What's Out Here, Anyway?

I just had dinner with an old colleague. A correspondent with us, actually. Made her name ruining days for Imperial fleets¹, but she mostly hauls now. The colonies are the place to be, so I'm told, now that Brewer Corp's behemoth factory-ships are painting their way out from the Bubble, tankers trailing behind like so many mosquitoes.

It was mostly just talk. Between half stories, though, and bites of the greasiest sandwich either of us have had in a while (Damien's, on Aleksandrov, 4th level. Pretty good if you like heavy food, just grab napkins.) she asked me "Well, hold on - after all the moving and shaking in and around the old Core, what's out here in Boonta these days anyway?"

Fair enough question. She's CIU by choice, not by station or system. There's a medal on her ratty flight jacket to prove it.² I guess it's tough to really know a place when all you see is the hangar most days. I never really flew, just a few local runs in a Type-6 before the gene plague. Enough to miss it though - the feeling that you could pull up at any time, hop systems til you run out of fuel, drop into a no-name port, and feel like you're home. It's different to really have one, though. To fight for ideas-in-people, people-in-ideas, instead of the one or the other. Less romantic maybe, but closer to the chest.

If you've been here a while, you know what's out here, but sometimes I forget not everyone here is up to speed. We're nearly ten billion strong now, and the Coalition itself is in its toddler years, so most of us are just starting to break out of old habits.³ Others of you are scattered in isolated stations, scrapping with corpo raiders. Some of you aren't 'Boonta' at all yet - when I helped start this paper, most of our readership was cranks like myself, jailbreaking their terminals, feeding through sketchy proxies, looking for any sign we weren't alone. If that's you - you're still who we write for, most of all.⁴

So to get back to my friend's question - what's out here, exactly? In plain geographic-demographic terms, not much. A small collection of rocky planets, around a cluster of stars in the Scorpii Sector, near the galactic north of the bubble. A number of populated stations, packed to the brim, and a few tentative colonies breathing their first. But I think what she really wanted to know was "who," not "what."

So here's a list. I love lists.

• Communists.

  I count myself here, and probably you too, if you've read this far. Ties to the Party run deep, and grudges from the indenture days run deeper. The level of public support for the Coalition government in Boonta space would genuinely worry me, if it wasn't already the pig I'd bet onthe allegiance I'd chosen⁵.

  We're lucky, in a way. We hold in living memory the fear and pain of living under the lords and the capitalists both. We know the monotony, the deep and wide sadness nobody could truly express - except, maybe, for those we saw dangling from the I-beams, maybe those lying in the streets and the mess halls with yellow tape circling their bodies after the riots, with the cops nearby, lying to the cameras. We know how precious a thing it is to live as we live now. You'll still get your cranks, your contrarian royal-wannabes, your bourgeois-propertarian simpletons and your garden-variety bullies. I've even seen the occasional deserter dip out of port, punching a Sidewinder into the great galactic darkness, as though afraid someone will stop them. I hope they find what they ache for out there. As for the rest of us, though - we did it, motherfuckers. We built socialism flying by the seat of our pants, and we're well on our way to building communism. And we're not going back. Not ever.

• Economic migrants.

  Coalition policy gives a good bit of leeway to community governments for implementation details, but the Universal Human Privileges Directive is extremely clear: nobody is to go hungry in our territories. Nobody is to go without secure, comfortable shelter.⁶ Nobody is to be held in a position of debt or servitude of any kind. Word apparently gets around about this kind of thing.

  I remember the vids from when the first self-liberated slaveship docked at Khruvanaye after the rev rolled through. It didn't take an eagle eye to spot the blood spatter on the cockpit window before the cameras cut away. The ramp lowered and the liberated started to show themselves, cautiously, Imperial lascannons pointed out at the crowd and the cameras and the revolutionary guard, as though afraid that the station itself would suddenly laugh and swallow them up. I remember two men, hand-in-hand, walking down the ramp with bandages on their faces - it took me a few minutes after closing the the newsfeed to realize they must have removed each other's ID tattoos in the hours since the breakaway.

  None of them had auto-translators. Common Imperial practice, as I understand - limit rebellion by limiting outside communication. The pilot's had evidently been damaged in the process of converting his head to spraypaint. Port Authority had to track down a Neo-Farsi professor from a U. of Epomana edu-station to properly address their captain. It took about ten hours before the news announced an agreement had been reached. 3 years later, the captain agreed to give an interview on the whole ordeal (not us, sadly. Voice of Yarucci got a yes first.) He explained, in his matter-of-fact way, that negotiations took so long because the crew universally interpreted our unconditional welcome as a refusal to name our price. It took three weeks, he said, for the first of his companions to take him aside and confirm these odd zealots with the red stars on their outfits really did seem to mean what we said - food, shelter, and human companionship, no strings attached.⁷

  Small radishes by comparison, but myself, I still wake up in the night, convinced I've overdrafted and the bank is adding another 3 years to my debt tally. Freedom - real freedom, not the opportunity bullshit we were sold as children - is a relief incomparable to any drug the megapharmacies can produce.

• Burnouts.

