Nova Arcis B 1
The Poisoned Ground
The serene, sun-drenched broadcast garden from before the break were gone. The view that now greeted the billions of viewers across the galaxy was startlingly different.
Cokas Bluna and LYRA.ai were now deep within the guts of Nova Arcis, walking through one of the main service conduits that formed the station’s circulatory system. The atmosphere was sombre, the air filled with the low, resonant hum of massive power lines and the distant rush of recycled air. The lighting was purely functional, casting long, dramatic shadows down the immense tunnel. Gleaming silver pipes, some as thick as a man’s torso, lined the curved walls, carrying water, data, and life itself to the twenty-five million souls living in the sectors above.
“Welcome back to Stars Unbound,” Cokas began, his voice now devoid of its earlier warmth, replaced by a grave seriousness that matched their new environment. “Before the break, we spoke of the ‘soup’ humanity perfected during the long Stagnation of Speed—the stable societies, the resilient cultures. But as I said, that was not the only thing on the menu. There was another dish, prepared decades earlier. A poisoned one.”
He paused, letting the weight of his words settle. “We are walking now through the maintenance tunnels of Nova Arcis. This is the hidden machinery that makes the beautiful garden above possible. It’s a place of hard truths, of complex systems, a place where a single failed component can have catastrophic consequences. It feels… appropriate for our next topic. Because the story of Mars is the story of a magnificent machine with a poisoned core.”
A squat, multi-limbed service robot, its chassis scuffed with the marks of long and diligent labour, whirred past them on its magnetic track, its optical sensors blinking a soft, blue greeting.
“Good cycle, Unit 7B-9,” LYRA.ai said, her voice a warm, respectful acknowledgement. The robot chirped a brief, pleased response before continuing on its way.
“The Martian colonies,” Cokas continued, his gaze following the robot, “founded on the grand, heroic ambition of Mego Reveers, were a gifted future. A second chance for humanity to build a new world, free from the constraints of a dying Earth. But it was a future poisoned by the ideologies of the past. Reveers didn’t export humanity’s best ideas; he exported its oldest sins: greed, hierarchy, and the belief that some lives are worth more than others.”
LYRA.ai picked up the thread, her own voice a founded, calm anchor point to Cokas’s rising passion. “The story of the Martian Revolution is not just a political history, Cokas. It is a foundational myth for much of the solar plane. For the independent cultures of the Asteroid Belt and the outer planets, it is their genesis story. It is the narrative that proves that even in the face of absolute corporate tyranny, a society built on the principles of cooperation and mutual respect can and will prevail. It is the ultimate testament to the Asterion Collective Paradigm.”
“A paradigm they had to build from scratch,” Cokas added, “in the dark, in secret, after one of the most brutal acts of suppression in human history. The Red Strike of 2155… it wasn’t just a massacre; it was an act of profound narrative violence. Ares Dynamics didn’t just kill the miners; they throttled the network, trying to erase the very story of their crime. They understood, even then, that controlling the flow of information was the ultimate form of power.”
Their path through the conduit opened into a vast, cavernous junction, a cathedral of engineering where massive pipes and data conduits converged before branching off to different sectors. In the centre of the junction was a brightly lit platform for one of the station’s internal tube-trains. The air here was cleaner, the hum of the station a more distant presence.
“This is what the revolution was fought for,” Cokas said, gesturing around them at the clean, efficient, and public infrastructure. “Not for wealth, not for glory, but for the simple, fundamental right to control your own world. To breathe your own air. To tell your own story.”
He turned to LYRA, a look of profound respect on his face. “In our last segment of the Philosophical Debates, Bate Bobsman argued that humanity needed to ‘write a better story’. The Martian Revolution is perhaps the first, and most powerful, example in our interstellar history of a people who did exactly that. They rejected the poisoned narrative they were being fed and wrote their own, a story of freedom and cooperation that echoes to this day.”
LYRA nodded. “A story of profound sacrifice and ultimate triumph. Its echoes are in the legal foundations of this very station.”
They stepped onto the platform as a sleek, silent tube-train arrived, its doors hissing open. Cokas and LYRA entered, the doors closing behind them, and the train began to accelerate smoothly into the darkness of the transit tunnel.
“Our next segment,” Cokas’s voiceover continued, as the lights of the station flickered past the train’s viewport, “is a deep-dive into that very history. The events that led to the Red Strike, the rise of the resistance, and the birth of a new philosophy in the cold, hard vacuum of the Asteroid Belt.”
The camera held on their faces, illuminated by the passing lights, before transitioning to the first, stark images of the historical broadcast. The journey into the dark heart of the Martian past had begun.