Jovian Interstellar Republic

Jovian Republic Jovian Interstellar Republic
Republic Flag Seal
Motto
"First Amongst Equals"
Anthem
Transit of the Galileans
Io orbiting above the Jovian clouds
Interstellar Federation
Capital:	Sommerville Landing, Europa
Official languages:	Solar English, Solar Chinese, and 6 others
Currency:	Jovian Legacy (JL)
Demonym:	Jovian, Republic(an)
Politics
Government:	Federal bureaucratic constitutional republic
- Executive Director:	Loranz Dzonaban
- Council Director:	Cerymine Teisetsu
Legislature:	Jovian Interstellar Republic
- Upper house:	Jovian Council
- Lower house:	Jovian Congress
Religion(s):	None at federal level
Settled:	2248
Formation:	3505
Colours:	IGSA standard:              (Civil)              (Military)
Demographics
Population:	7 billion
Geography
Planet:	Jupiter
System:	Solar System
Avg. distance from Earth:	588 million km
Orbital period:	11.862 yr
Moon(s):	79 (incl. Amalthea,Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Himalia, Io and Thebe)
[Source]

Article under construction This article is in the pre-production phase, and is thus largely unwritten. The author(s) apologise for the inconvenience.

The Jovian Interstellar Republic (Martian English: Inrestelaa Ribelik Zibudaa), officially the Jovian Republic, is a federation of the states of Callisto, Ganymede and Europa, with its seat of government located on the latter moon.

Jupiter rose to power following the collapse of the Interstellar Governed Space Authority, and sheltered its Solar operations while it grew in the vacuum, becoming an interstellar power and frontliner in agriculture, shipbuilding and genetic engineering, with Jovian starships and designer lifeforms since earning the praise and envy of the system. Come the present era, however, Jupiter has approached its midlife crisis, with the planet’s population density, over-consumerist culture and high automation reducing it to a realm of sinecure bureaucrats, pensioned retirees, social shut ins, university dropouts and unemployed welfare hogs. As the rest of governed space marches forward, Jupiter lags behind, its eyes distracted by plastic junk, celebrities, esports, drone-delivered fast food and holographic romance.

History

“	Earth and IGSA’s collapse mirrored that of the great ancient nations; slowly at first, and then all at once. Me and my colleagues in the Big Three merely had enough foresight to be ahead of the curve.	”
–Excerpt from Ribonucleic Castle, autobiography of Koi Boy founder Lee Woo-bi

The Jovian moons Callisto and Ganymede were settled in 2248 through a joint state-corporate venture involving Earth and the United Nations, with the Luna-built Minos Station - shipped over with the colonisation fleet - later entering Europan orbit to begin the semi-automated construction of domed cities destined to be lowered to the moon's surface.

Jupiter was governed as the Earth-controlled Colony of Jupiter until seceding in 3305 with permission from the newly renamed Interstellar Governed Space Authority, with the Climate Disaster having long atrophied effective governance by the Federated Earth Arcologies (FEA). Rather than simply replacing the former rulers, IGSA delegated governance to local authorities in order to maximise their stretched resources to better places, namely Earth and the Colony of Qaf. Jupiter was thus declared the Union of Jupiter, with IGSA assuming co-control of the former colonial government, appointing local officials to various state positions and flushing its bureaucracy of redundant administrators, all while allowing the de-facto corporate control to continue unabated.

With Earth's parasitic influence gone - which saw vast amounts of capital and minerals sucked out of the Jovian moons to and sent homeward to salve the wounds of the dying planet - and IGSA taking the back seat, the local Jovian powers found themselves with a unique opportunity to flex their own interests, laying the basis for each moon to develop their unique economies and cultures. Three companies in particular would benefit greatly from this changing of the guard: the Callistoan shipbuilder Cody & Shelving, the Ganymedian mass food producer GanySubsist (later SBSIST), and the Europan Woo-bi Genetics (precursor to Koi Boy), each exploiting the Climate Crisis and the slow downfall of IGSA for their own benefit.

