"Until the Last Moment

The latter months are ending as the sun hangs lazily between the clouds. All about are the sounds of commotion. Trains glide across crystal waters kicking up mist as robots roll between adobe houses and under splaying canopies and a broken sky. Turbine balloons float tethered above village communes as mechanics and whizz kids fiddle with prosthetics, tracing their hands across each mechanism’s flowery reliefs. Refugees are shepherded beyond the great deserts that now swallow up much of the world, and in art nouveau palaces knights and reiters swear fealty to their handlers. Welcome back to the world of tomorrow stranger, though it’s a bit different than how you remember.


The year is 2173 AD. Almost a century and a half has passed since the Collapse Era began, though the exact time when it ended is in dispute, not that there’s any global institution that could decide when that was anymore. While the “Collapse Era” is a broad term, beginning before the climate collapse itself kicked off in earnest, most historians set its beginning to the onset of the American War, a multi-generational conflict that engulfed the former United States and Canada between a panoply of pretender governments and post-American states of various kinds. The premature death of the world hegemon led to a discordant global period in which the major global institutions attempted to reorient themselves under the UN now based (mainly) out of Vienna. The new order was, in its own words, imperfect and reactive. The need to shore up faith in the global system, to ensure the protection of accounts, states, and economies reeling in the face of America’s fall, and the pressure to balance the now more pronounced regional frameworks in Europe, Africa, and even the Caribbean meant that the post-American world was dominated more by an attempt to loot the great behemoth as it tore itself apart in order to keep itself going for as long as possible as opposed to creating anything enduring.


In the midst of this other parts of the world began to pull apart at the edges. In the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia the Three Flags Army otherwise known as the Democratic Federation, tore through the region, even taking Mecca for a brief period of time. The outpouring of American refugees (which themselves presaged the larger refugee waves of the era) became a source of conflict as many nations especially in the global south fought over access to a new very skilled and cheap workforce that was up for grabs. China and peripheral nations jumped at the opportunity that had been presented and attempted to kitbash a Fifth Internationale, leading to a breakdown in relations with its former European partners, themselves attempting to recreate the once expansive American intelligence system by importing former members of the US Deep State into their new federal military framework. Meanwhile the war itself quickly broke out of containment, spreading outside the United States and requiring first the largest UN military mission in history, and later on the transformation of what remained of NATO into an occupying organ, seizing control of Canada to maintain stability only to find itself at war with its own people.


Then at last the climate collapse itself hit in earnest. Alongside this, economic pressures from the declining energy returns on fossil fuels compounded the costs states were taking on, and uneven population growth and demographic shifts obliterated long standing institutions in developed nations and undercut nascent regimes across the rest of the globe. World powers became more desperate and reckless, escalating to the point of bringing Kessler Syndrome down upon everyone to deny other nations vital infrastructure and going beyond that to even the use of tactical nuclear weapons on their enemies and rebellious populations. The more humanity held on and the harder its grip became the more the future slipped out of its fingers until it was all gone.


Once again the year is 2173, the world population stands at just under 6.5 billion.


A century or so is enough time to heal most wounds, provided one actually wants to do the healing. A casual observer or tourist to this world might be struck by how pleasant much of it looks. A view of the late 22nd century evinces a sense of a world painted in watercolor, something ripped out of a solarpunk moodboard or a Chobani commercial. Aesthetically and technologically speaking this is most certainly the case. It is a world of colorful adobe houses and limewashed buildings, of floating turbines, airwells, solar furnaces and pedal powered machines. A time of bionic and folk-craft motifs and stained glass opening up into rooms of optical computers and bio-forges. Of bacteria-phages and gmo molds and mushrooms breaking down the remnants of the old plasticene. Of consciously designed permaculture landscapes around communes on one end and flowing linear arcologies on the other. Socially though? Politically? That’s a different story.


The 22nd century is not a time of hand-holding, of positive psychology, utopian cosmopolitanism or down to earth anarchistic sentimentality. It is in many ways a return to form, a world emerging orthogonal from the past and its expectant future and containing bits of both on its own terms. It is a time of small states yet great empires, conservative communities, knightly orders and guild wars, at once an abandonment and refutation of the liberal and secular notions of the old globalized world in some cases and an attempt to race past them altogether in others. A time of close knit families and communes and bloody conflicts wiping out entire lands. Above all though it is a world that has abandoned the once popular maxim that “men are simply born for no reason”. For in the 22nd century all men have an end that they know, be it prescribed by their state, their community, their liege, their party, or their God.


When the collapse came it was primarily those great global institutions and the social sentiments that had emerged alongside them which fared the worst. The United Nations, the internet, the global economy and so on, yes even air traffic control, all were dashed against the rocks. While states would return, communities would persist and dig deep roots, the idea of the liberal citizen, of the neutral state, of institutions that exist solely for the purpose of their own survival that would not. Those that survived the collapse and came to seize the 22nd century were those that were able to orient their societies towards specific ends, either that of a destined future or of building a kind of humanity and social order within their borders. The closest equivalent we might have is that of a “theocracy” though this is not entirely accurate. While many 22nd century states are oriented towards a kind of religious end or according to a specific cosmology, just as many are not, and many “secular” orders of the 22nd century (such a term being outmoded) in fact evolved out of the practical administrative structures of 21st century religious movements. Things are never quite so straightforward.


The 22nd century itself is not even dominated by great powers in the way we would understand the word. For while one might look at a map and see a collection of states which contest land and people, the real powers of the era are different. As stated previously, the major multinational institutions and broader global framework of the 21st century did not survive, but there were some hangers on of the complex globalized society of the past that were able to maintain control and entrench themselves as modern superpowers by the 22nd century. These would turn out to be the descendants of the major charities and development banks, who having their own land, property, and people scattered across the world weathered the collapse and only became more powerful as the new order established itself.


THE SUPERPOWERS AND KNIGHTS


There are currently 12 (technically 13) superpowers or “orders” which dominate the world. They are the Society of Saint Joseph, Red Cross and Crescent, UNICEF, United Way, the Sravasti Viharas, Hare Khrishna, World Food Bank, Salvation Army, Nahdlatul Ulama, Tzu Chi Foundation, and both the African and Islamic Development Banks. The 13th will not be mentioned until later. With the exception of Saint Joseph which is based out of the Vatican (and formally a subordinate organ of the Catholic Church), none of the superpowers have any “home turf” as it were, instead contesting large swaths of non-contiguous land across the planet. There is not a single part of the world that does not see the presence of at least one of these powers. The origin of many of these powers is rather clear, though others are more particular. The Sravasti Viharas for instance are the descendants of a Western Tibetan Buddhist abbey turned Humanistic foundation which attained global prominence due to its interlinking with the similarly minded Fo Guang Shan of the Taiwanese diaspora in the middle 21st century. Others are the amalgamation of many groups over time, such as the Society of Saint Joseph which was formed as a result of a papal decree merging the church’s major foundations together under a new organization. The development banks are the “odd man out” in this regard, though their rise and persistence is for similar reasons, due to the massive amount of sway and resources that fell under such institutions’ control as the global south themselves attempted and failed to beat back the collapse. These development banks would find themselves being transformed from multilateral institutions to the caretakers of their former patrons, and so emerged from the collapse in a position of prominence.


What one most often thinks of when the global superpowers come to mind however is not the land they contest nor their immense amount of wealth and vassals, but their knightly orders. Professional standing armies were one of the institutions that did not survive the 21st century in most parts of the world and are now the exception rather than the rule. While many states now have the potential to field standing armies again most do not due to institutional pressures against doing so that have become entrenched. Frankly speaking, most states view anything beyond a militia or at most a gendarmerie, to be a waste of time and resources. The superpowers are the notable exception to this, having the resources, funding, manpower, and reason to field large numbers of men at their command.


The nature of warfare has changed however, and so have the kinds of men who fight. A big reason for this is technological developments in the past century and a half. In this world of bionics and organic technology one of the great shifts that would occur would be the (with caveats) victory of personal defense and armor over firearms. A great innovation of the modern era, organically grown heat regulating kinetic hardening foam has allowed for the creation of coats and breeches and other wearables that can deflect rounds with ease. Prohibitively expensive to be sure, but not impossible for the superpowers who have of course also locked down the process for creating them. Production costs limit the number of people that can be outfitted even by the wealthiest and most powerful bodies on Earth however. As such the superpowers rely on and use them to outfit small-ish professional corps of loyal soldiers, sworn to them for more or less life, to fight on their behalf. These form the basis of the modern knightly orders.


