Schism

"When a society breaks its social contract with the people, what obligation do the people have then to that society, I wonder."

When Carol Dreeson died last Tuesday, few of us holdovers from the era were surprised by her passing, aged as she was, like all of us now. I was surprised by the reaction, though. I suppose it is not too dissimilar an experience for anyone who is close to a titanic historical figure—the discrepancy between the person you know and the one who gets portrayed. Perhaps this is a part of what troubled me about the stories being told of my friend and colleague Carol. But there was a glaring absence her life as presented in all the official remembrances. Certainly, we lionize our heroes, and truly, Carol was that. Everyone remembered why she was beloved here on Hellenia, her leadership through the early years, lean and tough as they were. We remembered her compassion, kindness, and guidance as our civilization got its legs under it. Yet everyone seems to have forgotten that by far the most important chapter in the life of Carol Dreeson was also the most difficult. In those trying times she was, if not one of the most reviled people in the galaxy, surely among the most controversial. A pariah in her own family. A threat to the common good. A menace. This diminutive, demure, decent woman, the least likely iconoclast one could ever imagine. We see the outcome and we forget the degree to which it was all in doubt, not just here in Hellenia but in the system we call Dreeson’s now, around the planet we call Athos now, amidst the beginnings of the orbital ring that bears the planet’s name. Carol had no assurances of her place in history, as no one does. But perhaps more than any figure I can remember, those years of doubt were doubly important to shaping the beloved woman she would become.

We cannot forget this, and it seems we have. To the extent that my personal contributions to our founding have fallen into obscurity, settling under the larger umbrella of the initial work, I am satisfied to be remembered anonymously among friends—within the greater collective of early pioneers. If, though, as I hope, this account of our greatest founder becomes as well remembered as it deserves to be, perhaps even as the definitive story of Carol Dreeson’s life, then I shall have played my biggest part for Hellenia as historian and friend of our founder. Building a home from a barren, rocky moon, and shaping it into a marvel—none of that was easy. But that was not nearly as difficult as getting here. That is the real story of Carol Dreeson’s life.

For context, in the shape of posterity, your narrator is Jaylen Reece-Kedi, formerly of the city of Bartock on Charris, now of Gracia on Hellenia, whose burgeoning, though still modest population stands at roughly thirty million citizens at the time of this writing. That number reflects nearly a tenfold growth in our population since the outpost’s founding and continues apace.

My history became entangled with the Dreeson family on Charris. During the years leading up to the diaspora, as the population of Charris neared eight billion, the discussions began, at leadership institutes, within local governments, in educational materials. The drive to disperse into the galaxy became impossible to escape, especially for us, the youth of Charris. What I don’t see mentioned anywhere in present history was the downward pressure placed on us from the older generation, who over-educated us, enticed us with stories of exploration and industriousness, and then denied us entry into positions of authority and economic prosperity on Charris. It was almost as though, once they’d begun making spaceship engines again, the older generation was determined to get as many of their children off their planet as they could. And I wonder as I write this how much of their mandate is lost from the history of my generation, because it very well may have been their parents who thrust that idea upon them. So much gets obscured with the passage of time.

Our parents’ era was the age of exploration, sending out early voyages with the task of mapping the surrounding areas of the arm, searching not just for singular systems that were conducive to building populous and prosperous space societies but finding areas that were dense with numerous such systems in proximity to one another. The momentum of human progress that concerned the dwellers on Charris was always geared toward a dream of a cosmopolitan human galaxy, an interstellar network of friendly human societies that traded goods, art, technology, and culture. There could be no greater aspiration for a seed world, such as Charris, as it came to maturity, than to have its own seeds sown and sown widely to flourish.

