Polity
From Earth Central
The human polity was the largest and most powerful human civilisation in human history, encompassing thousands of worlds and trillions of citizens. It was established in the 22nd century when the AIs created by humanity seized control of the weak and decadent human civilisation. Under AI rule, the polity expanded and grew rapidly, becoming an advanced and relatively Utopian society that spanned much of the galaxy. Since its inception, its governing structure has only been altered once, when ECS agent Ian Cormac turned against the polity and destroyed Earth Central (a different AI took control, which did not posses many the original EC's tendency to sacrifice large numbers of citizens to further the polity's development).
The polity was governed under an absolute autocracy controlled by the AI Earth Central, with Sector AIs controlling various regions of space, and Planetary AIs responsible for individual planets (planetary AIs also normally controlled the Runcible traffic into and out of their planet). In spite of this autocratic system of government, Poltiy citizens were still guaranteed certain basic rights and enjoyed a very high standard of living. The ruling AIs were known to operate quasi-legal operations in the interests of national security, however, and typically censored anyone attempting to bring this to the public attention. This eventually culminated in Earth Central allowing a full-scale invasion of the Polity in order to stiumlate futher technological development, believing that the Polity's increasingly stganat progress may have made it more vulnerable to future attacks.
National security in the Poltiy was the responsibility of Earth Central Security, an organisation including the military, emergency services, and Federal Police. ECS was responsible for safeguarding the Polity against external threats, such as the rise of Jain technology, and internal Seperatist movements. The Seperatist movement was a widespread bloc of individuals and organisations who resented AI control of humanity, and, unable to gain any real political leverage (most citizens enjoyed the comfortable lives and freedoms afforded to them by the existing system), frequently resorted to terrorism in an attempt to achieve their ends.
Being such a large civilisation, the Polity's economy was colossal, enabling it to support a variety of extremely large-scale projects, such as the Cassius Dyson Sphere, a project predicted to take millenia to fully achieve. It also possessed an extremely large military, which controlled, amongst other things, several spacecraft so large that they could not orbit planets with oceans (for fears of disrupting tides).
The Polity has only faced a large-scale threat to its existence twice. The first was the Human-Prador war in the 2300s, during which the Polity was nearly defeated by the alien Prador kingdom, whose starships initially outclassed Polity vessels in terms of armour and weaponary. The Polity eventually developed similar technology, however, and was able to fend off the Prador with its greater industrial capability. The second attack came from the Jain-technology AI entity Erebus, who attacked the Polity with Earth Central's complicity, but soon moved beyond its remit and threatened to annihiliate the Polity entirely. It was defeated when Fiddler Randal, a software entity hiding inside Erebus, informed the Haiman Orlandine of his plans and provided her with the means to foil them. The Polity's only other conflicts have been "Line Wars" which occasionally occured when the Polity assimilated new territory. According to Polity Law, ECS was permitted to invade and take over foreign territories if 80% of the population of said territory voted for it, or if the existing government requested it.
| “ | There was an example of what he had been defending: those queues never became very long. There were no papers to be handed over, no passports, and no lengthy customs bureaucracy to bypass. Polity citizens travelled in absolute freedom from world to world. The only restriction was on proscribed weaponry, and even that did not prevent travel. If said weaponry was registered and deactivated, you could take it along with you. Even if you did not register it, you could still travel, only the weapon would be dust at your destination; disintegrated by the autoproscription device that runcibles have inbuilt. To travel distances once inconceivable, all you had to do was book your place and pay a fee, register your identity with the runcible AI when you arrived at the sphere, and walk on through. | „ |
| —Cormac in Gridlinked, Chapter 5 | ||
