Revolutions - 11.18-The Gemini Vids

Episode Date: March 16, 2025

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Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 11.18, The Gemini Vids. We left off last time in late December 2249 with the assassination of Omar Ali, an assassination which marks the beginning of the end of the agreement of 2248. As I said last time, there was, objectively, very little mystery surrounding the assassination. The investigation into the murder was wrapped up by January 3,000. the 5th, 2250, and concluded that Tal-Batista acted alone, mostly for reasons of personal bitterness. This conclusion did not stop conspiracy theories from swirling, and one thing I don't think

I was clear about last week, but which further fed those conspiracy theories, was that when I said the guard officers with Ali dropped the assassin, I meant that they killed him. He was dead within seconds of getting his shot off. As a rule, the guard did not keep their neutron gun set to fatal, so the fact that in this case they clearly were, and Batista lay dead before anybody could question him, only added conspiratorial fuel to the speculative fires. It made everyone just a little more paranoid. Ali's assassination had broad impact on the course of events, in part because it had a narrow personal impact on Maple Door.

She and Ali had been friends for a long time. They had come up together as young executives, joined the Society of Martians together, served on the Martian Advisory Council together. They had stood side by side during the dangerous chaos of the three days of Red, and for the last two years they had worked together to establish an autonomous Martian society while also maintaining order, production, and prosperity. And even here now at his end, they'd been aligned. Dore and Ali shared the belief that Martians abusing Earthlings should be treated just as seriously

as Earthlings abusing Martians. That concern for the Earthlings is why Batisians. that had been denied a spot in the Martian Guard, and it's why Omar Ali was now dead. One thing we all love to do when studying history is to draw invisible lines, to divide up epochs and periods and eras. Before this line it was like this, after this line, it was like that. We do the same in individual biographies. Now, these lines don't actually exist, and everything is an unbroken continuum of subtle changes and transformations, but there are still moments that make us say, Hmm, before this it was like this, after this, it was like that.

And for Mabel Dor, Ali's assassination sure looks like one of those moments where we can draw a line. As we talked about last time, challenges to Dor had been slowly but steadily mounting. And while she had a thicker skin than most, that did not mean she was not human. She was especially sensitive to accusations of being insufficiently committed to Martians and the Revolution. She had dedicated her entire life to uplifting the Martian people. For her entire life, she had given it her time, her fortune, and her energy. And for her trouble, she was now being accused of betraying the very Martians she'd uplifted, all because radicals were proposing wildly impractical ideas like full independence and abolishing the class system,

both of which sounded great in the drink holes, but which, in reality, would likely cause phosphide production to crash, taking with it the foundation of a functional Martian society. And now her friend, ally, and partner in government had been murdered. Why? Because he was a good enough person to care about defending the lives and dignity of earthlings living on Mars. So after his death, we can observe a marked shift in Mabel Doar's behavior. In both her personal life and public appearances, she became increasingly exasperated, testy, and resentful. Dore believed the results of the investigation. She believed Batista was a disgruntled malcontent who acted alone. But she also believed his head had been

filled with ideas propagated by irresponsible radicals who, if not directly complicit, were at least morally complicit in Ali's murder. The growing hostile divide between Dor and the radical Martian activists widened precipitously in early 2250 over the question of who would succeed Ali as head of the security services. As we've seen time and again, during the early days of the Martian revolution, when Mabel Dor settled on a policy or wanted somebody appointed to a certain position, that was good enough for the Martians. She was the one voice they all knew and trusted. But now we are two and a half years into this thing. Other voices now exist. Down in the Warrens especially, Martians were watching, reading and listening to stuff being produced by the Monce Cafe

group or being passed around the ranks of the Martian Guard. In these materials, Dorr was being portrayed as a hindrance to the revolution, not its highest authority. A lot of the red caps remained upset at the dismissal of 22 of their comrades just because Dore and Ali chose to prioritize the needs of whiny earthlings over noble and patriotic Martians. Graffiti in the corridors and posts on the networks called both of them earthworms, Martians who were traitorous supporters of Omnicor and the Earthlings, which I got to say was a particularly galling charge to level at Mabel Dor of all people. What all this meant was Doors' assumption that the Martian Assembly would rubber stamp her candidate to succeed Ali's head of the Martian Guard,