Cody & Shelving was formed out of a merger of two humble Jupiter-born shipbuilding companies that rose quickly through the purchasing of liquidated Earther infrastructure on Callisto, most of it being too expensive to disassemble and ship back to Earth. With Earth crippled, Mars distracted by its terraforming efforts, and the wild west that was contemporary Saturn inhibiting the manufacture of quality products, the company moved to fill the void through the manufacturing of high-quality starships for the Solar System, using their moon's stable geology as a safe platform to construct various vessels. Two other factors also aided in upholding this need for quality: the growth of the Kimber-Sonoshee Racing League amongst the outer planets - which maintained a high bar for powerful, efficient VASIMR and Kimber Drive engines and durable ships - and the hostility of Jupiter itself, with the gas giant's powerful magnetic field and the Io Plasma Torus demanding ships worthy enough to brave its perilous orbit. Though initially slow, with Mars-made starships proving to be a bitter competitor, the red planet's drive towards isolationism and Earth's rebirth as an interstellar power saw Cody & Shelving and their home moon become a leader in the Solar shipbuilding industry.

Ganymede's size, magnetic field and abundant subterranean saltwater sea - kept in a liquid state from a combination of tidal flexing and geothermal energy - was a natural breeding ground for prosperous agriculture. While already a powerful food producer by the 34th century, the moon's industry was highly irregular and rife with redundancies, with its disparate governing domes inheriting the mixed agendas of Earth's various states. The foundation of the Union of Jupiter was the necessary seachange that allowed local producers to step in and make proper use of the moon's crop-friendly traits. Beset by hundreds of competitors scrambling to carve up the farmland the Earthers left behind, the key IGSA partner and former Germany-based GanySubsist Corporation (Formerly EuroSubsist) made good on its IGSA coffers and prior experience in feeding the Climate Disaster-ravaged Europe to mop up a large share of Ganymedian greenhouses and smartly invest in the mass production of cheap, quality, pan-cultural edibles to feed the starving bellies of Earth's diverse people-groups. According to mainstream economists and journalists - both then and now - it was the strong ethos of cost cutting and quality control held by GanySubsist's CEO Albretta Lang that allowed her company to rise above its competition, with her decisions seeing it dominate the moon and subsequently shape its culture for centuries to come. Rather than rely on local workers from Jupiter or the belt, Lang and her board of executives took advantage of the influx of Earther refugees with the institution of a large recruitment program that'd pay for the relocation of promising refugees to Ganymede to be put to work in its farms, providing them with basic dwellings and discounts for GanySubsist products. The investment was heavy, with Lang herself drawing from her own personal fortune to see it through, however the long-term returns were considerable, with the Earther immigrants' desperation to earn a living, lack of expendable funds, and often lack of other employable skills locking them in a state of de-facto wage slavery and loyalty to the company. In time, a large percentage of the settlements of Ganymede were populated by a new swathe of poor Earthers, with this swelling demographic of immigrants popularised in Jovian media as the "Eight-hundred Dollar Earthers". GanySubsist also focused most of its efforts on the cultivation of edible bugs and algae rather than maintaining a diverse portfolio of various crops and stock, allowing for the fast mass-production of cheap, nutrient-rich food bases that could be sold and consumed as-is, or adapted into various cuisines. Its direct involvement in each step of food production, from the farm to the table, also allowed rigorous quality control, which in part helped it earn a good reputation amongst the sea of otherwise mixed-quality algae and bug produce that plagued the system. In the following centuries, GanySubsist's success would see it earn greater attention from IGSA and other state and corporate entities throughout governed space, with it striking various lucrative and sometimes exclusive deals to produce food (and later pharmaceuticals) for space exploration and colonisation, military rations, and welfare programs. To reflect this interstellar expansion, GanySubsist would rename itself SBSIST in 3499.

