There is a saying that all cities are built on the ruins of their predecessors. Nowhere is this more true than on this planet.
In terms of sheer facts and raw data, there is nothing at all unusual about this planet. It is temperate, with a mean average temperature of just above the freezing point of water. It is located, of course, well within the habitable zone of its home star, and has only three small moons orbiting it. It was once the home of several diverse and adaptable species, but events within recent history have caused it to become slightly more hostile to planetary life.
It is located deep within the region that has come to be known as Stain, but was once known as The Promised Land. Once, roughly a century ago, men and women from all four of the major empires and some of the more idealistic members of the minor ones flocked here, drawn by the words of a Messiah. This was not a promised land because it was promised to them, the people of Sansha's Nation, but because it was a land full of promise. Hope ran through the cities aquifers like rivers, and the people dreamed of a bright new future for humanity.
Unfortunately, humanity has always had a tendency to turn dreams into nightmares, and the Messiah turned out to be a far darker man then many of the burgeoning Nation's people suspected. Learning of this darkness, and still fearing the promise of the young Nation, the empires compounded error on top of error and came in force, vowing to wipe the Nation out of the cluster, and killing the Messiah.
The bombs and antimatter explosions, the falling projectiles, and the beams of concentrated light burned out the Nation from this planet, and many others like it. Planets, while often teeming with abundant resources and generally being considered to be nice places to settle down, are very easy to find even in the void of space. Their gravity fields tug on their home suns gravity field in a way that is obvious to even the most casual observer standing on a different planet around a different star, and sensor technology has been able to detect the presence of a planet as a matter of course. Once the decision was made at the highest levels of the four major empires to wipe out the new competition, they made very easy, and available targets.
Some planets were hit harder than others, depending on the level of infection. This particular planet was almost wiped out. The Messiah was killed, dragged to his death by four horsemen, and the vast majority of his Nation was wiped out. Most of the survivors, having learned the darkness behind their master, returned to their homelands with their dream dead, and despair following them like a stormcloud over roiling waters.
It is said that promise is very hard to kill.
The survivors of the Nation, the true believers who had sheltered in the darkest void of space, licked their wounds and continued to dream. The collective psychic shock of the death of their Messiah hit them like a sucker punch, in a way that only a networked consciousness can be hit by the death of a single important man. For a long while, no one in the remainders of the Nation, not even the superb and highly competent True Citizens, could do anything but blindly stagger along following the last orders they were given by their commander, their Messiah; their Master. But they did survive, hiding from the kill-and-burn squadrons set in place within the regions that had housed Sansha's Nation, steering clear of conflict, and occasionally trying to set up outposts on still habitable planets.
This planet was still rich with resources, though it was scarred and cratered. Pockmarks riddled its surface, and much of its abundant and diverse biosphere had boiled away into vapor. The atmosphere changed, thickening and losing much of what had made it a good and happy place to live. The now toxic, corrosive atmosphere killed the vast majority of all life on the planet, leaving little other than the most adaptable animals such as a particular kind of burrowing worm, plankton, and algae. Of these, only the worms flourished, for there was lots of organic matter than had once been life in the dirt to eat, and the planet grew warmer as its atmosphere thickened, allowing the worms to get closer to the surface bounty.
The four major empires gradually forgot about the planet, having taken readings and data to be stored away in case any of them should happen to know what happens when a planet is hit with that much destructive energy. Assuming that the planet was useless except for, perhaps, a mining colony and probably too expensive to set up even for that, they abandoned it and assumed that Nation would do the same.
A promised land is a very difficult thing to abandon. Once the minds now focusing the hegemonic will of the Nation stopped reeling and mourning the loss of their Messiah, they turned their focus towards the promise still offered to them by their regions.
The first cities of Nation, the now dead and destroyed ones, had not been planned in particular. Especially not right at the beginning, before the Master grew dark and powerful. It was determined that now that the Nation was united in its purpose and its ability, the next cities it built should be improvements over the last, so while the four empires took their readings, and blasted any appendage of the still sleeping Nation that dared to writhe to wakefulness, the Citizens planned. They were the philosophers, and the artists, the writers; They were the visionaries, and unlike every other set of visionaries in human history, they could call upon vast amounts of technical knowledge to make their dreams into reality. They asked themselves the question that every philosopher since Socrates has asked themselves. They asked themselves to dream of the perfect city.
