I found this little story online and just had to share it. I just wish this was for real. I'd sign up in a microsecond.

The Frog Leaps – © Ralph Hayes Junior

It was the twelfth month of the voyage of the good ship Diaspora. The engines of the longship roared through the night as the crews labored to adjust the trajectory of the colony vessel, pointing us towards that distant pinpoint of light that was to be our new home. If all went well, and no reason it should not, in two month’s time we would be setting foot on the Martian soil.

As a supercargo-class passenger there was less than nothing I could do to contribute to the efforts of the crew, save to recline in my acceleration couch and wait for the vectoring to end. I passed the time flipping through the files on my datapad, sifting through the last few terabytes of downloads taken from Earth before we passed out of SatNet range.

It wasn’t exactly cheerful reading. Well, not in the classical sense of “cheerful.” As a bunker baby, though, I have to confess to getting one hell of a lot of schadenfreude out of it.

Back at the beginning of the 21st century, the writing was already on the wall. Runaway spending; worldwide fiat currencies, all racing towards collapse; increasing encroachment by the federal government on people’s rights– what little of them there were left. It’s said that a frog in a pot of water, if you turn the heat up slowly enough, will not notice it until it is too late– that it will sit in the water and boil alive. The leftists and socialists and other totalitarians had relied on that, turning up the dial as fast as they dared…

In those last few years, the frog had started to notice. Thousands, millions of common people began rallying together to protest the governments’ extravagance and unconstitutional powers. The government and their cronies in the press called them racists, fascists, terrorists. They called themselves Tea Partiers.

At first they made headway; winning seats in the government, pushing back unjust laws and unjust taxes… but those in power do not give up easily. The ruling class, the oligarchy that had replaced our elected officials pushed through laws in the dead of night that criminalized the Tea Party and it’s activities. They sent out agents of the IRS to harass and torment their leaders. They got the press to ignore their rallies and protests and petitions. They destroyed net neutrality and used their corporate cronies to strangle them into silence on the internet.

Frustrated and outgunned, the Tea Partiers retreated. They fell back among the survivalists, retreating to ranches and settlements in the back country, living the pioneer lifestyle, going off grid. At least as far off grid as anyone in the 21st century could really go, anyway. Their enemies in the political arena declared victory over them. There was even dancing in the streets by the radicals and hedonists at the “triumph over the white male zionist christian patriarchy…” Triumph, because the last conservatives had been beaten down and driven to the point of living like the Amish, or worse, like Indians on a reservation. The grinning idiot in the white house himself had been on TV, proclaiming that “It seems the Tea Partiers have finally met their Bunker Hill.” And hence we were re-labeled… from Tea Partiers to Bunker Babies.

It was a clever little snipe; eliciting not merely Bunker Hill, but the image of us as paranoid bunker-dwellers… and the memory of a certain Archie Bunker, the televised character and parody ‘right wing bigot’ of a prior generation…

Nobody was laughing quite so hard after the economy collapsed.

A hundred years of theft and fraud disguised as a monetary system finally came to a head. The value of the dollar imploded; with it went every fiat currency in the world– and they were all fiat currencies, all of them backed by the dollar. The stately british pound, 300 years old and devalued to half a percent of its original worth, vanished in a puff of smoke. The german deutch mark followed its ancestors to the grave. The lire, the peso, the yen, the ruble– none were spared as the chain reaction swept the globe.
Economies already burdened with obscene taxation collapsed into the ground. Stores shuttered, factories ground to a halt. Civil unrest followed close behind, with riots blossoming in every city.

The ruling class then moved. Surprised? Don’t be foolish; they had planned for this. They had arranged for this to happen. All across the globe, martial law was declared. The conqueror’s boots marched in the streets of Washington, and they all came from within. Surprisingly little blood was shed; the masses, used to meekly standing in line for whatever Father Government gave them, humbly knuckled under. Order, if such a thing can be called by that name, was restored.

It was then that the ruling class turned covetous eyes on the remnant. The grasshopper reigned, and the ant was ripe for plunder. Laws were passed, orders were signed; the food and staples of the working class, which they had saved against time of need, were to be taken from them– by force of arms, if necessary. Any who resisted would be sent to till the now abandoned fields of the American breadbasket in prison orange.

The announcement was broadcast over the failing television networks; excoriating those to be looted as “hoarders” and selfish ogres who would have left the nation to starve. These enemies of brotherhood and progress were given a deadline– hand over their wealth by then, or face the consequences.

What I would give for a photograph. What I would give for just one look at the faces of those arrogant, greedy, self-anointed royalty when they woke up the next morning to pillars of fire streaking into the sky.

You have to remember; the technology to reach space, to reach another planet, dates all the way back to 1969. The computer power to fly a mission to the moon once took up an entire room; today, it could fit on a cell phone as an app. Chemistry, engineering, materials sciences had advanced by leaps and bounds since then…. and the working proof-of-concept, Space Ship One, had been launched decades ago. Anyone with access to the tools, talent, and technology fifty years old was hypothetically capable of reaching space.

And the Bunker people had that.

The leftist elite had laughed at the seeming gormless rubes that had packed the ranks of the Tea Party. But it wasn’t just uneducated middle-class workers in their ranks. Pilots, engineers, mechanics, programmers, inventors– all the people who had made the spoiled left’s lifestyle possible, yet had been given nothing but contempt by them, had joined the ranks. Rand had been prophetic; as success had been more and more severely punished, “Going Galt” had become the option of choice of both the humble laborer and the great inventors and innovators. And the lowly grease jockey and the Lockheed engineer found they had more in common with each other than with the Great Thinkers who ran the world now.

They planned. They networked. They labored in secret, in underground hangars dug out by hand, working from blueprints broadcast over private wireless networks and with parts printed out by fabricators designed in the public domain half a century prior.
Then, when the rulers and would-be masters of humanity announced their intent to plunder them of the last of their possessions and dignity… they had launched.

In the space of an hour, over ten thousand hand-made rocket shuttles had leapt into the void, beyond the reach of the highest flying drone or rocket or missile. Within twenty four hours they had navigated to a geostationary point, as the little tin kings panicked far below. Within three days, they had assembled into the first orbital colony, built out of the very bodies of the ships that had carried them aloft.

The rulers and tyrants and bureaucrats had raged and seethed and threatened… to no effect. They had left their space programs unfunded, their rockets and shuttles to rust. The Bunker People were beyond their reach. Predictions that we would eventually have to come down “for lack of resources” withered when, by the end of the year, the orbital colony had established a mining base on the moon. We were no fools; even as the orbital colony was being built, plans were set in motion to colonize the moon, mars, the asteroid belt— to move ever outward, as far out of the Earth’s reach as we could get; to sever all ties with the homeworld.

And so it has been for the past thirty years. I was one of the first infants born on that first station. And so I have watched as we have spread outward, to the moon, to Mars, ever further out of the tyrants’ faltering reach. And now here I was, following in my parents’ tradition, ready to make camp on one of the moons of Saturn…

They had tried to boil the frog in their pot. They had never counted on the frog deciding to leap.