11.14-The Mutual Blockade

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.14, the Mutual Blockade.

Less than a week after the standoff in Stockade 7 began, the order of the solar system was completely upended.

On July 26, 2247, Earth and Mars Mars exchanged final defiant transmissions.

Mars had a list of demands and swore they would send no more Phosph back to Earth until those demands were met, and Earth refused to even discuss those demands until the Martians handed back control of Mars.

Neither side had any intention of backing down, and so after a week of rapid-fire events, the trajectory of the Martian Revolution ground to a sudden screeching halt.

They transitioned from chaos and confusion to a permanent state of anticipatory stasis.

Surely the other side was about to see reason and break down.

Will today be that day?

No?

Okay.

Well, let's keep sweating them.

Surely they will crack tomorrow.

But then tomorrow would become today, and neither side would back down.

And then another tomorrow would become another today.

And so on and so on and so on.

And they crawled through this series of tomorrows becoming today's with nobody breaking for eight long months.

The breakdown of negotiations, or should I say the non-commencement of negotiations, led first to what we call the sorting of ships.

When all this broke out in July 2247, there were spaceships in orbit around Mars, spaceships in orbit around Earth, and spaceships traversing the space in between.

As Omnicorp swore no more deliveries would ever reach Mars until the Martians capitulated, Timothy Werner issued a blanket order for all spaceships to return to Earth and forbade any ship around Earth from departing for Mars.

This order was heeded by most of the Phosph container ships and a good number of the civilian cargo shippers.

Now those cargo shippers were far more inclined to side with Mars, but those in the environs of Earth were now hemmed in by the security service ships patrolling the lunar orbit line, and those who had chosen to travel in container fleet convoys risked being attacked by the security escorts if they broke for Mars.

So most of them who were en route to Mars reluctantly stuck with their convoys and returned to Earth.

But plenty of others were not traveling in those convoys and just kept going to Mars or turned around and headed back to Mars, and some committed souls who were a part of convoys used old tricks of the smuggling trade to mask their transponders.

They broke formation, set course for Mars, and were out of range before the security escorts even knew they were gone.

In this way, ships accumulated either around Mars or around Earth, and then they stayed put.

Hence, we call this the sorting of ships.

The only ships Werner explicitly ordered not to return to Earth were the ships still loyal to OmniCorps around Mars.

The senior officer of this group of vessels was Commander Li Wei, who had the support of 54 container ships, as well as about 150 civilian cargo shippers who did not heed Commander Cartwright's call to rebellion.

Now just for the record, None of these ships were equipped with like nuclear weapons of any kind.

And even if they did have nuclear weapons, it would have been inconceivable at this point for Earth to order some kind of bombardment of the Martian colonies.

The physical infrastructure of the FOSS 5 operations was simply too precious to risk.

If it was destroyed and needed to be rebuilt, well, that was even more threatening to the FOSS-5 supply than losing control of it to the Martians.

But that did not mean Werner would not attempt to use force to bring the mutinous ships back into line.

When negotiations between Earth and Mars reached a terminal impasse and broke off on July 26th, Werner issued an order to Commander Way to take Cartwright's ships back.

Now Way and Cartwright had known each other for a long time, and Way opened a channel to Cartwright saying, you are ordered to stand down and place your ships under the control of OmniCorps headquarters.

Cartwright simply said, no, thank you.

So then Way signaled back to Earth to say, he's refusing to comply and there's very little I can do.

And that's when Werner sent an order saying, you have security ships, don't you?

We'll go take Cartwright's ships back by force.

Way Wei said that she did not think that was a good idea, and Werner said, that is a direct order.

Go take those ships back right now.

The thing to understand here is that the Container Fleet officers were not like ancient warriors of old ready to die for their king, bound by oaths and sacred honor.

Wei herself was fed up with how they had been treated and frankly agreed with Cartwright's demands.

She just didn't think outright rebellion and mutiny was the best strategy for addressing their collective grievances.

