Freelance Traveller

A Brief Lesson in Developmental Imperatives

by Jim Vassilakos

This article originally appeared in Alarums & Excursions #510 and was reprinted with permission in the March/April 2026 issue.

Author’s Note: Traveller leaves the referee a largely blank slate when it comes to how democratic government became so discredited that monarchy seemed like a better alternative. The following story offers one possible history.

Thanks to the planet’s wireless grid, her voicemail reached me even before we berthed at Startown.

“It’s Elena. I hope… I… uh… I was wondering if I could ask a favor. If it’s convenient, could you drop by my office on campus?”

Campus was the Polytech, where I’d earned my certificate in Starship Maintenance and Engineering. Because some elective units in the humanities were also required, I had found myself in a history course, Failure of Ancient Democracy, where the professor, Dr. Elena Lynn, focused our attention on pre-stellar Earth and, in particular, on the events leading up to the Holocene’s untimely end, where unsupervised democracy became thoroughly discredited as a rational form of government.

As everyone in the class already knew from primary education, every time a democracy of sufficient size had been tried, the so-called rule of the majority had inexorably transformed itself into the rule of a despotic minority. But Dr. Lynn had a more nuanced view. She thought the chief problems with the ancient democracies were largely structural, and if they had amended their procedural defects, history might have turned out differently. Her views skirted the very edge of what was politically acceptable, because it called into question the necessity of Imperial oversight, but whenever a student would question her directly, she’d deftly turn the discussion back to history, insisting that the course was about the past, not the present.

On the way to campus, I replayed her latest lecture from the public net. Beside it ran a stream of comments from various people, mostly students or the more politically-inclined of their friends and parents, and seeing her in the video, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my altogether inappropriate affection for her both during and after the completion of her course.

“So what was going on?” she asked the class. “Why would the people of the United States, in this self-monikered land of the free, allow two parties to take control of their political system, even to the point that these two parties staged their own debates, to which, of course, they would invite only themselves? I mean, it seems transparently self-serving. How did they get away with it?”

Hazel eyes surveyed the rows of desks for a long moment, as a little ball of light bounced randomly from desk to desk, stopping finally at the desk of a student who appeared to have been zoning. The cameras knew where the light would land before the students, so lecture videos always showed the surprise in their eyes when it was their turn to either know the answer or make a fool of themselves on a video that would be archived in publicly accessible storage for their rest of their lives.

“Uh… yeah… uh.”

“Please tell me you at least remember the question?” she smiled at him with what I knew to be faux-sympathy.

“Uh…”

“Two parties,” she threw him a bone. “Why not three? Why not a thousand?”

“You could only vote for one. They didn’t have ranked voting, like we have.”

“Right.” She nodded. “What sort of voting system did they have?”

He glanced at his notes, “First-Past-the-Post.”

He’d been zoning, but at least he’d been reading the book or watching previous lectures. Maybe he’d been up all night working or studying for another class. That was legit, except that it was his choice to be there, being that one could stay in bed and watch the lecture remotely instead of attending. Parents, of course, would encourage their offspring to go to class so they could see their little darlings in the public archive, but not all of them cared, and those that didn’t tended to produce the sort of offspring that wouldn’t have contributed much to the discussions anyway. This ended up skewing the average intelligence level of the discussion to a point somewhat higher than would have been achievable if the entire class were forced to attend à la the babysitting model of education, which was still practiced on some worlds.

“One person, one vote,” Dr. Lynn repeated for the class. “And why did they have this system?”

The student looked down again, finding a paragraph in the textbook that he must have highlighted in advance. He read it verbatim: “The primarily advantage of first-past-the-post is that counting votes is simple enough that people can do it manually, without the aid of computers or any sort of automation, which, although not important today, was critically important when the earliest democracies began running elections.”

“Precisely,” she nodded. “Unfortunately…” she shifted her attention back to the rest of the class, “first-past-the-post almost invariably results in a two-party monopoly, with all the attendant consequences one might expect. Why is this?”

