A small thing I am doing

Today sucked at work and I have no energy to be too creative, so I thought I would share with you a bit of thing I wrote for another source, I have spoken of the sci fi game Aurora before, a very in depth, graphically primitive science fiction game that lends itself to telling stories, on the forums for the game, I play in a community game run by another member, we are formed into factions and compete against each other in the race to the stars.

My faction is the North American Union(NAU), composed of the entirety of North America, we have more or less set ourselves up as the villains, or at least as untrustworthy, after our abortive attempt to mandate nuclear disarmament in the face of our energy weapons superiority backfired, we found ourselves isolating from the rest of the powers, breaking trade agreements and so on, this, even on the scale we play the game, is pretty not optimal when growing an economy and infrastructure, so we have spent the last five years or so attempting to repair that.

Behind the scenes at least, the character I have chosen to drive the plot is... not too big a fan of cooperating with foreigners:

Where is he now? The banished Congressman.
Panopticon's election to the senate seat vacated by Congressman Romero after his scandal shocked the nation, but was in retrospect not too surprising given the mans strange charisma and ability to focus the rage of his massive number of listeners to his popular broadcast "The Eye", additionally, his district had been gerrymandered in such a way as to be nearly ideal, the residents of which where later found to be no less than 90% "Eye-diots" (their own name for themselves) the district was approximately five kilometers wide on average and stretched from the north end of the old USA state of Florida all the way to Maine, investigations as to how this has happened are still ongoing, and have resulted in the resignation of a half dozen government officials and the arrest of 17 others.

Of minor interest is his name, Panopticon's birth name is unknown, and according to the documents he presented when running for Congress the mononym he is known by is his legal name. Originally coined to describe a design of prison where a single guard can watch over the entire wing of inmates.

Today we on Earth hear little of Panopticon, as during the colonization program of 2101 his entire district was "randomly" selected to form the NAU colony on Mercury, necessitating he move as well. His show is still on the air as no way has yet been found to block the blanket broadcasts radiating from his fortified compound on Mercury's capitol of Gehenna, however he has changed the name to "The Corona" offering "The hottest takes from the hottest planet" and "News as unstoppable as a solar flare". To date, his claims to have focused the solar energy of our star into some form solar broadcasting laser remain unproven, if worrying.

Mercury remains an unsafe place to live for the majority of colonists, however no seats have been empty on the intermittent colonization runs made to the planet.


As you might imagine, Panopticon does not have an enlightened policy of pretty much anything, I am not alone in ridiculous stuff though, one of my teammates is playing a character that no other team has figured out is basically a thinly veiled Dr. Evil.

It is fun being the bad guy sometimes.