To: Auxesia. From: Armin Jansen, der Alster Union. Subject: A gift.
Subject: Potential reset.
I’ll open by telling you what I am.
I am a mouthpiece. I speak from a prescriptive script. I am, in essence, an actor, a pretty face. I am sacrificial. I am analogous to the masks you are notorious for. When a group perceives the Union in personification, they perceive me.
The Union pays me a significant amount of money to potentially take bullets for them. It is a productive relationship. I prefer to live a minute as a prince than a decade as a pauper, as does anyone. As, indeed, do paupers.
Rheinland is in geopolitical paupery, Auxesia. You care not - it is not your field of interest. You hold both broader yet thinner aims. however, have played the field for your own gain. You openly fraternised with the BDM for your own advancement and you have a reputation for wrestling sides against each other. Liberty is likely infected within the entirety of the military industrial complex - our own Buro, equally so. The GMG, dissatisfied with merely Kurile, Sirius’s largest Plutonium mine and the near entirety of Sirius’s fuel gas production, are attempting a heinous violation of international law through their colonial efforts in Sigma 21, and their frequent political agitation for Sigma 15 as well. Republican is milking Interspace’s financial teat to the brink of its one hundred and fifty seventh bankruptcy.
We have no technology which would be of use to you, and we assume by your relative cosiness to the BDM you intend to liberate them of their hardware.
The Union only fights that which directly advances our objectives. We gain no political advantage from fighting you. Indeed, the word is erroneous to depict what has predominantly been a war of words alone - for months on end, neither of our assets have encountered one another. Your logistics are statistically irrelevant compared to foreign corporations, your capabilities are unknown, and whilst your transhumanist agenda is academically and technically fascinating, it bears no immediate, discernible use for us. We acted as we did to ensure Auxesian influence over the Rhein would be minimal after your initial meddling without regard for purpose, consequence, or hazard to civilian lives.
We made our declaration of hostilities because we do not want a collective of trans-simian mercenaries and professional technology thieves inserting themselves into the national narrative. Rheinland is covered with mosquitos already. Your open fraternisation with the BDM will condemn you. The Buro does not believe in colleagues - it sees only tools. They will play you for an appliance - they already use their own citizens as chess-pieces. Foreigners without a government to hide behind are mere meat for the deep state. They will get to you, if you but open the door.
Be advised, we are not offering truce - just congratulations of your adherence to the status quo. You have committed crimes against the cause that render you, at the minimum, complicit with forces that are attempting to promote anti-popular elements to the Bundstag, in order to exact reprisals. We suspect you of worse conspiracies - your timing was near exactly synonymous with the beginning of Bundschuh agitation to the Hesse for the initialisation of another, far more critical, war. A true war. Not the saga of a gutted robotics transport and a few Arbeiters hulked in the border worlds.
However, well done. You appear to have minimised your operations in Rheinland. That was all we ever demanded, and all we ever stood to attain.
Therefore, we will reward you. You have done precisely what we desired of you - nothing, and far less than that which we suspected. You managed to kill a few of our colleagues, but their deaths are statistically irrelevant. Heaven does not suffer from life support overcrowding.
Send a contact to planet Hamburg, to the city of New Harburg. In its fifteenth precinct, seventy first street, property one hundred and fifty nine. Outside the residence is a communal waste disposal unit for any rubbish too firm for domestic naniites Conventionally, the back panels of these units are keyed to the Universal ID Cards of ALG Sanitation Technicians who work the route, mostly to stop the cylinders from taking on a second life as a roadside squat for the homeless - it is one of the finest careers a working class citizen of Hamburg can aspire to in the modern era - that is, when ALG isn’t fleshing out its uniforms with Kusarian illegals. This unit is defective, and open to anyone - provided the ID card bears an Barrier Gate registration stamp, which the average unemployed Arbeiter, worn down by the oppression of the Globalists, is unlikely to possess.
You will find within that bin, stuffed within a McSynth Burger wrapper, replete with a very real, extremely decomposed rat to drive off the inquisitive, lies one of the last three remaining field-forming internals of the Bering to Hamburg jump gate. Little but structural alloy and remorse lines the wreckage of the Bering gate, to our displeasure, DSE have stripped away the choicer elements before our own efforts could bare fruit. Yet even the most thorough of scavengers cannot recover everything, especially not amidst the meteoric turbulence of a planetary accretion disk swarming with the Reichsarbeitergesellshaft’s finest, and their remain the twisted wreckage of various gate component drifting around the sun. Whilst our salvage teams never found anything sufficiently intact to reverse engineer (if such a thing is even possible), fragments of the Jumpgate’s internals have survived - although cumulatively, they add up to barely a cargo unit. Hardly enough to open a new black market at the expense of a monopoly, let alone begin to explore any attempt at technical imitation. But a handful appear to still possess their original structures.
