The Breakdown

Overview

It is said that a single event defines every century. For the 22nd century, that event was the Breakdown, the near-total cessation of interstellar travel due to an infoweapon. The worst economic disaster in over a century, the only two major interstellar conflicts between humans and the complete breakdown of communication with over half of all colonized worlds could be traced directed to the Breakdown.

The Breakdown was caused by the rapid propagation of the RFM-1 (Recycle Failure Mode One) virus via drive infolinkage effects, a process that had been purely theoretical in exotic spatial computation academia. Clearly requiring some form of posthuman benefactor or technology capable of substantially more powerful dust operational coding than transhumanity circa 2150, the exact source nonetheless remains elusive. What is known however is that the RFM-1 infoweapon was released into the wild by a group of Chinese exhuman seperatists in the HIP 59272 system after what appears to have been a vicious internal struggle.

RFM-1 was not particularly subtle in its effects, but it was fast-propagating and went unknown for the first critical weeks, propagating by playing on two weaknesses of human FTL technologies. It took advantage of the fact that all human FTL technology save a few experimental Theta dust systems used the same basic operation system passed down from the posthumans; in essence, FTL technologies used a black-box kernel with various systems and manufacturers adding their own firmware. A second weakness was that the bulk of ships used their delta-dust jump drive as not just a method of travel, but also for hyperstate communications and computational power. These had been identified as potential security holes, but as no method existed to reliably infect a ship's computational systems with a virus short of physically installing it onto the ship; in other words conventional network protection methods were entirely sufficient.

By highjacking FTL transmitters to propagate itself and operating on the root process level, RFM-1 turned established wisdom into a fatal flaw.

It took roughly a week for the first reports to start filtering in along the Chinese and Russian arms of FTL drives showing abnormally high signs of malfunction. As ships of the era regularly required 10-15 days to recycle their jump drives an infected ship could potentially go two full weeks before the unpleasant discovery that its jump drive was refusing to function. Some jump drive models even failed gracefully enough that they could make one or more jumps before their drives seized up. By the time the true extent of the contagion became clear to various media sources and bureaucracies, it had spread into the Euro and Pacific arms, flashing down the catapult chain in less than a day.

Only the Rim was saved from RFM-1; the natural inclination of captains suffering from malfunctioning jump drives is to retrace their steps towards the high-tech centers nearer the Core where repairs could be made. Others, upon catching an emergency broadcast from the core that sometimes - unwittingly - carried the seeds of contagion with it, scrambled to return to where they would not face a lonely eternity a dozen light years from any inhabited world. Not all made it, and in the succeeding years the shell of stars that made up the outer Expanse was abandoned with those that could escape on functional ships moving outwards. To the current day it is a bleak zone of empty worlds, failed colonies and collapsed geoengineering.

The Core's Breakdown

The Core, led by Earth but densely webbed by relatively populous daughter-worlds was the economic heart of Human space. It was the source for virtually all large starships, precision goods and credit, bankrolling and building a Human galaxy.

Then the Breakdown struck and the sovereign debt of dozens of colony worlds instantly went into default. A sudden lack of demand from those same colonies along with a cessation of importation of resources and exotica deepened and lengthened what was already guaranteed to be a depression to end all depressions. Immediate and severe government intervention only barely managed to keep various national economies afloat and for the 'lost generation', economic stagnation and retrenchment became the norm. The intricate web of suppliers and producers for starships simply imploded, surviving only on massive government subsidies or outright nationalization.

Military acquisitions were likewise slashed as both austerity measures and due to overcapacity; the bulk of the primary Core bloc warship fleets were tasked to patrol systems that were no longer even reachable. Warships still in spacedock were completed simply to provide some work for yardhands, but for example between 2152 and 2182, no new capital ships were authorized by the United States Congress. Experiences in other nations was not dissimilar.

Hardest hit however was China. Having the largest, most efficient staryards the Chinese offworld colonies were connected not by the catapult chains that stubbornly maintained a modicum of functionality but almost entirely by large, fast freighters. As an offworld power, China was functionally destroyed and massive social uphevals wracked it. Today's China is a reflection of that.