The rise of the Jovian designer life form industry is popularly attributed to the pioneer and self-declared “first true clone immortal” Lee Woo-bi, whose talents and business endeavours effectively laid the groundwork for the modern culture of designer pets, near-human androids and clone dynasties on Jupiter and the greater Solar System. Moving from Earth to Ganymede in 3405 to fulfil a GanySubsist contract in edible cockroach engineering, Lee left the company in 3411 to found Woo-bi Genetics, exploiting the limited IGSA presence and lax Jovian laws on genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to create artificial lifeforms, with his business model evolving from environmental conservation through the re-introduction of hardy animal species to Earth, to creating designer animals for the environments of Mars and Jupiter, and later to entirely customisable pets, with various premier lines being aquatic pets for the subsurface seas of the Jovian ice moons, leading the company to rename itself “Koi Boy” in 3438. By the 50’s Lee expanded into human cloning, infamously using his uploaded consciousness for the creation of prototype clone dynasties, with the success of his tech rapidly attracting the attention of wealthy venture capitalists across the Solar System. Before leaving Jupiter for the freer markets of Saturn in 3465, Lee’s final project was the prototyping of limitedly intelligent pet-like humanoids, which laid the basis of the modern day Kappa line of aquatic humanoids (or more colloquially “Fish Girls”). While Lee was a loose cannon that attracted frequent poor press, his departure from the company and its copyrights on various life designing technologies allowed it reap the profits necessary to pursue the creation of high-cost, high-quality pets and clones, inspired in part by the similar business ethos pursued by Cody & Shelving and to a lesser extent SBSIST, with its products proving themselves to be considerably more customisable and defect-free than the little meaningful Solar competition that existed at the time. Additionally, similarly-advanced Interstellar States beyond the system that were capable of posing a threat, such as Tranquility (with its own culture of transhumanism and unshackled AI development seeing a parallel development of clone dynasties) or Zhu Que (which headed its own successful development of artificial animals for its high-grav, low-oxygen atmosphere, with a flagship creation being its crimson feathered, peacock-based Vermillion Bird), were heavily impeded by the light barrier.

Owing to its proximity to the main belt, its productive agriculture, high employment opportunities, the abundant subsurface oceans and radiation-shielding crusts of its icy moons, and the influx of refugees from Earth, Jupiter's population rose steadily in the coming century, and with the maturation of the gas giant's industry headed by the Big Three, its culture, and the Jovian national identity, IGSA moved to stabilise the planet's limited government in 3411, creating a federal Jovian government out of the colony-states of Callisto, Europa and Ganymede and declaring the planet as the independent Jovian Republic.

With the later foundation of the Martian Federation (3453) and the Commonwealth of Earth (3460) seeing IGSA's Solar power shrunk dramatically in under a decade, the interstellar organisation made a concerted effort to keep Jupiter under its thumb, striking deals with the planet's ruling corporate entities in exchange for continued political influence, with the Republican Government moving to diffuse local independence protests with IGSA-funded food, festivals, and tear gas. The Big Three happily obliged, with each seeing a mutual benefit in sheltering the cowering IGSA on their moons while using its legitimacy and muscle to secure monopolies over their respective markets.

Government

Officially, the Jovian Interstellar Republic is a super-entity that coordinates three self-governing republics and four federally-administered departments. While nominally decentralised, the vast bureaucracy that presides over the Jovian moons holds the balance of power and cooperates heavily with the Interstellar Governed Space Authority and Interstellar Police Force, the latter of which is sanctioned as the the Interstellar Republic's official law enforcement agency, with other policing companies strictly restricted to the purview of private security.

Jupiter's two top-level government entities are the popularly elected Jovian Congress and the Jovian Council - formed of appointed state, IGSA, INTPOL and corporate delegates -, headed respectively by the Executive Director and Council Director. In general, laws are drafted by the Congress, where they pass to the Council for scrutiny or approval. Elections to the Jovian Congress occur every five years for every adult citizen over eighteen years of age. Congress also presides over a number of Offices which administer the various functions of the state, including the governance of Jupiter's four departments.

Jupier's three celestial states and four departments are:

Moon	Type	Capital	Population, c. 4005
Amalthea	Department	Voyager I Base
Callisto	State	Asgard	1.1 billion
Europa	State	Sommerville Landing	3.7 billion
Ganymede	State	Heliopolis	2.2 billion
Himalia	Department
Io	Department	Boösaule	1,0001
Thebe	Department

1. Official Records

Due to the nature of their varied economies and histories, the three celestial states have followed noticeable trends in regards to state decisions. Callisto, with shipyards as the backbone of its economy, has backed industrial and militaristic policies. Ganymede, wanting to ensure stable markets, has backed pacifist and agrarian policies. Europa meanwhile, as the traditional heartland, has tended towards conservative policies.

The republic's self-adorned title of "Interstellar Republic" is officially justified by the Congress "...in recognition of Jupiter's instrumental economic presence throughout Governed Space in the form of its leading freighting infrastructure, and in honour of the Jovian Interstellar Navy's and Merchant Marine's role in assisting cooperative IGSA-INTPOL peacekeeping."

Gallery

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  2nd Millennium composite photo of Jupiter's south pole

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  Chart detailing two Jovian starships in their IGSA-defined colours