew as defiantly not negotiating didn't seem to do anything to end the crisis.

After the Lomerich leak, Wong finally won the revote on negotiating, then led those negotiations, then successfully sold the agreement to the board.

So it was not much of a surprise when they voted for her to become the next CEO on July 11, 2248.

But this was not a unanimous vote.

The handful of Werner dead-enders were thoroughly embittered against Wong and would never support her.

But there was also a group that revolved around Kamal Singh.

those critical of both Werner and any policy of appeasement towards the Martians and the spaceshippers.

They wound up becoming a small but vocal revantious minority on the board, always pushing for a harder line in the restoration of Earth's direct control over Mars.

But a healthy majority of the board supported Wang in the Agreement of 2248, so there were no shenanigans and there were no Trojan horses, just a desire to regain Omnicorce footing after years of alarming dysfunction and instability.

According to the Agreement of 2248, the autonomy of Mars division was contingent on the Martians hitting agreed-upon quotas of FOSS-5.

Now the Martians were not dumb about this.

The quota numbers could not just be arbitrarily decreed by Omnicore headquarters back on Earth.

The quota numbers had to be agreed upon by a six-person commission composed of three Martians and three Earthlings.

But also, to be clear, for the Martians, the quotas were a bit of a fictitious concession.

What happened if they stopped hitting quotas?

Omnicore would say, you didn't hit quota, that means you have to hand control back of Mars to us, and we would just do that?

Just because it says so on some document?

The whole reason Earth had been forced to negotiate that agreement was because they lacked a compelling mechanism to force the Martians back into subservience.

So we don't hit quota and Earth says they get to retake control of us?

Well, good luck with that.

So, you know, quotas, fine, whatever.

Who cares?

But they did go through the motions.

The Martians on the quota commission came in with instructions to set the levels at a number reflecting the new realities of life on Mars.

Like, for example, the Martians were not giving back their weekends.

Guaranteed days off was indeed one of the first and most permanent results of the Martian Revolution.

So the Martians refused to simply accept a quota number from Earth pegged to a schedule where everyone was working every day of their lives, because we are not doing that anymore.

They also had to take into account a major adjustment in personnel.

Part of the agreement of 2248 addressed the right of people currently living on Mars to return to Earth if they wanted.

And lots of people did.

Most of them were Earthlings born on Earth, now eager to get off Mars and go home.

There were senior executives like now former director of Mars Division Eva Zhang,

also a good chunk of the disarmed security services, about 65% of whom were Earthlings just serving a tour on Mars.

Plus there was a huge number of C-class supervisors on temporary rotation who wanted no part of post-revolutionary Mars.

But there was also, I should mention, a small number of Martian-born Martians who wanted no part of the revolutions and now departed for self-imposed exile on Earth.

They would wind up effectively as political refugees who would come under the benevolent care of one Kamal Singh.

The Martians would not stop anyone from leaving.

They agreed that anyone who wanted to leave Mars would be free to do so.

And so for the whole rest of 2248 and well into 2249, just about every ship that went back to Mars had people on board.

Your place was supposedly assigned by a lottery, but as you can imagine, there was a highly active black market in tickets off Mars.

But everyone who left Mars would do so voluntarily.

Mabel Dorr had announced that no one who wanted to stay on Mars would be forced to leave.

One of the other fast-entrenching legacies of the revolution would be a ban on deportations.

A hatred of deportation as punishment had been seared into the hearts and minds of the Martians.

So no one would be forced to leave.

We don't do that anymore.

And while this was considered one of the triumphs of the revolution, it did lead to some sticky issues with people who wanted to stay on Mars not because they wanted to make the revolution work, but because they wanted to make it fail.

For example, a former security service captain with the lovely name Bruno October.

Bruno October had been born in Alberta and was nearing the end of a seven-year tour in the security services on Mars.

Completing this tour would give him extra wages and special privileges once he returned to Earth.

And when he arrived in 2243, it seemed like the idea was just to serve his time and then come home.

No sweat, no problems, not even any real danger.

Then everything exploded after Vernon Byrd died.

October found himself constantly on the front lines combating popular unrest.

He was not present for any of the really big actions.

For October, it was just a long series of small confrontations, arrests, and raids.

The constant conflict radicalized him against the Martians and their resistance to the new protocols.

He came to really loathe the Martians for causing so much unrest and disorder.

They should just get back to work.

This loathing really cemented itself during the three days of Red.

October's unit was holding a corridor when it was mobbed and overwhelmed.

Half his men were killed, the rest were disarmed and then left injured on the floor as the riotous wave swept on without them.

He kept his head down during the period of the mutual blockade, but was appalled that the Martians were putting billions of lives at risk back on Earth just to satisfy their own little petty parochial demands.

So after the agreement of 2244, October decided he was not going to take the first ship back to Mars like many of his colleagues.

