Lore

A Moment

The year is 2053. Basketball is eternal.

The year has always been 2053 on your little slice of paradise. You fish a familiar bakelite-shelled personal computer out of your satchel. It's warm to the touch. "September"... - again? Feels like it's been September for at least three dozen shifts.

You stopped counting months a while ago. They don't line up with anything significant on the frontier. 119.65 months to a revolution? Besides, the only real calendar these days is the annular ... *ahem* video distribution ring. Count the passing time by the regular repeats of greetings.dmi. Fuck. You pull out a pen and draw a small line on the warning label behind the PDA. Two more shifts and you'll break even again.

The year is 2053, so much so that it's burned into the screen. You don't think it *couldn't* be 2053 if you tried. You don't try though. A new PDA costs 350 creds.

You rub the sleep from your eyes and slip on a jumpsuit. Gray and purple. You stare out a porthole while your brain plays catch-up. You remember the blue glow. You remember the swirl. You remember the warnings- BUCKLE IN - you only made the mistake once.

You were practically a child then. '46. Your knees ache.

The year is 2053, as you stuff a paper cartridge down the barrel of your sidearm. It's 2053 as you check your ID's licensing and DRM. It's 2053 as the hull shudders and creaks.

Somewhere, a man in a green hat is downing the last bottle of wine. Real wine. Somewhere, a woman in a yellow hat is crunching the numbers. Somewhere, a lizard in a gray and blue jumpsuit straps into a pod. Nowhere, a radio beacon flies at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, never to reach Central Command. Several nowheres, the link repeater buoys fill their buffers and retransmit the signal on to the next; a perpetual delay line of not-quite-forbidden content. Every once in a while there's a hiccup, and something new squirts itself into the ring.

You pull on your boots. You grab a mop. Same as every shift.

You step outside your dormitory. The hallway moves. The ceiling stares back at you with a dull thud as your gray and purple suit takes on a brown tinge.

Your radio crackles. "Who the FUCK took a shit in the hallway man? It's Twenty fuckin Fifty Three"

Gun's Out, Fun's Over

Excerpt from diary document recovered from pod of unknown make (found adrift, breached, and unoccupied)

-het#er d^termin-sm or sheer chance, things were like I expected them. Big bang. Condensing of gaseous matter into galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets, moons, comets.

Everything progressed as expected. Earth as I mostly remember it. Species emerged and disappeared, tribes formed, countries founded, joined, split. Same names and everything. Languages. Relatively normal frames of reference.

Who knows exactly how or why there was such a divergence, but there was. Whether a cosmic ray zigged instead of zagged or a butterfly farted, as far as I can tell there was a confluence of events in the United States in the mid 1860s.

It's not just that Rollin White's patent on the breech-loading revolver was upheld. That happened in my time and isn't even a big deal. A footnote I only knew from trivia night at the bar.

In this timeline, however, it was upheld to such a degree that his litigation successes and damages won were staggering. They came with increasingly large controlling interests in the firearms companies found to be infringing on his increasingly broad patents, in some way, shape, or form, because they simply didn't have the cash on hand to pay the judgements.

It wasn't just a public spectacle, it was an opportunity. By the time it came to light that the judges were receiving massive kickbacks the whole time, the Rollin White Patent Extension Act had long been signed into stone after intense public furor and lobbying. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Shares of patents on public markets, the worthless ones the average person could buy into.

Intellectual property was not the only "get rich quick" speculation at play, but the sheer legal weight of ownership and the licensing rents that could be extracted from the prolonged and broad terms caught the attention of long-term-oriented scoundrels. Find the right person to come up with an idea, swindle it, you're set for life, your family's set for life, your company continues in perpetuity milking it for all it's worth.

This timeline's economy wasn't corrupted by capitalism and financial hustling, it was all done in by patent trolling. I can't get over it and I don't know if it's more or less insane than anything I've seen back home.

So America never becomes a superpower, all work and education is oriented to uphold the patent-holding industry because it's the single most profitable sector. It spreads like a disease to Europe within a decade, the hot new fad. It goes about as well as you expect before some of them snap out of it.

They don't know how to make anything new. Nothing's invented to be built by the creators, only licensed to others, because that's where the real money is. Sell a product without making a product. And you see, Rollin was 50 years, retroactive. Business owning patents pushed for 100 years since corporations can't die of old age. When public domain came knocking in 1955, it got pushed up to 200 years.

The end of that is just two years away, forever. It's been 2053 at least a few times that long. In all reasonable senses, it's over. Legally, it's not. Everyone (well, mostly everyone) just accepts it at face value.

Imagine that. 200 years and you can't build anything fancier than a flintlock musket without paying a dozen people for the right to use their own special bullshit loading mechanism that tries to get around the idea of loading a bullet at the back of the barrel. And these fucking guns are everywhere.

And yet, I look around at all this shit, the engines, the mainframes... even the Buddies are here. I don't understand. How are there Buddies here? Nanotrasen? Fucking Nanotrasen? The copyright trademark trolling universe is infringing on that, of all things? I can't grasp how any of this is possible.

I know the hulls they're building for space stations aren't structured like the tin can space stations I worked in. Way overbuilt for stuff meant to sit in orbit and barely try not to explode, let alone on the ground. That's not the Nanotrasen I know., bu%,

...What's haunting me is, I swear t-ose wal^s looG exac%ly lJke the #nes -# t-e Ho7- I z - -