Polity Agent

Separatism is a cover-all label for those who rebel violently against the rule of AIs and would like to reinstate some mythical halcyon time when humans ruled themselves with justice and wisdom. Their political ideologies are based on a mish-mash of ideas sampled seemingly at random from opaque political tracts that have appeared over the last six hundred years. On the one hand they deify some of the worst dictators of ancient times like Chairman Mao and Stalin, claiming the intransigence of humanity prevented these monsters from establishing true socialist societies, while blithely ignoring the millions these autocrats murdered. Yet on the other hand they demonize AIs as monsters of a similar stripe, and are seemingly unaware of the personal freedom and wealth every human now enjoys, and the fact that the Polity is the only society that has come close to the ideals espoused by reformers of that previous age. And of course, to get what they want, it seems perfectly acceptable for them to commit any kind of atrocity. But in the end one only has to study the histories of those few worlds that came under Separatist control and managed to secede from the Polity. Their descent into chaos has been well documented in every case. As their leaders tried to apply ideologies refined in academia, without any reference to reality, the people divided into factions, sometimes into nation states, and often went to war with each other. Frequently the nuts and bolts of running a civilization were neglected, and social collapse and famine resulted. And in every case ECS has needed to come in to clear up the mess, and to cut down the ideologues hanging from the lamp posts.

— From a speech by Jobsworth

King gazed down upon the new system directly in line of Erebus’s present course. It consisted of a white dwarf star orbited by two gas giants far out in space, a ring of moon-sized planetoids orbiting close to the sun, and one Earth-sized planet orbiting at about the distance of Venus from Sol. Two moons orbited this last planet, obviously stripping away enough atmosphere to prevent the world itself descending into greenhouse cascade. King cruised in with its scanners at maximum function.

The equatorial temperatures of the hot desert planet topped 100 degrees Celsius, and polar temperatures did not drop much below 50, yet atmospheric analysis showed there might be life here. King first concentrated on the moons, soon ascertaining one to be dead rock while the other showed signs of recent volcanic activity, having spewed swathes of brown and yellow sulphur across its surface. Within seconds the AI detected wreckage scattered across the regolith of the first moon. It loaded to one rail-gun a close-scanning telefactor—just a tongue-shaped missile packed with sensory equipment—fired it towards the moon and focused through the moving device.