11.2- In With the Old

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.2 In with the Old

Last time, we discussed the early colonization of Mars, got the first and most important colony city of Olympus up and running, and got FOSS-5 shipped back to the Earth on a regular schedule.

Now just to keep things simple in that introductory episode, I was saying things like Omnicore did this and Omnicore did that, as if they were some kind of independent entity, not a collection of nameable executives, CEOs, and shareholders.

But we're here to talk about a revolution on Mars that gets rolling in the 2240s, so I didn't want to bog you down with a bunch of names that are ultimately irrelevant to that story.

The short tenure of Hans O'Connor is obviously fascinating in its own right, but we do have to keep moving.

Today, though, we begin with a person who is most definitely important enough to name and talk about, and that is Vernon Bird.

Maybe you've heard of him?

Vernon Matsusaka Bird was born in Sydney, Australia in June 2093.

He was the eldest son of two high-ranking Omnicore executives.

His birth in this final decade of the 21st century means that he was born just after flex cells had been introduced, but just before Omnicore successfully landed humans on Mars.

Bird was in fact 16 years old and attending an elite STEM academy in Delhi when the Archangel landed on Mars, and Byrd later said that seeing Henrietta Akai land on Mars was a transformative moment in his life, that it made him want to lead humanity even further out among the stars.

This is a story that was often repeated in future biographies, but as Eleanor Wood revealed in Young Verne, a biography which focuses exclusively on Bird's life before he became the CEO of Omnicore, Byrd's school chat logs show that he overslept that day and missed the landing entirely.

He only watched the recording of it several days later and made no further mention at the time of it being at all important to him.

But still, Bird was a good student and after graduation he was awarded an employment contract in Omnicore's engineering division with a specialty in hydromechanics, which got him a spot under the Toronto Dome.

By all accounts, he was a highly competent engineer and was lead designer of a new filtration system that became standard in most North American domes for at least 100 years.

But as Wood shows in Young Verne, Byrd's real genius lay in the realm of corporate politics.

Sure, he was smart and worked hard, but his promotion records are filled with glowing comments from both superiors and subordinates.

He clearly had a knack for flattering the egos of people higher up in the corporate chain and earning the loyalty of those underneath him.

Byrd took care of us, one of his engineers later said.

He treated us like human beings and we loved him for it.

This charismatic gift for interpersonal relations earned him a lot of goodwill as he rose up through the ranks of Omnicore.

He soon had a solid network of patrons above and devoted followers below.

Now of course it also helped that in 2123 he met Manuela Garcia, the daughter of very high-level Omnicore executives.

Not only did Garcia come from this extremely prominent family, but she herself was emerging as a major figure in the bioengineering division.

She helped pioneer the resilient biomass structures that were so critical to the Martian colonization project.

Byrd and Garcia married in 2125 in a marriage that was something more than a mere contract of convenience between two executives, but something less than a loving romance.

Hector Bartlesby writes in Manuela Garcia A Life and Life that by marrying Byrd, she married down.

but she could see that he was ambitious and undeniably charismatic.

He would keep rising through the the corporate ladder, perhaps even to the very top.

Garcia herself wanted to focus on her research projects and saw in Bird a natural political talent who could handle the mundane backstabbing of corporate intrigue that would leave her free to do her work.

Their genetic compatibility test checked out and they had three children, Gaius, Julia, and Octavian, in case Bird was afraid anyone would miss how ambitious he was.

Along the way, Byrd made several shrewd investments that made the couple extremely wealthy apart from their salaries and positions inside Omnicore.

Byrd's love for credit-making became legendary, and one of his most famous quips was, quote, we must imagine Sisyphus rich.

It should come as no surprise that this incredible talent he had for securing the loyalty of both his bosses and his employees came with regular transfers of credits from his ever-growing bank accounts.

In his hilariously hagiographic biography, Vernon Byrd, Great Man of Destiny, which I read so you don't have to, Victor Kovak calls these transfers, quote, the product of Bird's overwhelming generosity of spirit.

He simply could not stand the thought of a friend in need not getting what they needed.

Meanwhile, J.J.

Akinori's Lazarus Mans takes a far more cynical tack, saying, quote, he would bribe anyone, and everyone, and he did.

