PmWiki | PaintItGreen / Grezzo

Near future.

An independently wealthy science hobbyist invents a precursor to the warp drive: it allows speeds to up to approximately 1.15c (thus showing that the speed of light can be surpassed, although it's not practical for interstellar travel) and, most importantly, reduces the amount of propellant that a space probe requires to operate by 85%. The drive is useless in an atmosphere.

The hobbyist has sold his grandparents' house to afford the test probe's construction and launch, and the probe, marked as an Earth-orbital Cubesat, has just zoomed itself into a rendezvous with Mars, thanks to having more delta-V than it could ever want.

The hobbyist hastily sends out the sensor data, basic design, and the like to a local science journal, as well as to his country's patent office.

The next day, a group of very serious people come to visit. They look like they're CIA or something, but no, they're from a US military prime contractor.

They want to buy out the hobbyist's design and single-member LLC, for a cool billion dollars. That's peanuts, obviously.

This particular prime contractor, although wealthy beyond measure, has had significant setbacks lately. Their weapons glitch out during tests, their rockets and capsules are always behind schedule, and so on. The truth is, they need something spectacular for a comeback. This may not even be any sort of dark conspiracy, it's just... marketing. The hobbyist is well aware, as this particular company is regularly made fun of on techie and maker blogs.

"A billion dollars buys you bragging rights. I'll tell everyone you sponsored me, your current CEO gets to be second author on the patent. But that's all it does. I keep shop rights and I'll license the technology to who I want -- although I'll listen to your boss if he has any advice to give. This is one for the history books; our names will be printed next to Von Braun, Goddard, Webb, and Korolev."

"I came here with instructions to buy the whole thing. Or else."

"Well, then call your boss! I know it's four in the morning in America, but this is worth getting up early. Or you can come back later, but who knows who's going to show up at my door in an hour, no?"

The hobbyist doesn't acknowledge the "or else", for now.

The hobbyist, Gregorio, called Grezzo by friends because he's impressively hairy and hasn't shaved in years, lives in a little town in central italy; it's slowly dying, most of the population retired or about to. The place is close enough to the historical town of Vinci that, when the headlines appear in a couple of days, the comparisons to Leonardo are inevitable.

The "security consultants" stay. Fortunately for Gregorio, they don't speak Italian.

Gregorio refuses to talk to national or international media until he has given an exclusive interview to the town's struggling three-days-a-week newspaper. Likewise, after buying back his grandparents' home, he starts making lavish purchase orders -- several million dollars in total -- from local businesses. He pays the bar tab of everyone in town, tells a florist to deliver an enormous order to the local church in vote to a local saint, and all that.

The prime contractor's people, used to cutthroat economics, don't understand what he's doing. Eventually, someone figures it out; Grezzo wants his little town to thrive from this. The prime contractor's CEO figures that, if he plays along, he will be able to extract furhter concessions from the inventor. When he in turn is interviewed, he mentions hometown pride about a little town in the Mojave where in truth he hasn't set foot in twenty years. He is called out on that on social media almost immediately.

The normally sluggish Italian patent system, for reasons of national pride, present Grezzo with a patent (in his name with the American CEO guy as a co-inventor) in record time, less than two weeks. Unfortunately, that's where the lawsuits start. No less than four other companies come out of the woodwork, claiming that they were working on something similar.

Grezzo is overwhelmed; he wants to get back to work, not talk to lawyers all day. The Americans figure that now is a good time to offer to change the deal in their favor a bit.

Grezzo's solution is very middle-Italian. He calls a press conference (with CNN, RAI, the BBC, and so on, this time) and tells everyone "Vaffanculo a tutti, my hyperdrive is now open source under the General Public License. Thank me, and thank my American friends, for the generosity."

On one hand, this is a marketing coup for the American contractors; their stock, having skyrocketed, drops a tiny bit, but the company name that was a meme on tech blogs is now a beloved brand to the general public.