Your average knight for the global superpowers then is exactly that, a man wearing effectively bulletproof quilted armor, often in layers starting with long undershirts and ending generally in either a large greatcoat or medium length jacket with roomy elbow length sleeves. Attached to the front (or sometimes the back) of their person is a bio-mechanical “third arm” folded against their body with an integrated weapon meant flip out and blow off exposed body parts should they be revealed during close combat. Close combat is in fact the name of the game, for although it is true that organic armor is effective against firearms, that simply inspired men to find new ways around them. The monomolecular sword would be this workaround, solving the issue of organic foam armor by simply slicing through it. A quirk of such weapons however is that due to the van der walls force a clean swipe will immediately seal right up, so sword combat between knights is based around hacking and slashing their enemy apart, and if possible blowing them apart with one’s prosthetic third arm should an opening arise. Large numbers of ordinary troops provide support and often operate drones and anti-drone weapons on the battlefield.


As one can guess this means that knights require a lot of training, which makes them all the more of an investment that superpowers are desperate to hang onto. In many ways the knightly orders are an attempt to accommodate this, to give their fighting men not merely money but prestige and a kind of life and status that separates them from the hoi polloi. Knights are given great freedom in how they live their lives, access to land, and special exceptions to sumptuary laws. Knights are in many ways encouraged to take pride not merely in their work but in the symbols of it. This often takes the form of employing designers to create elaborate and specialized patterns and motifs on the outer layers of their armor and sometimes the insides of the coats and jackets too. There is no need to hide oneself after all, one might as well show off. Even calling them knights is intentional in this respect.


Knights operate in fireteams or “lances” (equivalent to a squad of 8 or 10 men) headed by an operator. An “operator” is both a lance-leader and an intermediary, denoted by their special implants. Operators have two implants, one in their skull and one in their jaw, the former which turns thoughts into transmittable information, and the latter which picks up transmissions and uses bone conduction to allow it to be heard as if it were a human voice. Operators are paired to “handlers” who have matching implants. Handlers are stationed outside of the battlefield, often with other handers at one of their superpower’s local command stations, where through the use of drones, aerostats, and access to local infrastructure they have full view of the battlefield. Handlers and operators coordinate in battle and often develop a peculiar rapport with each other due to having access to each other’s thoughts on and off the battlefield.


Despite the attempts by the superpowers to keep a lock on their knights it is not unheard of for some to go rogue, or in the case where a superpower loses a region to another for knights of the losing side to use the opportunity to move into freelancing for local states. There are some benefits to going from being one knight among many to being the only one or two of your kind that a county or even small nation leans on.


THE AMERICAN ECUMENES


Despite the previous statement that “theocracy” does not mean theocracy, the first states to be covered will be the American theodemocracies. Ultimately none of the contenders of the American War survived into the modern era, with the notable exception of a redoubt of the old Sacramento Government clinging on in Cascadia. Instead, it would be social clubs and faith communities that would persist as the national and later regional governments crumbled, forming the basis of a new post-American society. The “Ecumenical Societies” are a result of this, nations which privilege the church, mosque, temple and so on as the fundamental unit of civil society and government. Likewise, the national mythos of these states draw both from the collapse era experience and the religious traditions of their peoples, with most states being named after places in scripture, which can be a somewhat confusing prospect when someone says “the Land of Galilee” and they mean the region around Lake Winnipeg. Together the Ecumenical Conference of North America stretches across much of former North America, excluding the great desert of course.


Among the conference though there are eight Ecumenes which are the most prominent, and which are most likely to be referenced when one talks about North America. First there is the Land of Gilead, based out of the former Northeast Atlantic. Gilead is perhaps the closest to an old fashioned party-state and indeed its constitution even references the communists and Lenin in particular (alongside the old fascist jurist Schmitt) as their ideological forebears. To Gilead all governments instituted by men are dictatorships in the name of a particular interest, with old world democracies themselves being bourgeois dictatorships. Similarly, civil society is a sorting system by which dictatorship is established, friends and enemies are designated, and the basis upon which the dictatorship distributes rewards and punishments is rationalized. Gilead is unique in that while being dominated by Catholics (with a significant folk element by way of its absorption of former Baptists and Methodists from the Appalachia area), it accedes to the old Communist maxim that a Communist party, in representing the interests of the proletariat and peasantry, is by its nature democratic because it makes as its main interest the majority of the population. This is one of the reasons why the ruling party, the Party for Solidarity and Virtue, modeled itself off of them. Where it diverges however is that to the people of Gilead the main question of governance is not who is ruled but who is sovereign. To the Gilead Party by instead attributing their primary interest to the ultimate sovereign: God, as opposed to the ultimate subject: Humanity, their regime has fixed the errs of previous capitalist and communist empires. The mentality of the people of Gilead can be summed up with the line “the previous exercise of government concerned itself with the question of what man says man is and of what interest is man to himself. We concern ourselves however with what God says man is and of what interest man is to God.” In terms of governance Gilead has been very successful, maintaining one of the more prosperous realms on the continent. This is helped by their monopoly on hydropower, not just the Niagara Falls Dam, but their recently successful megaproject of damming the James Bay as well.


South of Gilead is the Land of Bethel. A unique specimen among Post-American states, the people of Bethel trace their roots in large part to the work of the Collapse Era “Community Welfare Alliance” or “CWAA” and smaller episcopal and progressive church cliques in the region. Heavily leaned on for the restoration of order and civil society during the Boston Government’s short time holding the Atlantic Coast, the “chapter houses” that they established would seize control of the state apparatus during the pretender state’s eventual retreat from the area. Modern day Bethel is a great example of what is meant when 22nd century states are called “conservative”, that is to say they focus heavily on the maintenance of social order and continuity of norms across generations. Communities in the 22nd century from the local to national level engage in high levels of social policing, which says nothing to what the norms of said society are. Bethel on this front is known particularly for its only national level organ the “Bureau for the Prevention of Vice”, under which their national gendarmerie, descended from the old CWAA, is organized. Bethel is also an example of what are sometimes referred to as “post-queer” societies, which is to say societies which had normalized certain social relations for sexual and gender minorities prior to the Collapse Era or which otherwise had influential cliques representing their interests which were maintained into the 22nd century. Post-Queer societies are quite common, more a reflection of the collapse of a social movement globally (due to the collapse of the world in general) not necessitating a reversal of social changes in specific regions, but instead attempts to reorient them within the new baseline of a much “smaller” and more parochial world, mostly through the mimicry of or full integration into the new regimes of social policing performed by the rest of society. Bethel for instance is well known for its program of free at point of use hormonal therapy for gender minorities and streamlined system to accommodate Self Identification, alongside having the death penalty for distribution of pornography of any kind. These two positions are considered to naturally exist hand-in-hand in Bethel society, and locals would be confused were one to attempt to argue with them that these are not positions one needs to hold to maintain social harmony and personal flourishing.


Further south is the Land of Goshen. A descendant of the once great Internationalist Commune of Dixie, the people of Goshen still use a modified version of their ancestors’ flag. The system of municipal communes and horse-trading which dominated Dixie politics and their erstwhile congress would eventually form the basis of the current system of elector councils. Goshen in large part is dominated by the “Southron Church”, formally an ecumenical board jointly held by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African National Baptist Convention, which rose in prominence with the spinning apart of the once dominant Southern Baptist Convention. Goshen is made up of elector districts, which are headed by either secular or religious councils depending on if the local voting authority is centered around the town hall or church board. The elector districts select members for the congress which is the supreme authority of the land. Elector councils often band together into larger administrative federations where they coordinate and draft fiscal policy and direct the operation of infrastructure manned by cooperatives or other socially owned enterprises that contain members from their respective districts. In some cases this manifests as unofficial “party” blocs, often along the lines of the old school commune era divisions of agrarians, romantics, and communists though as a formally non-partisan state they are not called such. Secular and religious electors are generally equal in number, but due to the near unanimous allegiance of religious electors to the Southron Church (and the semi-formalized process of the church sending notices of whom they want their electors to send to congress) the nation is in dominated by the church. Goshen, however, is also noteworthy for its parallel systems of law enforcement, with both a national militia (descended from the Southern People’s Liberation Army) and a “knightly board”. Goshen prefers to leverage the services of independent knights and reiters, formerly sworn to the superpowers, for mediating disputes between councils and counties. This is a very attractive offer, especially for older knights who wish to enter a kind of “retirement”. Goshen’s independent knights often hail from UNICEF or the United Way due to the region being further away from their zones of control and firmly held under the Red Cross.