But now she was faced with a direct order from the CEO of Omnicorp to attack Cartwright's ships.

That would mean death and destruction.

And that was not something Commander Way wanted anything to do with.

There hadn't been a space battle in 100 years.

And even then, it was just the one.

In this case, everyone had friends, acquaintances, and former shipmates on the other vessels.

They collectively had far more in common with each other than any of them did with the Earthlings demanding that they fight each other.

So Commander Commander Wei took the temperature of the other container ship captains, and none of them showed any interest in actually attacking Cartwright's ships.

So Wei sent a signal back to Earth.

We are not going to attack them.

We are not going to spill blood over this.

Werner, in his infinite wisdom, sent a transmission relieving Commander Wei of her command.

So Wei sent back a transmission saying, okay, well in that case, we are all joining my friend and colleague Commander Cartwright.

Please meet our demands or Earth will never get another shipment of Phosph again.

I hope you're happy.

And that is how the burgeoning Martian Navy more than doubled in size overnight, and how Cartwright and Wei both embarked on their paths to becoming the first admirals of the fleet.

Commander Way's defection was the biggest shift during the sorting of ships.

But when the sorting ended, meant every spaceship was either clustered around Earth or Mars, traffic between them ceased.

For the first time in like 150 years, all that lay between the red and blue planets was vast empty space.

With both sides denying the other any exports, we have come to call this the mutual blockade.

Initially, of course, this was meant to be a temporary situation, a brief staring contest that would surely see the other side blink first.

But the non-negotiator majority on the Omnicorps Board of Directors were committed to not setting the precedent that they would capitulate to terrorist demands.

The Martians and spaceshipers, meanwhile, believed Earth needed what they had more than they needed what Earth had.

They could just wait them out.

And so, like I said, instead of resolving quickly, the mutual blockade would last for eight months.

While they waited for Earth to yield, the Martians now had to sit down and figure out how they were going to run themselves now that they had severed themselves from Omnicore's direct control.

They were now untethered completely from the only life and system they had ever known.

How were they going to function?

What were they going to do?

Who was in charge?

Do we still have to go to work?

Do we still get paid?

There were lots of miserable jobs that nobody wanted to do.

If I'm doing one of those crappy jobs, can the revolution please mean I don't have to do it anymore?

To answer these questions, Marcus Leopold and the Mons Cafe group had been hard at work spreading the gospel of this thing called the Martian Assembly they had declared on the third day of Red.

The idea for the Assembly had come from discussions amongst themselves about alternative forms of human governance before the corporate structure had sunk in.

There had been times and places when people, as people, had been able to govern themselves.

Vestigial parts of this idea existed in the form of shareholder votes.

But what did shareholder votes mean to the Martians?

They had been ignored for their entire history, suffering through decades of exploitive neglect that was only replaced by a system of abusive micromanagement.

The Martians themselves had never counted at all in any of this.

But now they would count.

All of them.

Because every Martian counted.

Every Martian was vital to the functioning of Mars.

They were all in this together, right down to the lowest third-class technician servicing Dispenser 172 in Corridor 159.

The Mons Cafe group wanted a future where no Martian's voice was ever ignored again.

At first, their proclamations about the formation of the Martian Assembly and its subsequent Declaration of Independence made little headway in the confused comm channels during and after the three days of Red.

It wasn't clear to anyone who was in charge or what to believe.

There were lots of contradictory reports and announcements and declarations floating around out there.

The only thing that seemed to break through all that noise were the addresses of Mabel Dorr.

So Leopold and Darby and Zhao and the other founders of the Martian Assembly knew they needed to get Dorr on board with the idea of the Martian Assembly.

And this would not be a hard sell.

As I mentioned last week, Mabel Dorr was into the idea.

She too wanted all Martians to have a voice.

But

there was the matter of independence.

Dorr was absolutely committed to autonomy for Mars division, but still inside the Omnicore corporate umbrella.

