Dear Diary,                                                                                            7/4/90

Today was wonderful! It was July 4th. We ate Colders and drank Guesses. It was awesome! Then we had fireworks. They shot off by themselves and when they crashed together, they made the flag. All 60 states. 

     We played all sorts of games. We played Robot, Goose, and many more. I ate too much ice cream so the nanobots fixed the problem. I have never had such a fun 4th of July.

In the American Northeast,

Or, at least, what’s left of it

Holographic renditions

Of Washington crossing

The Delaware River, with

His Continental Army,

And his pale, ghostly steeds,

Loop endlessly in the wintry place

Where it happened.

Just below the River,

The Delaware Bay has

Swallowed up every inch of land

From Trenton to Cape May.

Philadelphia has become a new Atlantis.

As has the entire West Coast through

The collapse of the San Andreas Fault line.

Copies of the Declaration of Independence

Have been uploaded into everyone’s minds

--But that has not stopped Time from

Transforming history into legend;

The founding of America, now thought

Of in the same realm as Camelot,

Or the mythical country of Arcadia, is

Considered “an apocryphal tall tale

Until time travel is proven”-a fable told to children

Just before their their programmed dream-sessions,

In which they dream of Washington the Arthurian Hero

Discussing with his delegates of the Round Table his

Plans to defeat Britain, Queen of the World

After her betrayal with Benedict Arnold,

That treacherous Lancelot who defiled the hero’s Guinevere.

The American Midwest is all that has remained

Of the former United States since the year 3010--

And it has become since then a lawless land,

Akin to the seedy Colonial ghettos

And mob-towns under the surface of Mars,

And on the newly discovered desert planet

Of Alamo orbiting Barnard’s Star,

Occupied by lowlives, thieves, “ship wranglers”,

And even the occasional wanted outlaw.

Alamoans, to this day, celebrate the day they

Won their independence from the rest of Sol,

Every July 4, since the year 3052, by displaying

Holograms all around the planet of the battles

That took place between the Neo-European Coalition,

The Barnardi alien natives, and the local Alomoans.

The Asteroid Rush of the year 3031 is taught in schools today

As what originally drove most cowboys and prospectors

Near the Martian Asteroid Belt, while the second

Arkansium Rush of 3042 drove many refugees from Earth to

Barnard’s Star to mine its planet for the extremely rare radioactive element,

Arkansium (atomic number 125), as a revolutionary fuel and energy source.

Needless to say, a War erupted over the mineral,

But the planet of Alamo managed to keep it for itself

And wrangle it out of the grips of the desperate

Medieval Neo-European worlds orbiting Jupiter and Saturn,

Who allied with the original aforementioned armadillo-like

Alien natives of the planet that worshipped the mineral,

For it allegedly came from another realm, and was given to them

As a gift from their supposed gods.

In the Philippines,

All is ocean and only the tallest

Mountains remain.

July 4, 1946-- the day the island nation

Won its independence

From the sovereign nations of the

Pre-Martian colonial era,

Has now become a day of memorial

Dedicated to the ruin of the Republic of the Philippines

By the tired and rebellious forces of Nature,

--A nation who fell first by the shaking of the earth,

Second by the hot blood of several volcanoes,

And third by tsunamis and the rising seas.

--All occurring on July 4, 3018.

With no land left to conquer, due to the state of Earth,

The Filipinos went up to space in the mid 3020s, and have

Since commemorated the day of their downfall

By deploying over seven thousand small-scale

Neutronium bombs over the atmosphere

Of a terraformed Mars-- each “star-cracker”

Representing one island of the

Seven thousand that made up the Philippines

In the days before the current Colonial Republic,

And watching them explode from

The safety of their massive Mikonawa-class

Dreadnoughts that released the bombs

In the first place.

To this day, Filipino refugees, and

Residents of the island colonies of Mars,

Marvel at the flashes of red, blue, green,

Purple, orange, and white illuminating

The cloudy skies of the planet,

--The residue from the neutronium

Clashing and doing battle with

The oxygen-rich atmosphere of Mars.

And children, starry-eyed

And in absolute wonder, to this day

Consider themselves extremely

Fortunate if they manage to glimpse

Amidst the flashing clouds

The chromatic form of the largest

Mikonawa-class dreadnought--

The three-mile wide Adarna, gliding across the sky

With its multicolored, scintillating

Lights, sparkling in different hues

Like its namesake mythical bird;

Its massive trapezoidal wings

Rivaled only by the sheer size

Of the two-mile long Bakunawa-class

Escort Cruisers, whose iron-steel hulls resembling

The tribal shields of the Nias and Igorot

Tribes-people of the former Philippines

Flank the Adarna, and are large

Enough to eclipse the Sun

Over the Martian waters.