On the other hand, this makes a lot of people mad. One Russian oligarch with ties to one of the four companies that was suing Grezzo tries to put a hit on him and, the next evening, is calmly informed by the Italian mafia that Grezzo is off-limits.

But that was a rash, amateur attempt. Now powerful legal firms have an incentive to invalidate the GPL.

Grezzo finds himself quickly "obsoleted" by the effort of other groups, who quickly copy the system and improve on it. He figures that this is exactly how it should go.

Now that fast interplanetary travel has come down in price a thousandfold, all the old dreams of colonizing Mars reappear. The Mars Society, Mars One, even the Raelians begin making plans for Martian colonies. Whoever the first person on Mars is, there will be soon political implications to discuss. Who owns the planets?

The African Union proposes a system of Wadaa al-yad for interplanetary claims. The EU want every land claim to remain under the jurisdiction of the parent government. And so on. Everyone has their own idea.

Crewed testing for the hyperdrive (which Grezzo wanted to call "trasmissione gravitica", "gravitic gearbox", but everyone outside of Italy and France is just calling a hyperdrive) is pending, and will take about a year even with accelerated schedules. However, probes are another matter. The United Nations quickly agrees on something, for once -- no, landing a cubesat on a celestial body isn't enough to claim any land around it.

Crisp pictures taken from cubesats with tiny thrusters and hyperdrives flitting around the Moon finally shut the Apollo hoaxers up. Grezzo flies to the United States, on no notice, because Buzz Aldrin is finally dying and wants to shake his hand; the photo goes viral, each engineer saying that they are honored to meet the other.

Grezzo is quickly "conscripted" by the American contractor -- they're working on a hyperdrive capsule too, obviously -- to do a brief goodwill tour; his name is still fresh in the media, after all. He agrees, speaks at a few universities and tech conferences, but quickly finds that academia and the corporate world resent him a bit for being an outsider. Also, his "handlers" keep wanting him to shave, and he keeps telling them that he won't. He has this big round fluffy teddy bear face, now starting to go a little grey.

An Italian-French startup approaches Grezzo, wanting to hire him on as an engineer. The American defense contractor point out that they have at least earned right of first refusal. Grezzo says that he doesn't care who the first person on Mars is, but would prefer that they be from a democratic nation, and encourages the two companies to sort it out. He points out, though, that he doesn't think he has a big contribution to make anymore; now it's about optimizing the design and making it safe for people, and he's not a professional. "I measure once and cut twice" he says "you need people who can design circuits ten atoms wide."

Three months in, it becomes obvious that the people furthest ahead in the new space race are the Chinese, Russians, and South Africans. The reason is simple: their pilots are willing to take risks. What if the hyperdrive generates unknown dangerous radiation? Who cares, everyone signed a waiver.

Grezzo says that if anyone asked him to fly a hyperdrive-equipped capsule, he'd volunteer. He has no astronaut training, though. "It's my mess, if anyone gets hurt it should be me. I wouldn't land on Mars without permission. I'm already famous, don't need to do that."

Meanwhile, the international legal efforts to overturn (or to preserve) the GPL continue.

Complicit a corrupt, right-wing Supreme Court, the GPL is declared null and void. There's no legal precedent for this, and no convoluted legal theory behind it -- the decision is one paragraph long and offers no explanation, no case history, and no appeal.

This has enormous ramifications, not only for hyperdrive technology, which -- except in its basic form -- can now be patented again, but also for the software running on a vast majority of the world's servers. Who owns Linux, for example?

The CJEU quickly issues its own ruling, exactly opposed the USSC; this time, the ruling is well-justified, citing centuries of precedent starting from royal letter patents.

Other countries go with one or the other interpretation, according to convenience, payola, public sentiment, or the whim of the executive.

The first person on Mars is a Brazilian nonbinary scientist who, having lost their legs as a child in a car accident, leveraged this and a crowdfunding effort to build a minimal capsule and, without much fanfare beforehand, just launch and go. Having no legs, they can afford to be miserly on capsule living space, oxygen, food, and water.