In 2143, Vernon Bird was promoted to director of Exoengineering and was elected to Omnicore's Board of Directors just after his 50th birthday.

And this election, I should mention, is where young Vern ends.

And it should tell you something that a book about his quote-unquote early life wraps up just as he's turning 50 years old.

Over the next 14 years, Byrd worked tirelessly to curry favor with every one of his colleagues on the board of directors, and won most of them over through a mix of bribery and, when the situation called for it, a little friendly blackmail.

And so it was that when the sitting CEO, Felicia Ostenega, suffered a debilitating stroke and had to resign in February 2157, there was only really one choice to succeed her.

On April 23, 2157, Omnicorps' board of directors elected Vernon Bird to be the new CEO.

Little did anyone know it would be the last such election for 87

years.

Now obviously Vernon Bird did a lot of different things when he became CEO of Omnicor.

This job came with it responsibilities that covered practically every facet of human life in the 22nd century.

But we are here to talk about the Martian Revolution, and so we will set aside his policies, reforms, and initiatives on Earth and stay focused on his activities beyond the orbit of the moon.

Byrd well knew that Phos V continued to be the single most important component of Omnicor's operation and, frankly, human civilization.

But he also knew that while the fact that there was 500 years' worth of the stuff on Mars, that did not mean that there was 500 years worth of the stuff just in Olympus Mons, nor did it mean that the supply on Mars was literally inexhaustible.

500 years was a long time, yes, but it was not literally an eternity.

And whatever else one might say about Vernon Byrd, short-sightedness was not one of his faults.

He did seem to genuinely care what happened 500 years in the future, that it was not something to be put off, but something to be addressed right here and right now.

So in addition to what he's about to do on Mars, for example, Byrd immediately ordered scout ships out to Jupiter and Saturn to begin laying the groundwork for even more human space colonies.

But when it came to Martian policy, Byrd immediately set in motion plans to construct two new colony cities.

One was located at Tharsis, a volcanic plateau in the western hemisphere, that included three huge mountains known to contain large deposits of Phosph, Arcea Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascreus Mons.

Founded in 2168, Tharsis was only about 1,200 kilometers from Olympus, and because of its proximity, Tharsis would become something of a sister colony, although with a pretty marked sibling rivalry aspect and intense inferiority complex.

Tharsians would always chafe at being referred to as the second city of Mars.

The third colony was established in 2175 at the base of Elysium Mons in the eastern hemisphere.

Elysium was over 4,000 kilometers away from Olympus, far enough removed that the Elysians would develop their own independent identity and culture, as we will see.

Olympus would always be the central and principal city of Mars, and its relations to the other two would eventually become quite strained, as Olympian supremacy became something that was both promoted by its promoters and criticized by its critics.

Following the model of Olympus, these two new colonies grew downward.

and were fundamentally huge underground city complexes.

But Byrd also had a vision for the Martians to be more than just diggers, and so at the same time he initiated the founding of Tharsis and Elysium, he ordered the first surface dome habitats constructed at Olympus.

Olympus' prime dome opened in 2177, and in the years to come a further network of domes sprouted up atop the vast underground tunnels and chambers of the colony.

As soon as the surface domes were built, the elites of Olympus moved up and into them.

and that is where we would find the administrative headquarters of Olympus specifically and Mars generally.

The creation of two new colonies and the expansion of Phosph extraction operations necessitated even more colonists be sent from Earth.

So this is a good time to pause and talk about who those people were, where they came from, and most importantly, explain the employment contract classification system that defined their lives and would become such a huge part of the story of the Martian Revolution.

So Everyone on Mars held an employment contract with OmniCorps.

There was literally no other way to get there or to survive there.

If you didn't have an employment contract, there was no way to get to Mars.

And if you had one and then your contract was annulled, well, the next step is deportation.

Deportation to where, you might ask?

Well, at first it was back to Earth.

But then, once Omnicore's operation spread further out among the stars, it meant the moons of Saturn.

and that is not any place you wanted to be sent.

So everyone had a skin chip that contained employment class and status, and it defined where you lived, how you lived, what you ate, what you wore, what you were allowed to see and hear and do.