Her left thumb pushed the button on the randomizer’s remote, and the ball of light danced about again, landing at the desk of a rather cute girl. From the steadiness of her gaze, it was clear she’d been paying attention.

“Ranked voting gives people greater choice.”.

“In what way?” Dr. Lynn dug to see if the student would get closer to the core point.

“We’re able to choose who we like best and second best, and so on, because, if you can only choose one candidate, then just two parties get a lock on everything.”

“Yes, and why does this happen?”

“Um… well, it’s because it’s kind of like yin and yang?”

When they started answering questions with questions, it meant they were in one of two categories: unsure or just plain no idea. This one had probably read the chapter summary before class. She knew the “what” but not the “why”.

“Yin and Yang, I didn’t realize you were a Taoist, Ms. Managudeli.”

“Um…” the student couldn’t help but laugh at herself, since it was obvious which of the two categories she fell into, but rather than bob in the soup, she said (very sweetly), “I’m sorry, but I’m not really sure,” almost pleading for the professor to move on to her next victim.

Dr. Lynn pushed the button on the remote yet again, and this time the ball of light landed on desk of a girl who had for some reason colored her hair in alternating stripes of purple and green. “If you can only vote for one person,” the girl said, “then you don’t want to waste your vote by voting for somebody who nobody thinks has a chance.”

“Why don’t they have a chance?”

“Because nobody thinks they have a chance.”

“Why not?”

“Because they haven’t won in the past.”

“But why not vote for them anyway?” Dr. Lynn pressed this particular student, perhaps because she seemed to understand the underlying psychology of the voter’s dilemma. “What’s the harm in voting for a candidate who you know can’t win?”

“You’d be pulling your vote away from somebody who you like second best, but who can win.”

“And therefore, who ends up winning?”

“The person you like the least.”

“Precisely. What is this called?”

“The spoiler effect.”

“Can you name three elections in the pre-stellar USA where the spoiler effect changed or potentially changed the outcome of the election?”

The girl looked at her notes. “−2523, −2515, and −2499.Gregorian Calendar years 1992, 2000, and 2016 respectively.”

“And did the spoilers come from the same side of the political spectrum?”

“No, they came from all sides.”

“In −2523, the spoiler received almost a fifth of the popular vote,” Elena explained, “taking most of these votes away from the incumbent. The result was that the opposition cruised to a 5-point win. Eight years later, in −2515, more or less the same thing happened but in the opposite direction. Sixteen years after that, two spoiler candidates drew enough protest votes from both sides that they may have changed the outcome, but since the USA didn’t have ranked voting, we’ll never know for sure.

“Bear in mind these three elections all happened within a mere quarter century. People who voted for third-party candidates were routinely blamed for a bad outcome. Instead of being celebrated for voting their conscience, they were told to hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils lest the greater evil be elected. Hence, it’s safe to say that the entire voting population on both sides of the political divide was keenly aware of the deficiencies of first-past-the-post voting.”

A hand went up from a guy wearing a letterman’s jacket, and she waited for the obvious question.

“If everyone knew the voting system was messed up,” the student asked, “then why didn’t they do anything to change it? By this point they had computers. They could have easily gone to a ranked voting system.”

“Ah, yes. The definition of insanity, as we all know, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So why didn’t they fix the problem? Who knows the answer?”

A couple of hands went up. She nodded toward each in turn.

“They were used to there only being two main parties. Excluding third-party voices didn’t seem like such a big deal.”

“People saw the two-party system as being more stable,” the second one added.

“How so?”

“Both parties needed centrist voters, so both had to moderate their extremes.”

“In theory. However, the proliferation of media options meant that people no longer necessarily got the same news. Biased news became more popular and therefore more profitable than unbiased news. Nearly all news sources became one-sided, most consciously so, and if not telling outright lies, nearly all committed errors of omission, ignoring or minimizing reportage on events that went against their audience’s political perspective. The result was that it allowed people to effective choose their own reality, and consequentially, there were fewer centrists. Anyone else?” Elena asked, looking toward a third hand as it came up.