He was going to stay on Mars.

Not because he was reconciled to the revolution, but because he wanted to destroy it.

If you want to learn more, the best biography of October is Waynau Vokar's Company Man, Bruno October and the Counter-Revolution on Mars.

But though people like October would not be deported because we don't do deportations anymore, this was not actually a universally beloved change.

The problem wasn't with deportations per se, it was with who had been deported.

Deporting the wrong people was bad.

Deporting the right people?

Well, that could actually be very good.

And this reignited a long-running debate about who was really a Martian.

Because there were Martians who now rose in the assembly to say all earthlings ought to be expelled, don't you think?

Mars is for the Martian, right?

But the problem was that lots of Earthlings were first-generation Martian immigrants who planned to stay permanently.

There was nothing for them to go back to on Earth.

It's why they were on Mars in the first place.

So expelling Earthlings would get rid of a lot of people who supported the Revolution and were eager to help build a better Mars.

It would also leave out Martian-born Martians who remained Omnicore loyalists, and those people did exist, especially in the upper levels.

So who is the true Martian?

The person born on Earth who supported the revolution, or the person born on Mars who opposed it?

But mostly, when people rose up to say we should deport all the Earthlings, they were usually drowned out by chance of no deportations.

Among the Martian leadership, Mabel Dorr's position had long been that anyone who lived on Mars was a Martian.

She herself was a third-generation Martian and had deep claims to Martian roots on both sides of her family.

But from this position, she did not claim some blood and soil definition of Martian identity.

Meanwhile, Mons Cafe stalwarts like Ivana Darby, Chen Min, and the about-to-be-infamous Kenji Crew struck many of the same egalitarian notes as Mabel Dorr, but also believed that being a Martian was an active calling.

In their minds, an Earthling could absolutely be a Martian as long as they supported the revolution and the ideals of the revolution.

just as a Martian-born Martian could be an earthworm, their pejorative term for a Martian who sided with Omnicore against the revolution.

In their minds, the only way to be a true Martian was to support the revolution.

And this is in fact where the phrase, no true Martian, comes from.

But there had also always been people wanting to go back to good old-fashioned blood and soil definitions of what it meant to be a Martian.

This tradition dated back to the first society of Martians in the 22 teens and 20s.

People born on Mars were Martians.

People born on Earth were Earthlings.

It was simple.

One of the principal leaders reviving this tradition in the wake of the revolution was one of the new senior captains in the Martian Guard, a dedicated red cat patriot named Jose Calderon.

Calderon was a second-generation B-class Martian, the son of two advocates, he developed a strong sensitivity to the injustices perpetrated against Martians by Earthlings.

He joined the Society of Martians during the annulment crisis and started going down to the Warrens to make contacts.

Calderón turned out to be a highly effective organizer, but he always stuck to the Martian-born parts of the D-Class Warrens.

He stayed away from areas where new arrivals from Earth tended to congregate.

Those more recent arrivals didn't really know what it was like to be a Martian, did they?

They might even be more loyal to Earth than Mars.

Calderón started building out a network inside the Society of Martians of like-minded Martian-born Martians.

And there is a great biography of Calderón I really suggest everyone read by M.

John, called Red Captain, The Rise and Fall of Jose Caladrone.

Caladrone's network had activated during the three days of Red, and he himself was down in the Warrens when the riotous waves started spreading through the corridors and tunnels in five ways.

He helped talk a unit of security service personnel into just standing down, dropping their weapons, and walking away.

Then he took those arms and redistributed them to his fellow Martians, and then they all went up to the Prime Dome together.

Calderon briefly wound up in in charge of Boris Haptow for several hours after the Martians stormed the headquarters, and now he was a senior captain in the coalescing Martian Guard.

And in his mind, he was there to protect Martians.

It was, after all, called the Martian Guard.

While Calderon's network and the Mons Cafe group had different definitions of what it meant to be a Martian, they did agree on the issue of independence.

Support for independence had peaked at about 30% during the vote on the agreement of 2248.

Over the subsequent year, the issue receded as the routine of life settled back in.

Things seemed to be going okay.

We're not under any direct threat.

But the Mons Cafe group and Cal Deron's network had become committed ideologues.

Independence was coming.

They believed that.

And in fact, in the years to come, they would say it was already at this point an accomplished fact.

In the future, they would always date Martian independence to the Declaration in the Commissary on July 23rd, 2247, even if most people didn't recognize that for another three years.

But the point here is that the Mons Cafe group and Calderone's group were both going to be pushing for independence from Earth as a vital and necessary step to protecting Mars and the revolution.

Independence was coming, and if it didn't come on its own, they would make it happen.

But while we wait for independence, let's turn now to a word from our sponsor.

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So getting back to it.

