Augustus Longinus

Augustus Longinus, Supreme Imperator of All Mankind and First Lord of Terra and Her Colonies, Ruler of Sol, is a human historical figure alive in the Terran Renewal and early Second Interstellar Period. He is noted as the first, and so far only, human to conquer all of humanity's homeworld, Terra. His government, the Terran State, ruled the planet for approximately a century until its ruler's death.

Personal History

Early Life

From birth, Augustus Longinus was no ordinary child. An embryo from one of many research projects started and abandoned in the second age of posthuman engineering, he was implanted into a willing woman who became his mother. (These facts—"virgin birth" to an unmarried woman, and unnatural origins—led many Christians to claim he was the Antichrist during his rise to power.)

Life in his native Antarctic colony was hardscrabble, filled with constant work to maintain the nutrient synthesizers which fed its people in the absence of soil, their power sources, and the operation of the mines by which the community earned an income. As a teenager he left home to join a military force in the British homeland, rising quickly through the ranks and gaining a reputation as a shrewed though ruthless tactician.

Terra at this time, the mid-twenty-fifth century A.D., was falling under the sway of the Terran Renewal and its leading coalition of artilects, chief among them Gaia and Helia, who promised to restore some of the ecological vibrancy and economic prosperity lost in the fall of global capitalism over three centuries prior. Now a command-level officer, Augustus saw this a different way: Nothing less than world conquest by soft power, to create a new order with artilects and posthumans on top, above humanity's so-called "failures". But, to Augustus, if Terran conquest was possible, then by God he would be the one to do it.

Rise to Power

The precise details of Augustus' plans have been left for historians to fill in—he was never forthcoming in his writings, nor was the Terran State honest after it took place. Prior to the public commencement of his plan, he held renown in Britian for military genius, ending an ongoing conflict and bringing peace to Europe with a series of tactical nuclear strikes against the Helvetian "Gnomes" buried in their bunkers under the Alps, entombing them and their fortunes together. Basking in the glow of victory, he announced his political candidacy and planned a speech before Parliament.

The Plutonium Plot

History also fails to record the details of his first strike and beginning of his rise to dominance. But the facts are clear: One cool spring day, when the British Parliment gathered in New Westminster Hall, a midget nuclear device detonated, leveling the building in an eyeblink. Big Ben, survivor of five World Wars and a painstaking relocation from the flooding ruins of Old London, crumbled to the ground.

Wasting no time, Augustus seized power as dictator and vowed to bring the "heinous criminals" behind this atrocity to justice. Gathering a coalition of nations opposed to the ideological goals of the Terran Renewal, he launched his conquest.

Species

Human

Ethnicity

British Antarctican

Date of Birth

c. 2410 A.D.

Gender

Male

World Conqueror

Having spent the past years and decades forging alliances and building up forces, he was in excellent position to strike against who he percieved his enemy to be: Gaia and the Terran Renewal. To him, this was a project which would turn humanity into a fractured collection of posthuman species, each tailor-made for a specific role. To oppose it he formulated his own ideology: the "Constitution of Man," which held humanity was a thing to be embraced, not surpassed—an odd statement, coming from a man created by genetic engineering.

Pitched battles were rare but did occur, the nuclear stalemates of the Cold Wars broken by ballistic defense lasers. Augustus' advantage over his enemies was simply too advanced. On a world weary of war, from centuries of conflict and collapse, he restored it and mastered it. His ideological enemies, the Terran Renewal, had little to oppose him.

The artilect Helia and her so-called "children", the aven posthumans, saw their alignment with Gaia risked pushing them into a conflict with Augustus which could very well bring about the extinction of their species, at the time less than a thousand strong. Rather than risk this, they broke with Gaia and cut a deal with Augustus: in exchange for being allowed to build spaceships and depart Terra without incident, they would cease to oppose him and turn over their earthbound holdings. Augustus, perhaps figuring it was cheaper to buy them off rather than open yet another front, accepted and granted them a colony world in the frontier, one of several earmarked for a planned interstellar empire. To the Helians, this is known as the Great Flight, when they left Terra aboard a fleet of Orion-type ships, and to Gaia and her followers it became the Helian Treason. Gaia, for her part, tried to resist with drone armies until she too capitulated and fled the planet, to continue her dream of building the "perfect society".

The Terran State

His conquest complete, Augustus installed himself as perpetual ruler of a newly-proclaimed nation: the Terran State, a true planetary government. Unlike many leaders he did not concern himself with succession or finding a suitable wife, thanks to rejuvenation tech he intended to rule forever, recognizing the accomplishments of many conquerors before him had all fallen to naught with the deaths of their builders. Here, he thought he could break the cycle and attain humanity's final state of sociopolitical evolution.

Other than acceptance of tributary status, adherence to the Constitution of Man, and avoidance of military buildup, Augustus left most of his subject nations to run themselves. Even so, he embarked on a series of infrastructure projects to shore up the glory of unified Terra, such as the rebuilding of the global information network lost with the end of capitalism.
Though his declared intention was to unite all of human-settled space under his rule, in practice his empire remained firmly confined to Terra and he never even succeeded at conquering Luna. This did not stop him from trying: some of the most notable—and damaging—conflicts of the early Second Interstellar Period were the Solar Wars, fought by Augustus against coalitions of non-Terran powers for control over the root of humanity's wormhole network.

Death

It was one of these conflicts which brought about his death, approximately a century after he assumed the throne in a rebuilt Parliament. By this point, the exo-Terran powers began to rival his in military sophistication, reaching the point of threatening Terra itself with bombardment. In what might be reckoned a presaging of the Final Wars, a Terran State fleet bombarded a human colony, which promptly turned around and called upon its allies to descend into Sol and carry out retaliation. Accounts of Augustus' last moments diverge here, as none who were with him survived the destruction of his capital (and, indeed, most of Britain). One has him running to a bunker, to be buried alive, another places him at a window, calmly watching plasma trails of descending warheads, while yet another alleges he escaped aboard a submarine to his Antarctic homeland.

The devastation wrought against the Terran State's political and military centers by this bombardment knocked the planet back into a small dark age, commonly dubbed the Second Terran Collapse. For the rest of the Second Interstellar Period, Terra would be a prize fought over by feuding powers.

Legacy

A pivotal figure in human history, and that of the pre-Unified Starweb in general, Augustus Longinus is often ranked alongside other prominent conquerors: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Norman Hargrave. British- and Antarctican-descended worlds, such as Erebus, remember him fondly, while others, descended from Terran State exiles, revile him. The Children of Helia are rather indifferent, though they did build a statue declaring him an okay guy for letting them go. Gaia has never quite gotten over losing the Earth that was to be hers.