“Political tribalism,” this student said, clearly reading the word out of the textbook.

“Your timing is impeccable. Describe political tribalism in your own words.”

The student looked up and thought for a moment. “Basically, everyone was either on Team A or Team B, so nobody cared about Team C or D or E, even if one of those had the right answer.”

“A democracy needs centrists,” Elena said. “Not only do they act as a bridge between partisans, but they can call out the hypocrisy on both sides. I tend to think of them as political lubricant, as if they’re sufficiently numerous, neither side can afford to alienate them. Without centrists, however, political discourse goes from a conversation to a shouting match with partisans willing to break any rule in order to win. At this point, politics gets truly ugly, and the uglier it gets, the more unstable the political system becomes. This is the reason media is now moderated by government,” she added, her voice trailing off as she looked to her lecture notes.

Of course, not only were there censorship laws, but on many worlds, political candidates also had to meet the approval of Imperial authorities before they could run for office. The ancient democracies, by contrast, operated without guard rails, so it was only natural they flew off the tracks every so often, usually transitioning into dictatorships or monarchies.

“These are all good responses,” Elena said, “but we’re forgetting one.” She looked back toward the student who initially prompted the discussion. “We’re forgetting about the special interests, the people who donate money to political campaigns, usually expecting political favors in return. What would they have thought about modernizing the voting system?”

The student stared at her for a moment before he realized that the question was directed at him.

“Uh… well, you mean bribing candidates for office?”

“Bribery is illegal,” she said, shaking her head, “except in politics.” Her head-shake suddenly switched to a nod.

I had to laugh. It reminded me why I liked her so much. I hit the pause button and took a moment to look out the window as the landscape whooshed by, remembering how I TA’ed for her following the completion of her class. She was smart, vivacious, beautiful, funny, kind, patient, and wise. To the extent I’d gotten to know her, I couldn’t see a damn thing wrong, except that she was quite a bit older. Unfortunately, at least so far as I could tell, there was nobody like her in my age group, nobody even close.

Perhaps it was my own fault for not looking hard enough. Instead of frequenting lectures and symposiums, I trolled clubs and bars, and, as a result, chased the sorts of women who only read the chapter summary, assuming they read at all.

For a moment, only a moment, I considered telling her how I felt. Of course, she would laugh, thinking I was joking, or maybe she’d instinctively run the other way. No, it would automatically end whatever sort of relationship we currently had. She’d never call me again, and I’d never again be able to call her. Such a stupid, ridiculous notion.

The class was laughing as I hit the play button, and Mr. Mark waited for it to die down before giving his response.

“I guess there’d be more candidates for them to bribe.”

“But could they have bribed them all?” she asked. “Would all of the various third-party candidates necessarily have been bribable? In a two-party system, the special interests can play the parties against each other. Party A says they’re going to give me X, but you’re only offering me Y. You didn’t realize this was going to be like algebra, did you?”

He opened his mouth but then closed it again.

“No, go ahead,” she coaxed.

“Were they really that… brazen?”

“All we have to go by is the word of people who took part in special interest lobbying, people who did it for awhile, grew sick and ashamed of what they were doing, and finally quit. So, basically, the answer is yes. Behind closed doors, it was often all about the money. Granted, these same politicians who were taking bribes complained that they had to spend so much of their time fundraising. They all said they would change the system if they could, but, of course, they never did, and actions, as we all know, speak louder the words.

“One little-known fact is that the knife cut both ways. Politicians would occasionally propose some law or regulation they knew a certain money-laden group would hate. Then they’d promise to kill it in committee in return for a big pile of cash. It was essentially a shakedown. Hence, we can see that both sides were constantly working each other, yet it was ultimately in both of their interests to keep this corrupt system in place.

“It’s human nature,” she continued. “Every society has political and economics factions, and the internal tensions existing between them are shaped by the rules of their political system.”

“All societies? You mean our society too?”