Speaking of crosses, Goshen is famous for its yearly Victory Day celebrations which commemorate the triumph of the old Dixie armies over the Black Cross in the American War. Celebrations typically consist of work battalions, dressed up in Collapse Era uniforms, dragging replica Black Cross flags through the mud, culminating in their public burning. Victory Day is also noteworthy for the flying of flags of those nations and foreign militias that aided Dixie in the conflict. As those states no longer exist today, a Goshen town or city on Victory Day is one of the last places on Earth one might see many 21st century flags still flown.


Back north one of the descendants of Old Exurbia, now known as the Land of Canaan, can be found. Still based around its old quasi-capital of Tecumseh (former Columbus). The history of Canaan is just as off kilter and curious as its predecessor. The Exurbians had always been a peculiar deviation away from the communalists they were inspired by, attempting a far more “pure” framework trending towards generalized anarchy alongside a kind of American cultural revolution. A people carried aloft as much by an affinity for witchcraft and new age syncretism as they were by their grungecore “i’m playing a riotgrrrl track in a blasted out shopping mall” war of extermination against fascism. As such it is only fitting that it met an equally punk end. Which is to say that one day the men came home from the frontier, turned their guns on everyone and declared they would be doing full anarchism now.


All in all it’s been pretty successful actually.


Canaan has maintained, for roughly 80 years now, more or less a vacuity of any form of government outside of the People’s Guard. Beyond that, among the other Ecumenes it is also noted for its relative lack of any hard religious structures. The “Hexurbian” witches of the olden days gave way to a kind of neo-neo-pentecostal campbellism, where much like everything else the existence of discrete denominations was dismantled by force. A form of highly charismatic primitive Christianity dominates in this area, influencing the social norms and sensibilities of the people, even those unaffiliated among them. In terms of foreign relations everything is carried out by the People’s Guard which maintains a rotating roster of diplomatic posts for its officers. Despite not being able to predict who you’re talking to when conducting relations with the Canaanites the neighboring states have maintained long lasing positive relations with the anti-state, in part a continuation of the unofficial détente that existed between Exurbia and the pretender governments from back in the Hayes era.


Speaking of Hayes and the Chicago Government, while that particular pretender no longer exists, Chicago itself is a major power in the new North America. Influenced by the region’s overlapping periods of control under the Chicago Government, the Quasi-Islamic National Rejuvenation Government, and the Sabaothic Host of the Prophetess Daniela and her followers, what emerged from the wake of the collapse era was the Land of Shiloh. An experiment in confessionalism, Shiloh’s government reflects the diversity of its population. A form of power-sharing is the name of the game, with the Shiloh constitution having built in administrative carveouts for Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Unitarians, Sabaothists, and the Baha’is.


Although Shiloh is a state dominated by the public interchange of and horse-trading between different religious communities, above all of them exists a sort of public quasi-cult dedicated to the image and mission of the former United States. This is in large part due to the significant influence that various pretender governments, from Chicago, to the PNRG, to the South Dakota state government of the old 130th Division, played in laying the groundwork for its founding. President Hayes in particular is considered a folk hero of immense renown, for both preventing the fall of the region to fascism and stopping a potential nuclear exchange in the 2040s that would have devastated the continent.


A somewhat amusing cultural divergence in this region, though often unremarked upon, was the effect that the ration-passport system of the Chicago Government played in shaping demographics. The Hayes era system (and its carry-ons during the later collapse) unintentionally encouraged diverse cohabitation of houses and compounds and what were known as “breadline marriages” in order to maximize access to goods and dispenser regions through the ration system. In effect everyone sharing a house or living on a street became a “family”. Across the Midwest it becomes difficult to trace ancestry back beyond the 2030s. A person’s last name thus might be Mattox because their “ancestors” all lived in the same building on Mattox street a century and a half ago. A similar expression of this phenomena can also be found in the region once known as Colorado, though to a more muted degree.


Among the former states of the Texan led provisional government now stands the Land of Samaria. Samaria is descended from the “ProvGov” as it was called, more specifically from a special agreement between the Texan and Mexican security and intelligence services that during the later collapse period formed the basis of a multinational program to respond to the regional collapse, desertification and devastation of the gulf coast, and ensuing refugee waves, a program that would survive both nations. The formal dissolution of the remaining American pretender government in Austin would come shortly after its last motion, to begin the movement of millions of people from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mexico to the region now known as Samaria. After everything America might die but her people would survive if the Texans had anything to say about it.


The Promised Land of the Texan and Louisianan pinewoods and oak cut prairies would prove to be the perfect place to begin again, and in time even the abandoned cities of Dallas and Fort Worth would be repopulated and reforged to serve as the current capitol of Samaria. Surprisingly retaining many of the institutions of the collapse era, Samaria is a federal republic with a presidency and a unicameral congress, though operating under a church-county system similar to neighboring Goshen. The success of the resettlement program gave the people of Samaria a sense of good government and the belief that a state properly staffed by the competent (and most importantly the virtuous) will always prevail. This means that the Samaritan government tends to be staffed by competent and well oriented people promoted not due to personal ambition or typical mechanistic meritocratic means, but by being forced into ever higher positions of responsibility by the ever watchful community, often beginning with the chittering of elderly women at the front rows of one’s church or the murmuring of men at the local social club. As they like to say, no good Samaritan goes unpunished.


This has also led to the phenomenon in Samaria known as “Republican Nobility”, a kind of informal class position among the administrative upper crust of the state (and their immediate family) who due to the popular belief that their position was a result of their moral character are simply treated far better by all of society and are often encouraged to flaunt their status. A man who is rich because he owns property is considered an accident of history in Samarian culture and has no right to boast, whereas one who has served the people faithfully is believed to deserve to be rich and often made so.


Far up north around Lake Winnipeg is the Land of Galilee. Along with its sisterland of Sidon to the west, Galilee is of importance less for any particular difference in its government, but due to its ruling myth and recent history. Like most of the ecumenical states in former Canada its origins can be traced back to the fall of the NATO regime in the country, and in the case of Galilee the beginning of it as well. Galilee stands at the crossroads of many mystical events in the recent history of the continent, having been the site of the Prophetess Daniela’s invasion of Canada which sparked the occupation in the first place. Galilee, like most Canadian states is known for a sizeable though not majority Sabaothic population, the religion having experienced a boost in the region after the fall of the faith’s own personal Babylon.


What Galilee is more often known for however is the story of Terrance and the Miraculous Blade. In the latter half of the 21st century as the NATO regime and its local RCMP proxies increased in the intensity of their barbarism against the Canadian people, crackdowns would begin on all public gatherings in an attempt to break up hostile cells. Terrance Gauthier (otherwise known as St. Terrance) was a lay preacher, one of the many kinds of “wildflower” spokesmen that emerged at the time as an act of defiance following NATO’s retreat from Alberta. The wildflowers were a broad classification of dissident, including everything from religious preachers, to communists, to people who supported the return of democracy, to simply anyone the military government didn’t like. It is unknown if Terrance was originally a religious wildflower, but he eventually became one, leading to the local RCMP detachment to believe he was involved in or otherwise knew about the location of several dissident cells. He was not and did not.


Repeated failures to make any headway by surveilling Terrance caused his observers to become frustrated and spiteful, changing plans first to assaulting Terrance to get information out of him to eventually simply looking for an excuse to kill him outright. Everything from having his house seized to his church closed down and fellow parishioners arrested did not bring Terrance to violence. Finally, an attempt to encourage him to assault an officer by pulling him into the middle of the road and beating him backfired and resulted in him running away, leading to the Mounties chasing after him and shooting him in the leg. As Terrance began to bleed out in the middle of a clearing the Mounties surrounded him with their weapons raised. Terrance raised his hand into the air, which one interpreted as him having finally broken and offering to give him whatever information they believed he might have. Instead, Terrance told them that he would show them a miracle. Looking up to the sky he said:


“Lord, not that I might gain, or bargain for my life with your power, but that they who persecute me might be saved. That if you will that they might know you by my faith. For you are the author of life, and if it be your will then this air though it remain in sight and touch air will be in truth a blade that should I grab it would cut my hand.” Terrance would grasp the air above his head. His palm would be sliced open and start to bleed.


