Talk:Siberia Prime

From Halo: Daybreak

Old writeup[edit source]

By Quirel. Pasted here for documentation's sake.

Siberia Prime isn't the most dignified name for a colony, but it's the one that stuck. When the United Nations Geological Survey listed the System 728 on the CMA registry, the colonization rights were sold for a pittance. System 728 had little to offer prospective colonists besides a depleted asteroid belt and two habitable planets that were locked deep into an ice age. UNGS prospectors reported that the asteroid belts were picked clean of heavy elements and iron-nickel asteroids greater than 850 meters in diameter were nowhere to be found. Three gas giants were present and found to be decadently rich in ice and deuterium, but a plentiful source of engine fuel was economically useless to a dead-end system.

The inexpensive colonization rights were snapped up by a Russian venture group, who spent the next fifteen years spinning wild stories about System 728. The Yaytsa System held not one but two planets that would become tropical paradises with the most cursory of terraforming efforts and the three gas giants were going to be the crown jewels of the CMA trade fleet because trade through the system is going to be booming once more distant colonies are opened up and won't you buy tickets right now because there's only so many seats on a Pheonix and they're filling up fast.

The two habitable planets were quickly renamed "Siberia Prime" and "Siberia Secundus" by the less-than-impressed colonists. The vast majority had already sold their homes and earthly possessions to make the journey, and had no option but to make landfall and build a belt of arcologies around Siberia Prime's equator, where the temperature occasionally rose into the positive digits. Billions of credits of terraforming infrastructure were imported and didn't change the weather one whit. Perennial lawsuits against the venture company were shot down one by one in the CMA court. The malcontents soon emigrated to distant colonies, which left a core population of thoroughly jaded citizens who were willing to put up with anything.

Finally, for perhaps the first time in the history of the universe, such a people found the fortune they deserved.

Five days after the venture group broke up to avoid more lawsuits, the Siberians found hydrocarbon deposits. Deep, vast, unimaginably rich hydrocarbon deposits under the ice, taking the form of thick oils that were easy to tap and ideal for industrial use. It was perfect for polymer manufacturing, and plastic quickly became the material of choice for prefabricated buildings and space stations in that corner of UNSC space. The heavy metals were found as well; it would appear that an object had passed through the Yaytsa system about 800,000 years before, pulling many asteroids into the center of the star system, where they were vacuumed up by Siberia Prime and Siberia Secundus. The craters had long since been covered up by sheets of ice, waiting only for the inevitable discovery by oil prospectors.

Thanks in no small part to Siberia Prime's burgeoning manufacturing sector, the colonies beyond Siberia Prime flourished. Harvest, Arcadia, and other garden worlds were rich enough that trade flowed in both directions through the Yaytsa system, and that trade was magnified by a nearby region of dead space. Careful exploration revealed that there was a vaguely defined band of space, 100ly tall and 60ly wide and 7 ly deep, in which ships travelling through slipspace disappeared. Studies of the dead region continued for over a hundred years with nothing to show for it but a long list of lost ships and unresponsive probes and Slipspace theoreticians who threw their careers away and took up watchmaking. The existence of the region and the fear that it might grow retarded colonization efforts in the region for a few decades, but the Yaytsa system was a prime refueling point once it took off again.

The Siberians had resources. They had growing markets and a leg up over the competition from Sol and Epsilon Eridanus. All they needed was a stable government to make sure the population wasn't exploited, and they went through several coups and a short-lived civil war in the process of making said government. Siberia Prime was a resounding success story ever since the civil war ended in 2461, and the Siberians were confident that the Covenant invasion would be stopped dead in its tracks at the Yaytsa system. In 2548, they were proven wrong. From a population of 4.8 billion, perhaps 1.2 million were successfully evacuated. The byzantine policies of the UNSC's refugee resettlement program have scattered them across Human space, and the largest concentration of the once-proud people is a camp of 50,000 in Cuba.


Few of Humanity's colonies can be considered melting pots, and Siberia Prime is no exception. Many of the initial settlers were drawn from the overcrowded slums of Western Russia, but other Oblasts were soon contributing malcontents and wanderlusts. Germanic settlements in the asteroid belts soon expressed interest, and opted into the project by contributing asteroid habitats and small space stations that could be rebuilt into Slipspace-capable starships. Once an arcology completed construction, settlers were chosen by a lottery system that was spectacularly vulnerable to bribery and exploitation. As a result, the two populations were mixed and blended, with a few neighborhoods heroically maintaining their ethnic purity. As a rule of thumb, Siberians are about 25% Belter German and 72% Russian, with that last 3% divided among ethnic Bashkir, Ukrainians, and various 'foreigners'.

Siberians have emerged as an ethnic group of their own. They have their own heritage. They have their own language. They have their own stereotypes. In typical Siberian efficiency, they forged a new identity faster than everyone else. In typical Siberian practicality, their identity is based around simple things like the common struggle against the cold and musophobia and the technological-commercial arms race against Epsilon Eridani and Sol. In typical Siberian bloody-mindedness, they bet it all on a valiant stand against the Covenant that was supposed to change the tides of war, and were nearly exterminated for their trouble.


The problem with Siberians is that they don't speak German, and they don't speak Russian. They speak... Siberian. Siberian is not really a language, nor is it a dialect. Linguists are only half joking when they call it "The Thing That Should Not Be" and suggest quarantining the Yaysta system to halt its spread. To speak Siberian, you take the vocabulary of the Russian, German, and English (The lingua franca of the UNSC) languages, and then use them interchangeably. The rules of grammar from each language can likewise be substituted for one another, or dispensed with entirely. Finally, loanwords from Turkish and Tagalog are found ever more often in common parlance thanks to the astronomical popularity of a television show about the early colonization of Mars.

To write Siberian, and there is plenty of written media, one must use a special 58-letter alphabet made by mashing the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets together in a particle accelerator. Some subcultures use more. For some reason that no-one else in the universe can understand, the Siberians took to salting and peppering their new alphabet with vestigial diacritics, the rules for which follow no coherent order.

The point of Siberian is not to communicate, as linguists across the UNSC opine. If they want to be understood, the denizens of that rat-infested iceball speak straight German, Russian, or English. The point of Siberian is to be completely incomprehensible, an outlet of insanity and anarchy in a rigidly formal society. The Siberians even took pride in being incomprehensible to a citizen from another part of the same arcology, or in finding new perversions of syntax and orthography. But the language is dying out now that Siberia Prime is glassed and the survivors scattered to the four winds. Today's generation may be the last to speak it.