“Toying with them is where the job satisfaction comes in.”

– Henry Phillips, NBN Sysop

A philosophical question lurks beneath the myriad conflicts on Mars: What does Mars owe the Earth? For some, this question has an easy answer: Mars was settled by colonists from the Earth. It imports most of its technology and resources from the Earth. Even the names of its largest cities, nodes, and starports are indebted to the authors and scientists on Earth who dared to imagine life on the Red Planet.

But, the Martian Clans argue that their ancestors took the real risks involved in settling on a cold, lifeless world. They built the first domes, found the first ice fields below ground, and planted the first real crops on Mars. They suffered and died so that their decedents could live free—not so they could live in fear of Warroids run amuck across an unregulated R&D lab the size of a planet.

And yet it seems like the corporations that funded Earth's war against Martian independence successfully purchased the rights to pursue their agendas with impunity all across the planet's surface. So, while Haas-Bioroid develops new Bioroids capable of taking human life without human oversight and Jinteki maintains its stranglehold over Martian agriculture, NBN is reforming education to promote greater compliance while the Weyland Consortium is laying the groundwork for a new Martian Beanstalk.

The sixty new cards (three copies each of twenty unique cards) in Earth’s Scion—on sale today—explore the complicated relationship between Earth and Mars in Android: Netrunner. But no matter what the lawyers and philosophers say about the legacy of Mars’s exploration, one thing remains certain—the conflict between Runners and Corps will never end.

Dream Big

The Big Four aren’t shipping materials and technicians all the way to Mars for safe investments or gradual improvements—they’re taking audacious risks to seize the next breakthrough before anyone elsedoes. Weyland’s newest Operation— Audacity (Earth’s Scion, 58)—captures the corporate spirit on Mars. By sacrificing a few cards from their HQ, a Weyland player can place up to two advancement tokens on up to two cards that can be advanced.

With the ability to advance an Agenda once with a single Operation, you can install Project Atlas (What Lies Ahead, 18), advance it once, and then score it by playing Audacity. Alternately, with Audacity, you can stack advancement counters on a couple pieces of ice as you prepare to hire some Red Planet Couriers (Earth’s Scion, 59). Couriers may seem antiquated and slow when information shoots across the Net faster than anyone can hope to understand it—but the steadfast investors on the Weyland Board know that they can’t be hacked, and they may yet be the key to seizing control of the Martian government (Government Takeover, Order and Chaos, 6).

Inherit The Stars

The corporations aren’t the only ones with big dreams for Mars. Many Clan members still dream of forging a new destiny for Mars—a destiny free from Earth’s past.

So, while the corporations hire native Martians to clean their offices and maintain their buildings, they can never be certain about their loyalties. They can never know for sure when a member of Clan Aeneas (Aeneas Informant, Earth’s Scion, 44) may leak crucial information to someone who can throw a Spike (The Valley, 4) into their servers—someone who might prefer that Mars wasn’t too profitable Earth-based companies.