In the re-established Otto-Mars Empire,

Whose new sultan-- the cloned cyborg

Body of Sultan Abdulmecid II-- saw opportunity

In the developing Martian landscape

To rise up from the ashes of Earth,

And prosper under a new version of “Thars-Islam”,

July 4, 1918 has remained for millennia

As the date of the rise of the last “true”

Sultan of the pre-Colonial Ottoman Empire--

The late Mehmed VI, who preceded Abdulmecid II,

In the days when the Earth was more fertile,

And less desolate and disheveled.

Though Jerusalem was spared from the rising

Waters of the Dead Sea from the East

And from the flooding Mediterranean from the West

By the glory of its seven great mountains,

Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, was not so lucky

Due to its proximity of the Red Sea, for

“It became like the blood of a dead man;

And every living thing in the sea died”.

Prior to the destruction of the holy city,

On July 4, 3029-- the day marking the

Death of Islam on Earth, and the day

Marking its rebirth on a nearby world,

Muslim scientists managed to retrieve

The sacred draped kaaba and its accompanying

Black stone and teleport the entire cubic structure

Aboard the four-mile wide crescent-shaped

Hilal-class mosque-ship, the Al-Buraq,

Using a heavenly tractor beam mechanism,

And set it down on the Tharsis mountains

On the red planet, building the city of Thar-Mecca around it

As the new place for all Muslims to

Embark on their annual hajj towards.

Under the order of the cloned sultan,

And thus the revived ancient Caliphate

Acts of terrorism motivated by hatred and by fanaticism

Stopped, due to the fall of the West, and

And the establishment of the new Islamic Kingdom

On Mars and in remote Jovian worlds,

That many displaced Arabs and Muslims knew

Would last for tens of thousands of years

Under the cyborg Abdulmecid II, who was

Created after the DNA from his rotting skeleton

Was extracted and used to rebuild him in the days

That he was alive.

The Sultan awoke, coincidentally, in his artificial

Amniotic capsule on July 4, 3025, and lived to see

The crux, the cornerstone of his religion rise into the maw

Of the Al-Buraq, flanked from behind and on each side of the crescent

By smaller Arkan-class destroyer frigates up to three miles long--

Pillar shaped and cylindrical, resembling 16th century Ottoman bombard

Cannons in terms of form and architecture.

The largest destroyer, the Ghazi, loomed in the sky bronze

Or rusted brown in color, next to its twin frigate,

The Dardanelles, which shone under the Sun with a silver hue.

As long as the Sultan’s life support systems did not malfunction,

And he remained out of harm’s way from both enemy

And friend by means of treason or assassination,

His rule over the Otto-Mars Imperium would continue forever,

And Abdulmecid II was more than happy to know this.

July 4, 1918, is a day many Neo-Communists

In the now melted country of Russia

Have celebrated as the day Czar Nicholas II--

The Last Monarch of Imperial Russia-- was killed

By the Bolsheviks-- who laid the foundations

For the later Soviet Union under Stalin

Following the Russian Revolution.

Since the year 3040, and thus for 3,731 years,

The Neo-Stalinists of Russia have been attempting

To avoid the destruction caused by Stalin, in their

Vain attempts to create a “utopia” on Titan,

Instead driving their own peoples through

A different kind of destruction altogether...

Every July 4, the people of the moon robotically

Bow down and worship the artificially hyper-intelligent

Matryoshka Brain surrounding their moon

In a mess of intersecting rings and spheres

Known simply as Baba, and nothing more.

Baba was originally created

On July 4, 3028, and was meant to be a massive

Artificial Intelligence system that would help

Colonists on Titan develop their society-- free from

The Chaos of the Colonial infighting and the weak

Provisional governments that plagued Titan in the early 3020s,

Free from the influences and wars of the Jovian planets

And free from the conflicts of the inner worlds.

She was powerful, but could not assume her form

As a Matryoshka Brain superstructure surrounding Titan.

She needed a power source sufficient enough to

Provide her with the amount of energy required for

A machine of her size, design, and ambition.

She found that energy source during the

Arkansium Rush of Barnard’s single planet.

The idealists on Titan managed to get ahold of

A gigantic radioactive Arkansium slab forty feet tall

In the depths of the caves of present-day Alamo,

And were able to slowly transport it out of the planet

Through several months of grueling battles

With the local Barnardi during the Barnard War,

Becoming temporary allies with the Neo-Europeans

And the Otto-Martians throughout the duration of the War.

Once the Barnardi were defeated, the enormous slab,

Which was held over neutral space in the Asteroid Belt

Until the governments of Sol could decide who got to own

How much of the precious mineral, was fought over

In the years between 3059-3064 in what was later

Called the “Arkansium Slab War”, resulting

In a victory for the Russians, who managed

To overpower the weak Colonial Alamoan forces in

The Asteroid Belt, and evade the disorganized

Neo-European powers who were and had been in constant war

With each other anyways since the Fall of Earth in

A sort of eternal Second Dark Age.

