11.15-The Agreement of 2248

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Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.15, The Agreement of 2248.

In March 2248, the OmniCore Board of Directors finally voted to negotiate terms with the Martians and the spaceshippers.

After an eight-month-long staring contest, the Earthlings finally blinked and announced their willingness to try to attempt to reach some sort of agreement.

And that's not just me doing an overly qualified sentence.

That line was in the official statement.

Not reach an agreement, not attempt to reach an agreement, but try to attempt to reach an agreement.

Try to attempt.

Really committing themselves to a lot there.

But after Lomerich's leak in February 2248, they were going to have to do something.

Global pressure on Omnicore to yield became too much to bear.

There was now open talk of revisiting the contract that granted Omnicore monopoly rights to everything beyond the line of lunar orbit.

Phosph was the concern of the whole world, and if Omnicore could not be trusted to deliver, then they didn't deserve to keep their monopoly.

Now, just to remind ourselves, there are four other major corporations on Earth besides Omnicorp.

In order of relative size, they are BiCorps, CalCorps, MazCorp, and T

Omnicor was the biggest by far, double the size of Bicor, which was its next largest corporate rival.

But just for the record, while we focus on the five major corporations that dominated Earth in the 23rd century, there were smaller corporations and independent free cities and leftover rump states existing in between and around them.

But in the main, the five major corporate powers dominated Earth.

The major powers existed as broadly siloed off and vertically integrated companies.

Inside their global corporate structures, each of the great powers owned, controlled, and distributed goods, services, resources, personnel, energy, and consumers such that they were mostly self-sufficient.

Mostly.

All of them were tied together in a larger global system that accounted for resource imbalance and particular sectors of manufacturing or services being done better by one corporation than the others, or, say, one company had exclusive claim to something the others needed, like how Omnicor controlled the FOSS-5 and had contracts with the others to supply them.

Now, those contracts were not totally one-sided.

In exchange for their monopoly over space, Omnicore had shared Flexel designs with the other corporations so that they could all manufacture their own.

They also agreed to joint ventures that allowed the other four companies to reap further benefits in exchange for giving Omnicore rights to everything beyond the lunar line.

TCOR and MASCOR, for example, were both cut into the spacecraft manufacturing programs.

The contract they all signed gave Omnicorps rights to everything beyond the line of the lunar orbit.

But inside that line, anyone was free to do anything they wanted.

So all five of the major corporations eventually put up satellites and orbital platforms around Earth and bases on or above the Moon.

CalCOR and MAZCOR's presence on the Moon was pretty minimal, but T Corps and Bi-Corps both had significant lunar operations.

TCOR had joined the construction of the original container ships, and that had wound up producing a robust space division inside their own corporate structure.

Bicorp, meanwhile, recognized they'd made a huge mistake thinking they were setting up Omnicorp to fail by giving them carte blanche over the rest of the solar system.

After Mazcorp went rogue and tried to break their contractual agreement and plant a colony on Mars in 2154, which ended with the colonial convoy getting blasted out of the sky in the quote-unquote battle of the line, Bicorp swooped in to take over Mazcorp's half of their astronautical joint ventures with OmniCorps.

When Omnicorp slipped into its geriatric phase at the beginning of the 23rd century, the other corporations took advantage of the corruption, sloth, and inattention seeping through OmniCorps.

TCOR, for example, had slowly taken over effective control of many of the joint ventures with OmniCorps.

All it cost was a series of modest bribes.

Every corporation fed goods and parts and equipment into the smuggling pipeline to Mars, most especially Bicorp and TCOR, who like I said both had major orbital platform facilities and colonies on the Moon.

Their lunar colonies were ostensibly there for mineral extraction and scientific research, but mostly they provided a great cover story for building and maintaining space divisions.

It would keep them well positioned if, one day, Omnicorp truly faltered and they could tear up the lunar line contract.

Because though Omnicorp's monopoly had been in place for a long time, nothing lasts forever.

But as long as the FOSS-5 was coming down, there was little hope of challenging Omnicore supremacy directly.

