At any rate, it looks like the war with the Outliners is going to escalate, again. What does it take anyway for people to stop fighting? Nothing can cure that I guess. There’s over twenty wars going on throughout the system right now, as defined by the UN. Most of them are between UN members squabbling territorial disputes. I don’t get it. We have all the energy we could ever need, just about all the resources we’ll ever need, and still people fight. I can even understand the Eugenics wars. Wars of ideologies never end. Wars of conquest will always be here too I suppose. Maybe people just get bored.

So, in case you don’t know, the Outliners attacked a civilian cruise liner between the asteroid belt and Jupiter. They were on course to hit the Sphere’s, marvel of engineering, and were ambushed.

Not to go off topic, but I just have to comment on the AI that named these people. Outliners??? A statistical anomaly where all but a few Sentients are members of the Sentient Accords. So, the AI who did the research named them Outliners and it caught on. I don’t mean to belabor this point too long, but come on.

Anyway, its rather gloomy around the University today. The news hit the wires and nets sometime this morning about the cruise ship. All 800 people on board lost. I don’t know anyone that had family or friends on it though, thank god. 

The biggest question I have is why. Why would the CY’s, AI’s and others that make up the Outliner groups bother? They are mostly insane Cyborg’s really, only a handful of AI’sjoined up with them and a few non-approved Sentients that think they deserve sentient status. That was quite the shock with that happened. The AI council freaked out, well, as most as AI’s can freak out that is.

The outliner groups, there are multiple factions and they often fight among themselves, live somewhere in the outer system. Mostly they move around from one hole to another. It’s really a wild west out there. There’s nothing really terribly valuable out there, the inner system has everything it needs to live quite comfortably. Every once in a while a new group gets a Bigelow station or some other type of habitation ship and heads out there to start up a colony. Most just want to be left alone. I even heard of one group that took one of the old Titan class habitation ships, refitted it, put in a dome for agriculture and headed out to deep space, beyond the system itself. Crazy.

Anyway, no government really wants the trouble of dealing with the outer system. Every once in awhile the Outliners do something like this, attack a ship or a station or something, and then the inner system musters up a fleet to smack them around a bit. Guess it’s time for that again.

This time though, the fleet is 100% American. Well, Western and Eastern American anyway. There is a Republic of Texas ship going too but it’s only a fast frigate, whatever that means. I’m mostly paraphrasing from my friend’s message. This won’t leave the America’s vulnerable of course, we’ve still plenty of military to go around. The one good thing since the split of the U.S. into regional countries was the keeping of a unified military force. Kinda like NATO I guess.

I’ll be following this with regular updates from my friend in the fleet. He’s actually fairly high up, don’t want to say how high, in the chain on the Ulysses, so I’ll know things pretty quickly. Lets hope this is over soon and doesn’t blow up into another system war. God knows what the Outliners have been doing for the past 50 years, since the last time they decided to start a brouhaha .