Stuff I Did This Week: Monday - Tuesday - Section 99

Heroes: The New Hot Trend in "Settings?"

This is me sweeping cobwebs out of my brain. I've wanted to update Section 99 for a while, figuring into the spirit of things I wanted to do with Armoured Collective. Apex Legends and a revisit of Titanfall 2 got me in a real Futuretech Tacti-Guns frame of mind, so it was only a matter of time until I got back on my bullshit again.

This time though, I approached what I wanted to do as backstory that works as setting writing, a setting described through a personal assessment of 9 of the freelance Insurgents forming the protagonists (the would be 'player faction' were this going to be a bigger thing [it most likely is, stay tuned]), in the words of their commander, a character who for now, will be known as The Colonel. Because no matter what opinions are of the sequels, First Blood was a good movie, and this character wound up in writing coming off like a Col. Trautmann with more empathy and no sense of patriotism. Other than that, this was some fun freeform writing, describing some utterly terrifying people, who are nonetheless bent on doing good in their world. Enjoy!

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“Dizzy”

Illima Dizij

There is no tactical advantage to be had in a gemmed dagger. When wielded by a capable hand, a gemmed dagger however shows intent and character. Capability, intent and character are the deciding factor as to why Dizzy, an individual some would see as intemperate and unorthodox, is who I approached for the role of the team’s medic and field health specialist. Brash, loud, committedly strange and possessing uncommon agility even among members of her own species, Dizzy is skilled as a protector, custodian and taker of life, with a disregard for all petty obstacles that might stop her from doing her work, in that order or priority. Nothing about her is cold-blooded; it takes a boiling blood to fight like Dizzy does, ferocious, but never forgetting her compassion.

A former Clan Warrior, one of the informal but regimented soldiers of the Clans of the Anarchic Zones on her homeworld of Rhishan, Dizzy has survived adversity, being raised by her aunts, uncles and surviving grandparents. Knowing what loss means from a young age shaped her views, drove her to learn both to fight, and when and how to do things other than fight. Her Clan belonging to the Rhishan Republican Bloc, of reshaping the Anarchic Zone to a stable, sub-rosa government beneath detection by the Sovereign, her and her peer Warriors were often placed in positions of civil service, ‘community brickwork’ the term used RRB activists. This is where Dizzy learned how to stitch and patch. This is where she learned botany and agriculture. And this is where Dizzy learned how to throw claw-hands, shoot a nail-carbine, and pull a trigger with a live target dead in the sights. Of the wisdom Dizzy has come across, closest to her heart and primary to her core beliefs is her experience with the trust people will give you when they realize you’re as willing to heal them, and build with them, as you are to fight with them on their behalf. Strength nurtures those without it.

The practitioner of an old faith that divines meanings from marks left by cosmic spirits and attendant ancestors, and an intrepid traveller through the galaxy that is hallucinogenic substances, Dizzy is not the picture of a calm and professional surgeon. But this team is not a hospital, it’s an Insurgency. Though an individual who uses her injector gun to numb a target in order to set up a knockout punch would normally be seen as dangerous and impulsive, Dizzy has demonstrated her ability to channel the less constructive elements of her impulsiveness and reputational flexibility in a safe direction: Front, Toward Enemy. Because that is the essence of Dizzy: an individual that can take steps forward, even when the room might be spinning. Or falling from space.

“Cannonball”

Jean Paul Bruneau 

One possessed of both temper and will, who can build up momentum as potential energy and release it as an explosion from their own selves- the so-called “hothead.” Hotheads tend to do two things when they put themselves behind a gun. The first and most common is that they flame out and die young, they explode one last time. The second and far more rare outcome, is that the hothead encounters an experience that cools them, like cold water to red steel. They become tempered, and they grow older and more savvy. They learn when and who to explode at, and how to do it in a way that makes an ending, not a beginning. Cannonball was an element I was glad to find in such high quality: an individual who never starts fights, but always ends them.

He is an individual whose reason for even being in the Freelands in the first place is his betrayal, at the hands of his moral inferiors. Recruited from the Canadian ranks of the Sol System Forces Expeditionary Legions, where he trained as a high-mobility EVArig operator- a Jetpack Jockey, as they’re called -Cannonball was eventually reassigned to the Joint Interior Task Force, the Terran-arm of the Sovereign’s counterterror forces. Soon after however, he found himself being challenged by his new unit. Namely, he was assigned to a mission in which he and his fireteam was briefed that the opposing forces would be labor traffickers, common slavers. It was then revealed near zero hour that this was op was to be a test of loyalty and his team, that the Sovereign reserves all right to dictate what is truth, and to them, Existence Means Service, at all cost. It serves as credit to the character of Cannonball, both that he chose this as his moment to explode, as a judgement call, and as well that his team remained loyal to him through what came next. Namely, that when their boarding skid hit the hull, and they made entry into the ship, they made to gun down every slaver they made contact with. This resulted in one of the most high-level cases of non-accidental fratricide among the Sovereignty Armed Forces, in which Cannonball and his fireteam eliminated all other squad elements aboard ship, and escaped to the Freelands with the same refugees they had been sent to retrieve for the Sovereign, the op’s true purpose.