Like many in my generation, I eagerly absorbed the spirit of the age. I studied logistics and strategy, learning these arts mostly through gaming and simulations, though I excelled in formal study as well. It was during one of these formal competitions I met Zair Dreeson, the third son of that illustrious family. We grew quite friendly as competitors, and it was through Zair that I was introduced to the Yuhl Dreeson, the eldest child of what was, on Charris, only a modestly famous family then. But their familial belief in the future of the Dreeson clan was unflinching. It was the clear expectation of their parents that the Dreeson name would echo in the stars, and what surely would have manifested as political ambition, drive for leadership, industrial domination—all the traditional occupations of the ambitious—these tendencies were solely directed into coaching the Dreeson clan into worldbuilding, which on Charris, in that era, meant securing a charter. Carol herself was too young then to be of any use to Yuhl, Barron, Zana, or my friend Zair Dreeson in crafting the charter that was eventually awarded to Yuhl for its ingeniousness, meticulousness, and potential for growth. He called it Athos—the largest human structure ever conceived, an orbital ring seven million kilometers in circumference, future home of trillions, jewel of the galaxy. Yuhl was a genius of the highest order, who had drawn from the maps of the system and its neighbors to construct a plan for Athos’s creation that was nothing short of staggering in its intricacy and creativity. First would go miners, metallurgists, and roboticists to construct the factories that would fabricate the framing. A ring in ten years, a civilization in twenty, a galactic wonder in a century. That was the promise, a perfect promise to the numbers. Nearly ten million of us were so captivated by Yuhl’s promise that we signed the charter pledging our dedicated skills, our work, our lives, and our futures to the plan. It was so big, so impossibly bold. It was also achievable, not just in the specs, but in reality. Deep-space automation and millions of metalworking macrobots made it so. The math was certain, and so were we, even young Carol Dreeson, sixteen when she signed, twenty-three when she departed, a skilled logistician, four years my junior. She was my colleague near the upper echelon of the Athos project’s department of human growth and development. By virtue of our connection to the Dreeson family, she by birth and I by friendship, Carol and I were the youngest such executives in that critical department. That was how we came to grow so close. It was also how the troubles began.

We were stationed aboard the cylinder Reyes, one of the administrative centers of the early phases of the Athos project. I still remember her first inkling of the coming strife. She walked into my office and said, “Jaylen, are you seeing with your eyes what we’ve missed in the models?”

And my response was as obtuse as I suppose we all were then: “The models haven’t missed anything.”

“That’s a no,” Carol said. “Well, we’ll need to do something about it fast or the whole thing will blow up in our faces. It’s going to fail.”

“What is?”

“Athos is going to fail.”

“But the math is correct.”

“As much as he’d like to, Jaylen, Yuhl can’t model people, and people are going to fail this project,” and she stopped that train of thought dead cold. “Scratch that. This project is going to fail them—the people. I need to see Yuhl.”

Then she walked out of my office, leaving me there dumbfounded.

It was our job to catch these things, to see that morale was satisfactory, that people had upward mobility, a sense of worth in their work. These were critical things to any project, but on the greatest engineering undertaking in the history of humanity, that meant many fronts evolving over many years. The easy part was getting people to buy in. What builder, creator, engineer, planner wouldn’t want to be a part of Athos? The challenge was whether our workforce, writ large, would still feel the same way about it after five years, ten years, twenty years. We didn’t need them to love the ring the way Yuhl did, but they couldn’t hate it, feel cheated by it, or resent that they were a part of it—at least not in large numbers. And that was what Carol foresaw long before it ever became a problem.

She called it “the tyranny of location.” Yuhl was so busy that he couldn’t see Carol about the problem for nearly a week, in which time, she did her best to define the eventual problem in terms Yuhl would recognize and consider addressing properly. The way she explained it to me was that upward mobility needed to be present in the system for a significant segment of the working population—common knowledge among us human logisticians. Some people would be fine working the same job for thirty-five years, yes, as long as the other parts of their life were fulfilling. And in those early days, that was not much of a problem as the cylinders were getting built and communities coming together under these new circumstances. It’s actually more difficult for people to remain connected to a community over generations than to feel connected to a new community they’re building. We saw this first-hand on Charris and there on Athos. The problem was that certain facets of the ring building process took place too distant to offer entry points for higher level work. The wire teams would be trained to move to other elements of the construction process when the cables were completed. But the miners stripping the asteroids needed to move further and further out, and the job remained the same. Similarly, the Ag specialists, once their cylinders were established, wouldn’t have a chance to move to the ring for decades. Thus it became logistically improbable to offer their children opportunities as apprenticing engineers ringside due to the length of the commute. The further the fleet spread out as their tasks became more specialized, the more pronounced it would become, and the more years that passed, the more hardened the social implications of these entrenched roles became. That was the problem Carol foresaw.

“You really think it’ll be that much of an issue?” I asked her. “Most of the jobs shift as the phases of the project evolve anyway.”

“Even fish understand fairness,” she said. “It’s deep in our animal brain. If you shift some people from one low-level job to another while other people are moving onto the ring and securing a better present and future for their children, Jaylen? Yeah, people are going to notice those things.”

It wasn’t that we didn’t plan for these circumstances at all. But our educational model for all these pragmatic professions, especially the few that still required the delicacy of deft human hands, it was all apprentice work, applied for and begun at early ages—the oldest and best educational model, one-on-one learning at the hands of a skilled mentor.

