The new world: dystopia. The new powers: corporations.
Welcome to that new world, CEO. Or, if you like, Oligarch, Tyrant, First Speaker... it really isn't important what you like to call yourself. I am Mekis One, the leader of the Blue Sky Conglomerate. We have important news, news which you need to hear. It is official: Earth is dying. Sure, sure, she has always been dying, ever since the bombs fell and the Gilded Age came to an end. But your shareholders aren't going to be around for much longer if you don't do something about it. Your citizens are going to be rioting in the streets as they gasp for their their last breaths, making sure they burn down your palace around your pointed ears before all of humanity follows the example of our paleontological ancestors. So that is why I am here: to give you a prototype Jumpdrive. The stars beckon.
Yeah, I know. What void-addled monkey cares about space any more? We gave up on that almost two centuries ago, back when it turned out mining the asteroids was too expensive, and as the public eye saw only rock and dust beyond our atmosphere. But the Jumpdrive changes that calculus. Dump a nuclear reactor's output into a spacecraft for a day, and you can be in the asteroid belt sucking up precious metals by the cargo hold that evening. Spend a morning over a solar cluster cluster, and by teatime you can be in orbit over Mars dumping poor peons into the sparse atmosphere to try and eke out a living beyond our overcrowded exhausted ball of blue. Overcrowding? Opportunity! Vaporize enough heavy water to float a battleship, and you'll find yourself in the outermost sheathe of Jupiter looking for rare gases to run the next generation of fusion experiments.
And your corporate rivals will be doing likewise. We may have made this innovation first, but Blue Sky are no fools. We knew you all would find out, eventually, and the potential of this invention is worth a war. Worth a war that would doom the planet we have left. We aren't altruists, but we are large fans of our children growing up. So we are free-sourcing this invention, giving it to every entity big enough to make use of it on our humble ball of rock. I ask, as Chairman, that you refrain from killing the world despite our best efforts. That is all.
Silverlight Tower, Neu Pretoria, Sud Afrika
January, 2120
From up here in the glittering heights of Neu Pretoria you could almost ignore the darkness that spread to the horizon below. The daggers of steel and glass clove the sky in twain, at this hour before sunset flaring into prismatic hues of purple, ochre, indigo, violet, and crimson. The old man paced, stretching the tendons in legs which had been far too idle for the last few hours. A curse of his position, that some days he didn't even get the opportunity to make it to the roof for a walk over the noon hour. His office had been besieged of late with emissaries from as far away as the Namib, men and women concerned at the influx of refugees the government's new Land and Soil program had created.
It was a fact which all the demographic officials tried very carefully to ignore, or avoid talking about. The underclass ranted and raved about immigrants taking their jobs, but the truth was that most of them were effectively useless in the scheme of economies and mechanized industry. Their contributions infinitesimal, their commensurate drains on the resources of the state likewise had to be minimized. They were bodies that allowed the government to tax business entities for the privilege of possessing, little more. Especially the new immigrants from the Congo and Tanzanikya; they hadn't been raised in a technological society, so bringing them up to speed to be productive members of the Conglomerate would hardly happen overnight.
No, the clan-fathers and house-bosses weren't very happy about more eaters showing up in the dole lines. But there were other uses for bodies than economic outlooks. The boys over at Starbound were fundamentally certain that automation for extraterrestrial endeavors might not stand the test of economies of scale against sheer manpower. The Solar Dynasty had proven that pretty fulsomely back at the turn of the century, with their leaking spacesuits and mass casualties still placing more sleepers on extrasolar trajectories than the rest of the world combined. Any state had the option to throw time and money at a problem. The ability to smother a fire in bodies was just another tool in the arsenal of any good leader.
Heh. A good leader. The old man turned, staring out at the darkness below. Most of the lights that twinkled in the underbelly of Old Pretoria did so in carefully choreographed rows and blocks, the endless urb-sprawl of factories, warehouses, and habs denoting the consummate order that had been imposed in the wake of the devastations of the Rainbow Insurrection. But still here and there, in what should have been swathes of darkness of rail-yards, generation-zones, and underlays, you could pick out the odd chaotic conglomerates. The shantytowns that had haunted his nation for two hundred years still refused extermination, for a myriad of reasons. A good leader might had devoted more resources there.
But set against the inky void between the stars, the endless black pit of poverty was a far more formidable enemy.
Sud Afrika is Promoting Immigration to South Africa.