Cannonball is the picture of a measured individual. It’s only that he knows how to measure others as well, and so knows when he has a shot worth taking. This is the nature of Cannonball’s composure, a Terran that understands restraint, while having hesitation forcibly burned out of his tendencies. Cannon knows when to stand at the ready, aware, but held still. Cannon knows when it’s time to maneuver. And Cannon knows when the situation calls for something immediate and drastic. It’s this reason why Cannonball is where he is: when you’re running an Insurgency, you trust a bullet that can aim himself, and still keep shooting afterward.

“Palisade”

Athena Bell

You want to find people with strength of conviction, look to the union town. You find lots of traits to admire there, like people who like to work with their community, both to build a place to live as well as things other people need, and who know the difference between a want and a need. People that understand it’s hard to say you truly live in a mansion when the rest of your neighborhood is a slum. Kellerton is no slum, but a place of trees, grass, water and flowers under domes, interconnected with strut-bridges and high speed transit. It’s a place where your apartment is in a brutalist mountain amid parkland, and diner breakfasts and pizza by the slice are readily available to fuel up for a shift in the workyard. Your job is any step of the process that turns iron-rich asteroids into starship hull sections, or spaceframes, or steel process stock for use in assembly mills. Or it’s in support of the yard, up to and including serving the breakfast and spreading the pepperoni on the pizza- the union here covers everyone, steel workers, ship builders, child-carers, homemakers all the same.

Palisade is Cogitoi might and resolve, built in Kellerton, by a Union-proud parentage collective, with her ferrous parts made from Kellerton steel; she is built of Kellerton, the small town girl of the future. She was sculpted by Saturday afternoons eating nachos and watching football from the stands, played by people who built their physiques on-shift, running mass welding rigs in zero G; she was galvanized by being brought up that first, you talk out a problem, honestly and in earnest, and if that doesn’t work because the problem isn’t reasonable in a fascist-sorta way, you beat the problem’s ass. Community Security Enforcement was on Palisade’s union ID, the people who intercede in matters that could affect communal stability and nurture discord. What this translated to was largely being an armored mediator between aggrieved neighbors, and escorting stoned or drunk folks back home. One day, for Palisade, it escalated in scale. Namely, when a routine shipboard safety standards check turned into a pirate attack, during which Palisade captured an enemy weapon and proceeded to defend the ship’s crew with both it, and her own heavy-duty frame until help could arrive.

Palisade was able to be saved, but her family needed to rebuild much of her. Knowing their child, they rebuilt her even stronger than before. This is what she is, having found the next stage of her life in an Insurgency: an armoured chooser of who is to be slain and who will see tomorrow, who protects the innocent and the worthy with an impenetrable shield, and lances down the lost with a righteous gun. She is a machine-knight, who carries with her the values of a place where paying dues is a point of pride, and you can get good fish and chips at this little shop on the boardwalk- nobility not born of a bloodline, but a community. It is an uncommon person that will stand in front of another when a gun is drawn on them, on reflex; I am glad to have found such a person in someone so pure as Palisade.

“Specter”

Yurah Losmea

I know much of the wickedness of my people’s Sovereign, the the things that The Throne of the Inner Universe perpetrates. Of these things, I know of the Indoctrinated, individuals born of prime vocational stock, inspected and approved to perform a task, and then raised to be a living automaton, whose only happiness and validation can be found in the execution of that particular task, and improving one’s own understanding of said task. They are programmed to be narrow-minded toward all but their task, to which the breadth of depth in it they perceive to be infinite and all-attention consuming. There is no greater fulfilment than of your task; challenge yourself to achieve new heights of fulfilment. The Sovereignty controls the universe. The Sovereign dictates reality. There is Nothing Beyond the Throne. 

