The Never Ending Tails
Back to the Dark Ages

TheUniverse is ridiculously big, but ridiculously repetitive. Far far from earth,life is evolving in quite similar patterns, and passes through the same phasesevolving in a slightly different way and enabling some scenarios to take form.

Theexample of the Planet Doulos is quite similar to Earth but ended up indisastrous ending. Doulos had a similar evolution to earth leading to the riseof a race quite similar to humans who evolved in the same way; those alienspassed through history and evolved to have agriculture, metallurgy,civilization, wars, and economy.

Economywas the reason of their doom. The people of Doulos got really affected by thisnew technological tool that evolved to become an end in itself. Through themedium of money, People of Doulos created a whole structure based on the basicmotivation of amassment of currency and their whole society became obsessed byonly producing new means to make money out of nothing.

Paradoxically,another structure appeared on Doulos. It was called the Network. The Networkwas a new medium of information exchange more revolutionary than the old onesprivately owned and only based on the passive reception of information.

Thenetwork had a user friendly interface connecting all the monitors to the globalhub and making them able to create and instantly respond to information. TheNetwork was at the first only an experiment to see the potential of the mediantransfer of information through an invisible structure, but its creators builtsomething beyond their own goals.

Thenetwork was powerful enough to handle the majority of Doulos’ population and itbecame a transcending way of communication and life perception. Everything wasgood on Doulos for a few years, and then everything started to crumble.

The slavesof the currency became more powerful and developed new ways of acquiring muchmore money in less time. But the whole economic structure felt and the crisis affectedall of Doulos, A crisis like the planet never had before.

The crisisradically changed the way of life of all the inhabitants of the planet. The bigcorporations and lobbies that were already controlling the basic flow ofeconomy started to lose their assets. In a fear of Bankrupcy, they started to figureout what could be the best investment that could get them out of troubles. Asimple answer appeared. Prisons!

The bigcorporations were losing a lot in having regular people working for them andthey needed to produce a maximum to get the economy back to its normal regimeby pushing people to consume.

Prisonswere like golden pots where they would have free labor to produce even moreproducts and flow the market to get people to consume again. So they started tothink of ways to get the maximum people in prison in order to generate apotentially interesting working mass. They turned to judge the network and withthe old information media they decided to take it down.

Duringthat time, the continent of Kentro was the most influent in all Doulos and mostof the biggest corporations were set up there. They decided to attack fromtheir by influencing the laws and regulations in disfavor of the network,accusing it of plagiarism and getting the direct authority to get it down.

The users ofthe network were furious, but they weren’t organized enough. Some of them sawthe fall coming and decided to flee, they were the rare one to get out oftroubles; for most of the others, they just continued to use the networkwithout caring, thinking that it was absurd that their authorities would doanything.

They wereso wrong, the Kentro government started the hostilities a few times before theofficial ratification of the laws, and took down a giant of the network:Titanus. Titanus was a platform of free exchange and the Kentro government usedthe motive of ownership rights infringement to attack them even while they werelocated out of Kentro.

They also confiscatedall their records and all their hardware as evidence of the fraud. Peoplereacted hard to the news and the users of the networked started hacking thecorporations’ properties on the network. It was the beginning of the first andonly invisible war of Doulos: The war of the network.

Many ofthe corporations’ platforms on the network crashed thanks to the attacks, theusers though that they were winning. The Kentro government pulled down one ofits laws against the network but kept others which made them attain their goal.

All overDoulos, other countries started adopting similar laws all in profit of the corporations.With the records of the Titanus, the Kentro government had the list of all theusers that ever committed ownership rights infringements and they were a lot,more than 30% of Doulos population.

With thoserecords, and the official application of the new laws, the corporations hadfull right to imprison a big part of the population using them as free labor.

Followingthat, Doulos had its first contact with an outside corporation of life formsfrom different other planets that took an interest in what was happening there.

Thecorporation passed laws in order to imprison all what remains of Doulospopulation for motives related to the network and became space businessmendirectly passing laws to treat with the other races.

Doulosthen became a prison planet where all the partner planets were dumping their lotsof criminals and misfits, they were all used as free labor for the corporationsin their transactions with the other planets.

Thepopulation of Doulos and the prisoners of the coalition were making all thecheap products for the population of the other planets. Things changedeventually, but that’s another story…