What do you want to do? Live forever?
Hello and welcome to Revolutions episode 11.2.
In with the old Last time we discussed the early colonization of Mars, got the first and most important colony city of Olympus up and running and got phosp5 shipped back to the Earth on a regular schedule.
Now, just to keep things simple, in that introductory episode I was saying things like Omnicorp did this and Omnicor did that, as if they were some kind of independent entity, not a collection of nameable executives, CEOs, and shareholders.
But we're here to talk about a revolution on Mars that gets rolling in the 2240s, so I didn't want to bog you down with a bunch of names that are ultimately irrelevant to that story.
The short tenure of Hans O'Connor is obviously fascinating in its own right, but we do have to keep moving.
Today, though, we begin with a person who is most definitely important enough to name and talk about, and that is Vernon Byrd.
Maybe you've heard of him.
Vernon Matsusaka Bird was born in Sydney, Australia in June 2093.
He was the eldest son of two high ranking Omnicore executives.
His birth in this final decade of the 21st century means that he was born just after flex cells had been introduced, but just before Omnicore successfully landed humans on Mars.
Byrd was in fact 16 years old and attending an elite STEM academy in Delhi when the Archangel landed on Mars, and Byrd later said that seeing Henrietta Akai land on Mars was a transformative moment in his life, that it made him want to lead humanity even further out among the stars.
This is a story that was often repeated in future biographies, but as Eleanor Wood revealed in Young Vern, a biography which focuses exclusively on Byrd's life before he became the CEO of Omnicore.
Bird's school chat logs show that he overslept that day and missed the landing entirely.
He only watched the recording of it several days later and made no further mention at the time of it being at all important to him.
But still, Bird was a good student, and after graduation he was awarded an employment contract in Omnicore's engineering division with a specialty in hydromechanics, which got him a spot under the Toronto Dome.
By all accounts, he was a highly competent engineer and was lead designer of a new filtration system that became standard in most North American domes for at least 100 years.
But as Wood shows in Young Verne, Byrd's real genius lay in the realm of corporate politics.
Sure, he was smart and worked hard, but his promotion records are filled with glowing comments from both superiors and subordinates he clearly had a knack for flattering the egos of people higher up in the corporate chain and earning the loyalty of those underneath him.
Bird took care of us, one of his engineers later said.
He treated us like human beings and we loved him for it.