LP A/N: Been working on this thing on and off for a while. Need to justify why exactly the High Lords are all such assholes and how we get to whack-ass shit like Penal Legions, death moons, and the ever-fucking mess that is NOVENSILES.

Spent all day at the hospital with a friend who was stabbed. Waiting on recovery, so… decided to push this out.

FROM THE OFFICE OF THE COMMISSARIAT

IN THE NAME OF THE BLESED MARTYR VICTOR MANSWELL

Commandant-General R'magh Singh

Effective Utilization of Criminal and Non-compliant Elements in Society

with Ramifications of the results of PROJECT DOLON and PROJECT SINON

as presented by the Commandant-General and his staff, August 5, in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 2157

My noble lords,

The Commissariat exists for one purpose only, to uphold the conditions of society under which humanity may survive the darkness that is both around us and within us. It is a sandbar under constant assault by the tides; a thankless task undertaken by those already abused and thrown away by our own families and people.

I do not say this to criticize your rule, but to underline the fact that mercy, decency and pity are elements of reaction and determination that can play no role in the years to come, no matter how much we may wish to pursue a more Christlike demeanor. I will begin my precis, then, with why that is.

THE SITUATION AS IT STANDS

We, humanity, are faced with two issues. First, our society is still fractured, held together by the iron will of your guidance and the fires of the Commissars. While the inner colonies and Sol are unified, more than a few Class II and Class I colonies are less enamored of the choices of the past four administrations focusing on Sol and Earth. Thus, we ourselves are not a monolithic state that is invulnerable to deceit, manipulation, and coercion.

There are a number of solutions to this, but it is mostly driven by crime, poverty, and the lack of proper employment on Earth (and to a lesser degree, Luna, Mars, Titan, and the Belt). The rise of various gangs and cults – both of human and alien creation – has further splintered our once unified society.

This is problematic because it is the natural attack point for infiltrators, be that traitors who want to throw down the High Lords, alien intelligence or criminal syndicates, or hostile agents who seek to break into the Mars Archives or the work undertaken by the Department of Abnormalities.

I believe I am making an understatement that the latter being revealed would lead to large problems.

Second, we are surrounded by hostile alien beings who ultimately do not have our best interests anywhere in their scope of expected reactions.

I know that it is considered gauche to engage in such blatant smearing of all aliens, especially the asari. And while they certainly did save us from the turian, we must consider the actions they took and why they took them to determine the proper context.

I do not state the alien is a threat out of some kind of stultifying, idiotic xenophobia. We, given our history, have a tendency to reject predetermined notions of the reactions and tendencies of a given race of people, given our own struggles with racism and nationalism in the times before the Days of Iron. Nor do I deny that the aliens themselves are not monolithic – many asari are coming here due to PROJECT CERES and already, xenopsychologists have noticed changes in asari who do so. But aside from that, there are outcasts of all races, and humanity is unique in that we take those in. Alien individuals can be trusted if they prove themselves, and we should be careful to allow that.

But alien star nations… we cannot afford such starry-eyed credulous naïveté in allowing ourselves to think they would not subjugate, enslave or even destroy us if it profited them.

The attack of the turians very nearly destroyed our entire species, and I mean no insult to say that our response was criminally incompetent. Some of this, I grasp, was due to the organizational structure of the Systems Alliance and the very well-founded fear that a strong military is a precursor to falling back into the 20th and early 21st Centuries.

The fact that in the past decade alone the Commissariat has foiled over five hundred various plots from military, ex-military, or paramilitary/mercenary groups proves the wisdom of your actions.

Unfortunately, a military bifurcated in the fashion ours is gives us no security against another decapitation attack on Sol. Even if we engaged in hyper-militaristic buildups, such as the studies done in PROJECT ARES, we are left with the ugly facts. We simply do not have the raw materials or shipbuilding capacity to match even a third of the turian fleet. Even if we devoted all energy to building such the time-frame for such a crash program is more than thirty years.

Building enough ships to ensure nothing could transit through the Charon Relay would result in all loss of habitability of Earth outside of the arcologies and has a greater than forty percent chance to result in complete socioeconomic collapse.

