The Brass Concord: Difference between revisions

The Brass Concord
Emblem
Brass Concord literature seized in the Northeast Reach, 2050
Founded	2041
Founder	Austin
Leader	Austin
Ideology	Anti-technocracy, anti-surveillance
Type	Militant organisation
Area of operations	Sylvaris, Northeast Reach, Northern Dominion
Suspected base	Ulquelquel
Notable attacks	2049 Sylvaris Transit Corridor Bombing
Designated terrorist by	Cohesive Global Concord, Unified Orylian Pact

The Brass Concord is an anti-technocratic militant organisation founded in 2041 by Austin, a former systems engineer. It began as a protest network opposed to the use of automated systems and artificial intelligence in public administration, and turned to violence after the 2046 data privacy scandal. It is responsible for the 2049 Sylvaris Transit Corridor Bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the Cohesive Global Concord, which killed 842 people.^[1]

The group is designated a terrorist organisation by the Concord and the Unified Orylian Pact. Its leadership is believed to operate from Ulquelquel, a remote island continent outside any state's jurisdiction.^[2]

The name comes from Austin's Letters from the Brass Age, which contrasted "brass" institutions, slow, human and answerable to the people they governed, with the automated systems that had replaced them. Members called the movement a concord in deliberate mockery of the Cohesive Global Concord, which they regarded as a government of machines.^[3] Its early literature focused on the people wrongly cut off from benefits and services by automated decisions; its later statements described violence as the only way to make governments "see" those people.^{[citation needed]}

Between 2041 and 2046 the Brass Concord organised protests, occupied registry offices and published leaked internal documents from public agencies. It had no formal membership, and estimates of its size in this period range from a few thousand to tens of thousands of sympathisers.^[3]

The 2046 data privacy scandal radicalised the movement. A core group around Austin began attacking data centres and registry offices, at first at night and without casualties. In 2047 the bombing of a registry office in the Northern Dominion killed nine people, and the Concord designated the group a terrorist organisation the same year. By 2048 it operated as a network of small cells across the Northeast Reach and the Northern Dominion.^[1]

On 14 November 2049 the group carried out coordinated attacks on three transit sites in the Sylvaris metropolitan area, killing 842 people, including 127 first responders, and injuring more than 3,000. Austin claimed responsibility in February 2050. The attack led to the largest counter-terrorism investigation in the Concord's history and to sweeping expansions of the surveillance powers the group had opposed.^[1]

The Unified Orylian Pact Task Force dismantled most of the group's known cells by 2051, and more than 200 members have been convicted. A raid on Ulquelquel in 2051 found an abandoned camp but did not capture Austin.^[2] The group has claimed no major attack since 2049, though it continues to circulate Austin's letters and recordings, and security agencies regard it as active.

The Brass Concord is condemned across the political spectrum, including by civil-liberties groups that share some of its criticisms of automated government; several of them have described the Sylvaris bombing as the event that made those criticisms impossible to voice. The Ulmarkan Empire initially blamed the bombing on followers of the Cult of Landon and has never accepted the investigators' findings.

• Austin
• 2049 Sylvaris Transit Corridor Bombing
• 2046 data privacy scandal
• Ulquelquel
• Civic Registry Authority
• Veridian Spire