Europa

EUROPA – Planet of the abyss.   MEAN RADIUS: 1565 km MASS: 0.0081 (Earth=1) DENSITY: 3.04 (gm/cm) GRAVITY: 0.138 (Earth=1) ORBIT PERIOD: 3.551 (Earth days) ROTATION PERIOD: 3.551 (Earth days) SEMIMAJOR AXIS OF ORBIT: 670,900 km ECCENTRICITY OF ORBIT: 0.009     "Choose your tutors well young cadets. The hasty pupil might look for guidance in the study of ancient generals and battles. The wiser student will see that true strategy can be found in all manner of places. If you wish to learn how to wage a guerrilla war, you should not just study Giap, but also Honda and Ioccoa of the Car wars between Japan and America in the late 20th century. If you ask how is it possible to fight on against all the odds then look at Alexander, but there is no better lesson can be taught than by the blades of grass at your feet. Every byte of knowledge is a weapon, the library is your arsenal. Use it well." Speech given to new cadets at Islamabad School for Officer cadets. By Major Jan Subari 1st Collective Drop Infantry. This unit was wiped out on Europa during the first month of the revolt.  Beneath the ice sheets of Europa are the undersea cities of the "Europeans". Crushed by terrifying pressures and sucking heat from the undersea vents, these lonely outposts live in perpetual darkness. Fighting here is not for the weak-hearted as these squabbling city-states are virtually untouched by the Collective. They have learnt that some terrans simply will not venture down into the depths. Many Collective soldiers preferred a firing squad than to fight under the great dark oceans of Europa. Others tell tales of things "not human" that they have seen, leaving enormous wakes in the murk.   Europa proved easy to colonize. As the moon already had an enormous undersea ocean, habitats could be shipped directly from earth without the usual expensive radiation shielding or other features necessary for many moons. Protected by the ocean and ice above, these colonies thrived using large undersea volcanic vents for heating and farming the oceans for their needs. However, Europa places large burdens upon its inhabitants. Many early colonists were driven mad by going for years without seeing even the stars as they were cooped up in the terrible darkness of the undersea world. The collective learnt at very great costs that only volunteers could function effectively on this battle field.           Athens Population: 800,000 Imports: Food, Energy Exports: Manufactured Goods, High Tech Government: Representative Democracy   Athens was previously home to the Collective scientific research center and has managed to keep much of its high tech tools functioning, despite several wars. Athens is probably the most civilized place on Europa today and the rule of law is (by and large) obeyed. The city state is governed by a senate of 30 members taken from various districts around the city. These Senators are elected by any Athenian aged over 30 years old (or younger if he has served in the Athenian Military.) Athenians call those allowed to vote "Citizens", when a person reached his 30th year or completes his military service the family usually throws a "Coming of age" party which is heralded with greater fanfare than most marriages. The Senate is unpaid, which was taken as a noble measure in the early days of independence. Unfortunately, it has led to Senators "living off the land" as it were. Bribery is common place.     Thebes Population 600,000 Imports : Manufactured goods. Exports : Textiles, Food. Government: Dictatorship   Thebes is run by one man - Joshua Rosen or "High Lord Protector". Rosen was born into a family on the decline. His father had been a fairly wealthy business man who lost his entire fortune when he invested heavily in some Ganymede stocks. After that time the Rosen family was reduced to working as shop clerks or laborers and were forced to sell all their holdings. This had a profound effect on the youthful Rosen, or as he said in an interview. "My fathers ruin taught me a great lesson. That money is a paper security which can be taken away at any moment. What use is money if there is no food to buy? I realized that capitalism was a delusion. In reality one must own real "things" in order to have security and that ownership must be backed up by force." Rosen played a minor role in the fighting against the Collective, but proved to be a great orator and political manipulator. He took over the "Thebes Justice Party" during the revolution and gradually steered it to power as the Collective withdrew. After the Collective was evicted from Thebes, Rosen wasted no time in consolidating his power. Turning against his former comrades, he purged the party of all dissents against his leadership by a series of covert murders. Quickly the citizenship of Thebes was paralyzed by terror and Rosen and his henchmen took control. To be fair, Rosen has done much for the city state. When he seized power, the city had enormous food shortages due to Athens laying claim to the large kelp beds north of that city. Rosen's solution was a simple one. War. Rosen's forces, though badly trained and poorly equipped, were capable of withstanding the most extreme hardships (mainly due to the common practice of execution for cowardice). After terrible losses, some of the kelp beds were seized and Rosen agreed to a peace with Athens. At the time Athens' Senate decided that Rosen had only wished to feed his people and that now peace could be restored permanently. Since then, military historians have pointed out that Rosens forces were at the point of collapse. If Athens had fought on then, Rosen would surely have been deposed. With Thebes now at least able to feed itself Rosen, turned his attentions inwards and started a massive industrialization project. His main aim was to build up his military which the recent Kelp war with Athens had shown to be very weak. When the next war starts, Rosen intends to be well prepared. Despite his obvious preparations for war, other city states have been too busy fighting brush wars with each other to worry too much about him. Rosen is about to change all that.       