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On The Shoulders of Giants

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Out of all the monuments left behind by a mysterious, seemingly uncaring past, none of them match the sheer scope and impact as that of the gigantic, omnipresent halo of debris floating around Earth's orbit. Pieces of ships, ancient satellites, debris, wreckages of the weapons that fought forgotten wars and have now turned on their creators, encasing the globe in a cocoon of artificial meteorites, ensuring humanity will never reach the stars.

The corporations have no problem accepting this. Space is not profitable and the result of man's last mentality are evident; whatever it was that came before the corporations destroyed itself while trying to reach the stars. A pact was made: never again would humanity attempt at interstellar colonization, for the mysteries and horrors that the ancient predecessors had undergone could very well extinguish the human species were such an event to happen again. In an event unprecedented, all corporations agreed unanimously.

Centuries later, the seeds of dissent to this agreement were sown in nothing less than the largest corporation of the world. A cabal of ideologues, the "Akousmatikoi", idealists having made their way up corporate hierarchy and holding immense ammounts of power, decided to break the pact. Under the guise of laser-triggered fusion powerplants, five weapons were built by the ideologues, the massive Neukirchen ASAT cannons, named after the location where the first one was discovered.
The gigantic ground-based laser cannons, each being powered by its own nuclear reactor, had such monstruous ammounts of power and such wide breams that they were said to be capable to clean the skies in all but a week.

The secrecy of the construction of the Neukirchen cannons was a testament to the Akousmatikoi's power, but the cost of the weapons became their undoing. The Akousmatikoi found themselves under scrupule and their plan was discovered by the creditors and banks of their corporation, who established a large network of spies and informants to tell them where their money was really going. When the intentions of the ideologues became apparent and the AUC proved incapable of stopping the dream of the zealous idealists, the world turned on the builders of the massive weapons.

What followed was the brief conflict known as the Japhette War, though the origin of the name has been lost to time. The ideologues liquidated their corporation, defaulted on its debts, destroyed their own assets and flooded the currency market by selling their fortunes, causing a financial panic that destroyed the first wave of corporate armies more efficiently than any nuclear weapon would have done as their parent companies bankrupted overnight. The battered survivors of this financial strike, however, eventually routed the armies of mercenaries paid by the Akousmatikoi and seized the incomplete Neukirchen cannons at a massive human and material cost that eventually made the pyrrhic victors collapse into financial ruin. At the end of that year, none of the corporations involved in the Japhette War were still operating.

Save for the nebulous "Silent Weapons", which are said to be everywhere at once, the Neukirchen ASAT cannons are the largest weapons ever built. Most of the ASAT cannons were captured before they were operative, save for one, which was turned on its attackers and caused losses so terrible that wreckages and skeletons are still found in most excavations of the area, and the event still lives on in the oral tradition of the natives, who speak of an abyss of fire opening in the sky and swallowing swarms of aircraft. Ever since, large air offensives have fallen out of favor in corporate military doctrine.

A fifth cannon was confirmed to exist but it was never found. Long after every person and corporation of the Japhette War has returned to dust, legends of the fifth cannon have outlived them and are now the centerpiece of the dreams of idealists trying to continue the legacy of the Akousmatikoi, of scavengers dreaming of the technological marvels of the cannons and of explorers seeking adventure, fame and fortune.

The eternal husks of the Neukirchen cannons still stand, one of them in a flooded area close to the coast in the Bohol Sea, Philippines, where it has laid silent witness to the rise and fall of an entire city; once a bustling world-class metropolis that returned into nothingness once the rich mineral deposits and its prosperous banks withered away; and now inhabited only by squatters and scavengers.

A lone corporate frigate patrols the area. For another year, the pact will remain unbroken.
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Comments10
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WatcherInThePuddle's avatar
You should write more, didn't see much writing like this in your gallery. 
Couple of things:
-You got anymore stuff about this world? I'm intrigued.
-You should have added a visible ring of the debris in the sky, that would have been cool :)