was about to crash headlong into the reality that she was no longer the voice of the Martian people. Doar's choice to succeed Ali was a guy called Bob Smith. Bob Smith was an A-class Martian who had been along for the ride the whole time, but more than, more as an effective functionary and organizer, rather than a public face of the revolution. He'd been serving as Ali's deputy since the Three Days of Red, and was largely responsible for the guard's structure, chain of command, and logistical apparatus, all of which would be kept in place even after, well, even after what happens next. When Ali was killed, Smith became acting head of the Martian Guard. All Mabel Dor wanted the Martian Assembly to do was turn that status from

acting to official. But this time the assembly was not going to rubber-stamp her choice. Because on January the 10th, 2250, Jose Calderon announced that the Martians deserved a commander who would vigorously protect Martians in the Revolution. They deserve better than just a continuation of Omar Ali's misguided policies that handcuffed the guard and prevented them from cracking down on the enemies of the Revolution. So who was the commander the Martians deserved? You guessed it, Jose Calderon. Calderon was not unknown to the Martians. He was an impeccably credentialed veteran of the revolution. Everybody knew he was dedicated to the Martian people.

This had been demonstrated a thousand different ways publicly and privately, in ways both big and small. His network of supporters had had little trouble pitching their version of Mars for the Martians, which embraced and elevated Martian-born Martians, but excluded and denigrated anyone born on Earth. Inside the Martian Guard, support for Calderon was high among the rink-and-file guardsmen, but the choice of who would succeed Ali was not up to the guardsmen alone. In the wake of the three days of Red, the Martian Assembly had assumed the power to appoint department heads. This precedent had been set by their acclamation of Door as Director of Mars Division and approval of her slate of candidates to run the various departments.

This all established that they served in their positions because the Assembly had put them there. And so it was the Assembly that would now select a new head of the Martian Guard. Now I know we haven't gotten into the nitty-gritty of how the Martian Assembly operated, and if you want all the details, I do suggest reading The Martian Assembly, a parliamentary history by Kali Urdu, which expertly traces how its various institutional structures and procedures developed. But in short, every Martian could attend sessions of the Assembly, either in person or over the networks, and they could vote on any issue that was put before the Assembly, if they logged in and voted. At first, attendance and interests were extremely high, especially during the period of the mutual blockade.

But since then, it had fallen off steeply. By the time of the vote on a lease successor, it was mostly A's and B's paying attention to the goings on in the Martian Assembly. This is not to deny the existence of politically engaged D's, just to say that it had been a while since the raw vote totals that could be mustered from among the D classes had really been tapped. They were about to be tapped. After some debate, the Mons Café wing of the Revolution chose to support Calderon. The debate was less about whether they preferred Calderon to Smith. They did. Calderon was a staunch supporter of true independence, and they shared his concern that Doar was too wedded to the idea of staying a part of Omnicor.

They also shared Calderon's concern that Dor was probably hindering necessary efforts to root out counter-revolutionary threats, because he was more concerned about the optics of defending earthlings than addressing the very real threat of counter-revolution. But they also had their own separate grievances with Thor, for example, her opposition to dismantling the class system, an issue which Calderon himself was indifferent to, but his candidacy at least represented a way to challenge Doar's overall power and authority. So the Monscafe group embarked on a campaign on Calderon's behalf to specifically engage and mobilize de-class voters.

People like Zhao Lin and Ivana Darby toured the warrants in a series of public meetings to raise awareness. They also tapped trifectus to support and endorse Calderon, using their moral authority to say he is the true defender of the revolution. This is also, I should mention when Kenji grew started testing his abilities as an affected polemicist and propagandist, but we'll get to him in a bit. In an attempt to turn back the growing momentum for Calderon, Mabel Doer turned her attention to the person whose revolutionary credentials were perhaps more impeccable than anyone's, and she was certainly the most famous of the trifectas, Alexandra Claire. Dorr and Claire had developed their own relationship

in the post-revolutionary days. Door had long wanted to win Claire over to the side of supporting a hierarchical meritocracy that would provide stability and prosperity for Mars, but a hierarchy based on merit and accomplishment that would recognize and promote people like Claire herself. Doer would say, You've done so much, more than most.

