System: Bodhisattva 2a
Type: Neo-Buddhist terraforming colony
Population: ~1,000 colonists
Gravity: ~0.5 G
Atmosphere: Thin, barely breathable; rebreathers required
Overview
Siddhartha’s Peace is a struggling colony founded by people trying to escape corporate life — “the escape from corporate wage slavery,” as the welcome packet puts it. It’s centered around the base of a space elevator connecting the planet to an orbital terraforming station. The soil is heavy with salt and the oceans are too saline to be much use untreated, and the whole colony survives on a trickle of desalinated water, most of which goes straight to paying down a debt to the corporation that financed the place, Straylight.
The colony was founded with Straylight’s backing: an AI core and terraforming station in exchange for the colony’s water exports. Every colonist signs a Straylight contract and a colony registry on joining. Power has been failing for months — the tide generators are held together with salvage and duct tape — and the orbital terraforming station, the colony’s only source of spare parts and manufacturing, went into a mysterious lockdown, then came back online broadcasting ominous prophecies about “purification” and a figure called Bishamonten across the colony’s PA system. At night, colonists carrying torches and wearing sword-and-flame pins have been seen gathering in the streets, echoing the broadcast.
The colony’s co-founder, Genma — an AI engineer and former Straylight coworker of the Abbot’s — disappeared around the same time the station went dark. His ocean-rig laboratory still stands, but salvage crews sent out to it don’t come back.
The Uprising
The broadcasts stopped being a curiosity the night the whole colony went up. Every screen in Siddhartha’s Peace lit at once with the flame and the spear and a voice screaming that the prophet had come; converts with shaved heads and the emblem tattooed across their scalps moved through the streets with stun batons taking people in the name of “purification”; and the colony office was breached, besieged and burned by a mob armed with real firearms nobody can account for on a planet with no arms trade. The dead converts the crew examined were ordinary colonists — an oxygen farmer, a sanitation worker — carrying nothing but their colony identification.
Abbot Ben Shirayuki was taken up the space elevator at gunpoint by Ensho, along with an employee in a Straylight Computing jumpsuit. The crew evacuated roughly twenty people from the colony office roof — Odo, Jian, First Instructor Fugen, the wounded Tenka, five office workers, and Franco’s family — and left the rest of the colony’s thousand-odd inhabitants on the surface, with no way of knowing how many of them were faithful and how many were just people who worked there.
Siddhartha’s Peace, as an institution, no longer exists.