Angry Jasper-Eight

The Earth-first rebels were a hodge-podge band, the offspring of fools and the destitute, the proud ancestors of those who might have believed the Earth was flat, or that God gave a rat’s ass what happened on that derelict planet. Never mind that Earth’s destiny was to one day, billions of years from now, to be consumed by our dying sun.

The original seed of the revolution was, of course, the fugitives who had opposed the ascendancy of the Corporation. Those men and women were Europeans, Americans, Chinese, Indian, Arab and African, fully a representation of the world’s amazing diversity. But war, and suspicion, corruption and the centuries had reformed the revolution just as surely as the elements had reduced the once proud Egyptian pyramids to mounds of sand and broken stone. The rebellion succumbed from within to the same petty squabbles, power grabs and ignorance it eschewed in their Corporation foes.

Over centuries of near constant warfare, the rebels had been reduced, or chased, into a vast, if disconnected network of subterranean refuges. It hadn’t always been that way, and for a time before retreating underground (literally) it almost appeared the rebels might prevail, at least enough to sue for something approaching peace. Indeed, the wholesale stripping and pillaging of the planet’s resources by the Corporation had all but ceased following a hand full of successive victories against the Corporation. But revolutions are odd creatures, and never what their pie-in-the-sky conjurers intended. Scattered, antagonistic and contemptuous of one another, the rebels lacked the unity to repel the Corporations exploitation of their factionalism.

One might believe this would be a proper time to quote some long dead philosopher, something about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Perhaps Defoe’s words of wisdom about how every man would be a tyrant if he could. Maybe the religious angle, something on how power and money are the roots of evil, or maybe things are best when they’re left simple. Let’s just say that the offspring of those original good and true fugitives did not follow in their forefather’s footsteps, and that power turns every man into a pimp and a schmuck!