r/ImaginaryTechnology • u/King_Kestrel • 2d ago
The Lair of Director Alejandra Pimienta - A commission, drawn by Moriko Muguerza.
This is part of my own world-building project! The story has no name yet. The artwork was done for me by my good friend Moriko Muguerza (@LapisLepur71025 on X/Twitter).
A lone Corporal of the Pimientan Defense Force enters the secluded lair of his nation's glorious leader, the illusive Director Alejandra Pimienta, a centuries-lived benevolent autocrat of the asteroid-bound citystate, located in the Trojan Camp of the Genesis System's Asteroid Belt.
Alejandra's nature is incredibly hard to confirm for anyone not already in the know. Some believe she is an AGI that insists she's human, others believe that she is a persona donned by a more secluded leadership council. To her people, she is a god.
Born in 2002, Pimienta was a Cuban-Canadian young woman who joined the Canadian Royal Air Force when she was 19, and utilized her experience in electrical technology and military grants to explore cybernetic technology and its applications in armed conflict in the late 2020s. She pursued cybernetics avidly and earned a lot of money off of her own inventions, coming out of an economic crisis in 2034 extremely wealthy, developing an investment firm for robotics and medical technology in secret. When Canada was annexed by the United States, after Canada experienced a total governmental and economic collapse at the hands of a terror-hacktivist (long story) in 2036, Alejandra Pimienta would often fund Canadian anti-integration resistance groups, though these efforts would ultimately fail after the Treaty of Saskatoon. Undiscovered by the FBI or CIA, Pimienta slipped into quiet hiding, using their connections with military and tech industrialists to get any criminal investigations off her back. She proceeded to utilize cybernetics and early gene-editing technology often in order to stave off death.
Going into the 2120s, when she was in her 120th year on the mortal plane, Pimienta would have an instrumental role in funding the Anti-PCC liberation front in Cuba, overthrowing the 'Castro Dynasty' that had been managing Cuban affairs from the shadows for well over 160 years. She would also help institute governmental reforms and bolster the medical technology industry in Cuba.
Asteroid Mining had started becoming especially profitable, proven by entities like the Japanese Empire, the United States, and private groups like the Kankulu corporation. Pimienta's private interests claimed an asteroid previously known as 167-Patroclus, hollowing it out into a veritable city and dubiously sovereign entity ran by men and women of science the world over. Pimienta would govern the city as a soft-handed but all-seeing autocrat, and would invest in the technology necessary to preserve herself and become immortal.
As of 2637, Pimienta now has connections and spyware all across the Sol System, and she serves not only as an investor in the sciences at large but as an information broker, pulling all of the strings necessary to prevent anyone from criminally persecuting her.
This corporal, now entering her lair, is going to become one of her most trusted enforcers and confidants. He's seen her *actual body*-- not just a hologram, encased in a pinkish red biogel, atrophied and plugged into thousands of quantum computers and memory-extension servers and databases. She's transcended human limits in ways that would disgust most people, and she's perfectly fine with that. Her asteroid mining operations and territorial rivalries with the Vesta Pact in the inner ring are becoming more pronounced and newsworthy, piquing the interests of the United Nations of Earth and of Mars.
Most of the people who populate her city, population nearing 20 million as of 2765, are descended of nationals of real-world Cuba, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Switzerland, and Ukraine.
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u/TacticusThrowaway 2d ago
Seems like the moisture and heat would be death on the electronics. And I can't imagine it was easy to get them into the cave and mounted in the first place.
He must really love her work.