Protector Vaun's office...
"you've actually got a really good setup, your predecessors knew their business." Elizabeth explained, "if I were rating what I've seen in these reports, and what I've observed, in around fifty years, you'll be..." she waggled a hand, "About on par with what we know about the Homeworld Clans. You're still under a billion people, with most of a heavy manufacturing base and a secure system-a little extra work and you'll be in that 'paradise spot' where you effectively are on the cusp of post-scarcity as long as the raw materials hold out."
"That's very flattering. I didn't really realize we were that close, I mean, it doesn't feel like it."
"That's because the voice in the back of your mind-the smart voice, is reminding you of two things:" Liz began, "one, your resource base is finite and two, Nobody ever gets to post-scarcity, Societies discover new things they're short of, or they implode. I give yours about thirty years before you hit the first serious stress riser."
"you said fifty-"
"I did. You break past that first cultural stress fracture and you'll make it fifty years, assuming you don't go turtle again. to put it in perspective, Nick Kerensky took less than three years to hit crisis point after Operation Klondike, his solution was to invent an untouchable external enemy-something I ascertained after getting to look at his journals. If he hadn't turned on your ancestors as viciously as he did, his social experiment would have collapsed of its own weight about the time he started slipping up-which he was when he went after Clan Widowmaker. There would be no 'Clans', just a bunch of colonies that didn't have a good balance of male-to-female for a healthy population, and a declining tech base since without a unifying ideology they'd be at each other's throats with real weapons. You got lucky the same way my ancestors did...only with nicer real estate. Problem is, you can only hold on to that for so many generations, and even with your population growth, you're going to hit the bracket-point in thirty years. Break past it, and you'll be at Cusp for post-scarcity in fifty, and then it's up to your descendents to keep it going. Your braket point is local resources. you don't need manufacturing equipment, you need resource extraction equipment."
"Mining gear?"
"And farming machinery...and farms, and farmers." Liz clarified. "You're too distant for reliable immigration, which makes it easier to hand pick who comes and who stays, even with your long-jump drives, it took a very long time to get here, you can keep mixing the batter in your iron womb project and that's a hell of a force multiplier, but it's still a limited population." she counted off. "Everyone native here looks like you-a tall supermodel. You're tweaking out the defects, thing is, what happens with guided evolution?"
"Guided evolution...speciation? post-humanism?" Vaun shook her head, "That's kind of nuts."
"Not really. I was aiming for Domestication. Take a purebreed dog, put him in a cage with wild canines, could be any member of Genus Canis, really, even foxes or ferals. what happens to the purebreed?"
"Uhm..."
"Yeah, you know what happens, It's like in a book of good farming, eh? So you have your wild-strain, the Colonials, but there's only forty something thousand of them, and it'll breed out, especially once their kids enter the iron womb project to produce your next batch of colonists to harvest resources to drive your buildup. Give it ten generations, and 'munchkin' will genuinely be hate-speech, because there won't be any."
"And that's a crisis point why?"
"how well did the Cylons cope with their first contact with Clan Wolverine?" Liz asked rhetorically.
"Not well!"
"Right, they're already at crisis point. it's why we have two generalized groups-the Cylon Imperium, and the Cylon Republic. There's a third group on Kowloon, they've mutated." Liz explained, "Not just body, but mindset. as beings of what amounts to pure thought, mental changes are as fundamental to Cylons as physical changes are to humans. We've got resulting physical changes following the mental, but it's more like the speciation is accelerating. I've got a Centurion in a loving relationship with a Raider. They're practically married, but based thousands of kilometers apart, I doubt either one has physically ever seen the other outside of a networked online game and social media space. They're changing us, we're changing them...same is happening here, but slower."
"The Clans."
Liz nodded, "Marthe Pryde figured it out-they aren't sustainable as they were when they invaded, they can't win the culture war-eventually they would end up being assimilated into Inner sphere culture by default-Her and Vlad and Kabrinski and that Novacat guy, they worked it out, did the math. That's why they're trying to integrate now to avoid the nasty shock later. You all, brought yourselves with this teensy population base, back into the realm of mankind. do you have a plan? If you don't, you better start working on one now, before you wake up and discover you've domesticated yourselves and the next big-bad hasn't."
"So do you have a plan?" Vaun asked..
"Hells no. I'm making it up as I go along, because I am not qualified to make a plan, at least, not for you. YOU are qualified to make a plan, maybe, or someone here, is. Best I've come up with, is doing some corruption cleanup and starting a university with the objective stated goal of pursuing knowledge and disseminating it in the widest range possible without worrying about if it's dangerous first. As I had put in bronze at the front door of the University; 'We have lost so much knowledge we don't have names for what we've forgotten'. I meant it, mean it, mean to do something about it...now, what I can do is help fill your toolbox...or the toolbox for whoever's stuck in that chair after you retire."
"what would be your first suggestion?"
"Recruit Belters." Liz said, "send an envoy to the Metis Coalition, make overtures to the California Nebula, open trade with NIOPS, and get some belter families to move in, because convict labor is sloppy and sets a bad precedent for your future-ask the Cappellans who's richer, them, or the Lyrans. That gives you a whole super-stack of tools you don't even know you need, and spreads things out so a single rock moving at .5C doesn't obliterate your whole civlization. Second would be opening settler recruitment in trusted systems...or do what the Belters in the Boojum did, and make a habit of emulating The Folk."
"The Folk?" one of Vaun's advisors asked.
"Spacers with no home system, they kind of act like a back-door diplomacy between concentrations like Ross or NIOPS...or Boojum, with other Spacer/Belter communities, they also 'rescue' refugees and threatened peoples, adopt 'em in, and so on, mostly to keep their lines 'threaded' as they call it, or healthy, but it also gives them insights and keeps their tech and knowledge up to par. Make Friends with the Folk if you haven't already, and grow your society out here, find worlds and build, one disaster and it's all over right now, that doesn't have to be."
"How do you know about The Folk?"
"My Great Aunt Thanh, she ran off to join them. It's in grandfather's diaries, I got confirmation from Alicia Li that she did it. Vanished somewhere this side of Davion space...my main concern in all my dealings is to foster growth for a potential customer. to do that, I need to know what you need to have, and what you want to be able to have."