Your skin chip marked your status and either allowed you or denied you access to certain tunnels and levels, commissaries, housing, employment sites, shops and theaters, you name it, your employment status defined everything.

And as we'll see when the annulment crisis comes up, simple things like being able to open a tunnel door came down to what popped up when your skin chip scanned.

And if your skin chip stopped scanning, well, you literally couldn't go anywhere or do anything.

You couldn't even open a door.

So life on Mars at its most basic level was defined by a five-tiered employment class pyramid.

At the very tippy top was the S-Class.

The S's were the top executives and formed an almost microscopic part of the population.

For most of the history of pre-revolutionary Mars, the S-class were nearly all earthlings, and their orientation was 100% Earth-facing.

To them, Mars was a site of resource extraction for Earth, and they were there to manage that job, and that's it.

The S-class at first lived in the tunnels and chambers nearest to the Martian surface, and then as soon as the first domes opened, they were the ones to move in.

Below the S-class, literally and figuratively, was the A-Class.

The A's were senior managers outside the upper echelon of the S-Class, who oversaw operations of their respective divisions, bioengineering, exoengineering, phosph extraction human relations etc etc

the a class lived in the uppermost chambers of their respective colonies and often had access to surface habitats or depending on who you were you might actually live there too

though the a's were often earthlings just like the s class as the years went by the a class became filled with martian born children of former s-class families who themselves could no longer break into the s-class because omni-core headquarters back on earth always sent earthlings to fill those positions.

We'll talk all about this when we get to Mabel Dorr because if you don't think this was a source of simmering resentment, well, you don't know much about human nature.

Below the A class was, you guessed it, the B class.

And it is among the Bs that we find the crossover between Mars as a site of resource extraction and Mars as a human community.

Because even if you want everything to be about extracting FOSS5, there were human activities that inevitably came with the presence of that many people.

So the B-class was filled not just with younger middle managers, but also an array of what used to be called the professional classes.

Legal advocates, medical doctors, professors and teachers, media producers.

Well-educated people who were vital to the functioning of Mars not just on an economic level, but on a human level.

This is medicine and law and culture.

As time went by, the B class was the first class to stop being predominantly earthlings and start being predominantly Martians.

It seemed to be where most of the educated descendants of S's and A's of previous generations, which obviously has a big impact on their role in the Martian Revolution.

Collectively, these three upper classes made up about 10-15% of the population of Mars, and they were often referred to as the Sab elite, or just the Sabs.

Now, as to where they came from originally, Well, it was from the elite rungs of life back on Earth.

The climatic disruptions of the 21st century had of course scrambled up most of the old national definitions until they became incoherent, but there was still a distinct geographic and ethnic dimension, with elite classes in Europe, North America, China, and India riding out the chaos and remaining on top after things stabilized in the 22nd century.

So most of the SABs trace their origins back to the people who were on top back on Earth.

mostly North Americans, Europeans, and Chinese.

Now they did not come from the very top of the hierarchy back on Earth, mind you, because, well, if you were on the very top of the hierarchy back on Earth, there was no reason to move to Mars now, was there?

If you're interested in more on this, there's a great rundown by Amari Davu about the ethnic origins of the Martian colonists called, well, the ethnic origins of the Martian colonists, and it's full of tons of helpful charts, tables, and demographic data.

Below the SABs, we find the vast majority of the Martian population.

The C-class were on-site supervisors dealing with the actual bureaucratic administration of the the colonies, not just managing the Phosph extraction work, but also every aspect of Mars as a community, not just Mars as a site of resource extraction.

So commissaries, housing allotments, health clinics, retail markets, security forces, these were all operated and managed by the C-Class.

And the thing is, most of the C-class were earthlings who went to Mars to earn bonuses and employment points they could use back on Earth to upgrade their living situation.

Eventually, it became de facto policy to make sure the C-class supervisors were rotated out and replaced by Earthlings as the Creole Martian population grew.

As Martian identity and values took shape independent of earthling interests, the C-Class were there to make sure the colony still ran the way headquarters wanted.

For Earth, first and always.

And then finally we come to the D-Class, who made up the majority of the population.