She believed this would garner far more realistic support both among the spaceshippers and the Earthlings.

It was a comprehensible outcome that would give us what we want, autonomy, without terminally alienating possible supporters.

We need people on Earth pushing Timothy Werner and the board to negotiate, and we'll need people on Earth to accept any settlement we sign once it's agreed to.

By keeping Mars Division inside Omnicore, we allow them to save face.

We give cover to many potential allies who might otherwise hold the line against us.

Leopold and the others in the Mons Cafe group didn't necessarily agree with this, but they did understand that Doerr's support was crucial to getting the new assembly off the ground.

So they agreed to a deal.

Mabel Dorr would join the Martian Assembly herself, as long as any formal declaration of independence was kept off the agenda.

They said fine, but amongst themselves agreed, independence was not off the agenda for good, just for now.

In preparation for Dorr's visit to the Martian Assembly, which would raise its profile and attendance considerably, they left the Commissariat headquarters behind as a symbolic place of birth and moved to an open-air park in the center of the prime dome called the Fields of Earth.

Then, Dorr delivered another colony-wide address, saying that as they waited for Earth to yield to their demands, it was up to the Martians to govern themselves, and as long as she had anything to say about it, they would not simply go back to arbitrary corporate structures.

And that is why we have formed a Martian assembly where all Martians will be able to participate.

Tomorrow, I will go there myself, and I invite all of you to join me.

So on August 1, 2247, the Martian Assembly convened on the fields of Mars to an overflowing crowd.

And even this overflowing crowd was just a small fraction of the overall audience, as most Martians tuned in via their screens.

What they watched unfold was a series of speeches and videos that stirred and celebrated their revolutionary victory.

The best of them was by Ivana Darby, who exhorted the Martians to remember that they were tougher, stronger, and more committed to each other than the Earthlings were, that they may face hardships and sacrifices, but it would all be worth it when they won what they deserved.

Mabel Dorr later said she became nervous when Darby really got going because it kind of seemed like Darby was gearing up to call for independence.

But she stuck to the agreement and finished merely with the agreed-upon formulation that was already on the verge of becoming a revolutionary cliché:

Mars for the Martians.

As they had also agreed in advance, when this set of speeches wrapped up, Marcus Leopold went up to the rostrum and said, We need leadership in this new era.

Leadership all Martians can trust.

And there is no one on Mars that we trust more than Mabel Dorr.

I nominate her to serve as the new director of Mars Division.

They were still making this up as they went, and it wasn't entirely clear how anybody was supposed to vote on anything.

but the crowd's response supporting Dorr was thunderous and essentially unanimous.

So it stuck.

Then Dorr came out on stage after the noise died down and said, I accept this trust you have placed in me.

I will lead you with the respect and compassion I have always shown my fellow Martians.

This assembly will be your voice, and I will be your humble servant.

Then she went on to say, I have a list of qualified Martians that I recommend to lead all the principal departments of Mars Division, because we do still need those departments to function.

And she produced a slate of names and departments that flashed up on people's screens.

Clarice Beau is head of finance, Kindred James, head of personnel, Omar Ali, head of security.

All of them were A-class executives, and most of them had served on the Martian Advisory Council with one notable exception.

Dorr's list included B-class advocate Marcus Leopold as the head of the legal division.

She could think of no one better suited for the job.

And since the Martians out there could, in general, think of no one better suited for any of these jobs because they had never thought about it at all, the crowd thunderously endorsed Mabledore's list by acclamation.

Newly empowered by the Martian Assembly, Mabledore and her executive colleagues took over their various departments and tried to puzzle out what the new order was going to look like in practice.

Meanwhile, the Martian Assembly met nearly every day, and their broadcasts became a source of collective entertainment.

as Martians watched Martians rise to voice different complaints and ideas and opinions, some serious, serious, some incredibly silly.

One guy presented a plan to terraform all of Mars in six months, the feasibility of which would be passed along to the appropriate department for further study, after which it was never heard from again.