She stepped back, perhaps realizing she’d somehow traipsed across the line between then and now. “I teach history,” she quickly recovered. “I can only speak to historical governments, but the point remains that since both parties were already taking bribes, neither one could very well accuse the other of taking bribes. But throw a third, fourth or fifth party into the mix, and you can see how this complicates the picture. Big money didn’t want more parties, and the politicians themselves didn’t want more parties. The only people more parties would have benefited were the people themselves, but, of course, they didn’t matter. They didn’t really have a voice, although most of them imagined they did.

“There was an academic study done at the time which showed that over a period of some twenty years, the preferences of regular people had almost no effect on actual policy, whereas the preferences of donors, economic elites such as corporations, had a large effect. To put it bluntly, the authors concluded that the United States was an oligarchy masquerading as a democratic republic.

“Of course, it wasn’t always like this,” she continued. “There was a time when presidents took on the ruling class. There was a time when they reined in corporate malfeasance and runaway inequality. But by the end of the republic, it had become common for leaders to have a private position as well as a public one, at least on important economic issues, and so financial backers knew no matter what a particular politician might say during the heat of a campaign, once elected, they’d repay their donors many times over. The public got lied to over and over again, to the point that they hated their politicians and even began to despise democracy itself. Fewer and fewer would vote. ‘It just encourages the bastards,’ they’d say.”

The class laughed. To them, separated from it as they were by over three and a half millennia, the whole thing was a dark comedy acted out by people long dead, but it seemed as if to Elena it had become a recurring tragedy, one which she relived semester after semester. Every time she spoke of it I could detect a certain sorrow, as if the freedom lost was her own.

“The same thing happened to Rome, more or less. As a few of you may hopefully recall, last week we covered the end of the Roman republic. We talked about how votes were often bought in exchange for free food and drinks, free entertainment, even free money. Of course, some senators tried to ban vote buying, but they immediately ran into the problem of distinguishing between ambitus/bribery and mere benignitas/generosity. Roman election law, as you’ll recall, specifically allowed the latter. Who can remember who was the great reformer of that period?”

“Cato,” someone said.

“Was he successful?”

“No.”

“Marcus Porcius Cato spent years trying to push through campaign finance reform, but he made the mistake of addressing the problem in terms of personal morality rather than as a systemic crisis, which is what it was. In other words, he focused his efforts on addressing the worst excesses of a manifestly corrupt system, rather than trying to overhaul the system itself. And even when he found cases of obvious cheating, the senate, which was itself mostly corrupt, would protect the guilty for fear they’d be the next to be prosecuted. If you tried to steal a loaf of bread and got caught, you’d be punished, but if you tried to steal an election, there were no repercussions. What is this called?”

“A two-tiered justice system,” responded the girl with the green and purple hair.

“Marcus Tullius Cicero at one point claimed that so much money had been borrowed and spent during election season that the interest rate in Rome briefly doubled. What did this do to the public’s trust in government? Mr. Mark.”

“It wasn’t good,” he replied.

“It utterly destroyed their faith, so much so that when Gaius Julius Caesar dissolved the republic, setting himself up as dictator-for-life, however brief the remainder of his life turned out to be, the people were willing to go along with it. They were ready for a succession of strongmen, because representative government had so thoroughly and repeatedly failed them. But was it inevitable?”

Several hands went up, and the students to which they were attached gave all the usual answers:

“Democracies can’t last without a responsible overseer.”

“They become corrupt and change into oligarchies.”

“Unsupervised democracy plus unsupervised capitalism equals unsupervised plutocracy.”

“So when it came to the failure of the American experiment,” Dr. Lynn said to this last student, “who’s fault was it?”

“It was the system.”

“Was there nothing they could have done to fix it before it was too late?”

“All unsupervised democracies eventually fail,” came the expected reply. That is what we were all taught, growing up. The only way democracy could work in the long run was under the benevolent supervision of an Imperial overseer.