I agreed with Carol that the situation could generate some resentment and moral problems, but I didn’t share her assertion that the problem would become critical.

“Talk to me in five years, Jaylen,” she said, “if the top hasn’t already blown off this thing by then.”

I talked to Carol again after her meeting with Yuhl, who initially dismissed her concerns as overblown and then as something that could be dealt with piecemeal as problems came up. Despite her insistence that something needed to be done to mitigate the issue before it even arose in the consciousness of the workers, Yuhl’s concern was to keep the technical elements of the process flowing at all cost.

By then, the process, a great multi-faceted machine it its own right, with mining leading to smelting & printing, which led to bot & machine factory formation, which led to bot fleet control, which led to massive metalworks, space joining & architecture, followed by utility & environmental foundations, micro & macro automation, build site assessment and oversight. Every movement had its place and purpose. This extraordinary machine couldn’t be jeopardized by the feelings of the humans it ultimately would benefit in the long term. Yuhl’s position was that Carol’s job, along with the other human specialists was to make the problem go away, and as much as she tried to explain to him that it was physically impossible to do so, because the problem itself was physical, Yuhl insisted that the problem was hers to solve.

“It’s too big,” she told me. “The ring, the build, the job site. It’s all too big. Fatally flawed as a self-contained operation.”

Nevertheless, we had our mandate from Yuhl. Do whatever we needed to do to mitigate and keep the problem from becoming a problem. This meant maximizing and encouraging upward mobility to the extent it was possible while emphasizing community building away from the job. Carol became a leader for me in coordinating between the employment end, which I was trained for, and the community building end, which was a foreign domain for me. I learned both from her and the community organizers working in the growing clusters of cylinders and fleet groups surrounding the outer work sites.

We did our best to ensure morale was high and mobility was well advertised and offered to everyone who aspired toward it. After several years, with those extra efforts focused on the problem, I thought we were succeeding. This was five years into what Yuhl’s plans dictated as a twenty-five-year build. That was when we met Bucky.

Bucky worked in the foundry 415, which was one of the near-space foundries that worked with the Taft mining group in the system’s asteroid belt. He oversaw several hundred belts, and was, according to his service record, an excellent technician and supervisor. But he was so far out, it was rare for us to meet his like. He came into the offices in the Reyes cylinder during a week-long vacation period for his group. He had concerns.

Before he got to my office, he’d already had ten conversations with people who either didn’t understand his concerns or couldn’t do anything to address the problem. After all that, he still greeted me with a smile when he came into my office. The first words out of his mouth were: “Beautiful facility here. I’m Bucky.”

And he meant it. He looked around the transparent walls out to the causeway and up to the center of the cylinder. That office space looked a lot like a crystal maze with palms and creeping flowers and vines, morning glory, hyacinth, and bougainvillea.

“Bucky?” I said. “That’s an odd name.”

“It’s a nickname,” he said. “People struggle with my real name. Buchele Sandoval is my real name, but everyone calls me Bucky.”

“What part of Charris are you from?” I asked him.

“No part, really. My parents were in the fleet, exploring this area. I grew up on ships my whole life, me and my brothers.”

“What can I do for you Bucky?”

“Probably just pass me on to the next guy like everyone else here has been doing. Nobody really knows what to do about the problem I’m telling them about so…”

“So would you please explain it all over again for the tenth time today?” I joked with him.

“Yeah, pretty much,” he said.

“I’m about as senior as you can get in our department. Only person I could possibly pass you up to is Carol Dreeson herself, so hopefully this will be the last time you explain it.”

“The short of it is, I’ve been watching how things are going, reading, paying attention to the plan, and then I started doing some math. Thing is, we got two kids, me and my wife, and resettlement to the ring, on our schedule, won’t happen till both our daughters are all grown up. The question then is location, ten years after your types have already been there integrating into cities. Then in come the foundry workers? How’s that gonna go, do you think?”

“Are you asking me?”

“Sort of, I guess. Maybe it’s part rhetorical. Maybe you know?”

“I don’t know. It’s so far down the road.”

“Not too far to see what’s growing here.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“A caste system, Mister—I’m sorry, I didn’t catch what your name is.”

“I’m Jaylen Reece-Kedi,” I said. “Please, Bucky, call me Jaylen. And I have no idea what you mean.”

“Maybe it’s not intentional, but it sure looks like that’ll be the end result.”

“No, I mean I don’t know what that is. That word you used, I’m unfamiliar with it.”

“Caste system? Ask your assistant. Or you could take my word for it, the ignorant guy from the foundry.”

