omg sid meier's alpha centauri
SO
The planet's called Planet and to the best of our knowledge we, the survivors of the UN starship Unity, are all that's left of the human race. Earth wasn't doing too hot when we left.
Problem: on the way to Alpha Centauri, our captain was assassinated and the crew split into six rival factions. Miriam Godwinson's obnoxious Believers are all fundamental Christians. The lovely and dangerous Corazon Santiago heads up the Spartan Federation, a bunch of military survivalists. Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang's radical collectivist Human Hive is all about the group. Academician Zakharov just wants to do science. Pravin Lal is the last UN loyalist, heading up the Peacekeeper contingent. And Lady Deirdre Sky is obsessed with the ecology of the new world we've landed on.
And then of course there's me, charismatic CEO Nwabudike Battuta Morgan, intrepid champion of the free market and the accumulation of wealth for the betterment of all.
Planet. Harsh, red earth caked in an alien fungus that spreads faster than a Subic Bay whore. Choking, noxious atmosphere. And the mind worms. God, the mind worms. They come in waves of thousands, paralyzing their victims with psychic terror and then laying their eggs in the brains of paralyzed colonists. Their young erupt from the eyes and ears of the hapless dead. A mind worm boil cannot be challenged by the most powerful modern weapons; only the mentally hardened can withstand the psychic assault long enough to set the boil to the flame.
This is our new home.
The Morganite colony pod containing myself and my loyalists touches down on a desolate island continent in the planetary north. We have no contact with the other UN parties save for the occasional bursts of a high-frequency emergency transmission. (Like Pravin Lal's Peacekeepers, who manage to die in the first few years.) I establish Battutaville in a cove on the edge of the planet's northern sea and immediately set about building up my economy.
All goes well in the isolated lands of Battuta Island. Robotic synthmetal sentinels keep the mind worms away from our habitats. After a while we dispatch terraformer teams - 'formers' - to clear the fungus and plant forests, build roads. The wealth produced by my capitalist democracy goes back into research, catapulting our society forward. I neglect weapons technology in favor of new social and economic advances.
The fungus reacts to the industrialization of its land. Mind worms gather. My scout teams dodge them, grabbing crashed pods from the Unity and strange alien artifacts to supplement our growing economy and tech base.
By the time Zakharov reaches me I have ringed Battuta Island in new bases and even spread out onto the surrounding sea, setting up floating settlements to farm kelp. We've met new varieties of Planet's native life, Islands of the Deep and dreadful Locusts of Chiron.
The mewling Zakharov's first boat blunders into one of my settlements. We exchange pleasantries. Zakharov insists that he be left alone. I offer trade, he refuses. I sneer and send him on his way. I have no time for bookish intellectuals.
My isolation concerns me. It's clear that the other UN factions have much larger populations and territories. I'm falling behind. But my navy is weak, and Battuta Island is out of room to grow.
Another ship arrives. Santiago's Spartan Federation. I have a pleasant dialogue with the Colonel. Her military might meshes well with my economic juggernaught, and we sign a pact. I am pleased to have such a powerful and attractive ally. She gives me her maps of Planet, revealing a large continent to the south of mine - we'll call it the East Side - and a large supercontinent to the west where the Spartans and the Human Hive are locked in a struggle. I label that one Big ****ing West Landmass.
Zakharov controls the north of the East Side continent. To the south, Miriam's fundamentalists.
Deirdre Skye's followers are already gone, wiped out. Predictable. Her eco-friendly ideology had no place here.
I am tiny and alone on my little island. Santiago makes demands of me: trade technology, trade more technology! I am advanced beyond the rest, but I give Santiago my edge just to keep her placated. Perhaps our little dalliance wasn't as much of a good idea as I'd thought. She's already at war with the Hive and seems to be losing.
Zakharov comes to me with demands for technology as well; he's jealous. I refuse. He declares vendetta: open war! I snort; it's going to take a mighty navy to get onto Battuta Island. Yet I do worry...I have little in the way of weapons technology, very few standing forces, and my riches...
...well, the thing is, I barely have any money. I make a lot, but I've invested it into beating the other factions to creating Secret Projects, unique wonders like weather control. So I don't have much in my bank if I need to hastily raise an army.
