If you’re here for the first time, and wondering what this book is all about, I’d suggest you take a look at some of the Universal Union documents contained on this blog. Yeah, they’re a little dry, but what else do you expect from the Union Advanced Research Labs?

Apologies if some of the content is redacted; again, it’s not like the Universal Union is going to want their most strategic secrets spread far and wide, even if it is to a pre-Expansion culture.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy your own copy of Mecha Corps!

Because of this, let’s open another chapter on the Displacement Drive. Perhaps humanity’s largest failing isn’t its aggression or greed, but simple laziness. Since the Displacement Drive works, we don’t worry too much about how it does what it does. Nearly everyone has Displaced at least once in their lifetime, and everyone knows the drill. You shuttle up to a converted Asteroid, you board and sit in a lounge, sipping an overpriced drink. The stars change, and you shuttle down to another world, many light-years away.

Simple as that. Instantaneous travel from one point in the universe to another. Without the Displacement Drive, there would have been no Expansion. There’d be no Union, no Aliancia, no Taikong, no Corsairs. We’d be stuck in the Solar System, or perhaps even on Earth, billions of humans crammed onto a single rock with no way out. The Displacement Drive was the most important discovery of the 21st Century; it changed the course of human history forever.

Nobody can forget the epic stories of the early Expansion, when, on the heels of Jim Kwong’s Point-Based Wormhole Spatial Displacement technology (ironically funded by CERN’s asteroid-mining operations), the best and brightest of humanity rebelled against the Sustainability State to claim their asteroids and refit them as Displacement Drive ships. The story of how we almost accidentally Displaced Earth’s Moon to oblivion; the rush to get to orbit as the first Displacement Drive ships appeared overhead; the Thesis, lost to a fundamentalist nuke; the first video of worlds glowing blue and green like Earth . . . we had no idea how scarce habitable worlds would be in those early days, but reality soon set in.

Everyone knows the stories, and everyone has Displaced, but have you ever really thought about what happens during a Displacement, or (even more chilling), why there are such arbitrary limits to Displacement?

Let’s review some of the puzzling facts about Displacement:

1. Displacement only operates on masses of a billion metric tons or above. This is why all Displacement Drive ships are converted asteroids. A Displacement Drive simply won’t work in a ship the size of, say, a Hedgehog or Rhino. Kwong tried to explain this as a “point defect in gravitation which allows the wormhole to manifest,” but his math has been shown to be highly flawed, time and time again. Why does a Displacement Drive ship need such mass to Displace?

2. Displacement has both a maximum and minimum range. Displacements of less than 2 light-years and greater than 20 light-years are not possible. Anything within this range is “allowed.” Hence, it’s simple to make the trip from Eridani to Geos (17.49 light years) in one Displacement. Worlds at the edge of the human Expansion (currently about 2000 light-years in circumference) require multiple Displacements. Maneuvering between points less than 2 light-years apart requires a “drunkard’s walk” approach, where the ship Displaces at a vector away from the target, then re-Displaces back to the target. Why do these upper and lower limits exist? Kwong never really tried to analyze this, preferring to do hand-waving arguments about local causality. Current researchers say these border on the metaphysical, but they aren’t forthcoming with their own answers.

3. The amount of energy needed for Displacement is relatively low and constant. Only a hundred thousand megajoules is needed to induce Displacement, and this doesn’t change very much over a broad range of masses. Displacing a planetary size mass is not out of the realm of possibility, given current antimatter generation technology.

I’m afraid I don’t have any answers to the above questions. I’m an academic, but not a scientist. Our researchers here on Aurora tend to take the common person’s view: if it works, it works, and that’s all there is to it. I don’t think this is indicative of any great conspiracy, however; I think they are simply weary from so many years of researching the Displacement Drive, and attaining no definitive answer.

But this brings me to the question that interests me the most. It’s less about the technology than its application. The question is this: what about the Space Between?

