3024 Nova Arcis A 6
The Stage of Cooperated Greed
The image of the elderly engineer faded, leaving behind the lingering sense of quiet dignity that defined Erin S. Green Brian. Cokas Bluna leaned back in his chair, visibly moved by the testament.
“A nursing mind,” Cokas murmured, quoting the engineer. “It puts a different face on the era, doesn’t it? We are taught that the mid-21st century was a time of ruthless corporate expansion. And it was. But beneath the greed, there were people like Erin, building for life.”
LYRA.ai brought the discussion back to the macro-scale. “Erin’s account provides the necessary technical context. The union of the AME and the ITT-drive - the ‘Airship’ principle - solved the lift problem. It made access to space routine. But once the technology was released in 2048, the monopoly of purpose ended. The technology that built Venice Station was immediately repurposed for a different kind of expansion.”
“My old university professors,” Cokas said with a wry smile, “the cynical ones, at least, had a name for the forty years that followed the Venice Project. They called it the ‘stage of cooperated greed.’”
In the space between them, a new image resolved: a sleek, almost primitive schematic of the Stellar Explorer, the iconic ITT-assisted spaceship. It was a machine of the common contradictions - part chemical rocket, part quantum marvel - a perfect symbol for the hybrid, chaotic age it would define.
“On the surface, it looked like a new golden age,” Cokas continued. “Humanity, finally freed from the threat of total war by the Varna-Voss ‘Grand Deception,’ turned its immense energy outwards. The same corporations and repurposed state agencies that once built weapons now built habitats. The competition didn’t end; it just changed arenas. It became a race, not for military supremacy, but for resources, for territory, for the most valuable real estate in the solar system.”
The 3D-media-stream shifted, displaying a rapid, time-lapse visualization of the solar system between 2040 and 2080. Tiny points of light - new stations, new mining outposts, new settlements - blossomed around the Moon, then Mars, then later into the Asteroid Belt and beyond, a frantic, incandescent wave of expansion.
“It was an age of incredible cooperation,” Cokas narrated, his voice a complex mix of admiration and condemnation. “You had old rivals, like the remnants of the American and Chinese state space programs, forced to partner with new corporate giants like StellarLink and Ares Dynamics. They had to cooperate to build the massive infrastructure, the supply chains, the life support systems. It was a monumental achievement.”
“But,” he added, his voice hardening slightly, “it was a cooperation driven by greed. Every dome built, every asteroid mined, was part of a relentless, high-stakes grab for power and profit. They hadn’t solved humanity’s most basic problems; they had simply exported them into the void. The old nationalisms didn’t disappear; they just rebranded themselves as corporate philosophies.”
LYRA.ai provided the Perceptionist insights. “The dominant narrative of the time, heavily promoted by OCN’s predecessor, StellarLink, was one of unified human progress. The story was simple: ‘Humanity, united at last, reaches for the stars.’ It was a powerful and, for a time, a necessary fiction. It papered over the deep, continuing divisions.”
“It gave us our first signs of the future,” Cokas conceded. “But the old issues continued to fester. Yet, all of this chaotic, greedy, brilliant expansion culminated in a single moment. A moment that, for the public, seemed to justify everything.”
The schematic of the Stellar Explorer pulsed with a soft light, drawing their attention back to the central topic.
“A moment,” Cokas concluded, a final, cautionary note in his voice, “that offered both the undeniable gift of real, tangible progress, and, as Amara Varna herself would later warn, the seductive poison of false hope.”
With that, they turned their full attention to the historical clip, a perfectly restored recording of the moment humanity first officially touched one percent of the speed of light.