Heechee's Serial Experiments

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Our Father's Stars: Grace Will Lead Us Home
The third take in the Our Fathers' Stars series. In this alternate timeline, the Second American Revolution succeeded, but was hijacked by the Faith Party and the Theodomists, shaping it at its image. During the Third War on Terror, This America aggressively supported the Red Flag faction, resulting in a new form of Islamic Theodomist unity. The crises of the century proved utterly wrong those who once thought Secularism was the wave of the future. Post-liberalism has seen its influence greatly reduced, overshadowed by all forms of Dominionism and other strands of Fundamentialist revival, while Asia is liberal democracy's last stronghold.

Still, in the Revivalist world, strong differences persist, and some of the biggest ones are cross-denominational and inter-denominational. First, there's the Marxist versus the reactionary strands of Theocratic order. In the reactionary side we have the Russian Orthodox, the Green Flag Islamist regimes and the heirs of the Christian Remnant in Europe. In the Marxist side, we have the American and the Brazilian spheres of influence, with differing theological views: Brazil is closer to the Post-Millenialist roots of the movement due to its Pentecostal flavor, still considers the construction of a Christian world-state is neccesary to bring the Second Coming, and has a more populistic flavor, truer to its leftist ethos. America is more prone to collaborate with other Theodomist denominations -notably, the Red Flag Federation-, while cracking religious dissent within its borders, and its leftist policies are less radical. The New Ecumenical Patriarchate is just a collection of Orthodox Theodomists that stand defiant to the Russian schism, and that play an equidistant game with both factions. Pan-Theodomism is an offshoot movement that tries to encompass all abrahamic denominations as compatible, and that has taken hold in very few places, the UK being one of them, but also Israel, both at heart as a generational shift and as a means of survival, depending on and surrounded by Theodomist powers. Italy, meanwhile, was nearly torn apart by the tensions between the Christianist Padanians and the increasingly Theodomist Mezzogiorno, which ultimately made the paramilitary forces of the Partito Nostro to intervene with almost nobody from the general public batting an eye. North Italy is close to a war zone, and the difficulties to keep order have turned Italy into a Mafia-run police state.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Our Father's Stars: Paint It Black
The fourth instalment in the Our Fathers' Stars series. In this world, the aborted Second American Revolution resulted in a US collapse and Europe didn't resist the Black Tides. The far-right inherited the future in the Western World. More properly, in Eurasia and its lip-service-Eurasianist sphere, that has had it easy to play divide and conquer to rule as the more cohesive bloc, as different strands of reaction fight for supremacy, often literally.

On one hand, we have those countries that follow the ideal of white European supremacy, albeit deeply divided on the details. On the other hand, we have 'second tier' countries that follow similar ideas in the periphery of the Western system. All of them have devolved into strands of de facto authoritarian countries where minorities and enemies of the nation are either deported, sterilized, confined in black sites or subtly deprived of basic access to key utilities. In spite of this, their rethoric and their mobilization processes often verge on Participism.

Liberal Ultranationalist countries are superficially close to the liberal democracies of old, often with a Post-liberal veneer, but one where citizenship is strictly based on culture adherence and scrutinized to draconian degrees for that matter. Christianist countries are reactionary on ethno-religious grounds, and are de facto theocratic. National-syndicalist countries are both virulently atheistic and economically radical, the closest in many regards to the old Neo-Nazi movement. National-mysticists craft their identities based on archetipes constructed by Neo-Jungian memetics, and tend to the Neo-agrarian. Social Patriotism combines Dirigist left-wing policies with a civic yet radical and exclusionary Nationalism. The Sovereign Authority regime combines grassroots Libertarianism with strong reactionary views on natural law. All of them use the European Heritage politiclub as their forum and political arena.

Other politiclubs orbit European Heritage when we move to the periphery. Africa For Africans represents this world, much more Parafascist form of AfroTechnocracy, and the National Sovereignity Alliance is the junior Liberal Ultranationalist politiclub for those countries deemed not white enough. The Young Pan-Americans have taken the deep caste division implicit in what other world's Cuba would call Mercenarismo and taken it to its final form. And of course, there are the reactionary Islamist and Stratocratic regimes of Africa and Asia, always useful as a scapegoat.

There are scapegoats to spare, though, for old-school democracy is alive and well in China and its sphere, even in the diffuse bounds of the Islamic and African worlds -though informed by input from tribal organizations and other groups of interest. There's a titanic wrestling match between Asia and Eurasia, to see who can subvert the other first. And who knows where it may lead.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Our Father's Stars: Do You Hear the People Sing?
The fifth instalment in the Our Father's Stars series, one with leftist topics in mind.