“But they must have known what happened to the Romans,” the guy with the letterman jacket said. “Why couldn’t they just get money out of their politics? Go to public financing of elections and be done with it.”

“Who specifically had the power to do this?”

“The poli… oh.” As the camera focused on his expression, you could sense the light bulb switching on somewhere inside his brain. It was like reality suddenly slapping him in the face. “I get it,” he said. “The politicians all held power through corruption. If they’d fixed the system, they’d have to get real jobs.”

“Members of the U.S. Congress were all tied in to wealthy campaign donors. Collectively, they easily outspent their challengers and won reelection well over ninety percent of time. The system as it was worked for them just fine, and as we previously discussed, it also worked for the donors.

“It may be the case, although this is purely conjectural, that the only way to get money out of politics would have been to first break up the two-party monopoly. By the time the elections of −2523, −2515, and −2499 occurred, the practice of political bribery was already well established and was, in fact, accelerating with each new election cycle. As a result, the two major parties were effective owned by corporate sponsors.”

She pressed a few buttons on her remote, and two graphs appeared on the wall behind her.

“The policies of both established parties drifted toward corporatism. Corporatism can take different forms depending on where and when it arises, but in a hegemonic power that is in decline, the policies favored by corporations tend to be low taxes, free trade, low barriers to immigration so they’ll enjoy greater access to cheap labor, and lots of money for military contractors.

“Every so often a true populist would rise up who would earnestly campaign against one or more of these, but every time, the corporations would control the outcome. After all, there were only two major political parties, so if one party didn’t do as it was told, the donors could give money to the other side. This implicit threat kept both parties in line and forced them to converge on corporate-friendly policies.

“But in a political system with three or more viable parties, its harder for any single party to dominate, even one that’s well-funded. The two smaller parties, provided they aren’t too small, can gang up on the biggest one to enact legislation, and this tends to make things more chaotic. You end up with unlikely bedfellows, so it’s harder for donors to control the outcome.

“It may therefore be the case that first-past-the-post voting leads to two party monopolies which leads to an inability to conduct meaningful campaign finance reform, or independent redistricting, or even moving to a ranked voting system to allow for instant run-offs. The whole process is part and parcel of the power structure.

“After all,” she continued, “everyone knew the political system had serious problems, and these problems had obvious solutions that had been implemented elsewhere, but the United States stubbornly refused to change. Why? Perhaps it was because those in charge didn’t want to fix these problems, because as far as they were concerned, these issues weren’t a bug; they were a feature.”

“I still don’t get it,” the guy in the letterman jacket shook his head. “Were people back then just stupid?”

“Well,” Elena paused for a moment, “considering all the pesticides, hormones and other chemicals being dumped into their food supply, which was already of dubious genetic quality…” she made a face, “...but, of course, some historians claim the Romans became idiots due to lead poisoning. While there’s some validity to this argument, I don’t see it as determinant. The simplest explanation is political inertia. What could they do? Go into the streets and protest?”

“Sure.”

“Sheeple are not so sophisticated. When they finally take to the streets, it’s usually over the lack of some necessity, or perhaps basic inequality, or maybe fear of impending doom or even anger. But have you ever known people to protest en masse over procedure?”

“But…” the student fumbled for a bit, trying to find the words to counter her argument. “You said that procedure ultimately determines policy.”

“And so it does.”

“Well, their procedures sucked! Couldn’t everyone see that they were being scammed? That their whole political system had become a fraud?”

“Yes.”

“And yet they didn’t do anything about it.”

“A few tried,” she replied. “Too few, as it ultimately turned out.”

They went on to talk about negativity in political campaigns (attack ads), and how this money is best spent when there are only two viable parties. From there they discussed political polarization, and the overall strategies politicians and “big money” used to manipulate the electorate by keeping it divided along major-party lines. Then they concluded with a discussion about ranked and rated voting systems, and how either could potentially have saved the pre-stellar U.S. from crashing.

