11.3- The Martian Way

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.3, The Martian Way.

We left off last time at the turn of the 23rd century, with Omnicore entering a period of geriatric rule.

Each day, CEO Vernon Bird sunk a little deeper into an aging body propped up by life-extending pharmaceuticals which kept him alive, technically, but increasingly disengaged from the world around him.

Now, only a limited number of doses of these life-extending pharmaceuticals could ever be produced, so Byrd only shared the secret of life extension with other members of the board of directors.

They happily took the drugs and followed Byrd into a reclusive world of technical aliveness, totally detached from the company they were meant to be leading.

And because the shareholders had generously elected them all to life terms in 2193, they were insulated from the problems that mounted as a result of their collective indifference.

But oh boy, were problems mounting.

Every aspect of Omnicore's operations, personnel, finances, accounting, security, manufacturing, shipping, sales and marketing, all of it, eventually you have critical elements that require the approval or sign-off or guidance direction orders from senior management.

And increasingly, all of these urgent requests for approval, sign-off, guidance, direction, order were being submitted to leaders who had long since gone to bed.

Now this was certainly not the first time something like this has happened in human history.

Emperors slip into senility, monarchs are incapacitated by a stroke.

Times when the sovereign is alive but no longer able to handle the day-to-day responsibilities of the job.

Now usually in cases like this, a mix of two things happen.

First, a phalanx of aides, secretaries, and assistants surrounding the checked out leader acquire powers far beyond their technical job descriptions.

This is how the chamberlain who controls physical access to an incapacitated monarch suddenly becomes very powerful.

Oh, unfortunately the queen can't see you today, but if you give me the request I will surely see if she can sign it in the morning.

And then you come back in the morning and find the request has been denied thanks to a signature that looks suspiciously like the chamberlain's.

And so it was for Omnicore at the beginning of the 23rd century.

Surrounding the 52 members of the board of directors directors plus Bird himself was a screen of about 500 aides and secretaries.

And as time went by, they started taking control of the routine administration of the company, signing off on things, circulating memos, directing meetings.

Pretty soon, they were effectively running things at company headquarters.

Now, for a long time, this flew under the radar.

These aides were happy to play pretend with their decrepit bosses while living fat and comfortable lives.

Their main goal seemed to be keeping their bosses plugged into the life extension drugs, skimming some of those life extension drugs for themselves as long as it didn't risk their bosses' lives upon whom their own positions depended, and running Omnicore just well enough to not get caught.

And when it came to running Omnicore, the aides focused on core operations to prevent any catastrophic failures, but otherwise following the pattern set by their aging bosses, they tended to ignore and deprioritize anything that wasn't an immediate emergency.

After all, they didn't want anyone to catch on because they were managing things too vigorously.

But the problem is that when you make a list and only do the most pressing thing on that list, a bunch of other little things that are not ever pressing but do still need to be done get constantly driven to the bottom, never to be seen again or dealt with again.

And that brings us to the other big effect of the inactive and non-responsive sovereign.

When a monarch checks out, peripheral leaders lower down in the organizational chart, whether that be the province of an ancient empire, a fiefdom of a feudal monarchy, or a state in a confederated commonwealth, start making decisions for themselves.

If something needs to be done, and the king needs to do it, but the king is not doing it, well, that doesn't mean the thing doesn't need to be done anymore, it means that somebody else needs to do it.

And so, there's a slow but obvious devolution of power that gets going in the early 23rd century, as division heads and other lower-level managers started noticing whenever they submitted a request to headquarters that was anything but like the end of the world, the pingback request pending just sat there unaddressed forever.

No matter how many times you clicked refresh, it just sat there, request pending.

It didn't seem like there was anyone on the other end of the line.

But directors and managers could still be held accountable for failures even if the failures were the result of headquarters ignoring their calls.

So they had to start improvising way around company protocols anytime they ran into something that required approval from senior executives.

