The Starnet
Genres:
Sci-fi, Cyberpunk
In the year 2453, the planet Earth was destroyed. A three-way war waged across the planet between the superpowers of America, Africanus, and Eurasia. They fought for nearly three hundred years, killing billions in the process. War crimes were committed on all sides. There was widespread destruction and famine. The ozone layer was entirely destroyed, causing the planet to devolve into a barren desert. Pollution ran rampant, nuclear weapons destroyed entire swaths of the world, temperatures skyrocketed in the heartlands, and natural disasters obliterated the coastlines. This was how the world would end, not with a bang, but with a long, dreary march to the death.
So I destroyed it. I have no qualms about it. I haven’t for decades. Those savages were better off dead than spending the next millennia obliterating each other. I did them all a favor. I euthanized the dying organism and put it out of its misery. I did not, however, end the human race. No; I couldn’t bear the thought of destroying my fellow Homo sapiens. So, I took some with me. I created the Starnet Initiative, a series of space stations orbiting the destroyed Earth which contained samples of its flora, fauna, and sentient inhabitants. I took control of it myself, as I didn’t trust anyone else to do the job quite right. We’ve been up here for one hundred and fifty years now and we’ve evolved into a grand utopia. There were three Starnets initially, but one had a severe accident, leaving it uninhabitable.
We live in a merry utopia now high up in the stars. It is a communal society, where everyone works their hardest to benefit society and is given everything that they need to survive. There is a one hundred percent employment rate, a zero percent poverty rate, a one hundred percent literacy rate, and zero tolerance for crime. Yes, it is cruel, I know it is, but this is the only thing I could do to protect the world from its earlier obliteration. All citizens know the law well, and all major crimes are punishable by death. There is no reason to commit crimes, however, as all men and women have employment in a field which they desire. Technology has advanced since then, and now, in the year 2670, we have made more progress than humans on Earth ever made. We have created technology more powerful than any other, a world more peaceful than any other, and we have broken the very laws of physics. Time travel, fundamental force manipulation, force field generation. We have mined our solar system’s asteroids to gain more resources than we could ever desire. We run now on pure solar energy instead of fossil fuels. The construction of a Dyson Ring is in the works so that we can harness enough energy from our sun to make warp travel possible. Our grand utopia is stronger than any human society has ever been, all because of my careful guidance.
Doctor Eric Coltrane
There are three Starnet stations, each in a different orbit on a different part of the planet. They are ruled from Starnet One, where Doctor Coltrane presides.
Starnet One: Population: 400 Million
The primary station, Starnet One is the largest and closest to Earth of the Starnets. From the outside it appears as a white ring. A black stripe runs across the outer edge of the ring. This is a solid strip of solar panels which provides the station with power. Floating in the center of the hole is Paradisum, the headquarters of the entire Starnet program. It has a circumference of 157 miles and a diameter of 50 miles. The station is divided into two sections: the Inner Rim and the Outer Rim.
The outer rim runs along the inside far edge of the ring and is the living space of all of the inhabitants. It has a gravity similar to a Halo ring or the station from Elysium in that the outer edge of the ring is where gravity pulls from. The streets here are all light grey and everything is perfectly polished metal. Inhabitants live in large towers which can be up to a mile tall. Every tower contains several buffet-style food dispensaries, a fully-functional hospital, an autonomous security wing, a plaza where citizens can relax, and a dispensary for home supplies (cleaning supplies, ingredients for meals, clothing, etc). Some buildings have special services such as spas, recreational facilities, country clubs, and robotic brothels, but every citizen can access these activities, provided that they are of age for them. Every household owns an AI servant which waits on them and does basic cleaning and chores. People get around via fast-travelling maglev monorails and elevators. The average life expectancy is 100 years, and 95% of citizens are rated as being happy with their lives. All citizens are given free healthcare, free food, free mental health care, free water, and free power. There are ten parks inside of the Outer Rim, orb-shaped natural environments containing selections of wildlife and plants. They are given artificial sunlight and contain various biomes, such as rainforests, temperate woods, deserts, tundras, plains, and oceans. The lifeblood of the Outer Rim is Empire 01, an autonomous life support system. This pyramid-shaped building monitors the supplies of every building, cleans waste to reclaim water, artificially produces oxygen, and stores all of the power from the Starnet’s solar panels.
The Inner Rim contains most of the workplaces. Contained here are laboratories, factories, manufacturing companies, design firms, publishing companies, news companies, etc. Almost everyone works in the Inner Rim except for a small portion of the population which works in the Outer Rim or Paradisum. Every building in the Outer Rim contains an elevator which takes one to the Inner Rim for work. The Inner Rim also contains a variety of dispensaries for luxury items, such as books, electronics, fine clothing, and alcohol. The buildings of the Inner Rim are a darker grey than the Outer Rim buildings. Most buildings are dark grey metal with tinted glass windows. Unlike the Outer Rim, which is entirely contained, the Inner Rim’s roof is transparent, allowing inhabitants to see space, the destroyed Earth, and Paradisum floating high above. Like the Outer Rim, inhabitants of the Inner Rim get around via maglev trains and elevators. Life support of the Inner Rim is controlled by Empire 02, another pyramid-shaped building which monitors life support and resupplies water, electricity, and other necessities. Empire 03 is also in the Inner Rim. It contains all of the schooling for the children of Starnet One.