That was the first hint of resentment I detected from Bucky, and I wondered where it was coming from, for I hadn’t been anything but polite and certainly hadn’t given any sign personally that I looked down on him in any way, because I didn’t. Maybe it was the bougainvillea.

I had my digital assistant explain the word’s meaning and its origins aloud. Bucky sat nodding as she took us through a fairly comprehensive history.

When the assistant had concluded, Bucky said. “Yeah, like I said, caste system. We signed up for the bright future on the ring that Yuhl Dreeson promised us, not that.”

I knew what he meant, because he’d put his finger exactly on the sore spot Carol and I had been trying to salve. I didn’t know how to explain it away other than to say perhaps—here’s what we’ve been doing to try and mitigate and there’s nothing more we can do. So I called in Carol herself. She came within minutes, and apparently had been made aware of Bucky’s identity and his concerns.

“I’m Carol Dreeson,” she said as she came into my office and sat beside him, as though he didn’t know who she was.

“Bucky Sandoval,” he said. “I’m guessing this isn’t news to you people.”

“No. It isn’t,” Carol said. “We didn’t foresee the problem until the project was well underway, but I can assure you, we see it now, and we agree with your assessment of the situation.”

“That’s fine,” Bucky said. “Your agreement doesn’t change my daughters’ educational situation any, though.”

“Today, no,” Carol said. “But I appreciate the gravity of the situation. I know it must have taken you a day to get down here and now you’re spending your day in meetings with us rather than with your family back home.”

“Home’s not really the word for the foundry, Ms. Dreeson. The cylinder is fine. Not as nice as this place, but I’m a realist. It’s fine, though. But that place is a work camp as far as my wife and I are concerned. Home will be the ring. We didn’t expect to move in before you and your siblings, but fifteen years later, after smelting a million miles of metal and turning another generation of our family into travelers and roughnecks? That’s not what we had in mind for our girls. Charter said fifteen years.”

“Of work, yes.”

“And then we’re expected to wait however many years more before we’re placed?”

“I understand. It’s a problem,” Carol said.

“You don’t,” Bucky said. “I’m not the only one to notice, Ms. Dreeson. My daughters aren’t the only kids of workers who aren’t going to be overlooked. Pretty much everyone we talk to sees the same thing. We signed up for a brighter future. And the social structure we’re getting is an ugly one from an ugly past. We’re going to get treated better or Yuhl’s not getting his ring. That’s as friendly as I can put it while still being direct.”

“I’d like to meet with you more, Bucky,” Carol said. “This work takes precedence over your foundry duties until we sort it out.”

Bucky shrugged, but he seemed to grow a bit more appreciative of Carol’s overture as she made it clear to him that she genuinely wanted to settle the issue fairly.

He remained with us aboard the Reyes cylinder for nearly a full week helping us to map out the scope of the issue, working through occupational spreadsheets from the most massive mining operations to fleet transport and duty rosters of individual service vessels. The outcome was always the same, though, the managerial class—executives and the top-level engineers—they preceded the workers by five, ten, even fifteen years on their resettlement to Athos. The plan was to literally leave these people behind. Carol saw it, and she was not happy about it.

She took the work we’d done with Bucky to Yuhl. Only now, she had a much clearer map of the problem’s scope to show him. She also had a sense of Bucky’s resolve. He’d been polite, but he was firm in his position that he and his children were not going to be relegated to second-class citizenship, and neither were the other three million workers in the outer fleet.

This was the polite phase in what came to be called “the crack in the charter”—the days before talks of workers’ strikes, flash work boycotts, threats of sabotage and outright revolt. Yuhl didn’t understand yet. In that second meeting, he told his sister to tell the workers to review the charter they’d all signed as well as their contracts. There were always conditions that people didn’t consider in advance. The onus had been on them, according to Yuhl.

What Carol tried and failed to convey was that contract or no, you couldn’t force anyone to work. They had to continue to do so willingly or the project would fall apart. And they had to be satisfied with the conditions as they were in reality, not in the contract.

I honestly felt bad for Yuhl. He wasn’t obstinate, and I don’t think he was deliberately trying to be exploitative of the workforce. I just don’t think he could see anything but the ring. He worked maniacally himself—fourteen-hour days, six days a week, checking in regularly on the seventh, and he didn’t understand how anyone would do otherwise, not with the prospect of the ring on the horizon. Athos was to be humanity’s greatest creation. Had it been physically and socially possible, Yuhl Dreeson wouldn’t have slept. He’d have skipped every last meal, foregone every recreation and pleasure. The ring was all.