And ultimately what sprouted up was a little black market run by the aides at headquarters who sold signature key logs for Bird and other members of the board.

If you were a division head and you had this key log, you could start approving requests for yourself.

And this became a routine part of the graft of the later Bird years.

Because unless you ponied up for the key log, well, you were going to face the consequences for that decision at your next performance review.

And so you pony up for the key log, knowing that it's the aides themselves who were ignoring your calls so that you would have to buy this key log.

But it did mean that once this key log was in hand, that division directors and managers could now direct their own operations without any oversight at all.

The power of decision-making was devolving to the divisions, and they started being run as related, but not necessarily coordinated institutions.

Now, to bring this back around to Mars, obviously FOS5 remained a top company priority.

Even the venal cadre of executive aides assuming de facto control of Omnicore knew that.

The routine maintenance, service, and fuel procurement for extraction and shipment of FOSS5 was one of the rare places where request pending would become request approved, with less friction than in other parts of Omnicor.

But the interest in Mars of the AIDS running company headquarters was extremely narrow and short-sighted.

As long as Phosph quotas were being met, they ignored the rest.

It was as if the people who lived on Mars didn't need any attention at all.

They would just magically be there to do their jobs, even if the grav units in their housing quarters failed and everyone was suffering from the G-bends.

Not that the AIDS back at headquarters knew or cared what the G-bends were.

And so it was left to the Martian colonial administrators, and the Martians themselves, to manage their own lives as best they could.

And so, when we go hunting for the origins of Martian independence, this steadily increasing administrative neglect by Earth obviously plays a huge part.

But this neglect shown to the Martian colonies by headquarters did not mean that Mars was now in the hands of the Martians.

As we discussed last week, the colonial administrators were all S-class Earthlings whose principal loyalty was to Omnicore.

For them, Mars was simply a temporary posting.

Their families and futures were all back on Earth.

So, when Mars began acquiring some de facto autonomy as a result of geriatric drift, it was power held exclusively among S-class Earthlings.

But it did mean the colonial administration housed in the prime dome of Olympus became the final word on most aspects of life on Mars.

And since Earth's oversight and interest waned severely, no one thought too hard about the long-term consequences of any of this.

Meanwhile, beneath the feet of these S-class Earthling administrators, a Martian consciousness began to awaken.

In the early days of Mars, everyone was an Earthling.

But over the years, the Creole Martian population grew, and pretty soon there was a second generation of Martians and then a third generation of Martians.

And these Martians, born and raised on Mars, came to recognize themselves as a distinct group of people, a people living in a place that was more than just a site of resource extraction.

They were not on Mars just to extract resources for Earth.

They were on Mars because Mars was their home.

And as we look back, I think we can point to the Martian centenary in 2214 as a convenient marker for when springtime started dawning for the Martian people.

Now the origins of the Martian independence movement can be traced a variety of different ways.

As we'll see in a second, some commentators, both then and now, believed Martian independence came pre-baked into the very founding of the colony, that it was the destiny of all colonies to eventually become free and independent.

Others, like historian Hamish Soto, argue Martian independence was a very late-breaking affair, that even in the election of 2244, Martian independence as an idea had little real force or currency.

But I think we can point to the centenary in 2214 as kind of the sweet spot.

Celebrations surrounding the anniversary of the founding of Olympus kicked up a lot of pride among the Martians.

There was music and art and performances and books all produced to talk about the 101s and the first generation of settlers and the successful construction of the domes.

I think it's very fair to draw a line around 2214 and say before this Mars and its people were merely an extension of Omnicore's Earth-based operations.

But after 2214, the origins of the Martian Revolution are definitely falling into place.

Emerging from the patronage of the arts that surrounded the centenary commemorations, for the first time we start seeing Martian artists, musicians, and bards.

They mostly came from the younger ranks of the B-class.

All of them had regular jobs, serving as advocates, producers, doctors, engineers, or administrators.

