Title: Common Pieces

Summary: One-shots set in the Piece of Eight universe. These are bits of narrative in a variety of styles containing everything you never wanted to know about this crazy AU-Space melded universe of Sherlock and Once Piece. In short, this is a parking place for various tidbits of history and world building but don't let that turn you off because most of these will be more story-like than a true meta.

Parings: None yet

Disclaimer: I own no rights, I make no profit. Created solely for the amusement of myself and any readers who might happen upon it.


A History of the Londinium L4 Orbital Outpost

(An Excerpt from a document produced by the Greater London Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Board.)

The Londinium L4 Orbital Outpost, London for short, is unique among orbitals and the reason can be summed up in a single word: History. Londinium was one of the first worlds identified for settlement in the initial wave of the mega-corp colonization efforts. This was the era of fleet based colonization where a group of large ships would jump into a system with everything needed to set up colony, orbital and all, along with the company people to staff it and the colonists to inhabit the planetary outpost. The colonists and orbital staff would live on the ships until a rudimentary orbiting platform was built and then shuttle the materials and people for the new colony down to the surface of the planet. Eventually all the colonists would relocate to the planet, the company would complete the orbital and trade would commence. At that point the lion's share of the profits would be siphoned by the mega-corp for upward of five hundred years to pay off the debt the colonists incurred to the company for the initial capital outlay. Some of the colonies in this situation eventually worked themselves free while others became more indebted as time went on due to purchasing upgrades and amenities. Neither of those scenarios happened with Londinium.

The first problem the proto-colonists found upon hitting system was that the company probes which had identified the planet as suitable for habitation were wrong. The probes it turned out had a flaw in their programing which, as the result of a misplaced decimal point, labeled the water on Londinium as fully potable when in fact long term use and exposure to such water would result in heavy metal poisoning in humans. This left the company employees in somewhat of a dilemma. They had been tasked with setting up an orbital to serve a colony but they couldn't put a colony on the surface of the planet because it would kill the colonists within 30-40 years of exposure. No colonists meant no exports and no exports meant no profit. This was an unacceptable situation for everyone so the best and the brightest sat down, put their heads together and came up with a solution that served almost everyone's purposes except the mega-corp which had sponsored the venture in the first place.

What they ended up doing was to place the orbital in the more stable L4 point rather than the simple geosynchronous orbit that most orbitals occupied. While it would take more energy to shuttle up from the planet overall the energy saved by not having to constantly correct the orbital's course around the planet was vital for what came next. The orbital itself was seriously old style, consisting of what looked like a set of ancient wagon wheels with spokes connected to each other by a central core. The whole thing rotated such that grav-generators were not needed in the outer edge of the structure. What the colonist and orbital staff proceeded to do was cannibalize the ships and colonization supplies and start to fill in between the spokes of each wheel and in between the wheels structures themselves. When they were done they had a hodge podge vaguely can-shaped satellite with enough space to house the entire colonial contingent. They used a good portion of the central hub and extra space to create an entity that was mostly self-sufficient both biologically and economically.

During the same time period another group of engineers and chemists put their minds to the problem of the heavy-metal laden water of Londinium itself. Their solution involved liquid-liquid extraction of the metallic and other compounds suspended in solution. End result was a highly specialized mining operation that put out clean water as well as a variety of useful minerals and mineral byproducts. All of this was accomplished in a relatively short amount of time such that when the first mega-corp ship showed up to inspect the new colony they encountered something completely unexpected.

The mega-corp ship was met not with a proto-colony ripe and ready for exploitation but a united group of pioneers who had managed to make the best out of an untenable situation and had bonded over the experience. They were not longer divided as company and colonist, they were inhabitants of London and were ready willing and able to tell the mega-corp just what they thought of the original mistake. It was also a happy coincidence that among the colonists there happened to be one of the most preeminent retired jurists in the known galaxy named Holmes and among the company contingent a bright young lawyer with the surname Vernet. Together these two came up with a legal strategy using the mega-corp's faulty information to tie up the status of the colony in litigation for over two decades. At the end of that time Londinium owned itself and was becoming one of the first truly independent colonies.

The mega-corp involved was none too pleased with this result and plans were in the works to rectify the situation by force when fate took a hand in the form of the great data corruption. History tells us of the horrors unleashed on the unsuspecting galaxy when the anarchy group Anonymous unleashed a modified computer virus specifically aimed at the mega-corps and managed to take them down. Unfortunately in the process the virus mutated infecting other computer systems including a number of those owned by the governmental bodies overseeing the corporate sector. While this in effect ended the era of the mega-corps it also meant that many of the colonies that had been funded by such corporations became lost as the navigational information had been held as trade secret information. The colonies that were company planets were found relatively quickly since there were quite a few starships which still had the navigation information unaffected by the data crash. The independent colonies were a different matter altogether and many, Londinium among them, remained lost for over 400 years.

