The Oluundi were humans from the distant world of Caszyrri that arrived on the planet Oluu as part of a Caszyrrian colonization push to expand Mankind's reach among the stars. Oluu is the fourth planet of the Kor Tiaki Beta system and lies safely within the star's habitable zone.
Carried aboard colony pods, the first Oluundi had the task of establishing and fueling the bases that would centralize their colonial activities. In only eight decades, the population had increased to thousands of people and advances in genetic engineering allowed the breeding of the specialized workers that were always in demand for the growing colony.
For centuries, the Oluu colony sent transmissions back to Caszyrri, though the arrival of new ships was a rare event because of the limitations of propulsion technology and the relatively large distance between the worlds. When a new ship arrived, it was at the time when the Alpha and Beta stars of the system were at their closest; but affairs on Caszyrri were turbulent in those times, and the colonists of Oluu knew they had to rely on their own labors to persevere.
After another century, the surface of verdant Oluu was transformed. Human cities existed on all of the planet's five continents and the population had climbed into the millions. The scientists of the planet had been developing their own technologies to create the further specialized workers that they needed to begin their endeavors in space. As an autocratic government demanded more from the workers, the society became strained as men and women began to question if there was more to their existences than colonial life and collective activity. The Oluundi government began developing techniques for maintaining cultural dominance, and in implementing them found that force was the most expedient means of assuring the strict social hierarchy that granted the planetary elite the power over the fate of the civilization.
It wasn't long after the rise of the planetary oligarchy that a ship carrying ambassadors from Caszyrri was destroyed and the attacks blamed on enemies of the State. The resultant social unrest created a power vacuum that the emerging corporatist sector instantly filled. The first product of these unified corporate think-tanks was draconian legislation designed to utterly enslave the population of Oluu.
Under new laws enacted in the wake of the shuttle bombing, any colonists who wished to reproduce would be required to select and purchase a license for a 'gene-make' from a private corporation. A collection of presequenced genes forming a viable genome, gene-makes were commercial products that would modify the parents' gametes to create a baby with specific genetic characteristics. Hailed as the salvation of the Oluundi People, the gene-tampering industry soon became a cruel and grotesque parasite that inflicted misery on the great majority of the population that could only afford inferior gene-makes full of sequencing errors and atavistic traits that generally served only to reduce their health and make them reliant on pharmaceutical remedies for their deformities and ailments. A rift began to open between the people of Oluu as the once healthy population began to show the unmistakeable signs of genetic exploitation.
As the population of Oluu became more and more influenced by genetic manipulation, the laws governing the subject became more sinister. One would not only be required to purchase a license for a gene-make for their children; but those children would be forced to lease the gene-make from its owner, often through a lifetime of servitude. The penalty for failure to pay the lease in the early days was exile to a labor camp; but as the decades passed, it became mandatory for the Oluundi to wear tracking devices on their wrists that would inject instantly lethal neurotoxins into their bodies upon expiration of the gene-make lease. The planet's population had become entirely enslaved; and the Oluundi Regency had arisen, an oligarchical corporate empire in which the leadership of Oluu was conducted by those who worshiped the advancement of their own genetic structures and called themselves living gods. It was at this time that the Regency sent a final communication to their distant brothers and sisters on Caszyrri: “We are separate.”
The iron-fisted Oluundi Regency might have ruled forever on their world as the master of slaves, but there came a time after the establishment of the planet's space programs that the State began to accumulate ships of war. Increasingly militant and blood-thirsty, the geno-supremacist aristocracy of Oluu began to cast its hungry eyes on distant Caszyrri. What began at first with raids on Caszyrrian shipping lanes escalated over the years to a full-scale invasion of the human homeworld by the combined armada of the mighty Oluundi Regency. A desperate struggle ensued, and the design capabilities of the combatant starships were pushed to their limits. As the shock of the initial invasion died down, it was revealed that Caszyrri's planetary defenses had performed beyond their creators' most optimistic expectations. Though besieged, Caszyrri had not had its industrial nor logistical capacities reduced by the attack.
It is sometimes said that one never makes enemies one at a time, and this was true for the invading forces of Oluu. At that time, the humans of Caszyrri had only just discovered the existence of the Sho'tokir, neighbors that had gone undetected on the small water planet of Velussek orbiting nearby Proxima Tiaki. It was not known widely yet among the people of Caszyrri, but the sho'tokir had been instructing human researchers in the disciplines of phase dynamics, inertial capacitance, and applications for field generation that would allow human starships to transcend the practical limitations of ultra-fast travel. Caszyrri's first generation of hyperspeed starcraft and phase weapon systems tipped the balance of the war; and the skies of Caszyrri were littered with the shattered remains of the Alpha Gene-Makes and their burning ships, the bitter flowers of an overproud aristocracy.
In the aftermath of the war, Caszyrrians learned that the enslaved peoples of Oluu had become the target of their remaining masters' wrath for their failure to conquer the humans. Intervening just in time, a sho'tokir officer was able to hack the central planetary network responsible for communication with the tracking devices that almost all Oluundi wore. The code to release the locking mechanisms on the tracking bracelets was processed just in time, and the Oluundi were spared a genocide as the tracking bracelets of the entire population opened and fell off before they could be used to dispense their lethal neurotoxins and satisfy the aristocracy's pyrrhic lust for revenge. The pride of the arrogant ones turned quickly to terror as they realized that they were entirely surrounded by newly freed slaves; but even freed slaves must eat, and their former masters thought to wait out their demise by famine in hidden bunkers beneath the surface of the world; and so they hid, but famine was not the fate of the Oluundi, who had begun receiving Caszyrrian relief efforts that in only a few short months restored self-sufficiency to the planet. Now exiles, the former architects of corporate slavery remained hidden, waiting for their time to surreptitiously rejoin society.
Because of the wide array of genetic modifications inflicted on the people of Oluu, their men and women often have physical features associated with the gene-make of their parents or grandparents. Though still legal, genetic modification on modern Oluu is a strictly governed industry and natural breeding is the most common form of reproduction. Many Oluundi are proud of the changes to their physical appearances that run in their families, and have adopted a good-natured attitude on the subject. Oluundi stand one to two meters in height and have an average adult mass of 70 kilograms.
© Copyright 2012 to 2015 C. H. Watson. All rights reserved.
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