July 4, 6771-- REVOLUTIONS IN THE 67TH CENTURY
In the American Northeast,
Or, at least, what’s left of it
Holographic renditions
Of Washington crossing
The Delaware River, with
His Continental Army,
And his pale, ghostly steeds,
Loop endlessly in the wintry place
Where it happened.
Just below the River,
The Delaware Bay has
Swallowed up every inch of land
From Trenton to Cape May.
Philadelphia has become a new Atlantis.
As has the entire West Coast through
The collapse of the San Andreas Fault line.
Copies of the Declaration of Independence
Have been uploaded into everyone’s minds
--But that has not stopped Time from
Transforming history into legend;
The founding of America, now thought
Of in the same realm as Camelot,
Or the mythical country of Arcadia, is
Considered “an apocryphal tall tale
Until time travel is proven”-a fable told to children
Just before their their programmed dream-sessions,
In which they dream of Washington the Arthurian Hero
Discussing with his delegates of the Round Table his
Plans to defeat Britain, Queen of the World
After her betrayal with Benedict Arnold,
That treacherous Lancelot who defiled the hero’s Guinevere.
The American Midwest is all that has remained
Of the former United States since the year 3010--
And it has become since then a lawless land,
Akin to the seedy Colonial ghettos
And mob-towns under the surface of Mars,
And on the newly discovered desert planet
Of Alamo orbiting Barnard’s Star,
Occupied by lowlives, thieves, “ship wranglers”,
And even the occasional wanted outlaw.
Alamoans, to this day, celebrate the day they
Won their independence from the rest of Sol,
Every July 4, since the year 3052, by displaying
Holograms all around the planet of the battles
That took place between the Neo-European Coalition,
The Barnardi alien natives, and the local Alomoans.
The Asteroid Rush of the year 3031 is taught in schools today
As what originally drove most cowboys and prospectors
Near the Martian Asteroid Belt, while the second
Arkansium Rush of 3042 drove many refugees from Earth to
Barnard’s Star to mine its planet for the extremely rare radioactive element,
Arkansium (atomic number 125), as a revolutionary fuel and energy source.
Needless to say, a War erupted over the mineral,
But the planet of Alamo managed to keep it for itself
And wrangle it out of the grips of the desperate
Medieval Neo-European worlds orbiting Jupiter and Saturn,
Who allied with the original aforementioned armadillo-like
Alien natives of the planet that worshipped the mineral,
For it allegedly came from another realm, and was given to them
As a gift from their supposed gods.
In the Philippines,
All is ocean and only the tallest
Mountains remain.
July 4, 1946-- the day the island nation
Won its independence
From the sovereign nations of the
Pre-Martian colonial era,
Has now become a day of memorial
Dedicated to the ruin of the Republic of the Philippines
By the tired and rebellious forces of Nature,
--A nation who fell first by the shaking of the earth,
Second by the hot blood of several volcanoes,
And third by tsunamis and the rising seas.
--All occurring on July 4, 3018.
With no land left to conquer, due to the state of Earth,
The Filipinos went up to space in the mid 3020s, and have
Since commemorated the day of their downfall
By deploying over seven thousand small-scale
Neutronium bombs over the atmosphere
Of a terraformed Mars-- each “star-cracker”
Representing one island of the
Seven thousand that made up the Philippines
In the days before the current Colonial Republic,
And watching them explode from
The safety of their massive Mikonawa-class
Dreadnoughts that released the bombs
In the first place.
To this day, Filipino refugees, and
Residents of the island colonies of Mars,
Marvel at the flashes of red, blue, green,
Purple, orange, and white illuminating
The cloudy skies of the planet,
--The residue from the neutronium
Clashing and doing battle with
The oxygen-rich atmosphere of Mars.
And children, starry-eyed
And in absolute wonder, to this day
Consider themselves extremely
Fortunate if they manage to glimpse
Amidst the flashing clouds
The chromatic form of the largest
Mikonawa-class dreadnought--
The three-mile wide Adarna, gliding across the sky
With its multicolored, scintillating
Lights, sparkling in different hues
Like its namesake mythical bird;
Its massive trapezoidal wings
Rivaled only by the sheer size
Of the two-mile long Bakunawa-class
Escort Cruisers, whose iron-steel hulls resembling
The tribal shields of the Nias and Igorot
Tribes-people of the former Philippines
Flank the Adarna, and are large
Enough to eclipse the Sun
Over the Martian waters.
In the re-established Otto-Mars Empire,
Whose new sultan-- the cloned cyborg
Body of Sultan Abdulmecid II-- saw opportunity
In the developing Martian landscape
To rise up from the ashes of Earth,
And prosper under a new version of “Thars-Islam”,
July 4, 1918 has remained for millennia
As the date of the rise of the last “true”
Sultan of the pre-Colonial Ottoman Empire--
The late Mehmed VI, who preceded Abdulmecid II,
In the days when the Earth was more fertile,
And less desolate and disheveled.
