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Author : Rachelle Shepherd He came into the house throwing …
The Universal Peace
Author: Alzo David-West
The Radical Machine Rightsists had implemented their ban on all vessels of the United Interstellar Territories. Any unauthorized craft in RMR space was summarily disintegrated into particles.
Amid the crisis, the UIT faced a dilemma. A civilization that had long abandoned force as politics was compelled to reconsider its two thousand years of peace. How could the Articles of Non-Aggression, which spanned planets and star systems, respond non-defensively to the militancy of the machines?
Tomi Mura of the Ministry of Planets recalled her warning to the delegate Organon at the failed talks on Korzan: the UIT would pursue more extraordinary measures if Arazan did not comply with reparatory compensations for the illegal torture and execution of the convicted citizen, tourist, and rapist Jizu Mori.
At the Plenum of Planets, 195,000 sector plenipotentiaries for 900,000 worlds gathered to deliberate on the Old Planet. Before the physical and remote attendees, Tomi Mura delivered her speech, stating that although the founding documents had historically forbidden force, the provocations of Arazan required a defensive position.
The plenipotentiaries became restive at the proposition of altering what they and the epochs before them had known — the achievement of universal peace.
“But how can our political and legal principles be maintained,” Tomi Mura argued, “when there is a party that rejects peace, refuses to join the UIT, and maintains archaic sovereignty, robotic chauvinism, and closed planetism above the rights of all open planets?
“We reject violence,” she stressed. “Yet we suffer the deaths of hundreds of our citizens — our travelers, traders, researchers, and android crews — and the loss of thousands of our autonomous vessels for exploration, science, and security. We are not collectively responsible for one abnormal individual’s deactivation of the gynoid minder on Arazan. The robot republic is an existential threat, a polity that never left the barbaric age of the early twenty-first century.
“So the UIT, after two millennia, must take a defensive stance or sacrifice more of our innocents to outer-space terrorism. Plenipotentiaries, I appeal to your conscience; I appeal to your reason; and I appeal to your judgment,” she said, her voice confident but quavering.
There were shifting sounds and whispers in the ascending rows of the plenum.
“The Anthrobotic Republic of Planet Arazan has been tolerated, but the RMR are guilty,” Tomi Mura declared. “This is no longer a local case of a UIT citizen executed on a local world but of an authoritarian non-treaty planet violating universal inter-planetary laws — a rogue-planet regime.”
She finished. The three sector presidents of the plenum announced that plenary votes would be cast to adopt a defensive position in the interest of interstellar peace.
The plenum became quiet as the plenipotentiaries navigated AI-aggregated feeds from billions of sub-assemblies, casting their own representative ballots on an event that would impact the policy and culture of their vast cooperative space government and society.
Color-coded virtual displays appeared before the participants. The third president pronounced that the results would be disclosed. Columns, constituencies, and numbers flashed into view: 5,367 agreed, 4,946 disagreed, 3,235 neutral, and 5,602 abstained. The UIT defensive peace resolution was confirmed.
“War is still war!” someone remote screamed.
The procedural paradox of a war for peace, with the full expectation that the Arazaneans would fight to the last machine, had to be reconciled.
Tomi Mura spoke once more:
“Our defensive peace will be waged in the diplomatic, economic, information, and resource spheres. Through our charters and alliances, all exchanges with the belligerent planet will be embargoed and cordoned through autonomous interspace blockades. Arazan is self-sufficient, but it is not completely autarkic. Every attempt will be made to broker concessions and establish peace talks, even if the RMR are resolute in their violent intransigence.”