Unfortunately for Yuhl, the human workers overseeing the metals understood their leverage points. In that phase of the project, millions if not billions of metalworking bots had already been fabricated for the construction of the ring’s main structural elements. They were fully dependent on the steady supply of workable metals to keep the project moving. And people were a major part of that supply process. That had been part of the appeal of Yuhl’s proposal in the first place—a human wonder built with human ingenuity and sweat equity, and somehow, he’d forgotten the human tendency of human workers to have a say in the little things, like their children’s education and future prospects. It was difficult for Carol to reconcile the process at work with the foundational beliefs she knew Yuhl had been raised with.

It only got worse as pressure mounted. As threats to slow the workflow or even outright strike mounted, Yuhl demanded more of Carol. She was often dispatched to quell flare-ups of anger and noncompliance at various pressure points in the process. Often, I would accompany her. Just as often, we would return with the same bewilderment over the degree to which these workers were voiceless.

“The problem is they have no representative I can even speak with,” Carol said. “Bucky was the closest thing they ever had, but he’s a metallurgist, not a solicitor or a diplomat. Sometimes I wonder whether Yuhl wants to keep it that way.”

“It seems like we’re making the same promises to different people,” I told her.

“If I’m honest, Jaylen, I feel far more compelled to advocate for them than for Yuhl. I don’t know what would become of that, though.”

“What do you suppose will become of it if no one advocates for them?” I asked her. “I mean the society? Let’s say we get through the project without it going off the rails—no major stoppages or setbacks. What’s the society that results? Not the ring, I mean. The civilization that lives there?”

“Good questions, Jaylen. The right questions.”

The anger kept building, and Carol took it personally. She became increasingly emotional after these trips, where she felt that she was being forced to lie to the very people it was our job to serve, and they reacted quite often with real venom and vitriol. I think what made Carol different is that rather than growing resentful of the people lashing out at her, she listened to the substance of their complaints despite the animosity directed at her.

A year and a half to the day after he first came to see us, Bucky reappeared in my office while Carol was out meeting with the bot wranglers. They were beginning to connect wires to major fittings and reactor stations, nearly a year out on the schedule from when we would be ready to spin the first wire pair.

“I want to see her,” he told me. “We’re not stupid. Nothing has changed in eighteen months, except the lip service is becoming less and less believable as it grows louder.”

“I’ll listen,” I said. “But you’re clever enough to understand, Bucky, that if Carol doesn’t have enough pull with Yuhl to change the order of things, I certainly don’t.”

“We’re going to unionize,” he said. “The metalworkers, the miners, the bot minders, the ship hands. All different unions too, make it a living hell to negotiate with the workforce. We’re not going to tolerate being second-class citizens, and we’re certainly not going to build the nation that seems destined to make us that. Not going to happen.”

“I respect that,” I told him. “I don’t know how to fix it, though. I believe in your right to control your future. I also think we should build the ring, that it will be one of the greatest achievements in human history.”

“Only if it doesn’t reflect what history always has. People like me and my family turning the wheel while people like you and the Dreesons benefit from supervising the work. You won’t see our faces at the ceremonies for that accomplishment. We’ll still be smelting ore out at the L3.”

“I’ll write you a dispensation if you’d like to stay and wait for Carol to get back,” I told him. “We’re long overdue for a conversation.”

“No, we’re long overdue for some action. The conversation has become part of the problem, Jaylen. I’m going back to the 415. You tell Ms. Dreeson to come see me when she gets back.”

When Carol returned from meeting the bot wranglers, she was distraught. We were close enough neighbors on the Reyes cylinder that she didn’t have far to go to come visit me at home, and it was late in the evening when she returned, so I wasn’t at the office. She was in tears. I’d never seen her in such a state.

“I lied to them, Jaylen,” she kept saying. “I looked them in the eyes and I lied to them. Over and over.”

“How so, Carol?”

She didn’t answer me directly.

“I came to the realization in the shuttle on the way back that if I’m going to continue to serve this project, I’m going to have to lie to the workers for the next fifteen years. I’m done with it.”

“I don’t think we should lie to anybody,” I said. “But what can we do?”

“Jaylen, I want you to advocate for the project—for the government, I guess—in all these negotiations with the workers from now on.”

“And you?” I asked her.

“I’m going to advocate for them.”

