The Never Ending Tails

The Universe is ridiculously big, but ridiculously repetitive. Far far from earth, life is evolving in quite similar patterns, and passes through the same phases evolving in a slightly different way and enabling some scenarios to take form.

The example of the Planet Doulos is quite similar to Earth but ended up in disastrous ending. Doulos had a similar evolution to earth leading to the rise of a race quite similar to humans who evolved in the same way; those aliens passed through history and evolved to have agriculture, metallurgy, civilization, wars, and economy.

Economy was the reason of their doom. The people of Doulos got really affected by this new technological tool that evolved to become an end in itself. Through the medium of money, People of Doulos created a whole structure based on the basic motivation of amassment of currency and their whole society became obsessed by only producing new means to make money out of nothing.

Paradoxically, another structure appeared on Doulos. It was called the Network. The Network was a new medium of information exchange more revolutionary than the old ones privately owned and only based on the passive reception of information.

The network had a user friendly interface connecting all the monitors to the global hub and making them able to create and instantly respond to information. The Network was at the first only an experiment to see the potential of the median transfer of information through an invisible structure, but its creators built something beyond their own goals.

The network was powerful enough to handle the majority of Doulos’ population and it became a transcending way of communication and life perception. Everything was good on Doulos for a few years, and then everything started to crumble.

The slaves of the currency became more powerful and developed new ways of acquiring much more money in less time. But the whole economic structure felt and the crisis affected all of Doulos, A crisis like the planet never had before.

The crisis radically changed the way of life of all the inhabitants of the planet. The big corporations and lobbies that were already controlling the basic flow of economy started to lose their assets. In a fear of Bankrupcy, they started to figure out what could be the best investment that could get them out of troubles. A simple answer appeared. Prisons!

The big corporations were losing a lot in having regular people working for them and they needed to produce a maximum to get the economy back to its normal regime by pushing people to consume.

Prisons were like golden pots where they would have free labor to produce even more products and flow the market to get people to consume again. So they started to think of ways to get the maximum people in prison in order to generate a potentially interesting working mass. They turned to judge the network and with the old information media they decided to take it down.

During that time, the continent of Kentro was the most influent in all Doulos and most of the biggest corporations were set up there. They decided to attack from their by influencing the laws and regulations in disfavor of the network, accusing it of plagiarism and getting the direct authority to get it down.

The users of the network were furious, but they weren’t organized enough. Some of them saw the fall coming and decided to flee, they were the rare one to get out of troubles; for most of the others, they just continued to use the network without caring, thinking that it was absurd that their authorities would do anything.

They were so wrong, the Kentro government started the hostilities a few times before the official ratification of the laws, and took down a giant of the network: Titanus. Titanus was a platform of free exchange and the Kentro government used the motive of ownership rights infringement to attack them even while they were located out of Kentro.

They also confiscated all their records and all their hardware as evidence of the fraud. People reacted hard to the news and the users of the networked started hacking the corporations’ properties on the network. It was the beginning of the first and only invisible war of Doulos: The war of the network.

Many of the corporations’ platforms on the network crashed thanks to the attacks, the users though that they were winning. The Kentro government pulled down one of its laws against the network but kept others which made them attain their goal.

All over Doulos, other countries started adopting similar laws all in profit of the corporations. With the records of the Titanus, the Kentro government had the list of all the users that ever committed ownership rights infringements and they were a lot, more than 30% of Doulos population.

With those records, and the official application of the new laws, the corporations had full right to imprison a big part of the population using them as free labor.

Following that, Doulos had its first contact with an outside corporation of life forms from different other planets that took an interest in what was happening there.

The corporation passed laws in order to imprison all what remains of Doulos population for motives related to the network and became space businessmen directly passing laws to treat with the other races.

Doulos then became a prison planet where all the partner planets were dumping their lots of criminals and misfits, they were all used as free labor for the corporations in their transactions with the other planets.

The population of Doulos and the prisoners of the coalition were making all the cheap products for the population of the other planets. Things changed eventually, but that’s another story…