Erasmus
“When all you have is a sniper rifle, everything looks like unexploded heads.”
Illustrated by JJ Wind · Markosia Comics, 2012
The story
In 2154, independent nations have given way to splintered corporate entities responsible for the health, security and education of their employees and shareholders. Government everywhere has scaled down to the point of collapse, leaving those outside the private territories to fend for themselves.
Without the safety net of essential services, and facing constant relocation as land on Earth and the frontier worlds is repartitioned, society outside the walls begins to fester — failed states with drug- and terror-fuelled economies taking hold between borders. Control of all business dealings and disputes is governed by an evasive bureaucracy known as Ombudsman. Few people are willing to acknowledge that a One World Government has taken firm hold throughout the colonized solar system — one that responds only to the needs of corporate hubris. Fewer still are aware of the machinations behind Ombudsman’s rise to power.
Erasmus, a five-issue science fiction miniseries, begins on the day three genetically-evolved members of an Ombudsman naval SEAL team initiate a terrorist plot meant to return government to the people — and ends with their spectacular failure. Relegating traditional sci-fi trappings of gadgets, spaceships and quantum physics to backdrop, it is character-driven political fiction with a gritty, detached realism grounding its more extraordinary themes.
Book One — Primer
Captain Rico Troy, a SEAL pilot in Triton’s 11th, gains instant notoriety when he flees with one of Ombudsman’s newly-developed FJ-11 Raven fighters during a live-fire test over the Mars desert. Genetically-evolved SEAL Marcus Brilliant, awaiting processing in a Luna military prison, trades knowledge of the desertion plot for his own release — while secretly working with Troy and Gunnery Sergeant Varga Watts to draw Ombudsman’s attention elsewhere.
As a hijacked orbital rail takes out a 1,111-floor corporate headquarters over North America, a mercenary team ascends Brilliant Tower seeking the execution of Marcus’s father, Ombudsman shill Finlay Brilliant — wheels within wheels, plots within plots.
The bigger idea
Erasmus isn’t really asking whether the SEALs pull off their coup — it’s asking what’s left to govern once every government has quietly outsourced the job to whoever can afford the dispute-resolution fees. Ombudsman never conquered anyone; it just stayed the only entity still answering the phone once everyone else gave up. The terrorists at the center of Book One aren’t trying to seize power so much as prove there’s still a person, not a policy, behind every decision that’s been made to look inevitable.
“A five-issue miniseries that treats a corporate dystopia the way a heist film treats a vault — wheels within wheels, plots within plots, and a body count that starts on page one.”
— house pitch, Markosia Comics