There's nothing wrong with being rewarded accordingly, or having Martian society recognize you as superior. Claire, meanwhile, had moved into the Mons Cafe orbit with Zhao Lin, and she tried to turn door in the direction of a more egalitarian post-revolutionary society. She would say all of that so much more that she did, she did to set people free from systems of oppression, because to her, every Martian mattered. On this issue of Bob Smith, versus Jose Calderon, Dore did have some reason to believe she could convince Claire to support Smith, because Claire's egalitarian beliefs extended beyond Calderon's limited focus on Martian-born Martians. Claire did not in fact believe that Martians and Earthlings were fundamentally different.

Earthlings had been coming to Mars forever, and in her mind they had been subjected to the same exploitive corporate control that Martians had been subjected to. They had spent years suffering right alongside each other. And besides, how did any Martian come to be a Martian? That's right, their parents, or their grandparents, or their great-cramp parents had been born on Earth and moved there. Earthlings and Martians were not two different species. And certainly, if the problem before had been Earthlings abusing Martians, this would not be solved by Martians abusing Earthlings. But as much as Dor hoped, Claire could be persuaded, that hope was not enough. Despite her misgivings about Calderon's anti-earthling biases, Claire was also concerned

that the counter-revolutionary threat was not being taken seriously enough. And she also suspected in her heart that despite Dora's protestations that she was not opposed to independence, she just didn't think now was the time. The Dore would never actually get there, that she would never say it was the right time. And on top of that, Claire herself felt no small amount of personal betrayal that Dors' response to the Cole's chat memo saying dismantling the class system was unthinkable and then lying about it. And so in the days leading up to the vote, Alexandra Claire released a statement saying that she was voting for Jose Calderon. This statement marked a permanent rift between Dorr and Claire that would only be partially repaired at the end of Doar's life. On February 19,

2250, the Martian Assembly convened to vote. The work of the Mons Cafe group paid off, and it was the single best-attended session of the Martian Assembly since the ratification of the agreement of 2248. By a margin of 54 to 46, Jose Calderon was elected to be the new head of the security services. Although I should say he never referred to himself by that title. He believed the formulation was a relic of Omnicor's corporate structure. He would only ever refer to himself as commander of the National Guard. Calderon's victory dealt a significant reputational blow to Mabel Dorr, as she had openly called for Martians to vote for Bob Smith.

Calderon's victory also only further emboldened Doris critics. She was no longer the infallible voice of the Martians. With Calderon now commander of the Martian Guard, he quickly established new directives and orders to guide their operations. Protecting the Martian people and defending the revolution would now mean, Exactly that. The Guard's resources would now be put towards rooting out the counter-revolutionary conspiracies that threatened them both. He ramped up surveillance of Earthlings on Mars, who he naturally believed were at the heart of these conspiracies, and he was not overly concerned about

the impact this would have on their lives. And though Bruno October had managed to keep his own identity as leader of the very real counter-revolutionary threat hidden, Calderon's blanket surveillance of Earthlings wound up, including October. He was surveilled, and it was surveilled, and it was did actually hinder his ability to organize and direct the reactionary loyalist movement. This, even as the Martian Guard never actually uncovered any evidence implicating Bruno October in any of those activities. But though October himself was never picked up for questioning, plenty of other earthlings were. And when they were, Calderon and the Red Caps did not pull punches when interrogating them. Literally. Though it was not well understood at the time, we now know

that these people were being picked up by the guard and taken to various stockades where they were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques that soon crested into outright torture. And they used all the old tricks, sleep deprivation, sensory overload, solitary confinement, and good old-fashioned beatings.

Several earthlings picked up during this period simply disappeared, and they are now presumed to have died in custody. The problem with all of this, beyond just being morally abhorrent, is that, as we've known for centuries, Torture does not produce reliable intelligence. It just produces whatever we'll get the torture to stop.