I knew it wouldn’t be an easy proposition on any front for her. As a Dreeson, especially one who’d been actively advocating for the project for several years against their interests—at least as the workers perceived them—to turn around and claim to represent the people would be met with justified skepticism. Meanwhile, Yuhl was going to lose his mind over a course of action we expected he’d view as a betrayal on both a familial and professional level. We were not wrong in that assessment. Carol went to visit Bucky, and while she was gone, Yuhl himself came to visit me with Zair, Zana, and Barron Dreeson in tow, apparently in an attempt to stage a family intervention. He was incensed that she was out in the field so much amongst the workers rather than managing from our central office on Reyes.

“That’s her way,” I told him. “It hasn’t been easy for her to tamp down tensions among the workers, Yuhl. She’s very sensitive to their needs.”

“She needs to be more sensitive to the delicate nature of the project. Every benchmark must be met in turn. Delay would mean disaster for the project.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m certain her actions are primarily in service of that common goal.”

I wasn’t remotely certain of that. But I didn’t know what else to tell Yuhl. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him that I thought her advocacy could lead to a splintering of the workforce. It depended, frankly, on Yuhl and his lead engineers—whether they were willing to be flexible in what they offered the workers. He still maintained that the situation dictated their circumstances, as though it were a law of physics. The work itself required certain actions of the workers and could not stop regardless of the reason.

Carol came back from meeting with Bucky with very different ideas from Yuhl. Strident ideas. She’d fully embraced Bucky’s position on splintering the workforce into separate negotiating groups on the idea that each had different needs and all had to be addressed before work could proceed any further. Assurances had to be given and be real. Anything else, she believed, was just a delay tactic on Yuhl’s part. She wanted to bring in representatives of each faction for a meeting with Yuhl.

I told her that was a terrible idea, that she needed to meet with Yuhl first. Both parties needed some softening up before they got in a room together. That was my sense, and thankfully, Carol took my advice. She also took me to that meeting with Yuhl, which was, I guess, the best way I could describe it? Explosive.

Beyond the phenomenal amount of emotional capital that Yuhl and the rest of the Dreeson siblings had invested in Athos, there were familial tensions bubbling beneath the surface that came out in that meeting that I had no idea even existed. Resentment, jealousy, pride, lingering unsettled anger from past childhood grievances. Zair and I, mostly, ended up playing peacemaker as best we could, but even he got sucked into the infighting.

Carol, skilled negotiator that she’d become, didn’t go into the meeting without alternatives, options, solutions. Each was met by, essentially, the same objection from everyone in the room, especially Yuhl, that every small delay compounded the delays downstream in the process, such that a work stoppage of two months eventually would translate into a later end date of two additional years for the initial construction phase of the project. Her tactics could take a thirty-year project and turn it into a sixty-year project if she insisted on going down that road. There was truth to that point, but there was also truth to the fact that the family’s rigidity and unwillingness to listen to alternatives risked fracturing the project’s workforce altogether, such that Athos could turn into a perpetually squabbling cylinder group rotating around an unfinished orbital ring that loomed over the planet as a symbolic monolith to their inability to cooperate and reach a fair outcome.

Carol’s suggestions ranged from a lottery system for lots in the capitol city on the ring, to recruiting new workers from Charris to replace workers retiring to the ring before project completion, to delaying population of the ring until all the work was completed, which seemed fairest to my mind. But that, Yuhl’s engineers estimated, would add nearly fifteen years to the end of the project date, largely on daily commuting of the on-site project managers to and from the ring.

If I were to point to the very moment of Hellenia’s conception, it was in that meeting, nearly seven hours in. The lot of us, angry, frustrated, exhausted, hungry, with little progress having been made, Yuhl, head shaking, turned to Carol and said, “I just can’t figure what’s gotten into you, sister, that you would derail the entire project and delay it by decades so you can lead some sort of ill-conceived peasant’s revolt as though you’re some sort of champion of the people. As if that were somehow heroic and not stupid. Millions of people will have to wait ten years for their new lives for the sakes of your workers’ egos.”

Carol, to her credit, responded rather emotionlessly, “Who are the peasants, Yuhl?”

“It was a turn of phrase,” he said angrily. “An expression.”

Carol took a deep breath, but didn’t offer any retort to that. I tried to carry the conversation back to the grounds of negotiations, alternatives, but I could see as the meeting wound down a different kind of energy from Carol herself, a resignation of sorts.

After the meeting concluded she made a telling remark to me on the way back to the Reyes cylinder.

“When a society breaks its social contract with the people, what obligation do the people have then to that society, I wonder.”