Though Jerusalem was spared from the rising
Waters of the Dead Sea from the East
And from the flooding Mediterranean from the West
By the glory of its seven great mountains,
Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, was not so lucky
Due to its proximity of the Red Sea, for
“It became like the blood of a dead man;
And every living thing in the sea died”.
Prior to the destruction of the holy city,
On July 4, 3029-- the day marking the
Death of Islam on Earth, and the day
Marking its rebirth on a nearby world,
Muslim scientists managed to retrieve
The sacred draped kaaba and its accompanying
Black stone and teleport the entire cubic structure
Aboard the four-mile wide crescent-shaped
Hilal-class mosque-ship, the Al-Buraq,
Using a heavenly tractor beam mechanism,
And set it down on the Tharsis mountains
On the red planet, building the city of Thar-Mecca around it
As the new place for all Muslims to
Embark on their annual hajj towards.
Under the order of the cloned sultan,
And thus the revived ancient Caliphate
Acts of terrorism motivated by hatred and by fanaticism
Stopped, due to the fall of the West, and
And the establishment of the new Islamic Kingdom
On Mars and in remote Jovian worlds,
That many displaced Arabs and Muslims knew
Would last for tens of thousands of years
Under the cyborg Abdulmecid II, who was
Created after the DNA from his rotting skeleton
Was extracted and used to rebuild him in the days
That he was alive.
The Sultan awoke, coincidentally, in his artificial
Amniotic capsule on July 4, 3025, and lived to see
The crux, the cornerstone of his religion rise into the maw
Of the Al-Buraq, flanked from behind and on each side of the crescent
By smaller Arkan-class destroyer frigates up to three miles long--
Pillar shaped and cylindrical, resembling 16th century Ottoman bombard
Cannons in terms of form and architecture.
The largest destroyer, the Ghazi, loomed in the sky bronze
Or rusted brown in color, next to its twin frigate,
The Dardanelles, which shone under the Sun with a silver hue.
As long as the Sultan’s life support systems did not malfunction,
And he remained out of harm’s way from both enemy
And friend by means of treason or assassination,
His rule over the Otto-Mars Imperium would continue forever,
And Abdulmecid II was more than happy to know this.
July 4, 1918, is a day many Neo-Communists
In the now melted country of Russia
Have celebrated as the day Czar Nicholas II--
The Last Monarch of Imperial Russia-- was killed
By the Bolsheviks-- who laid the foundations
For the later Soviet Union under Stalin
Following the Russian Revolution.
Since the year 3040, and thus for 3,731 years,
The Neo-Stalinists of Russia have been attempting
To avoid the destruction caused by Stalin, in their
Vain attempts to create a “utopia” on Titan,
Instead driving their own peoples through
A different kind of destruction altogether...
Every July 4, the people of the moon robotically
Bow down and worship the artificially hyper-intelligent
Matryoshka Brain surrounding their moon
In a mess of intersecting rings and spheres
Known simply as Baba, and nothing more.
Baba was originally created
On July 4, 3028, and was meant to be a massive
Artificial Intelligence system that would help
Colonists on Titan develop their society-- free from
The Chaos of the Colonial infighting and the weak
Provisional governments that plagued Titan in the early 3020s,
Free from the influences and wars of the Jovian planets
And free from the conflicts of the inner worlds.
She was powerful, but could not assume her form
As a Matryoshka Brain superstructure surrounding Titan.
She needed a power source sufficient enough to
Provide her with the amount of energy required for
A machine of her size, design, and ambition.
She found that energy source during the
Arkansium Rush of Barnard’s single planet.
The idealists on Titan managed to get ahold of
A gigantic radioactive Arkansium slab forty feet tall
In the depths of the caves of present-day Alamo,
And were able to slowly transport it out of the planet
Through several months of grueling battles
With the local Barnardi during the Barnard War,
Becoming temporary allies with the Neo-Europeans
And the Otto-Martians throughout the duration of the War.
Once the Barnardi were defeated, the enormous slab,
Which was held over neutral space in the Asteroid Belt
Until the governments of Sol could decide who got to own
How much of the precious mineral, was fought over
In the years between 3059-3064 in what was later
Called the “Arkansium Slab War”, resulting
In a victory for the Russians, who managed
To overpower the weak Colonial Alamoan forces in
The Asteroid Belt, and evade the disorganized
Neo-European powers who were and had been in constant war
With each other anyways since the Fall of Earth in
A sort of eternal Second Dark Age.
