Talk:The Eternal Dawn

Rebirth

Rebirth is a hot, humid world heavily covered in thick black jungle. Temperatures average ~40 C about the equator and humidity is often above 80-90%. Despite being lush and life-bearing, it has relatively low oxygen content compared to Earth, a near-nonexistent ozone layer, a somewhat toxic atmosphere, and is generally hostile to human or terrestrial life.

Nature Red In Tooth And Claw

Rebirth has near-zero UV protection and its weak magnetosphere and high concentration of radioactives exposes it to all sorts of constant radiation bombardment. Evolution has been supercharged, animals living, breeding, and dying quickly to avoid inordinate genetic damage. The arms race has created deadly predators and even deadlier herbivores, capable of eating toxic, spined plants.

Boost

One of the interesting evolutionary tracks of Rebirth fauna is that their adrenaline-equivalent is a powerful oxidant, redlining a creature's metabolism and giving them virtually unlimited endurance during high-stress situations-high enough that often massive organ damage can result from using this chemical, 'boost', for too long. Rebirth animals are often languid in normal movement, lazing around to dump heat and store up boost by metabolizing the thin oxygen of the world, but blurs of motion when threatened or in pursuit.

A common predator tactic is to harry a large herbivore in packs, each animal cooling down as it reaches the limits of its endurance, but the pack itself constantly harassing. Either the herbivore tires out and bleeds out, or it cooks itself.

This biochemical adaptation has seen actual use in several Eternal Dawn combatant designs.

Dawn Society

Gimlet was originally colonized by an eclectic mix of civilians, many of them wealthy and transgenic. With plenty of funds and government backing, they ended up as one of the longshot colonies, choosing one of the more promising worlds, a faraway planet which showed signs of life and a healthy biosphere. Unfortunately, the planet was a seductive hellhole, hot, radioactive, and poisonous. Despite this, the colony's wealth and position made it a common stopping point for rim exploration and kept it in contact with the human sphere at large, something many colonies that far away from Earth failed to manage. The colony survived a few decades without incident, but eventually one of Rebirth's protozoans jumped the species barrier to humans, leading to a horrific plague that required external help.

Alshain had been a nexus of exhuman and biomodification until the exhuman insurgency used it as one of its main bases and it was invaded by the PLA. Its fleeing citizenry was intrigued by the odd biochemistry of Rebirth, and its skilled bioengineers were tasked to enact a cure, with the promise of riches and the planet itself as an experimental lab for more techniques to improve the exhuman condition. They worked hard, tirelessly, through failing quarantines and martial law, isolating the protozoan and finding a cure.

But the damage had been done. No longer was Gimlet a rich trading hub. Now it was impoverished by the fleeing rich and the funds spent on finding a cure to an elusive, deadly disease. Traders had left it, found alternative hubs. Many who once lived there were dead. Only the Alshain refugees and workers, with their hyper-advanced immune systems, had been left mostly unscathed. Those who still lived of the original Gimlet families were often the poor or now-broke, embittered by the abandonment of their jewel by its peers. Renaming the planet Rebirth, the refugees took to building Alshain-in-Exile, a exhumanist hub and survivalist haven. Assimilating Alshain survivalist exhumanism into its ideology, they would strive to conquer the harshest worlds, live anywhere in the galaxy, become men like gods.

It would be an eternal dawn of human dominance of the galaxy, humanity spreading to every corner of the galaxy and beyond.

The Politics Market

In the 21st century, it was theorized that a market could be programmed via inputs to solve difficult problems. In theory, a market capable of constant optimization of goods and services would be capable of hypercomputation, with literally infinite processing power. This, of course, never came true. But yet, the idea of using the market as a parallel-processing system, with human computation nodes, lived on. To cure the plague, everything had to be repurposed to find a cure. With moderate libertarian leanings, Gimlet had a healthy free-market economy at that point. The Alshain computational experts were quick to disassemble it and rebuild it into another computer system, one that still lives on today.

The Politics Market is Rebirth's own sleeping god, a powerful (if slow) programmed-market computer that is guided through constant transaction between people. The Dawn have no leaders, no masters, just the dictates and results of the distributed-computational element that is their market system. It is part economic manager, part societal manager. Its whispers have provided the citizens of Rebirth reasonable wealth despite their isolation, incredible industrial might, and common happiness. To enhance its ability to enact domestic policy, Rebirth is a panopticon state with no right to privacy.

Although not actually capable of hypercomputation (and not immune to human error in either interpretation or input), the guidance of the politics market has brought Rebirth recovery from devastating plague and a growing, happy population.

Market Regulation

Because regulation of the politics market itself would create potential distortions that would reduce its effectiveness, Rebirth runs on a fully lassez-faire economy with near-zero regulation on outputs and market processes, only on input (and interventions to fix market failure states). It does, however, run a social safety net, funded via an independent "shadow economy"-essentially a command economy. This societal safety net provides free education, utilities, food, and basic shelter-basic public services-that any citizen of the Dawn is guaranteed to be given access to, as even if they produce nothing of value economically, they are still a processing node in the Politics Market.

