The recent news
involving our failed mining colony on Europa has spread too many rumors for
this leadership to rest any longer. Many suggested a thoughtless move on the
part of myself and my family, which put the financial future of this company in
danger. Others said that we showed little regard for those whom we employ, to
recklessly send them deep into our solar system in search of something we have
easy access to on Earth. Still others accuse us of using humans as pieces in a
game, like politicians, then discarding them when they became too inconvenient.
I wish to put all of these rumors to rest.
Breathe Easy, Inc has been in business for over a century, since our ancestors signed the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood, and took a solemn vow to help restore humanity. Our species had made many stupid mistakes and the Cheng family created this company specifically in agreement with the Declaration, to keep humans alive. We had to create structure to work together, in order to save ourselves from rising oceans, unbreathable air.
The oceans did, of course, seem like fertile ground at first. But as the tides rose, so too did competition – not with other Incorporated Businesses under the Declaration, but with pirates, rebels, renegades, who thought they could save the Earth on their own, without a legion of help. These groups mined the planet down to its barest core and left little for the rest of us, who merely wanted to survive. There was no more metal, oil, gas.
Some of our intrepid fellow businesses took to the stars. They, too, in the first fifty years were accused of misusing the resource of living human workers to profit. Many of their employees, most of whom were the lowest castes, died terrible deaths in space, trying to mine distant bodies. But after some attempts, these businesses succeeded in their quest, and soon, precious material began flowing back to Earth.
This was all that Breathe Easy wanted. The seas are battlegrounds and we lose too many workers to continue to find use in this world’s oceans. We turned to space, but this time, not for gold and iron, but for water. We knew from the old world’s records that Europa had liquid water beneath an ice crust, and with some facilities already set up, we had our most brilliant Gadhavi engineers work out how best to get there, how a group of people could best survive, and how we might train them. It came to our attention that we could find many useful skills among this country’s defectors and criminals, those whose minds still, for some reason, did not fully come into line with saving the whole of humanity.
In other words, we discovered a way to make the useless useful again.
These criminals took to the idea. However, a criminal element is not easily suppressed, and those urges sent them to their doom. It was not us, it was not our planning, but it was they themselves, impure of thought, who ended their own lives. They could not meet our terms, and they would not work with us.
The following is a first-hand account from one of the colonists. We have kept these records in our files, not releasing them to the public, because much of the material is controversial and emotionally painful. We assigned a fallen Gadhavi to write this account for us, and you can see for yourselves how her spirit simply could not bend to the task of keeping all of our species alive.
We apologize for the graphic nature of this account, but it was my strong feeling, as the current CEO of Breathe Easy, that we must allow the public, all castes, to know this material, to know what truly happened.
In corpore plena.
I wish to put all of these rumors to rest.
Breathe Easy, Inc has been in business for over a century, since our ancestors signed the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood, and took a solemn vow to help restore humanity. Our species had made many stupid mistakes and the Cheng family created this company specifically in agreement with the Declaration, to keep humans alive. We had to create structure to work together, in order to save ourselves from rising oceans, unbreathable air.
The oceans did, of course, seem like fertile ground at first. But as the tides rose, so too did competition – not with other Incorporated Businesses under the Declaration, but with pirates, rebels, renegades, who thought they could save the Earth on their own, without a legion of help. These groups mined the planet down to its barest core and left little for the rest of us, who merely wanted to survive. There was no more metal, oil, gas.
Some of our intrepid fellow businesses took to the stars. They, too, in the first fifty years were accused of misusing the resource of living human workers to profit. Many of their employees, most of whom were the lowest castes, died terrible deaths in space, trying to mine distant bodies. But after some attempts, these businesses succeeded in their quest, and soon, precious material began flowing back to Earth.
This was all that Breathe Easy wanted. The seas are battlegrounds and we lose too many workers to continue to find use in this world’s oceans. We turned to space, but this time, not for gold and iron, but for water. We knew from the old world’s records that Europa had liquid water beneath an ice crust, and with some facilities already set up, we had our most brilliant Gadhavi engineers work out how best to get there, how a group of people could best survive, and how we might train them. It came to our attention that we could find many useful skills among this country’s defectors and criminals, those whose minds still, for some reason, did not fully come into line with saving the whole of humanity.
In other words, we discovered a way to make the useless useful again.
These criminals took to the idea. However, a criminal element is not easily suppressed, and those urges sent them to their doom. It was not us, it was not our planning, but it was they themselves, impure of thought, who ended their own lives. They could not meet our terms, and they would not work with us.
The following is a first-hand account from one of the colonists. We have kept these records in our files, not releasing them to the public, because much of the material is controversial and emotionally painful. We assigned a fallen Gadhavi to write this account for us, and you can see for yourselves how her spirit simply could not bend to the task of keeping all of our species alive.
We apologize for the graphic nature of this account, but it was my strong feeling, as the current CEO of Breathe Easy, that we must allow the public, all castes, to know this material, to know what truly happened.
In corpore plena.
No comments:
Post a Comment