But in their free time, they wrote, composed music, and staged performances.

Among them was Giles Nagata, Felice Timberland, and Janice Horne, the latter of whom wrote a song that took off back on Earth, making her the first interplanetary star.

It was certainly the first time anyone on Earth took notice of a cultural product from Mars.

Collectively, this cultural movement came to be referred to as the Martian Way.

And I'm getting all this from a book conveniently called The Martian Way by Pim Manus, which does a great job covering the movement from its origins during the centenary to its suppression in the 2230s.

Martian Way artists and writers tried to highlight the things that made Martians Martians.

Musicians used the unique acoustics of Mars' tunnel and chamber systems.

Screen vids specifically highlighted the trials and tribulations of Martians born on Mars.

Whether serious drama like Diggers, or comedy like Mr.

Blastoid's Big Bang Show, the focus was always on Martian characters and Martian issues.

Martian way artists also highlighted what they thought were critical differences between themselves and Earthlings.

That, for example, from the beginning, the close quarters of the Martian colony and distance from any immediate help meant that anyone living on Mars needed to be far more cooperative and communal about things than they had been on Earth.

The kind of atomized individualism that was common on Earth couldn't withstand the realities of Mars, and many Earthlings who struck out for Mars thinking they were going to become self-reliant pioneers simply couldn't hack it in the confined tunnels and chambers of Olympus.

The Martian Way always emphasized the virtues of cooperation and community, and ill winds forever blew for characters who tried to go it alone.

As Martian Way culture developed after the centenary, an organization was founded in 2220 called the Society of Martians.

The Society of Martians was part social network and part philanthropic social service devoted to supporting anyone who was born on Mars.

The Society raised funds from Martians in the A and B classes and then offered health services and repair crews and supplies of all kinds to anyone who joined the Society of Martians, and the only requirement for joining the Society of Martians is that you were born on Mars.

As shortages, delays, and other cancellations became an endemic part of life in the later bird years, the Society of Martians filled a critical gap, at least for the Martian-born population.

The colonial administrators tolerated the society because they actually were providing vital services, and the imperative of maintaining social order trumped concerns about what might be growing in and around this organization.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise what I'm going to tell you was growing up in and around this organization because as the saying goes, politics is downstream of culture.

With Martian Way works proliferating and the Society of Martians organizing as a benevolent affinity group, some Martians had a political awakening to go along with their cultural awakening.

Inside the Society of Martians, a subset of members began talking amongst themselves about how Mars was being run, who was running it, and why Martians were shut out of real power over their own planet.

These younger radicals came to sport jaunty red berets as a sartorial calling card, which is how they come to be referred to as the Red Caps.

The most famous red cap was Jose de Petrov.

Petrov was born on Olympus in 2187, second-generation Martian on his father's side and third generation on his mother's.

Precocious from a young age, he read widely with a special interest in history and politics.

He attended B-Class Academy and emerged with a job placement in the education division.

This was right around the time of the centenary, and Petrov got into Martian way culture.

Using his position inside the educational system, Petrov was also able to access books not otherwise available to the public.

When the Society of Martians formed in 2220, he joined immediately.

When the subset of younger radicals started coalescing, Petrov was among the first to don a red cap.

In 2223, Petrov published an anonymous screen vid innocuously called The Forces of History.

It was a culmination of his early studies of history and politics that left him convinced that Martian independence was inevitable.

Whenever a Metropole founded a colony, eventually that colony declared independence.

History was full of such examples, from Greece in ancient times to the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries, to African and Asian decolonization in the 20th century.

Colonies broke free.

That's what they did.

Now, of course, Petrov became convinced of this, even though there were many examples throughout history of colonies that never broke away and remained integrated with their home countries forever.

But those were inconvenient exceptions to what Petrov concluded was effectively a law of history.

In 2223, Petrov released the forces of history and it spread rapidly through red cap hands and became one of the urtexts of Martian independence.

