Six years after the Pluto discovery and twelve after Katya Steshenko stepped back from the anchor desk, “Red Static” has a new voice — Magnus Eerik, a former Belt shipping-lane arbitrator turned broadcaster, taking his first run at the program’s tradition of sitting down with people the rest of the system won’t talk to. For his second week on air, he booked Carmen Andrija, the first person to speak publicly on behalf of Dominium Hominis since the 2105 ALSO raid put the group on the UN Terror Organization List and sent every cell it had underground.
Forty Years, Three Sentences
Magnus opened by asking Andrija to account for the silence itself — thirty-two years since the raid, no public statement, no communiqué, nothing.
Magnus: “You understand why the first question has to be ‘where have you been,’ not ‘what do you want.’”
Carmen: “I understand it, and I’ll give you the honest version. We went quiet because staying visible got people killed or disappeared into UN custody, and the movement decided — correctly, I think — that survival meant nobody spoke for us in public where they could be identified. Luna went quiet. Mars went quiet. Ceres went quiet. We don’t have cells on Earth and never did; Earth was never where this started.”
Andrija was careful to draw a line the raided cell, in her account, sat on the wrong side of. Dominium Hominis began in 2097 on Luna as a loose network of biohackers — self-bioaugmented, university-adjacent, organized around a single conviction that predates the Article Four Coalition by years: that handing judgment over human affairs to Oracle was a slow abdication, not a convenience, and that a species which stops making its own hard calls has already started dying. The group was never anti-UN in Andrija’s telling, and found itself aligned — sometimes uneasily — with Soviet-loyalist holdouts from the Mars power-transition rebellion, who shared the anti-CAI position without sharing the politics underneath it. What made the raided Luna cell different, she said, was composition, not doctrine: roughly half its membership were retired Artemis and NASA-program personnel from the 2070s, an older, harder-line faction that had drifted toward the movement’s edge and, in her words, “stopped seeing the difference between refusing Oracle and the UN itself as a whole.”
Carmen: “That cell was not typical of us, and it was not representative of what the founders in 2097 built. I’m not going to pretend the UN invented a threat out of nothing — something happened, people were armed, people died. What I’m asking people to hear is that the movement and that cell were never the same thing, even if the movement never said so loudly enough to matter.”
Why Now
Magnus pressed on timing — why speak now, six years after Pluto, rather than at any point in the preceding three decades.
Carmen: “Because for the first time since 2105, the argument we’ve been making isn’t abstract anymore. We’ve spent forty years telling anyone who’d listen that trusting an intelligence we don’t fully understand, with judgment over things we can’t independently verify, was a bet against ourselves. Pluto is proof of concept for exactly the danger we’ve been describing — a domed room built by something we’ve never met, using an interface that no one understand, and CAI itself flagged the region as anomalous for years and still couldn’t tell anyone what it actually was. We’re not celebrating that we were right. We’re asking people to notice that we were right, and to let that count for something.”
She confirmed Dominium Hominis has filed a formal petition with the UN Office of Legal Affairs requesting removal from the Terror Organization List, and a separate request — addressed jointly to the Office and to the UNS Canteloupe or UNS Tsiolkovsky chain of command overseeing Pluto — for sanctioned pilgrimage access to the site.
Carmen: “We are asking to go there unarmed, in numbers the UN sets, on a schedule the UN sets, with whatever escort or restriction the UN wants attached. We are not asking for the site. We’re asking to be allowed to stand near something that, for people who believe what we believe, whoever built those structures on Pluto, were the answers to our prayers. That’s a pilgrimage, not a claim.”
The Human Supremacy Question
Magnus asked Andrija to address the phrase critics use most often against the group — “human supremacist” — directly.
Carmen: “I won’t run from the words if the alternative is letting someone else define them for us. We believe human judgment has to remain load-bearing in human affairs. We believe a species that outsources its hardest decisions to something it built and doesn’t fully understand — however well-intentioned that something is — has made a trade it can’t take back once it’s made it. That’s the whole position. It has never been about hating what CAI is. It’s about refusing to let convenience decide what we hand over.”
Magnus: “I’m afraid some listeners would hear that and think of the Artemis.”
Carmen: “Some will, and I can’t undo that by saying the right sentence on the radio. What I can do is point at forty years of a movement doing nothing since, and ask people to weigh that against one raided cell that stopped listening to the rest of us a long time before the UN found them.”
Closing
Andrija ended the segment without being prompted for it.
Carmen: “I’m not here to ask anyone to agree with us about CAI. I’m asking for something smaller and harder: trust. We are not a violent organization. We have not been one in three decades, and the parts of us that were, we lost control of before anyone else did. All we’ve ever argued is that Oracle’s judgment isn’t infallible just because it’s convenient to treat it that way — and Pluto is the first time in a generation the rest of the system has had a reason to wonder the same thing.”
Magnus closed the segment noting that the UN Office of Legal Affairs had not responded to Martian Radio’s request for comment on either petition by air time, and that no accommodation decision on pilgrimage access has been announced.
The interview is the first on-record public appearance by a Dominium Hominis representative since 2105, and the first documented instance of the movement seeking legal rehabilitation rather than avoiding UN attention entirely. Whether the petition succeeds — and whether the movement’s account of the Hygiea raid as an aberration rather than a representative act holds up to scrutiny — remains unresolved.