In fact, Londinium might not have been rediscovered so quickly if it hadn't been for a cat, his two graduate student owners and a thesis. One of the two students was an economist doing his thesis about the economic demise of the mega-corps and attempting to determine if such corporations could have remained economically viable if the great data corruption had not occurred. In amongst his research was the court case dissolving the colonization contract and giving Londinium its financial independence. The research itself was primarily hard copy and over time had ended up piled all over their shared living quarters. One day the cat allegedly knocked several of the piles over creating even more of a mess. The other graduate student happened to be an astrophysicist who had previously served on a corporate starship as a rated astrogater. She was a fastidious sort and in the process of sorting the paperwork came across a familiar looking numerical sequence which just happened to be the coordinates for Londinium. (FN1 The bounty for discovery of a "lost" colony enabled the two grad students to pay off all their loans, become domestic partners and keep the cat in lavish style for the rest of all their lives.)

Upon discovery of the coordinates the Galactic Federation sent a contact ship to see what, if anything had become of the colony. They did not have high hopes given the elapsed time period and the results of previous expeditions to similarly lost colonies. The initial re-contact ship was quite pleased to find not just a thriving outpost but The Commonwealth of New Britannia, a set of five related star systems which had been all colonized in turn from Londinium.

There were, of course, some rather strange social quirks which had developed over the interim period. The most minor of these quirks was the propensity of the populace to consume a beverage made by pouring hot water over certain dried plant matter. The most difficult for the contact group to comprehend was the local governmental system. It seems the Commonwealth of New Britannia was officially a constitutional monarchy ruled from London. Each planet in in the commonwealth it seemed had its own parliamentary democracy but all of them acknowledged as their titular head a monarch who happened to be located in London. The diplomats received welcome in the name of the monarch, which at that time happened to be known as King William, and negotiated treaties with various functionaries of the crown. It was only after a number of trips and discussions regarding the reintegration of the Commonwealth into galactic society and trade that the diplomats learned that King William was in actuality the computer core AI that controlled the L4 orbital.

It took a while for the Galactic Federation diplomats to find a local source who could explain exactly how this particular governmental system had happened but they eventually discovered that the reason was entirely practical. The last information the Bretons, as the citizens of Londinium and the Commonwealth liked to call themselves, had received about the Galactic Federation was from a ship that managed to escape from Federation space just as the full effects of the Great Data Crash were beginning to be known but before the virus had mutated and infected most of the space going vessels. From that information and the lack of subsequent ships the Bretons assumed, and rightly so, that the Galactic Federation had either collapsed or was so damaged that they were going to be effectively on their own. That set off their own exploration and colonization efforts which eventually resulted in the settlement and development of the Commonwealth systems. It also brought them into contact with an amphibious race of beings colloquially known as Fishmen. (FN2 This reference term was adopted for the simple reason that the actual name by which the Fishmen designated their specie happened to be a series of clicks and whistles which were mostly pitched above the range of human hearing.) The Fishmen were a highly stratified, quasi-feudal society and did not understand or trust persons or entities without some sort of hereditary leader. The Bretons, seeing a simple way to encourage their new neighbor's trust and trade created a fictitious monarch who delegated all authority to the parliamentary system. (FN3 No one is quite sure exactly when the fictitious monarch's name was attached to the orbital AI but once it was the populace quickly adopted it and the government soon followed.) To keep up the ruse the Government had to change monarchs from time to time. Once again practicality was invoked and the Bretons decided that whenever the AI core is substantially changed, as determined by a complicated algorithm, the computer engineers declare that the old monarch is "dead" and there is a "new" monarch. (FN4 Of course this provides an excellent excuse for a Commonwealth wide party every 50-70 stan-years.)

Due to its history and intermittent bursts of construction London is more like a planetary city than an orbital in nature. In fact it is more akin to the ancient concept of an archology than it is to a space station. Most orbitals are sleek cylindrical shapes with a girding of docks all around the center. London on the other hand looks something like a dozen bagels threaded onto a sausage. There are docks protruding from the midmost bagel but due to the sheer size of the structure they don't continue all the way around. In fact, the London docks happen to be at four opposing points. The North and South docks are set up to handle the large freighters and heavier commercial vessels while the East and West docks are set up to handle smaller craft with the East being primarily commercial and the West being passenger and private craft.