She didn’t answer that question, and neither did I. Carol was quiet for weeks after that fateful meeting, but I could tell she was disturbed by the ease with which Yuhl had adopted an aristocratic and dismissive attitude toward what we both viewed as legitimate grievances of ordinary people. Both he and the other Dreeson siblings, Zair perhaps excluded, seemed to be in total denial of that fact. The timeline, in their view, absolved them of listening to Carol’s proposals.

Carol did not talk to me much in the following weeks. We were still acting as adversaries in what was very much a performative negotiation between Yuhl’s interests, which I represented nominally, and the workers’ interests, which Carol was passionately advocating for. Unbeknownst to me in those weeks, she began exploring an alternative I’d have considered unthinkable at the beginning of the project—forming a splinter group to colonize another star system. From what I was told later, Carol had thought of this plan as nothing more than a bargaining chip, the last resort to put on the table to move Yuhl if all else failed. She told me later that when she assigned the small team of speculators the task of seeking out alternative systems, she gave them the genuine impression that she intended to break up the fleet. But that was never her true intention. She merely wanted them to develop a serious, legitimate alternative as a bargaining tool, and their belief in its legitimacy ensured that the plan would be formidable. It was only after Carol saw their plans for Hellenia that the thought of breaking away became an alternative with a grain of appeal.

Less than six light years from the system of Athos was a G-type main-sequence star with six planetary bodies, one of which was a Neptune-sized gas giant with a moon approximately point-nine Earth masses rich with abundant metal and mineral deposits. The speculators initially called that moon Helen, for they found her in a state of bright white light at the far edge of the planet’s terminus, emerging in sunlight, seemingly putting on a show to mark the arrival of her first human visitors—a “sign,” as one of the explorers had put it.

Helen was barren, bereft of an atmosphere or magnetosphere, but she was orbiting far enough from the planet that there was minimal tidal heating on the planet’s interior from the gas giant’s gravitational pull. She was incredibly stable, and the system itself, which had been thoroughly examined through spectroscopy, had all the necessary elements for a robust human civilization in the six planets of the system and their moons.

Best of all, a city capable of housing four million people could be erected in a matter of several years, given the materials readily available on the moon’s surface and the equipment in the fleet circling Athos.

The most difficult part of the entire operation, according to the speculators, would be the terms of their divorce from the Athosians. Calling it that—a divorce—was just the framework Carol had been lacking, but it crystalized the thing in her mind. What was a divorce if not breaking a charter that two people had solemnly pledged their lives to and later came to find intolerable? Marriage was a contract far more sacred than the Athos charter and one which billions of people over the centuries had broken. It was also the first time Carol or I could ever recall having heard any people referred to as “Athosians.”

She wasn’t open with me in those months, but later, after the schism unfolded, she confided in me what had been eating at her all that time. “I thought, Jaylen,” she said, “that we were going out of our way to force these people to be a part of a civilization that didn’t particularly want them. And I wondered why they should want to live in a home where they weren’t appreciated. The prospect of Hellenia put us in a position of strength when we went back to the table with Yuhl. He could either deal with us fairly or we could walk away from the table with our heads high.”

Carol didn’t go into that meeting unprepared either. Yuhl had no idea that she was ready to do anything more than she’d been promising to do for years now—threaten to strike, boycott, and kick up a fuss. But Carol came not just with a plan for an alternative, but with a list of resources that our faction would be taking with us, including bots by the millions, ships, mining concerns and foundries, Ag groups, and even a fair number of engineers who shared the concerns of the human resources departments. By the time Carol had formally proposed the split to Yuhl, it was almost a foregone conclusion in the minds of the millions of workers who’d grown to feel spurned by the society they were laboring to build. All that time, poor Yuhl Dreeson had been suffering under the belief that all he’d been building was a structure. Carol had gone so far as to hire attorneys who specialized in divorce proceedings to draft a framework that severed the fleet in a manner that would be equitable, ensuring that the process crippled the prospects of neither faction.

We thought all of this was fair. Yuhl’s supporters, who began to be called originalists, were irate. They seemed to hold to the notion that the proper legal analogues to the Athos charter we’d all signed were conscriptions aboard wooden ships in the old seafaring era of Earth. Death to deserters! And so forth. Times had changed a little was our position. To be fair, our departure was going to significantly alter and lengthen the construction phase of the project. We speculated that Yuhl would likely need to solicit Charris for millions more future Athosian citizens. There would be a yawning gap in their capability to carry out the plan. But we understood how fiercely resourceful the Dreeson group was. They would survive, and eventually, build their ring.

