11.8- Bloody Sunrise

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I felt like I was out of gas, even though by the measure of the original scope of the show, I was only like half done with the project, even though I felt like I was done done.

But having stepped away for a few years and refreshed my batteries, I then sat down and started composing the Martian Revolution series as a fun, creative project for our collective enjoyment.

But it's been gnawing at me more and more that this isn't actually the way to go out.

That the Revolutions podcast is a job that is unfinished, and all these revolutions that everyone's been begging me to cover that I intended to cover in the first place, Ireland and Cuba, Algeria, Iran, and the rest, rest, still need to be covered.

And so my personal Saturnalia present to all of you out there is to announce that the Martian Revolution will not in fact be the end of the Revolutions podcast, but merely its intermission.

When the Martian Revolution runs its course, I'm going to fire back up the Haydn theme music again and we will return to the ashes of World War I to pick up the revolutionary threads that we set down in Moscow and Petrograd.

So I hope you enjoy the rest of the Martian Revolution, and I hope you enjoy what comes next.

And until then, you can go to cottonbureau.com/slash Mike Duncan to pick up some cool merch, or you can go to patreon.com/slash revolutions to support me and the podcast now and in the future.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions,

episode 11.8: Bloody Sunrise

We left off last time with Timothy Werner pushing through the third pillar of the new protocols, annulling employment contracts of people he deemed poor performers, and especially people he saw as disrupting the implementation of the other pillars of the new protocols.

Werner was clearly convinced that once the fat had been trimmed, the technology upgraded and decision-making centralized, that the rough patch Mars Division had run into would surely not just be a thing of the past, but serve as a springboard to an even brighter future.

Present sacrifices for future rewards, etc., etc., etc.

But the new protocols had been introduced way back in August of 2245, and we are now approaching the end of 2246.

Werner himself has been on Mars for more than six months, and objectively, things have only gotten worse.

Now back on Earth, some Omnicore executives were starting to get concerned that the bold new direction their CEO was embarking on was taking them nowhere good.

But Werner had two things working in his favor.

First, his supporters on the board of directors were still with him.

The grumbling about the new protocols back on Earth mostly came from people who had not wanted Werner to be CEO in the first place, and they were a minority.

The majority on the board still supported him and his mission to modernize and streamline this great hulking near-shipwreck they had inherited from the late Vernon Bird.

The other thing was that thanks to his centralization of control, most of the really bad stuff happening on Mars was being papered over.

Earth was not really getting the whole story here.

Now on Mars, the concerns expressed about the new protocols by Mars Division executives and managers had been severely muted by the arrival of Werner himself.

Very few wanted to risk their careers by standing up to the boss, even if they themselves could see what a disaster this was all turning out to be.

One of the lone exceptions to this was Mars Division director Apollo Tanaka.

Now the thing about Tanaka is that when I first started researching the Martian Revolution, I had no strong opinions about him.

He was just a blank slate.

And honestly, I kind of assumed he was another relatively incompetent, Omnicore stooge paving the way for revolution.

But now that I've actually gone back through the records, I've developed a lot of sympathy for Tanaka.

Practically alone among his colleagues, he continued to bring negative issues to Werner's attention even after it was clear Werner wasn't super interested in hearing about it.

You have to give him credit for continuing continuing to write chat memos with the subject line Areas of Concern right to the bitter end.

Tanaka's overall record is middling and obviously what's about to happen on Mars damns him forever.

But really what we're looking at here is a guy who's trying his best to do his job under the thumb of a terrible boss.

And if nothing else, it's extremely relatable.

Meanwhile, the Martian executives who had ceased speaking up to Werner fell into two categories.

The majority were just careerist cowards, hoping to get through all of this without getting fire.

But a minority stopped speaking up because they felt it would do absolutely no good anymore, and other avenues of pressure deserved exploration.

Among this group was, of course, Mabel Dore, her husband Royce Saito, as well as a small cadre of A-Class Martian executives.

Among them were Clarice Bow, Kinder James, and Omar Ali, who would all go on to serve in Mabel Dore's first cabinet, but I am getting ahead of myself.