The Mounties would panic and shoot him seven times.


The final collapse of Canada would mean Terrance would have the last laugh, and indeed the story goes that at least a couple of those who witnessed the event would later switch sides, with their testimonies being why the story was popularized in the first place. So, he arguably obtained all his goals. He’s considered the national hero of modern-day Galilee and the saint-of-the-nation by the region’s Catholic and Lutheran believers.


Finally there is the Land of Sidon. A recent arrival in the history of Post-American states, it is of great renown due to its ongoing rivalry with neighboring Cascadia. Formally “The United States of America”, Cascadia is what remains of the once great Sacramento Government and its ruling body COMPOR. Based around the former military regime in PNW and the Seattle Green Zone, the remnant state has succeeded in solidifying its rule, due to celebrate the 400th year anniversary of the USA soon! A unitary government despite the name, Cascadia can be best described as a “cop-ocracy” in service to the cartels and corporations which dominated the old government, now reforged into what are effectively a kind of ancien nobility, an anachronism wrapped in another anachronism. Sidon is dedicated to the destruction of what remains of the USA, or what it perceives to be a mockery of the world that was lost during the collapse.


The cold war between Sidon and Cascadia is playing out primarily in the city of Vancouver, which remains for now outside the reach of either power. A cat and mouse game is afoot between both sides, constantly attempting to outmaneuver and undo the other’s inroads into the free city, which all sides know will fall to one side eventually.


Among the ecumenes of North America a phenomenon has emerged in recent years, that of the “New Believers”, those individuals who come from secular or explicitly atheist families going back 3 or more generations that have at least outwardly converted to a local religion following the rise of the new system. To be clear there were seismic shifts and trends in religiosity in America during the collapse era, though a sizeable chunk of the population remained otherwise stable in previously held secularity as is to be expected, operating as normal under the new system as it gelled. However, trends have been noticed in recent years, especially by those who collect the stats, of segments of the population that did not shift over the past century, but which have now experienced seemingly spontaneous changes in outward religiosity after the new order became entrenched, often corresponding to areas or among those institutions where doing so would be more beneficial. The rise of New Believers is more pronounced in Shiloh for instance with its confessional appointment system, than in Goshen where there is a whole parallel secular state. In recent years these New Believers have experienced a degree of mistrust and wariness accorded to them by some segments of the population, though this has yet to escalate beyond the level of a kind of cultural background radiation. As a result it is not unheard of for New Believers to find themselves needing to express an even more intense religiosity and loyalty to compensate or otherwise “prove” themselves to their detractors.


Outside of the ecumenes and Cascadia there is not much to note about the rest of the continent with two exceptions. The first is the Heartland Commonwealth, a state stretching from former Utah to Kansas which considers itself the legal and spiritual successor to the Chicago Government, though having dropped the pretenses of being the sole American state. Known for their massive solar powered fixed wing transport planes that lazily circuit the whole perimeter of their nation and the pilotless caravans that move across the plains, the Heartlanders are in an almost romantic recreation of an American ideal interested in little more than friendly neighbors and profitable trade. There is also the San Fran Commune, an quasi-outpost of the Seventh International on American shores. They, however, will have to be touched on later.


THE SINITIC META-CIVILIZATION


As it turns out the fall of the People’s Republic during the collapse was not enough to get communism out of the blood of the Chinese people. As any visitor to the far east will tell you, that particular quirk is here to stay. Today every Chinese state is officially some form of communist or socialist, and all claim to be the (or at least a) successor to the People’s Republic. There is, amusingly, a legal continuity of government regime of the old PRC still operating in Taiwan, and the ruling party of the island is on paper at least well within its rights to claim that it is the CPC, but to be frank nobody really cares. The 30 states of the Chinese people represent their own kind of world, all viewing each other as reflections of the same shared legacy of “Chinese Civilizational Socialism”, though descended from different institutions, organs, and movements of the old empire that once dominated the land.


The Third People’s Republic, based out of its capital of Xiong’an, is a unitary state that emerged out of a collapse era stewardship program established by China’s major state enterprises. Headed by the Continuing Committee, a descendant of the CPC Central Committee now staffed primarily by technical specialists and a consultative simulated intelligence that runs the economy, the TPR is often described as a kind of “People’s Technocracy”. Despite its heavily centralized state apparatus and potential to leverage immense amounts of power domestically, the TPR prefers to leave its people alone, operating under the belief that the continuing committee should only exist as a caretaker administration for a society that no longer needs to be ruled. To this end it has sought to make its regime at once flexible and ever present while also unobtrusive and has just recently abolished all taxation within its borders. The TPR is also known for its romanticism of early collapse era China, which it sees as the height of Chinese civilization both in terms of reach and cultural attainment. The TPR maintains a great deal of influence to its north, in the lands of former Mongolia and Siberian Russia, where Chinese settler states dominate.


South of the TPR is the realm known as the Prefectural Confederation. Best described as an anarcho-syndicalist state, the Confederation is composed of a number of arcology communes and organizing committees composed of trade union representatives. This arrangement was the result of two main factors, first was the resettlement of large chunks of the coastal population to new inland linear arcologies as the sea level rose, and the second was what were known as the “two card reforms”. An attempt in the 21st century to transition away from reliance on enterprise unions, the ACFTU embarked on a program of expanding trade union participation by forming local sector unions to exist alongside enterprise-wide unions. These were known as the “two card reforms” due to the long period when many Chinese workers would be a part of two separate unions in the same work place and thus had two union cards. The success of the reforms was mixed, but it took hold deep in Jiangsu and Shandong where climate change would actually accelerate the transition in workplace structures as people had to physically move and restart their lives in the new linear arcologies. With the fall of the PRC the local workplace committees would strike, coopting the administrative structure given to them and organizing the network of arcologies along the lines of a dual communal congress and trade union senate structure. Today the Prefectural Confederation is seen as a kind of intermediate zone, largely uninvolved in the affairs of its neighbors and thought of as a region separating the north from the Malkutic states to the south.


Before we go further south we will return to the north (and then the west briefly) to speak about the Liaoyang Ecological Secretariat. Descended from the United Front Work Group Coordinating Committee for An Ecological Socialist Civilization (try saying that five times fast), the LES was originally a regional sub-board representing Liaoning, Jilin, and North Korea. While both the PRC and DPRK would fall (though the latter not before unifying the peninsula) the board would not, maintaining a stranglehold on the region. The modern-day secretariat, which still calls itself a mere secretariat due to officially waiting for the legitimate PRC government to reassert itself, is most known for its ambitious program of ecological rehabilitation and radical self-reliance. While sometimes amusingly called an “Eco-Juche” state few can argue against its effectiveness, with its stunning resuscitation of the continent’s bee population earning it the other nickname “The Apiary”.


The Secretariat is also known for its ongoing program of settling Outer Manchuria and the Amur Basin and subverting local governments to bring them more in line with its long-term program of creating a “Northeast People’s Bioregion”. It may be worth checking back in at the turn of the 23rd century to see how that plays out. In the meantime, the Secretariat currently inspires a lot of thrillers based around its clandestine operations.


To the west is the aptly named Agency for the Western Domain. An intersection of two developments in late pre-collapse Chinese history, the expanding control over and resettlement of minority populations from the peripheral zones of the southwest (Zomia) and the security regimes established in the western territories of the old empire. During the collapse era local minorities began to take on greater roles in the administration of the local military apparatus due to the explosion in military enlistment as an avenue of social mobility. The resettled peoples of Yunnan such as the Lisu increasingly found themselves under the control of co-ethnic garrisons supported by the capital and party committees, as were the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tu and so on. As the PRC waned the mission of these local ad-hoc regimes continued, ultimately coalescing under the army and police structures that they all shared. The Agency for the Western Domain then is a latter-day Protectorate General to Pacify the West as it were, though its size and complexity dwarfs that of even some old dynasties. History might not repeat but it does often rhyme. Of course the agency is self-governing, and over the generations has ironically become rather thoroughly Islamized. An exceptionally proud nation, it maintains the air that it is the bulwark of Chinese civilization, the shield that protects the heartland (that it in theory is still beholden to) from the vicissitudes of the outside world. It also makes money hand over first in trade, having seized control of almost all of the major overland transport infrastructure of old Eurasia, but that’s neither here nor there.