Specter is one such kind of Indoctrinated I had access to as part of my command within The Throne City. I am, frankly, terrified of the thought that our timelines under the Throne’s shadow line up, and that I may have used them back when they were a nameless and more senseless creature, and I was a more devoted oppressor. The fact of the matter is, my people’s Sovereign is wicked, but my people as one have a pragmatic wickedness to us, we forget pettiness but nurture grudges for damage done, until murder is less of a possibility and more a logical conclusion to an unresolved issue. Specter is a person now, more than what they were before, back when I might have met them, back when their name was a serial number and assassination for the Sovereign was the full shape of their world. Part of me will never stop thinking they’ve come to kill me for denying them a life fully lived. They have had many chances to kill me and haven’t yet. To noble Arissiyans of differing social standings, this is what we understand as “trust.”

Specters are vengeful spirits; the creature an Arissiyan would use ‘specter’ to describe is a being that’s undying, and always improving in its ability to seek you and end your life. A specter will always get to you, even if it needs one hundred chances, because it only has time and interest. This is who announced themselves to me, as though handing me a resume to Insurgency. This is the persona that Specter, this person who was once unfortunately a thing, has taken on in order to experience a world they once swore was an impossibility. That they died, and in the afterlife, they’ve been rewarded with an identity, free time, companionship- unimaginable things to an Indoctrinated. All the same, they still pursue their task. If this is the afterlife, and they have been rewarded, then obviously they were good in life, and so why not do the thing that still feels good to do? And so Specter, unseen killer, warrior of shadows and shimmering, continues to improve their craft and take their chances. This is why the fear will never leave me: because a Specter will get to you, even if it needs one hundred chances. It has only time and interest.

“Haze”

Dianelys Santos

In my native language, there is a term, “amber-eyed,” and it doesn’t mean what it sounds like. It’s nothing to do with colours, but rather a look described in ancient poetry: “eyes made to become full-grown too quickly, last vestiges of innocence rapidly dying, frozen, like as though in amber.” Haze lost her first boyfriend when a bandit group rolled into her idyllic hometown, a place built by arboreal terraformers, gentle woodcrafters and harmless, if self-absorbed neo-hippies. He was the first to die that day. The bandit that killed him died second, when something both valiant and violent woke in a teenage Haze and roared for the first time. On that day, a hunter born into a backwoods family became a killer with sudden, horrible grace. For this, she spent the next three weeks living in a culvert, scavenging in early daylight hours. At night, she learned firsthand that brutal, hardened and emotionally dead people are still afraid of simple, common things, like fire, smoke, strange colours, and sudden bangs from the woods at night. She did not liberate her hometown by herself, but she prevailed until neighboring militia forces could mass and organize. A victory made of bad men throat-slit in clouds of glowing smoke, and hearts blown out backs from seemingly impossible angles. Her reward: status as a young legend, and amber eyes.

In one of Haze’s many languages, there is a phrase, “nunca más”, never again, and she has it tattooed on her trigger finger. It’s the ideal that she’s working toward. She would be a dangerous individual if she had began as an aggressor, because her will is fearsome, as is her focus. She is the most aggressive precision rifleer I’ve ever seen, as capable as using fire-and-displace as she is lying in wait for an optimal shot. And moreover, she knows how to exploit fear and amplify natural battlefield anxiety, a sharpshooter with a talent for making people think outside of their right minds and do senseless things- a threat to anyone that doesn’t live inside a concrete vault.

Instead what we have in her is someone who would be considered still young for even one of my quick-to-burn-out people, let alone a Terran, who is wise beyond her years. She understands the fragility of life from the view of someone who watched the first person to make her heart beat quicker die with a hole in his head, and whose response was to deal back the same with her hunting rifle, with a glare, and without sound. Within our first meeting, she confided in me that she can never go home, because it doesn’t exist anymore. She also confided in me the purpose this has filled her with, because there are other people with other places that are like the one she used to come from, as fragile as that place was. That if she needed to and she had the chance, she’d find the angle to shoot down a starship from orbit with her rifle, such is her vow to protect others from having to face what she survived. Such is her ability, that I don’t rule out that I might someday see her demonstrate this.

“Minutes”

Colt Beretta

Picture the worst imaginable way to be born, with regards to starting with out with a stable frame of mind to develop from. When I called upon myself to answer this question, I did not picture being born in the process of killing members of my family, who were trying to welcome me into the world by pleading me to stop until it occured to me that I even could. This is because I am not a mind reader, or an echo quantum, so I was unable to read Minutes’ mind when I first met him, in order to answer him posing this question to me correctly. This was the manner of his figurative birth, he being a first generation Cogitoi, Freed Hardware. Namely, that his Awareness completed during his active suppression of a Cogitoi demonstration he was deployed to quell. One of his first Aware sensations was of his newly departed kin’s coolant blood, collectively splashed on him, expending the captured heat of their broken life-functions on his armoured skin.