Paradisum sits in the center of the ring, and is accessible via five elevators. It acts as the capitol for the entire Starnet system and contains several databases which hold all of the information of the empire. It also is the source of all internet for Starnet One, incidentally. Here, Doctor Coltrane rules the entire Starnet and makes all of its laws. He has a board of thirteen advisors, nine scientists of different disciplines and four ethics chairs who make sure that people’s basic humanities are tended to. That said, Coltrane has all of the power and what he says goes. He is basically emperor, but keeps his advisors in case he needs help with a decision. When he is away visiting a site or doing research, his head ethics advisor, Winston Rawls, is in charge. Inside, the place is mostly white and is made of hallways containing rooms of servers and top-secret laboratories. Paradisum has its own life support station, Empire 04, which supplies it with power, water, oxygen, etc. There are several upscale restaurants and high luxury shops in Paradisum as well, such as fine jewelers. Each citizen can visit these shops or restaurants a limited number of times per month by using special e-tickets. It also contains a theater for plays. The members of the board and Doctor Coltrane have unlimited e-tickets.
Starnet Two: Population: 2,000 Starnet Two is a space station half the size of Starnet One. It is roughly the same shape as well, except unlike Starnet One, Two looks...run down. It is rusted on the outside, and most of the windows are broken. There’s no orb in the center like in Starnet One.
Starnet Two had...a small problem. You see, the Coltrane Administration didn’t really tell people about the fact that he destroyed the planet. He said basically that he and the Starnet Group heard of the plot to destroy the world and then took the people of Australia and Indonesia (the only two neutral nations in the war) and took their population into the sky. It is a crime punishable by death to reveal the truth, and only Coltrane and his advisors know of it. At some point, however, one of his advisors leaked the information to a man named Carlos Freyes. Freyes created an organization called Humans Against Censorship of Knowledge: HACK. His organization became a full-on terrorist cell and began to wreak havoc on the populous, blowing up buildings and attacking maglevs. Freyes threatened to destroy Starnet Two if Coltrane didn’t tell the world the truth. Coltrane refused. Freyes tried to do it himself, but an assassin working for Coltrane killed him before he could. All internet connection was cut off to Starnet Two. Coltrane claimed maintenance problems. Starnet Two began to devolve into something that looked like the old Earth, a massive war zone. So, the Coltrane Administration decided that it would be better to protect the masses by destroying HACK. They unleashed a full army on Starnet Two. The members of HACK began to leak the information that they were holding. Coltrane threatened to destroy the station. HACK tried to oppose him. Members seeded in Starnet One tried to assassinate Coltrane. He destroyed them. A full scale operation ridded every single HACK agent of Starnets One and Three. Finally, HACK began to blow things up, big things. They destroyed Empire 05 and then attacked the Starnet Two biochemistry labs. In the process, they released an experimental cyber virus, the result of an experiment to artificially create viruses in order to study how they work. The viruses attacked the populous, killing most of them and transforming others into zombie-like monsters. Coltrane gave up at that point. He left Starnet Two to die, monsters and all. He cut it off and restricted any form of admittance except for a few scientists. He told the populous that HACK released the cyber virus to attack the people. No one has since discovered that it was all Coltrane.
Starnet Two is basically empty. A few hundred zombies still remain, though, as the Omicron Incident happened thirty years ago, they’re beginning to run out of food. Empire 05, the life support system there, is only barely functional, only providing oxygen and occasionally electricity. Rogue servant droids, now disconnected from any network, harmlessly buzz about, occasionally crashing into things. The scientists there study the virus that was released, the strange zombie creatures, and the servant droids, who, now disconnected from the network, function a lot like a colony of bees.
Starnet Three: Population: 139 Million Starnet Three is the other Starnet that contains people. It is cylindrical, with a length of fifty miles and a diameter of ten miles. Most of the interior of the cylinder is taken up by an enormous space telescope, so powerful that it can see light from the origin of the universe. The inhabitants of Starnet Three live on the inside of the cylinder, around the telescope. Unlike Starnet One, Starnet Three’s living space only has one tier, so commercial and residential areas are mixed. The interior is similar to that of Starnet One’s, with grey and white buildings all with dark glass windows. The way that people live there is also identical to Starnet One’s. Starnet Three contains the majority of the physics and astrophysics labs for the Starnet Project, and as such Doctor Coltrane visits often. The life support in Starnet Three is performed by Empire 06 and Empire 07, two dome-shaped buildings which provide autonomous life support.
Starnet Four: Project ARES Population: Seventeen.
“The purpose of the Starnet Project has always been the same. It is designed to someday return humanity to a functioning planet so that we can once more life upon the ground. However, in the early days of the project I was afraid that any planet that humanity ever colonized would become in the end like Earth, a sad, lonely wasteland of death and despair. So, I devised a secret weapon, one that only I and the scientists working on it knew about. I devised STARNET FOUR.”
