Blood and Profit: Chapter 1

Historians called the fall of the USSR the end of the “Cold War”; a period of time defined by secret wars and open paranoia between countries that had allied together during the World Wars. The “Quick Sale” was different. Governments around the world found themselves on the wrong side of astronomical debts to privately held companies and, one by one, each and every country sold itself off to pay those debts, slowly ending the reign of civilized government as it had been known for thousands of years. The Quick Sale started with companies in America going around the world and systematically constructing financial situations that would sink country after country and buying each nation out of their land and infrastructures. Once the buy out process started any resistance was violently subdued by the existing governments; which then sold themselves off piecemeal until they were owned in total by The Corporation. In the end Great Britain was the last country to become a privately held corporate asset.

Six hundred years after America had taught the world that slavery was wrong, an American company completed their campaign to convince the world to sell itself into bondage. The Corporate States of America had completed what countless empires before had failed to do. The planet was under their complete control. The board of directors consisted of nine men and women. The nine most powerful people on the planet. But their victory was not complete. The Pacific Free Zone remained a free and autonomous nation. Their freedom was ensured through careful planning and extensive effort. The CSA saw incredible profit in space and turned the full production power of earth toward the stars. But while violent strife pushed technological improvements in many areas, the kind of super computers needed for extensive space travel were purely a peace time pursuit. The kind of coding and hardware that was required was near impossible to produce in the chaotic conditions of revolutions and constant war efforts around the world.

The Pacific Free Zone had spent the resistance years turned inward. With strong borders intact they focused on pure research, aimed at creating the worlds first bio-synthetic machine that was equal parts Squid and computer. The design behind the bio computers was brilliant and sinister in equal measure. The computers needed time to grow naturally. The P.F.Z had a enough tests to prove that the computers became unstable when forced to reach full growth in less than a year. And the PFZ had the only stable growth area that was clean and secure enough to produce usable computers. And so The Corporation and The Pacific Free Zone tolerated each other in order to send mankind into deep space.

That is how mankind went to the stars: in ships that housed squid computers bred to survive in space. The Corporation colonized the moon and Mars in less than a decade. Not long after, the moons of Jupiter and hundreds of space stations filled the empty spaces of our solar system.

The accident became the turning point in the quest for a faster way to traverse the solar system. The accident was the result of a containment breach on an experimental system that folded space. The test folded space around a single atom of hydrogen and when the containment system failed, two square blocks of Chinese real estate were leveled. Once the files had been retrieved, The Corporation realized what had been done and moved all tests out beyond Pluto. That is where the first successful folds were completed. They called it “Slip Tunnel” technology and repurposed Mars to focus on creating slip gates. The gates sustained the folded space which would allow ships to traverse huge distances in almost no time at all. Within five years The Corporation had colony ships taking employees and slip gates in every direction out into the black toward every planet that satellites and probes had returned data on. The human race was ready to settle the galaxy.