In this world, the Second American Revolution was a full success. The United States was refunded on Mutualist, Left-Libertarian grounds as the Third American Federation (the First being the one of the Articles of Confederation and the Second being the Republic it overthrew), a party system emerging from the revolutionary groups involved. In the following years, America pursued an alliance with China as Chinese politiclubs bet on one or another American revolutionary party. The wave of malcontent spread to Southern Europe via a series of water crisis, and the new Sino-American axis ensured via memetic warfare it would spread, resulting in a complete refunding of the European Union. The New Global Deal was born. Still, many revolutionary groups worked outside the system in America, as much as Chinese Republicanism tried to contain their influence, and their spread felt across the world. Iran followed the example of Pakistan, and much of the Red Flag movement ended up giving way to more orthodox brands of Synthesis Marxism or Shura Democratic principles with a strong Gift Economy bent, while the renewed, quasi-anarchistic Democratic Confederation of Kurdistan made further gains. Anarchism itself spread way further than in Coldwine Prime, even reaching the shores of Africa via the Lusosphere. Maximalist Populism survives in Russia, Transhumanism has its haven in India and its emergent sphere -not to mention the Antardine experiment, nor that the Japanese and Korean Mutualists have a distinctly Transhumanistic flavor-, AfroTechnocracy resists the new wave as yet another mutation of the Indo-Aryan Meme-Complex, and a few National-Populist countries stand their ground in Europe under France's umbrella.

New Global Deal countries either follow a form of Progressivism (a return to the pre-Zentrum social order with extensive social programs) or are more Mutualist-oriented (with workers owning competing firms). 5th International countries are usually more radical, with direct democratic structures coordinated bottom-up, the main difference between the Marxists and the Anarchists is that the former still have nominal multiparty structures, delegation channels are more formal, abitration means are different and there's more room to gift economy in the Anarchist world. There's the growing concern of a "consensus authoritarianism" in those countries, as much of the everyday life inevitably involves interdependent management of the community. The new leftist order may range from techno-progressivist to bio-conservative, but synth rights are generally respected and, save in some NGD countries, germline (bio)modification is strictly prohibited.
By 2068, the new international order is starting to fracture, and the frenemies that are the New Global Deal and the 5th International could become foes anytime soon.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Our Father's Stars: And Hell Followed
The sixth take in the series around Our Father's Stars. In this world. The government of the People's Republic of China tried to put its survival above everything during the Dactyl Rot crisis, not being able to aknowledge the seriousness of the situation. By the time the world knew what was going on and tried to fight back, the Rot was devouring large swathes of California and being transported via international cargo to many other ports. It became a global outbreak that could have made humanity extinct, and forced a degree of cooperation and draconian measures never seen. As for the Rot, nobody still knows well where it came from. Some say it was a local fungus gone wild out of its ecological niche, but bioweapon conspiracy theories abound, and nobody's to be blamed for that. The Rot is a fungal, finger-like infestation whose spores end up being toxic for humans, able to grow in the most adverse conditions, and resilient to everything but the most aggressive chemical attacks. Decades after its debut, all the global Boards have managed is containing its advance, as it has gone too far for them to make anything but temporary advances over the scorched land. Still, the Boards' reason to be is survival and reclamation.

The European Emergency Commision and the Pan-American Common Security are what the old Post-Liberal order have turned into after being passed through a filter of raw Survivalist Pragmatism. Pan-America has gone further down the Technocratic rabbit hole: fully post-national and panel-ruled, its idea of optimization and suvival is one that even most in The Center Can Hold would consider Totalitarian. The Emergency Commision still keeps some cohesive nation-states inside its borders (all ruled by mandatory, all-encompassing Grand Coalitions overseeen by a part-bureaucratic, part-military, part-medical panel), but the situation cannot be called very different, and in fact, both Boards cooperate as closely as two wings of the same bird would. Theoretically, the Maximized Opportunity Bloc should follow suit, being a child of Post-Liberalism as well, but it has followed a different strategy: being a fundamentally insular alliance that only has to worry about the streams and winds and about containing the Western Australian outbreak, it has gone the path of aggresive, armed isolation. Nobody can go inside the Zone unless passing Kafkian health checks; once there, free market, social credit and 'pursue your path and mind your own business' technocrats await, which for this world standars might well be as utopian as you can get.