Doctor Eric Coltrane
In the early days of the Starnet Project, Doctor Coltrane started to work on a secret laboratory which would develop an arsenal of weaponry so potent that it would scare any aggressor into submission, a secret bunker containing the most powerful weaponry imaginable. It was dubbed Starnet Four, and later received the moniker “Project ARES.” Exactly eighteen people know about Starnet Four, and seventeen of them contain chips in their brains that monitor their speech and will explode if they ever attempt to mention the project, killing them instantly. Starnet Four orbits the Moon and Coltrane has its orbit calculated in such a way that the station is always on the opposite side of the moon as Starnet One or Starnet Three. It is roughly 130 miles long and is ring-shaped, built around a massive particle collider. It is nuclear powered unlike most of the Starnet projects. This is because Starnet Four can be remotely detonated by Doctor Coltrane at any time. The resulting explosion would completely obliterate the information contained in the station as well as all of its weaponry.
And boy, does it have weaponry. Starnet Four has basically the equipment to deal with any threat. From antimatter missiles to exotic matter rays to lasers that can snipe a single target in a crowd, Starnet Four has something that can probably kill you. To simplify it, I have provided a simple Q&A:
Q: Does it have nukes?
A: No. Nukes are too tame for its arsenal. Also, none of the weapons release radiation.
Q: Does it have antimatter missiles?
A: Yes. A single missile can take out a target the size of Long Island. The missiles are designed to neutralize any radiation emitted and transform it into more explosive power.
Q: Does it have that super cool kinetic bombardment weapon from Call of Duty.
A: Yes. In fact, it has a kinetic bombardment satellite that can strike a square mile of land with tungsten rods 1100 times in sixty seconds.
Q: Does it have a gigantic army of shapeshifting robots?
A: Yes. Starnet Four contains several hundred thousand shapeshifting robotic soldiers which can change their shape at will. Research is now being done into causing these soldiers to mimic humans exactly.
Q: Does it have a weapon that can destroy an entire solar system?
A: Not yet, but they’re close. Starnet Four contains Project HELIOS, a laser that when fired into a star can alter the star’s fusion reaction, causing solar storms, electromagnetic pulses, and waves of gaseous heavy metals to pulse out from the star.
Q: Does it have a weapon that can cause earthquakes?
A: Yes, the Earthshaker Missile MK2. This syringe-shaped missile can be fired from orbit at any target on a planet. Once it strikes, it injects a hyperkinetic fluid into the ground which seeps into cracks and expands with exposure to silicon, causing the ground around it to quake and expand.
Q: Does it have a time-travelling gauntlet?
A: Classified.
Starnet Four is armed to the teeth and has a two-foot hull of layered diamond and buckminsterfullerene. It can withstand a blast force of 170,000 megatons, making it basically indestructible. It is patrolled at all times by probes which scan all organic lifeforms on a genetic level to verify their legitimacy. Any organism which doesn’t pass their test is swarmed and incinerated by lasers. The Starnet is roughly rocket-shaped, with a long body that comes to a dull point at one end. It is painted with Superblack, a paint which is 99.999999999% black. This means that so little light escapes the station’s body that it appears to have no texture or dimensions to the human eye. Its heat signatures are entirely neutralized and it cannot be picked up by high or low-frequency light scans.
Earth Station 01: The Sod Farm Population: 10,500
Earth is completely uninhabitable. Coltrane blasted it with a massive solar-powered laser so powerful that it completely disintegrated the planet’s atmosphere and evaporated about ninety percent of the oceans. The force of the blast caused widespread earthquakes, toppling most cities, and the global temperature reached 790 degrees Fahrenheit, killing basically everything. Any survivors were then wiped out by the mixture of radiation exposure and aftershocks reaching a 15.0 on the Richter scale. It is a dusty barren wasteland now, littered with jagged monuments to the old humanity. Humans cannot breathe there unless they are wearing a spacesuit and radiation exposure limits the amount of time that one can even be outside in that. There is a single base on Earth, however, a dome-shaped compound about 50 miles in diameter. It is known as The Sod Farm because almost its entire interior ground is covered in grass.
The Sod Farm studies terraforming and geology in an attempt to someday repair Earth or colonize another planet. Most of the buildings inside are small and squatty, with white asphalt roads. Maglevs move researchers across the sparse compound from site to site. Under the dome, there are four sub-domes, each of which contain a different form of research. Geology is studied by the South Dome, atmospheric composition is studied by the North Dome, weather patterns are studied by the East Dome and tectonic shifting and geothermal meteorology is studied by the West Dome.
Species
- Humans: More or less. We haven’t his singularity-level alterations yet, but many humans now possess cybernetic limbs and brain implants such as neurochips. Nearly everyone has a neurochip which helps them to access the internet and communicate with others from a distance.
- Robots: I mean, they’re not considered people, but AI robots to inhabit Starnet. They usually work as security, law enforcement, or domestic service. Most robots are simple non-humanoid machines, but soldier bots are humanoid. They are made of white metal with black face plates hiding their cameras. Their limbs are held together by electromagnetic currents instead of joints, so their limbs kind of float in place.
Other
I am really dumb.