By 2225, Petrov had moved on from disseminating ideas to organizing for action.

Petrov paid attention and was well aware of the administrative drift taking place throughout Omnicorp, and when it came to Mars specifically, Earth was barely paying attention.

So after a period of intensive study of revolutionary strategy and tactics, he organized the first revolutionary cells on Mars.

Petrov got together with a few trusted comrades to form the first cells, and then they all went out and formed additional red-capped cells without revealing who they were inducting into the organization.

At the center of this growing revolutionary cell network, Petrov further developed a theory that really all anyone needed to do was seize Mars Division headquarters in the Prime Dome, evict the S-Class Earthling administrators, take control of key operations on the planet that ran through headquarters like communications, transportation, and most especially Phosph extraction, and once they had control of Phosph extraction, well, they held all the cards and would force Earth to recognize Martian independence or risk losing this vital resource.

Taking advantage of declining oversight and rampant corruption, Petrov's red caps began acquiring black market weapons.

After several years of waiting and watching, their moment suddenly came on April the 19th, 2229.

That was the day the director of Mars Division, Holden Kremer, died in a skiff accident.

Kremer was the first director of Mars Division to die in office, but Petrov and his followers cared less about that historical footnote than the fact that there was now destabilizing confusion at the top of the colonial org chart.

If ever there was a moment to strike, this was it.

So, ready or not, it was time to go.

On the night of April 23, 2229, Petrov and about 250 armed Red Cap partisans used counterfeit skin chips that allowed them to access the tunnels beneath the Mars Division headquarters in the Prime Dome.

They quickly neutralized the guards, who had basically never dealt with a real security threat and so were caught completely by surprise.

And if you read Darvin Quidley's Night of Broken Dreams, which is a practically minute-by-minute account of all this, we find that most of the security personnel were asleep or drunk when the Red Cat partisans suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Not a single shot was fired at this point in the operation.

Their counterfeit skin chips got Petrov and his comrades all the way up to the main floor of the headquarters building before things went haywire.

When they tried to access the executive floors, the scanners sounded an alarm.

The building went on full lockdown and suddenly the Red Caps could not go back the way they had come up.

A small first wave of security responders arrived, but the Red Caps opened fire and drove them back.

But they were still trapped inside the building, and with additional security companies arriving in force, they found their way to the main commissary of the building, where they holed up to make a stand.

The vice director of Mars Division, now acting director of Mars Division, was woken up and came down to open communications and find out who these people were, why they were here, and what they wanted.

Petrov responded that they were Martians, that they were here because Mars was their home, and their demand was Martian independence.

Petrov gallantly signed off by saying, I would rather die than settle for anything less than freedom.

This romantic flourish quite literally sealed his fate.

The vice director said fine, directed security to barricade all the doors to the commissary, then set the air scrubber serving the commissary to vacuum mode.

Within a matter of minutes, all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, and Jose de Petrov and all his comrades lay dead on the floor.

It was a rather anticlimactic and ignoble end to years of dreaming and planning.

Jose de Petrov was ahead of his time, and even had the red caps made it to the executive suites, it's likely they were still doomed.

As I said, Hamish Soto makes a very good case that in the 2220s, the cause of Martian independence was not on the tip of everyone's tongue.

Petrov and the other red caps were living in a B-class bubble that did not yet reach down to the masses in the D-class.

Nor was it likely that simply seizing control of headquarters would be enough to take over Mars and withstand retaliation from Earth.

So, it was a pretty half-baked plan, honestly, that didn't even trigger an immediate wave of outrage or sympathy.

Their failed revolutionary coup was buried under a heavy blanket of censorship that prevented most of the inhabitants of Mars from learning what had happened that night.

It would not be until the 2240s that many on Mars learned about these revolutionary precursor events from the 2220s.

But once he was rediscovered, Petrov's legacy lived on in two areas, one political and one social.

Politically, he was going to become a revered figure during the Martian Revolution.