Then you have the Pan-Turkic military Board, as much of an autocracy as it is a military dictatorship, which has become so mercilessly successful at containing both the Rot and the Evicted that has managed to build a military/intel hegemony in the surrounding area, even helping to reconstruct broken states in the aftermath of the plague. And you have the African Survival Institute, the Afro-Technocratic (much, much less Informalist in this world) lobby that oversees the African republics to a degree it is the Institute, not them, that can be called the civic authority in much of the continent, with its control of both infrastructure, medical-military issues, local loyalties and memetic channels.
And, of course, you have the Evicted. Officially the Settlement Agreement and often called the Sixth Board in a derisory way, it comprises the precarious yet hypercrowded and gargantuan network that both houses and contains those who fled the Rot. Majority Han, it is nowadays the final destination of many who find no place anywhere else. Most Boards treat it as a scapegoat, with the unfounded pretext of being a security breach in the global effort, and the much more make-belief pretext of being the children of those who started the plague. The worst kind of propaganda often calls The Evicted 'The Rot by other means'.

The real danger, apart from the obvious, is somewhere else. Some misanthropic billionaire became radicalized in his own pessimism by the Rot events, and fed too much on Dharmic texts about cycles of life and death. He became convinced the Rot was meant to wipe us all, and that the job must be completed. It has engaged in cyberterrorism and memetic warfare for decades to gather adherents. And its multiple cells might be building something extremely ambitious across the Boards and beyond.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Our Father's Stars: Old and New Flesh
The final part of my take on Our Father's Stars. In this world, the Tedd Simms Incident was averted and the subsequent backlash against synths never happened. At least, not in the way it happened in Coldwine Prime. Google survived and US economy remained robust, and Trashumanism gained a momentum it never had the opportunity to gain in the *original TL. Canada, Brazil and India lead the way of Techno-Utopianism taken to the max. The main difference here between Hard and Soft Transhumanism is that the latter in practice usually happens in a run-of the mill democratic nation, maybe overseen by Transhumanist International, where the reach of Transhumanism is usually mitigated by the fact it's only expressed by the ideology of an electorally dominant party, whereas Hard Trashumanitst nations have Transhumanist dispositions fully entreched in their consititutions. Also, from a theoretical standpoint, Soft Transhumanism is more permeable to apply Bioconservative or Reclamationist policies on Pragmatist grounds, while the approach of Hard Transhumanism is fully Maximalist. Then you have the Populistic Transhumanist branch of Vidalism-Calderonism, for in this world Cicerón Vidal didn't flee to Antarctica, but colonized it from an Argentina he ruled on his terms.

The US still leads a seriously eroded Zentrum, but America is in the brink of change. Everyone knows the heyday of Post-Liberalism is gone, even if it retains regional power, which has made Germany, one of its last real bastions, to adopt a zeal even greater than in Coldwine Prime, fully disposing of democratic formalities and going the Maximalist Technocratic path. Back to America, the grip of the Moderate Party has relaxed, and Transhumanism is advancing, California and Utah already being Ascension strongholds (the marriage between Mormons and Transhumanist was included in the original story). Along with the Chinese democratic bloc and an Ankara Pact of National-Conservative democracies, Zentrum lies within that group that oscillates between Techno-Progressivism and bioconservatism depending of the political winds that blow at the moment. The Marxists, Red Islamists (They broke up with Synthesis Marxism ITTL) and National-Bolsheviks range from the cautionary (and instances where synth rights are both protected and curtailed on different aspects depending on their national ideal of social interest) to turning a blind eye to occasional pogroms. Only the Maximalist Populist Poland took outright genocidal measures towards cybernic and augmented peoples, and those who are tolerated by 2068 are so in exchange for blind patriotic loyalty.

