Behind the Boardroom: Vox Orbis

Welcome to Bromden, a small gas farming system far from the glitz and glamour of the core worlds. Most of its 625 million people were born and raised here. The majority have never known life beyond the hydrogen enrichment plants that orbit the two outermost planets, giant balls of hydrogen and helium gases.

Most visitors to Bromden have never met the locals. They bypass the factories and never make it in to Bromden 2, the only colonized planet. Bromden caters more to psychologists and medical professionals than sight seers and tourists, and their destination is a small, glimmering space station in orbit around lifeless Bromden 4: The R. P. McMurphy Mental health Clinic.

Recently, Chan. JENI was contacted by officials at R. P. McMurphy inviting us to tour their facilities. This reporter is always skeptical of such an invite - one is never certain how far their reputation has travelled - but Mr. Jafo insisted we accept. As it turns out, R. P. McMurphy had become the new home of a significant news maker.

"A couple of weeks ago, we received a very perturbed new patient," says Nurse Mildred Wretched. "Since his arrival, he's been loud, unruly, disruptive, and violent. Forced labour, overmedication, and laserbotomy have had no effect, and he's refused less conventional treatments. He's insisted on having the press interview him, and to date JENI has been the only one interested."

Sitting alone, in one of the thousands of activity rooms found throughout the facility, we find our man. The room is illuminated only by the system's single red dwarf star, located millions of miles away. The plastisteel window - the thin border between life and the cold, harsh vacuum of space - is scratched and dented from hundreds of years of frenzied attacks, projecting the sunlight into an almost inhuman aura over the solitary figure.

Meet Sotil "Subversion" Harding, founding member of the Cry Circle, a pseudonational interstellar paramilitary organization that, over its short life time, regularly made an impact well outside its weight class. A few short weeks ago he was amongst the galactic elite, one of a handful of up and coming politico-economic leaders who were poised to challenge the long established old guard of companies like Genesis Industries and Axis Inc. Today, he's drinking watered down strained peas through a sippy cup, and has been denied access to even basic cutlery after he brutally scooped out another inmate's spleen with a plastic grapefruit spoon.

Grapefruits sounded a lot better than stabbings, so we blew Mr. Harding off to seek out the cafeteria. There, we found lunch, and Harding's spleen donor.

"It wasn't such a big deal," says a recuperating Jim Martini. "I wasn't using it at the time."

"Things were very good at the beginning," says former Cry Circle member, Leroy "Hutch" Hutchings. "Everything was running smoothly. Our member count was steadily rising, political and military structures began to take form, and we even found some other cultures to enslave."

"Before Subversion's initial breakdown, the mood in the Circle was quite happy and joyful," says Ennon Galita-Shamoi, another former associate of Mr. Harding. "That may seem hard to believe today."

However, the fate of the Circle was tied very closely to the fate of Mr. Harding, and neither could maintain their meteoric rise for very long before exploding into a fireball. When we return, we'll see how this veil of harmony and prosperity the Cry Circle concealed a rotten core. A core that was to tear the organization apart!

 

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