Yet even still, he was welcomed by his kin. This is the genesis of the man called Minutes on my records, whose true name is a ridiculous slam-together of two historic Terran gunmakers, chosen in a state of numb grief to accentuate his self image as a dangerous weapon. Minutes, who tried to be the tragic hero that died during the extraction of over 200 of his Cogitoi comrades to the Freelands, and instead proved to be too heavy a machine, too perfect a killer to be stopped by the Sovereign forces that responded in time to meet him at the terminal. A man who has been looking for his death since he made the crossing with them, a constructive death in the name of the gentle and humble against the arrogant and forceful. A death that wages the kind of individual-scale violence against a remorseless aggressor that, in some abstract and cosmic sense, demonstrates his own existence as an act of shortsighted hubris before gods more merciful than their creation, who were so childish and cruel as to make a hominid-shaped killing machine.

Minutes is not okay. He is doing better than he used to- a pet is a small life to care for in place of your own when your spirit is down to cooling embers, and Large Ralph the cat would be a good friend to him even if he didn’t have the highest heat signature of any of the crew. The man is now amenable to entertaining ideas for a life beyond Insurgency, of there being a time for him not being always within a reach of a rotary gun. He still denies himself repair of facial damage, a broken and since-removed jaw module that, if fixed, would allow him both solid food and natural speech instead of his backup vocal amp; but at least now, he’s decided to mix himself cocktails, to stop denying himself flavors. But what remains is the anger, the overwhelming and volcanic wrath of a person who might have asked to have been born, had he not been doomed to be born a butcher of his own kind. It’s the reason for his callsign: a single life containing within it a coldly apocalyptic fury, stood upon an unstable foundation; the mindset of a nuclear winter, a frame of mind forever Minutes to Midnight.

“Hitchcock”

Michael Elmore

He was taken from his home, and spent a long time with his eyes covered with a visor that showed nature photos, his ears covered with insulated phones that played classical music and river sounds. He tried to Listen Through The Glass to hear their thoughts, but all he could hear was a repeated mantra: “Be Still. Be Silent. Deep Focus Occupies a Mind and Body in Motion.” He was administered a mild hallucinogen to mask his sense of place and direction for the final steps. When his senses came back into focus, he was in a grey room, in a leather chair, sat at the end of a long table, with a black stone block the size of a billiard ball in front of him. The man sat at the other end stared at him behind dark glasses. From this stranger, a teenaged Michael heard a single clear thought: “Failure will kill you, but consider how that could be a positive.” The stranger said to him, “move the block with your mind.” He did, obediently. Three years later, after training his body and mind to survive the process, they stuck focal repeaters into his spinal cord, via jacks ported into his vertebrae, and connected his nervous system to a quantum amp. He could move the block faster now, near the speed of light. Except not as a solid mass of stone, but a geometric shape in spacetime, rippling the fabric of reality into a literal killzone in linear area of effect. The next stage of his life began: to consider a target made of solid black stone. He was to break it with his mind, or die, whichever happened first, before he would be allowed to leave the room. And also, he was to enjoy his studies, and their application. Because The Sovereign Has You, they said.

Michael is a man now, a man who understood that escape can mean working your way to a place where they’ll let you take your leg irons off to do your work, graciously treating someone that accepts their lot, and then being trustworthy and loyal with them off. Until you have the perfect day and moment to run into the woods and disappear, which is what he more than figuratively did. He has no ongoing struggle with the people that hurt him, who he has since identified as the Special Assets Requisition program of the Sol Systems Forces. He didn’t bother to get the name or the story of the stranger that was with him in that room, who was consistently present for every new low moment of his life. He did turn him inside out, while maintaining his consciousness with a spatial containment field, ensuring he felt pain far past the point of reason for such a physical dismantling. But this did nothing to put his mind at ease. If anything, it only confirmed the damage done.

Instead, he lives a life ill at ease, filled the low lying dread of there being a brand new low waiting around the corner, just for him. It happened once before, for no reason other than his mother travelled at FTL while she was pregnant with him, and it caused his brain to develop in a way that made him just slightly more different than most. He paraphrases his callsign namesake in describing his life: “there is a bomb under every table I sit at, and I can never see the face on the clock, I can only hear it ticking away.” Yet in this bleak self description, there is strange hope, because it’s been through his embrace of horror and suspense that he’s achieved a means to describe what goes on behind his difficult eyes, a touchstone to relate to others. He has not yet reached the point where he can find this bitterly funny. Small steps.

