Tag: octopus

#29 – Genzy, The President

Genzy Maskoon Saudade is the President of People in a future where earthlings are nearly extinct. She’s the president of the Networked Nations, a federation of all living things from Earth – ‘raw’ humans, animals, AI, robots, virtual constructs, that all fall under the category of ‘people’ – whether they still live on the Planetary Preserve or are part of the Diaspora. Her inheritance as ruler of earth is her access to the Akashic Record, the memory of all the People of Earth throughout history.Unfortunately, that inheritance no longer includes what natural resources are left on Earth (all preserved now, by universal edict), so she uses her presidency to hustle jobs and deals that make life better for the scattered Earthlings.

Like any cosmopolitan traveler of the day, she travels with an enhanced cephalopod diplomat, named Bacha. As the commander-in-chief of People, she’s protected by a sentient flying drone called the Baraka Bomber, that attacks her enemies with doses of weaponized compassion. The letters P.O.P. that she has stenciled on her jumpsuit stand for her official title, “President of People.”

Maskoon is Arabic for ‘haunted’ but literally means ‘lived-in’. This is a family name for the President of People adopted in the 30th Century, when more people had left an increasingly deserted, haunted Earth for the stars than had chosen to remain on the home planet.

Saudade is a Portuguese word that describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. It often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return. It has also been described as the duality of envisioning, before you should, a future swamped with nostalgia. Adopted as a family name for the President in the 25th Century, in anticipation that Earth would eventually be turned into a Planetary Preserve, unable to sustain the lives of its many varied inhabitants.