Chapter Text
Caitlyn’s device pinged on the bedside table beside her, and she didn’t need to look at it to know what the alert was. She could continue to stare listlessly up at the ceiling, and not need to lift a finger to confirm that the rest of her life was now unalterably determined. Her passage off planet Earth was confirmed. The Kirammans were leaving the solar system.
They could have gone on the first of the Exodus ships that left, three years ago now. Given that the Kirammans were one of the key financiers for the establishment of the new world in the Trappist system, they could have gone whenever they wanted. Her mother, Cassandra Kiramman, shrewd and indomitable CEO of Kiramman Industries, usually liked to be in the vanguard when it came to revolutionary advances in technology.
But such was the Kiramman’s financial and political heft on Earth, it had taken two years of furious legal wrangling for Cassandra to be able to satisfactorily extricate her wealth and negotiate her new position on Trappist 1e. The position being she would own something like a fifth of the planet. And something close to a fifth of the population too. Passages on an Exodus ship were expensive. Tech magnates like Cassandra were loaning people the cost of the fare, in return for their labour on the new world.
“It’s not a loan if people will never be able to pay it off,” Caitlyn had pointed out, more than once. “It’s indentured labour.”
Caitlyn loathed the thought of it. She loathed the reality of it. But there had never been a choice, for her, not really. To be a Kiramman was to have a singular life path laid out ahead of her. There were no real choices for her to make: she would be successful in all her endeavours, beautiful whenever she appeared in public, and then she would take over as CEO of Kiramman Industries and be matriarch of the Kiramman family. Under no circumstances would she let the family down.
At eighteen, Caitlyn put as much distance between herself and her family as she could. She fled the US to study in London which, as Cassandra’s hometown, was tolerated, and Caitlyn was obedient and studied Law, which befitted a Kiramman. But after her master’s degree, with the reality of returning to take a post at the helm of Kiramman Industries looming, Caitlyn broke faith with her mother. She didn’t listen to sound advice. She didn’t come to heel. She became an officer for the Metropolitan Police in London.
This was a scandal. It made the newsfeeds, albeit briefly: the daughter of one of the richest people in the world working for the police. But the interest inevitably faded, and every day she worked her arse off. She refused the fast-track option into leadership, spending years on the beat, guarding crime scenes in the middle of a winter’s night with fingers freezing in her gloves, dealing with drunks at the weekend and keeping the endless stream of protest groups that seemed to swarm on London from going to war with each other. By the time she became a detective, she had earned the grudging respect of those she worked with: respect which was worth more to her than all of the Kiramman’s material assets combined.
By the time she became a detective, the world was falling to pieces. The Collapse was tearing apart the fabric of civilised society, slowly but surely. In London, there were queues for food. Then there were boroughs with no water. Then boroughs with no medicine. And the government’s response was cordons and road blocks and curfews and the people’s response was rioting and smashing glass and Molotov cocktails.
The chaos was not confined to London.
Three days before global airspace shut down, Cassandra Kiramman sent a private jet to London City Airport, and Caitlyn – God, she would never forgive herself… Caitlyn got on it.
Their compound boasted barbed wire fences, armed patrols and constant surveillance: a heavily armoured safe haven for a handful of the ultra-rich. Caitlyn had been here since, in her parents’ house, watching. Watching the world outside fall apart; watching it crash and burn; watching the people riot and starve; then watching as the world slowly tried to rebuild itself.
The ultra-rich were not interested in rebuilding Earth, crippled as it was. There were better goals; bigger plans. There was a not-so-distant star system, with two likely planets, ripe for the picking. And technological advances funded by Hextech and Kiramman Industries meant that humans could now get there, terraform them, own them. The Trappist system was beckoning.
But the people of Earth had been taken to the brink of existence and pulled back again. They had been reborn of destruction, baptised in fear, anointed in blood. It wasn’t the tech-magnates they now looked up to. It was the men (and it was invariably men) who promised them God. The men who sold them a vision of the future: a pure, obedient, sinless world which would never again incur the wrath of God. The New Church would take the true believers off world, lead them in a new exodus to the promised land of the Trappist System.
Thus the unholy alliance between the tech moguls and the New Church was formed. For the Kirammans it was an opportunity like no other. They would own swathes of a new planet, and all its riches. They would be rulers in their own territories: monarchs of the New World. They were going.
And although no one had even thought to ask her, Caitlyn was going too.