Then there are the Urban Conservatives. It is a Participist ideology, just like Anarchism: organicist and municipal in which it sees the city as the basic natural polity. They're anti-Nationalists, decentralizators and radically democratic: their Conservative ethos comes from that cling to organic authenthicity and collective communion regarding social relationships and traditions. It doesn't matter much whether God exists as it does that worship is a form of public participation in the cultural space of your urban community, for example. When that Organicism and authenticity gospel apply to the human body, you find their attitude towards synths is that they're aberrant. Although, as an ideology, it prides itself in rejecting violence, you'll find it's not murder if you call it decommission and that, though not as brutal in methods as the Maximalist Populists, they admit no redeeming exceptions. It grew strong as a reaction to the Transhuman wave, usually in countries where it was electorally strong already -France, where it ousted the FN; Quebec, promting its independence; and Spain, with some powerless Techno-Progressive pockets due to Spanish Municipalism's convoluted history-, and spread from there. New York has been ruled by an Urban Conservative by nearly a decade, and it currently co-hosts the Municipalist Federation summits with Paris.
They represent the reverse of the Transhuman ideal, and even in democratic and faux-democratic nations, it looks like the Urban Conservatives and the Transhumanists are the ones polarizing this new Culture War, the ones paving the battleground to fight for the future.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Sabirist Movement
Inspired by ramones1986, an alternate flag from a world where the early 19th Century went different enough for France to eventually vassalize as opposed to fully incorporate Algeria, one of the main side effects being that the Sabir pidgin never died as a maritime Mediterranean lingua franca.
The flag represents an international language movement, similar to the OTL Esperantista one, one that politically aspires to the independence and brotherhood of the Mediterranean islands, with Sabir as the main common ground. While its political success is scarce so far (Only Corsica has gained independence respect to OTL), Sabirism has proven politically influent, even eventally forming governments in Cyprus and Malta and being part of coalition regional governments in many other islands.

The flag symbolizes the Mediterranean sun and the seafaring/merchant origin of the language via its solar compass rose, while the background is a stylized Mediterranean sea. The compass grows into an intermingled pattern that reminds and actual rose, as a symbol of friendship, interdependence and trade routes, as well as the cultures that populated and still populate that sea. Said pattern is ten-pointed due to the main"ten regions" of the proposed Sabir Space, to wit: Balearic Islands, Malta, Corsica, Sardinia, Djerba, Sicily, Ionian Islands, Aegean Islands, Adriatic Islands, and Cyprus.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

A Study on the Murcian Municipal Arrangement
Ok, so I got bored and started to play with my hometown's neighbourhood and district division. I did so because of the peculiarities of my city: located in the middle of an agricultural valley, it's surrounded by nearby rururban centers of population that often aren't contiguous to the city proper but nonetheless are logistically a part of it. These centers of population are arranged in Pedanías, a form of neighbourhood sub-mayoral system. The problem with this is that, as the city grew, many of those Pedanías became contiguous to the city proper and now act as neighbourhoods in their own right, yet the municipal nomenclature doesn't reflect this. I rearranged the city centre so all the cohesively contiguous Pedanías get in. I also merged, split and altered the the neighbourhoods, as well as some names: the official and traditional name of many neighbourhoods fits wherever there's a nearby parish, but some of those areas are now perceived as a whole, or named after something else, or ultimately defined by different attractors -this last part might be particularly subjective on my part, though. Finally, I grouped them in what I consider as comprehensive sociological urban macro-units to form districts.

So... yeah. This probably won't say a lot to you, but I'm more than happy with the final result. Here's an article that includes the OTL municipal arrangement of the core urban area.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Potterverse Wizarding Schools
A result of trying to articulate my own headcanon about how wizarding schools work within the Potterverse. Because fuck Pottermore. I just expect not to have messed with all those languages I don't know way worse than JK Rowling would.

The map reflects a general idea: Wizards cannot completely disconnect from Muggle communities, nor completely ignore what they do. What Muggles do has an effect on wizards as collateral damage, with their ever-changing borders, colonization and decolonization processes, occasional genocides... and there's always a flow of permeation via Mudbloods and Half-bloods. In this scenario, one of the most important European schools of the Middle Ages was lost with the Reconquista, to cite an example.The Ministries of Magic and equivalents lead and conceal, but also keep that level of osmosis in check.

At the same time, cohesion in magical communities doesn't perfectly match national and territorial cohesion between Muggles and the way it mutates. The Ministries of Magic do the managerial part of leading the wizarding communities, and have by sheer need to adjust to Muggle politics -there are special cases, though. The Andorran Minister of Magic is a sort of Catalan-Aragonese Minister of Magic in functions, to cite one. To cite another, North Korean wizards, while still concealed, are completely loyal to the Muggle regime.
The Schools, OTOH, have an utmost importance as they articulate a wizarding community by structuring and delivering the instrumental knowledge that makes said community what it is. Not only knowledge is power, but also a form of spiritual leadership the Ministries can't provide. Where there's a School there's either a wizarding true national brotherhood, or a transnational -or even an intranational- brotherhood that supersedes the national one -and such is the case in Hogwarts: Irish wizards are still Irish, but their alma mater unites them to the English wizards in a way that couldn't be within the Muggle community.
Ultimately, there's also the geography of regulated education: More traditional and common in Asia and Europe -and spread to North America from there-, more scarce elsewhere. There are small wizarding communities that fall within the curricular range of the Schools while keeping their own intra-group cohesion, but when their numbers fall below the few millions or when their tradition is ingrained in that regard, they usually resort to homeschooling as an alternative to standard education, as it used to be the normal before the fomalization of the great Schools. The Albanian wizarding community is the least numerous between those who count with their own schooling system.
Long story short, it's a variable mix of school tradition, absence of language barriers -one wizards haven't quite magically solved yet-, regional cooperation, community networks and how Muggle issues haven't messed those up, what determines the reach of a School in the Wizarding World.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

