
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 customers 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 century 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 drinking in the solar wind from a high orbit sail, 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, and living to spend our profits. 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.
La Guiara, Old Caracas
It had been almost a week and a half since the rather melodramatic announcement by the Chairman, secretly distributed to the major global corporate entities, and to the eyes of the average denizen of the Neo-American quarter of Old Caracas business continued much as usual. Orphans played in the dust of abandoned buildings in the antiquated port, La Guiara, beneath a sun which was hotter in the depths of the South American summer that it really had any right to be. Water rationing had been introduced for the barrios from Fuentes Heights all the way through the East Quarter again, based on the degradation of the pipelines coming up from Apure State. There was a hot malaise than hung in the air, a sense of both quiet despair and too many attempts to do anything about the slow rot which had failed.
Today, however, that malaise had the very faintest tinge of excitement in her - perhaps not excitement, but uncertainty? with the tiniest leaven of hope?
For, you see, there were not only the usual denizens of the ruined port out and walking in the warehouses today. A half dozen sharply dressed engineers and architects in white and black coveralls were stamping alongside the rusted oil trans-shipment pipes, accompanied by three armed guards in the distinctive slate-gray composite plates of the Grupo Central, one of the nebulous shadow companies and private military contractors which the locals had some vague conception of being related to the distant Blue Sky Conglomerate. They talked in low voices, not around where any of the locals were gathering in interest, and occasionally glanced toward the northern horizon.
That horizon was the larger part of the interest which was stirring in La Guiara. For upon her stood a heavy dredging ship, bigger than any that had been seen in Caracas in a generation, one of the great machines the Americans built in the 2030s to keep the Great Lakes from silting up after one too many bad dust storms and to pull up the bottom of Lago Gatun to keep their preciosa Canal Zone working when the latifundes choked her with debris.
Good Bolivarian activists looked at the ship with dread in their hearts, an echo of neo-colonialism and the indignities of the Reconquista too near the surface to see it for the opportunity it might represent. But more moderate locals were weighing, calculating. A dredging ship next to a harbor blocked with earth due to a lack of maintenance wasn't a difficult problem to solve for, if one was inclined to find a non-ideological solution. And it was an even more interesting calculation if you were one of the few dozen men and women of the languid sea-side commercial estates that were aware some southern investors had bought up the derelict Amadores Refinery, with an eye toward reactivation.
Rafael Jimanez wasn't one of those locals. He was from Buenos Aires, trusted to lead the investment team for the very hush-hush Blue Sky efforts to begin manufacturing fuel for extra-terrestrial voyages, the first step towards a fungible initiative for the Jumpdrive. But despite not being a local, he too had noticed a shift in the air. Optimistic men would have called it hope. Hope in her most raw form, however, had been beaten out of the inhabitants of South America over two centuries of broken promises and failed opportunities. Still - even as a natural pessimist? The operations manager didn't have a better word for the emotion that fluttered in the back of his brain as he looked at nitrogen-oxygen fuel fabrication hypothetical timetables.
Fine. Call it hope.