Mabel Dorr used the assembly to keep Martians updated about what she was doing and why.

And in the early days, the first thing she needed to impress upon everyone was that, at this moment, we need everyone to return to their jobs.

We cannot let this place slide into neglectful disrepair.

This is our home, and we should take care of it, not for them, but for us.

And it became patriotic to be willing to work and endure the hardships to come.

But things were now different.

Obviously, if they weren't shipping FOSS-5, extraction operations were going to be suspended.

That entire part of the workforce, all those D-class techs and their C-class supervisors, were now completely idle.

But that was only like 30% of the actual workforce.

Most other Martians were doing service, support, and logistical jobs, most of which would need to be done whether Phosph was being extracted or not.

Lift shafts still needed to be maintained no matter what.

Food still needed to be served.

Water recycling and air scrubbers needed to be maintained.

At first, it was largely assumed the extractors would get to go on a permanent holiday while everyone else continued to work.

which the extractor teams quite liked the sound of.

But then they wondered, if we're not working, how do we get paid?

Will we get paid?

Meanwhile, other Martians would start to be like, hey, why do they get to loaf around while we continue to work seven days a week?

And the question of pay was handled by Clarice Bow, who is now head of the finance department.

She basically created a Martian fiat currency by announcing in the Martian Assembly that credits would be duly deposited every payday, just like always.

And for the moment, most people did not question this.

Credits would appear in the amount that they were used to every month.

Great.

But Bo knew that just as Omnicore had sent money into Martian accounts, they immediately vacuumed it all back up, in the form of housing fees and water fees and air fees.

Then all the commissaries and food bars and drink holes and arcades.

All of the credits spent there went back to Omnicore.

Well, everything except what was siphoned off into the black market, but you get my point.

Clarice Bo was really hoping no one would ask too many questions about what it would mean for Mars Division to now be generating these credits instead of OmniCore headquarters, or what it would mean if Omnicore was no longer vacuuming the credits out of the system as fast as they were put in.

And luckily no one did.

They were satisfied with this simple idea that they would get paid on payday just like always.

Now if you're keen to dive deeper into this and get answers to some of those questions Clarice Beau was hoping no one would ask, I suggest turning to Jorge Delegente Arnaldo Perkins, who wrote the definitive works on Martian economics.

His first volume, Red Money, explains all this stuff about currency and finance.

And if you're really a masochist, you can turn to the other two volumes, Tomes, really, which are called Red Labor and Red Trade, respectively.

Check em out if you want to learn more, or if you are simply having trouble getting to sleep.

The question of what jobs people still had to do was handled by Kinder James, who was now head of personnel.

With the extraction work suspended, 30% of the Martian workforce was now totally idle, which was fine with them as long as they got paid.

But there were concerns about what would happen with this now suddenly idle population who had nothing to do, and concerns about the other parts of the workforce who still had to keep working, which, like I just said, led to gripes.

Why do they get to do nothing while we have to keep working?

And this gripe touched on one of the most grueling parts of life on Mars.

There were no days off.

Everyone worked every day.

It was just part of the day.

You slept, you work, you had some rec time.

That's what it was, every single day.

And now, some Martians got to work zero days, while others had to keep working seven days.

Was that fair?

Complaints like this were soon being voiced in the Martian Assembly.

Meanwhile, Omar Ali had taken over security, which made him the head of the new Martian Guard.

Now, the Martians had been responsive to the call to reconsolidate weapons and create volunteer units to keep general order.

Something like 80 to 85 percent of the weapons that had been seized during the three days of red were accounted for by the beginning of August 2247.

As Ali took up the job of organizing the volunteers into formal units, he created a basic uniform code that was topped with the revival of one of the original symbols of Martian revolutionary spirit, the red berets worn by Jose Dipetrov and his comrades.

Every member of the Martian Guard was to find a red head covering and wear it while on duty.

