Ex Lacrima Remnant

#B-Side VII – Do we still need Atropos?

The year is 902. The project for an orbital space prison is approved by some stuck up bureaucrats in a dusty room. It will bring pork to thirty-four provinces out of forty in New Netherlands, so why not? People vote with their wallets and for their wallets. That’s what the pen-pushers signing that resolution and handing it with a cost plus contract to NNSEA must have thought. So, after not even a decade of negotiations, Atropos is finally greenlit as a part of the national space strategy. One step back. The year is, again, 902. Neon has finally been completed. A fully functional moon city, designed to host up to twenty-five million people. Almost completely independent from Lagash. A gargantuan effort, an achievement of all of mankind. Not New Netherlands, not the Eastern Coalition, not even the Pangean Union. All of mankind. No exclusions. So, also not under complete control of anybody. And with huge chances to foster free trade in space. That’s what must have prompted these bureaucrats to push forward with such a ludicrous project.

‘Wouldn’t it be funny, say, if we had a space station that could be used to monitor Neon, act as a chokepoint for shipments, and become a place where to send the most callous criminals too as an exemplary punishment?’

What was most likely a party joke quickly turned into a real project, with public tenders and lots of public funds. Rumor has it that Fijona Berger, then chief of the NNSEA, proudly answered ‘what in fucking Lagash?’, when the Ministry of Space Exploration explained the idea to her. Berger was an engineer at heart. She knew what was required to do what the people in power desired and she had a very, very, very good idea of the costs and resources required.

Nevertheless, her objections were – guess what? – completely overruled. Project Atropos was approved despite her fiery opposition, leading to a design that sounded quite fascinating, on paper: an orbital ring with a radius of three hundred meter and a cross section of twelve meters times three meters, turning at circa two rounds per minute. This specific configuration was engineered to grant a gravitational acceleration similar to that of Lagash on a walkable surface of around eighteen thousand square meters. The planned facilities included a gym, a theater and a greenhouse, plus two laboratories for space science – all parked in an orbit reachable in around one to two days of travel using a standard RSV. By the way, ‘atropos’ is an old Terran word for ‘unalterable, inflexible’ in the language of science. Which became a very good description of the issues the project would face in the following fifty years.

Yes, fifty years.

For a space station that was supposed to take at most twenty years to build, with an estimated total lifetime budget of one hundred billion eas. And that’s where the cost plus contracts made their triumphant entrance, blowing up budgets through the roof (or to the Moon?) and making development crawl at abysmal pace. Sarganos Systems, Mazuda Aerospace and Incensi were the worst offenders, ending up footing a bill inflated by three hundred percent of their original quotation. Tito Korbash, Mazuda Aerospace’s HOO, used to repeat ‘the ring will be delivered when it’s complete’ over and over, when asked why the habitat modules were still being tested, ten years after the originally planned end of the project. The it in his answer referred, of course, to his luxury villa on the coast of Odengren, fully financed with public money – which, incidentally, was inaugurated mere days before said ring was finally delivered.

So, comes the year 959 and finally, with all components ready to go, Atropos begins being assembled in space. At this point, Neon has reached a stable population of five million people and agreements with New Netherlands for exchange of goods and services through the Fast Rocket Artery System, or FRAS for short. FRAS alone made the ‘chokepoint’ argument completely redundant. Thanks to it, goods to and from Neon could be delivered in as quickly as two days, without the needs of stocking them in a temporary station. So, note it down: no space toll. Down from three to two expected uses. Now, just a control system to monitor Neon and a prison.

Fast forward five years. Atropos is finally operational, with just thirty-five years of delay. In this time, Neon’s bureaucrats, evidently smarter than the clique that greenlit Atropos in the first place, obtained a historical agreement with the United Nations of Lagash. No surveillance. Full sovereignty. No interference from any single member nation without approval from all the others. Which meant, of course, that Atropos could either become a UNL neutral observatory or scrap the control purpose altogether. After having spent so much money and time into it, guess what the government decided?

Scrap the control.

Now, down to one use case. An orbital prison for the vilest criminals who ever walked the soil of New Netherlands. The ultimate deterrent – life sentence, but in space.

Except, what constituted a crime worthy of being sent to space? That’s when judges were pressured to find someone, anyone, to send up there, as a sacrificial lamb for the good of the whole Atropos project. The choice fell on the mass murderer Fae van Dine, notorious for the massacre of the Towa dam. A convenient scapegoat, someone everyone would point at as evil, depraved and worthy of punishment.

Chances wanted, however, that the docking procedures for Atropos were not as tested as initially marketed. All because Incensi needed to get some more cash out of the contract and skimped on safety. Which resulted in the catastrophic loss of RSV Helena, with all its crew and the serial killer in question, just moment before finishing the rendezvous with the station due to a faulty oxygen duct. Shit hit the fan. Incensi had the worst day on the stock market since the crisis of 897, with their value plummeting by ninety-seven point seven percent in two days, as soon as the technical report by NNSEA became public. There’s some poetic schadenfreude in knowing that at least one of the three major offenders burned down to ashes in less than a hundredth of the time needed to build that space coffin. Unfortunately, that came at the cost of five innocent lives – plus one that actually deserved to be burned too.

So, three years of repairs later, a new docking procedure, more resistant oxygen ducts and four additional years of testing, Atropos is – again – fully in operation. Except, without a single purpose left. The Van Jocker Act abolished space as an approved venue to store criminals, no matter the gravity of their crimes, unless very severe threats to public security applied. That gimped Atropos completely, leaving nothing – nothing of its original concept on the table.

We’ve arrived to today.

The year is 999. The Turn of the Millennium is imminent.

Yet, Atropos has still to host even one single prisoner.

Currently, the station is used as a makeshift training ground for the Peacekeeper Corps, to teach them to fight in reduced gravity, and hosts a couple minor scientific experiments. A little too little, very much too late for a ‘technological marvel’ that squandered more than four hundred billion eas and required the best part of a century to even become operational.

So, do we really still need Atropos? Or can we finally put an end to this death by one thousand small expenses that weighs on the pockets and wallets of everyone of us?

The answer should be clear as day.

And I won’t offend your intelligence by spelling it out for you.

Eric van der Weide

Sternchen, vol. 6 YR999