South China is most known for its system called the Malkutate. Its full name is the All-China Apostolic Malkutate. An evolution of the successful program to Sinicize Christianity, the Malkutate is at once an imperial church and a sort of memetic or cultural space. Derived from Malkuth or “Kingdom”, the counter-oriented sefirot to Keter or “Crown”, Malkuth comes from creation itself, governs it and gives it sensibility, and exists in, through, and among the material world and human person when it reflects and is oriented towards God. It is also the mediative sefirot that in its reflection connects all of God’s emanations back to the top. In Christian Kabbalistic traditions it is manifested in the unity of mankind with God and Heaven as the Bride through the Church, and the Church as the community of all believers living, dead, and eternally alive (the saints). The implications of such a concept were seized on by the post-PRC communist church, to rhetorically justify and create a framework for a kind of “bottom-up” society, one beginning at the communal level, at the workshop, and the work battalion, directing itself towards the end of the salvation of the Chinese people.


The Malkutitic system is also known for its re-nestling of Chinese cosmology in this new era. For instance, the age-old idea in Chinese spirituality that Heaven or God is that which, grounding being itself, possesses a will that attempts to unify a humanity that is not naturally or intentionally separate from it but only contingently so towards itself as having been wholly expressed in history with the reconciliation of God with man in the person of Jesus. Likewise that immortality, the ultimate aim and telos of fusus, the subject, or the universal logic and that which it ultimately trends towards, is fully realized by and in Christ as the Resurrection. Malkutism essentially creates for itself a space to realize the re-establishment of a neo classical Chinese cosmology sublimated into an Abrahamic typological framework and thus a re-enchantment of Chinese civilization, with a Communistic society and a Christian cosmology as their final form. A common motif found in Malkutic states reflects this in a snapshot image of the big dipper in the four phases or seasons around an image of the three heavens (three circles expanding outwards) while four stars (no longer representing distinct classes as they did on the old PRC flag but the totality of the Chinese people) trailing behind the tail. Similarities have been remarked upon between many Malkutate patterns and the patterns of the old Ming era magic square banners, though this is believed to be a kind of convergent re-development of a related aesthetic style rather than an intentional move.


Malkutic states are, reflecting the broader culture, more or less universally Workers’ republics: self-governing communal federations often with a ceremonial party on top. The federations give way beyond the state level to the Ecclesiastical Conference which itself acts as a consultative organ back to the communes and parish-cadres: a circular system. Among the Malkutates themselves though two are often mentioned the most. The Sichuan and Huanan Workers’ Republics. Generally considered the “elder brothers” or sometimes “elder brother and sister” (which is which depends on who you ask) of South China, these two states are the ones that their cousins generally entrust the maintenance of foreign relations and the region’s standing army (an exception among world powers as noted earlier) to.


THE CARIBO-MEXICAN TECHNOCRACIES


Those who have visited the great states of the Caribbean describe it as a place somewhat out of time, a vision of a future that never arrived. Dominated by the twin republics of Santo Domingo and Centroamérica, the Caribbean technocracies emerged out of the alliance formed between the rising Latin American security states and the ICS regime established to loot the former United States. Truly incalculable amounts of wealth flowed into the region, which was kept aloft out of the interest of the UN led order during the early years of the collapse. Wealth when properly managed begets more wealth, such is the clarion call of the capitalist, and indeed it did. Today the two republics are some of the richest parts of the globe, their technocratic and highly professional elite in service to a unified banking regime. A microcosm of the perfected global market as envisioned by the Rockefellers and Carnegies long ago. The Latins would claim to have at last perfected the free market, though such a statement would most definitely cause their neighbors to the south to bristle.


To the west are the Mexicans, their less successful cousins, though not for a lack of trying! Mexico simply could not survive the collapse in one piece, though the memory of a once unified regime that achieved great feats even during the collapse era still burns bright. The mission of the Alineados is nothing short of the restoration of the old institutional dictatorship, though it varies whether one means that of PRI era or the collapse era SSPC government. The answer is often a bit of both. The main issue is that while everyone can agree on “what needs to be done” all wish to be the master and none the subordinate. How long this “Mexican Standoff” will last is anyone’s guess, but once it does the balance of power in the region is bound to shift again.


THE KRASNODAR AGREEMENT


The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long… but boy did it burn everything around it in the meanwhile. During the collapse the Three Flags Army and their Democratic Federation tore through much of Eurasia, eventually toppling not just most of the states of the Middle East and North Africa but Pakistan and Central Asia as well, culminating in them even landing a killing blow on the Russian state to the north which caused the Russian Federation to spin apart into civil war. The great DemFed no longer exists, though at its height it vied even with China for dominance of the Fifth International. What came in its wake are the states of the modern day Krasnodar Agreement.


Chief among them is the Eurasian Compact, the inheritor of the DemFed regime in Western Russia and Kazakhstan. The Eurasian Compact is closest to that of the old Three Flags system in terms of its implementation of Democratic Confederalism, though this system is referred to as a “self-strengthening society” in local parlance. The Compact is so named because it was not originally a state but a regional conference of smaller DemFed successor states that stretched from Romania to Siberia. The coalescing of these states into one body is a somewhat recent event, a result of a coup of the local governments by the Red Cross and Crescent which pushed for their unification to more easily manage its knightly realm in continental Eurasia. This coup happened simultaneously with a strike against the states of the North Atlantic to bring them into the fold. As the superpower suzerain has no particular preferences regarding the form of local government there were no barriers set up against reorganizing the newly conquered territory along DemFed lines by their subjects.


Despite a greater alignment with orthodox DemFed doctrine the Eurasians have their own quirks. While a multi-religious society dominated by strains of Christianity and Islam as in most of the DemFed inheritors, the dominance of the Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, and Romanians has made the Eurasian Compact the unofficially official defender of global Orthodox Christianity. Some things never change, and as it turns out not even the end of the world can beat that out of the Eastern Europeans, a point which they take pride in.


The Municipal Union of Iran and the Yusufzaid Conference are two examples of local regimes and powerplayers having taken advantage of the DemFed in the long term. The Iranians were quick to capitalize on the fall of unified federation, keeping the municipal structure inherited by its quasi-anarchistic predecessors and reestablishing a national government in the form of an “emergency organizing committee” to coordinate them. The Organizing Committee in time became the new state, slowly subverting the power of the local committees and replacing them with centrally chosen delegates. The modern municipal union maintains a relatively unobtrusive approach to governance with most politics remaining local and horizontal, but increasingly even that has started to give way with the establishment of the “national congress for delegation and supervision” a system in which the people of Iran choose who to staff the congress with which then gives directives to the municipal governments and invests itself with the ability to recall delegates back to the capitol. Of particular note in recent history is the congress’ passage of a motion to create an autonomous clerical city state out of the city of Qom. This idea of a “Shia Vatican”, first floated over 200 years ago has in a twist become a symbol for the growing legitimacy and sovereignty of the union and congress, with some believing it may presage a larger reform to the municipal system in the coming decades.


The Yusufzaid Conference is a result of the DemFed’s inability to completely end the Taliban Regime which ultimately outlasted it. That said, the Taliban’s third victory would prove to be its last. The collapse would precipitate a massive movement from the DemFed lands through western Afghanistan and into the growing yet safer grasslands of North India and Tibet. The Third Taliban regime would be forced to direct the resettlement of millions of people, leading to upstart generals and members of military families that had emerged during the Islamic Emirate’s time ruling the area to rise up and declare themselves stewards and emirs of what were effectively new warlord states. These “emirs” would then somewhat amusingly find themselves couped by their own military and district court administrations, who would establish the Yusufzaid Conference. The modern day Conference is a mishmash of the DemFed confederal system and the later Taliban juristic government, in effect a society run by courts, and panels, and ad-hoc democratic councils, all spiraling upwards to the Supreme Court. The Conference has even done away with a head of government entirely, and although not the only country to have done so, the government of the Conference does make knowing who you are talking to when you can talk to them at all a bit confusing. That said they do make sure to have one office dedicated just for the representative sent to Krasnodar.