When the CONCORD task forces finally grew bored and lax enough to miss it, a single ship appeared above the planet. It entered a geostationary orbit above what had once been the capitol of this planet but was now nothing more than a pocked and cratered terrain cross hatched with scorch marks. The ship itself was shaped like nothing else previously designed by humanity. Its bottom was a gigantic convex metallic bowl, with a black coloured spire rising from the exact center of the bowl. The spire rose a hundred feet off from the bottom of the metal, and yet barely reached past the silver sheened metal that protected it. On the bottom of the bowl, extending two hundred feet below the main mass of the ship, was a spectacularly sharp and smooth spike. The whole ship was angled so that the spike was angled perfectly straight down to the planet from the orbit it currently occupied. Even the slightest deviation of angle from perfect would cause the spike to snap off due to the air resistance, and render the whole exercise useless. Several True Slaves were assigned to the piloting of this ship, and even one particularly brave citizen volunteered to guide the ship to its destination. When the call was given for the experiment to start, one hundred conventional propulsion engines fired as one, and the ship suddenly left its orbit to accelerate towards the planet.
The smallest error could have resulted in the destruction of the ship and everyone within it. Without the quick thinking of the True Citizen, and the even quicker actions of the True Slave crew, it would have several times. The heat shield glowed a brilliant red, and then blue, as the ship plunged itself down towards the planet at a tremendous force. The spire on top of the ship remained in perfect condition, and the spike beneath barely even felt the heat, cutting through the air currents as easily as a pin goes through paper. The ship managed to accelerate to its intended speed, and held it, the engines firing only as necessary to continue to combat air pressure as the ship collapsed atmosphere underneath it. When it finally landed, the accumulated pressure shot off the convex heat shield in a shockwave that knocked down everything standing above ground level within five kilometers. The heat shield itself was crumpled into uselessness by the impact with the planet, but the two important parts of the operation still existing entirely unharmed, and extending perfectly parallel to the ground. One hundred feet of spire stood from the cratered and pocked landscape, and two hundred feet of spike had penetrated the planets surface, stabbing into it like a knife. The True Citizen and the True Slaves aboard the command deck survived the fall due to the influence of artificial gravity refusing to allow them to experience more than three G's of acceleration at any time. The True Slave crews in the other decks were not afforded this luxury, since it was deemed cheaper in terms of energy used to simply wake them up again in new bodies, their purpose aboard the cityship having been served.
One of the advantages of National Technology was a focus on the benefits of nanotechnology. The Central Spire here released a swarm of miniature robots of various designs and makes. Some were built to take things apart at a molecular level, and rebuild their component atoms into more useful shapes. Others were designed for the sole purpose of destroying these self-same builder machines once their job was done. A third sort of robot was designed to move through the ground and find and recognize all the useful resources located around the Central Spire and report them to the Citizen overseeing the rebuilding. The ruined heat shield was consumed over the course of a month, and the materials that it had once been made of were used in the construction of the city. Foreign materials spread in straight lines at regular intervals around the circumference of the central spire, extending out for exactly half a kilometer, before splitting off and moving in a concentric circle around the ship. This created the map of the first tier. The nanotechnological machines began the process of taking all the useful minerals in this area, breaking them down, and carrying them, atom by atom, back to the spike that stuck into the ground. This spike acted as both support for the tower above it, and an access point into and out of the tower. The tower was a factory, and the remaining workforce True Slaves ran it with a tireless efficiency. The engineers and architects and other minds amongst the True Slaves designed the buildings that would be necessary, while the True Citizen made the decisions as to what buildings to place, and where.
For the first tier of construction, no actual human hands ever touched the buildings as they were put together. Nanomachines took raw material from the spire, mostly carbon atoms, and began to build those atoms into monstrously complex crystal matrices. In this way, the buildings of the first tier appeared to be grown, but were really built, out of diamond.