  Speaking of drugs - the Coalition stands by our collective duty to ruthlessly examine and defuse all types of reactionary prejudice. As such, I feel obligated to acknowledge the sheer volume of comrades brought to our ports by the widespread, cost-free, generously capped availability of the humble onionhead gamma strain. Quantity is more relevant than quality in this sense - though in my personal opinion, we do know how to grow them nice and strong, maybe a bit on the harsher side but still pleasantly clear and with a very manageable comedown. Despite my own habit, I must admit, I was worried at the outset about the Central Committee's decision to regulate drug tourism so lightly. After seeing this policy in action, however, I've come around - people really do come for the clouds and stay for the company, so to speak. Most of these people are "burn-outs" in the truest sense - smoke and booze are an analgesic, a stand-in for actual relief. Once the stress itself is reduced (indeed, once people realize life, creativity, and mutual help can exist without constant coercive pressure), the compulsion to live every waking moment high off your ass tends to gradually recede for most. Medicine long ago removed the agony of direct chemical dependence for the business class, but we are proud to offer these benefits to all who request them. And contra the ADTF announcements back in the day, drug users in general are hardly a 'drain' on our resources. I know a young lady, friend of a friend, who singlehandedly developed an efficient and scalable laser engraving method for carbon-composite minichips over the course of a four-day bender. Personally, I prefer to sit back and play some light music. To each their own.

• [redacted]Renegades.⁸

  One of the other things about Boonta is that we don't put people in cages. After a full millenia or so of overwhelming evidence on human behavior, we can confidently state that, whatever you did, putting you in a box for ten years with all the other screwups is not going to help much of anyone.

  There's a type of person who hears that, and thinks it means they can get away with whatever they want. Some poor fucks find out otherwise at the business end of a shrapnel cannon before even setting foot on-world. Most think they're clever though - they'll land and lay low a while, taking advantage of the hospitality, until whatever's itching starts to need scratching. Most people just steal, try to truck something off-world - it's funny too, I've seen people skip the region with shiploads of stuff they could've just plain requisitioned, individually, with no issue. I've also seen much, much worse.

  The thing most of these people don't realize is that, even on a busy row in an overloaded Coriolis, nobody's 'nobody' here. When we say we watch our buddies' backs, we don't just mean our friends. Protecting each other's too important to leave up to chance and social graces. As with many situations here where individual judgement won't cut the mustard, this is where ENOSIS steps in.⁹ If you're a relatively able-bodied person within sprinting distance of another human being and you pass the analytical sniff-test - congrats! You're someone's emergency contact. Probably a couple someones. You can call the rev' guard too if you want - but your government assigned buddy's usually quicker, liable to be nicer, and less likely to escalate whichever situation. We've all gotten nothing calls - it happens, people get scared - but it's unthinkably rare not to have anyone respond when you need help. The system keeps track of these things, and nobody wants it public knowledge that they let someone down.

  And if the worst happens, not having prisons doesn't mean there's no consequences. Being caught is a near-certainty, and being a known murderer, rapist, and so on means that while you'll still get your food and shelter and it's still illegal to kick your ass, you'll also get very little else. We're not known to forgive easily, or quickly. Fleeing the system means a bounty, like anywhere else, and staying means a level of continuous and extremely personal rejection I'm not keen to experience, and wouldn't recommend. Thankfully for everyone, not many people put the code to the test after fully grasping the stakes.

• Families.

  I had the surprise of my life with how many of my friends told me they were expecting 6 months after the rev. I initially chalked it up to overzealous victory celebrations, but then the migrant ships started rolling in. Whole clans, great-grandmas down to tiny newborns. Now they're running all over the place at all hours like they own it, which I suppose they do, in a way. Keeping 'em out of the damn za¹⁰'s a task in itself. I think that's when it started to really hit me that people didn't just see new lives for themselves here. They saw lives for their kids - a place their kids could grow up and get in trouble and fall in love and get old, maybe without the kind of heartache they'd had to go through. Kids and I don't get along great, but if their being here means they're not digging for coltan in some waking corporate hell, I can live with that.

That's the roundup, just about. You'll get your occasional trends besides, too - there was a 'Goid cult or two operating out of Bizet (HIP 81237, if you're not from there. Read the numbers and squint.), before the commissars caught wind. Freedom of thought's a guarantee, but not an absolute, and as above, we're not keen on being held subject to anyone anytime soon, least of all alien gods. I'm sure there's still a chapel allocated for the holdouts somewhere, but ENOSIS doesn't tend to put a high priority on subjectives like 'devotion' when handing out resources. Fine by me. I hear there's Catholics and so forth running around too, but I'm not one for roleplay¹¹.

Why the write-up at all? Because, if you're out there, and you sound like you'd fit in somewhere in the above - we want you as a neighbor, and an ally. Times are changing fast, what with the wars in core CIU. I can't claim we're completely safe out here either - Beyond Infinity's been a thorn in our side since the old days, and while we're on good terms with Social Eleu, they also seem happy to scoop up our best and brightest with, I don't know, penthouses and so forth. But we're strong, and getting stronger all the time. We're making things I'd never even thought to dream of, out there in the stars. Come say hello. We're happy to have you.

As always, for Boonta and the Union,¹²

--K.

Important

Any correspondence or editorial discussion related to Party messaging standards compliance is listed below, in accordance with section 3(A), subsection 4 of the 3308 Transparency Order.