This was a group that had been together since Doar's campaign campaign for the board back in 2244, and who were now deeply alarmed at the chaotic disasters Werner was imposing on Mars.

To Werner, Mars was simply a site of resource extraction far away from home.

But for these Martian executives, Mars was home.

So what we know now is that in response to the new protocols, and more specifically to Werner ignoring all criticism of the new protocols, is that this group of disaffected elites formed the uppermost rung of the new society of Martians.

If you will recall, the First Society had been mostly B-class Martians with some A-class financial benefactors.

The original point was to be an aid group that filled in the ever-widening gaps between what the Martians needed and what they were getting during the later bird years.

Now this mission was never a front in the sense that it wasn't real or that it was just made up to cover something else, but it became a front.

because more radically inclined Martians like Jose de Petrov organized a deeper cadre with real revolutionary purpose inside the First Society.

When they failed miserably at their attempted coup in 2229, that's when the First Society of Martians had been disbanded and suppressed.

Now in the later 2230s and early 2240s, the philanthropic relief the First Society had provided was taken up by Mabel Dorr and other A-class Martian friends and supporters who helped her fund, procure, and distribute goods and services under the tacit toleration of the Mars Division authorities.

Her operation was apolitical, but in setting this up she wound up working with many of the same people and connections and networks the First Society of Martians had established, meaning that the Second Society was not just the spiritual heir of the First Society, but its direct descendant.

Now the future leadership of the new Society of Martians coalesced during Mabel Dorr's failed campaign for the Board of Directors.

But it was not until the new protocols hit in the summer of 2245 that we start to get signs that something deeper and more seditious is being organized.

Now it's hard to tell myth from reality, from speculation, from lies, from wishful thinking, because obviously after the revolution, everyone claims to have been a part of the society.

Lots of people gave testimony, they told stories, they showed off alleged proof of their participation that has created very muddled waters for historians to swim in.

Accounts are contradictory, they don't make sense.

If you take them all at face value, they give an impossible timeline of events.

And of course, it doesn't help that the people who were actually involved in these early days destroyed all the evidence of their involvement.

But there is a great book out there called The New Red Caps by Parvati Bruno, which does a great job parsing through all of this and trying to separate fact from fancy.

What Bruno concludes is that the New Society of Martians became active as a clandestine organization in response to the new protocols.

Their first goal was to document and highlight how bad things were, and when that did little good, they turned to directly amplifying outrage over the death of the Breathless Five, using hacks and pirate streams and word of mouth to spread the story across all three colony cities.

And then of course we know that they advanced a battery chucking in May of 2246.

When the annulment of contracts started a few months later, they actively participated in protecting the annuled from the authorities, organizing food, water, and housing for them, and making sure the security services received nothing but the runaround.

But now the leaders of the Society of Martians began planning a much larger action.

Something to not just wake Werner up to the problems he was causing, but to create vids that could be pirated and smuggled back to Earth, maybe get somebody somewhere to actually care about what was happening out here.

The idea that they hit upon was a mass march through the tunnels up to the Prime Dome to present Werner with a list of demands.

This had never been attempted before and would require help from all levels of the society.

Now below the A-class elite leaders were the B-class Martians.

It should come as no surprise that people like Marcus Leopold, Ivana Darby, and Zhao Lin were all active members in the society by the time of the day of batteries.

In fact, their social cohort that was based at the Mons Cafe would become an absolute hotbed of recruitment.

And so, for example, just to throw some names at you that will become important later, we have Chen Min, who was at this point a junior executive in the education department, and Kenji Grew, who spent his days working as a physician in a D-Class health clinic.

Neither are super important at the moment, but both will become important as our story unfolds.

The B-Classes were about to provide technical support for the planned march, as well as recording, disseminating, and propagandizing what was about to happen.

And then when arrests and trials inevitably followed, they would provide the accused with vigorous defenses.

Now the C-class members of the Society of Martians are trickier to deal with because their demographic that they came from and their role inside of Martian society made them the least likely to join an organization like this.

They were, remember, mostly earthlings working a temporary posting.

They were far closer to Timothy Werner's view that Mars was just a site for resource extraction than a home worth fighting for.

Now, there were C-Class members of the Society of Martians, but in the new red caps, Bruno shows they appear to have been cordoned off organizationally and rarely trusted with truly critical information.

