Mark 3.11.AI-14

My name is John Hiporia Barrére. Hiporia was my grandfather's name. John was his father's name. Barrére has been the family name for as long as I can remember. Why am I writing this journal? I cannot say I know. Who will even read it? Certainly not Ma, or Lily. What I write will be too private for that. I guess I'll be writing these journal entries as a way of releasing my feelings instead of punching someone. I think Ma would approve.

Today was the first day of the new school year. I'm 13 years old, almost done with school. At 16 I am enrolled in what we called FRI, which means Forced Recruitment and Initiation. There used to be an old saying that said Friday was a student's favorite day. Not for the sixteens, I can tell you that. All of the boys hate it, or at least the idea of it. We don't know what happens after FRI, because no one has ever come back to tell us. Actually, that's not true. Some come back. In wooden coffins. I don't know where the girls go, but its somewhere similar. They don't allow the boys and girls together, not after 16. And they don't see each other again until they're 18, and ready to enlist in the TEC. Or so we think. They couldn't separate us forever, could they?

But back to school. I log into school at 8:45 every morning, and sign off at 16:00 every afternoon. Each class period is about 45 minutes long, with 10 minute breaks in between. We have a free hour, from 11:00 to 12:00, for lunch. My teacher is Ms. Debrask, and she teaches about 100 kids at a time. I learn a lot in her classes, and Ms. Debrask also tells us about the news and current events, so I learn a lot about how the Trade Order works "in the today," as she says. I only wish I understood half the things Ms. Debrask says about the Order.

Mark 10.11.AI-14

My planet is called Lusitania, and it is the economic capital of the Eastern Rim. Some people call it "the Jewel of the Eastern Rim" because of the vast riches of the planet's natural resources. Even Nuremsk, a small town--not even a city--on the fringe of Lusitanian civilization, is located beside a large and successful mining operation that is mining under the Burask Mountains. The Burask Mountains are a formidable mountain range containing a confusing labyrinth of twists and turns around its snowy peaks. Every year deaths are reported of explorers who had tried to discover trails through the mountains. In fact, there was only one safe passage through the mountains: Valkyrie's Trust, named after the planet's president who had ordered the passage cut through the mountain range. The Trust, as most people called it, cut straight through the middle of the mountain range like a knife, and there was a heavy government toll to travel through it. The Burask Mountains cut Lusitania's Western Hemisphere almost in half. There were no mountains in the far north or the far south of the region, but those passes were very cold and very hot respectively, and not many people traveled around the mountains when they could just cut right through then. The expense was considered worth it.

Valkyrie's Trust was very wide, allowing a lot of traffic to pass through, and a lot of traffic did. It was impossible to fly over the mountains; all material used to make flying machines of any kind--planes, spacecraft, even old-fashion hover cars--was "requisitioned" by the TEC for the war effort. Anyway, explorers were always trying to find new, natural passes through the Burask Mountains, but they were always either driven back by the weather or lack of food, or they were killed by frostbite, starvation, or the wild animals that prowled the bases of the mountain for the elk-deer hybrids that reside there. I don't think anything actually lives inside the mountain range.

Mark 12.11.AI-14

Who am I writing this for? When I write in this journal I feel as if I'm talking to someone, but I have no idea who that would be. Whoever you are, I guess I'm describing my planet to you. I live on the outskirts of Nuremsk, near the entrance to the big mining operation under the Burask Mountains. My father used to work in the mine, before a cave-in killed him and three other men. It's just me, my ma, and my six year-old sister Lily now. I guess times would be tough, but ma has this special formula that washes the soot right out of clothes. She used to use it for dad, but now she sells it to the wives of the miners, and we get by. The nearest city from Nuremsk is 15 leagues away, so we're pretty isolated. We don't have much to do with the planetary government, but we send our required TEC resource taxes just like everyone else. No one from Nuremsk has ever been famous, inside or outside the military, who call themselves the Trader Emergency Coalition, or TEC. The nearest we have to a celebrity is Charles Barklin, the Southeastern Mining Supervisor. Since Nuremsk is located in the southeastern foothills of the Burask Mountains, Charles Barklin is the overseer for all of the Nuremsk miners. But Charles Barklin is not from Nuremsk, so he doesn't really count. Charles is from Lusitania's capital, New Enterprise, where the mining company's headquarters are located. New Enterprise...every time I hear the name I laugh. Can't you tell how economically driven the Lusitanians are? "Money squanderers," ma calls the New Enterprise folk.