Enter Timothy Warner and the New Protocols.

The unrest on Mars, triggered by Timothy Warner's arrival in 2248, had the other corporations on Earth positively licking their lips.

Every rival corporation had paid spies, agents, and moles inside all the other companies.

and they all had such agents on Mars.

There's a great book about this called Open Secrets, Corporate Espionage in the 23rd Century by Altoon Boyland, if you're interested in learning more.

The various spies and agents on Mars either formed contacts with members of the Society of Martians or were members of the Society of Martians in good standing themselves.

When the idea of independence started getting seriously floated in 2246, It was a well-understood part of the debate that other corporations would probably be happy to support the Martians in such a gambit.

What would those corporations want in return?

Well, we would turn our Phosphate production in their direction, at least some of it.

Maybe we allow them to plant their own colonies and extraction sites on Mars.

Maybe the existing colonies could simply be acquired by another corporation, basically keep everything the same, but have a different corporate logo.

Then along came everything that happened on Mars in 2247 from Bloody Sunrise to the Three Days of Red.

Martian society was coming apart at the seams, which was both exciting and alarming to the other major corporations.

But as long as Omnicore patrolled that line of lunar orbit, there really wasn't a way for the other corporations to directly intervene in what was happening on Mars.

Omnicorp always rattled the space sabers over anyone even thinking about crossing that line.

But then, even in the face of wild declarations from Mabel Dorr and some character called Commander Cartwright, Omnicor defiantly refused to negotiate.

and insisted to the rest of the world that this was purely an internal matter.

They said there was no threat to the FOSS5 reserves.

Everything on Mars is under control.

The other corporations knew this was not true and leaned on Omnicor to settle, pointing out the various ways they could hurt OmniCorp if they wanted to.

But OmniCorps resisted that pressure for eight months, and the other corporations didn't necessarily want to upset the balance of the world order.

Then came the Lomerick leak in February 2248, and with it proof that Omnicore had way less in their FOSS5 reserves than they claimed.

That is what forced Omnicorp to the table in March of 2248, because if they didn't come to some sort of agreement with the Martians, the other companies would come for them.

So most of what follows I'm getting from a book by Yolange Frullo called False Summit, The Making and Unmaking of the Agreement of 2248, which, yeah, has spoilers in the title, but you had to have known that was coming.

The Board of Directors named a team of representatives led by Jin Wang, who had successfully led the negotiator faction of the board to final victory.

After losing that vote, Werner tried to take the lead in the negotiations, but since getting rid of Timothy Werner was at the top of the list of Martian demands, Werner's skeptics finally outnumbered his true believers.

Omnicor needed to make a deal, and his presence would disrupt that.

Working out of conference rooms in Omnicor's headquarters in New New York, Jin Wong and her team prepared to hold on to as much as they could, knowing full well they were going to have to give away a lot to get the Phosph moving again.

Mabel Dore led the negotiations for the Martians from the Prime Dome, aided by a committee established by the Martian Assembly that included Ivana Darby.

They were going to have to figure out how far they were willing to push, how much they were ready to demand.

The question of reintegration, autonomy, or independence was a hot topic among the Martian negotiators.

Everyone wanted the resumption of the shipments and equipment from Earth, and everyone wanted the resignation of Timothy Werner.

Beyond that, some would have settled for a few reforms, the right of Mars to nominate its own leaders and have a few checks on Earth's arbitrary authority, but otherwise let's just reintegrate.

Mabel Dorr wanted full autonomy for Mars division, but still struggled with the idea of full independence for both practical and strategic reasons.

Ivana Darby, meanwhile, wanted full independence and free trade with all the other corporations.

She and her friends had used intermediaries to talk to the other corporations, and they believed a deal could be done with one or all of them that would allow Mars to break free of Earth and become its own thing.

They would be no one's corporate subsidiary anymore.

Finally, Commander Cartwright stood for the space shippers from his cabin on Container Ship 55 of Convoy Group 9.