Eventually, red berets for the Guard would be fabricated according to a set design, and they wore them whenever they were on patrol.

And that is how the Martian Guard became the new red caps.

One of the main early preoccupations of the Martian Guard was defending against possible threats from stubborn Omnicore loyalists who hated all of this.

There were still top Earthling executives who were opposed to everything that was happening on Mars.

Plus, a lot of the C-Class supervisors were not on board with this revolution at all.

There was also the question of the disarmed security service personnel.

Some of them had been herded into the stockades that had once kept Martian detainees.

Others had slipped away in the chaos of the three days of red after being disarmed and made their way back to their own housing allotments, or they were simply unaccounted for at the moment.

In every level and every department, there were people who thought this was all madness.

Most would just try to ride it out miserably and bitterly, but safely, while others would show themselves to be just as capable of clandestine organization as the Society of Martians.

They would lay the foundations for a reactionary pro-Omnicor fifth column inside of Mars.

The red caps would be the ones trying to topple that column.

As the mutual blockade continued and no immediate resolution was at hand, Martians did start enduring hardship.

As I said a few episodes back, they had air and they had water.

They could make food from biomass units, but none of it was particularly pleasant or appetizing.

It was simply enough.

All the other things they were used to getting from Earth were now either in short supply or nowhere to be found.

The commissary shelves were increasingly bare.

The higher quality stems, feels, and drags disappeared only to be replaced with homebrews that were neither as satisfying nor as safe.

The same was true of medical supplies.

A lot of medicine could be synthesized on Mars, but not at the same standards as the manufacturing plants on Earth.

As the months ticked by, real deprivation set in.

Meanwhile, complaints about the division of labor increased.

About three months into the blockade, Kinder James presented a plan to address those complaints.

Rather than some people doing nothing and other people working around the clock, D-Class technicians from the extraction teams would be trained to do other jobs.

James sold this idea with the slogan, many hands make light work,

in direct reference to Timothy Warner's ridiculous maxim that fewer hands make light work.

According to James's plan, Once the extraction techs were brought into shift rotations to help do the other jobs of the colony, it would no longer be the case that some Martians worked zero days a week and other Martians worked seven days a week.

Every Martian would now work five days a week.

So it had taken almost 200 years, but the Martians finally invented the weekend.

Now though most Martians were committed to doing their part to endure the blockade, and this whole concept of days off was mighty appealing, That did not mean that morale did not have to be addressed.

Everyone could get by sure, but that doesn't mean we like eating biomass three squares and two triangles a day.

So the entertainment department introduced initiatives to keep the Martians occupied, including a contest to develop the most appealing biomass recipe.

But they also sponsored video contests and musical showcases to give people something to do with their newfound free time.

Competitions were set up for all kinds of things, digital games as well as physical games.

Pickup corridor hockey had always been a thing in the Warrens, and and now formal teams and leagues were established.

And by and large, these efforts were successful.

It created a lot of camaraderie.

It created a lot of shared memories.

Who can forget the time Flavin Hop Maven's biomass recipe triggered quarantine procedures, or the corridor hockey final between Alpha and Omega?

It was also during these months the Martians developed a celebratory culture around themselves and the revolution.

After poring over security vid footage, Zhaolin identified 27 Martians who participated in all three of what he was now coming to conceive of as the big moments of the revolution, the Day of Batteries, Bloody Sunrise, and the Three Days of Red.

He dubbed these 27 Martians the trifectas.

They had been there for all three.

And he built them up as the first heroes of the Martian Revolution.

He tracked them down and interviewed them and broadcast their stories.

And it was while producing this series that Zhao landed on Alexandra Clare, who he was thrilled to discover was not just a trifecta, but she had been in Stockade VII.

He could not ask for a better face of the revolution.

When Zhao came looking for her, Alexandra Clare was in the Martian Guard along with several comrades from Stockade VII.

Zhao came down with a crew to find her and film her.