Our use of the Displacement Drive has given us some dozens of habitable worlds, but we pop from world to world directly, not exploring the space between our points of light. In many cases, we haven’t even ventured to the cold outer planets of our stellar systems, nor to the hot inner worlds. Why? Laziness again, perhaps. “Life that can exist in such extreme environments is not of interest to us–and we have yet to find intelligent life in any case,” is the common refrain.

But I have to wonder–what hides in the Space Between?

Although many of the records have been lost, there is such a volume of them that they can’t all be destroyed (thank you, scientists and engineers, for this personality trait.) Because of this, it’s possible to put together a more complete picture of the man who created the Rogue—and the Rogue itself.

What emerges is a picture of a man obsessed with secrecy and control, and a machine as dangerous as it is powerful.

Dr. Roth’s electronic document trail is one of redirects and delays. He continually rejects UARL’s requests to benchmark the Rogue Mecha by testing it to destruction. Indeed, it’s possible that such a test was never actually performed. The document stubs become more redacted as time goes on, especially in reference to the pilots. As the volume of benchmarking requests drops, the number of requests for pilot interviews, medical histories, and detailed psychological examination rises. This seems to suggest that there are factors of Mecha use that affect the pilot. There was a documented phenomenon in mechanical Mecha, Giant’s Rage, in which the size, speed, power, and general invulnerability of the pilot was amplified by the humanoid nature of the Mecha, giving rise to destructive rages. However, the phenomenon seems to be more pronounced in biomechanical Mecha, since the battery of tests requested included markers for physical addiction.

The results of the pilot tests are equally unknown. The few tests are heavily redacted, and the pilots themselves are unavailable for interviews; it seems that most of the early biomechanical Mecha pilots never went on to additional duties. Perhaps they are too involved in the current Hellion Mecha to be easily accessible.

It is extremely improbable that the Rogues have an actual physical effect on the pilots. I can’t imagine what kind of system, biomechanical or not, that would cause physical damage other than gross trauma. Most likely the effects are entirely psychological. However, when combined with the short life of the Rogue and their disappearance from the public eye, this leads to the most phantasmagoric speculations. I’ll refrain from going further with this.

Dr. Roth, himself, furiously protects both his Rogue Mecha and his pilots, going so far as to petition the Union Prime herself for an intervention when Union Army troops occupied his labs on Earth. While the Prime has no record of responding, it is interesting that the Army quickly withdrew from its position. Perhaps the Mecha wins against the Corsairs with respect to the Independent Displacement Alliance had something to do with this. The Union always values results over all else.

Dr. Roth is also widely hated by both the Union Army, Union oversight, and his own staff. Day to day documentation show them tracking his movements so as to avoid his presence, and many tech reviews, between the redactions, contain many references to “Dr. Roth’s temper,” and “inaccurate instructions and a moving endpoint.” Dr. Roth is not a diplomat or a manager, which lends credence to the idea he created the biomechanical Mecha technology as a lone inventor. However, it still does not explain how he could have put together the resources to do so.

One of the first things I noticed is that Dr. Roth’s official bios, profiles, and interviews all view almost exactly the same. It’s as if the UUN is sticking to a very tightly controlled script when they’re conducting an interview, and Dr. Roth is saying the same well-practiced lines. If you put it together, it comes down to the same bullet-pointed facts, over and over again:

• Dr. Roth was a top-ranked conventional Mecha engineer, stationed on Geos in the Union Advanced Research labs, for 20 years
• During the course of his research, he was inspired more and more by biological rather than mechanical systems, to the point of clashing with his superiors
• He took a 10-year sabbatical from the field, during which time he was able to take his ideas to levels he didn’t even expect
• Upon demonstration of his first biomechanical Mecha prototype, the Union saw the potential and contributed funds for him to perfect the technology
• The first deployment of “Rogue” Mecha at New Jericho colony demonstrated its power as a surgical instrument, turning back a potential Corsair occupation
• The current generation of biomechanical Mecha, “Hellion,” are much more capable than the Rogues, and much more powerful
• Dr. Roth’s company, Advanced Mechaforms, Inc., is a sole contractor to the Universal Union, and maintains offices on Eridani and on Earth, where pilots are trained to handle Mecha

First-hand reports credit them with almost magical capabilities. Of course, these first-hand reports are limited, with any user video or images heavily redacted by the Universal Union, unless it happens to fit their Standard Mecha Story: that is, that Mecha are the surgical instruments needed to extract Corsairs from precious Union cities, without the loss of civilian life.