Sometimes some bigshot top-of-the-company executives show up at Nuremsk to oversee the mining and to try to figure out how they could be bringing out a bigger yield. One of their "experiments" with a remotely-controlled mining drone was what killed my father and collapsed a whole section of the mine. The company, called Energon, has been reluctant to perform more "experiments" since then. I used to believe it was because four people had died, one of them my father, but ma told me it was because the section of mine that had collapsed had cut off access to a lot of high-grade ore, and it had put the company back by several months. Which, by Lusitanian standards, was almost a declaration of bankruptcy. Energon has lots of money, apparently, because throughout the months of little to no yield during which mining navigation programs charted out a new, safe route to the large stockpile of high-grade ore, the company never fired a single employee. Not a one. Some people said that the money came out of the company president's own pocket. I think its a man named Almence Saffour, but I'm not sure. That name sounds right though; Energon's president is foreign.

It has been four years since I lost my father.

Mark 13.11.AI-14

I've made it seem like the Burask Mountain range is a very important landmark on Lusitania, but its not. Not really. Sure, Valkyrie's Trust is internationally known, but not many people care to learn the name of the mountain range in which the pass cuts through. Only Energon and mining towns like Nuremsk really care about the mountains. To the rest of the world, the Burask Mountain range is just another of the rather interesting natural formations of Lusitania that the population can brag about. To the people of Nuremsk, however, the mountains mean much more. We care for the mountains, and they care for us. But now the mountain range is sick, and naturally the people of Nuremsk, living practically at the mountain range's base, are very concerned. Another of Lusitania's rather unique geological features is a rotating hot spot beneath the planet's mantle. As Lusitania orbits around its run, Rao, it wobbles, and for some reason this combined with some mineral properties in the crust itself allows for the hot spot to drift through the mantle. My teacher explained it all, but it was too much science and I didn't understand her. I don't think I did too well on that test. Anyway, this hot spot is much, much hotter than the average hot spot; you can actually feel the heat of the hot spot in the ground above it. Every few decades the hot spot gets "caught" in a particularly tough piece of the mantle and begins building up pressure until it explodes, gets free, and starts moving again. Normally, the heat is rather pleasant, and the path the hot spot usually takes is known as the Retreat Zone because of all the spas and tourists. Usually the Lusitanian Grounds Defense Force--otherwise known as the LGDF--drills vents above the trapped hot spot to release some of the pressure and to prevent an explosion. But there are times when this cannot be done. For instance, when the hot spot traps itself under Mt. Belfourd, the tallest mountain in the Burask Mountain range. And, as chance has it, Mt. Belfourd is located in the southeastern portion of the mountain range. Putting Nuremsk in serious danger in the occassion of an eruption. That hot spot, named Old Stool after the amount of crap the LGDF has to deal with to keep the hot spot under control, was essentially turning Mt. Belfourd into the largest volcano on the planet. 

Mark 4.2.AI-15

Much has happened since I've last written, and I hardly know where to begin. Nuremsk, and several towns like it, have been evacuated in reaction to the black smoke that billows constantly from small vent holes that the LGDF drilled around the base of Mt. Belfourd. The vents, drilled to release some of the stress building up on the mountain, do nothing but release huge clouds of ash and smoke that billow up and covers the area in perpetual darkness. My teacher, Ms. Debrask, says the pressure readings for the mountain have not slowed, and an eruption is predicted within the next few months. Normally the computers would be able to estimate the exact day and time of the eruption, give or take three minutes. The instability of the hot spot, however, is throwing a wrench into their systems, so to speak. The pressure evaluation programs have predicted eruptions everywhere from next week to five months from now. Obviously, they can't be relied on at this time. So the Lusitanian government made a decision: all affected areas by the volcano would  be evacuated for the next five months, and their futures determined after the explosion. The entire population of Nuremsk had to leave, and there was a very good certainty that we would never be coming back. Ash from the explosion is predicted to completely cover Nuremsk. Sometime in the next five months, my home will be buried under the earth by mounds of black ash. During class one girl asked how they could be sure that Nuremsk would be buried when they couldn't even determine when the eruption would take place. Ms. Debrask, a stickler for grammar, first made the girl explain who "they" were (the government), and then told us that the computer programs were predicting the severity of the explosion with 100% accuracy; it was only the time of the explosion that the programs were having difficulty predicting. Being an adult, Ms. Debrask had access to the worldwide web (WwW), so she probably knew what she was talking about. Still legally a child, my personal terminal only had access to my regional databases, or the regionwide web (RwW). And with me living in the newly constructed New Nuremsk, there were no databases yet created that I could access. It was frustrating.

