Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who is happy that their online friends like them and think they're cool
The New Republic of Libertaria has got to be the most bottomless pit of miserable iniquity in the entire Interstellar Commonweal, Ash thinks; and Ash seen some pretty fucking barrel-scraping planets.
This stage of terraforming is always ugly, an awkward teenager of an apocalypse, midway through the massive-scale disruption of reinstalling a human-compatible environment over what was there in the first place. The more often Ash sees these midway worlds, the worse a taste it leaves in her mouth; the anti-terraforming crowd may insist on bringing weirdo religious mysticism into it, but she can't help feeling that, at heart, on the ethical case they might be right: that it doesn't matter nothing was living there before, terraforming is still violence. That they're all willing witnesses to geocide.
But to fuck over a planet for this is just horrific.
The locals call in Rainworld, because they're having one of those terraforming centuries. And under the rain, they've decided to use the Commonweal's freedoms to build a little theme-park recreation of Capitalism All The Way To 11. Or, you know, a handful have, and bricked all the metaphorical exits shut to keep everyone else in; as theme parks go it's very realistic.
Ash's employer hires offworld mercs as personal security, because he's paranoid. Convinced that all the local forces are riddled with anticapitalist terrorists; Ash wishes. She'd be accidentally looking the other way, cleaning her gun or taking a piss or something, the entire time they were sticking his head on a pike.
Nobody's cracked FTL data transfer yet — not feasibly, not for routine interplanet comms — so outside internet comes in as big frozen archives, a free extra on Ganzfeld-crewed courier hops. It's the only thing keeping Ash together while she rides out the minimum contract term and gets the fuck out of here. She rations the emails, letting herself open an emoji-laden message or a stupid meme every time she needs a boost. She must sound as awful as she feels; every time a ship comes in she gets a flood of it, jokes and messages and kid pics and pet pics and affirmations that she's totally got this. It's good to feel loved.
The fucking prick's limo rolls slowly round the outskirts of the settlement. Nobody can build away from the atmosphere-rebalancing megastructures yet; they're not even supposed to build this far out from them, but capitalism. The limo, on its state-of-the-art smart matter suspension, is silk-smooth over a road that's in worse condition than a lot of bombed-out ones Ash has seen, on her employer's weekly backseat orgy tour of the — the slums — Ash doesn't have any other word for the city outskirts. It's supposed to be the kind of word, the kind of place, that's obsolete and forgotten.
Around them, malnourished kids with obvious respiratory problems play in the filth with shell casings and burnt electronics for toys.
"Dear Sal," Ash voice dictates. "Still on Rainworld. If I manage to find even one actual anticapitalist terrorist on this hellhole, I'm going to teach them to build a big enough car bomb myself. How are the kids?..."