Pell Annerley

Pell Annerley designed procedures. Their papers, written inside the loose network that called itself the Consortium Remnant and later the Reform Movement, are not arguments about who should govern. They are working designs for how a body should decide: how a question is put, who answers first, what a seat can and cannot gain by its answer. The test Annerley set every design was the same. A procedure was good if no seat could do better by defeating another seat than by saying plainly what it wanted.

Known History

• Born 2571 UCSD, under the Imperium. The record gives no birthplace. The papers place Annerley among the outer stations for most of their working life, and the network kept no membership rolls.
• Wrote outside official channels through the Imperium's last decades, as the Imperium page says the Underground did, and for three more after it fell. The record holds the papers and almost nothing of the person who wrote them.
• In 2609 UCSD the Imperium gave way to the Military Space Command by negotiated restructuring. The designs that restructuring adopted were modelled on the High Council, by people raised inside Imperium assumptions. They were not Annerley's.
• Died 2640 UCSD. The record does not say where.

Character Notes

The Imperium page says the Reform Movement's achievement was quieter than an overthrow: when the Imperium's contradictions sharpened, there were already people outside the hierarchy holding workable alternatives. Annerley's papers are among those alternatives. What the record shows is that being ready is not the same as being used. In 2609 the alternatives were on the table, and the table chose the design it already knew.

Annerley lived thirty-one years past the restructuring and kept writing, and the record holds no complaint from them about it. The later papers simply go on refining the same test, as though they were being kept for a later reader.

Whether any of the designs reached the Star Rangers Charter of 2723 UCSD, the hearing that preceded it, or the Concord's later instruments, the record does not say, and a resemblance between a procedure in the papers and a procedure in force is not evidence that one came from the other. The present's politics are less adversarial by design. Whose design that is, the record has not established.

Annerley is they in the record because the papers are signed with a name and nothing else, and the record will not supply what the papers withhold.

See also

• The Imperium, especially The Democratic Underground and Decline and Succession
• The Military Space Command