(RP) How I see the World (unknown date, Imperial Era)

[My writing is never AI generated. Ever. Policy Here.]

(Unknown Date, Lorentis Hab City 27B, Imperial Era).

I was only a child, back then. Young, naïve, perhaps ignorant. But there is an innocence in childhood that is hard to maintain into adolescence, much less into adulthood. I was born during the transitional period between the Federal Government of the United Aquarian Systems and the new, as many thought, dictatorship government of the ‘Imperial States of Aquarius’, or, ATIS, as they called themselves. I was only 16 when the crimson-banded officers arrived at our hab block to demand our registration with the new government. I remember seeing them with fear; these men clad in hybrid cybernetic power suits, their faces almost completely hidden by data processing augments and overlays. The one thing I remember the most, though, was their crimson berets, with the crimson tri-star of the Imperial Emblem printed on the front. I don’t know why, it always stuck with me.

Back then, things were hard. My family hailed from a traditional line of space-faring couriers; my father owned a courier business out of Lorentis, mostly local, but occasionally he’d return from the Angel Reach after long runs. He didn’t say much, I think it drained him a lot. He didn’t really have a lot of time for us. Me, my mother and sister that is. After the Fall of the UTN, Lorentis sort of ‘limped along’ under a temporary UAS civic federal government – they kept telling us that the ‘shock was only fleeting and that support from the other Core Worlds would arrive any day. It didn’t, of course. Well, not in the form we were all expecting.

As a child I was brought up with a firm understanding of ‘right and wrong’. And justice, if you want to call it that. My mother taught me well, bless her, she was always there for me, no matter how hard life got for us. During the last years of the UAS Civic authority on Lorentis, we were still taught in schools of the old-world way of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Democracy’, like they were bastions of our civilisation created by our forefathers who landed in Aquarius thousands of years ago. But as each day slipped past, the façade around these ‘lessons’ withered and faded until nothing was left but a shallow, empty husk. A word. “Freedom”, a word without meaning. It is not my place to say whether the authorities of the former UAS-state civic government actually cared about us back then, but it didn’t seem like it. Crime was rampant, sometimes you were afraid to even leave your own Hab Block – even during the day – because crime gangs had sprung up through the cracks left by the slow collapse of civilisation. And while the UAS Police occasionally sent a dropship overhead, sirens and searchlights flaring, it was mostly just an empty gesture. A sort of “We’re not quite dead yet”. The real authority was placed firmly in the hands of these cartels, gangs, common criminals who had organised into a sort of mafia in the habitation districts.

I don’t know if it were the case, but people had suspected for a long time that many of the officers in the UAS Federal Police were corrupt, ‘turning a blind eye’ to the activities of these crime gangs in exchange for payment, whether that be money of the old world, or power and influence in the lower districts, whatever. It was all the same: people exploited their ‘Freedom’ as granted by our ‘forefathers’ and they turned that into a tool to fuel their pure, selfish greed. It was how it always was, not just here, but everywhere us humans would settle.

I don’t speak much of the memories of growing up, it was hard. I watched my mother be brought to breaking point trying to maintain our ‘standing’ and ‘place’ among the district crime gangs. She would work day and night as a porter at a local food distribution centre, (one of the many set up shortly after the fall as temporary measures that would eventually just become the new norm). She used to come home crying most days, but she wouldn’t tell me why. Me and my older sister would just sit and quietly watch her weeping, covered in oil and grease from machinery in the warehouse. When my sister turned sixteen, she confronted my mother about what was happening to her. I remember her face like it was yesterday: she looked firmly into my sister’s eyes and she said, as a tear traced its course down her cheek: “It’s okay, we still have our freedom”.