Mark 6.2.AI-15

Strange news reports are being sent to New Nuremsk via AaW (All-access Web). In the RwW version, the important bits were edited out, but my ma showed me the WwW version. Strange, indistinct reports of ships of an unrecognizable design are being transmitted from the Eastern Frontier. The weird thing is, the war with the alien Vasari has never left the Western sectors in all of the fifteen years that we have been fighting them. The reporters speculate on whether or not these ships mean an entirely new sentient species has discovered us, and what that would mean in the TEC-Vasari war. Would these new creatures help us, or fight against us? So far the ships have not approached the TEC or TEC-controlled planets in any way. More and more unidentifiable ships just keep massing on the farthest corners of the Eastern Frontier. The reporters were not sure whether these ships belong to a subspecies of the Vasari or a new alien species entirely. Oh yes, the ships have actually contacted the TEC, once. They sent a single transmission on every available radio channel, which was what alerted the TEC to their presence in the first place. From the transmission, the TEC has learned only one thing about these new aliens.

They call themselves the Advent.

Mark. 7.2.AI-15

With the transfer of Nuremsk to New Nuremsk, many of the men believed that they were out of a job, as there was no mining to be done on the edge of Borongoa, a dense forest that takes up a quarter of Lusitania's southern hemisphere. Many of the former miners resigned themselves to becoming foresters, hopefully for a company in Energon's business conglomerate. They might be more willing to take former employees of one of their sister corporations. A sizable number did become foresters, which specifically meant becoming minor engineers to build the type of labor drones needed to fell and harvest trees. Metals and crystals of any kind, however, were in vast demand due to the war, and while Energon could stay in business with the absence of all the miners from Nuremsk, it was loathe to give up all mining operations in the southeastern section of the Burask Mountains. Therefore Almence Saffour, the president of Energon, and the rest of Energon's board of directors gave all of the remaining Energon employees a temporary, higher-paying job. The Nuremsk folk would begin construction of a system of underground tunnels and bunkers that would eventually connect all of Lusitania's major cities in an underground network. These, the board declared, would be kept for emergency purposes when it would become "prudent for the citizenry of Lusitania to travel and live temporarily underground." The government would even pay Energon to build these emergency shelters, so Energon would get rich and the Nuremsk employees would be getting higher wages. New Nuremsk was placed on the map overnight. Many of the former miners-now foresters applied to Energon for their old jobs back, but Energon was receiving so many new employees that the foresters had to remain foresters. New Nuremsk was growing rapidly as well; in a year or two it would be a proper city. The underground network of tunnels would begin at New Nuremsk, so all the new Energon employees flocked to New Nuremsk as fast as the construction drones could finish neighborhoods. You could always tell an original Nuremer from a new Nuremer; the "newbies" called themselves New Nuremers while us originals just called ourselves plain old Nuremers. Oh, and by some mix-up with Energon records, our house received a shiny new Energon employee personal identification card, or P.I., as all the workers called them. The name on the card was Jack Barrére, my father. I guess some secretary android had a bug and hadn't properly record my father as deceased. But this was a blessing, and it came at just the right time. With all the new arrivals in town, all bringing their trades and businesses, the miners' wives could now go to the best laundromats that could be found, and no longer needed my mother's special cleaning formula. And we wouldn't be getting the new Energon pay raise unless Jack Barrére, deceased four years, showed up for work. It really left only one option. Next week I drop out of school and begin working in the mines. As long as I am careful, I won't be sent to jail for all the laws I will be breaking.