The D-Classes, meanwhile, were forming the bulk of the membership of the new Society of Martians.

Even if it's not true at this point that most members of the D-Class were in the Society of Martians, just by numbers, it is true that if you were in the Society of Martians, you were most likely from the D-Class.

D-Class members of the Society like Alexandra Clare, Akeo Juma, and Desta Onyago were all recruited after the arrival of the new protocols.

But membership positively exploded when the annulment of contracts hit, because they hit the D-classes first and hardest.

It was D-Class members of the Society of Martians who were helping deliver food and water and supplies to people who had been annulled and to hide them from the authorities.

They actually had a pretty sophisticated system of moving people and supplies around that effectively evaded the security services.

Now, here at the end of 2246, their network spread the word that a mass protest was to be organized and that they would form the masses.

Now adjacent to the new society of Martians were the people who had spent all of these years going back to the original society, providing the Martians with what Omnicor was failing to provide, and that is the space shippers.

There had long been smuggling connections between the Martians and the shippers.

During periods when smuggling was deliberately overlooked by the authorities, these connections existed practically out in the open.

But since the new protocols had gone into effect, they had to become more secretive.

And while the overall amount of black market goods coming into Mars declined, there was always stuff coming through, and always people willing to deliver it.

The Spaceshippers have their own organizations that we'll talk about down the road, and with a few scattered exceptions were never members of the Society of Martians themselves.

But these long-standing smuggling connections between the spaceshippers and the Society of Martians was only going to grow stronger and tighter as everyone kept getting more politicized and more radicalized.

Now, speaking of getting more politicized and more radicalized, as I said last week, the drip, drip, drip of contract annulments meant you could wake up any day and find yourself among the annulled.

And so it was for Alexandra Clare on December 14th, 2246.

She later wrote in One Red Life that she was surprised she lasted as long as she did.

She had been caught up in the failure to meet quota infractions, but her record prior to all of that was pretty unblemished, and so apparently she avoided the first rounds of annulments.

But on December 14th, she woke up, went to log into the system, and discovered that her contract had been annulled.

Like all of the annulled, she had a second message ordering her to report for processing, relocation, and deportation.

A message, like all the annulled, she ignored.

Meanwhile, up in the Prime Dome, Werner was getting reports from security services that there was something being organized out there, something big.

The Society of Martians seemed to have been able to mostly evade the security services, but evidence of a larger operation network was getting back up to the top.

Suspected elites like Mabel Dorr were put on round-the-clock surveillance, which severely curtailed what she could actually do here at the end of 2246.

Apollo Tanaka, meanwhile, who was not a member of the Society of Martians, continued to impress upon Werner that this was a real problem that needed to be taken seriously, that one day the day of batteries would go down not as just some one-off incident, but as the start of something that never stopped.

Now, the surest sign that Werner started to listen at least a little bit was his decision to send his family home.

Werner intended to see things through, but it was decided that Sarah and the children would return to Earth.

They departed on December the 17th.

And this is very important because it means that Sarah was en route back to Earth when the momentous events that are about to happen happen.

And thus we have the chat log records of conversations between Werner and Cartier.

As I said at the very, very beginning of the show, this question of how culpable Timothy Werner was in Bloody Sunrise was a matter of some debate for the first hundred or so years after the Martian Revolution.

Werner himself maintained that it was all out of his control and against his express wishes.

This was arguable until the discovery of the Werner deposits, a heretofore unknown set of backup files of his encrypted off-world communications from his time on Mars.

This included communication logs with Sarah.

And a more detailed exploration of the Werner deposits, plus critical selections from the Werner-Cartier chat logs, are available to patrons of the Martian Revolution.

So now we come to the point where the momentous events that are about to happen happen.

On January the 10th, 2247, people started gathering in the Warrens as if on queue.

People left their housing allotments and instead of going to work, assembled at various five ways.

Security services tried to deploy to cover the gatherings, but there were so many in such a short amount of time they could not scramble a coherent response.

Then these people started moving in the direction of the old cargo tunnels.

These old cargo tunnels were huge switchbacks used for getting major equipment up and down through this underground city without using lifts.

