ALEXANDER MONAGHAN

• Metatype: Troll

• Appearance: Grey hair, 2.5m, polished horns

• Location: DeeCee

Being a Boston Brahmin, Alexander Monaghan grew up relatively privileged as orks and trolls go. As it happens, he was also a boarding-school roommate with the young man who would be-come King Alfonso XIII. Being a troll, he’s experi-enced shock and pain, and endured plenty of hate, simply for being alive. As UCAS attorney general,

one of the innovations he brought to the Depart-ment of Justice was to instill a cadre of metahuman lawyers who weren’t segregated entirely within the Civil Rights Division. Beyond that, however, was a unique perspective in addressing how the law affects metahumans, and specifically trolls and orks, on a daily basis without looking at how humans interact with them as a means of com-pliance with the law, but instead as inclusion into public and private spaces equally and fairly.

Monaghan and his supporters have silently for-mulated a vision over his term in office that culmi-nated with the principle that while civil rights are based upon the inalienable abilities of all people to engage in civic life, that there are fundamen-tal social rights that are based on the reality that metahumans, the Awakened, and non-sapiens spe-cies are fundamentally different—meaning that the government must acknowledge and operate in accommodation of these discrete, inalienable classifications in order to protect those citizens’

free exercise of civil rights as protected under the Eleventh and Fourteenth Amendments. To say this is an unorthodox, and certainly unexpected, argu-ment is an understateargu-ment. Chief Justice Richard Scott, a lion when it comes to metahuman equal rights, grilled General Monaghan extensively when he proffered the UCAS’s oral argument as part of the government’s involvement in a public retire-ment discrimination case, Moore v. Maine. It should be noted that, like the original plaintiff, Monaghan has late-stage Methuselah’s Syndrome. He made a powerful assertion that UCAS jurisprudence focus-ing on facial equality and equal application actual-ly discriminates against metahumans, nameactual-ly ork and trolls, because application of facially neutral but clearly unequal laws has harmed and effective-ly curtailed metahuman civil rights in the UCAS.

The explanation is too difficult to explain here, but what it means for people in the UCAS, and by ex-tension for the people of the dozens of countries and megacorporate tribunals that look to the UCAS and CAS judiciaries for guidance, is that it may no longer be sufficient under the law to treat all meta-humans equally. Instead, legal entities may have to extend “reasonable accommodations” to individu-als who don’t conform to the norm—that is, to the life of the mundane, human UCAS citizen.

>

were to adopt even some of Monaghan’s position when it decides Moore. The Supreme Court has basically limited

the scope of civil rights to being able to freely engage in commerce and exercise certain rights like voting. Even the rather absolute wording of the Bill of Rights depends on how those rights are defined (the right for criminal defendants to exclude illegally-obtained evidence from being used against them at trial was barely upheld as late as three years ago).

To put this in perspective, Chief Justice Scott’s own career was built on winning the Grumman case in 2036, where he successfully argued that Tulsa, Oklahoma violated the Constitution when it segregated metahumans into their own inadequate school away from human children. It was the metahuman equivalent of the Brown v.

Board of Education decision that ended racial segregation in the U.S. However, the fundamental assumption for all civil rights jurisprudence in the UCAS is that everyone is equal when certain traits are ignored.

Monaghan’s argument, which has never before been the position of the UCAS, is that metahumans are so different from each other and that equal treatment under the law means the government would have to enforce the law in discriminatory ways with the intention of producing equal effects with regard to each metatype. In its simplest incarnation, and specific to this case, the UCAS wants to enforce the law in a way that affects metahumans equally, with respect to how all metatypes mature and age at markedly different rates. This means orks and trolls could retire earlier because they die earlier, while dwarves and elves may not collect Social Security for decades longer.

More immediately, it means that food subsidies and commodities would be more heavily directed toward trolls and orks since their dietary needs require more calories, specifically more protein-based calories—something that I assure you will be violently opposed by non-trogs who are already seeing their food prices go up as agriculture conditions get worse.

>

>

lifespans are not as short as had been believed complicates this, but in some ways it simplifies it. If the shorter lifespans seen to date truly are a result of poverty and poor health care, then that increases the urgency to address those areas. The earlier retirement age, though, would go by the wayside. Some think ork and troll activists would be loath to give up this bargaining chip, but others believe that they will be so relieved to be released from this sentence of early death that the retirement-age issue won’t matter to them. (I suppose I could say “us” rather than “them,” but reportorial habits do not break easy.)