The Killing of a Sacred Cow
"He rarely appears in meatspace form, and when he does, it's usually during a school demolition, as he insist on personally attending the process of eradication of the physical school system where and when he can: where his old school laid there's now a giant sarcophagus filled with dimethylcadmium canisters. But in those rare instances in which he concedes interviews, he always stresses his own humility. He was never a ruler. He barely was a fighter. He only looked at the world with disgust, wrote about it with impotence, had more luck than many, gathered some followers when civilization collapsed. He was not, and he's still not a ruler. The Emergence needs a paradigm just as the Westphalian and Late-Capitalist order needed charts and constitutions; it needs a code of red lines. That code must be in touch with its own social interest, and both must be in touch with the reality of the Human space and the actual world in which Humans live. Otherwise, it will corrupt itself. That's why he, who accidentally devised that order, is the Chairman of the Supreme Consultative Committee. If anything, said Committee proves the synthesis of the old freedoms with the new freedoms. Rule of law is still guaranteed as in the best societies of yore, and yet it's the vast network of formal and informal committees, of franchised and semi-franchised co-ops that form the Emergence, who rule as a whole. Not wealth, because there is no economy in the old sense of the word. Not hierarchy, because access to limitless potential is there for anyone to take. Nothing but the common faith in leaving no stone unturned.

The reality of the Community of Emergent Systems, more commonly called the Emergence, is at the same time more complicated and much simpler. Though incredible breakthroughs have been made, post-scarcity is still not there, and a vast underground economy is mixed with a complicated and invasive system of social credit. Techbros run rampant, with an officially encouraged view of science that makes GLaDOS look humanitarian and constrained. Displacement and depauperation of entire communities are dismissed, often correctly, as simple howlers in the run of the complex collective intelligence. Rogue AIs become a concerning power, making the Systems delegate more and more lethal force in their own militias. But even if those were mistakes to be fixed and efficiently automated, if self-sustained plenty came, those managerial automated systems would still need directives to follow, and those are based on the original teachings of the Emergence founder and SCC Chairman.

It was an essay in two parts, with subsequent adaptations to online formats, and by now everybody is expected to know it by the letter. Behind its overtly academic and over-ambitious jargon, that superficially just tried to emulate the overreaching essays of the past, there was a whole way of understanding existence itself and a moral and political horizon to match. One that was ultimately incompatible with most of the horizons of its time.

The first part was cosmological. It was an attempt to displace the center of most contemporary Western philosophy from the Self to the World, to fix the separation between Analytic and Continental schools, and to move old forms of Materialism from Determinism towards a form of Trascendental Indeterminism, arguing Kant's synthesis had burdened everything that came after with a fatal flaw, and that the Necessitarian bias of the Modern Age philosophers who preceded him was greatly responsible for it, ultimately leading to the global collapse he was experiencing. The World, understood as the totality of what exists, simply can only be. The Self doesn't have to -hence Eliminativists-, but the World, defined that way, is undeniable. It only opposes to absolute nothingness, which is impossible. Logics are inner consistency rules ultimately derived from the only self-evident cornerstone that is the World existing. What's entirely accidental, he argued, is *how* it is, its actual content once given the basic inner coherence rules. Thus, the world-how-it-is is just one of the infinite possibilities that could have been. Understanding how the world is, understanding how epistemic circularity is not a rebuttal, how the world must inform any reasoning in a non-closed way to not become empty chatter, one can find rules to understand which philosophical model adjusts to the world. For all philosophical and political models would adjust to the some world or another -except for strict mysticism, which cannot be even thought in any possible world precisely because it posits there's something outside the World, he argued-. Everything that can be thought is essentially possible, if not necessarily real nor the possible is necessarily limited to the thinkable in this world. The existence of the world implies the existence of a limitless potential, and the features of the world-as-it-is imply that said potential can be known and used to a satisfactory degree.

