Section 99, and the Vibes of St. Joe's: Buying Pirate Media from a Corsair Reseller

In Section 99, sometimes people just want to watch junk, and sometimes they don't mind that media has a Consortium production company logo on it. It's just that it's not like those folks can legally distribute the things they make in the Freelands even if they wanted to, which is where the concept of a "corsair" media reproducer comes in.

Available in PDF at the bottom of the page.

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The Revisions Extended Viewing Club is a 3rd floor establishment, found along Aktin Street, just one away from Shoreside and Basin Lake. The buildings across the way are low enough that you can get a good view of the lake islands and the traffic on the turnpike on the cavern shelf behind, the lights of distant station cars rounding the way. Revisions is what’s called a Corsair Media Distributor, folks who specialize in media that nobody in the Freelands actually made, that’s against union business sanction to try and own in a corporate sense. What they do instead, is operate dedicated MetaNet connections via regular maintenance and rental payments to the comms union, making it capable for them to secure relatively large amounts of interstellar pulse bandwidth for the purposes of pulling audio and video data from entire worlds away. They then record these to floppy, datatape or jeweldisk, either stocking their shelves with the pirated material, or creating copies to order, sometimes even as custom-made mixes.

Lit like a movie theater, with neon-lined shelves separating material by genre and language, Revisions features a long counter with a glass display case showing off all sorts of memorabilia from many of the productions, art and sports that are available as copy on the shelves. They include: a ‘hero’ detail Reverie Blade from Dream Questers, one of the guitars used by Aston Reed during Phalanx’s ‘99 Eurasian Tour of the album Cumulus Formations, and the Sol Boxing Council’s original Super Middleweight title belt. Behind the counter, staffers work at countertop desks with dedicated audio/video screens and high-speed, multi-port drives. The satisfying ‘ka-chunk-viss-whrrrr-visss-whrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ of a datatape being loaded and the drive printing a menu head before printing off its chapters in sequence signals the finalization of a tape order, the vibrative hum of a jeweldrive spinning to max revolutions signalling the burning of massive amounts of data to archive. There’s a small lounge as well, built into the establishment’s now-enclosed balcony, where customers can enjoy their new mixes in luxury, provided they’re not particularly extreme content.

Here’s some of the things they keep handy, because they’re popular, as well as why the Consortium banned them.

Major Justice

Consortial Ban: Confused Consortial Messaging, Unsanctioned Satire, Criminal Star/EP

What was supposed to be a reasonably standard but prestigious legal procedural set within the Sol Interior Nation’s Criminal Repurposing Trust and the Major Justice Unit suffered what was described by Freelander critics as “a narrative aneurysm” after its initial producers pulled out due to a tepid first response. This led to now infamous actor Conrad van Horne to roll his own fortune into the show as its new executive producer, causing a drastic retool over its first midseason break, in which van Horne’s character, Prosecutor Everett Lock, is killed by healthcare dissidents and resurrected with the aid of cybernetics from PolyVitus Biomedical. Granted both physical and legal powers beyond the ken of mortal men, he is reborn as Prosecutor L.O.C.K. (Legally-empowered Open Conviction Killer), dispatched to destroy those judged in absentia by a SIN-CRT-MJU that has been granted similarly vast but indistinct cybernetic powers. He is known to the public as Major Justice: the Arbiter of Tomorrow.