The shippers demanded the full resumption of all their former pay and benefits for the FOSS 5 container crews, as well as a doubling of the table of rates for the cargo shippers.

Also, you may recall, they wanted a gratitude bonus that would be represented by a share of the value of the FOSS5 they transported.

The exact percentage could be negotiated, but the shippers just wanted to feel like their value was at least tied in some way to the enormous amount of wealth they were being trusted with.

In mid-April 2248, the three sides began negotiations over signal transmission.

They quickly established that shipping would resume.

Mabel Dorr said the Martian position was, we expect to ship Phosph back to Earth like always.

And the Earthling position was, great, we want to resume sending all the goods, equipment, and people that Mars needs.

They also agreed that anyone who wanted to leave Mars would be able to leave safely.

The Martians were happy for anyone who wasn't on board with the Revolution to voluntarily leave.

Conversely, Martian visitors, residents, and agents on Earth or the Moon would be similarly allowed to return to Mars unhindered.

Things got sticky when it came to how Mars would reintegrate with Earth.

Mabel Dorr said that henceforth Mars division would be fully autonomous.

No more S-class Earthling administrators appointed by you to govern us here.

We will determine all our own pay, hours, jobs, schedules, and corporate codes.

We also demand a tenfold increase in our budget to at least minimally recognize the value of what we produce to you.

Dorr personally had visions of massively improving Martian society with the increased resources she planned to secure.

Jin Wang had to take these demands in measured stride.

She couldn't let the Martians just throw off Omnicore control entirely.

So she counter-offered a plan to let the Martians name head administrators and the deportation policies and restore all of the annulled.

Wong also proposed forming a commission of Martians to propose possible changes to how Mars was administered.

What to keep from Werner's tenure, what to roll back, what to abandon.

Of course, Earth would need to reconnect to the Martian servers in order to...

No.

No, no, no.

From the Martian side, that was a hard and immediate no.

Even the most timid among the Martians was more afraid of reprisals from Earth if Earth got back into the Martian computer systems than they were of the abstract and unknown long-term consequences of keeping them out.

The Martians simply could not allow Earth to slip a knife under their throats with nothing but a promise that they wouldn't use it.

Mabel Dore assured Jin Wong that accessing the Martian executive mainframes was a dead end.

It was a deal-breaker.

While the Martians and Earthlings haggled over autonomy for Mars, the spaceshippers had a much easier time of it because their demands were much easier to meet.

The spaceshippers just want to get paid, right?

Okay, let's pay them.

Restore all their previous pay and benefits.

Double the table of rates.

Great, fine, whatever.

The only sticking point was Cartwright's gratitude bonus, which was meant to be an annual percentage of the total amount of PHS5 they hauled.

Wong said, absolutely not.

We are not doing that.

The mutinous shippers may represent a portion of the fleet, but a majority of the Phosph containers had not followed Cartwright's lead.

So maybe don't get too far out over your space skis.

The rest of it, we can do.

And would have to do.

Because even the shippers who had not mutinied fully expected at this point that most of the mutiner demands would be met.

One thing everyone agreed on was the fact that Timothy Werner must go.

Both Doerr and Cartwright were adamant about that.

Wong pretended to ham and haw about it to try to get the Martians to drop a few things if they agreed to fire Warner.

But it seems very implausible that Warner would ever survive this.

He'd been CEO for just about three years, and when you step back from the buzz and the hype and the misinformation and the dogged insistence that it would all work out in the end, he had created a massive shitstorm.

Mars was in revolt.

Omnicore's global supremacy was under direct threat.

Jin Wong saw no reason for Omnicor to continue dying on the hill of Timothy Werner.

She herself had been a skeptical critic of him for years.

Werner was toast before the negotiations even began.

Meanwhile, inside the Martian negotiating team, Ivana Darby continued to push for more than just autonomy.

She wanted Earth to recognize Martian independence.

And outside the negotiations, the Mons Cafe group seeded public discourse with questions about independence.

They had promised Dorr to not put it on the agenda of the Martian Assembly, but they could not help it if everyday Martians brought up the topic themselves.

