Bennu Station, 230:7 - Sekulby
The Sekulby have come.
Stories of their culture have been faint echoes within Bennu since my arrival. The massive agglomerative ship is like a planet closing in on the station, or more accurately, like the station is being sucked into some haphazard planet's gravitational pull.
My awe quickly turned to disappointment. Everything I knew about the egalitarian society and their moral fastidiousness unravelled before a single shuttle had docked. The first sign of a problem was the literal fragmentation of the massive mobile nation. For as long as there are records, the Sekulby have been a culture on the move, gradually acquiring new parts of their ship---really a mass of ships from every planet they have come in contact with, held together with the extruded polymer that the Sekulby have become known for. It is a good thing there is no air resistance, because it looks like a scaled up model of toy ships that a child would mash together, wrapped together in fabric glue, largely because that's exactly what it is. The scale is enormous. Thousands of ships, 27,942 if you believe the official manifest, which I do. Looking out the station window and forgetting it is out there never fails to send a cold panic through me. What happened to the stars and obliterated the entirety of space? This monstrosity is parked at a reasonable distance from Bennu, but still reaching with many polymer arms towards everything in its vicinity.
This large mass underwent targeted explosion, roughly 1/50th of the vessel breaking free and ejecting huge jets of habitable atmosphere into space before polymer nozzles on both halves staunched the depressurization. An emissary, one single shuttle from the smallest severed fragment docked at the station. Given our roles, Shah and I met it in the docking bay. The official documentation is a mess. Technically, they had become two separate ships, but only the large one had a prepared manifest, and it needed extensive revisions.
The emissary was Baj, and she was livid. Not at the documentation requirements, but at the creation of the separate vessel itself. Over the last few days, she has spent most of her time with Shah and myself, so I have heard the whole tale. Small drama with big consequences. The Sekulby culture has always been one of the individual adding to the group. This manifests in everything from their ship building to their speech. The fundamental Teek---translated, although I am told poorly---means "the air of breath". The literal breath that enables speech, but also the physical representation of an individual's true inner self. This Teek is the atomic fundamental that the entire culture is built around.
Recently a schism has been growing. Since the beginning of their agglomerative existence, the Sekulby have welcomed the Teek of all who join. Baj was one of the older members of the ship, attempting to pass down this fundamental concept, that no one Teek is more important than another. This is the central, inviolable tenet of their culture. She thought it was what the entire ship believed, but realizes now it was just what her own Teek held to be true. It was never true for everyone.
New ships attached from cultures where conquest is revered; others where a subset of the culture rules, even down to a single individual. None of these Teek valued the history of the Sekulby. The small breakaway disagreed that all Teek should be held equal, when so many were obviously abhorrent. It consisted of those who were united in their own beliefs, but opposed to the large ship that refused to disavow the central tenet of its founding.
From there, things rapidly deteriorated. The original breakaway (B1), split into B2 and B3. The B2 group still held that in principle all Teek are acceptable, they just preferred not to associate with the B1 group any longer. The B3s were having none of it. They said the B2s were worse than the B1s because they acknowledged there was a problem but chose to do nothing about it. The B3s sat in their smugness for less than a day before another fracture occurred. This one over whether it was incumbent upon them to save the original Sekulby from themselves; to proselytize, and bring them to acknowledge the error of their ways.
What soon became the B4s decided that a mission to save the Sekulby was in order. The B3s were delighted to see the B4 itself fragment before reaching the main Sekulby ship. Whatever the initial cause of cultural fracture, it spread and metastasized. The original ship kept losing small portions, but remained relatively stable; the breakaways were not so fortunate. Once a faction decided to fracture, the chain reaction was seemingly unstoppable. Breakaways refusing to communicate with other breakaways, fractures over valid communication targets, over whether using video unannounced was too oppressive, over the use of passive voice in the acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Atomization of the breakaways continued, and Baj found herself on Bennu for two days tracking B256, the fragment that contained her original ship. When it became B1037, and was finally alone in space, Baj became in all ways an individual Teek once more.
We later learned that the final disagreement that led to the isolation of Baj's ship was over whether propulsion drives were "literally the tools of Daya". We spent much of the last few days drinking tea with Baj, and watching the space around Bennu light up with the flashes of fragmentary detonations. She wants to rejoin the Sekulby main ship, but it is already on its slow acceleration out of the concentrics, having decided not to dock at all. Even if the main ship would have her back, Baj would never make it through what has become an aggressive asteroid field of ships. They intentionally prevent any contact with the main Sekulby, or the joining of any fractured B-groups. Already there have been nine complete destructions---51 dead---and the hostility is only growing.
Shah called in an enforcer from its patrol of the outer concentrics, and when it gets here clean up will be swift, as will criminalization and deportation. Until then I will continue to watch the disintegration of the Sekulby. There is an underground betting pool on how many separate entities will exist by the time the enforcer gets here. Baj bitterly suggested one ship for every person, but she vastly underestimates the banal cruelty of bureaucratic disagreements. My guess is 674, knowing that the inevitable outcome will be worse than the original starting position and cause the mutual destruction of many of the ships. Until then, tea will keep Baj warm, and I will enjoy the spectacle that has made the windows and public viewing screens at Bennu more crowded than I have ever seen them.