What occurred over the next episodes, and five subsequent seasons, could be described by Consortium content masters as “adequately mindless mid-afternoon entertainment for PrivCits and adjacent castes,” but is described by the people as “the degenerating imagination of a man with more money than restraint.” Increasingly unhinged, increasingly violent and increasingly complimentary to van Horne’s crotch via a subtly, progressively growing series of codpieces, which sometimes appear to upsize between cutaways within the same scene, Major Justice became a known and appreciated quantity of shlock in a Consortial media landscape that has progressively turned increasingly more bland and ‘scared money’. Funnier than all but the most anomalous comedies allowed on Consortium airwaves, this monument to van Horne’s ego spawned watch parties, drinking games and an entire universe of in-jokes, including Little Timmy Terrorist, a particularly visibly small wiry stuntman with bright red hair, who has been killed over 80 times in the history of the series, and Kath’s Shapeshifter Husband, a character played by 7 different actors, including once by two in the same episode. Despite increasing concern over its unrealistic portrayal of Consortial law and order (consider what this would have to entail) and content deemed “questionable” as to whether or not it was self-aware and cutting satire about the Consortium or simply just idiotic, high ratings kept it relatively well insulated against cancellation or censorship. The show was only doomed after a plot by Conrad van Horne was uncovered, in which a storyline was put into production where Major Justice’s PolyVitus implants began overperform, only to later fail him, his problem solved by PV’s competitor Rynala NewLife. This was where the show ended, with the arrest of van Horne for insider trading. It seems that van Horne intended to use the storyline as a means to pump, then dump his PV stock, then use it to buy further into RNL, which he’d recently become an investor in. This was the loose screw that collapsed the whole building, and Major Justice was purged from the airwaves. That said, the intense popularity of the show saw its wide scale and low-cost release on physical media, which meant it trickled into the Freelands aboard exodus ships at almost the same time the official releases dropped in the Inner Galaxy.

Underworld Wrestling Council

Consortial Ban: Unacceptable Gladiation, Anti-Consortial Messaging, Multiple Criminal Stars

The Unified Wrestling Council spun from a coalition of smaller promotions acquired by Saturnine Entertainment’s sport division, to be folded into their own flagging Ares Wrestling Incorporated. Initially a jumble of clashing styles and unclear vision in its booking, a creative hierarchy was established by Motor City Grappling’s former head booker Stephen Costa, whose influence saw UWC transform across the early 199Xs from a more brightly coloured and gimmick-driven product built for quick mass-market production, into something grittier and driven by big personalities, with matches emphasizing either technical prowess or the brutality of size. Ironically, the ever-darkening atmosphere of the shows is what actually drew more viewers into the product, causing the UWC to surge in popularity against competitors in the Stellar Territories. It’s amazing what the occasional hair-whitening kendo stick shot to the face can do for word of mouth, what the occasional yakuza kick through a plate glass window can do for ratings.

This was all by Costa’s design, as an anti-Consortium activist bent on at least a weekly hour and a half of televised culture jamming disguised as professional wrestling. Through slow erosion of the more typical grappling morality play, Costa booked storylines with core themes of rebellion in the face of conformity and oppression masked as tradition, angles marked by a distinct ‘Kill Your Boss’ flavour of mean streak. His own on-air persona, that of the tyrant owner Stephan Classer, played into these themes, and he was more than willing to take his share of bumps in portraying them, including an ill-advised Northern Lights Bomb on an opened steel chair by Colton Frost that gave him a severe concussion that left him temporarily blind in one eye. His response to that, was to wear an eyepatch and play an even more unhinged version of Classer until he healed. This eventually led to the narrative breakdown of control in the promotion, which culminated in their then-Worlds Champion Tycho Kain throwing his belt into an alloy recycler, then using the processed materials to forge the new Underworlds Championship Title, because this was the Underworld Wrestling Council now, motherfuckers. 

Truth be told, it wasn’t actually the unsanctioned profanity that got the UWC noticed by Consortium shitlisters, but rather the tendency for UWC’s shows to push the boundaries of acceptable decorum for live violence- these viewers aren’t properly being prepped that they’re potentially watching a Death Sport, yet they’re tuning into people being tangled in barbed wire? Madness! This was coupled with the UWC’s seeming affinity toward criminal talent, some of which were of the cool varieties (Kain, real name Tyler Kyle, was involved in a Freeland exodus action, during which he applied a shoot sleeper hold to an armed Consortium political officer) others of the distinctly not cool kind (Chad Felton Olivier, “CFO”, real name Mike Alton, was benefitting from a silent partnership in a bionic chop shop), and the combination eventually led to the doom of the promotion, its wholesale purge from the airwaves, and Interior Affairs investigations into all involved. Costa himself is now considered a Freeland martyr, as he died in the arson distraction he caused at Saturnine Entertainment’s on-site holding facility, which allowed his allies in the corporation to spirit the UWC’s tape library away as part of a courier payload aboard an exodus ship. Costa died preserving the work of his roster and team, and when you look at the pride preserved on tape, even despite the admittedly sometimes depraved violence on display, you can see why he fought like he did to see it live beyond him. If you want to know why Freelander pro wrestling is the way it is, watch Winter Offensive ‘99 and the 3-way tag team Ladder Warfare match between Three-Oh-Eight, Antisocial Order and The Trust Fund to see six people bleed for the art. When the crowd cheered Cyril Trust, they weren’t suddenly on the side of some bougie, they were cheering the bloodied-up hard motherfucker who just did a Moonsault through fire with tacks stuck in his legs.