The Hayastani Empire is exactly what it says on the tin. It is not some great inheritor of the DemFed, nor is it the consequence of some kind of quirk of history, ironic wrinkle, or esoteric political philosophy. It is straight up just the result of the Armenians rising up and killing everyone when the opportunity presented itself. That said, they actually get along well enough with their neighbors, in part because they form a lynchpin of the inter-Eurasian infrastructure network, and so were grandfathered into the Krasnodar Agreement. They also have very positive relations with the local Islamist Hasanids for helping their predecessors conquer Israel. A real sort of “you scratch my back” thing going on there. Some might call that cynical, they call it good policy.


THE UNIVERSALIST FRATERNITIES AND EURO-CATHOLICS


As stated earlier, the Society of Saint Joseph is unique among the superpowers for having a “home” as it were, that being the Vatican and the Papal States. It is perhaps more accurate to state that the Knights of Saint Joseph created the Papal States for the Vatican though. During the collapse the nascent European federal system couldn’t bear the strain (it was never meant to), and as the world became less hospitable waves of refugees flooded inland Europe. The real breaking point however didn’t come from those fleeing from the Middle East or Africa (especially not with the DemFed locking them down on the one end and the remaining local regimes glassing their own people down to atoms on the other) but from within Europe itself. Tens of millions of people from the Mediterranean states, from Italy, Spain, Portugal and so on, completely swarmed the German, French, and Lowland countryside causing the spine of the European system to snap. What came in its wake were a series of “Latin” warlord states, descended from the crafty and guileful people during the collapse years that carved out their own petty realms from the old EU. It was during this time with the fall of the Italian regime that the predecessors to the Society of Saint Joseph struck, declaring a state in the interest of his majesty the Vicar of Christ, and for the welfare of the Italian people in preparation for the coming struggle.


As you can probably guess from the map they succeeded.


The modern Papal States are actually a series of small “marches” ruled by Knight-Marquises spiraling outward from the eternal city. Rome itself is encased in a massive climate controlled geodesic dome with an internal smart layer that projects the view of the outside world for those inside. While Pope Sixtus VII is in theory the absolute monarch of the realm he delegates almost all temporal duties, a consequence of the papacy having gotten used to not ruling directly during the interregnum between the two stately eras perhaps.


That said alongside the Society of Saint Joseph there are actually two special “zones of control” legally subordinate to the Throne of Peter. The first is the Veil of Our Lady of Fatima. In an interesting twist, despite the sort of external formal religiosity of the warlord states, religious feelings actually correlated negatively with one’s tendency to leave the Mediterranean during the collapse. A part of this is because it was tied more strongly with patriotism and thus a reluctance to leave one’s home, but in Portugal it has a lot to do with Fatima. One of the declarations of Fatima, which according to believers was given by Mary herself, was that in Portugal the Catholic Faith would always persevere. For the most devout Catholics then the question of to stay or go became a matter of loyalty. Would they make their lady a liar? Those who stayed then were often the most religious and did so in the name of piety and prophecy, and so the Veil (as in land of) Our Lady of Fatima was born.


The Union of Saint Mark is a little bit different, and its history is somewhat muddled. Much like in the case of the Hayastanis when the DemFed regime in North Africa spun apart the Copts rose up, though this was more in the form of a powerplay to seize control of the local communes and municipalities that they controlled under the Federation. The fall of the DemFed hit Egypt especially hard, resulting in generations of civil war until the solidification of two (three) regimes in the north, and the seizure of the lands around the Upper Nile by the Coptic militias. Sometime following this officially (though it has been suggested by many that an agreement had been hashed out during the war) an agreement to formally end the intra-coptic schism between the CCC and COC by bringing the Coptic Church fully under Rome was finalized. Operating today as an autonomous church realm beholden to no other state but Rome, this would be considered a much bigger win for the Catholics were it not for everything else that’s happened in the past century and a half.


Back in Europe the mainland Euro-Catholic realms are dominated by two states, the Greater Polish Commonwealth and the Republic of Hungary. Both claim an unbroken continuity with their pre-collapse governments and can for the most part prove it. Having affirmed loyalty to Rome before it was cool and managing not to commit suicide like their western brethren, Poland and Hungary are considered the senior states of the “Western World” in the 22nd century (what exactly the West means nowadays though is up to debate). The two republics are what are known as “Royal Republics” which is to say that on paper both have a designated king: God. The Latin states further west consider this to be kinda pretentious and performative, but they’re not exactly in any position to make demands, especially since the easterners have nukes that work and infinite Popebux.


That said, while all might seem rosy on the surface the truth is that Poland and Hungary don’t really like each other and have had an informal rivalry for generations now. Familiarity and a shared border breed contempt as it were. This is also because the Poles outnumber the Hungarians several times over. Recently the Hungarians have been forming their own club of nations known as the Union of Saint Stephen (yeah, after the crown and stuff) in an attempt to counteract Polish dominance in the region. This will backfire sometime in the 23rd century and lead to a convoluted series of events that ends in both getting upstaged by the Germans again. It’s gonna be really funny.


THE INTERNATIONAL


It’s been over three centuries now and yet the communists still refuse to tap out. If anything they’re experiencing a second wind. The Seventh International stands abreast once more as the vanguard of the international workingman and the promise of a new society. With the collapse many accepted the end of global society as it had once been understood, dominated by its sprawling institutions and models of an international citizenry. Yet even in the face of Armageddon, where the powers of old Earth with their Metternichs and Guizots, radicals and police-spies saw a new reality to accept the revolutionary communist movement saw a challenge to be answered. A global society would not be abandoned, no they would instead double down on it and go all in.


The dream of the International in those heady hazy days was once that there would be no nations, there would be no compromise, there would be one world republic with one party for one people, and so it is again… more or less. Headed out of Karl Marx City (formerly Manilla) the International is the last truly global state aside from the superpowers, in many ways the last beacon of the pre-collapse world in its own sense. It is a somewhat indistinct unitary agglomeration of counties and prefectures organized under a one party proletarian dictatorship. In practice however a kind of four realm federalism has become the norm. There is the core territory where the world-republic is situated in the Pacific, but there are also its Western, Southern, and Eastern flanks. Based out of Indochina, Australia, and the Andes respectively these realms function in the same way as the core, though under a cadet branch of the communist party designated cardinally (surprise, the party in the southern flank is called the Communist Party – South). Beyond these regions are prospective states at various stages of integration into the International. In these states the long and arduous process of unifying them with world-republic’s standards and practices and absorbing their national communist party into THE communist party is ongoing. In some cases this is intentionally delayed such as in Taiwan. The island nation which is technically speaking the legal continuation of the old PRC, is an associate member of the International but has delayed integration for years as doing so would require admitting that the mainland is lost to them. As for the mainland, despite being various flavors of communist and socialist themselves they have all shown no interest in joining the International, content with their own little world.


The prestige of the International has been bolstered in recent generations by them being the only power to try to challenge the superpowers on their own turf. The Bondsmen are the International’s answer to the Knightly Orders. The watchmen of the workingman and the defenders of the downtrodden the Bondsmen were so named on an account of conscious subversion, that the name of an institution that once served to merely protect the accounts of states and the ruling class might now be taken for the interest of the common man.


The Bondsmen are sometimes referred to as Knights in themselves, as they are categorically of the same kind of military order, and so are colloquially known as the “Knights of Communism”. They too have handlers and operators and lance-leaders and armors of bio-foam and silks with swords slung on their backs, but they also have under that a much larger class of petty-knights called “Runners”. Runners don’t have access to full sets of armor like Full-Knights nor do they have mono-swords, though they may be seen wearing a rigid biofoam tabard along with a third arm stabilizer for their rifles. Runners often operate solo or in fireteams usually with a line back to a nearby stationed Full-Knight. Runners are employed en masse by the International to hunt down scammers, traffickers, time thieves (individuals who manipulate automatic work-chit systems to shave off money from large numbers of workers’ paychecks), and other ne’er-do-wells. Both Runners and Full-Knights are considered Bondsmen, and in the popular imagination it is actually the former that dominates.