What we have discovered, jars us.
The component we give to you, from what we conjecture, came from one of the Jumpvate’s three subspace attenuating control arms. Functionally, we believe the device emits a type of hyper concentrated anti-mass stream directly into the jump aperture, effectively preventing the spacetime from collapsing in on itself. Whilst graviton-manipulators remain a staple of modern day spaceflight, from atmospheric flight to defence shields, how the device manages to successfully project antigravity into the aperture, tugging the one dimensional cosmic strings into three dimensional spacetime for just long enough for a vessel to slip into the superluminal environment of jumpspace, remains utterly unknown. Equally inexplicable are the materials from which the attenuators are comprised - strips of a bizarre crystalline substance - sharing the superconductivity of Bose-Einstein condensate without its incredibly low temperatures. Equally, the so-called crystal structures are materially perfect, and ever more oddly, atomically symmetrical and bare no seams, inferring they are not the result of pressure formation.
Whilst bearing the obvious marks of terrestrial machining, we thought little of the wreckage, being materially redundant to conventional design wisdom, and whilst blue-skies curios may fetch a fortune before the Cambridge Research Institute, they are of no use to us, and were due to be sold off to third parties before we discovered unconventional structural similarities between the recovered unit and the presumed Q-field rift generators recovered from the, now shattered, structures of the Cult of Technology. However, the devices of the cult, whilst near magical in performance compared to the prototypical jump hole generators first devised by Maltese and now spreading around the border worlds like an electrical spark in a one hundred percent oxygen pressure suit, only challenge half of the predicament presented by gates. We have the ability to create jump anomalies, but not direct their exit, and they are, at the most, temporary, unsustainable affairs, endemically destined to collapse. The devices of the Cult, whilst capable of far more stable connections, to the possible point of being able to control the Singularity’s direction, are still bound by the same physical laws - they are temporal, and inevitably decay as their phase alignment breaks. Creating a continuous, stable, hyperspatial tear in a one dimensional cosmic string remains as mysterious to modern science as the moon landing would have seemed to a cave man. Yet Jumpgates, dependent, as they are, on breaking the known laws of physics by simulating disruptions of the dark energy constant far in excess of that of a jump hole, have somehow succeeded in keeping this engineering marvel secret from the rest of humanity for so long that their tyranny has become merely a fact of life - and thus, even in war, Liberty’s influence over Rheinland, Kusari and Bretonia remains absolute.
Consider this a reminder. Our interests are affixed to Rheinland and the preservation of the continuity of her social rights, economy - to bolster her soft power through the very hard, cold certainties of necessary evils, the restoration of the founding government, the liquidation of the deep state - and to generally flog multi-tonnes of vaguely K’vosh shaped quartz shards to the very Wall Street Elite that we intend to hang from their own towers. If a few foreign kleptocapitalists have their price-fixing proboscises yanked out of Rheinland’s artery and the Coalition’s red hammer somewhere than at the backs of Rheinland’s workforces and we all grow rich, fat and prosperous on the more dignified side of the law for doing so, then all the better. Yours, we only superficially understand. Our objectives do not overlap, but nor do they oppose on another. We are technologically able, yet are interested merely in pragmatism - a more compact rifle, mind-machine interfaces for faster helm control, nano-fabrication to reduce breaks in a pressure vessel, improved life support to better feed the thousands, improved sensor jamming to keep the artefacts flowing through. We have no interest in weapons of mass destruction, viral plagues, cardamine substitutes - tools for the insane and the damned. We would rather destroy a jumpgate than build one - the connection between Hudson and Texas has brought Rheinland nothing but agony and the destruction of Stuttgart’s biosphere - but the nature of the technology gives us pause.
It is in our nature to undermine monopolies that victimise the many of Sirius to suit the needs of the few. The secrets of stable superluminal tunnelling are the foundations on which Sirus is build - yet Agiera maintains absolute monopoly and all attempts to penetrate a gate, as far as we are aware, have to-date failed. If there is any one role Agiera fills beyond utter evil, it is their cunning in the development of sabotage devices.
I advise your people move quickly. That bin is emptied Friday, occasionally Saturday when the resident ALG office is understaffed. The Arbeitsdirektor would be loathe to see his gesture crushed into a trash compactor.