As it turned out, both parties promised repeatedly to reduce the public debt, a promise that went on for decades, but one which neither actually intended to keep. Both lied, basically at will, knowing that since the other one was also lying, they couldn’t really be held accountable for their own lies, as where else did the American voter have to turn?

Since there was no viable third option, the two-headed demogorgon, fighting with itself over the wheel, steered the once great nation straight off a cliff. Big money made out like a bandit, and the people were stuck with the bill, hardly a position from which to compete successfully in a financially and later politically integrated world, much less assure the survival of liberty and freedom during that integration.

As I walked from the vehicle, I reflected how she skirted the very edge of the politically acceptable. Most of these kids were taught from an early age that democracy only worked under the aegis of an Imperial overseer, such as Baronness Brionna Lynn Knowln. The ancient democracies, they were told, failed not because they were badly constructed, but rather because there was nobody in authority who was taking a long-term view of things. This was partially true, of course. Short-term thinking was largely to blame, but what Elena was arguing, implicitly, was that short-term thinking didn’t arise solely due to the absence of a planetary overseer with no term-limit, but rather it arose because their political system contained within it procedural deficiencies, which, had they been corrected in time, could potentially have solved the problem, and that this might have changed the subsequent political development of humanity during the three and a half millennia between then and now.

I’d asked her once, privately, what she thought of the Imperium, and she had smiled and said simply, “It is what it is.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She looked at me for a long moment, perhaps wondering if she could trust me not to report her to the administration for harboring anti-Imperial sentiments, and then she seemed to make a decision, and she began speaking in a tone that I’d never before heard her voice take. It was anxious yet determined, like the voice of someone speaking truth for the first time.

“Just as people have developmental imperatives,” she said, “things like walking, talking, perhaps even falling in love, things we must learn at certain stages in our lives, so too do societies, and if they fail to learn… if they refuse to adjust and avoid making the same mistake over and over...” her voice trailed off.

“What’s this have to do with the Imperium?”

“The Imperium,” she said, “owes its very existence to the fact that the leaders of the ancient democracies stopped responding creatively to the challenges of their time. Their civilization crumbled due to nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority What we do in life echoes for eternity,” she said, “and once the flame of freedom was snuffed out… technological advancements in population control...” her voice trailed off again, like someone talking to themselves in an empty room. “All it took was one generation to drop the ball.”

“So you’re saying the Imperium is a form of tyranny?”

She turned away. To ask such a thing was a bridge too far.

“Forget what I said,” she replied, looking down at the floor. “It’s not important.”

She shooed me out, and for the rest of the term, every time we exchanged glances, it was somehow different than before. Of course, I never told anyone what she’d said. The last thing I wanted was to get her in trouble. When I finally graduated, she gave me a gift, a communicator of the sort used by spacers, since she knew I was aiming to become one.

“I thought a lot about what you said that day in your office,” I told her.

“And?”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“Oh?”

“I think it’s very important.”

I kept in touch with her through correspondence, talking about the worlds I visited and how each had it’s own unique culture and political system, supervised, of course, by an Imperial overseer. I even sent her a copy of a travel journal I’d been writing, ostensibly so she could make editorial suggestions but really because I just wanted to stay in contact.

When I finally reached her office, I knocked lightly on the door. She opened it, and suddenly I was in her presence.

“Greetings and salutations.” She welcomed me in.

“Uh… greetings and salutations,” I repeated. For the first few moments, I was overwhelmed. It was like my brain couldn’t think. All I could do was smile and take a seat and then keep smiling like an idiot, trying to think of something… anything... to say. We exchanged pleasantries in this way, which is to say awkwardly, but before it became too much to bear, she got down to business.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you to drop by.”

“What’s up? What’s this favor?”

“I’m to understand that your ship visits Belizo on a regular basis. I have a friend there.”

“A boyfriend?” Holy Hiver-farts! Why did that pop out of my mouth?

“No, not a boyfriend,” she shot me a somewhat crooked grin, as though I shouldn’t have had the temerity to ask such a question, although she seemed amused. “He’s a long-distance colleague. When are you scheduled to go back to Belizo?”