While the Mons Cafe group and Calderone's network collaborated on advancing the the cause of independence, Calderone himself checked out when the Mons Café people started talking about reforming the class system.

Calderone didn't really care about that one way or the other, just so long as Martians, real Martians, were prioritized and taken care of.

But the Mons Café group was getting revved up by the idea of dramatically reforming the class system and possibly abolishing it entirely.

To them, Every Martian mattered.

Every job mattered.

All the revolutionary messaging had been about Martian unity.

Mars for the Martians.

We did this thing.

We did it together.

Martians of every class had sacrificed and fought and died.

So why should there be such a disparity in how wages, resources, and privileges were allocated?

If every Martian matters, every Martian should be able to share in the wealth they themselves were generating every single day.

Now in general, the revolution was already having a natural eroding effect on the class system.

The exodus of all the supervisors after the agreement of 2248 meant distinctions between the C and D classes broke down completely as the C class disintegrated.

At first, the D classes just carried on with their work without supervisors.

They usually worked in teams, people knew what their jobs were and did them.

Did we ever even need those guys looking over our shoulders?

But as the months ticked by, They did come to discover that the supervisors had been doing unavoidable clerical and communications work that none of them really wanted to do do and was now not getting done.

And that is how supervisor became a rotating job, not a permanent position.

Every week, someone would have to take their turn doing crummy supervisor work.

But though aspects of the class system were breaking down, plenty of Martians, including Mabel Dorr herself, did not presume that there would be any other viable way of Mars division functioning without some kind of hierarchy.

Any large-scale operation like this had a huge variety of jobs and responsibilities that were sorted by skill, importance, and magnitude into a hierarchy of functions that collectively got the job done.

But there was a such thing as senior leaders.

There were lowly jobs that didn't come with power or prestige.

And whether you liked it or not, humans just kept arranging themselves in this way, so much so that it seemed like the natural order of things.

Though it didn't make sense to try to overthrow that system, but instead simply make it as humane as possible, as comfortable and fulfilling as possible for everyone.

But some people are going to have more than others, because they have more responsibility than others.

And that's okay.

Now from his position as head of the legal department, Marcus Leopold would be working diligently to push against this.

He was drafting a more egalitarian corporate code that would apply to everyone equally.

During his many years as a defense advocate, he'd seen punishment multipliers attached to D-class infractions that never never attached to SABs who committed the same infraction.

Leopold and a team of fellow advocates who joined him in the legal department spent long hours revisiting the list of infractions and punishments to make them more equitable and just.

And this is, for the record, when deportations get permanently stricken from the list of punishments.

No one would ever be forcibly deported from Mars ever again.

Leopold also spent the rest of 2248 identifying times, places, and activities where the corporate code's reach would be severely curtailed.

The period of the mutual blockade had entrenched the idea of weekends and days off.

Now there had always been a subtle distinction between personal time and company time, but let's face it, they were always on company time.

Leopold's new corporate code would expand the definition of personal time.

It would also cut out most of the rules about what you could say, publish, or do during these periods.

It also cut victimless infractions that were only there to give the security services an easy way to harass people.

Leopold and the Mons Cafe group hoped to foster a new way of looking at things.

The Martians were not merely employees always and everywhere.

They would be people first.

Their jobs would just be their jobs, not their entire legal, political, and social identities.

Amabel Dorr mostly supported Leopold's effort.

but she did not see this as moving towards a full-fledged leveling of Martian society.

For her, this was about creating a humane society where everyone could find their talents and rise to the highest level of their capabilities.

To this end, she worked a lot with the Education Department to expand the reach and scope of Martian schools.

As we saw in the cases of Leopold and also Zhaolin and Nirvana Darby, Omnicore did have a system that recognized and elevated people with spectacular test scores.

But this was never really extended down to the D-classes.

Dorr now envisioned a world where every Martian child would be given a full education, then tested and evaluated to determine their future prospects.

Mabel Dorr absolutely believed that future leaders of Mars were buried down in the Warrens and needed to be found and elevated.

But for her this was not about an egalitarian leveling of Martian society, but sorting everyone into a more natural, hierarchical meritocracy.

The poster children for Dorr's new meritocracy were the trifectas, and in particular Alexandra Clare.

Destined to lives of toil and obscurity in the Warrens, they had instead taken decisive action and risked their lives for the benefit of all Martians.

The kind of revolutionary spirit and courage and determination the trifectas represented were attributes Mabel Dore was happy to celebrate and reward.

So all the trifectas were given quarters in the A-levels and offered special assignment jobs in the Martian Guard that amounted to being living icons of the revolution.

They had started low and were now living high.

That could be you.

And their principal occupation would be going to events, banquets, parties, and ceremonies.

Let people clap and cheer for them, then shake their hands.

It was, all in all, a pretty good gig compared to what they had been doing before.