Global warming begins. The sea levels rise. I farm kelp and wait for Zakharov's attack, nervous. But it never comes.
Zakharov begs for peace. I wonder what the hell is going on down on East Continent.
I get my first satellite into orbit and immediately gain view of the whole map. Zakharov has two bases left. Miriam's Christians control all of East Continent, a massive stretch of bases with names like He Walked on Water and Sacred Redeemer. Her armies, armed with shard guns and needleplane air support, are rolling over Zakharov. She is massive, and I'm clearly going to be next.
I freak out, begging Santiago to go to war with Miriam. She's busy with the Hive.
So I build ships - rushing their production with enormous energy credit dumps. Fusion-powered destroyers, a lot of them. When Miriam comes for me, her ships run into mine, and we blow each other up in an orgy of mutual destruction. Stalemate. I stare across the waters at her enormous empire as my tiny but prosperous nation swelters on its fungal island, fighting off mind worm boils attracted by our tremendous industries. She can't get to me!
The drones in my bases begin to riot. I consider resorting to nerve stapling, but instead divert some of my funding to psychology. For some reason, because I am a moron, I'm still not building troops. Instead I'm obsessed with getting an orbital elevator up. My little men are still running around with primitive impact rifles.
I am CEO Morgan. Warfare is just...beneath me. My island can't be breached.
Remember the global warming I mentioned? Miriam convenes the UN Council and asks to place a sun shade in orbit. She controls the bulk of the planet's population and thus most of the votes. It goes through. I don't pay much attention.
Sea levels drop. And just then, a volcano erupts at the north end of East Continent.
There is now a land bridge, made of cooling magma, connecting Battuta Island to East Continent.
Miriam swarms across. Dozens of units of shard infantry supported by artillery and needleplanes. She's here to crush my democracy and replace it with her religious state. My troops hold the line for a year before orbital drop troopers land behind them and crush them. She takes my two southernmost cities and I
don't know what to do
Santiago has abandoned me, the *****. Zakharov is gone. The Human Hive is remote and unreceptive. Miriam's armies are on my doorstep with the full might of her enormous faithful horde behind them. She has shard guns, aircraft...
I order a crash technological program. It goes fast.
Her troops spear north towards my capital at Battutaville. They're inside a year's march when the first yield of my project comes storming out out of the city.
I can build them fast: one a year at every one of my city. They are cheap - they come from planet itself. The only real cost they have is the piece they take out of my soul.
They are cadres of my best Talents, controlling enormous seas of mind worms. One of my secondary industrial centers completes the Phalos Mutagen, giving the mind worms' latent psionic powers an enormous edge. Great boils of seething psionic nightmares descend on Miriam's forces and devour them from the skulls out.
All her discipline and sophisticated technology is useless against the psionic assaults. She needs empaths; she has none. They are anathema to her religion.
The column of her advance is annihilated by the worms. Her beachhead on the south of my island rallies, but the worms storm in, division after division of handlers with their unending wriggling pets. When a mind worm boil is badly damaged I simply withdraw it and it heals, feeding off Planet's fungus.
My boils grow mighty and fat on the brainflesh of their foes. Demon boils are the culmination of their lifecycle. We take back our two fallen cities. Her air support tries to stop us but the dreaded Locusts of Chiron swat them from the sky.
I have turned Planet against my foes. I am unconcerned by the sight of her divisions screaming and clawing their eyes out, begging for mercy as the worms devour their brainstems. Fanatics deserve to die as they lived, without brains.
We press to the land bridge that almost doomed me. She has it guarded by legions of her crack troops and - worse - divisions of plasma artillery. My mind worm cadres cannot push through without horrifying losses.
My own needlejets, produced by my vast industrial parks and armed with newly discovered weapons, quickly silence the artillery. The mind worms are loose in Miriam's north, on East Continent itself. Her forces flood against us but still she has no empaths, and the demon boils cannot be overcome. One of my cities produces the Dream Twist, which makes our psionic attacks even more devastating.
But she is so vast, and I suspect she may already be developing a counter...
