The Government
Origin
The Government was set in place almost right after the ship crashed in Year 0, mainly because decisions had to be made, and an horizontal organization wasn’t a viable solution.
The general way of working is the following: as long as your work is judged correct, you can stay, but if your actions made things dangerous for the citizen, then you’re most likely about the be ejected through a putsch. You life is not necessarily in danger, but people no longer want you in charge nor near any form of power.
While initially, a “classic”, earthian government (with left and right wings) was tried, the terrain’s reality made this also something not doable.
Around the years 125, due to some internal politic drama, the Government had no choice but to elect women at the head of the planet, Valentina Selezneva as the president and Laura Ferreira Carvalho as prime minister. And to the general surprise (well, men’s mostly), things went better and smoother than they ever had before in the History. A few years later, when they both retired after what looked like a golden age of several years, men took back power, and things almost got instantly went bad right after this. Several months of ego war later, they got ejected, and two women were put in place, Yi Min Chin as president and Tuulia Hård as first minister. And then again, everything started to work again. A law was passed after this to forbid men to ever be chosen as either president or prime minister.
Infrastructure and transportations
Transports
When the houses where built for the fast growing population, it appeared clearly that people wouldn’t be able to have their own vehicles, mainly because parking spaces where something that they couldn’t afford to loose. So they decided to go full on with providing an extremely complexe and complete public transportation system, extremely reliable and most importantly, free of charge.
Part of the corporation taxes paid yearly is used for the cleaning, maintenance and improvements of the transportation systems. Since the (mega)corporations depend on their workers, they have all interests in them arriving on time, so they pay the government to ensure this happens.
People who damage means of transport generally receive a prison sentence.
Food
The vast majority of the chicken, porks, sheeps and cows didn’t either survived the crash or adapt to their new life, dying shortly after this.
Within a generation, the population had shifted entirely to plant-based diets out of necessity. The knowledge they retained from Earth included animal genetics, which led to the development of lab-grown mea, considerably cheaper to produce than conventional farming, with dramatically lower resource demands and pollution. Lab-grown meat exists and is available. It is slightly expensive, which makes it a middle-class marker. What you eat tells people where you are without anyone saying so.
The vegetarian alternatives that make up most of the population’s diet are cheaper and easier to produce. They are not healthier, since food and beverage corporations have no difficulty adding chemical compounds to enhance taste, color, and preservation.
The population eats what is affordable and available. The fact that it is full of compounds nobody asked for is simply the texture of the affordable and available.
Relationship with Pythia Solutions
Their relationship is mutual, deep and largely public, especially since Y285 when they publicly announced their collaboration. The Government overlooks the taxes Pythia should be paying. In counterpart, Pythia lowers the price of the services it provides: military contracts, infrastructure maintenance, “direct operations.”
Replacing Pythia would be enormously costly and logistically painful, which is precisely why the relationship is allowed to calcify into the status quo.
Pythia’s megacorporation and size status depends on one factor only, its legitimacy in the government’s eyes. It’s only because they are able answer to the Government’s requests:
A private military doing the Government’s dirty work can call itself a contractor, a partner, a stakeholder. Without the Government relationship, Pythia is just an armed corporation running its own foreign policy.
Despite everything, the Government managed to find a balance so the population doesn’t die in their hands. The day it happens, the Government will expect a Putsch and accept it without trouble, since it has been like this for several hundred years.
Military
The Government’s own military technically exists. It is unreliable by design and neglect: under-equipped, outdated, composed largely of people with nowhere else to go and nothing in particular to do. Organized resistance is rare when the population is occupied surviving rather than mobilizing. The military’s equipment is outdated because the Government sees no political reason to maintain it properly, since everything requiring discretion or precision is contracted to Pythia Strategic Operations anyway.
Nobody outside a small circle can say with confidence how large either force is, or where the lines between “Government military” and “Pythia mercenaries” actually fall. This ambiguity is not an accident. It is maintained deliberately by both parties.
Citizen sentiment
It’s basically an old cold feeling of being ignored (rather than oppressed), so there’s lots of marching, strikes, etc. They just sigh and go back to work.
The Government doesn’t exactly care about the population’s opinion, it cares just enough so the population doesn’t die from something that could have been prevented. And it also cares about population that can express their satisfaction with concrete rewards, such as investors, or Pythia Solution and the services it offers. The rest of the population is a logistic problem, not an audience.