There was a reason Marcus Leopold called for the Martian Assembly to convene in that very same commissary during the three days of red in 2247.

As the first great martyr to the cause of Martian independence, Petrov was enshrined in the revolutionary pantheon, and is still a revered figure on Mars to this very day.

Socially, his legacy is more complex.

Though Petrov himself believed in Mars for the Martians as a rallying cry for an oppressed people, the red berets left strewn across the commissary floor would be picked up during the revolution by a more aggressively nationalistic Martian spirit that was overtly contemptuous of earthlings, called for Martian political supremacy, and promoted Martian intermarriage to grow the population of true Martians.

The second-wave red caps also claim Petrov as their spiritual founder, whether he would have embraced their more aggressively nationalistic beliefs or not.

Now, though news of the failed Red Cap coup was suppressed on both Mars and Earth, the AIDS running Omnicorp headquarters knew all about it.

And while they were spooked, they were somewhat pacified by an after-action report that concluded that the REDCap movement was limited to the B-classes, and that people in the C-class and D-class had mostly been oblivious to all of it.

Believing this could be contained then, and lacking any sort of broader political imagination, the AIDS concluded that the only answer was to increase security and clamp down on anything that resembled political sedition.

This of course meant shutting down the previously tolerated society of Martians.

It also meant that censorship databases were updated to include nearly all the Martian way artists, musicians, poets, and performers.

All of these people who had been celebrated in the 2220s found themselves proscribed and banned in the 2230s.

Omnicord did its best to eliminate all knowledge of Petrov's failed coup, but they could not totally eliminate it.

S and A-class executives on Mars, who both lived and worked around the Prime Dome, heard about what happened and told each other what had happened.

There was one 20-year-old A-class Martian student in particular who learned what happened, and had her imagination fired as she contemplated both the excitement of the attempt and the horrifying end to the adventure.

Her knowledge of what happened in the commissary took her from being politically indifferent to becoming the great patriot of the Martian people.

I speak, of course, of Mabel Dore.

Mabel Dore was born in 2209, the only daughter of A-Class Martian executives.

And in fact, not only were both of Dorr's parents born on Mars, but so too were all four of her grandparents.

Mabel Dore was among the only fourth-generation Martians in the A-Class, and her family was among the richest on Mars.

certainly the richest Martian family on Mars.

Dorr attended the Elite Martian Academy, the first school school opened by the 101s back when they were first founding the colony, and it was at the end of her second year when all those red caps died in the commissary.

As the scion of the Martian elite, when Dorr graduated in 2232, she was sent to Earth to complete her education.

Specifically, she was sent to study psychology at Oxford.

Now you might be wondering how exactly one born and raised on Mars manages to get along on Earth, and the answer is, not well, but they could eventually acclimatize.

The grab units on Mars nearly replicated Earth's gravity, but it was never going to be bang on target, and so on Earth, Dorr initially struggled to do basic things comfortably.

It was simply harder for her to walk and talk and breathe than it was for her earthling classmates.

The sight of her laboring to get to class or struggling to get out of a chair made her an easy subject for mockery.

Even fellow students who showed some empathy often treated her simply as an object of curiosity rather than an actual person.

But if they thought they were looking down on Mabel Dore, they had no idea how much Mabel Dore was now looking down on them.

She later said, they didn't think much of me, but that's okay, because I didn't think much of them either.

I walked away as unimpressed with them as they were of me.

After two years on Earth, she returned to Mars convinced that the ruling elite on Earth were a bunch of dim-witted snobs who had done little to earn their own self-regard.

Back on Mars, Dorr took up a position in the personnel division, but she was shortly thereafter struck by tragedy.

In 2236, both of her parents died in the Draper collision.

This left Dorr grieving, but also in control of the family's considerable financial portfolio.

She was now one of the single, richest Martians on the planet.

At her job, Dorr quickly became frustrated with conditions under the later bird years.