I told her, and she seemed excited. It turned out she wanted me to take him a small package of some locally produced confections. I’d be there right around his birthday, and, in any case, she didn’t trust the custom agents not to steal it. She apparently had a long history of losing packages in the interstellar mail, so much so that she made me promise I’d place it directly in his hand.

As I left, I breathed a sigh of relief. Hopefully her colleague would give me something to return to her, and if he didn’t, perhaps I’d buy her something. What, exactly, I had no idea, but it didn’t matter. I’d come visit her again, and next time I’d hopefully act like less of an idiot. What I didn’t realize was that this was the last time I’d see her, and my coming rage and inconsolable loss would be rivaled only by the fear of one who knows too much in a society that is built on secrets and lies.

Patron Encounter: Confections from Hell

Requires: Starship

One of the PCs is approached by a good friend or family member who happens to be in academia, preferably someone who is teaching history, psychohistory, sophontology, polisociology, or some related subject. (It should be someone who the PC has especially strong feelings toward.) This patron wants a small package of confections to be delivered as a birthday present to another academic working in a similar field on a nearby world. Since the PC is going to the world in question, it’s a relatively simple task. The problem arises when the PC reaches the world. The patron’s friend is dead.

It happened recently, within the last few days. The individual died at home of a brain aneurysm. The authorities do not suspect any sort of foul play, and so if the PC investigates, the only thing he or she might discover is that since the body was found, a close relative went through the individual’s effects but was puzzled that a small computer that had no wireless capability has apparently gone missing. If questioned about it, this relative may explain that the deceased used to use this often and specifically kept it off the network to avoid getting any computer viruses. In any case, it wasn’t worth very much, being relatively low-end as computers go, so the relative isn’t really concerned.

Assuming the PC decides to return the confections to the patron, it will be discovered that he or she has also died, and coincidentally, it was also due to a brain aneurysm. As before, the police do not suspect foul play.
If the PC decides to open the package, he or she will find twenty-six confections, each individually wrapped in a fairly heavy metallic foil. Although it will not be immediately apparent, a close examination will reveal that one of the wrappers has been tampered with. Opening the wrapper and examining the candy within will reveal that a small line is still present where it was cut in half. Pulling it apart or biting into it will reveal that this particular morsel has been partially hollowed out to make room for a data stick (similar to a modern USB thumb drive) which, in fact, is still present. Although there is a small amount of metal in the data stick, the metal in the wrappers would set off a metal detector before the metal in the data stick would ever register. Likewise, the wrappers would also tend to foil x-rays.

On the data stick are 155 files, all of which seem to be videos of various lectures relating to the patron’s and the intended recipient’s fields of academia. None of it is very interesting, and one of the files appears to be corrupted, refusing to open in the video player the PC is using. In actuality, this so-called video file is misidentifying its file type to the operating system, and were it re-identified using the user interface, the PCs would be able to see that it is actually a password-protected archive.

If the PC manages to crack open the archive, he or she will find a paper by an unknown psychohistorian, or at least someone who claims to be a psychohistorian, identifying himself only as Pitiable Scholar. The paper is written in an academic style, rendering it almost unintelligible to the average lay person, as it uses many mathematical formulas deriving from the axioms of statistics to prove mathematically, from a detailed study of Imperial history, that the Imperium is periodically purging itself of its democracies by apparently favoring the aggression of tyrants.

The first argument of the paper is that democracies that include the freedom of speech and sufficient technological infrastructure are evolutionarily advantaged. One of the reasons is that they almost never go to war with one another. If it happens at all, it is usually a case of one part of a nation trying to split off as an independent entity due to deep, philosophical incompatibilities, but as far as interplanetary warfare, the wars that do occur are almost always one form of tyranny attacking another or attacking a democracy, or a democracy attacking a nation that it regards as tyrannical and dangerous, but usually only if the democracy is able to effect a regime change with relatively little risk to itself. Hence, over time, one would expect that because tyrannies tend often to attack one another, democracies, simply by better avoiding existential conflicts, would tend to have an evolutionary advantage.