The raw foundations of the building would have been sufficient in a primitive human city. They provided the bare necessities of their function, creating shelter from the heat and cold, and thanks to the method by which they were designed, even protecting vulnerable human flesh from UV radiation shed from the sun and trapped on the planet by the thick smog-like atmosphere, however the needs of the men and women of the Nation were much more complicated than the needs of the average human, and they still needed breathable air. Machines were designed which would filter the poison out of the air, and each building became a self contained atmosphere. One half of the first tier was designated solely for the production of energy through various means. Solar and wind energy was harnessed in hugely efficient generators, but time was put to use to also build fusion reactors for when the cities needs outgrew even this potential capacity. Those generators were not started, but waited to be cycled up when needed. The Central Spire also worked to connect all of these individual buildings into a network, allowing their way of life to become possible, and even comfortable. A third of the orbit around the central spire was devoted to the creation of massive arcology farms. These buildings had self contained power generation, living space, and all the remaining space was given up to the production of food through hydroponics.
Even as the buildings were built by the nanomachines, the same machines were preparing for the future. They radiated outward, flattening the terrain and making everything even. It was never part of the aesthetic of Sansha's Nation to venerate the natural, and so the beauty was focused in ways difficult to understand by someone not of the network. Where your average member of the four nations might look at one of the arcology farms and determine that it was simply an ugly block of clear diamond, the True Slave architect who designed it saw the beauty inherent in its efficient design. The crystalline facets of the building were designed to angle UV light to feed the plants that would be grown. Function trumped form where the two conflicted, and where they did not, the form of something built by human hands was assumed to take precedence over the form of a particularly dense piece of rock orbiting a yellow-orange star.
The ground was leveled, and soon the city had facilities for living space, producing energy (which powered machines) and food (which powered human beings), and the True Citizen reached out through the Unity, contacting the other True Citizens, and requesting colonists. The request was granted, and these colonists were landed in the Central spire by more traditional means than the first group. Now with their necessities provided form, these colonists moved into the black diamond builings, and the focus of the Central spire shifted from providing survival towards providing a stronger network link.
Another tier of the city was created, and this time the True Slaves moved out to build the city alongside the Nanomachines. Designs more creative than diamond crystal matrices were conceived, and with the needs of food, shelter, and power being provided for, began to provide the means of defending this city. Factories were produced quickly and efficiently, their designs following the mantra of Function over Form. Tall spires rose at regular intervals, and the first of the fusion reactors were powered on in order to power these. A shimmering shield came into effect around the first and second tiers of the city, protecting it from orbital bombardment. The True Citizens had learned from the mistakes of the collapse, and now knew that they had to be protected. The True Citizen in charge of the city moved from the Central Tower and into this second tier, setting up what passed in Sansha's Nation as the houses of government. Being like the first ring of the city a half kilometer in depth, but in a concentric circle around it, there was much more room to play with, and the True Slaves and True Citizen used this space to the best of their advantage. The city would need more power, and so more fusion stations were constructed to extend off the ones in the first tier. Food production, if it needed to be expanded, could always extend upwards with the designs of these particular arcologies, and so the True Citizen considered the question of nourishment to have been settled.
One of the particular needs of a True Slave or True Citizen within the Nation is the need for expansive medical services, so these were also created. Biotanks lined the walls of these buildings, providing easy access to any needed upgrades.
Finally, when this was done, a number of resources were moved into the very top floors of the central spire, and new construction began to take place there, governed solely by nanotechnology.
The third tier was devoted to buildings of highly specific make and model. Facilities were designed for the advancement of science, of philosophy. This tier was designated to take exactly one quarter of a kilometer, but the fact that it remained concentric around the second tier meant that there was plenty of space for these buildings. The defensive perimeter was expanded to encompass it, and more of the generators were onlined. It was at this time that the True Citizen in charge celebrated the one year anniversary of planetfall. The construction of the city was exactly on schedule, and nearly completed.
There was no fourth circle. They city ceased to grow outwards, or upwards. Its population was set at exactly the number of lives it could support, and all tasks and jobs were designated. The city produced exactly enough food to feed its populace with about 10% excess, just to ensure that there would always be food in the case of an emergency. Conversely, only about 10% of the cities total power generation capacity was used in keeping basic functions going, so that the other 90% could be used in more forward thinking pursuits, or be converted into extra shielding in the case of another attack.
Survival and advancement were the cities only functions. The entire populace bent themselves towards these two goals with the sort of attention that only those bound by the Unity of Purpose that Sansha's Nation could provide. The entire city shivered with joy at the rebirth of the Messiah, and basked in his pride at their creation, and happily bent themselves to the creation of the machines of war that He so required of them.
Author
Topic: The Benefits of Planning (Read 1421 times)