If one were so inclined, one could enter the old cargo tunnels and walk all the way to the surface.

Now, the doors to the old cargo tunnels were obviously meant to be locked at all times, but savvy B-class hackers had no trouble overriding the antiquated security systems, and pretty soon D-Class marchers poured into the tunnel and started walking up.

Alexandra Clare and her friends were in the vanguard of this growing mass.

While these people got on the march, an anonymous post announced that this was a political action with specific demands.

They wanted Timothy Werner to meet with a delegation of these Martians so that they could deliver three demands.

Reinstate those who had been annulled.

End all further annulments, and undo the new protocols.

Up in the Prime Dome, the Mars Division authorities briefly panicked about all of this before they came up with a response.

Security services believed that they could form a line where the C level met the B level and prevent these marchers from advancing any higher.

Werner ordered them to do this immediately.

Despite later claims by the revolutionaries, though, there does not appear to be any solid evidence that the authorities contemplated a plan to vacuum the tunnel and kill everyone all at once.

That option does not appear to have ever actually been on the table, and we only see it pop up for the first time later in the posts of Kenji Grew.

Now, originally, the plan was for the protesters to cross the line from D to C and then from C to B and along the the way pick up new people.

But security services went into lockdown especially in the upper levels, closing main arteries and preventing anyone from accessing the cargo tunnels.

Then they declared a quarantine order, which meant everyone had to stay wherever they were, whether it was at home or their office.

No one was supposed to be out in any public tunnel or large gathering area and anyone caught outside would be detained.

This obviously did not stop all of them, and some B-class Martians did try to sneak their way over to the cargo tunnel doors and attempt to join the march.

But for the most part, this lockdown and quarantine order did the trick, and the Martians marching up the tunnel would remain largely D class.

Now good to their word, the security services finally formed a strong skirmish line where the sea level reached the B level, a line that marked the divide between the lower and upper habitats.

This line of security personnel could hear the marchers coming up from below chanting and singing.

They were chanting no doors, they were chanting restore the contracts.

They were chanting no annulments.

They were chanting down with the new protocols.

Claire, Juma, and Onyago can all be seen on video at the front of this procession as they rose to approach the switchback marking the CB line.

And there they found themselves directly facing armed security services arrayed in front of them.

As they approached, they were ordered to halt.

When at first they did not halt, security personnel raised their weapons and pointed them directly at the crowd.

And then they halted.

Now at this point, it's worth keeping in mind that the reason this is presently unfolding the way it is is because security services did not want to just do mass butchery.

As I said, the claim that the response was bloodthirsty from the beginning is wildly overstated and belied by the simple fact that the authorities didn't do the simple and most extreme measure possible to block access to the upper levels, vacuum the tunnel and kill everyone.

Like I say, so far as I can tell, there is no evidence whatsoever that that option was ever seriously considered.

So now what we have is something of a stalemate.

The protesters couldn't move any further, but security services didn't want to just open fire.

Now Apollo Tanaka believed that what they needed to do was negotiate with the protesters about their demands.

But Werner was simply furious everything had gotten so quickly out of hand.

He blamed Tanaka for this mess, he blamed the security services, he blamed everyone, and demanded repeatedly that they just issue orders for everyone to go home or else.

But those demands were falling on very deaf ears.

Werner did not want to negotiate at all, but clearly this was a crisis with no easy solution, and Tanaka finally persuaded him that some kind of gesture would be needed in order to get everyone to go home.

Then, once everyone is home, we can go hog wild rooting out the people behind all of this, make sure nothing like this ever happens again, while simultaneously slow-walking whatever promise you have to make to resolve the immediate situation without giving away anything you don't actually want to give away.

Finally, Werner agreed to issue some kind of SOP to the people to get them to go home.

But after he agreed to this, he had a further meeting with the head of the security services for five minutes, a conversation whose log has been lost forever to time and about which there would be major disputes later.

Because when he left that meeting, Tanaka came back in to discuss what measures could be adopted to resolve the crisis when things started happening on the screens.

Tanaka was in the room with Werner when the situation flipped on a dime.

On the screen, Werner, Tanaka, and the others watched his security services became suddenly active.