My sister argued with her after that. I didn’t listen much, I was crying too, we all were. I think everyone just broke down after that point. All I remember was a loud knock on the door as my father returned from his shift in orbit. Mother quickly wiped her face of tears and tried to compose herself as she sent my sister away to her room. I followed after her, and all I heard was shouting. The next day, mother didn’t come home from work. Father came back early, but I simply remember him pushing me and my sister out of the way and saying over his shoulder ‘Not now’. Me and my sister kept to ourselves after that, we never had much of a relationship with our father, but beyond this point, he was merely a background presence.

I never saw my mother again. Each day, we went to school, we were taught the same lessons; that the ‘Core Principles’ of “Justice, Freedom and Liberty” of the Old World were alive and well, and all we had to do was keep our heads down and do hard, honest work and everything would fix itself. Or that, at least, is how I felt it was taught. Most of these teachers came from wealthier families of the higher blocks who didn’t have the same issues we did. The Federal Police prioritised the wealthier estates with their patrols and left the lower ones mostly in anarchy, while still claiming that this ‘free democratic society’ was fighting for them, too. I didn’t know it back then, but in hindsight I realise that most of the executives in the Police were corrupt and being paid by the elites in the top districts, their lives up there were mostly how it was taught in the propaganda lessons; order, freedom, whatever. They had it all. We had nothing. How it always was, but it takes real hardship to really show it as plain as day.

When my sister turned 18, she was forced to work in the same food distribution facility as mother had worked before. On her first day, she came back with stories of how she was told that the ‘gangs’ pretty much run the entire operation and were allowed to do whatever they wanted. She used to tell me how one of her new friends at work had confronted a gang member after she saw them taking crates of food meant for the poorest families, exploiting the supposed humanitarian supply chain in order to sell these crates on the black market, likely back to the same starving families that they were meant for in the place. Except, of course, they couldn’t pay with money, only their labour, and ultimately; their lives. This had apparently been going on for many years, and anyone who reported it to the UAS Police was dealt with harshly. My sister told me she never saw her friend again. The very next day, the workforce was told in almost direct terms: if you question the operations of these so-called ‘operatives of the state’, you would be punished severely. In not so many words, you would be killed. And so, they kept their heads down. I felt so angry and powerless, but as a child; I was. In a tight embrace with my sister she whispered in my ear the same words my mother did so many years ago. “We’re still free”.

It wasn’t until I turned 16 that I truly realised the extent of the corruption. My sister had tried to keep it together like mother did, but just like her, each day, she came home dirty and weeping, sometimes covered in blood. History would repeat itself, as it always did, if not for the arrival of the Crimson-accented soldiers of the new Imperial State.

When those officers arrived at our Hab Block, many people were confused and scared. One thing I remember the most was how an armoured vehicle carrying the Crimson tri-star emblem thundered down the street, carrying a dozen armed soldiers who dismounted and fanned out into the block, searching homes and demanding people comply. I was scared, I was a child. But I remember feeling a sense of safety with those armed men filling the street. They weren’t the criminal thugs of the lower tiers, they were loyal to an emblem perhaps more than just pure greed. Maybe I was just a naïve child, idolising a sense of order when there was none, but that is how I remember it.

I sometimes revisit that old distribution centre today, to remember what it was like back then. Of course, while I’m on duty I can’t hang around much. But I try to maintain a level of humanity when I see people come to hand in their food tokens for state-provided nourishment. A smile can go a long way, even if you’re clad in exo-armour and wielding an assault weapon. The thing is, these people, they may lack freedom; but they don’t lack Order. Protection. Regulation; these new principles they teach us in education now. A pragmatic approach to society where people cannot be trusted with their own freedom. I never once thought to myself ‘what have I done to the principles in which I was taught back then; of freedom’, I never once looked in retrospect and thought I had done wrong.

Because when people are given freedom, they are free to abuse. They are free to corrupt. They are free to murder and cause suffering. Yet, in any case, the poorest and most vulnerable of society are never free: they are the ones who suffer the vices of the ‘free society’ the most. So, in this new world, they may still have no freedom: but at least others are not free to exploit them. That is how I see the world now.