Everything she encountered in the course of her work in the personnel division convinced her that Martian colonial administration was simply not serving the people of Mars.

She drafted memo after memo outlining reforms and changes that could be made, all of which were ignored by the colonial administrators.

Helpless to do anything through official channels, Dorr started pouring her fortune into privately ameliorating conditions for the people on Mars.

She picked up where the disbanded Society of Martians left off, funding philanthropic efforts to provide health clinics, air scrubbers, grab units, flex cells, and other necessary supplies to the lower classes.

She managed to avoid being barred from these activities the way the Society of Martians had been, because her vision was far more universalist than theirs had been.

For Mabel Dorr, you didn't have to be born on Mars to be a Martian.

You simply had to live there and call it home.

So while the Society had limited access to their services to Martian-born Martians, which made them a political liability, Dorr made her services available to all without reservation or qualification.

The authorities weren't exactly wild about this, but they had their hands full with other concerns, and just as they had once calculated with the Society of Martians, they figured Mabel Dorr's efforts were probably staving off a crisis that might otherwise be unavoidable.

In 2239, Dorr signed a marriage contract with fellow A-class Martian executive Royce Saito.

The couple never had children, but instead spent their days working at their jobs and in their free time promoting the health, happiness, and well-being of the people of Mars.

They sponsored a second wave of Martian artists who were not as overtly political and subversive as the first wave had been, but who still expanded the vocabulary of Martian culture.

Down among the D-classes, her name became synonymous with food, drinks, medicine, and equipment that arrived even if the company failed to deliver.

Bar tabs were often picked up by Mabel Dore, entertainment spaces were rented out and opened to the public for free by Mabel Dore.

By the early 2240s, Mabel Dore was probably the single best-known and best-liked Martian on the planet.

But in those early 2240s, two things happened.

First, three members of the Omnicore Board of Directors died, two in 2241 and then another in 2242.

These were the first deaths of any board member since the turn of the century, and the first non-accidental deaths since the 2180s.

This meant that for the first time in almost 50 years, there would need to be shareholder elections to fill the vacant seats.

All three elections were held in the spring of 2242, and the three new board members were elected, one of whom was young Timothy Werner, who we will introduce and talk about next week.

But these deaths were a harbinger of the first major crisis looming atop the Omnicore organizational chart.

The other looming crisis was a slowdown in FOSS5 production.

Even though the aides running Earth headquarters stayed on FOS5 production and were now more involved than ever in ensuring Mars remained secure, orderly, and obedient, the fact was they were still failing to manage the wider context.

Shortages, organizational dysfunction, system failures, glitches, bugs, breakdowns, all of this defined Omnicore in the 2230s and 2240s.

Most supervisors and managers, whether on Earth or Luna or Mars, were leveraging opportunities for corruption and graft once it became apparent that nobody was actually paying attention to what they did.

So while Earth headquarters watched Phosphide production like a hawk, they weren't watching, for example, the factory that made the game spheres that were shipped to Mars and constantly constantly malfunctioned, driving D-Class Martians crazy, leading them to gripe about how nothing works right anymore and that all Earth ever sends them is junk.

The AIDS could never understand that their wider negligence was causing the shortages that they were so concerned about in this one particular area.

So across the board in the early 2240s, workplace standards declined, equipment malfunctioned, ship engines stalled, and for the first time since the founding of Elysium, Phosph production dipped below quota.

Earth headquarters was about to start exerting heavy pressure on the Martian colonial administrators to get production back on track, but this was derailed by a shocking event.

On February the 17th, 2244, word went out on screens across the solar system.

Vernon Bird

was dead.

He was 151 years old and had been CEO of Omnicore for 87 years.

Nearly every person on Earth, Luna, and Mars had been born after Vernon Bird became CEO of Omnicor.

They knew no other life, they knew no other CEO, and now he was dead.

What in the world,

or what in the worlds, was going to happen next?