They were the diggers, the extractors, and the maintenance technicians.

Now of course the heavy work itself was all done by drone bots who were mindless tools controlled by human operators.

But someone had to operate those drone bots and then do all the monitoring and repairing and servicing of the machines, as well as doing all the routine maintenance of everything else in the colonies.

Screens, panels, plumbing, grav units, heating, cooling, flex cells, all the stuff that made life on Mars possible.

So if there was a drone bot apparatus doing welding or wiring or metal fabrication, there was a team of D-Class techs monitoring, servicing, and directing that work.

Now this was was all hard and grueling work, and shifts came with very little downtime or rest because if anyone started making noise about the need for downtime or rest, well guess what?

Your contract has been annulled, and that's the last time anyone's going to see you ever again.

And just as the SABs were drawn mostly from the more elite rungs of Earth, the C and D classes came from the more desperate parts of the world, particularly Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia.

Most especially, from the displaced communities who had been thrown up and around the globe in the 21st century.

So though the melting pot on Earth got very melted together because of the demographic flux of the 21st century, old mentalities and racial and ethnic hierarchies reproduced themselves on Mars, which formed just one component of the overlapping lines of tension that define pre-revolutionary Mars and which would explode so spectacularly in 2247.

So let's talk about a few of those lines of tension.

The first and most obvious line of tension was between the employment classes themselves.

From the bottom up, there's just a lot of tension between the D-class and the C-class supervisors, not just on the job, but also in their regular lives.

For the most part, D-class Martians had no contact with the SAB elite.

There was always a layer of C-class supervisors watching over them, and frankly, lording over them.

The Cs developed a very contemptuous attitude towards the Ds, and in return the Ds developed a hatred of the Cs.

And both of them dealt with their own resentments as the Sabs above them treated them like vulgar brutes rather than real people, often referring to them as the C Ds.

Get it?

Like, CD is insorted and disreputable?

And hey, look, don't tell me that's cheesy and obvious.

I'm not making this stuff up.

I'm just telling you what they said.

Now, because there were many fewer of them, S's and A's and B's would come into contact with each other far more than they did with the C D's, who, if you were an S-class executive, you might actually never see.

unless, of course, your screen needed repairing.

But you would often come into contact with A's and B's, and so among the Sabilete, there was a lot of status signaling among them that was defined by snobbery and disdain and mutual resentments.

Now, another huge line of tension that cuts across these classes was the line between Martians and Earthlings.

At first, everyone was an earthling.

They thought like an earthling, they acted like an earthling.

But as the years went by, and then the decades, and then ultimately ultimately the centuries, the Creole Martian population grew.

By raw numbers, the most Martian-born Martians were in the D-class down in the Warrens, because that's where most of the people were.

But even in the D-class, emigration to Mars from Earth continued to form the bulk of the population growth well into the 23rd century.

So it was actually among the Bs that we find the highest percentage of Martian-born Martians.

And in fact, at the time of the revolution, they formed a majority of the B-class.

The highest-ranking ranking Martians were among the A's, because with very, very few exceptions, all the S-class positions were reserved for earthlings.

And then the C-class, as I mentioned, also had a very high percentage of earthlings right up to the time of the revolution.

And the tension between earthlings and Martians is very, very important, because anyone born on Earth automatically thought they were superior to anyone born on Mars, and in return, anyone born on Mars automatically thought they were superior to anyone who came from Earth.

And then as I just said, another simmering line of resentment was lingering racial, ethnic, and religious hostilities brought up from Earth and replicated on Mars.

This tended to be lessened as Martians intermingled, intermarried, and formed a Martian identity that started to transcend those old boundaries.

But lingering ethnic divisions between like North Americans and Europeans on the one hand and Africans and South Asians on the other was reproduced on Mars.

Unfortunately, humans did not become colorblind just because they were living further away from the sun.

So this all created a complex web of conflicting identities.

On the one hand, a D-class technician had nothing in common with an A-class executive, but on the other hand, if they were both born and raised on Mars, then they really did have something in common, and something important.

And then that same Martian-born D-class technician might seem to have everything in common with another Martian-born D-class technician, except, whoops, one of them is from North America and the other comes from Africa.