We still have some of the statements and confessions, and they're a mess. The stories are almost universally lies, inventions, or fantasies. This led the guard to expend their resources chasing phantom conspiracies and losing track of the real ones. So like I said, Calderon's crackdown, trying to root out the loyalist conspiracy, did have some real effect. Their organizations and efforts were hindered, but mostly because of the general repressive turn by the guard,

rather than them uncovering specific details of any real plot, and there was a real plot. Mabel Dor, of course, did not like this repressive turn, and as she had her own aides review the cases, files, and confessions produced by the redcaps, it became clear much of it was completely bogus, and not worth taking seriously, let alone acting upon. She, in fact, began to suspect that Calderon was juicing the legitimacy of these plots in order to create more fear and paranoia among the Martians that would feed the larger

radical project of Martian independence. So by about April 2250, Dore had become convinced that if a plot was uncovered by Calderon, then it wasn't actually true. This is the crucial context to understanding how she so badly misjudged the Gemini Vids. To tell the story the Gemini Vids, we need to turn our attention back to the space shippers, who we've neglected a little bit over the past few episodes. Since the advent to the agreement of 2248, the shippers appeared to be set for life. Their pay and privileges were restored,

the table of rates was doubled, shipping back and forth between Earth and Mars had returned to pre-revolutionary levels. And for sure, a bunch of them were now totally mollified and showed no further interest in playing at politics. But others were still, disquieted, either because they had been radicalized by the experience of the Martian Revolution, their own mutiny, and the period of the mutual blockade, into wanting to push the political

envelope even further, or because all those experiences had confirmed them as died in the wool reactionaries who wanted Omnacore to fully reclaim control of Mars and Foss 5. The largest percentage of shippers, ready to start pushing the political envelope again, were among the civilian cargo shippers. As it turned out, doubling the table of rates sounded great, but it was not all it was cracked up to be, especially when they started to notice that Omnicor was slowly but methodically increasing prices on various parts and services to practically make the whole thing a wash.

Agents of Omnicor's rival corporations found a very receptive audience among the civilian shippers for what they were now proposing, that if Mars declared independence, an Omnacor's monopoly, was canceled, then Bicor and T-Corps could offer rates that doubled the doubled table of rates. Basically, help us take down Omnicor, and you will be massively rewarded for your efforts. Among the FOS-5 Container Fleet, there were also officers willing to support this project. Though they had been even more comprehensively bought off than the civilians, many still had reason not to fully reconcile themselves to the agreement of 2248.

As part of that agreement, Omnicor had promised not to retaliate against officers and crews who had participated in the mutiny. And while they never did anything dramatic or overt, in the last two and a half years since the agreement had gone into effect, there was a series of promotions, reassignments, and reorganizations that always seemed to affect personnel and ships who'd been involved in the mutiny. captains were replaced, shuffled around and transferred. They were systematically removed from positions of prestige and authority, and then stashed in less influential places. Commander Cartwright and Commander Way, for example, were both promoted under suspicious circumstances.

Way was promoted to a role overseeing logistical planning for orbital platform maintenance. Cartwright was assigned to a desk at fleet headquarters that would keep him permanently grounded on Earth. transfers and reassignments like this became regular and noticeable to those who cared to pay attention. And among those paying attention were officers who had been permanently politicized by the events of 2247, officers whose ambitions had been raised beyond settling for mere material rewards, and who now wanted to start acting on those ambitions. But there was also inside the container fleet officers who had drawn the opposite conclusion.

We have our pay and privileges back, and there is frankly no reason to hitch our future prospects to radical Martian pipe dreams. And in fact, they considered those pipe dreams incredibly dangerous. If Mars actually did declare independence, it would be so catastrophically disruptive to the production of FOS 5 that it could simply not be tolerated.

And in fact, even this business of Martian autonomy should probably be rolled back. Their big takeaway from the events of 2247, was that Timothy Werner had been the main problem, and that now that he was gone, things needed to return to normal. Not normal as in the agreement of 2248 and Martian Autonomy, but normal as in the full restoration of Omnicor's authority over Mars.