Dizzying Heights

Consortial Ban: Embarrassing Loss to Patron Corporation, Multiple Criminal Stars

Dizzying Heights was originally envisioned as something of the endgame of Consortium-made entertainment: framing the life aboard a super-luxury starliner as the height of drama, made to be consumed by upper-level privcits as means to get them to spend outside of their means on trips they can’t afford, and entertain the masses with glimpses of life they’d only ever see as service staff. The show featured an ensemble cast of both established stars and up and comers, fittingly cast according to their station of fame and status as either guests, officers or servants, which only further endeared the production to Consortial censors who liked that particularly enforced stratification. The cake layers these lavish ingredients would cover, was a functioning starliner, designed and constructed at by the show’s principle corporate sponsors, Borealis. They called it the Elamir, the Bountiful Wilds, a somewhat strange name for the opulence inside, though perhaps it was meant to represent the extraordinarily tame conception of space it was made to tour. Really, despite its extremely upright and stuffy portrayal of Consortial wealth, it also was quietly sympathetic toward ship staff and even servants in its ongoing serial storyline, with well drawn characters across the board, thanks due to the many high profile stars who worked on its first and only season. As a bonus: when the show wasn’t in production, Borealis had an incredibly in-demand luxury liner they could charge the highest ticket prices available, one that wasn’t just fit to house thousands in luxury and tens of thousands in service, but give it extended range and partial self-sustainability through integral resource growth and production systems.

It was in fact many of these high profile stars that caused the show’s airwave purge, along with the overwhelming majority of the crew. As it turns out, the many who asked for deeper parts for their lower-caste characters weren’t simply trying to beef up their screen time as people suspected, it was because they were Freeland sympathizers aiming to push the boundaries of acceptable portrayal of the poors on Consortium airwaves. In many ways, their work in glamourizing the complete non-drama of the nobility and executives portrayed on the show contrasted the actual hardships of workers, because censors were so dazzled by how much money Borealis and its other producers had put into the show, they were certain all involved had to be loyalist. It did not occur to them, that early during filming of the second season, all in secret support of the Freelands were available aboard ship for the same call, locked in for 4 straight cycles of shooting, with minimal Loyalists trapped aboard with them. In a moment which was concealed as an emergency sequence where the Elamir’s fire suppression system failed, the cast and crew rebelled on the relative skeleton that was the Loyalist contingent, suffering few losses and injuries in the resulting scuffle that pitted untrained combatant show crew, ship workers and actors ganged with turned security personnel, against those bent on clinging to their Consortial money. Given how few of the latter there were compared to the former, most of the hellbent wealthy chose to surrender once real blood started hitting the bulkheads. This is what secured Dizzying Heights forever as a Freeland classic: it’s something of a strange, fictional prologue to the very cool stellar wildlife reserve and artificial nature lodge its mutineers brought for us to put our preserved animals and plants aboard- the Bountiful Wilds now lives up to its name in a greater capacities, its four-sector habitation cylinder now being divided into separate simulated habitats and temperature zones. Not a bad trade: the Freelands got an uncommonly nice ship to repurpose, as well as a bunch of really good actors and show crew, and Borealis, subsidiary of House Threlani, got endless shame and a financial loss they’re still recovering from.