Sleeper Cell 2240

Memoires of the 21st Century Interplanetary Revolution

After a mid-21st-century Space Race, catalyzed by open-source space hardware, an increasingly economically stratified world erupts into revolution. While both the minority of the very wealthy and the growing base of homeless and extremely poor battle it out, another broad sector of society adapts to become increasingly global while at the same time forming societies centered around individual villages rather than industrial urban centers. Information sharing and ease of travel have merged formerly adversarial cultures into emerging identities. Religious and "racial" barriers naturally begin to dissolve over the latter part of the 21st century. With the disintegration of these racial political boundaries, collapsing global markets, and increasingly mobilized and networked dissident grassroots fighting alongside the very poor, the elitist aristocracy—finding themselves on the losing end of a true proletariat revolution—have fled to a newly terraformed Mars. Those who remain on Earth are led by a group of Elders, heroes from the "Great Revolution" who govern by the Taoist virtues of "non-interference" or "Wu Wei" in leadership, modeled after the relationship of these Elders with an enigmatic extraterrestrial force of "Watchers" who quietly intervened throughout the course of the late 21st-century revolution. After requesting an audience with one of these Elders, his great-grandfather, a young man named Elijah, engages his family's story of the founding of this new Earth culture by direct dialog with an old mountain mystic who was there through it all. What Elijah learns over the course of training with his "Zeidy" in and around his grotto in the Carmel Mountains prepares him for what happens next...