And so just as mutineers were being systematically shifted out of positions of authority, officers identified as being particularly supportive of Omnacore supremacy were replacing them, almost as if this was by design. And one thing I will mention here before we move on is that while there were all kinds of rationales for why some officers broke one way and others broke another, one thing that should not be discounted were just personal rivalries among the officers themselves. Especially among the senior officers, we find people who would seem to have the same material, social, and political interests, but who nonetheless wound up bitterly opposed to

each other and on opposite sides to the coming conflict. And for example, three of the most important ravencious officers, Winifred Lowe's, Hiro Satoshi, and Stade Gimlet, their reactionary turns don't necessarily make sense until we go back through their biographies and discover that each of them had developed a personal rivalry with Commander Cartwright. In Satoshi's case, it went all the way back to their time in the academy together. Their opposition to the mutiny in 2247,

and their desire to restore Omnicor's control over Mars now, was as much about hostility to Cartwright's, as a person as it was to any of the larger issues at stake, which, frankly, is a lot more common in history than you might think. Okay, so with all that in place, we now have to shift down to Earth to establish the details of the real actual plot to recapture Mars that was in fact now being put into motion. Kamal Singh and his allies had been arranging things under the radar for years, including all those promotions, reassignments and reshufflings in the container fleet. This plot had three components. First, Singh had learned that Omnicor Sistex had discovered

an exploitable flaw in the Martian firewall, but no one had acted upon it because of the agreement of 2248. Singh planned to act upon it, coinciding with the second component of the plot, an armed insurrection on Mars led by Bruno October to capture control of the primedown. The third component would be a giant hammer that would soon be looming above Mars. Convoy Group 11, presently being prepared for the journey from Earth to Mars, had been methodically stacked with ravenous officers, not just loyal to Omnicor, but to Kamal Singh. In gross violation of the Agreement of 2248, their container ships were at that moment being loaded with nuclear devices that could threaten full bombardment of a Martian colony city.

The ravenous were now of the opinion that it was highly likely the Martians would capitulate in the face of the threat of orbital bombardment. And if they did not, it would be better to drop bombs on one of the cities and accept the task of rebuilding as the price of ensuring the entire planet and its POS 5 remained under Omnicourse Control forever. All three of these components were moving into their final places in May of 2250, when an engineer at the Gemini orbital platform named Akina Mirabelli, who had been improperly vetted by the ravenous and was in fact sympathetic to the Martians,

discovered that nuclear devices were being loaded onto the container ships of Convoy Group 11. This was obviously an alarming discovery, and as quick as she could, she took out her handscreen and captured video of these devices being loaded onto one of the ships. The vid she took became known as the Gemini vids. She had to sit on them for a week before she could safely transmit them to a contact she had among the civilian spaceshippers, who then passed it along to a contact in the Martian Guard. By then, Convoy Group 11 had left dock and were on their way to Mars. The Gemini Vids finally wound up in the hands of Jose Calderon,

and he was, of course, even more alarmed than Mirabelli had been. Containerships armed with nuclear devices were now headed for Mars. They had to do something. But what? So he contacted Mabel Dor, demanded a meeting immediately, and he showed her the vids. As soon as he was done, he wanted to know what Dore planned to do about it. But she decided to do nothing. She did not believe what she had seen.

Not disbelief as in surprise, disbelief as in she did not believe the vids were real. She thought they were fakes. It was just another effort to inflame the situation, undermine the agreement of 2248, and get her to do something that would force Mars towards independence. Calderon was furious, but he was caught in a boy who cried wolf scenario, where his credibility with Doer was already so wrecked, specifically over the issue of him presenting exaggerated conspiracies to her that turned out not to be true, that he could not convince her the Gemini Vids were real.

In fact, the first thing Mabel Doer did was alert Jin Wong that fake vids purporting to show nuclear devices being loaded onto Convoy Group 11 were circulated. Wang said, there's no way that happened. I would never approve it. It would wreck everything. And Wong was not lying. Even though she was CEO of Omnicor, Kamal Singh and the revanchists had kept her completely in the dark about their activities. That was because there was a fourth component to the revanch's plot. The starting pistol for the operation would be calling an emergency meeting of the board of directors, voting Wong out and making Kamal Singh. the new CEO of Omnacore.

So we will leave it there, with Convoy Group 11 on its way from Earth to Mars, Bruno October's group making final preparations for an armed uprising when it arrived, the CISTEX on Earth ready to initiate their exploits and take control of Martian servers. On the other side, Jose Calderon and the red caps were extremely agitated and furious

Doar was going to do nothing about the imminent possibility of all of them being consumed by nuclear fire. With each passing day, as Convoy Group 11 grew closer and closer, tensions on both sides would be cranked to intolerable levels. And these tensions would finally be released in an explosion of chaos and conflict that history now calls the Independence Days.