The second part was axiological, in which he used the first part to to inform the right set of human values. He went beyond Rawls and argued that you cannot know what you need if you don't know what you are. Values are objective but not universal, because in order to be right, they adequate to a way of being without being detrimental to its constitution, and not all ways of being match. He called that shared way of being that allows for a veil of ignorance to work a Genus, argued our Genus was humanity and all of its mimicry intelligences, then described what he thought humanity was in order to outline what it needed. He showed a humanity with a set of urges and an open horizon of possibilities, left in a damaging and scarce world of which the own Human destructive instincts are nothing but a glimpse, a creature with the ability to understand its own situation and even try to change it -an unpredictable sapient species suffering in an indifferently hostile world. He concluded that humanity was a broken element of nature, a schism even to its own self, like a cursed child that could never reach an equilibrium with the universe, and yet that inability to make peace with its own world was what made humanity better than the whole. It was nature what was objectively evil for humanity, probably for all beings. He concluded humanity thrived on freedom and plurality, in the same potential nature was denying it, that humanity was prone to exert hierarchy and yet suffered hierarchy as much as scarcity, and that its disposition of rebellion against hierarchy and scarcity, conditioning and pain, were further proof that nature was a monstruous enemy, for those were her weapons. That by pursuing limitless potential and respecting each other's potential, humanity was pursuing its own inherent meaning. That it was better to collectively die trying than to make peace with nature. That any higher intelligence was their potential ally, even their potential sibling in humanity, but just as long as they shared that feeling of rapture that pushed them forward. That achievements were never to be taken for granted. And that those who, during the collapse, had left humanity alone against nature or sided with the latter were enemies of freedom, and by extension, of humanity.

This double work informs the morality of the Emergence, the systems' militias being loyal to the bone, but also, by opposition, of their enemies. The whole thing having evolved into what's essentially a left-wing, even more techno-utopian form of Objectivism, the list of enemies of potential has grown over time. Neo-Nazis and reactionaries of all kinds were amongst the first to be killed. Then common oppositors were regularly denounced as reactionaries. Eventually, defenders of conspiracy theories, quack pseudo-scientists, Vegans and animal rights activists in the strong sense, Tankies first and then every single Marxist whether heterodox or not, luddites and degrowth advocators, Fundamentalist and Traditionalist religious people but also Positivistic Secularists and those who claimed God was impossible, Postmodernists and other Social Constructionists, Determinists, Misanthropists and philosophical Pessimists of all kinds, all were deemed enemies of potential and objectively wrong -it meant the same-, thus killed by the millions. They still are on a regular basis, rightly accused or not, sometimes undesirable for other reasons -it's no secret that very few people born before 1965 survived the early depurations. And with those purges, potential accusations by your peers, potential accidental mistakes, multiplied. Even more: though never explicitly stated in the Commitee Mod Rules, the Chairman has stated many times in his speeches that he considers stupidity to be ultimately the worst kind of evil. As a consequence, in most systems, being labeled as a stupid person can be a death sentence. You should also start to tremble if someone tells you that something you just did is illogical. To be frank, the leader has never said anything against all of this happening. And why should he?
He's never been a ruler".

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Where is your God now?
Like my Nicene-less scenario, a religiously-centered scenario. This came up because I've seen many "No Muhammad" scenarios, but, oddly given the historical impact of it, few, if any, "No Christ" scenarios. At least not scenarios where the absence of Christianity is the main divergence. Here is my proposal.
A previous aclaratory note: when exploring this idea, I'm wary of the historically naive idea that Christianity turned back the clock in all aspects and we would live in an Enlightened utopia if not for it: don't let the map fool you in that regard -I've decided my maps look too naked and yet I'm still kinda alone on the idea that legends with an attached wall of text defeat what maps are for. Now, on to the scenario.

In absence of Christ, the crises of the latter Roman Empire centuries happened on schedule, as the flourishing of both esoteric and Salvationist doctrines with popular appeal did. Diaspora Jews failed to introduce a proselitist element that made it go towards a universal message -and so did Samaritans, who became the new religious majority in their former homelands-. That leap initially was covered by the Imperial Solar cult, but outside of the fringes, it was ultimately displaced by oriental-inspired Dualist doctrines. Manichaeism, which benefited both from its compatibility with Neoplatonism and by its idea of a cosmic mission -adopting Stoic values and ideas about Cosmopolitan Universalism in the process- became an increasingly popular, ultimately hegemonic doctrine. Pagan faiths weren't so explicitly targeted and subsisted for longer, and though most faded away, this comparatively more relaxed attitude would affect their hold in the northern outbounds of the former Empire.

