Political Movements

Everyone has a plan for fixing the Cluster. Usually because they have correctly noticed that something is badly wrong.

Workers are being replaced. Governments are corrupt. Habitats are unsafe. Planets are dying. Speciated people are still treated like property. These are real problems. The difficulty begins somewhere between identifying the problem and deciding what everyone else must do about it. Having the correct diagnosis does not qualify you to perform surgery.

Most movements start with petitions, organising, research, strikes, or elections. Some stay there. Others become parties, militias, insurgencies, or very respectable organisations that would prefer you not examine how their security budget is spent.

Armournauts usually arrive around that last stage. Ideology is mostly speeches until somebody budgets for power armour.

Ethical Governance Movement

The Ethical Governance Movement argues that machines might govern people better than people do. Its strongest support comes from the Jambles, where centuries of unstable governments, corruption, and civil conflict make the idea of an incorruptible administrator rather appealing. Idris and Pestralia are the movement’s favourite examples, though advocates disagree sharply over what AI government should actually mean.

Some favour AI-facilitated democracy, where a governing intelligence interprets popular will and turns it into policy. Others prefer technocratic systems in which specialised intelligences manage particular functions under elected oversight. Supporters argue that AIs cannot be bribed, threatened, flattered, or distracted by personal ambition. Critics point out that this is only reassuring if you trust whoever wrote the code.

That distinction matters because not all AIs are alike. Sublunary-class intelligences are limited, comprehensible systems designed for specific tasks. Apparitional-class intelligences are genuine general intelligences: adaptive, creative, and not reliably altered or constrained through ordinary programming. Giving one control of life support, weapons, infrastructure, or government is therefore less like hiring an administrator and more like handing the keys to a schizophrenic genie. Not dangerous or even malicious but hardly anyone ideal reliable first choice in governance. 

The movement campaigns, funds research, distributes governance systems, and hires Armournauts to protect researchers, server farms, and shipments from increasingly violent opposition. Its most visible advocate, Keely Reynard, also owns a major AI research concern and the data centres supporting much of this work. Which is convenient. I can see the appeal of removing corruption from government. I am less convinced when the woman proposing machine rule also owns the machines.

Groupe Galactique Syndicaliste

The Groupe Galactique Syndicaliste, or GGS, began as a revolutionary labour movement on Balharn during resistance to Yscenic rule. After the overthrow of the Balharn Directorate and creation of the People’s Republic, it expanded from a national movement into a Cluster-wide organisation campaigning for labour rights, workplace safety, political agency, and collective bargaining.

GGS is most active in the Core and maintains a list of “Subversive Worlds” where it believes workers are systematically denied rights or political power. All eighteen Yscenic worlds qualify, along with several Venti holdings and Saulchus Freeport. Even allies are not exempt: Sophia Station was temporarily listed after the Vrisbane Cylinder Collapse, and Vaetovki remains a lasting grievance after the detention of thirty-one labour organisers by Union authorities.

The movement now claims millions of members and operates independently of Balharn, funding demonstrations, legal action, organisers, investigators, and increasingly Armournaut security in the Frontier. Most contracts amount to protecting picket lines, escorting organisers, investigating intimidation, and making sure corporate security remembers that workers can also afford people with guns.

I went through the phase. Read the theory, complained about everything, imagined a better tomorrow. Then I chose the third option and started cracking skulls for people with better budgets. GGS contracts are at least a pleasant inversion: you stand around looking dangerous so somebody else does not crack the workers first.

Kluster-Klimaschutz

Kluster-Klimaschutz, or KK, is the Cluster’s largest environmental movement, founded around a fairly simple observation: humanity already destroyed one homeworld and has shown an impressive willingness to rehearse the process elsewhere. Old Earth’s final centuries were marked by climate collapse, mass extinction, famine, war, and an evacuation that saved only a fraction of humanity. After the Scattering, many colonies repeated the same mistakes and died with their worlds.

KK campaigns for sustainable energy, agriculture, industry, and settlement practices intended to keep inhabited worlds viable without destroying native ecologies. It works through political advocacy, public campaigns, technical support, and alliances with sympathetic governments. The Frontier has become its biggest proving ground, with KK backing colonies designed around long-term ecological stability rather than extracting everything valuable and leaving somebody else to deal with the poisoned groundwater.

Those colonies are often technologically sophisticated and profitable, which naturally means pirates, corporations, and neighbouring settlements take an interest. KK increasingly hires Armournauts to protect colonial infrastructure, researchers, shipments, and communities.

Growing up on Conran gave me a soft spot for these people. You can taste the air on some Jambles worlds and nobody notices because they have never breathed anything better. We have had the technology to avoid that for centuries. It’s easy to justify waiting another year. The problem is that planets don’t care about justifications.

Orbital Workers League

The Orbital Workers League, or OWL, advocates for gravity-affected workers and their families. Its roots stretch back to pre-Scattering stellar labour movements, and its modern purpose is much the same: keep people from being permanently damaged because an employer decided gravity, healthcare, or safe habitation were too expensive.

That matters because Gravity Affected People now make up a significant portion of the Cluster, and many cannot safely acclimatise to planetary gravity at all. OWL has spent more than a century pushing governments and industry towards safer station design, mandatory spin gravity, medical support, better work rotations, housing protections, and compensation for workers exposed to harmful gravity conditions. Its campaigns helped shape measures such as the New Monaco Accords and later protections across Venti, Union, and Temple space.