Another difference is organizational. In a standard orbital the decks above the docks are numbered with ordinal ascending numbers and contain living quarters, high-end entertainment, retail, and office space. The decks below the docks are all prefaced with 0 and tend to have commercial ventures, entertainment that caters to the space faring crowd and the infrastructure needed to keep the station habitable. London on the other hand seems to have no such organization. The city is divided into sectors. (FN5 The sectors were named after various districts in the greater London metropolitan area on ancient Earth. Corridors and pass ways were likewise given names that corresponded to Old Earth London streets.) Each sector has its own power grid, environmental and other support structures although they are all tied together into a unified network. Most sectors also have a mix of business, residential and commercial. In case of an emergency a sector could be sealed off and survive quite handily on its own for quite a few stan-days.

The third and most unique difference between London and other orbitals other than sheer size is the composition and use of the hub, the sausage like structure upon which bisects the bagel-like bumps. The hub is a huge open area containing parks, hydroponic farms and even a river system running all the way from one end to the other. (FN6 Continuing with the general nomenclature the largest of these rivers was rather quickly christened The Thames.) A relatively thin straw-like structure containing mirrors, photovoltaics and heat exchange generation systems runs through its center providing additional power to the station as a whole. This structure allows light from Londinium's star to penetrate to even the center of the station. Panels were opened and closed at intervals to provide diurnal cycles and allow the plants to grow in a more natural manner. The only drawback to this system was caused by the size of hub itself and the prevalence of open water and plant material. From time to time the entire station environmental system would get slightly out of balance for one reason or another resulting in fog. Thus London is unique among orbitals in that it has its own weather systems.

The complexity and intricacy of the interconnected infrastructure required a rather complex and sophisticated computer system to keep things up and running. The Bretons discovered rather early on that they did not have the staffing necessary to keep a human eye on everything that needed to be monitored. This is why the AI for London was developed in the first place, to control and monitor the systems and alert the humans if something had gone awry. Over time the AI became more and more integrated with the subsystems of the station and by the time it was named as the monarch it was arguably the most advanced AI in the entire galaxy. (FN7 Some of the current engineers that work with the current monarch, Queen Victoria, will assert when inebriated that the AI could not only pass the ancient Turing test but that it is in effect a self-aware fully conscious entity in its own right. Of course this is officially considered an urban myth.) This unique setup places London at the forefront of computer technology as well as making it one of the most stable, secure and safe orbitals in known space.

Despite, or more likely, because of its unique status London is highly amenable to both tourists and business alike. It is a highly cosmopolitan and diverse metropolis with something that will cater to most every taste imaginable. From cultural offerings like theatre, music, art and historical museums to the vast collection of the New Britannia Library the intellectual life of the city compares favorably with that of the oldest of the worlds in the Galactic Federation. Likewise the business climate is highly favorable due to the burgeoning high-tech industry and balanced raw material base provided both in-system and throughout the Commonwealth. Strategically placed for easy starship access to both the inner Galactic Federation as well as the frontier areas, London provides a stable base for trading and launching explorative ventures into the unknown and little known areas in and around the gravitational anomaly known as the Grand Line. For further information regarding current opportunities in London please feel free to contact the Greater London Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Board who will be happy to field your inquiries.


Author's Notes: Many thanks must be given to Kneoria/Erif_of_Taloma (on and AO3 respectively) who asked me to beta read What are the Odds which introduced me to the craziness that is Once Piece and caused my muse to fall in love with Marco the Phoenix. She then handed me a cute fluffy plot bunny along with an event to post it in (opscifiandfantasy – lunarshores on tumbler) which resulted in The Universe is Rarely So Lazy. The next thing I knew I had a whole host of plot bunnies hopping around the orbital, stealing starships and generally insisting on being written. Of course this, like all AU's and crossovers required the development of a certain amount of backstory to combine the two fandoms. While I normally do this via timelines, character rosters and scribbled notes this particular AU demanded something more and you are looking at the result.

The influences on this AU are varied and numerous. Of course Once Piece and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales, with all of the retellings up to and including the BBC's Sherlock, are the base fandoms. However, ensconced herein are bits of Star Trek as well as allusions to James Bond, Harry Potter, and Alice in Wonderland to name just a few. Stylistically much of this owes homage to Nathan Lowell's Trader's Tales From the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, Anthony Ryan's Slab City Blues stories, and Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Sci-Fi channel series The Expanse and Killjoys were also influential. If you want to know where a particular bit of something came from please feel free to ask.