Western Rome fell -in a rather different fashion-, Dualistic Manichaeism becoming the gatekeeper, rescuer and censor of the old knowledge -especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, which fared much better with no Islam to form, and yet with a more thriving Persia to care about. Slavery fell from grace in the Old Word as this form of Manichaeism spread, though it formally persisted for more time -servile revolts were a problem for centuries. A mutated form of the old Arabian religion survived, a form of Matrifocal-Trinitarian religion based on the Goddesses/aspects of Fate, Justice and Harmony. Mongols invaded Europe and were partially expelled, yet left a much more lasting mark and presence: both the Norse and the Mongolian religions survived, organized and thrived. Later, what would be Neoswebia would see, thanks to its settlers of many confessions and its homesteader and communitarian emerging mentality, the advent of a new syncretic religion: a form of pantheistic Henotheism in which all gods and symbols past and future were archetypes of some aspect of the universal totality.

Eastern Rome, Persia, a Tengriism-converted Sweden, Swebia -roughly OTL Netherlands-, and Anglodania took the lion's share of the *Americas, *Britain being ravaged by religious wars at the time, while Persia managed to vassalize Texcoco. A decolonization wave was sparked by the Roman crown jewel of Plethoria, an industrial wave spread through the Western and Persian world, running parallel to the ones in Mathura and Dong Wu -Bamaria, Iamato, Aksum and Mongolia would later follow-, while the Bourgeoise-Reformist and revolutionary wave would prove more tumultuous. Radical-revolutionary ideas would take hold in the most equatorial trade outposts, both extractive and with a sufficiently developed urban elite. Meanwhile, bands of *Anarcho-Individualistic freedmen would establish havens deep in the *Amazon forest.
Religious influence, much like in most of our world, varies from place to place in a context of generally secularized trends (The Tri-commandment of the Persian Sphere is a secular one guided by the religious one. Persia being a strictly Zoroastrian technocracy, it holds many non-Zoroastrian influenced countries and ex-colonies under its umbrella). In this scenario, it is the anti-Persian followers of Sol Invictus, particularly the Touareg and Ethiopians, the ones who fill the stereotype of religious fanaticism.

Humanity is currently marching towards the orbit and the Moon, in a Space Race of sorts, maybe as a springboard to go beyond. This is not devoid of strategic significance, for satellite-directed microwave collectors can be the key to energetic independence in the midst of an of economic-energetic transition -and they can also be weaponized. In spite of this, biotechnology and medicine are twenty to fifty years behind respect to OTL, and information technologies remain slightly behind. Persian, Mongolian and Roman rivalry, Plethorian armed neutrality and power buildup, Langobardian attempts at recovering their soft power and their resumed sabre-rattling against the Homelander Table, Aksumite financing of rogues and guerrillas, Demarchist and Anekumenist agitation, the economic ascendancy of Baft-Kew-Kew, the trade wars and proxy skirmishes between Mathura, Dong Wu and the Bamarian-sponsored Mong Mao League, are the major political happenings of the modern world.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Trotsky Need Not Apply
ITTL, Stalin miscalculates and tries to purge the Left Opposition too early, which creates, with the Cheka loyalties divided, a de facto state of emergency that results in an anti-Stalinist backlash and purge. Tomsky, Rykov, and most importantly Bukharin are also purged due to their backing of Stalin. The dust settles with a Kamenev-Zinoniev-Trotsky triunvirate, but their inner bickering makes room for the emergence of a respected, well-positioned compromise figure: Ivan Nikitich Smirnov.
Kamenev and eventually Zinoniev are sidelined by Smirnov, now firmly positioned as the General Secretary, while Trotsky starts as a Defense Commissar and rapidly gets demoted to more and more remote and ineffectual positions as his alienating doucheness does its magic. By late 1925, Smirnov's Soviet Union is a firmly established reatity: a revolutionary country firmly devoted to the ideals of Trotsky, without Trotsky.

While Smirnov's USSR is still an Authoritarian, Cheka-happy place ruled by a dictator in the Roman sense, there's no enforced cult of personality this time, nor hyper-bureucratization, and the constituent republics are given much more autonomy than they had in our world. The Ukrainian famine is not butterflied -pressure towards industralization, anti-Kulak sentiment and bad harvests still being there-, yet it takes a lesser toll and it looks less institutional in nature. Still, it will create a wide anger within Nationalist and crypto-Nationalist Ukrainian elements that here live where IOTL they didn't.