Even as we push against Miriam something strange is happening. Fungal growth is accelerating all across the planet. Wild mind worms breed at an insane rate, boils erupting all across Battuta Island; my capital is infested, millions killed, before I can drive them back again. I, the implacable Morgan, immortal though I am, am having strange visions of a whispering voice.
The Planet itself is awakening.
The war on Miriam drags on for years. The front opens too wide for my Mind Worms alone to handle. I use my Orbital Elevator to drop quantum-armed shock troops into her deepest, most densely populated hives, seizing one of her largest cities in one fell swoop. Once I have the city I use my credits to pump out legions of troops there.
The planet, as a whole, is some kind of interconnected organism. It's growing. For thousands of years it has rested in what it calls the flower dream, but now, my scientists tell me, it's approach critical mass, the network almost on the verge of sentience - mind worms, fungus, Isles of the Deep, all some kind of enormous brain.
Miriam unleashes her empath cadre. Their weapons technology now drags behind mine, but they can forestall the mind worms long enough to make a difference. It doesn't matter. My industrial areas have been turning out new weapons at a leisurely pace. As if my squadrons of needlejets weren't enough, now I have enormous floating antigravity fortresses armed with neutronium plating, clean reactors to minimize their impact on my economy, and singularity weapons. I call them the Tertiary Phallus of Battuta. They violate Miriam's troops like an unfortunate scene from a prison shower.
Fifty years ago Miriam was in serious contention for the position of supreme rule of the planet. Now she's unable to raise enough troops to stop me, and her drones are rioting. She is finished.
But it won't mean anything if the planet awakens from the Flower Dream. The fledgling sentience in the planet itself seems to understand what's going to happen. Every few thousand years it explodes into a frenzy of growth, bringing it to true sentience - but the fungal apocalypse kills off most of the planet's life, and the network has nothing left to sustain itself. It starves back into its primordial slumber.
Humans will be the casualty of the next awakening. Mind worms by the milliions, swamping our defenses. Fungal growth shattering our roads and mag tubes, breaking our proud arcologies down into shards of plasteel.
CEO Battuta Morgan will not accept this. I ask my scientists for an answer. They provide.
It only takes me a year - I pump so many credits into the project that they could probably have constructed it out of paper-machied currency. The Voice of Planet is a transmitter that will upload the sum total of human knowledge, drawn from the planetary datalinks, into Planet's fungal network.
It works. The network convulses and accepts the download. It is now aware of human history, receptive to us - reachable in a way it never was before. The flower dream will last a few years longer, to give us a chance to find some middle ground, some cure for the cycle. If we were to work hard enough, we could upload our minds to the planetary network, become one with the superorganism...
The superorganism that is reachable to all of us. Miriam is in no position to exploit this, and my onetime ally Santiago is now just a desperate enclave in the face of her enemies. But the Hive, the mighty Hive...
One of us will build the Ascent to Transcendence project and merge with the planet-mind first. Whoever uploads first dictates the terms of mankind's future. And my war with Miriam has sapped my funding. The Hive is ahead of me.
It's not even a contest. I have swarms of orbital mines and hydroponics bays feeding my sprawling economy. One of my cities probably out-generates the entire Hive. But I can't take the risk he'll somehow beat me, so I supply insurance.
I orbital drop ten divisions of singularity shock troopers into the land around his capital. His shard guns and photon barriers are no match. The legions defending his capital evaporate like mist. Mr. Chairman's Transcendence project burns under my guns.
And then I turn his captured capital to the spawning of mind worms. The shadows of my Tertiary Phalluses - running on the limitless fuel of clean reactors - cross the sea to the Western Land Mass and his cities quail under the bombardment of the juggernaughts. The citizens of the Human Hive die like the nerve-stapled insects they are.
As the echoes of the conflagration spread across Planet I upload my solitary, majestic mind into the planet itself. My enemies are left in the wreckage, cursed to watch my ascent in awe as I merge with the world itself - if the mind worms don't eat their eyes out first.
It is over. I look back from an immortal future in which I, the Planet, partner with my posthuman nano-enabled children to build a Dyson Sphere and recolonize the wastes of Earth itself. I look back and I laugh at the pitiful efforts of those who opposed me.
Battuta is eternal now.
