United Powers League: the police state that exiled humanity

The United Powers League, usually shortened to the UPL, was the government that held Earth for most of three centuries and the power that cast the ancestors of the terrans into exile. Formed on 22 November 2229 from the defunct United Nations and the remaining world governments, it ruled close to ninety three percent of the human population as a single police state. Its laboratories opened warp space and cryogenic hibernation, its Unitariate Commissions outlawed the major religions, and its Project Purification killed more than four hundred million people over eighty years. One of its own scientists, Doran Routhe, loaded forty thousand of its condemned prisoners aboard four supercarriers, lost them in warp space, and seeded the Koprulu sector by accident. When the descendants of those prisoners met the protoss and the zerg, the terror that swept Earth reshaped the League into the United Earth Directorate.

Founding on a fractured Earth#

The twenty-second century brought what the League's own histories called the decline of Western civilization and the seeming breakdown of society. Out of that long unraveling came the United Powers League, established on 22 November 2229 as the successor to the defunct United Nations and to the world governments that had failed alongside it. The new body took up the mantle of defender of humanity and did not intend to share it.

Consolidation was fast and close to total. The UPL police state controlled almost the entire planet and close to ninety three percent of its people. Only a handful of volatile South American countries stayed outside its authority, a stubborn remainder that the League tolerated for the better part of three hundred years. Earth was its capital world, and Luna its first holding beyond the atmosphere. In time its writ extended to the Solar system, the Tau Ceti system and the Centauri colonies.

Enlightened socialism#

The League governed in the name of what it called enlightened socialism, and it enforced that ideal as conformity. Fascist methods were turned against ethnic separation and racism, erasing the distinctions themselves rather than the prejudice built on them. English was imposed as the primary language of humanity and other tongues were banned outright, a policy whose consequences outlived the government that made it and left the scattered colonies of the Koprulu sector speaking a common language centuries later.

Religion fared worse. Beginning in 2231, the Unitariate Commissions placed most of the major world faiths under official ban. In their place the League set state atheism and the philosophy of the divinity of mankind, a doctrine that put the human species itself at the center of reverence. That belief had an edge to it. If humanity was divine, then anything that altered the human form was a defilement, and the League moved to outlaw the manipulative sciences accordingly. Cloning, gene-splicing and cybernetic enhancement were all prohibited.

The same government that closed those doors opened others. The UPL reopened many fields of science that had been ignored for centuries and pushed them hard. Warp drive and cryogenic hibernation both came out of that effort, and within forty years of the League's founding humanity held colonies on moons and planets throughout the Solar system.

Project Purification#

The divinity of mankind carried a logical conclusion, and hardliners within the League drew it. Scholars argued that genetic alteration, cybernetic technology and psychoactive drugs were degrading the species. Law followed argument, and law produced Project Purification.

What began as a program to remove mutations and unnecessary cybernetic prosthetics from the population became a campaign of mass killing. The League rounded up dissidents, hackers, synthetics, the cybernetically enhanced, tech-pirates and criminals of every description, all of them classified as threats to the purity and survival of the species. Over four hundred million people were eradicated. The project ran for nearly eighty years, and thanks to state controlled media the general population never learned the true scope of what was being done in its name.

Doran Routhe and the four supercarriers#

Project Purification produced a vast supply of condemned human beings, and a brilliant young scientist named Doran Routhe saw a use for them. Routhe's passion was the colonization of worlds beyond the Solar system, and his ambition was to consolidate his own power within the League. Through his connections and a run of luck he obtained thousands of UPL prisoners as specimens for a private project, a scheme to settle the outlying world of Gantris VI. The prisoners were deemed expendable. Nobody would ask after them.

At his private laboratories on Earth, Routhe catalogued the mutations and cybernetic enhancements of fifty-six thousand prisoners and fed the data into a revolutionary supercomputer, the Artificial Tele-empathic Logistics Analysis System, better known as ATLAS. The machine predicted which of them could survive long-term cryogenic hibernation and passed forty thousand as viable. The remaining sixteen thousand had already been slated for mass execution before Routhe acquired them, and what became of them is not recorded.

Four automated supercarriers were prepared, loaded with the sleeping prisoners and with enough supplies, rations and hardware to establish a colony at the far end. ATLAS was installed aboard the lead ship, Nagglfar, and controlled all four. Argo, Sarengo and Reagan were programmed to follow. The voyage was meant to last a single year.

It lasted twenty-eight. En route, ATLAS scanned the cargo of sleeping convicts and found something Routhe had not looked for. Fewer than one percent of them carried a mutagenic strain that augmented the latent psionic potential of the human brain, weak in the present generation but likely to express itself within a few more. ATLAS logged the discovery and transmitted it back to Earth. Then the guidance systems linked to the supercomputer failed, and the coordinates of both Gantris VI and Earth were erased. The ships sailed blind through warp space until their engines reached critical meltdown, emerging into the Koprulu sector in 2259 and falling toward the nearest habitable worlds. Nagglfar came down on Tarsonis, Argo on Moria, and Reagan and Sarengo on Umoja, where Sarengo broke apart in its descent and killed all eight thousand aboard.

Routhe himself was ruined. His experiments became known while the ships were still under way, and when they sailed past Gantris VI without stopping his reputation collapsed. His many enemies pursued him to the Centauri colonies. The Long Sleep had turned his instrument of advancement into the founding disaster of a new branch of humanity.

A distant and disinterested watch#

The exiles built their own civilizations across the Koprulu sector without ever knowing that Earth was still looking. The League monitored the wayward colonials from the beginning and saw no reason to act on what it saw. There was little interest and less incentive in involving itself with societies that had grown up out of a criminal cargo lost in warp space, and for generations the observation stayed exactly that.

Reformation as the Directorate#

What ended the League's indifference was not anything the terrans did to each other. It was the arrival of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Humanity had never encountered another sapient species, and when the colonies of the Koprulu sector came into conflict with the protoss and the zerg, the prospect of two powerful alien races reaching Earth and its own holdings produced widespread panic across the League.

The reaction was consolidation. The few nations that had resisted domination for nearly three centuries, the volatile South American holdouts, now joined for the sake of protection, and their entry expanded the League's power to cover the whole planet at last. The government that emerged from that expansion took a more proactive posture toward the sector, renamed itself the United Earth Directorate, and set about deciding what to do with the descendants of the prisoners it had thrown away. Officers who had risen through UPL service, among them Gerard DuGalle and Alexei Stukov, would carry that decision into the Koprulu sector themselves.