Introduction
IT is the Forty-Fourth Century. Barely a thousand years ago, the human race dragged itself out of a period it has called the Dark Ages. The population had collapsed as the result of one great calamity and had then been forced into second-class status by the rise of AIT – Artificial Intelligence Technology. The word Robot is still spoken with fear and horror. Barely a thousand million souls walk the Earth, more than half of them still live in the underground refuges that had shielded them from the eyes and attention of the machines, but even from this depth in the Earth, humanity has reached out once more: Mars is terraformed and hosts a population of three hundred million; the Moon is colonized, as are the asteroids, the Jovian moons and numerous chilled outposts beyond that. The nearest star, Proxima Centuri, has been visited.
Human progress, if there is such a thing, has stuttered back to life after its self-inflicted seizure and the solar system has begun to teem with the masses, growing in their ability, confidence and reach.
Our story opens on the Moon where we meet the custodians of order in what are termed ‘the shallows’ of Earthspace – those regions extending from the Sun to the orbit of the Earth and its satellite. The Earth Space Police Force – the ESPF – keeps the law in the warm, sun-blessed track of the home planet.
They are often so good at their job that some unkind, possibly incarcerated, souls have taken to calling them the ‘Thought Police’.
As the ESPF investigate current crimes on the Moon, an organisation on Earth investigates the great crime of the past, the Robots. VOID are gathering their forces and looking into the past to see how it threatens the future; the Robots left some very strange things behind them…
IT is the Forty-Fourth Century. Barely a thousand years ago, the human race dragged itself out of a period it has called the Dark Ages. The population had collapsed as the result of one great calamity and had then been forced into second-class status by the rise of AIT – Artificial Intelligence Technology. The word Robot is still spoken with fear and horror. Barely a thousand million souls walk the Earth, more than half of them still live in the underground refuges that had shielded them from the eyes and attention of the machines, but even from this depth in the Earth, humanity has reached out once more: Mars is terraformed and hosts a population of three hundred million; the Moon is colonized, as are the asteroids, the Jovian moons and numerous chilled outposts beyond that. The nearest star, Proxima Centuri, has been visited.
Human progress, if there is such a thing, has stuttered back to life after its self-inflicted seizure and the solar system has begun to teem with the masses, growing in their ability, confidence and reach.
Our story opens on the Moon where we meet the custodians of order in what are termed ‘the shallows’ of Earthspace – those regions extending from the Sun to the orbit of the Earth and its satellite. The Earth Space Police Force – the ESPF – keeps the law in the warm, sun-blessed track of the home planet.
They are often so good at their job that some unkind, possibly incarcerated, souls have taken to calling them the ‘Thought Police’.
As the ESPF investigate current crimes on the Moon, an organisation on Earth investigates the great crime of the past, the Robots. VOID are gathering their forces and looking into the past to see how it threatens the future; the Robots left some very strange things behind them…
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