Basic housing is communal, generally space-efficient barracks with shared hygiene facilities. Basic food is often vegetarian in nature (as the Dawn have transgenically adapted themselves and several staple foods to the local environment, they do not use food factories but rather still maintain an agricultural sector), and utilities include education in any field of study up to any level of expertise, power, data access, water, and medical care up to and including fairly significant elective augmentation and neural reprofiling-something no other universal health care programs offer.

That is to say that the Dawn make it possible for anyone to achieve their wishes, almost regardless of ability. There have been immigrants from ZOCU or the Core who have sought out Rebirth as their final chance to achieve the dreams they wished for. They often find out that no matter what you wish for, it never comes out the way you imagine it to. The vast majority can accept that, but a handful leave, going back home with their surgical and psychological modifications, shattered dreams, and a black mark on their record.

Rejecter Enclaves

Approximately 35% of the Dawn are not large-scale participants in the politics market. These are disproportionately exhuman immigrants, who are allowed autonomy and their own local governance as long as they abide by a fairly short set of policies which amount to noninterference and cooperation in Eternal Dawn affairs, and acceptance of the panopticon monitoring that is common to the Dawn. Often, these enclaves are used as experimental controls for sociological experiments, as they range from cults of personality to autocratic dictatorships to democracies to libertarian freeholds that simply reject the idea of using the market as a computer.

One of them is an autocratic, militaristic, survival-state. It is the professional Dawn military.

The Dawn Military

Ad Finem Temporis, Fidelis Tamquam Post Mortem-"To the ends of time, loyal even after death" (Official motto of the Eternal Dawn Military Service)
"No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy." (Unofficial motto of the Eternal Dawn Military Service)

The Eternal Dawn military is not part of the politics market due to potential conflicts of interest. As an effective military requires top-down organization and loyalty in its personnel, but this same top-down organization and personal loyalty means that it could easily create market failure situations, its soldiers are withdrawn from the politics market for the duration of their service. They no longer are allowed to interact with the market and are provided amenities by the military itself, running off of the same command economy that provides utilities.

Voluntary militia are not, and although the professional military has more advanced equipment, better augmentation, and more glamorous jobs, many of the Dawn's citizens prefer serving public service in the voluntary militia. Their existence (and the militias/military forces of other enclaves) is a counterbalance to the Dawn military in the event of insurrection. However, the indoctrination of the Dawn military and the loyalty of its citizens to the Eternal Dawn as a whole (not just the military) is the first line of defense against such a problem.

The Dawn military's founders were predominantly of the minority exhuman religion of (X), exhorting Upgrade as a method of achieving divinity and avoiding the sins of flesh, and although the military itself is a mostly secular organization the trappings have never faded from existence. Even so, the military is disproportionately religious, with 40% claiming (X) as their religion and another 34% claiming another religion.

Infantry

Relatively prestigious and numerous, the infantry are the core of the Eternal Dawn's fighting force. With cutting-edge bioaugmentation and elective cybernetic enhancement, the Dawn's infantry are trained to fight in any environment with any tools. Originally trained with lessons learned from being the insurgency fighting a much-better-resourced foe, they have shown a surprising amount of counter-insurgency skill, and even during the closing year of the Magnate War, many of the Dawn's remaining light infantry went to ground and became surprisingly adept guerillas.

Aerospace

Dawn aerospace specializes in close support and strike operations, with competent but uninspired training in air-superiority (they leave that to other Magnates). Their aerospace craft tend to reflect this, heavily armored flying tanks with angled armor that provides both some degree of stealth, but is primarily intended to deflect enemy fire.

Unconventional Warfare

Civil Affairs

Civil Affairs includes combat engineers, interpreters, military police, medical personnel, and infrastructural management staff, and are the softer side of the Dawn unconventional warfare duo. Nonexistent until the Magnate War, their job was to administer, along with the other Magnates, conquered worlds, minimizing resentment by bringing infrastructure back on, treating the sick and wounded, and other positive incentives. They also administer the economy-in-miniature that supplies the Dawn military with the goods and services it needs, and what little interaction it has with the politics market.

Special Forces

Eternal Dawn Special Forces were near-nonexistent until the windup to the Magnate War, where Alshain refugees with insurgency experience and exhuman insurgents were requested to form the initial training cadre. This perspective, gained from being the terrorists and insurgents fighting an organized military force, has limited Dawn Unconventional Warfare units in terms of counterterrorism and rapport-building, but they are excellent terror units, with scads of institutional experience in committing assassinations, kidnappings, hostage-taking, and other dirty wet works. As Hyperborean unconventional warfare units were better at missions that required a "softer touch", the Dawn's own covert warfare units found themselves building a somewhat exaggerated reputation for brutality and cruelty, as their highest-profile missions were reprisal operations or battlefield assassination.