By that time, whatever reservations Bucky and the other proponents of the schism had once held about Carol had long been put to rest. They were the first to come to her defense when she was attacked by the originalists as a traitor or an opportunist who was merely using the people to make a name for herself as a humanitarian. Honestly, I think it was less Carol’s desire to be seen as anything than it was her desire to live in a society that didn’t openly mock its own ideals by failing to live up to them.

By the time Carol’s divorce plan was fully articulated and on the table, there was no longer a possibility of making the original Athos project whole again. Nearly three quarters of the laboring workforce was prepared to leave for Hellenia, as we’d named our great moon. That number was too high for Athos to remain tenable, even on a much longer scale, and this final major hurdle at last brought Yuhl Dreeson to negotiations in earnest. He, Zana, Barron, and even Zair were furious at Carol—and me, by extension. But the survival of the entire project was now at stake, so they came to talk, and initially it did not go well. Divorces are never free from contention. Ultimately, Zair suggested that it would be best if he and I were left alone to hammer out the details of the split with legal representation from both sides. Amazingly, with all the strife through those early years of the Athos ring’s construction, that was the first time that work finally came to a stop.

Zair and I negotiated for nearly a month. His main concern was retaining enough of the workforce to continue construction while they recruited new pilgrims from Charris, a contingency that would take nearly two years to make up for the shortfall. My main concern was in maintaining an amicable relationship with Athos.

Carol herself, meanwhile, went to see Hellenia with her own eyes for the first time. There were major engineering concerns to be addressed colonizing a barren moon. All of the structures would need to be formed as closed units with radiation dampening properties, which meant little sky until an atmosphere could be syphoned off Hellenia’s gas giant which the surveyors had named, appropriately, Troia. Carol returned to Athos brimming with a sense of optimism and glowing reports about Hellenia’s desolate beauty. She had one request of me, however, in negotiations. “We need their engineers, Jaylen. We’re going to need ingenuity in abundance.”

After all, we needed each other.

Zair and I began and ended the negotiations with that premise, and within several weeks, we appeared to be closing in on a mutually agreeable outcome when the final obstacle presented itself. The engineers, who had mostly remained loyal to the initial charter, did not take kindly to having their services bartered as though their lives and futures were fungible tokens. When drafts of the separation framework were circulated, the response from the engineers and architects was to form a guild of sorts called the Technician Rights and Services Protectorate, which demanded a seat at the table with Zair and I as an equal party. Neither of us objected.

The final pieces that sealed the agreement were as follows. First, the Trasp engineering guild would provide education and mentorship for any citizen of both sites with appropriate test scores and willingness to relocate. In exchange for third-party control of engineering management, the Trasp guaranteed full service to both sites for the duration of both projects. There was even talk of a second ring around the smaller gas giant neighboring Athos. Certainly those engineers loved to build.

Second, all workers would work on six-month contracts, guaranteeing them the right to re-negotiate the terms of their circumstances at regular intervals.

The last major compromise was at Carol’s insistence, and was a piece I needed to fight Zair for with great persistence, as Yuhl was hard-set against it. But ultimately, citizens of Athos or Hellenia would be, in perpetuity, recognized as dual citizens with the rights, privileges, and responsibilities thereof, free to relocate at any time for any reason.

“We may be a squabbling family,” Carol told me when she proposed that clause, “but we’re family, and we always will be.”

There was a ceremony signing this new charter where Yuhl and Carol were the primary signatories posing for pictures wearing labored smiles. For me, though, the moment I will always remember was after finally concluding negotiations over that charter: Zair Dreeson and I left the room together, old friends still, and we shook hands. I couldn’t help but hold onto that handshake for a few seconds longer, and perhaps he did as well, sensing a tremendous gravity in the moment. The history of two worlds diverging, yet as perpetual friends instead of enemies, always a short jump and a handshake away.

None of that was guaranteed. Much of it was Carol Dreeson. So this week, as we remember the pride of the early years, the way Carol reminded us all that the most important part in the work of building a new world was the actual work itself—that most adventures were ninety-percent drudgery, boredom, and sweat. All those early speeches. Yes, I too will remember the leader she became. But I’ll never forget the precariousness of the limbs Carol Dreeson boldly stepped out onto—so young, in her mid-twenties when it all really began, standing almost solitarily against the genius of the plan, against her formidable siblings, against the inertia of the galaxy it seemed at times. And Carol Dreeson said no. She may have stood as much chance of stopping the planet spinning in its tracks as stopping the work around it. Yet she did it anyway. She said no. Carol Dreeson said no, and an entire world was born.

I implore you all to remember that truth as the sun rises on Hellenia tomorrow.