RP [Acala] Anxiety By Design

Discussion in 'Side Stories' started by Luca, Jul 22, 2020.

  1. Luca

    Luca Administrator Staff Member

    > START

    The rent was late, so no more Breslew family.
    More specifically, Rikido, Gianna and their offspring were blackballed from the only world they had been pressed into building, with a lineage going back two generations within the confines of an automated, 'unmatched society' Fudou Holdings Incorporated sold its captive citizens and immigrants.

    Fudou the planet (named after their gracious benefactors when they bought the place out; lock, stock and barrel before the Old War finished) traced lazily around Acala's sun upon a lopsided orbit, all natural signs of life previously upon the formerly rocky, light-oceaned planet had been blotted out - terrain reshaped and sculpted to fit the image of the Fudou dynasty, who had been in power for many more generations than the likes of Breslew or even the dozens of hundreds of drones who'd married upwards into a better perceived stratum of living. Fudou could answer the question on how many generations it took to carve the glyphs that represented the immovable, wrathful mindset of its leaders into the planet with cities, offices, warehouses, infrastructure, personal capital, and an immovable idea that propelled it all: the process.

    Along the way of seeing this vicious dream spiral into the reality that'd lurched into present day, a wafer-thin snapshot of that vision had to be marketed towards those who would build Fudou initially, the carrot and stick together in a glitzy package. To convert those who'd already given their bodies and their future offspring wouldn't be necessary - punishment and enticement was only for those outside of the gracious process of Fudou.
    The idea of such a process suddenly locking the Breslew family into private citizenship and out of their society's protections and services - for the process they had been serving with blood and sweat to come for theirs indifferently as it'd done others for generations - nothing was personal when the world was manufactured at such a gross scale and everything else laid waste during the process.

    But the truth was that the process of Fudou was only as robust as They willed it to be, failing cynically for all and working whimsically for the powerful and well-connected in plain view. Rikido Breslew's appeals for visibility seemed to go nowhere through the next couple of days. The details of his performance reviews stacked up against his key performance indicators as set by his leads were fine. His quotas were fine. According to Fudou - or at least those in on the process, everything was fine, aside from the rent which'd snowballed with a heave-ho by the process, and grown into a tumour for the Breslew family - that just couldn't be explained despite the machinery and omnipresent data apparent in the process, compounding the frustration.

    The thing that irritated Rikido was that he knew everything about him was tracked down to the brand of cigarettes he liked, and there existed a commissariat which swiftly rooted out treason to the company from within, executing traitors publicly; and yet accountability for anomalies such as a skipped rent remained murky no matter where a worker turned - always out of the reach of the bottom-rung to concern themselves with all the sudden when accountability was thrust upon them.
    Rikido called every favour he could to pay off this rent with cash and an exorbitant interest, but the wheels were already turning to process the Breslew family. Gianna had been trying to butter her contacts in the distro office for some semblance of an outcome however dismal, but everyone in on the process remained tight-lipped. The Breslews were private citizens now, to shunned and given no station, nor platform or line of defence - as the process dictated a good citizen should do to private citizens.

    Within spectatorship of the corporate entity was the orbital megastructure of Acala Space Gate, one of the oldest surviving designs of assisted interstellar, faster-than-light transport from before the Old War, its bisected cylinder body rotated lazily while traffic moved through the 'sky' interior fluttered to the artificial gravity on its edges. This structure served Fudou as a means to transport their Red Sheoul spacecraft fuel across to places beyond and to compete with Aleph Null. Depending on who you asked or shook down, Fudou alleged that Aleph Null had to answer for massive debts incurred according to receipts nobody outside of the company's ideological punchbowl cared to acknowledge.