We'll dig into this more next week as we talk about the revolutionary precursors that started to show up at the beginning of the 23rd century and how a new pan-Martian identity began to have a real force as the Martian way started to take root and spread, and hopefully transcend all this nonsense the Earthlings were foisting upon them.

But we'll save that for next week because right now we have to get back to the seeds of the Martian Revolution and where they started to get planted.

Now the prime fertilizer for the Martian Revolution was basically just the continued existence of Vernon Bird.

Elected in 2157, it did not seem wildly abnormal that he was still CEO in 2187.

30 years is a long time, sure, but it wasn't outside the bounds of anything.

But then the years kept ticking by, and Vernon Bird just stayed and stayed.

And so too did the board of directors surrounding him.

And in fact, by the dawn of the 23rd century, only two members of the Omnicore board had died, and both were accidents.

The reason for this is that after doing so much in the first decades of his tenure as CEO to expand Omnicore's operations beyond the moon's orbit and cement Omnicore's status as the largest and most powerful corporation on Earth, Byrd concluded, as all great men of destiny invariably conclude, that no one else could possibly succeed him or finish the job that he started.

What people did not know at the time, but which we all know now, is that Manuela Garcia had been experimenting with life extension techniques.

Now, life extension has always been a pursuit of the super wealthy, because one of the great benefits of being on top, all the way back to caveman days, was access to the resources, comforts, and medicines that prolong life.

That's kind of the whole point of power.

So in the 2180s, Manuela Garcia developed a pharmaceutical cocktail that allowed her and her husband and the other members of the board of directors to stave off the bony finger of death.

When Vernon Bird celebrated his 100th birthday in 2193, the board celebrated by orchestrating an election that confirmed all of their positions for life without any further need for regular elections going forward.

At the time, it seemed like this was just a cute little present, because after all, every one of them was positively ancient.

I mean, Vernon Bird is celebrating his 100th birthday.

It's not like he's going to live much longer.

Ha ha ha.

So the 23rd century arrived and Bird was still CEO.

and all the same directors were still in place.

They were just getting older and older and older and not dying or being replaced.

But the thing is, the cocktail that Garcia developed was not like fountain of youth stuff.

It's not like they remained young and vigorous, or that they didn't look like they were 100 years old, and then 110, and then 120, and then 130.

They all frankly looked like dried-up raisins.

Their mobility was increasingly limited, and their bodies, though alive, were incredibly frail.

And their minds, though in slightly better shape than their bodies, started drifting, drifting into heretofore unknown realms of experience like a computer that's been left on too long.

So the vigorous and ambitious and engaged Vernon Bird who had come to power in 2157 was increasingly out of touch and distant from operations of Omnicor when he celebrated his 50th year as CEO in 2207.

And you can imagine what that trajectory was like when he then celebrated his 75th year in power in 2232.

By that point, most people on Earth and Mars had lived their entire lives with Omnicore having precisely one CEO, Vernon Byrd, and he was surrounded by a board of directors who themselves, with just a few exceptions, had been in power with him the whole time.

As we will discuss more next week, a distinct drift entered Omnicore management, especially when it came to the Martian colonies.

Now, presumably, Byrd believed that by staying alive and staying in power, that he would see through to the end these plans that were operating on a 500-year timeline.

But the truth was that the fact of his being alive was not the same as him being able to do the job, or even being interested in doing the job.

He may have set out to be the only one who could do it, but he stopped being able to do it.

Schedules and logs from the later years of Bird's life show him engaging only infrequently with company affairs.

Things that needed his attention and approval were getting ignored, lost in the shuffle, dropped through the cracks.

And this was especially true for the Martians.

And it seemed like as long as Phos 5 shipments continued to flow, there was going to be very little direction and guidance or orders or oversight from back on Earth.

They were increasingly left to their own devices to solve their own problems and live their own lives.

And so several generations of Martians, whether born on Mars or transplants from Earth, got very used to the idea that they were running their own affairs now.

It might be frustrating on one level, but on another level, it was positively liberating.

And next week, we will discuss the effects of Omnicore's experiment with extreme gerontocracy as we discuss the formation and development of the Martian Way.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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