Static defenses, like the RLC array on Mars and the HAIL MARY moon coilguns, as well as the asteroid bases and fighter bases, can close some of the gap, but even then, full security would take decades… and assumes that only a third of the turian capacity would be used. If the full might of the Citadel Fleets were turned on us as they did the krogan we would not survive more than four days.

Our only defense in that case is to engage in CASE DAEDALUS and perform solar relay immersion… but as our studies of Roswell and other events show, the salarians have the FTL capacity to reach us and that is not total security. Worse, we cannot hope to feed all of Sol shorn of our colonies, not to mention we will have critical shortages of molybdenum, chromium, eezo, platinum and almost all higher optronics.

Thus, we are left with the ugly realization that we cannot guarantee our own species survival. Victor Manswell had that as the very highest goal of the Manswell Decree and we have already failed at it.

DETERMINING THE THREAT

Given that none of the above is exactly news to your gracious selves, the reason I am making this presentation myself is that our findings in how to deal with this situation have led to a great deal of internal strife – both within the Commissariat and the AIS liaisons who work with us as well as the xeno-psych and xenology studies staffs that assisted.

To preface: In 2155, the Commissariat and several other groups were issued a commission to study the effects of internal and external issues and the threat they posed to our survival.

DOLON, named after the unfortunate spy in the Iliad, was a study of our internal issues. SINON, named after the treacherous liar who convinced the Trojans to bring back the Trojan Horse, was a study of external factors. Both projects were completely black – funding was done via cut out funds smuggled through laundering ops run by criminal gangs, oversight was done by chipped Commissars, and all assets not directly controlled were executed at the end of the studies.

The news is not good. Not only were we unable to find any real weaknesses in the aliens, a detailed examination of both internal and external events seems to point toward deliberate action by alien intelligence groups. Historical research and outreach have only underlined the ugly facts – there are aspects of the aliens who dominate the galaxy that are starkly incompatible with the continued existence of humanity as a sovereign and distinct racial nation-concept.

The turians, milords, are not the threat, and perhaps they never were. They are elemental, violent, and given to a certain oddly xenocentric hypocrisy, but there is a difference in brutality and evil, between simply not valuing life of any kind and seeing life as a tool or a span of fabric to be manipulated. The turian is simple and the threat can be easily ameliorated. They attacked us to placate their own kind and I suspect very strongly that they were manipulated into attacking us by the salarians, who wanted to deny the asari a new ally.

Dealing with the turian threat is, ironically, easy. Turians only escalate threat when attempting to dominate a new client, or when they feel threatened in the sense of military power. As long as we do not initiate hostilities, there is a very low chance the Hierarchy would attack again.

The asari and salarians, however, are not so easily dealt with. We have uncovered evidence – going back to nearly the birth of Christ in timescale – that at the highest levels the asari and salarians have been fighting a horrific shadow war that has claimed billions or tens of billions of lives. More than half of the pirates and terror networks in the galaxy can be traced back to asari or salarian backers, both have publicly understated their military might by a factor of four or more, and there is evidence both have some kind of pocket ace up the sleeve – a network of rogue AI units for the salarians and something to do with the Temple of Athame for the asari.

In short, we are vulnerable and must mitigate our weaknesses quickly and deeply.

The findings of this committee are as follows:

Humanity does not have enough stand-off capacity, military strength, or technological prowess to avoid complete assimilation by the asari in under a century. Before that is allowed to occur, the salarians would undertake genocidal actions to destroy us utterly. This is not a conjecture, there are already resources drawn up by some salarian labs to produce a bio-weapon against us, and our captive asari source was forced to divulge everything she knew – an entire force of seductresses called 'the Discerning' is being seeded into every aspect of our culture to twist us.

Despite the threat, our main resources (eezo, military power, shipping) are already tapped to the limit. Therefore, we must utilize unconventional and unexpected resources in new and disruptive methods both to give us time and to fend off alien assaults on our culture and military structure as well as provide value-positive industries to grow the human economy, with an eye towards aspects that aliens won't think to expect or have counters to.