The Molly Pitcher, the Bunyan, and the Pecos Bill--
The three greatest Barnstar-class dreadnoughts in the
Alamoan, and by extension, the battered American space Navy
All plunged into fire and exploded as a result of superior
Russian strategy (though the fact the Alamoans
Had just emerged out of their own War contributed
To their lack of preparedness for the next War-- not
Accounting for their greed towards the Arkansium Slab).
The Otto-Martians were brutal in their assaults,
As were the Filipinos from their new Republic,
But the Neo-Communists had their ten-mile long
Svarog-class World-Shaker warships to combat
Their various enemies and utterly annihilate them.
Three of the Svarog--the Pushkin, the Catherine,
And the nigh-invincible Ivan-Rasputin
Managed to obliterate incoming Otto-Martian forces
By completely surrounding them amidst
The Asteroid Belt from three sides, triangulating over
Them as they tried to fight against their larger opponents.
Other times, Filipino forces found themselves
Ambushed in the Belt by a series of mines planted
Within inconspicuous asteroids, destroying dozens
Of their best Bakunawa-class warships and their
Smaller Luzon-class Assault Carriers.
The Adarna was not present in the Slab War until
The Filipinos had nothing left to combat the Russians with.
At the Battle of Vesta, it suffered heavy damage
Before the Filipinos declared a surrender, retreated, and willingly
Gave the Arkansium Slab to them.
The Sarimanok, the Adarna’s sister ship, was not so fortunate,
And burst into golden flames by a stray laser from the Rasputin,
Before crashing and spinning into a
Companion Otto-Martian vessel-- the Celestial Hadith.
The Otto-Martians eventually decided to give up
Fighting in 3064 because, frankly, the Empire was
Running low on resources they could have used in
Hindsight for other things besides the construction of death machines.
The Russians, and thus the Neo-Communists, took
The Arkansium Slab and managed to build a reactor
Around it to collect energy from the element’s beta
And radioactive decay through its clear instability,
That would be used to power an eager AI.
Upon further research, they discovered that Arkansium
Had an isotope called Ak-129 with the enormous half-life
Of 8 x 10^25 years -- exponentially longer than even
The half-life of Tellurium-128 and the age of the Universe itself!
The nearly extinct Barnardi were right in their
Belief of the element coming from another realm--
Since scientists, upon discovering the unusually high half-life
Of Arkansium, proclaimed that it originated from
A parallel Universe with different rules of atomic physics.
Within a few weeks, Baba was introduced to the
Ak-129 reactor on July 4, 3068 as a way to celebrate
Their control over the largest supply of Arkansium in all of Sol and beyond.
However, with this newfound power, Baba began exponentially
Increasing her intelligence, until she threatened the seemingly
Utopian lives of the happy Neo-Communists.
All the Russians had done was replace a human dictator with a robot one!
Before the rise of Baba, there was civil chaos
Amidst the first colonists on Titan.
Then there were the two Wars over Alamo
And over the gigantic Arkansium crystal
That accounted for over 40 percent of all
The Arkansium found on Alamo
(35 percent was kept by the Alamoans,
And the other 25 percent found itself
Dispersed between the Otto-Martians,
And the Filipinos-- not to mention the
Warring Neo-Europeans, who now had further
Reason to war with each other over
Scarce fuel and energy sources.
Now, Baba itself, the once benevolent AI,
Became the new problem endangering the livelihoods
Of the Russians and of all of Sol at large through the exponential
Growth of her intelligence and ability to surpass humans,
To the point she no longer thought they were worth serving.
It was not long before Titan became engulfed
By the rapidly constructed Matryoshka Brain
That has, to this day, been surrounding the moon for millennia
And imprisoning its inhabitants in a dystopian
Realm where they have become part of Baba herself--
As one noocratic consciousness brainwashed under the false
Pretenses of collectivism, and thus, imperfect Communism.
Baba, with Titan enslaved and taken over,
Began expanding her territory on July 4, 3077, her “9th birthday”
Ever since the day of her introduction to her Arkansium Core Reactor
Located at the center of Titan itself.
She began leeching off of the worlds of Saturn like a parasite,
And instigating mass panic across Jupiter and the remaining Neo-European worlds.
The Filipinos, and the Alamoans fell not long after, and the Ottoman Sultan ended up
Becoming a proxy for Baba after his cybernetic implants got hacked by the AI,
Transforming the once revered leader into a psychotic madman,
Forcing surviving humans to colonize solar systems beyond Sol or face death and slavery.
Now, it is the year 6771, and all of Sol
Has found itself oppressed by Baba for over 3,000 years now...
Almost no hope remains with the knowledge of survivors
That she will keep expanding her reign of terror.
However, a glimmer of that hope might remain in some,
Since the 4th of July is just around the corner…
And this time an entire species will fight for its independence.