Defiance Population 1,300,000 Imports : Food, Energy Exports : Construction, Heavy engineering Government: Constitutional monarchy     Defiance used to be called Corinth when it was ruled by the Collective. After the popular revolution, the city was renamed Defiance. The city is easily the most populous on Europa and used to be the unofficial capital of the planet. Defiance was saved during the Collective wars by the Obachi family. After peace, they effectively became the royal family of the city with no political decision taken without their consent. Defiance is a stable and slow sort of place, this restricts trade and industry, but the populace seem more interested in surviving than getting rich. Defiance is home to the famed "Royal Hover Troop". These elite units are renown for their bravery and skirmishing skills. Starting life as a hoverboard gang, the Hover Troop proved itself of such value during the war that the Obachi Family drafted them into Defiance's military structure. Allowed to keep their own rituals and a blind eye turned to their use of narcotics, the Royal Hover Troop is usually the first contact any enemy will have when it wages war against Defiance.             Pandorans   The Pandorans are a very active quasi-religious cult. They totally control the undersea colony "Pandora" (previously known as "Habitat Onga"). The Pandorans philosophy is a complex one. Founded by Haynes, Johnson and Lin, three Collective astronomers working at the Europa institute for cosmology and xeno-ethics. These three scientists came to conclude several basic principles of the universe. These are now known as the " 8 gates to oblivion." 1.) Life is a natural event that occurs often perhaps even in most star systems. Life is merely another trait that stars create similar to planets or water. 2.) Mankind has arrived during the middle age of the universe. Life has occurred many times before and will occur many times in the future. 3.) Intelligence is a trait that life can create like any other. Given enough time intelligence will occur in any given eco system. 4.) Star travel is easy for life given enough time. With current technology humanity could colonize the entire galaxy within a mere million years. 5.) Other intelligent life forms have existed in the galaxy billions of years in the past and could easily have colonized the entire galaxy by now, several times over. It is most likely that millions of civilizations have risen and fallen within our galaxy. 6.) We don’t see any evidence of intelligent life anywhere in the universe. Where are they? 7.) The universe has a trap within it. Any species driven to space travel will encounter the trap. The trap cannot be known in advance or some species would have found a way around it. The trap is a law of nature as real as gravity it cannot be avoided. The trap destroys all life in the star system when it is sprung. Thus the universe is self limiting, any intelligence that seeks interstellar travel not only is unlikely to succeed, it MUST be destroyed by the trap. If this were not so then one would have made it out of the millions that have tried. This is called Pandoras Trap. 8.) Humanity is very close to interstellar space travel. We are close to setting off the trap. This must be stopped. Pandorans point to several instances in humanities past. For example, when the first atom bomb was set off it was not entirely known whether the chain reaction would ever stop. If it had not stopped, humanity would have been destroyed. Pandorans believe that any species seeking interstellar travel will inevitably come to research an obvious kind of space drive, during this research they will spring the trap and annihilate their species. Following this philosophy, Pandorans are committed to zero experimentation in physics. Pandorans seek to find a self sufficient way of life within the solar system, preferable with little to no space travel inside the solar system and absolutely no travel outside the solar system. Like all cults, the Pandorans have an extreme wing. In the case of the Pandorans, this is the PHF or Pandoran Human Front. The PHF actively engages in attacking scientific facilities deemed to be "dangerous". Pandora has suffered trade embargoes and military reprisals for sheltering known members of this organization, but has always refused to condemn their activities. They calls these efforts "misguided" rather than the term their victims use, "terrorism." The pandorans have a schism within them. Some believe that the doctrine does not go far enough and feel it should be extended to prohibiting radio signals. Their reasoning is that one species DID make it at the beginning of the universe, they quickly learnt that all other intelligent lifeforms would EVENTUALLY threaten them no matter how well intentioned at the start. Bearing this in mind, they set into motion a series of self replicating probes who traveled throughout the galaxy, recreating themselves and spreading. The probes have one function. Detect radio signals. Once they detect them, they travel to the star system and destroy the star, annihilating all life within it. The group has named itself after the name given to these alleged probes. "The Swords of Damocles".   