And that is a true story. Let me give the Union credit where due. Their allowed videos correlate well with what people tell us: biomechanical Mecha are amazingly swift, precise weapons, capable of truly incredible feats.This isn’t in question. Who hasn’t seen the video of the single Mecha taking out an entire battalion of Corsair-captured Taikong tanks, without a single pane of glass shattered in the surrounding buildings?

But what of the other claims, such as the ones that say Mecha can actually transform from their standard humanoid shape into something completely different? Or even combine into larger and more capable forms? This goes beyond any simple steel-armored PowerLoader, or any of the earlier mechanical Mecha, like the oft-seen Villians. This verges on magic. And magic technology, as we know, isn’t condoned by the Union.

It seems to me there are only two credible arguments here:

1. First-hand accounts are mistaken. Awed by the power of the Mecha, people have exaggerated their capabilities. This would seem to be the most plausible explanation. After all, people on pre-Expansion Earth frequently reported being abducted by alien beings—to the point where the majority of the population believed them! Of course, we now know we’re living in an empty universe. The alien races we expected to encounter during the early years of the Expansion never materialized. So the stories of abduction by alien races in the 20th and 21st centuries are clearly fantasies—fantasies that survived the probing of early memory editing equipment, I might add.

2. The Union has a double standard for technology. For “us,” the typical citizen, we’re allowed the toys and trinkets that make life tolerable in the 4th century of post-expansion. Inexpensive space travel via Displacement Drive, reasonable access to costly FTL communication systems, and all the entertainment media we can consume. For the Union military, they condone magic technologies that go far beyond what we know. While most people take “biomechanical technology” to mean “things of steel, aluminum, and titanium which use principles similar to biological structures,” might it actually mean, “a metallic matrix which behaves like a living organism?”

Yes, I know. Insanity. Nothing we know works like that. The early dreams of nanotechnology never materialized. Artificial life forms have failed when they go above a certain level of complexity. Even human genetic engineering is problematic, especially with the prevalent negative bias which goes back to the time of the HuMax genocide.

But what if–what if it was true?

We wonder about things like this:

One, if we had the technology to create wonders like the HuMax early in the human Expansion, three hundred and thirty one years ago, where has it gone now? Why haven’t we raised ourselves up above the level that one wag once declared, “The 20th Century, with faster-than-light spaceships rather than cell-phones?” Yes, we all know the Union’s excuse: In a low-density distributed state, high technology is unsustainable and incongruent with our goals.

Two, what is the Universal Union’s goals? Planets like Keller cry out for better representation in the senate on Eridani, but our Prime doesn’t hear them; indeed, she seems to be uninterested in opening new planets for colonization, despite her otherwise impeccable credentials as a Unitarian; she seems almost like the Freecycles, or, worse, the libertarian Aliancia.

Three, the Corsairs. Why don’t we have a viable early warning system in place for this scourge? Why are our Mecha always sent in after the fact, under deep cover? They say it’s to preserve the Union’s most important technological secrets, but see above. Are the Mecha really so magical? Is there truly a chance the Corsairs might capture one? It seems impossible, if you believe the stories about the Mecha’s capabilities.

Four, the Mecha themselves. Sure, we’ve all seen power-loaders and mechanical Mecha, but what about Dr. Salvatore Roth’s biomechanical technology that came out of nowhere, now a decade ago? What is Dr. Roth’s relationship with the Union? Why hasn’t this technology been more widely disseminated? Where Mecha go, there are always questions, and the deeper you go, the more disturbing the questions become.

There are a lot more things I wonder about, but those will do for now. I hope you enjoy my Dispatch while it lasts; I have no idea when (or if) the Union will decide to silence me.

Until then, I will dig into this as much as my academic background will allow.