Cheekily, they bring a pair of shoes along -- the last ones they had as a child, cheap tennis shoes with inexpertly applied glitter -- and "set foot on Mars" with those.

The right-wing blogosphere blames DEI, a number of self-appointed legal luminaries say that it doesn't count, there's a whole new hoax circus about whether it really happened or not, and what-have-you. Rather than leaving the Brazilian flag, the scientist left a drawing by they cousin, a homemade UN flag with stick figures of people holding hands. Cue a week of surreal legal wrangling about whether it counts as a UN flag.

The scientist is due back in a week, and has said that they want to meet Grezzo.

The meeting takes place in the caffe' of Grezzo's hometown with the burly inventor having to carry the scientist, Danie, there bodily due to the narrow medieval streets not being usable for wheelchairs; the two briefly meet with the mayor and agree to an architecture program that will make ramps available without wrecking the town's character.

Danie brought back some Martian regolith, which is duly distributed to the world's space agencies; jut ten years ago this would have been groundbreaking, but now it's assumed that in six months the stuff will be readily available.

The two share a coffee, but refuse to reveal if it was an Italian or Brazilian brand.

Unfortunately, that's where their story ends. A bomb goes off in the caffe', killing them and a few other people instantly. Despite the best efforts of Italian and European counterintel services, the culprit is never found; several terrorist organizations claim responsibility, but none are deemed credible.

Obviously, everyone accuses everyone else. These incidents have the side effect of quenching international cooperation in space; the race to Mars becomes a free-for-all, and when the ISS is deorbited a few months later, right on schedule, there's no replacement planned, every large nation or bloc of small nations is going it alone.

To prevent an outbreak of hostilities on Earth, on the occasion of Grezzo and Danie's funeral, the Italian and Brazilian governments releases a joint draft plan for the colonization of Mars: since a free-for-all is will be all but unavoidable, at least the international community should set a few rules of engagement, to make sure any hostilities stay on Mars.

Each large nation, block of smaller nations, or conglomerate shall send one ship, with a set maximum mass. Hostilities are not to extend further than Mars high orbit; and all who go shall be volunteers. These ships shall travel together under a flag of truce and then disperse on the planet.

The rather odd proposal is approved by the UN security council, of which Italy and Brazil are temporary members, because it's the best alternative to chaos and possibly war on Earth.

Officially, it's a claim rush. In truth, everyone knows, there will be fighting -- hopefully limited to robot versus robot. The thin atmosphere of Mars means that only the lightest scout drones will be able to fly; this will be a land grab -- or a land war.

A few months later, seven ship from seven factions -- a large country, a group of small countries, or a corporate consortium -- prepare to make Marsfall.

There is no Spice Melange on Mars, no Turbinium, no Unobtainium. But there is land -- always a valuable commodity -- and at the tops of some of the tallest mountains on the planet, such as Tharsis Montes and Olympus Mons, the atmosphere is so rarefied that the hyperdrive can work at launch. The 24.5 hour circadian means crews won't have difficulties adapting. The thin atmosphere has smoothed down Martian dust enough that it's not as dangerous as the sharp dust on the Moon or an asteroid. . The lowlands can be terraformed to some degree. The reasonable temperature range allows for permanent settlement with relatively little investment. The lack of a molten core means that deep drilling for metals, minerals, and nuclear fuel will be much easier than on Earth. The relative proximity to Earth allows for training a cosmonaut corps in relative safety.

In short, Mars is an ideal springboard for a civilization that wants to spread out to beyond the Solar System. The hyperdrive's speed limit, which has slowly inched up to about 1.25c in the intervening years since Grezzo's discovery, will experience another breakthrough sooner or later, making it possible to get to a nearby star in months rather than decades. The nation or ideology that controls Mars is all but certain to leapfrog the others there.

That's the real prize; shaping the beginnings of an interstellar Terran empire that is sure to follow. What language? Which economic system? Which political model? Will pizza have pineapple in it?