And despite that our beloved Arbeitsdirektor would rather be force-fed extracts of Das Kapital than depend upon you, who are self-interested, neophyte, allegedly barely human, and houseless, this is where we stand. You are the best option amidst innumerable bad alternatives. The Hackers, whilst dependable, would merely feather their own nest with it. They may be anti-globalist, but they are, in the end, Liberty patriots. Would the Professor willingly . DHC, no doubt, have already claimed choicer shares. You, however, are just the right mix of self-interested, technically brilliant, and Machiavellian, with a slice of utilitarian ethics.
What you choose to to do with the hardware, is entirely up to you. It imbibes the Union with existential risk without any possibility of organisational payoff. We simply wish to be rid of it.
As afformentioned, this is by no means an abatement of of hostilities. Consider it, instead, a gesture of mutual respect for each other's place in the food chain. We live on a diet of the known, the tangible. We grapple with the establishment, with ideals proven by time. The unknown, can depart with you. Lightyears away from Rheinland space. We are, after all, both in the caretaker business.
Take it and go. Before ALG burns it in an nuclear incinerator. Either or, we get what we want.
Regards,
Armin Jansen.
First contact representative and Diplomat-in-Chief of der Alster Union, Pacifica Base, Bering.
Transmission Ended
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Hm. You'll have my complete undivided attention for this matter.
We have simply not touched Rheinland as it lacks reason for us to. Perhaps if a Black Hole formed, or something devastating of the like, perhaps then we'll be indulged to investigate and research into the matter. Whenever our duty calls, we go as we wish, political boundaries are of no interest to us, we work towards the bigger picture, than to one's feelings. Whatever you do in Rheinland is your own. You are the people of Rheinland. Hindering natives isn't within our interest. Enslave Rheinland, destroy it, turn it into Unicorn-topia for all I care, we won't care.
The society of Auxo is well aware of the Buro's instability when it comes to subjugation to the K'Hara, or deception is a common trait, you need not to remind us of that. Perhaps it's true that the Buro, or any other intelligence agency, would not deserve technology of such a calibur, only to bring about death, paranoia, domination amongst all. Nevermind my rhetorics, I shall go straight to the point.
Deception is not advised, if you are to remain true to your word, we will make note of it. An agent was already sent to investigate long before I sent this message.
To: Auxesia. From: Armin Jansen, der Alster Union. Subject: A gift.
When deception is force-fed you as a way of life, you realise the importance of truth. We may not like that you, to us, treat your comrades as a means to an end, or that the issues you focus on are macrocosmic - to do with humanity in aggregate, rather than individual humans. After all, it is not humanity who starves, dies, suffers - humanity itself has been on a consistent, evolutionary trajectory since the evolution of sentience; but tell that to a family suffering from addiction, unemployment, bereavement, incarceration. We will never reach the Unicorn utopia - utopias are a lie for children - but we will do what we must. Besides, your cause smacks of internationalism, which, to Unioners, remains conceptually vile.
Yet you have a role to fill. Humanity in aggregate is astounding at finding means to render individual suffering irrelevant.
The Federals spread the assumption that those of us on the far side of the law are dishonest because we are forced to entertain less-than-infalliable ethical codes. Whilst some organisations do use subterfuge as a way of life, the utility remains limited. A pirate puts themselves at risk to their prey - they form a compact of trust, credits and resources for continuity, a trust that safe exchange can overcome each other’s teleological differences. Both have something the other desires - so death is avoided. Trust. No proletarians would enlist in our cause if they believed that the Union offered nothing other than death or Virlande - yet still, many do, and their fate is wildly publicised. The Military, as much as we love them, is known to trade scalps for soap in areas where the supply situation
Know this, Auxesia. If a black hole formed in New Berlin overnight, we would not contest you. If an unknown alien war forms saturated the Rhein, we would not contest you, although the Order and Core, both of which who have significant interest in Rheinland, lamentably, might. However, if the Rheinland military developed, say, an armour impenetrable to gunfire, or Daumann developed an instantaneous replacement for trade lanes, we would happily die to the last man to preserve the state’s advantage.
So this is where we are. No lies between strangers. Your agent will return with exactly what they were looking for.
Till our paths bring us together again - which, if the Lord is my Shepard, couldn't come distantly enough.
Regards,
Armin Jansen.
First contact representative and Diplomat-in-Chief of der Alster Union, Pacifica Base, Bering.