A second but just as important reason has to do with intergovernmental turnover. The author argues that every century a certain percentage of democracies devolve though mismanagement, corruption, and demagoguery into tyrannies, but during the same time periods, the number of tyrannies that liberalize, either peacefully or though rebellion, tends to be greater. While the Imperial system slows down this natural turnover, both by moderating the behavior of planetary governments and by propping most up well beyond their natural lifespans, it slows down this natural process more or less equally on both ends of the political spectrum. Hence, intergovernmental turnover remains a net positive evolutionary effect for democracies, and therefore, for both of these reasons, democracies should, over time, tend to dominate any long-settled sector.

But what Pitiable Scholar shows is that during Imperial history, although the vast majority of governments behaved, more or less, as expected, democracies received almost no evolutionary advantage whatsoever, and by examining all the interplanetary wars of the last century, he or she statistically demonstrates with a high probability of confidence that the Imperium is taking the side of the tyranny most of the time, thus countering the natural evolutionary effect that would tend to favor free societies. He or she speculates that the Imperium does this consciously and systematically but in a manner that is either secret or disguised, providing technical, reconnaissance, political, economic, or even military aid, but almost always doing so through powerful intermediaries, such as the megacorporations or, in rare cases, though the lesser nobility, individual members of which can be later chastised as a show of Imperial benevolence, although the outcomes of their actions remain uncorrected. The writer’s conclusion is that the Imperium is doing this for important psycho-historical reasons, namely because it realizes that if the proportion of democracies were to rise above a certain level, it would lead to increasingly demanding calls for liberalization of the Imperial order itself, something which the highest echelon of Imperial society, for various reasons, doesn’t wish to entertain.

Included with this paper are a number of supporting documents, a few of which are spreadsheets, showing raw data and its statistical transformation into the numerical elements that ultimately support the paper’s thesis. Likewise, there are hundreds of news articles as well as in depth analyses by various writers from across the political spectrum, each detailing an individual example of the sort of Imperial bias that Pitiable Scholar concludes is likely to be taking place. However, these journalists and commentators never put the pieces together into a larger picture as the anonymous psycho-historian does, as they are each looking at different military conflicts taken in isolation, but taking their research as a whole, is all tends to support Pitiable Scholar’s overall conclusion.

In looking over this entire collection (the paper, the supporting documents, and the news archive), one can’t help but imagine that it took many years (if not decades) of painstaking effort on the part of the researcher. Nonetheless, it is written at such a level as to be almost entirely inaccessible to the average layperson, tending to discredit the notion that the writer is just a well-educated conspiracy theorist attempting to emulate the academic style of writing.

In addition to all of the above, there is also a prominent README file that warns readers not to put this document on any computer system that is network enabled, because the author believes that governmental reconnaissance of supposedly private files goes on much more than the average Imperial subject understands. Because of this, he or she emphasizes that this file is only to be transferred between computers via something called Sneakernet.

Roll 1d6:

1-2:	Imperial intelligence doesn’t know the PC has this file. They know it exists, because they’ve seen other copies, and they are trying to track down everyone who has it, so these individuals can either be quietly taken into custody or, if necessary, liquidated.
3-4:	Imperial intelligence learns via locational surveillance logs that the PC visited the recently deceased patron. This PC will be summoned to the local police station where he or she will be questioned about the nature of the visit.
5-6:	As 3-4, but the intelligence service also either knows the PC left the patron holding some sort of package (on a 5, thanks to surveillance video) or promised to carry a package for the patron (on a 6, thanks to a surreptitious conversation monitoring device that was in the patron’s home or office on the day they met). If the PC openly admits to whatever it is he or she knows, the intelligence officer will want to see the package and won’t let the PC out of his or her sight until this is accomplished. If, however, the PC initially conceals anything that the intelligence agent already knows, then the situation will become much more serious.

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