How can you say that every Martian has a voice except you can't talk about this one subject?

And so, talk of independence was broached in the Martian Assembly, and calls for it got louder and louder.

But there was also on Mars Omnicore loyalists, those whose principal interest was undoing everything that had gone on since July 2247.

And just as OmniCore's corporate rivals were in active communication with loyal agents on Mars trying to steer events in the direction of their corporate patrons, people loyal to Omnicore were in active communication both with Earth and and each other, to restore OmniCorps supremacy.

Not everyone was happy with the revolution.

C-class supervisors, bitter members of the security services, plenty of senior executives, all begrudged the revolution and would be eager to overthrow it and restore the old order.

From his position on the OmniCore Board of Directors, Kamal Singh, in particular, freelanced the coordination of a loose network of would-be counter-revolutionaries on Mars.

But despite his hopes of organizing something real as the mutual blockade continued, it turns out that they were swimming against the tide.

The debate on Mars was mostly between autonomy and independence, not, hey, who wants to go back to how things were?

The Martian Guard was also regularly tipped off about seditious activity, and they successfully disrupted counter-revolutionary networks as they formed.

These networks were not eliminated, obviously.

but they were disrupted enough that the Board of Directors could not count on some counter-revolutionary uprising on on Mars bailing them out.

So of the three sides sitting at the negotiating table, Jin Wong was under the most pressure to settle.

Omnicore needed to announce that deliveries of FOSS5 would be resuming and soon, or they would face potentially devastating attacks from the other corporate powers.

Plus, Mabel Dorr was successfully pushing the line that if OmniCorps did not take what was on offer right now, Mars Division Autonomy, but still within Omnicor's corporate umbrella, the alternative would not not be a restoration of the old order.

It would be the Martians declaring independence.

At one point, she said to Wang point-blank, You know, you have contacts on Mars.

We know you have contacts on Mars.

So don't take my word for it.

Go ask them.

Which way are the winds blowing on Mars?

Grant Mars Division autonomy.

Give us a bigger budget.

And in exchange, your entire corporate operation will not disintegrate.

By early May, the pressure on OmniCorps to bring the crisis to an end became too much.

On May the 6th, 2248, Jin Wang laid out terms she believed she could convince the board to accept.

And if the Martians and shippers rejected this deal, then fine.

I guess we all just die together.

Because there are people inside OmniCorp who would frankly rather nuke a colony from orbit than let Mars become independent or become a subsidiary of another corporation.

So think about that too.

The deal was this.

Omnicore will restructure.

Timothy Warner will resign.

Mars Division will be granted autonomy over its operations as long as it hits certain FOSS-5 quotas.

Mars Division's budget would be increased, but not tenfold.

And Martian leaders would be self-selected and allowed to allocate those funds as they saw fit.

Basically, congratulations, you win.

As for the spaceshipers, their pay privileges and benefits would be restored.

The table of rates would be doubled.

Members of mutinous ships would be retained and not retaliated against.

And finally, an additional annual bonus would be awarded, though at a fixed and much smaller amount than the profit-sharing version Cartwright had proposed.

In exchange, the Martians and the shippers would begin immediately sending FOSS-5 back to Earth.

Dorr and Cartwright conferred with their teams and each other, and agreed to these terms.

It sure seemed like an unambiguous win.

And this became the basis of what history calls the agreement of 2248.

So Jin Wong brought all this back to the OmniCore Board of Directors for them to approve.

Obviously, Werner and his closest allies railed against the demand that he resign as a part of all this.

What about the principle?

Mars can just pick and choose who it wants to be our CEO?

But the thing is I can only say his closest allies were helping Werner make this case.

Because everyone else had concluded that whatever precedent was being set, Werner was himself the cause of the Martians demanding he resign as CEO.

Just because the Martians did that to Werner didn't mean they would do it to everybody.

And just because the Board of Directors were willing to let Werner go in this instance, that didn't mean they wouldn't stand up for the next CEO.