    The belligerence with which the company operated on and clung to this grudge was a known quantity to the city-state of New Kashmir, who had a hard time keeping Fudou's sabre locked inside of its sheath. The leaders of New Kashmir had heard volumes of stories about Fudou's cruel indifference and religious deference to a vague 'process' which seemed to keep evolving and mutating in inhuman directions. Accusations of being wedded to their sacred process over the people who had the misfortune of being caught in its displeasure.

    Speaking to someone from Fudou who'd been baptised in their good graces, sent out front-and-centre for making deals thus empowered to leave the planet 'freely'; felt like speaking to a vessel within which the desire of the company had been occupying blissfully, without centuries of prior engagement which would provide a context explaining New Kashmir's distrust of the company and its pawns.
    Everything that came out above the neck of a Fudou employee came across someone else's words, leaving conversations with the overzealous representatives to be dismissed as artificial and fake at best, and sinister at worst. Conversations always steered away from questions that were above a representative's paygrade, like "where is my family" or "my friend isn't the same any more" or "my partner died on your worksites and they still haven't found the body" or anything else that got under the sanitised skin and dared to blemish the image - as though doing so would displeasure the process.

    The displeasure of the process was laid naked when footage of Rikido and Gianna Breslew plus children were openly intercepted and detained at a spaceport by a disproportionate goon-squad, citing the Breslews for fleeing debts to Fudou, and were announced to pay with their lives openly. Footage inevitably wiggled out of Fudou's tightly manicured networks, drumming up campaigns to save the Breslew family. Except, outside looking in, you'd think the 'process' that ruled Fudou was dictated and shaped by people who could be appealed to. Cynical New Kashmir residents who'd seen each generation of Fudou Holdings go by worse than the last, enforcing and extolling this process in all its meanness, knew better.

    To the polemic observers, Fudou's 'process' was an unwritten, but agreed upon social contract that allowed Fudou's machination to roll onwards in pursuit of more profits and proliferation. They would be half correct; in Fudou, the process had taken a life of its own as the societal gestalt, fooling everyone up to and including the Fudou dynasty to service itself. A contagious state of mind made possible with fear, control, and specific points of failure within the machinery of a society by design.
    The reinforced dictation of a long-running, and long unaccountable process of operation which had proven to be the only certainty in Fudou had lead to entire cities being sloughed off the planet's surface with no more explanation than it no longer served the process' needs. To bring up the idea of changing the direction of the process was as ineffectual as pissing beside a raging waterfall, hoping to alter the course of the river below who'd already had a lead enough to carve a canyon out of the rock of personal suffering.

    Too many people believed in the machination of the process and what it provided for them to just let it stop, as they watched the Breslew family get loaded into a black van, never to be seen again or mentioned by their neighbours or 'friends', whoever they appeared to be. Opportunities that once existed for original thoughts were now jeopardous, as doing so was ripe to invite the process to come for those same false neighbours one day, one how too. All the process needed was an excuse to fail on you - and if it couldn't find a reason, it'd machinate glacially, diligently, and spoken for by its captives silence to find one.

    New Kashmir had been also been looking, for a long time, for a concrete reason to flip the table and glass Fudou which those snot-nosed bastards or their selectively malleable 'process' couldn't spin their way out of. Even the company officially escalated into open warfare against Albion to disrupt competition would've been fine. It'd be a change of pace from Fudou's usual trickle of selectively unaccountable burnout, strung-out pirates and privateers going death-or-glory (usually death) at foreign freighters, always just outside the reach of their process' warped sense of accountability.

    Albion was well aware of this animosity and underhandedness - they had sent intelligence agents across the Red Tide to monitor the situation, and drafted plans of attack back home. Inventory of the company's assets across Fudou (planet) and its exploited planet Balasagun, while liquid by the day and at least a week out of date by the time it reached home shores, proved invaluable. New Kashmir tolerated this espionage as long as they too were in on Albion's findings about the rogue company that promised a 'society unmatched' - in the anxiety it was built upon: Fudou Holdings Incorporated.

    > PAUSE
     
    Last edited: Jul 22, 2020
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