At first, she rebuffed his attempts to talk to her, but eventually he convinced her that what she had done was special.

Her comrades told her that too.

And so she sat for the interview.

Zhao edited it, and it was broadcast across Mars.

All of these videos I should mention are available in the Martian archives, and they really are remarkable.

They're very human.

Zhao did not flinch from having them tell stories about the death and trauma they had witnessed.

Claire speaks very movingly of the death of her friends.

Overnight, the trifectas became celebrities.

They were honored guests wherever they showed up.

Some of them embraced the theatrics of it all and hosted events and competitions.

And Alexandra Clare became the most famous of all, because hers was the most remarkable story.

She didn't just fight in the three days of red, she had been inside Stockade 7.

Whether she liked it or not, Alexandra Clare was now a name and a face that every Martian knew.

Things went on like this, day after day, week after week, month after month.

Martian spirits spirits actually remained pretty high as 2247 became 2248.

Life was different, and in many respects worse.

But in other respects, this is kind of fun.

The food sucks, but the days off are great.

People were also allowed to rotate up through different parts of the colony.

The D-classes were able to come up to the Prime Dome to enjoy what amenities had previously only been available to the upper elite.

though obviously there were now many more people trying to access those amenities, which necessitated working from waiting lists.

They also arranged for the spaceshippers up on their ships to rotate down to the surface if they wanted.

Now they were pretty used to living on their ships for prolonged periods, but still it was nice to come down and hang out, just for a change of scenery and a change of pace.

While the Martians were basically riding their hardships in decent shape, back on Earth the natives were getting restless.

As the blockade stretched month after month, pressure built both inside Omnicore and outside Omnicore for the Board of Directors to negotiate a settlement, get the shipping lanes back up and running and start bringing Phosph back to Earth.

To bring further pressure to bear, Commander Cartwright and now Director of Mars Division Mabel Dorr dug up logs and records to disseminate outside Omnicore channels to prove that Phosph production had been in decline for years.

When this evidence was waived by Omnicore's critics, Omnicore spent months saying all all that evidence is fake.

But then finally in late February 2248, an increasingly alarmed engineer named Bianca Lomeric, working at one of the Phosph reserve stations on Earth, started leaking data about the real state of Earth's reserves.

There was supposed to be a 10-year supply of Phosph ready to go at all times.

Omnicorp had never publicly acknowledged anything less than seven years.

But Lomerik's files showed that at present, the FOSS5 reserves would be exhausted in a little under two years.

This was a fact known only to the inner circle of S-class Omnicore executives.

They themselves had been fretting about it a lot, and pressure to reverse the vote on whether to negotiate had been continuous since this all started and had only ever gotten louder.

But Lomerick's leak was spread to all the other corporations on Earth and it alarmed everyone.

In fact, it started destabilizing the prevailing global order.

No amount of denials from Omnicore would satisfy them.

Omnicore's right to handle the FOSS5 business was now seriously in doubt.

Their position as the preeminent corporation on Earth was now seriously in doubt.

And so, on March 12th, 2248, the Omnicore Board of Directors held a meeting where they reopened the question of whether to negotiate.

This time the abstract principle of precedent setting didn't matter at all.

The board voted to negotiate with the Martians and the shippers to get the Phosph flowing again.

Mabel Dor received the transmission in her office at Mars Division headquarters within hours of the vote.

The Martian Assembly happened to be in session at that moment and she rushed over to the fields of Earth to make the stunning announcement.

My fellow Martians, we have done it.

I have just received word from Earth.

They have blinked.

We will begin negotiating immediately.

When we stick together, we can do anything.

It was a triumphant moment of Martian unity, and the partying went on for days.

Amidst that partying, Dorr and the other Martian leaders prepared to commence the most perilous and consequential set of negotiations they had ever taken part in.

And next week, we will unpack the details of that perilous and consequential set of negotiations.

which ended with Earth and Mars ending the mutual blockade and signing what became known as the Agreement of 2248.

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