But though the consensus of the board was that Werner's days were numbered, the rest of the deal Wong came back with was hard to swallow.

Werner's little clique of dead-enders were going to oppose the deal, obviously, but another faction led by Kamal Singh couldn't believe how much of the store was being given away.

Granting Mars Division autonomy?

That is a huge concession.

We are admitting we don't control our own Phosphory.

To which Wong had to say,

we don't.

That's the thing.

We are not exactly negotiating from a position of strength here.

We may be huge, but we're bleeding and we're vulnerable.

By making this deal right now, we head off a declaration of Martian independence and we keep the Phosph inside the Omnicore corporate umbrella.

But we need to get the Phosph moving again or we are screwed.

If we accept this deal, we'll get the FOSS5 moving again.

We can figure the rest out later.

While the Omnicore board debated the deal, Mabel Dorr took all this to the Martian Assembly and delivered the terms with triumphant gusto.

They have given us what we want.

Mars division will be autonomous.

Mars will be for the Martians.

We can choose our own leaders and live our own way.

We're even getting a bigger budget.

Her presentation was received with enthusiasm by the assembly, but it did trigger a debate.

There was an aggressively vocal group saying, this isn't enough.

Door is selling us back to Omnicore.

We won our freedom.

We want independence.

Being folded back into Omnicore was not what we fought and died for.

And they raised the little revolutionary couplet that was now making the rounds.

We did this thing, we did it together.

Frack Omnicore, now and forever.

But Mabel Dorr's voice was still the loudest voice of all.

And she said, look what we have to gain here.

What we can have right now today as our spoils of victory.

The assembly will remain in place.

I'm committed to that.

We will review the corporate code together.

We will overhaul working conditions to meet our needs.

They can't stop us.

We will be autonomous.

That's what they're agreeing to.

And who knows what the future will bring?

But if we reject this deal and try to hold out for something better, everything might destabilize so much that we all get sucked into a void, together.

Commander Cartwright, meanwhile, had the easiest time of it.

He circulated the terms of the deal not just among the mutinous crews, but among those who had stayed loyal to Omnicore.

They all agreed it seemed great.

Yes, there were complaints.

Some wanted to extract more with the leverage they had.

A few of the more radical cargo shippers wanted full cancellation of all their debts.

There was some pushback even from among the officers of the Phosph container fleet that promises of no retaliation retaliation were maybe not to be trusted.

There had been some light talk between shippers and some Martians about bringing the spaceshippers under Mars Division's coming autonomous authority to get them out from under Earth control.

But those voices were drowned out by the flood of take the deals coming in from across the fleet.

On May the 18th, Commander Cartwright reported that the shippers would accept the deal.

On Mars, three weeks of debate culminated on May 30th, 2248, when the Martian Assembly convened to vote on whether to accept the deal.

And though the drive to reject the deal and declare full independence had been growing in force, it was not enough to overcome Mabel Dore's endorsement of the deal, nor the actual terms looking, well, pretty good.

In the end, more people were willing to take the ALOT that was on the table right now and available immediately, over possible greater rewards in some indefinite future after enduring more hardships.

When the vote was called, called, the Martians went 70-30 in favor of taking the deal.

With both the Martians and the spaceshipers having endorsed the deal, the Board of Directors faced a clear choice.

They could, right now, get the FOSS-5 back up and running and end the crisis.

Or not, and take their chances trying to stay on top without their most valuable resource.

The Board of Directors did not want to do that.

So on June 2, 2248, they voted to accept the deal.

With all three sides now in agreement, all that was left to do was implement it.

Which wasn't exactly going to be easy, but we will get to that next week.

Because before we get into all that, we must end today with the end of Timothy Werner.

When the board voted for the deal on June 2nd, they were voting for Werner to resign.

He was, more than any other single person, responsible for all of this.

He had probably survived far longer than he should have.

Werner managed to stall for about 24 hours before answering the demand that he resign as he scrambled for last-minute ways to stay in power.

But he was out of chances.

He was cooked, and everyone knew it.