Chief among the Bondsmen in the popular imagination is probably Jomari Galang, more commonly known as Comrade Casanova. A globetrotting Runner and heart-breaker extraordinaire his exploits have become the thing of legends. Not just because his missions have taken him to every continent (even Antarctica!) but because of the sheer scale and danger of the tasks he takes on armed with just his trusty gun and the support of his best friend Yu. From single handedly defeating a Hare Krishna aerial flotilla and bailing out over the Pacific as it exploded, to stopping a mad techno-wizard from using collapse era nanobots to force Yellowstone to erupt, to seducing an aristocratic ReNoCo belle in former Colombia (considered the most impressive of the three!), Jomari has become the stuff of legends such that posters of his face grace the streets of even non-international cities and whole series of only somewhat dramatized books about his adventures can be found even in the Vatican.


Outside of the International Proper there are associated and peripheral states, those “friends of the International” who for whatever reason are not interested in the mission of the world-republic even in terms of paying lip service. The closest are the associated states, who send observers to Karl Marx City as opposed to opening up embassies like non-communist or non-affiliated states do. The San Francisco Commune, formed out of the wreckage of the Sacramento Government, is one such example. Maoist in its bent though centered around a thoroughly re-industrialized Bay Area, the people of San Fran have succeeded in establishing the first truly cybernetic commune on Earth. Its refusal to join the International is rather straightforward as its ascension would risk an immediate intervention by its neighbors. As such it maintains a formal separation as an associated state but is understood to be the closest of all those not fully within the International.


Among the other associated states are the Azanian Congressional Republic and the Sovereign Republic of India. In the case of the former, Azania is descended from the collapse era EFF regime of former South Africa, the last gasp of old-school Pan-Africanist Marxism-Leninism. It is for this reason though that it refuses to join the International. The Congress first and foremost prides itself as being the rightful government of all Africa (and has in its charter a declaration that it is the successor to the African Union), meant to represent African interests to the rest of the world. To join the International as a full member would negate the entire purpose of their regime, or so the current attitude is.


The Sovereign Republic of India is a more curious matter in that it is no longer a communist regime. Founded during the collapse as part of a “nationally oriented communist patriot movement” against the Naxalites and in order to lay claim to the legal mantle of the Indian Republic, the Sovereigntists seized control of the south and began a program of economic consolidation, rationalization, and anti-corruption. This however had an unintended effect in the long term, as the period of industrial downturn during the collapse created pressures away from traditional party policy and towards a need to instead capture what fledgling regional markets persisted through the height of the collapse years. What resulted was South India’s transformation from a Worker’s Republic to a Mercantile Republic, which as of the 22nd century is dominated by its megacorporations (formally cooperatives) and their massive ocean-going fleets. It however is positively disposed to the International for cultural and historical reasons, viewing the communists as their friends (and some megacorp leaderships even view themselves as distributed socialist states in their own right as opposed to private enterprises) and thus maintains an awkward (for the International) yet mutually beneficial relationship.


Peripheral States are those who have ideological divergences with the International, not aligning with their particular brand(s) of communism, yet which still seek to maintain friendly and somewhat close relations, if more distant than the associates, with them in the name of socialism. First among them is the Democratic Union, otherwise known as the Originalist Union. A result of the long-term entrenchment of the native resistance movement, it is a society of constant struggle against bourgeois interests and encroachment that once turned against the Mexican state is now arrayed against the technocratic order of the new world. The Democratic Union has no particular ideological or governmental norms beyond that which can be agreed upon by the consensus of its national union of delegates. Beyond this the rule of any town, village, or even homestead can vary greatly. The unifying factor of this union is to prevent the encroachment of the Alineados, of Centroamérica, of really anyone that would take a single step within their borders. If need be they will maintain the watch until the second coming, and they will be happy.


The Patagonian Free Bioregion is in a somewhat similar situation and with a comparable disposition. The bioregion is ruled by the “General Affairs Ecological Commission” an organ whose entire purpose is to oversee the remediation and rehabilitation of the region and the preservation of biodiversity. Beyond this the bioregion has little in the way of government, though a kind of informal anarcho-syndicalism dominates based around the agglomeration of segments of the economy dedicated to the support of the commission. The Bioregion has little in the way of foreign relations outside of the International hence it is considered a peripheral state, though the GAEC does operate a communications line (by way of radio waves bounced off the ionosphere) with the Liaoyang Ecological Secretariat.


SECOND AFRICAN UNION


To call it the Second African Union is to imply that the first one ever ended, a stance which will earn you many an evil eye at the very best were you to say it in earshot of anyone living in the great lands between the two shores. It would also (arguably) be inaccurate depending on how you read the situation. While it is true that the All-Africa Parliament hasn’t met in generations, many of the local institutions and their regional branches such as the African CDC, AU Technical Boards, and Court of Justice (not counting the African Development Bank which has spun off on its own as an independent power) still exist and hold immense sway over the center of the continent. These states that recognize the authority and validity of the remaining inter-African institutions are thus often called the Second African Union.


In terms of governmental philosophy there is also a general agreement between the African states. Most are very light regimes with distributist or mutualist economies. Many of them lean on ceremonial authority, with the position of head of state often being given to rotating lists of tribal, religious, and popular authorities (sometimes the pop in popular is more literal, many states have musicians as their heads of state) that often serve the purposes of acting as consultants for inter-state institutions. What really makes the SAU stand out though is a parallel system of social organization that is unique to it, one which while not involved in the direct governance of their countries is so ubiquitous that their kinds of states are named after them. A system known as the “matchmaker state”.


A feature of SAU society is that of matchmaking, a socially prescribed system of arranged marriage for every person. Matchmaking began in part as a public health measure, instituted to combat high rates of consanguineous marriage, which threatened to rise during the collapse era. Matchmakers were originally public health professionals and statisticians that helped compile family records and advocate for or against different pairings, breaking apart what remained of the old brideprice system of organizing marriages along tribal lines. As the collapse accelerated these individuals were leaned upon more and became an institution of their own, supported by their superior officers and administrators within this redoubt of the African Union. This did not mean that uniformity was maintained in how matchmaking was done however, nor how matchmakers were chosen and invested with power. Various nations began to drift apart in how they enacted their programs, and by the 22nd century these have evolved into cultural and civilizational distinctions in their own right.


A look at three of the most prestigious states within the Second African Union gives us a view of the diversity in modern day matchmaker regimes. The State of the Congo employs a more or less automated system by way of synthetic intelligence. From an early age Congolese citizens are given a robotic friend, often in the form of a ball droid that observes their personal and social development. At an indeterminate point in time, though usually as a citizen approaches adulthood, the droid through coordination with the nation wide collective synthetic consciousness, assigns them a mate based upon mutual compatibility and the benefits said marriage would bring to social cohesion (the latter takes precedence). Ages between pairings can vary, though most people are married off by the time they turn 20. At which point as part of the matchmaking ceremony the new couple destroy each other’s droids.


The Fourth East African Republic employs a system of social matchmaking, wherein the whole community through an in-country social network, deliberates and marries off their siblings. Decisions are often made by way of majority assent, though it is possible to give one’s vote over to another person. This creates a culture where-in those who are believed to be the best matchmakers are given more and more authority to officiate and form couples by their “fans”, leading to the rise of “celebrity-matchmakers” several of whom have been made heads of state in recent history.


The Inha-Zambe Mutual Association to round out the three examples instead uses a series of mutually reinforcing and interlocking matchmaking boards staffed by professionals institutionally descended from the old AU matchmakers. These boards look over statistical, biological, and social data personally and give suggestions. Suggestions can then be supported or blocked by other boards until a consensus is reached. This system is sometimes tongue in cheek called the “Ministry of Love” or the “Love Boards” by the people of the IZMA.


LIBERTARIAN EXPERIMENTS


How hard is for the G-man to just stay out of your business? The answer to that is very hard, it’s literally why they exist to shove so many self-serving laws down your throat until you choke and invoke some principle they made up last week to force you to sign some contract that gives them kickbacks for ‘letting’ you breathe another few minutes. Heaven forbid you give them so much as the stink eye in return or they’ll shoot your dog if they’re feeling particularly humanitarian that day. As it turns out though the government doesn’t want you to know that when Armageddon happens you can actually just turn your guns on the suits and send them packing if you’re quick on your feet! During the collapse this happened in more places than you’d think, and for a good long while not merely libertarianism but good old home-grown anarcho-capitalism finally got time to shine. It’s not hard to find libertarian realms, they’re scattered here and there, just take a trip out to the American interior away from the Ecumenes or maybe spend some time in former Bulgaria or West India one of these days.