OWL also represents Armournauts and PMC personnel when orbital employers cut corners. One of its most famous cases involved Seaside contractors who suffered excessive casualties after the company refused to engage a gravity ring needed for emergency surgery. OWL secured compensation and forced procedural changes afterwards.

They aren’t GGS firebrands, more stubbornly hopeful people who insist that workers should not be crippled in service of the bottom line. Their work has helped a lot of people live longer, healthier lives. Out here, that is about as meaningful a victory as you get.

Genetic Liberty Front

The Genetic Liberty Front was founded in response to the gap between legal recognition of speciated people and the way many governments actually treated them. The Speciated Persons Act and Genetic Variant Persons Act were supposed to protect engineered human populations, but enforcement varied wildly. Some states restricted reproduction, imposed genetic viability testing, banned further modification, or simply continued persecuting the people the laws were meant to protect.

The GLF began on Rinthas after a Preeoran court banned the Selvori from reproducing. The Selvori were descendants of genetically altered colonists engineered for war and later trapped by the consequences of a nuclear disaster. The GLF organised protests, raised funds, and helped relocate members of the population to an orbital community where their reproductive rights were recognised. Since then, it has expanded into legal advocacy, medical support, relocation assistance, education, and access to genetic treatment for speciated people across the Cluster.

Governments tend to get nervous around the GLF because its argument does not stop at tolerance. It insists that engineered people have the same right to alter, reproduce, and determine their own bodies as everyone else. That puts it directly against states which are happy to recognise speciated people as citizens right up until those citizens want children.

I had two Selvori in Nil-Star, Garen and Lidi. Huge bastards. Unfortunately, they were also disgustingly affectionate, which ruined the cold inhuman enforcer image I was paying for. Lidi did once remove a trafficker’s jaw after he bit off her finger, though. She did it very calmly. So yes, I understand why anthrotypicals occasionally get nervous. I just prefer we turn that nervousness into good manners rather than legislation.

Sleepers

Sleepers are people who enter jaunt beds without setting a wake date. “Soft suicides,” depending on who you ask. Long Jaunting, suisleeping, cadaveresting; the names change between subcultures, but the idea is the same. To go to sleep for a long time and hopefully wake up in a better universe, if at all.

Different groups romanticise it for different reasons. Somnopunks treat it as rejection, Futurists as a shortcut to a better age, Doomsdayers as an escape from one they think is ending. The more clinical explanation is less glamorous: jaunt-bed misuse is strongly associated with depression, anxiety, escapism, and later suicidality. The technology feels reversible enough to make disappearance seem temporary right up until it is not.

The Superpowers regulate recreational jaunting heavily, with monitored facilities, failsafes, and mandatory wake provisions. Part of that is safety. Part of it is that governments generally dislike citizens quietly removing themselves from society for decades at a time.

I understand the appeal more than I should. Not permanently. You can cancel the welfare check. But ten years? Twenty? Wake up and see whether everyone finally sorted themselves out without me. Then I remember waking sickness. Four percent sounds wonderfully small until the brain dying on withdrawal belongs to someone you know.

Vox Moralis

Vox Moralis is a Cluster-wide nationalist movement founded by former Venti Prolocutor Hiram Iskaniel. Its slogan, One Voice, One People, One Power, tells you most of what you need to know. Hiram argues that humanity is being hollowed out by foreign powers, artificial intelligence, genetic modification, secularism, political subversion, and the general crime of not resembling the version of the past he prefers.

He built his following after failing to force major reforms through the Venti Republic. Hiram wanted a stronger Senate Guard, tighter control over colonies, more aggressive expansion, and a Republic less dependent on Armournauts. His attacks on the Senate eventually cost him office and drove him into exile on New Monaco, where Vox Moralis grew from media appearances and political campaigning into a movement with millions of supporters across the Core, Jambles, and Frontier.

The movement increasingly wraps its politics in Yilanic language, portraying the Pillars as divine gifts and Hiram’s programme as a cleansing of humanity’s enemies. Its parties and sympathisers have entered governments across the Cluster, while the Union and Temple have banned it over links to extremist activity. Vox Moralis does not formally hire Armournauts, but its Moralis Militia trains supporters in armed organisation and has repeatedly been connected to intimidation, insurrection, and political violence.

A lot of mercenaries love Hiram because he is funny, angry, and very good at telling people exactly whose fault their lives are. I get the entertainment value. The problem is that, after Vox has “handled” its first list of enemies, a new list is bound to pop up.

Workers Against Automation

Workers Against Automation, or WAA, emerged from the repeated collapse of human workforces after the spread of Temple-derived automation. On some worlds, entire industries disappeared almost overnight as drone labour replaced construction crews, loaders, technicians, and other workers faster than governments could adapt. The technology worked. That was rather the problem.

WAA grew from unions, cooperatives, and advocacy groups arguing that automation should improve human life rather than simply remove humans from the economy. Its preferred framework, “Technological Humanism,” pushes for human oversight of automated systems, retraining programmes, income support, and restrictions on replacing workers without providing some path forward. The Temple and major technology interests oppose many of these measures as inefficient or obstructive.

The movement operates through local chapters, demonstrations, strikes, education campaigns, and alliances with other labour groups. Its biggest weakness is internal division. Some members want regulation and redistribution. Others want automation stopped outright, which makes it extremely easy for corporations to paint the entire movement as frightened Luddites standing in front of progress with a brick.

For now, Armournauting is still cheaper with humans, something I take a strange amount of pride in. I have also been paid to make WAA protesters taste the jackboot, so perhaps do not take labour advice from me. Still, if they want better results, they should remember that corporations understand leverage better than speeches. Hire some Armournauts before the other side does.