OSR: Book One
Prologue
Even in the pursuit of good things motivated by good faith, humanity creates messes for its own future. The cost of malice may be eradicated from our species, and we would still find ourselves facing annihilation, grief, hard choices, by merely interacting with reality over time. It is said that evil is uncorrected error. By the middle of the 21st century, the nine billion people of Earth came to mostly agree that mindless, undirected exponential growth as its own end was an uncorrected error. The old freedoms won by the capitalist order were also the very same freedoms being consumed by it. The human soul found itself crushed once more, this time by the spirit draining constriction of techno feudalism. Courageous people, great minds, and young foot soldiers of a new movement calling themselves “Directionists” would ultimately wrest control of life itself from the sickly kings and their algorithmic golems.
Thus was formed the International Development Steering Organization. Under its watchful eye, humanity wielded the super-weapon of its own imagination more cautiously. Human dignity and a natural pace of life was doggedly pursued, a great divestment from the poisons of Silicon Valley began among awakening societies everywhere. People were at last looking up from their phones. A human future was being inscribed on the minds of the young, and physical rather than digital frontiers became the dream stock of emerging talent. Human talent once again had value. In a world that had, by choice, divorced itself of the countless cybernetic ways one could track, replace and exploit a human being, old and abandoned technological roads were dusted off and retread. Unexplored advancements made by backing up and taking different paths. And so, sights were set on the restoration of Earth, and redirecting the growth already happening on the high frontier. Humanity was pushing into the solar system in fits and starts, but the potential to transform life on Earth with the expansive resources of the planets and asteroids was a dangerous honeypot. All the same temptations remained, human nature hadn’t changed. Anticipating this, the IDSO devised a master strategy.
Robotic probes by the tens of thousands were flung towards the Hungaria group asteroids, delivering to their surfaces exquisitely engineered propulsion devices. Through microwave spallation the surfaces of these rocks became propellant, and flames of matter sprouted from the flanks of the lonely floating mountains. Over months and years, their trajectories changed, all headed for the same destination. At first slowly, then quickly, asteroids began arriving and settling into gently wobbling orbits around Earth-Moon Lagrange point 4. “Bring the riches home” went the reasoning, “so that they may be tended over and cultivated responsibly”.
There was, of course, more to the plan. But the opening of the L4 Resource Development Zone would become one of the most challenging chapters in human history. Watching over “The Zone” as it came to be known proved to be a behemoth task. An obloid volume of space a hundred Pacific Oceans across, swarming with tens of thousands of asteroids of all size, shape and composition. Earth had gained ten thousand tiny moons, an embarrassment of platinum, titanium, gold, nickel, iron, volatiles, and more.
Yet, whispers of trespassing settlers living and profiting off this new artificial frontier were undermining the plan, and with it confidence in the grand Directionist agenda. By the time it had officially opened to the world for resource operations in the mid 2080s, conservative estimates placed the unregistered settler population at nearly ten million. Ten million people were already secretly living and dying in a three quadrillion cubic kilometer region of space. On opening day, a skyward migration began that saw 1 million people added every week. The IDSO for its part maintained that this was still all part of the plan.
The average distance between rocks was about 8 thousand kilometers, or a half hour rocket journey at best speed. A floating un-tethered person in a spacesuit was a very tiny radar signature against a panoramic sky of free floating tracks. Rocks, junk, and very often other human bodies made it a vast, dangerous and dark sea, a strange sea that never knew anything but the unrelenting glare of sunlight.
Tucked behind and within every rock were a myriad experiments in technology, business, self governance, homesteading, and criminality. It was a wild land where new species of the good life, as well as the bad, were starting to flourish. Inevitably, this meant a myriad experiments in catastrophic incompetence. People were getting hurt out here, in increasing number.
Patrolling this expanse every day were the men and women of the Orbital Search and Rescue.