>

Beyond the obvious matter of civil rights, Monaghan is the UCAS’s top lawyer. He

supervis-es all criminal prosecutions by the government, en-forcing civil matters ranging from antitrust to treaty obligations, being the president’s most senior legal counsel, and overseeing several law-enforcement agencies. The largest matter encompassing all of those functions has been the CFD crisis and the Bos-ton lockdown. The FBI and IRS have been crawling up NeoNET’s ass for the last few years even since the Boston sprawl had to be quarantined, and the entire mess has made things difficult for NeoNET and other megacorporations within the UCAS. It isn’t lost on anyone that Monaghan has a personal stake in this because he is Bostonian to his bones, and he has recused himself and placed the matter entirely on the shoulders of the Deputy AG in or-der to avoid any legal entanglements. This doesn’t change the fact that Monaghan has personal inter-ests at stake that have kept the specter of interfer-ence alive, which is to the corps’ benefit as the mat-ter is reaching what appears to be a tipping point in negotiations over what the UCAS government can squeeze out of NeoNET and the others to pay for basically killing a major city. As I said, Monaghan’s job is to oversee all of the government’s legal mat-ters, and unsurprisingly, virtually every part of DOJ and the rest of the government has business with NeoNET, and an entire office now exists as a fire-wall between Monaghan and the Boston matter.

The fun part of this is how this means that there is an entire office full of secrets that everyone wants to get into.

Related to this is how Monaghan and Secretary of Business Fortune Relf have found themselves in conflict over matters of legal policy involving the Big Ten and the Contract Court since Business now oversees all legal matters arising within that court. The Business Department exists to facili-tate the activities of corporations, especially the megacorporations, while Monaghan has become increasingly disenchanted with the relationship between the UCAS and the megacorporations within the framework of the Business Recognition Accords. Relf refuses to acknowledge CFD as a defense against the repatriation of corporate cit-izen to their home megacorporations under the Thirteenth Amendment, while Monaghan and Homeland Secretary Jenkins insist on its validity in asylum claims. This wrangling has extended to the White House and Congress, and as is the case with Boston, this is a political matter as election sea-son heats up with each side trying to one up the other with anecdotal evidence, conflict legislative

solutions sought, and the amount of conflict and corruption this has caused within the Marshals Service. Monaghan, as it happens, oversees and also serves as the enforcement arm of the Busi-ness Department—and, to a lesser extent, the FBI, giving him multiple roles to play in all this drama.

CFD isn’t the exclusive source of conflicts with Business, but the most dramatic (and most likely to involve runners). Monaghan is a classical capitalist and doesn’t necessarily see the value of the exist-ing BRA legal regime as havexist-ing a net benefit to the UCAS markets. While he’s all for smaller govern-ment, he’s allowed the Antitrust Division a freer hand to go after the megacorps in order to protect free market competition between BRA-protected megacorporations and UCAS-based A-rated mul-tinationals and unrated corporations. This has led to a marked increase in information and intelli-gence gathering by DOJ, FBI, and IRS investigators as well as a commensurate increase in “proactive”

counterintelligence by megacorporations across the UCAS, especially when faced with “chick-enshit” and “protectionist” applications of laws.

Furthermore, because Antitrust holds regulatory hearings in addition to bringing court lawsuits, the megacorporations are seeking to go over Monaghan’s head to Congress. In response, DOJ has increased its own legal and shadowy political maneuvering against them. Monaghan endorses American capitalism and is on the record praising the economic successes of countries that don’t entirely acknowledge and enforce the BRA as a counterpoint to the UCAS’s blind adherence to the BRA as written, which is something Secretary Despain has also shown an interest in exploring.

Finally, since 2018, the DOJ has had legal juris-diction over Denver and Anglo reservations with-in the NAN with regard to enforcement of vari-ous treaty obligations and matters. Since 2074, the UCAS’s extraterritorial jurisdiction over those areas and other matters involving the NAN has been with the unspoken consent of the Sovereign Tribal Council. Which, of course, was created by the Treaty of Denver. I hope you see where this is going. Some reservations have been actively resisting attempts at governance by the UCAS, and this resistance has included attacks on Rez Agents. This has been further agitated by NAN actors who are impeding, directly and indirect-ly, DOJ activities within the NAN, or who are un-dermining enforcement and conflict resolution mechanisms (tribunals, etc.). With Ghostwalker

finally rejecting any foreign claims on the sover-eignty of Denver, this has had the added prob-lem of increasing shadow activities between the NAN, or parties within it, and the UCAS and CAS governments. This has also led to problems with-in the UCAS because the DOJ has to with-intervene in local disputes where the NAN or an interest-ed party can invoke the DOJ’s enforcement duty.

This mostly occurs within border states involving free passage and blends into civil rights and other areas such as antitrust. More NAN-based corpo-rations, and even some Tír-based corps, are using the DOJ or threatening to involve it as leverage against state and local governments to gain con-cessions like tax cuts and subsidies. Monaghan has stated he’s neutral on the matter, and that the law is the law, especially when it comes to ensur-ing “free” markets. However, he’s been covertly seeking congressional support to undermine ex-isting laws to favor UCAS corporations now that treaty obligations can be dismissed.