Alexandra Clare met Mabel Dorr for the first time at a ceremony held in the Prime Dome on August 5, 2247 to honor the prisoners of Stockade 7 for their revolutionary heroism.

This amounted to little more than sharing a stage together and engaging in a little pre-ceremony small talk.

But their paths then intersected at public functions, at first just by happenstance of scheduling.

But the more Dorr interacted with Claire, the more Dorr took a shine to Claire, and Dorr started actively seeking Claire out and inviting her to things.

In One Red Life, Claire says, Dorr told me that I was proof that the best of us could come from anywhere.

She wanted my help finding, nurturing, and elevating people like me from the Warrens.

She also shared books and videos with me to help advance my own education.

At that point, I had only done the Tech Academy program, which didn't have much to say about history, literature, or philosophy.

But Dorr was not the only one advancing Alexandra Claire's education.

It was during this period that Claire began a relationship with Zhao Lin.

Zhao had clearly become smitten making the vid about her for his trifectus series and started inviting her around to the Mons Cafe.

Zhao was by all accounts a handsome dude, passionate, influential, and now semi-famous in his own right.

He introduced Claire to all the Martian way material he had collected over the years, and Claire says, Lynn introduced me to all kinds of revolutionary ideas and seditious principles.

When the revolution began, I fought for myself and for my friends in the Warrens, but now I saw the bigger picture.

Zhao and Claire's relationship is obviously one of the most emotionally evocative parts of the Martian Revolution, often the subject of books and songs and poems and vids.

If you haven't seen Forever and Never, you really have to see it.

But be sure to bring the tissues because I think it's basically impossible not to cry over it.

Claire eventually grew weary of just being a symbol to be trotted out on select occasions, and by the end of 2248 she requested that she be allowed to serve in the Martian Guard just on regular duty, not special duty.

She would still do some of the ceremonial stuff, sure, but she wanted to do something, not just sit around.

This request was ultimately approved after a consultation between Mabel Dorr and Omar Ali, who was now head of the security services.

And so Claire was placed back on active duty in the warrens, though if she wanted, she could continue to have the quarters she was assigned in the A-levels.

It was while back in service with the Martian Guard that Claire got caught up in the hunt for the growing OmniCorps loyalist underground that was defying efforts to nail it down and root it out.

All the Guard was initially able to uncover was proof that plans were being laid for OmniCorps to reassert control of Mars, that this would involve breaking the firewall, and that when that happened there would be a simultaneous loyalist uprising.

Evidence of this plot fueled calls for Martian independence.

The truth was OmniCorps would never stop trying to recapture Mars.

The only way it could be prevented was breaking away from them completely.

The other major Earth corporations, particularly BICOR and T Corps, were both in regular communication with their contacts among both the spaceshippers and the Martians.

The agreement of 2248 did not have to be the last word on anything, they said.

It wouldn't take much for the whole situation to be plunged back into resistance and insurrection.

And if Mars declared independence, declared itself willing to trade with anyone?

Well, that might trigger a re-destabilization of OmniCorps position on Earth that BICOR, T-Corp, and the other corporations could take advantage of, and which Mars would walk away from, free.

In the end, the re-destabilization was a joint effort by more radical Martian revolutionaries and reactionary Omnicorp loyalists.

As we'll discuss more next week, they started feeding off of each other, with every action by the other proof that the most extreme response was not just justified but necessary.

This all really got going in earnest on February the 6th, 2249, when one of the reactors at the principal extraction site of Tharsis exploded.

killing hundreds and wiping out one of their principal veins of Phosph, causing production to fall off considerably.

It has never been proven conclusively what caused the explosion.

It could have simply been a very poorly timed malfunction.

Bruno October would later take credit for the bombing and said he did it to cripple the Martians and force them back under OmniCorps control, but October never had any compunction about lying or exaggerating in pursuit of his goals, so who knows how many grains of salt we need to take that with.

There was also a conspiracy theory that more radical Martians planted a bomb to prevent Mars from hitting its quota, thus forcing the issue of independence.

But what was more important than who actually did it is who everyone thought did it.

The Martian Guard believed it had to be the work of reactionary loyalists.

The loyalists believed that radical Martians were pushing so hard for independence that they had no issue killing some of their own people to get there.

And next time, both Mabel Dore and Jin Wong will find themselves caught between these two extremes that were chafing against the agreement of 2248.

On Earth, Kamal Singh would bang the drums about the threat posed by the other corporations and the almost certain attempt to make Mars truly independent.

On Mars, relations between Mabel Dore and the Assembly became strained, and the Martian Guard became one click more aggressive about pursuing counter-revolutionary threats wherever they found them.

But I do say next time, not next week, because I am taking next week off, but we will be back in two weeks for the unfraying of Martian unity and get the ball rolling towards the independence days.

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