Jump 105: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Jump 105: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Identity: Faction Leader
Faction: Free Choice (Free Drones), Mission Year 2100
Drawbacks: [+600] Alien Crossfire, The Little Terraformer That Could, Xenocidal Native Life

[600/1600]  Empath
[800/1600]  Politics: Democratic
[1000/1600] Economics: Planned
[1200/1600] Future Society: Eudaimoniac
[1400/1600] The Longevity Vaccine
[1600/1600] The Neural Amplifier

Welcome to Charon, in the Alpha Centauri system. Though people tend to simply refer to it as Planet. Sadly, there is no Foreman Domai, leader of the Free Drones; there is only myself. Of course, any number of colony pods headed for the surface, mine only being one among a dozen of them. And there are a great many good places on Planet for those pods to land.

Sabotage ensured that my splinter of the population ended up nestled in one of the bleaker sections of the planet, uranium flats couched in xenofungus on all sides, and with mind worm boils a constant threat. Now, xenofungus is not something that is terribly useful to a human population, but the native life loves to use it for feeding, for easy movement, while it seems to actively fight against human life. Mind worms are the white blood cells of Planet, if you will; the Planet has something of a massive but dormant mind, but sensing minds that are not native to it, its reflex is to exterminate them.

Which means the early days consisted of training soldiers to fight off the mind worms, fast-tracking terraforming research so the fungus can be supplanted in favor of Earth-native trees (apparently they LOVE the soil here), and doing our best to keep the native fauna from overwhelming our defenses as they would burrow into our skulls and lay eggs in our brains. No, I'm not even slightly exaggerating.

As the initial hurdle was being overcome, an unexpected event: two spacecraft were seen in the upper atmosphere trading exotic weaponfire, before they both crashed into different parts of the planet. One of them, later becoming known as the Manifold Usurpers, crashed relatively near to us. And so, new bases were built and our territory expanded while hostile aliens didn't bother to try to communicate, simply fighting against us, eventually overrunning a decently-sized frontier base. Many of its occupants fled in colony pods.

Those who did not are either put to the sword or, worse, turned into more of the strange-looking aliens.

Innovations came, and we begin to fight back. It took time and years of holding the line, but once we were able to equip units with effective missile weapons we were able to do quite a bit of damage. The overrun base was retaken, and the aliens were treated with the same tender care they gave us. Slowly, but inevitably, they were vanquished; we then made contact with another human faction, who styled themselves the Human Hive and took offense to our existence. Already on a war footing, we were happy to take control of their bases and liberate them from their oppressive leader. And from there, the armies of terraformers were put to work clearing as much xenofungus as they could; the central continent was a mess, but much less of one given time and effort.

It took some years later before safe sea travel was possible, but once it was, we explored the seas and made contact with other factions. War was apparently the way of the day, though they couched it in prettier words; we had vastly superior weapons and were making the transition to fusion power by then, so it was of little surprise that other factions rapidly sued for peace in hopes of getting a piece of the action. This was all well and good, until contact was made with the Manifold Caretakers. They, at least, were willing to talk, and they were appreciative of us having removed their enemies. They were less pleased at our long-term projects dedicated to terraforming the planet and removing the existential threat to us of the native life.

From there... well, things were relatively peaceful for decades, while we worked hard to remove any and all xenofungus on the continent we inhabited and the seas around it. And this was fine, right up to the point that the Caretakers decided we'd done too much ecological damage by some metric and declared war on us. And launched missiles that detonated outside our bases, which triggered fungal blooms and the proliferation of native life. We answered in kind; rather than some sort of esoteric warhead, our missiles had nerve gas.

The jungle of the continent to the east that the Caretakers had inhabited was, as such, ours by right of conquest; bases were rapidly established and it became the breadbasket of our nation. Our terraformers kept working, and more fungus was continually removed. The nascent planet mind, according to the Gaian faction who communicated with it, seemed to be growing more sluggish the further our work progressed. Which did not help as we began to advance our sciences by leaps and bounds - eventually we were able to equip gravships with terraforming equipment, sending them to neutral territory to remove any of the xenofungus there too.

Later research showed that, had we not done this, the planet would have gained self-awareness briefly before native life would have overwhelmed everything.

In the end... we had a technological edge that none could hope to match. Problems cropped up, as they do; the proper application of military might ensured eventual, but unconditional, surrender. Captured bases were returned and territory was terraformed out of our generosity. Other factions claimed we were either warmongering or empire-building; while a couple remained neutral, the remainder that weren't already our thralls chose to declare war as part of a massive alliance.

At this point we had grav-ships flitting about the planet with singularity engines, raining destruction from above in the form of weapons that flat-out caused matter to lose coherence. Not technically disintegration weapons, but string disruptors for the harder targets and graviton guns for the rest proved most effective in removing the enemy's ability to fight. And the enemy themselves.

To ring in the turn of the century in Mission Year 2500, the humbled factions united behind me as Supreme Leader.

And eternity lies ahead.