This is another one of those days, rookies, where we get a little real. No, no sit down. Today, the recorder stays on. Absolutely everything I am going to tell you is official.
You know Jupiter? Big gas giant planet? Sometimes I gotta ask rookie. Sometimes I gotta ask. No one lives on Jupiter, but it has moons. A bunch of ‘em, in fact, and on these moons people live and die under the control of the Jovian People’s Confederacy. The JPC.
On the surface of things, the JPC isn’t all bad. A little paranoid and a little crazy with the whole Marxist paradise thing… well, they’re a lot crazy with that, but whatever. Still, it’s a touch odd that you gotta request access to go to any of their planets. You touch JPC soil without their say so and it’s bye bye rook. Watch yourself.
The biggest thing is that they wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so corrupt.
They have mining operations, they have access to abundant water they can ship off world, they do oxygen mining which they export, but I’ll be a dead rookie if the JPC isn’t the biggest bunch of thieves you ever seen.
Fact is if they weren’t the legitimate rulers of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Calypso, I’d label them one big crime syndicate and we’d take them all down. Instead, the rulers of the JPC live on Calypso while the Ministry of Finance and Commerce tells each person how they’re going to live, how they’re going to work, who they’re going to marry, and probably even how they’re going to die.
And all the while the JPC controllers get fat and live on their own private moon thumbing their nose at the rest of us.
I don’t know what to tell you rookies. If you get a bounty on someone in the JPC, I want you to take it. But I don’t want to see you dead and the JPC will hit you back.
I will tell you what I do know. Every so often, you’ll see a mission come out. Not a bounty so much as a search and rescue op. SSPB don’t like people going outside us, but every now and someone will money will reach out to one of you.
See some people get permission to land on Calypso and they’re never heard from again. We hear rumors of slaves working the mines or hunts involving humans. Of course, they’re just rumors. The JPC would never let us in to actually investigate.
So, what I am saying, take one of those contracts with care. You’re liable to end up missing, too. But I’ll tell you what. You find some of those people and bring them home, well, then you will have made something of yourself, wouldn’t you rookie?
Tomorrow we’ll get back to civilization and talk about Mars.