Writing/drafts/The Deviants

In 2037 the Deviants fled Earth, vowing fiery revenge for the many imagined wrongs done to them.

Society tried so hard to help these broken and lost souls -- but like spoiled children they bit every hand of friendship, spat in every smiling face, stormed out of every attempt to negotiate peace. When it became plain that they couldn't get their way, that society would no longer allow them to impose their lifestyle and beliefs on everyone else, they stormed off like a jilted date and went into hiding to plot their return and gather resources for their next attempt to pervert our civilization.

...or, rather, that's the narrative which saturated homeworld mass media. Despite many countermeasures enacted towards stemming the Disinfo Pandemic, rage-farming was still by far the most profitable form of content and profit was still the entire point of the game. Small rule-changes designed to counter this were lost in the tide of larger rule-changes that accelerated it. Authoritarians continued to tighten their grip on society -- and they needed villains against which to unify the increasingly disinformed and gullible mass of humanity.

...at least, that's how we believe it would have gone, had we not left when we did. Our earliest simulations in the mid-2020s showed the danger quite clearly, confirming what many of us had intuited: the fire of capitalism and colonialism was too big to fail, and could only be left to burn itself out. Staying there to be burned with it would be a pointless sacrifice.

...except for the few who did stay behind, as agents and observers. Some of us were in relatively good positions -- a solid career and/or adequate resources to survive some pretty bad stuff -- but some of us just didn't care that much about continuing to live, and wanted to help others who did. The collective made it clear that although they were working on tech to make rescue possible at some point, they couldn't guarantee anything; Earth's airspace had been heavily monitored for some time, and the monitoring was only getting more intense as the AI got smarter and the satellites got cheaper. Getting out unobserved was a serious challenge... and being observed meant, well, probably very bad things for more people than just the one trying to get out.