Biona

PA6-0926-3

Summary

A colony world where primarily Tutinari live. Ownership of the planet as a whole is disputed between The Republic of Astrox, Arita Confederation, and Biona Corporation who all claim ownership of significant chunks of the planets land mass and water ways. The RoA allowed Biona ownership in the early days, but then reneged on that when Arita Confederation members began to establish colonies. When the RoA revoked the license to colonize, AC claimed they were breaking no rules, and Biona never acknowledged the loss of rights. The RoA has made some gestures to reclaiming the planet by force, but nothing serious as of yet.

The planet is the largest of the 3 original colony worlds, but its also the coolest which in some ways makes it ideal for a trading hub, while the Tutinari and Asida are most at home here, it is not so uncomfortable for the Rigna-et or the Gordinata that they can't come down and do trades in person. Although as time has gone on, most traders prefer to work only on space stations making this planets primary draw of trade less useful, but Biona has been hard at work using the expansive land to build large scale manufacturing.

History

Pulled from a now depreciated page with no reread for accuracy.

Bought in 1389, colonized in 1398

In the late 1380’s the Republic was at a tipping point economically, facing threats of hyperinflation the government was getting ready to issue orders for large public companies to pay huge taxes in order to balance the budget. Bionica Corporation, one of the largest companies in the Republic who does a bit of everything with primary focus on data centers and AI saw an opportunity and exploited some of their power with the current regime. This deal would give the Republic enough Astroni to operate the government for 5 years under a new, slimmer, budget that the Senate was already working to confirm. In exchange for this large sum of capital they would have sole colonization rights on the planet, whose name would change to suit the new owner of the planet. Among this agreement was a considerable pair of tariffs on the planet that would cover the cost of the Government operations on the planet along with free accommodations for certain government operations. The tariff deal was raw, and economically would be far more significant than the lump sum payment.

In the end the deal was struck in 1389 that Bionica Corporation would have sole colonization rights on the planet Biona, the Republic would collect a 40% tariff on imported goods, and a 20% tariff on exported goods. The Corporation would have to provide space for Republic official operations, 3 orbital zones for dedicated military structures and two for non-military matters with the option to purchase more. Of the 3 moons of Biona 1 would remain under Republic control, but the other two would belong to the Corporation.

In 1398 the first colony ships landed on Biona and established the company HQ and uninspiringly the town that grew up became known as Biona City.

Once initial services were set up on the planet Bionica Corporation began selling plots of land to Republic citizens offering a new wild frontier. There came a lot of caveats, raw land was remarkably expensive and only sold at scale. If you wanted to buy a couple acres you’d have to go through another company that bought thousands of acres and was now reselling the land in smaller plots. Sold land was also zoned as either agricultural, city, or industrial and each zone has things you were allowed to build. For example an industrial area couldn’t have less than 1 thousand dwelling units, but no more than 5 thousand per 10K kilometers square. While city zoned areas couldn’t have more than a specific amount of industry. When you bought land on this planet it was either leased, and never really owned, or it was contractually sold and a breach of contract would forfeit all land and any structures on it back to Bionica.

The Corporation had turned to primarily sell all the goods and services new colonies would need, including the management of these. The ideal package for companies moving to this planet was a customer who was looking to establish their corporate headquarters on the planet, they would need construction services, basic life support, logistics, and admin for dealing with all the paperwork that came with operations on the corporate colony. All of these services the Bionica Corporation would sell as a turnkey service. You pay them an astronomical amount of Astroni and they’ll do everything from architecture, city planning and development to importing and managing your workforce. The Bionica Corporation had subsidies for industrial corporations who built products on the planet, then let the export tariffs prevent those goods from leaving the planet.

In no time at all much of the planet had been sold to other corporations, since corporations couldn’t purchase this much land with this much freedom to choose what to do with it on any other corporate colony. In a grand strategy sort of way, this worked out well for the Republic. Corporations looking to maximize profit would go to this corporate colony, and not the Republic colonies so there would be little competition on those government colonies for control of the population. Many people would call this corporate colony the Republics Compact with how few laws governed the planet's corporations. Of course there are still plenty of laws, in fact all Republic law is supposed to be enforced on the planet, but in reality this was far more difficult to do than the limited government presence in the system would allow.

In 1402 enough services were online that the corporation could start bringing their government clients to the world as per their contract with the Republic. Most of these services had to be at the cost of the Corporation, which grew resentment from middle and upper-middle management of the Corporation who used unofficial corporate propaganda to spread that disdain for the government to its employees with the grand strategic objective to move the overton window away from government enough to create enough political pressure to let the colony be fully independent from the Republic, and adopt a more Compact way of economics but of course keeping enough government to maintain their monopoly on the world. (If you want a proper cyberpunk world, this would be it if the capitalist here have their way).

In 1408 when the Republic and the Compact struck a deal that allowed them to use their Gate/Fold network to reach a world that had a high habitability for the Asida travel through this system grew more and more dense and the naturally chaotic nature of dealing with Asida had grown onto the corporate colony in a dangerous way to the Republic.

This deal with Asida was pushed by the corporate senators and replaced the import tariff to the planet, replaced with a transportation tax for Citizens and Asida to pay when they traveled the Fold network in the Biona Arm. This tax would double the cost of transporting through the region, with the Fold network fee being 250 Asida and the tax also being 250 Asida, a trivial amount for corporate ships traveling in the Arm but a significant amount for private use, which was ideal for the Republic since growing anti-government sentiment was growing in the region, limiting private movement in the area would ensure that private citizens would have less power in the region while loyal corporation would be able to get this tax partially written off and Asidas corporations would not have such luxury.

By 1415 much of the world had been sold and was very quickly developing. It was the fastest growing colony by every metric, including lawlessness thanks to the 1408 deal with the Asida. Naturally to avoid the taxes a smuggling route formed that moved exclusively through Compact space except for the Bonisa system, which was often the final destination for many Compact ships while many more would travel freely through the system to the fold point to the Asida system. In 1410 the Bionica Corporation offered to build out its own private security division to assist the Republic navy in defense of the system. Privately owned military ships were expressly outlawed in the Republic, the Corporation was asking for an exemption from the law in order to deal with the high volume of traffic in the system, an exemption that was eventually granted, but the leadership of this private navy would report directly to the Republic Navy for operations, and the corporation only for funding and other corporate needs. Any orders issued from the corporation to their own navy had to be passed through a Republic officer.

If smugglers ran across the Republic Navy they would be arrested and their cargo seized. If they ran into Corporate Security it was generally a 50/50 on the CO being friendly to the smugglers and pretending not to see them, or acting as if they were Navy.

I don’t have any other major events or things that need explaining until 1439 when the Managed Fold was upgraded to a Gate. The Traversal Tax was increased with the Gate Fee to 750 Astroni each (Adjusted for inflation to 1408 Astoni this is 500 Astroni.) with the fee and tax tripled the majority of the users of the gate became law abiding citizens and traffic coming and going directly to Arita, very few Asida would use this new gate.

By this time much of the corporate propaganda had done its job and anti-Republic sentiment was common, even if it had been formally outlawed some years ago and was now punishable with prison time. This just meant that you didn’t discuss it online, and instead at bars or other in-person venues.

In 1445, a year after the Gate pair was complete, there would be a terror attack on the busy gate that would claim the lives of over 351 thousand Tutinari. Both gates would receive little to no actual harm, with automated repair drones able to fully repair all damages within a few hours. The result of this was the Republic stepping up it’s governance presence on Bonica and expanding Astrox Internal Investigation Division’s power in the system.