With the exceptions of the quarians, krogan and elcor, all known alien races routinely practice black operations with the explicit goal of dominating or destroying the power-structures of other races. The quarians, krogan and elcor are victims of this to a large degree, the volus and the turians to a lesser degree. Ultimately it appears the asari and salarians are destabilizing both volus and turians to cripple them in the long term, and it is almost certain they have drawn up plans to do this to us. Therefore, we must find ways to block this as well as monitor for incursions.

In order to cover this topic with sufficient depth, I have split my report into two pieces. The first, Effective Utilization of Criminal and non-compliant Elements in Society, covers how we can turn the unproductive trash of the mega-slums and unincorporated areas of the Earth and outlying colonies into positive returns with minimal investment. This is required because of both the drain such parts of society put on our economy, and because this is a source of manpower that the aliens tend to ignore because we always have ignored them.

The second half of the paper, Ramifications of the results of SINON (and some of DOLON) covers what the aliens are doing and why they have created or otherwise carved out specific legal flaws, oversights and other issues to ensure they can cripple us if we do not react. It also covers specific military, economic and intelligence counters to these, including reviving some pre-Iron concepts that have no equivalents in any alien culture that will catch them off guard.

I wish to make three further points in my opening statements.

First, (as I said earlier) the Commissariat is neutral on the position of alien individuals. Indeed, I suspect the vast majority of alien nationals who choose to live in the Systems Alliance do so because they do not fit in with their own cultures and societies. While it may seem at first glance logical to bar the alien from our inner systems, in the fashion that the salarians do, I do not think that is valuable. Alien nationals who embrace our ways will be our most potent answers to charges of xenoracism – indeed, if we employ aliens, let them into our military, our corporations, our churches and our government, when no other alien race does, what possible heft can there be to baseless accusations of human bias?

The first point is thus – we must always seek to turn the negative bias of the alien into a net positive in terms of how it is perceived.

Second, there is no amount of investment, production or technological advancement that will ever allow humanity to achieve even parity with alien star nations within the next century. The asari outnumber us by twenty-five times. The economy they wield is based on over a thousand colony worlds that are more developed in many cases than Earth itself. The concept of human dominance over the Citadel races is not even fantasy, milords – we are the inferior by centuries of technology and millennia of economic investment. Even with the technological concepts handed to us by our asari cousins, our grasp in utilizing the tech and achieving equal results with it still lags and will take decades or more to resolve. As such we need to focus on ensuring we are not seen as an active threat while at the same time remaining enough of a threat to not be worth trying to remove preemptively.

Finally, and perhaps most critically – the only way humanity can survive is if we retain and reinforce the centralized control of the Lords of Sol. We cannot trust generals and admirals. We cannot trust CEOs. We certainly cannot trust the public, or the 'state' of the government. As distasteful as it is for me to sign off on the need for near-martial law, I fear it is required. The asari, in particular, are adept at spending decades or even centuries to warp their targets and we are simply not prepared psychologically or perhaps even on a fundamental biological basis to respond.

Finally, there is a combined recommendation I will cover at the end of the project. It is somewhat controversial, but I fear that even if we undertake and succeed at all aspects of what we have laid out as responses, the best we can hope to achieve is shallow parity with other likewise powers (elcor, volus) and a sort of vague protection from the asari that will only last as long as the salarians fear being attacked if they violate such. We need to change the paradigm entirely, and in a fashion that eliminates bio-termination as well as asari mental and emotional manipulation by melding.

The rest of the paper is laid out as follows for your review:

Synopsis – Project DOLON

A: Summary of findings

Synopsis – Project SINON

B: Summary of findings

Findings and Take-aways

C1: Alien Military

C2: Alien Culture

C3: Alien Governance

C4: Alien Covert Groups

C5: Alien DepAb Equivalents

Elements: Utilization of the criminal

D1: Legions: Penal, Commissariat, Silver

D2: Response: force colonization, expanded use of nano, asari slave youths taken in

Ramifications: Projected threats and responses

E1: Military: commerce raiders, submarines, and carriers

E2: Economic: Front companies, 'clean hands' terror organization, quarian investment

Conclusions and Warnings

F1: Asari

F2: Salarian

F3: Other

Proposal: The New Gods Project (NOVENSILES)