Meanwhile, out the window of the executive offices and through the translucent prime dome, the sun just so happened to be rising small and blue over Mars at that very same moment.

Down in the tunnel, the people who could see what was going on with the security personnel rustled with panicked anticipation as they watched an officer step forward to make an announcement.

He said everyone had one last chance to turn around and go back to the warrens peacefully.

If they did not, security would take appropriate measures.

Those in the front received this warning in silence for a second and then responded.

One person in the front shouted, Frack this and frack you, which triggered a cacophony of other protesters each shouting their own defiant insults.

The officer turned around and returned to the line as the shouting intensified.

He signaled the security services to raise their neutron guns.

Now the people in the front realized they were about to get hit and took a split second to brace before security opened fire.

Now a neutron gun has many settings, from light stun to fully lethal, and it's true that that day they were set to heavy stun, not to kill.

But when the first barrage slammed into the crowd, the bodies dropped and there was no time to check to see whether people were being killed or only knocked out.

It triggered a full panic.

Those in the front ranks turned and ran and crashed into those behind them.

People in the back didn't even know what was happening yet, except suddenly there was a mass of frightened people pushing, shoving, and running back down the tunnel, heading right for them.

This stampede, predictable to anyone who thought about the efficacy of firing on the crowd for even two seconds, meant that people got trampled.

Bodies lay strewn about the floor.

The security services continued to advance down the tunnel to prevent anyone from coming back up, but they need not have worried.

People were in full let's get the hell out of here mode.

Tunnel doors were hacked open and protesters rushed back into the habitat areas.

Where once they had been a unified mass, they were all now individual molecules finding any crack or stream that took them back to the warrens.

Security services set up a few cordons to try to snag protesters, and they were successful at a few points, but mostly those who had marched up into the cargo tunnel made it back home.

Those that had not been killed anyway.

The final toll was shocking.

It is estimated that somewhere on the order of 50,000 people took part in the march.

Of those, 657 now lay dead in the tunnel, nearly all of them trampled in the frightened rush to get away from the neutron guns.

Another 844 were found injured and unable to flee, including most of those who had been hit in the first wave of firing.

Alexandra Clare managed to avoid both the neutron guns and being trampled, but was separated from her friends in the chaos.

It would not be until later that she found out Juma had been heavily stunned in the first volley and was then detained and sent to the stockade.

Onyago, meanwhile, was identified two days later among the dead.

She had tripped and fallen and been trampled in the stampede.

Back up in headquarters in the Prime Dome, Werner and the other executives around him watched in shock and then horror as all of this unfolded.

Tanaka was furious.

He thought this was all about to be peacefully resolved.

He lost his temper and yelled at Werner.

Werner, meanwhile, said that he had nothing to do with it, that he had told the security services merely to issue one last order to disperse, not actually fire on anyone.

The head of security services said that's not true, and Werner yelled, you misunderstood.

And that is the line he would maintain for the rest of his life, that he simply wanted to order the protesters to disperse one more time to test their resolve before offering the concession Tanaka had convinced him to offer.

And as I said, this remained a controversial historical subject for 100 years until the Werner deposit was uncovered, and we got access to his chat logs with Sarah, who was then en route from Mars back to Earth.

The chat logs reveal him saying in no uncertain terms that he told the the head of security services to fire on the crowd if they did not disperse.

Tartier commiserated with her husband over the rotten predicament he had found himself in, but soothed him by saying he had done what he needed to do.

And if you are so inclined, I have chosen some choice excerpts from the Werner-Cartier chat logs and talked about the Werner deposit more generally, and posted them for patrons of the show.

Next week, we will deal with the aftermath of what will become known as Bloody Sunrise, the second of the great revolutionary events, and explain how it built towards the Three Days of Red, the third of the three Great Revolutionary events.

You will not be shocked to learn, however, that Timothy Werner will not be around for that.

Right after Bloody Sunday, Werner coincidentally decided that his work here was done and that it was time for him to go back to Earth.

Meanwhile, the Mars Division authorities instituted far greater security lockdowns to control movement and access to computer systems to prevent anything else from happening.

But all all this really did was create a powder keg that somebody, somewhere, was going to set off.