The Theory of Ordered Colonization

John Fray’s thesis, “Theory of Ordered Colonization” received wide acclaim on Asperia, just as the scientist of that world rediscovered the trans-dimensional drive. An advanced technology lost when their world fell into chaos. Now exploration of the stars could begin anew. The Home World’s Central Council formed the Governing Quorum. Using the “Theory of Ordered Colonization” to guide colonial development, colonial expansion took off with renewed vigor.

For over two-thousand Colonial Periods the rules of the “Theory” have remained unchanged, unquestioned, and unchallenged. For many the theory worked, as evidenced by the steady expansion of the colonies without wars or chaos. The Governing Quorum approved and controlled every aspect of an emerging world’s government until they were considered able to self-govern, but under continued Quorum scrutiny.

The expanding colonial movement necessitated the use of a tremendous amount of raw materials. Determining those needs, required planning and vast amounts of capital. Enter the Mining Consortium. The Governing let members of the consortium have free reign to preform mineral exploration any place, anywhere, anytime. They could buy out whoever owns the land, move them off, and remove the minerals. In most cases they leave the land or even a whole planet polluted and unusable.

While the Theory meant freedom from political chaos to many, for one group of weary agriculturist it meant continuing enslavement to the Governing Quorum and Consortium wishes. Tired of pulling up stakes, resettling, re-establishing their farms, only to have their families uprooted again a generation later, they form an organization to do something to establish colony that could not be touched.

In the twenty-three hundred and seventy-fourth colonial period, farming families disappear after being displaced by the consortium. Around that same time, lawsuits against them are on the decline. The Consortium and the Governing Quorum, relived of the legal costs pay little attention to the disappearances of a few peasants.

In the twenty-four hundred and ninth colonial period, two men, Shawn MacKenna and Arturo Santiago, stroll into the great central hall and interrupt the Quorum’s routine cyclic meeting, requesting colony status for their world, Ventura Arriesgado.

The irony of the name (Risky Venture in the old desert language) is not lost on the Quorum and Arriesgado should have been declared a rogue world. However, unforeseen circumstances make the farming world’s enormous food stores of critical importance to colonial survival. The Arrisians obtain full colony status without close examination of, or modification to their constitution.

The development of Ventura Arriesgado, and the Arrisians sudden emergence as a politically, socially, and economically secure colony put the Quorum’s guiding theory in question by disproving the need for central control to develop a stable colony. Arriesgado’s accomplishment thus weakens the Quorum’s and the Consortium’s control over other emerging worlds, and earned the Arrisians some very powerful and patient enemies.

By colonial period twenty-four thirty, Arrisians are a peaceful agrarian culture, settled largely by people who’s roots that trace back to the mountain and desert regions of the home world. They carried to this world, their languages and many of their old traditions. In that same period, a chance meeting at an old style county fair between a reluctant fore-teller and a pregnant woman will effect their world’s future in ways neither could foresee.

In twenty-four fifty-three Shawn MacKenna’s youngest living descendent is convicted of brutally murdering his wife and father. The trial judge, aware that Kalen has been framed — but unable to prove it — sentences Kalen to twenty-five colonial periods in cold stasis, instead of imposing the death penalty. The judge’s goal is to uncover proof of the frame up and free Kalen.

Removed from Cold-stasis, Kalen is informed he has served his full sentence and his trial judge has died. He has awakened to a world change beyond anything he could have imagined, but one thing hasn’t. Someone still wants him dead. Kalen finds himself alone in the midst of a struggle that he must win or face his own death and the destruction of his own world’s male population.

While in search for the truth Kalen will discover the old wounds of forgotten family friends — inflicted by his grandfather — he must find a way to heal. He will chance upon a family history and the royal lineage never reveled to him. He will hear, for the first time, a prophecy — given only hours before his birth — foretelling the events of his life, and a plot that could enslave mankind to a future of controlled development and genetic manipulation.

But on a world as technologically advanced as Kalen’s, where man controls the very environment he lives in, who would pay attention to a prophecy made by a woman who didn't it believe herself?

The Quorum and Consortium are.
Kalen and the Arrisians had better.