The Molly Pitcher, the Bunyan, and the Pecos Bill--

The three greatest Barnstar-class dreadnoughts in the

Alamoan, and by extension, the battered American space Navy

All plunged into fire and exploded as a result of superior

Russian strategy (though the fact the Alamoans

Had just emerged out of their own War contributed

To their lack of preparedness for the next War-- not

Accounting for their greed towards the Arkansium Slab).

The Otto-Martians were brutal in their assaults,

As were the Filipinos from their new Republic,

But the Neo-Communists had their ten-mile long

Svarog-class World-Shaker warships to combat

Their various enemies and utterly annihilate them.

Three of the Svarog--the Pushkin, the Catherine,

And the nigh-invincible Ivan-Rasputin

Managed to obliterate incoming Otto-Martian forces

By completely surrounding them amidst

The Asteroid Belt from three sides, triangulating over

Them as they tried to fight against their larger opponents.

Other times, Filipino forces found themselves

Ambushed in the Belt by a series of mines planted

Within inconspicuous asteroids, destroying dozens

Of their best Bakunawa-class warships and their

Smaller Luzon-class Assault Carriers.

The Adarna was not present in the Slab War until

The Filipinos had nothing left to combat the Russians with.

At the Battle of Vesta, it suffered heavy damage

Before the Filipinos declared a surrender, retreated, and willingly

Gave the Arkansium Slab to them.

The Sarimanok, the Adarna’s sister ship, was not so fortunate,

And burst into golden flames by a stray laser from the Rasputin,

Before crashing and spinning into a

Companion Otto-Martian vessel-- the Celestial Hadith.

The Otto-Martians eventually decided to give up

Fighting in 3064 because, frankly, the Empire was

Running low on resources they could have used in

Hindsight for other things besides the construction of death machines.

The Russians, and thus the Neo-Communists, took

The Arkansium Slab and managed to build a reactor

Around it to collect energy from the element’s beta

And radioactive decay through its clear instability,

That would be used to power an eager AI.

Upon further research, they discovered that Arkansium

Had an isotope called Ak-129 with the enormous half-life

Of 8 x 10^25 years -- exponentially longer than even

The half-life of Tellurium-128 and the age of the Universe itself!

The nearly extinct Barnardi were right in their

Belief of the element coming from another realm--

Since scientists, upon discovering the unusually high half-life

Of Arkansium, proclaimed that it originated from

A parallel Universe with different rules of atomic physics.

Within a few weeks, Baba was introduced to the 

Ak-129 reactor on July 4, 3068 as a way to celebrate 

Their control over the largest supply of Arkansium in all of Sol and beyond.

However, with this newfound power, Baba began exponentially 

Increasing her intelligence, until she threatened the seemingly 

Utopian lives of the happy Neo-Communists.

All the Russians had done was replace a human dictator with a robot one!

Before the rise of Baba, there was civil chaos

Amidst the first colonists on Titan.

Then there were the two Wars over Alamo

And over the gigantic Arkansium crystal

That accounted for over 40 percent of all

The Arkansium found on Alamo

(35 percent was kept by the Alamoans,

And the other 25 percent found itself

Dispersed between the Otto-Martians,

And the Filipinos-- not to mention the

Warring Neo-Europeans, who now had further

Reason to war with each other over

Scarce fuel and energy sources.

Now, Baba itself, the once benevolent AI,

Became the new problem endangering the livelihoods

Of the Russians and of all of Sol at large through the exponential

Growth of her intelligence and ability to surpass humans,

To the point she no longer thought they were worth serving.

It was not long before Titan became engulfed

By the rapidly constructed Matryoshka Brain

That has, to this day, been surrounding the moon for millennia

And imprisoning its inhabitants in a dystopian

Realm where they have become part of Baba herself--

As one noocratic consciousness brainwashed under the false

Pretenses of collectivism, and thus, imperfect Communism.

Baba, with Titan enslaved and taken over,

Began expanding her territory on July 4, 3077, her “9th birthday”

Ever since the day of her introduction to her Arkansium Core Reactor

Located at the center of Titan itself.

She began leeching off of the worlds of Saturn like a parasite,

And instigating mass panic across Jupiter and the remaining Neo-European worlds.

The Filipinos, and the Alamoans fell not long after, and the Ottoman Sultan ended up

Becoming a proxy for Baba after his cybernetic implants got hacked by the AI,

Transforming the once revered leader into a psychotic madman,

Forcing surviving humans to colonize solar systems beyond Sol or face death and slavery.

Now, it is the year 6771, and all of Sol 

Has found itself oppressed by Baba for over 3,000 years now...

Almost no hope remains with the knowledge of survivors 

That she will keep expanding her reign of terror.

However, a glimmer of that hope might remain in some, 

Since the 4th of July is just around the corner…

And this time an entire species will fight for its independence.