“Sparks”

Nisha Yon

I know much of the arrogance of my people’s Sovereign. Of the things I know, it’s that the Throne loves to brag that Arissiyans have the most of everything. They never bother to point out that concerted measures are made to ensure the people reproduce at a rate to sustain interstellar expansion as an industry, and so by virtue of having a lot of people travelling FTL for extended periods, we also have a lot of pregnant people exposed to displacement fields, thus producing a lot of children capable of micro-realistic alteration, ‘quantums’ as we call them. There is no Manifest Destiny in our ability to field “armies of wizards.” There’s just armies of teenagers in gray tailored jumpsuits, trained to think exactly alike as the means to firing a physics-gun against which there can be neither armour nor shield. Many of them once had families, who protested that their kin needed to leave in order to Serve and Improve Themselves. Grain is separated from chaff in order to extract its full worth.

Sparks once wore such a jumpsuit, and once had a family. They were also once a carefree child who found it strange that others had to manually keep their tablet charged, and dreamed of one day taking over the family business, the fabric shop she grew up in, the colourful domain they were a princess within, where in the back she’d play in makeshift “gowns” made by draping themselves in the hanging stock. The tragedy of their story is that they’re here, with myself and the team, instead of selling their beloved fabrics. The quantum amp they wear, embellished with precious metals and gemstones to reclaim the fact it’s seated on bionics they were not allowed to decline, describes why that is. Their official position was that of an assigned Court Wizard, which made their a noble to no real advantage, given that their task was to wear the gray tailored jumpsuit of their office, summarily execute people for the Baron, handle ‘special’ matters in the houselands, and remain silent unless spoken to. It was that plain gray tailored life that kept their programming properly looping, their former individuality suppressed without their quantum power being similarly diminished. It was a chance and sudden return to their childhood kingdom of colour, now run by suspected dissidents moving refugees in shipments of fine fabric, that broke that same loop, and brought them into contact with exact sort of people they needed to meet.

There is no advantage to having long, flowing tails of embroidered silk spilling out from beneath an armour vest. But as I said, I know the arrogance of the average Sovereign Arissiyan, and this is not that. This is instead the person who once and now again remembers their birth name, that chose their parents diminutive name for them as their callsign, because one day they stared deep into a fine satin, as ethereal and violet-blue as plasma. In that moment, all fascist programming imparted upon them as abuse masquerading as training collapsed inward and fell away, smashed aside by a faint memory of innocence and the merest glimpse at a personal beauty. This is the audacity to challenge the ideals of perfection of the supposed Final Culture, narrow-minded and uniform, and also utterly powerless against real art; this is weaponized fashion, who knows that if they were once called a wizard, they should at least own it by wearing an incredible hat.

“Tig”

Deg Tignidi

Few can say they have looked down from space at the end product of their design, with the naked eye. Tig can, in the sense that he’s looked down from space at a city, and seen nothing, because the canopy he designed, that was executed with precision and care by a massive and skilled construction team, had grown over as planned, with farmed forest and natural foliage- a million and change free people, out of imperial sight and mind. It is testament to Tig’s character, to say the most of what he did was play the role of “one of a few important bolts in the process,” and that he worked to have his name limited in official records of the construction. What he did was design a thing for people who needed it, same, he reckons, as all the times he’d planned orbital defense gun arrays and satellite sensor nets. This was what he’d spent much of his early life planning, before the Freelands existed as more than a dream, and his most recent years executing.

Now Tig, once a humble welder whose tinkering with robotics led to advances in small-scale colony defense from orbital threats, has chosen to enter the next stage of his life. In his own words, that of “a more honest killer.” That sounds morose, I’m sure, to anyone that hasn’t lived for so long and spent much of his life assembling stellar-scale weaponry. In reality, it’s a resolution to stop being so remote in his occupation, of making planetary-scale hammers, in favor of pursuing the puzzle of tactical-scale scalpels. In other words, the designer has entered into the stage where he’s become focused on minitaturization, the next logical step. His designs no longer target ships in low orbit, but hostile infantry, designated by his tablet display. His designs no longer rip strike drones out of colony airspace before they’re in attack range, they zap grenades out of their arc before they can detonate. He doesn’t defend the people from the view of a blueprint, at a mass scale, he does it from behind the gun, in person.

He has the years left for this- the miracle of the diversity of intelligent life is how I’m describing a man who is, biologically, younger than I am, who has lived for more than three times as long as I have. Even so, what we share is a similar confidence, one born out of experience. This is what I needed that I found in him, a committed but humble advisor that’s as capable of directing operations from the ground, as he is from a command ship, and an individual that knows that some machines have to have multiple moving parts and pivot points that aren’t them. All this, in a Garak engineer-turned-sapper, a who for as much as he’s grown seasoned, has never lost his smile for the part where things go boom.

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Tomorrow: Back on the River and the Road!