Timothy Werner had taken over an Omnicore that had been neglected into a sorry state of malfunctioning disrepair.

Before he came along, Omnicore was coming apart at the seams.

Its divisions were separated and uncoordinated.

Graft, corruption, and mismanagement were endemic.

If it had continued on that way, the other corporations would have come for Omnicore eventually.

And so, to his credit, Werner did at least recognize the issues that needed to be addressed.

Omnicore probably could use some centralization in their decision-making.

Their software systems were out of date.

Their hardware was past its prime.

And what's wrong with getting rid of poor-performing employees anyway?

In the hands of a more moderate soul, reforms addressing these very real problems could have been successfully implemented and integrated with some care and attention to ensure, well, to ensure that what happened on Mars didn't happen.

But Werner was not a moderate soul.

He was a man of decisive and dramatic action.

And though he successfully identified problems, his solutions jerked way too hard and too fast in the other direction.

The new protocols was a rapid rollout of abrupt changes without careful review or planning.

He came in and started firing people without having a clear idea of what anyone did or why.

He completely overhauled computer systems without a clear idea of how it would impact the people impacted.

He just did it.

He also zoomed right past re-establish some centralized controls to I will micromanage everything.

Werner was not as much of a genius as his PR would lead you to believe.

But even if he was, the level of micromanagement he took on was too much for anyone.

In his zeal to make Omnicorp more abstractly efficient, he never stopped to wonder if what he was doing was going to bring the entire company to a screeching halt.

And how efficient is that?

On June 3, 2248, Timothy Werner relented and announced his resignation as CEO of Omnicor.

He did this in fine, self-serving fashion.

He said that he had attempted to make Omnicore better, and he believed he was succeeding.

But selfish, radical malcontents ruined everything with the help of certain individuals who lacked the vision to see things through to the end.

Werner made it very clear that he thought he was still right, he had simply been thwarted by lesser people.

Then, Timothy Werner retired to a private life of unimaginable splendor and comfort, thanks to the severance package he got that included payments that would make him one of the richest single individuals on earth.

That was because this package was all designed by Vernon Bird back when he thought he might resign as CEO one day.

Something he simply simply never got around to.

So, for all the misery he caused, we can at least take some solace in the fact that Timothy Werner is now living a life of unfathomable luxury without a care in the world.

The resignation of Timothy Werner was a cause for great celebration on Mars.

And to some degree, the Martian Revolution was now...

over?

If this agreement could stick, what had been building for years and then exploded so spectacularly in 2247 now had a real tangible result that fundamentally altered the relationship for Earth and Mars.

It fundamentally changed the lives of Martians.

For the better.

They had been pushed pretty far back and were now leaping ahead of where they had started.

That's a pretty nifty result.

Revolutions.

Sometimes they work.

So the Martians took some satisfaction in the very thing the Earthlings were most afraid of, that a precedent had been set.

The Martians had proved that they could take matters into their own hands anytime they wanted.

After all, from now on someone could always say, well, it worked before,

because it had.

With the deal going into effect in June 2248, that meant the first shipments of FOSS-5 going from Mars to Earth and the first cargo ships going from Earth to Mars would arrive in mid-July 2248, right as the first anniversary of the three days of red approached.

Huge celebrations were planned on Mars.

When the first new shipments arrived from Earth on July 19th, the welcome reception kicked off a week of non-stop partying.

Zhaolin and his team of videographers staged screenings of a film they'd made about the revolution called We Did It Together.

Memorial events and ceremonies and celebrations were staged at different key places.

Processions streamed through Stockade 7 and Expansion 13.

The Martian Assembly sat in near-permanent session from July 21st to July 23rd as Martians were invited to share their own stories for the record.

Mabel Dorr gave speeches all through this week, as did the other famous Martians that had emerged from the revolution.

Leopold and Darby both had prominent spots, as did the trifectas and detainees from Stockade VII, and of course Alexandra Clare, who was both.

This week was the point at which the Martians were the most unified they had ever been.

Everything had worked.

The future was bright, and they were all in this together.

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