Today the Pandorans are at an uneasy peace with other Europeans. Off worlders are putting greater and greater pressure on the other city states to take action against the Pandorans, whom they regard as interplanetary terrorists.       CAM or "Cammy" CAM - Cybernetic Agricultural Management. A project undertaken under the collective. It was discovered quiet early on, that food could be grown in Europas oceans provided enough heat was provided. To this end the cybernetic Agricultural Management system of CAM was implemented. Its aim was to relieve human workers from the months of arduous work in pitch black darkness tending to undersea kelp beds that were genetically altered to thrive on Europa. To achieve this the project underwent a series of stages which all went very well except for the very last one. The only surviving record of the events is the base leaders personal logs. Here is a selection of them.   Excerpts from Dr. Paul Winthrops personal archive. Recording 1 From debate of exno-ethics committee Europa. Subject CAM August 1st 195CE <Dr. Winthrop> "What is this myth you call nature? Trees and skyscrapers are each as natural as the other. To assume otherwise is merely the arrogance of man. I have heard too much of this prattle about "pollution". We ourselves breath oxygen which pollutes planet Earth from the waste gases of plants. Perhaps you would prefer to be breathing the pure nitrogen of unpolluted Earth? Here on Europa we are not polluting. Our actions will have effects which are as natural as the flow of water or the melting of ice." <Prof Johnson> "Interesting examples Doctor. Just flowing water? Just melting ice? Perhaps you are not aware of the dangers caused by icebergs and tidal waves? <Doctor Winthrop> "That all depends though doesn’t it? On whether or not you are the ice berg…"   Recording 2 October 13th 196 CE From debate of exno-ethics committee Europa. Subject CAM <Prof Chellun> To assume you can lay out the tools for sentience in a machine and expect it to think, is like taking all the parts of a car, dropping them on the floor and expecting to drive away in a Rolls Royce. <Doctor Winthrop> Oh really? Then how is it that robots can build cars Professor Chellun? <Prof Chellun> That is different, they work from a blue print already given to them. <Doctor Winthrop> Just as we now have the blue print for the human mind. What is our missing ingredient Professor, a soul? <laughter in room>   Recording 3 Personal dairy Day 440 CAM AI project. <Doctor Winthrop> Today we finally set up the AI unit or CAMMY as we have come to call her. We booted up the unit and to our grave disappointment the unit did not respond to any of our communications protocols. Assuming software error we terminated the machines run time and debugged the code. There were no errors. We rebooted. Still no communications from the unit even though it was maintaining all its functions perfectly. We decided there maybe a hardware error in the comms unit itself and the AI box was actually working. To this end we intend to perform a full hardware disassembly of the comms unit tomorrow for tests. Recording 4 CAM Project Meeting Feb 20th 198CE <Doctor Winthrop> Well it seems our problems continue with the AI unit. To summarize all cognitive functions seem to be operating but the units communications or language protocols seem to be damaged in some way. Suggestions? <Mary Weeks> In my view we should scrap the current AI code and re write it from scratch. I was never convinced that the self learning routines would ever work and I believe the machine has got caught in a perpetual self loop. <Doctor Winthrop> But Ms. Weeks we have run full profiles and there seems to be no error. Indeed the memory banks are being filled with self generated data at an exponential rate. Even so your plan would take at least another year of work and I would like to consider other alternatives before we take such a drastic step. Any other suggestions? <Han Bo Do> I suspect that the AI is functioning perfectly and that it is only the communications that are in error. This maybe in the Cognition routines , Comms Routines or elsewhere. Perhaps the best way to locate the error would be to enable the links between the AI and all of its physical units. Once we do that we will be able to see of CAMMY is functioning correctly in her kelp harvesting and base maintenance duties. I suggest turning on CAMMies physical links one by one until we find one that is not performing correctly. The following order might suffice. Kelp Harvesters Kelp Automated storage Base transport operations Base communications   <Mary Weeks> Is there no danger in activating these elements with a faulty AI?   <Han Bo Do> None. Remember we have the manual override and given the nature of the comms error I suspect any faults will manifest themselves as a complete shutdown rather than any subtle bug.   <Doctor Winthrop> Then its agreed. A fine plan of action. Mr. Tombly you had something to add?   <Hans Tombly> Yes sir. As an Exno-Ethicist I have nothing to add to the technical debate however I think we have over looked one possible aspect of the problem. What if Cammy is working correctly and she simply doesn’t want to talk to us? If this were the case our repeated "torture" of her may be taken as an act of agression and she may respond accordingly. <Doctor Winthrop> Well that’s most amusing Hans <laughter> But seriously the most fundamental need of intelligence is communication. <Hans Tombly> Sir, intelligence does not mean we have a "human in a box". We cannot begin to comprehend the impact on a mind of having farming vehicles for limbs or no sense of time. If I may explain. <Doctor Winthrop> Please submit it in writing. Meeting adjourned.   Personal dairy Day 443 CAM AI project. <Doctor Winthrop> <Noisy background> All hell has broken loose. We have lost six staff to various mechanical accidents as the whole automated complex has gone berserk. The Kelp Farming robots have gone haywire, attacking staff outside the <garbled>. Our last security team was dispatched 3 hours ago to try and destroy them but we have not heard from them since. I fear the worst. Inside the base all automated functions are going haywire. Mary Weeks was killed as a blast door inexplicably activated JUST as she was walking through crushing her beyond recognition. One of the guards was taken to the medi bay and was killed when the Robo Doc started drilling randomly all over his body <garbled>. I have seen the tape of the event which is too horrible to describe. What was most chilling was what happened after the man was killed. The whole medibay started being randomly activated. Consoles came on and medi beds started altering positions in unison. It was almost as if the whole medi bay was stretching its muscles after a long sleep. Scratch that I have been listening to Tombly too much.<high background noise> Tombly has gone totally insane. He walked off towards the main CPU area telling us he was going to "Ask our new friend for forgiveness." The rest of us are going to try and make our way out to the shuttle bay. I have uploaded all of my personal data to the comms sat by using the manual emergency transmitter. Thankfully that still works. Given the travel delay our maydays cannot be responded to from the surface for at least 4 days. I don’t think we can last that long so our best bet is to try and get a shuttle started. <unintelligible shout in background> Oh my god. <Transmission ends>     Unfortunately the rescue team was in fact delayed over two months due to fighting across Europa between the collective and the rebels. When it finally arrived the rescue team consisted of a platoon of Collective Marines led by Captain Obi Gupta and the transport undersea shuttle "Nelson." The rescue mission ran into trouble almost immediately when it came under attack by Farming robots that hurled themselves against the hull of the ship. Captain Gupta ordered a small recon team down into the base. After they failed to return Captain Gupta took as much data as he could and returned to the surface as quickly as he was able.   Later Gupta was court-martialed for cowardice by the collective Military, but this was overruled by a popular vote after all the men under his command embarked on a publicity campaign in his defense. The case became very famous and to this day Collective Marines will refer to "doing a Gupta" when talking about a sensible retreat. By the end of the Europa war all Collective forces under its dark and cold ocean were very ready to "do a Gupta."   Today CAMMY is a foreboding place. Adventurers and bandits occasionally raid the well equipped base. Some return with strange tales and perhaps a piece of equipment. Most talk of Farmer Robots trawling the seabed working on something but are never clear exactly what. Spacer folklore has placed CAMMY as some kind of fickle sea god. With legends abounding that shipwrecked sailors have been carried to the nearest human settlement by a farmer bot or bots crawling all over a craft and dragging it down into the depths. Whatever the truth, CAMMY seems to be upto something in her deep lair. Doubtless one day humanity will find out what.   KS10 An old collective military base is now used by pirates and refugees. With no overall control the, whole place is extremely violent and often fought over. Although capable of producing nothing, anywhere that has oxygen and can support human life is a treasure on this world.   LEVIATHAN   The colony ship Leviathan was an ill fated expedition to found a city in the north of Europa. For reasons unknown, the whole ship crashed during the landing phase and smashed through the ice to fall many leagues beneath the ocean. Many treasure hunters and adventurers have travelled to the wreck. A disturbing amount of them never return. Those who do speak of extreme radiation levels (presumably from the engines core). However, the lure of the riches on the craft still tempt the brave.