ESPERANZA GOES TO THE CARTEL GRAVEYARD
by Hazed
Attend the tale of the mysterious ghost cartel, which both was – and wasn’t – there. Like Schrodinger’s cat, it was neither alive nor dead.
I speak of Esperanza, whose owner Insomnius was an absentee Plutocrat who hadn’t set foot in Fed DataSpace for lo, these many years. The cartel was left to its own devices, with nobody at the controls. Rudderless, it lingered on, with only a few star systems as members whose POs didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that there was nobody in charge.
Until the planetary purges came last year, swinging a brutal axe and chopping out all those abandoned systems. The destruction proceeded through the alphabet, and when it reached the letter E, the star system of Esperanza was included in the little list of those to be excised from existence.
This was not meant to be! Systems that were the capitals of cartels should have been spared from the cull. But the inexorable forces of destruction were over-enthusiastic, and they snatched up Esperanza in their all-consuming maws and sent it to oblivion.
And so the political entity that was the cartel of Esperanza remained in the game, but with no capital system to give it a physical presence. A celestial anomaly, a galactic enigma, a ghost cartel.
Well now the forces of mundane reason have caught up with its twilight existence and have finished it off completely. Like Shrodinger’s cat when the box is finally opened, the Experanza cartel is truly dead. It is no more. It has ceased to be.
