Descartes

“The fact that I am giving you my direct attention instead of delegating is abnormal. You may feel privileged to be having this conversation, if you like. “
~Descartes

After the Corsica Event, the Earth’s governments were thrown into total disarray. Chaos reigned in the aftermath as even the most developed nations fell to lawless anarchy. While governments struggled to reestablish order amid broken chains of command and shattered supply and communication lines, the criminal element thrived on the fear and desperation. 

Organized crime experienced a massive growth of influence and power in the Corsica Event’s wake, with powerful crime syndicates like the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Triad, and the Bratva growing to unprecedented levels of influence in the following years. With power came boldness, and some criminal organizations began to openly challenge government heads for authority. Overwhelmed military and law enforcement forces struggled to keep the growing criminal threat in check. It began to seem like these crime syndicates would become the true inheritors of post-Corsica Earth, setting themselves up as conquering emperors as they legitimized their power over the governments they threatened to overthrow. 

Then, just as these criminal organizations reached the peak of their power, they began to collapse from within. Prominent underworld bosses across the world began to disappear, abruptly sever connections with allies, abandon their power bases, or simply come to grisly ends by assassination. A deft hand was dismantling these organizations with surgical precision, dealing devastating blow after devastating blow precisely where they could do the most damage. 

Leaders of these syndicates grew nervous and paranoid, blaming their rivals, oblivious to the fact that they were suffering the same plague of misfortune. Open gang war erupted: a war neither side ever really won. As rival gangs clashed, each conflict seemed engineered to cause both sides costly losses and leave no decisive victors. Slowly, as outfighting and infighting alike continued to dissolve Earth’s biggest criminal networks from within, the leaders began to realize another party was playing them all for fools.  

Taking a step back and conducting their own investigations, they found evidence that a new criminal network had begun to grow, feeding on the resources they kept losing. There were no clues as to how this network organized itself, where it was based, who its leaders were, save for a single name dragged from the lips of a captured saboteur: Descartes. 

No trace of Descartes’s true identity could be found. No one knew anything about them, no consistent description, no location, no contacts, nothing. Descartes did not interact with anyone face-to face, and to the rare few who were able to communicate with them by video, each had a radically different description of what Descartes looked like. Descartes’s network grew larger by the day, but nobody seemed to know how large, not even members of the organization. The syndicate was seemingly organized into thousands of small cells with little or no knowledge of one another, yet they somehow managed to work cohesively in an uncannily efficient manner. 

Rival criminal organizations were at a loss to combat this new threat. This “Cartesian Syndicate,” as they were now calling it, seemed impossible to fight. Every once in a while they would manage to find a Cartesian cell and eliminate it, but the damage to the overall network would be minimal. Unlike their own organizations, the Cartesians did not seem to have a hierarchical system they could strike at, no sub-leaders or street-level bosses they could target to cause a costly blow to the organization. There was only the enigmatic Descartes, who seemed to run the entire syndicate alone, from the ground up, masterfully coordinating thousands of criminal enterprises simultaneously with perfect precision. 

Ultimately, Descartes would run their rivals into the ground. The various mafias of the world went from the peak of their power to the lowest of lows in less than three decades, the Cartesian Syndicate filling the vacuum each fallen don left behind. Against all expectations, the syndicate seemed to lose no productivity or stability as it grew to massive size, despite seemingly making no changes to its overall organizational structure. The Cartesian Syndicate was now composed of an estimated forty thousand insular groups across the solar system, none larger than three hundred members, somehow still working in perfect coordination with one another to achieve the Syndicate’s goals despite almost no communication from one cell to another. 

 International watchdog groups and various federal agencies look at the growth of the Cartesian Syndicate with concern. Despite existing for more than half a century, almost nothing is known about Descartes. Many remain uncertain that any such person actually exists, and that the Syndicate is not actually a single network at all. In some spaces, the name “Descartes” is considered nothing more than an urban myth. 

A recent significant source of skepticism regarding the validity of Descartes identity comes from the simple longevity of this supposed person’s reign. The earliest accounts of Descarte’s activity trace all the way back to just after the Corsica Event, suggesting that this person has remained the active head of the Cartesian Syndicate for more than eighty years. The notion that one person could remain in total control over an entire criminal organization for such a long time and at such an advanced age seems unlikely, especially considering how vast the organization has become. The prevailing belief now is that if there has never truly been one single Descartes, but that the organization is helmed by a small cabal of individuals all operating under the common identity of Descartes. This idea is not without flaw, however, as this group would likely have to grow significantly over the years to accommodate the organization’s growth, and the addition of each new member of this cabal would increase the chances of power struggles at the top, which have never been evidenced. 

Whoever Descartes may be, their power shows no signs of diminishing any time soon, and some high-end estimates suggest they may be the most influential entity in the Home System. For now, at least, that is where Descartes’s authority seems to end, as the Cartesian Syndicate has only the sparsest presence on worlds outside the Home System, presumably because the slow speed of intersystem travel diminishes Descartes’s ability to directly control these operations.