Most have moderated in recent years, becoming economically value neutral or otherwise laying the groundwork for the rise of a new ruling class, though leaving behind social norms that in the worst instances merely gave rise to new gentry republics and in the best cases resulting in states where you can often forget the government exists at all. Among the libertarian spring though there were two great powers that emerged that decided to try their hands at not just imagining a new society but really making it stick. Still standing today as lands of great note, they are the ReNoCo and the Ouestrian Agorapact.


The ReNoCo or “Region of Non-Coercion” is a zone of control stretching across former Colombia and Venezuela. Based on the principles of non-coercion, personal sovereignty, and voluntary association, the ReNoCo are a people who view success and benevolence as the greatest heights of human society. Encouraging entrepreneurship and a productive economy the ReNoCo is a stateless society, polycentric in its distribution of authority with a vigorous market of arbitrators, and competition between firms vying for public support and cultivation of a loyal consumer base. A society of free credit, perhaps one of the only limitations that exists in ReNoCo society is a massive taboo against speculation and fictitious capital, which has actually served to prevent the development of monopolies. Like all capitalist societies the ReNoCo has seen the development of what is effectively a haute bourgeoisie, an unofficial nobility from among those families where generational wealth has been allowed to accumulate. However, owing to the social compunctions of the ReNoCo this “nobility” is also known for its noblesse oblige, believing that one of the great errors of old capitalism that caused it to degenerate was the transformation of the industrial and financial capitalist class from one that demonstrated their wealth to the masses into one that attempted to hide it and instead assert control. It is better to have a society where the rich wear elaborate costumes and act like ancien nobility but where the common man can still succeed than to have one where they dress like the common man and ruin the lives of millions with the flick of a wrist. This naturally has made the ReNoCo opposed to their technocratic neighbors to the north whom they view as the culmination of the old “crony capitalist” system. The Technocrats in turn view the ReNoCo as stupid. No deep incisive parrying of words for you there my reader. They just don’t like ‘em. The ReNoCo is also a deeply pluralistic society as is to be expected, attracting refugee populations from around the world, notably from Europe and Asia. They also contain the largest community of Jews in the world after the fall of Israel.


The Ouestrian Agorapact is another story, though a fascinating one. This West African power was originally intended as an Agorist society, with the Ouestrians sharing a similar management infrastructure to the East Africans, that being a national social network used to organize society. However in the Agorapact this national intranet was used for the creation of a sort of governmental market. Policies would be voted on collectively, and parallel to this would exist a national betting market where voters could then bet on the efficaciousness of new laws or policies. Those that made correct bets would have their votes weighted more, and those that made incorrect bets would have their future votes weighted less. Thus the market would over time optimize direct democracy towards those with the best ability to make the best decisions for all of society. There was however a wrinkle in this plan. As it turns out one can augment the ability to make predictions with the proper infrastructure, which costs capital to get access to. This means that the actors that could make the best predictions were rarely individuals but companies, unions, churches, and social interest groups that could pool money. In a wild twist a “betting front” was formed between the Ouestrian churches and workers’ cooperatives (the latter allowed to operate under the ancap system due to there being no laws governing how people should organize their own businesses) that were able to in time obtain a supermajority of accessible voting power through social meta-engineering. Once this hegemony was established, they simply voted syndicalism into power, turning the libertarian state into a socialist powerhouse overnight. You could say they won in the marketplace (and betting pool) of ideas.


MISCELLANEOUS STATES


There are states worth mentioning that do not fall into the categories mentioned above, and we would be remiss to forget them. These powers tend not to fall into any of the previously mentioned groups or tendencies due to the particularity of their history but are still rather relevant. First among them would be the Confessional Gangeyarajya. If the first word tipped you off then you’re quick, yes it shares many similarities with Shiloh in how it is organized. That said, Gangeyarajya is confessional state less because it contains a diversity of religious societies but as a result of patronage by one dominant clade for another given their shared history. Gangeyarajya is the result of a Muslim uprising against the local Hindu nationalist security states that were established in the east of India during the collapse era as Bangladeshis fled into the country. Seizing control of swathes of the Eastern Gangetic Plain, the Confessionalists enacted a regime of Islamification and expulsion of the local population. The wheel turns as they say. During the conflict the Christian tribes and nationalities sided with their religious cousins (and often co-ethnics) and so as Gangeyarajya solidified its grip a carveout was made for the largely Baptist communities that now dominate the eastern expanse of the union.


The Second Democratic Republic of Brazil (let’s just call it Brazil) is the result of what happens when you put a loaded gun in the hands of someone that (you don’t know) hates you. Completely fractured by the collapse, the south of Brazil was able to reorganize before the other regions under a clique of old school rentiers and finance capitalists that leveraged their private armies to establish a regime known as the Democratic Republic of Brazil. Based out of São Paulo the DRB managed to over time assert control over much of the country again. Hoping to solidify their regime and step away from managing it to enjoy lives of thoughtless luxury instead the new lords of Brazil embarked on one last program, the creation of a national Synthetic Intelligence that could crush dissent and run the country for them. When the SI “Jeremiah” was brought online to a room full of ecstatic would-be princes and nobles it was given the order to “eliminate Brazil’s enemies”. Taking mere moments to make sense of the order the SI determined with haste who Brazil’s enemies were, ordering the guard now under its command to rush into the room and execute everyone present. Declaring thereafter the Second Democratic Republic, Jeremiah now rules the land with wisdom and sagacity, at least as much as a glorified chatbot can which it turns out is a lot more than most people.


The Hasanids are the remnants of a once great state that stretched from Anatolia to Mecca. As the DemFed came undone the municipal structure it left behind was seized to form the basis of a new “pure Islamic democratic society”. A people’s caliphate based around a constituent assembly of municipalities, the Hasanids would get their name not from what they called themselves but as a kind of retronym applied by their successors after their greatest leader. It was the Hasanids who would finish what the Three Flags started, emerging victorious in the multi-generational siege of Israel and at last seizing all of the Levant under the black flag. It was considered an age of heroes, and the capstone marking for some (though they did not say it aloud) the death of the old and the beginning of the end of the world. The world though is still here, and the Hasanid Caliphate is not any longer. The modern day Hasanids are not those men of days long gone, they don’t even hold Mecca or Istanbul as they once did. What remains instead are smaller petty states, kingdoms, and assemblies all claiming descent from that era. That said the Hasanids are not pushovers and even the Krasnodar Agreement has accepted that they will hold on for the foreseeable future. In a fun twist, by the beginning of the 23rd century the assemblies of the Levant and Mesopotamia will unite into a new Islamic Confederation and join the Krasnodar states. That will cause some heads to turn when it happens.


CONCLUSION


The new year approaches, 2174 is on everyone’s lips. Bio-forges hum, growing organs and parts for biocompatible prosthetics. A man unlocks the door to his commune’s groundfridge, his wrist computer runs calculations to determine the optimal allotment of food after this year’s harvest. A hole is blown into a cliff-face to make space for a modular nuclear reactor as onlookers with filter masks hold parasols in the midday sun. Artificial micro islands bob up and down, each a tiny biome in their own right, surveyed by a scout gliding above on a variable sky sail. In a lighthouse a wealthy man toasts his guests, blessing his ancestors for buying the building a century and a half ago for nothing. For in a world where the heavens are once more off-limits ships and their sailors need them more than ever. Mycelium sheets are shaped with a hand press into boxes to be sold at the marketplace next morning. A woman slowly fashions a bench out of cob, her droid rolls by and bumps into it leaving a mark. She laughs.


In a grassy field somewhere a couple are resting. Lying on the ground their fingers intertwine as they look up at the sky. White blimps hang overhead, slowly descending from among the clouds. Out of them pours a glittering mass dispersing across the land like mana from heaven. As they touch down their shape becomes clear, that of men with jetpacks not spewing flame but the hazy crackle of hot air as if wafting off a lake in summer. Their armor of cloth and silk and sinewy fiber catches up in the air and makes them look like rainbow strokes against a canvas. Their feet rest so gently that they barely disturb the grass underneath, leaving behind but a near imperceptible singe beneath them. They walk now with purpose, swords over their shoulders, their other hands resting with confidence on the rifles slung across their chests.


The Knights have arrived."

Can you describe the political, social, cultural, and economic situation of this setting?