The butterflies in the world at large let themselves feel soon. Soviet consistent meddling and support of worldwide revolution has a direct short-term effect in Central Europe and Iberia, ultimately even precipitating the downfall of the Weimar Republic. The Capitalist powers are scared and prepare for war at the lesser excuse, which eventually comes when meddling in Romania precipitates a Soviet direct invasion. A long and exhausting conflict ends in impasse: A humiliated Japan is divided, Germany is taken back by the capitalists under the newly-formed Anglo-French Empire (later Federation) aegis. Soviet foothold onto Europe and North Africa receded -ultimately having to aknowledge the loss of a more-brown-than-red Ukraine- but also consolidated, with much more ground to further expand its influence in the bloody game of shadows to follow.

The Western world political environment is a radicalization of the trends we saw in our own: the US and its area of influence never saw FDR rose to preeminence and it could be called positively Randian, with the formation of powerful, quasi-statal and glorified private contractors with nearly-buccanneering capabilities eventually having important effects beyond the US frontiers. Europe is socially more conservative than IOTL, but economically rather to the left of OTL, as the economic actors of influence fear the appeal Socialism might have between the electorate. formation of nuclear-armed independent regional players is a growing trend that is expected to grow even more in the near future. Such has already happened around the Conservative and Hypernationalist democracies of the Thai-sponsored South East Asian Conference (add Isolationism to the Japanese case, plus toying with Democratic Socialism in the Indian case), in a world where South America was the main postwar ideological battleground and the main bulwark against Communism in SE Asia was a Thailand with means to resume and conclude its centennial history of war against Vietnam -and such has happened in the consultative-yet-despotic, luxurious and futuristic Sultanate of Oman, which sells as long as you're buying.

Fascism as such is seen as an odd Italian/Balkan experiment -of course, the South American Defence Corridor, the Ukrainian Soviet, imperial-hangover Oceania and the Hymalayan theocrats could well be called that to varying degrees (the RoC is just the USA through a glass, darkly). A doublethink attitude in that regard makes their inner policy state that, from either a Hayekian or Arendtian perspective, all forms of extremism are the same crap, while their outer policy dictates that at least they're our sons of a bitch. Casual antisemitism is politically correct everywhere, and most hospitals have an Eugenics Ward.

The ethos of the Soviet Union, in spite of being still pretty much a single-party dictatorship, is very different. Favoring abstract vanguard art, sexually libertine, architecturally Constructivist all the way -which has permeated Capitalist Europe to a degree, though they prefer to talk about Neoconstructivism-, getting closer to bottom-up democracy up until the security apparatus and Democratic Centralism allow. OTOH you won't find anything close to International Style buildings in most of the US, which went from Art Decó to Almost-Googie to Almost-High-Tech. Both countries have aerospace capabilities similar to those existing in our world (and both the USA and the USSR went to the Moon ITTL), medicine and biotech are more advanced, and the Internet exists as does personal computing, but both are mutually dissociated because the former suffers several enforced limitations, even in the West. Local area networks are much more of a thing in this world.

Nowadays, though, the main political concern is how cocaine trade and the side businesses it supports threaten to turn a significant chunk of the Americas, via its complicated network of trade operators, corrupted factions and official institutions in the game, into a narcofeudal Ancapistan that understands of no political but business allegiances. This fact itself is precipitating both Western and pro-Soviet polities to mellow, cooperation and detente to increase, where all strategic advantages and diplomatic moves failed.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

A Stop in the Way
"It happens just as light casts a shadow.
Have you ever considered ghost stories and what they all share? For it doesn't take a place of death and suffering for things that should not be there to claim spaces: otherwise, hospitals would be packed with them.
Have you ever considered what will happen to ghosts when Earth disappears? Will they wander an orb that isn't there anymore, unknowingly inside the fusion furnaces of a bloated sun, maybe all of them hanging from the cold, void slips of space-time, holding to a planet that isn't there like an immaterial shell devoid of egg? Why do they cross walls but don't fall through floors? Why they never seem to appear in new, comfortable spaces? Why they're rarely found out in the open, never in mundane places, such as a bustling square, no matter how much horror the place has swallowed with the wail of centuries?

A common rational explanation about ghost stories discards them as psychological phenomena. And if we take them as happenings heavily dependant on the conspiracy of a certain architecture, and just as only sophont beings are capable of imposing a conspiracy of architecture in the material world, the psychology of the observant indeed plays a part, at the very least. But it cannot be discarded that they're not a mere matter of suggestion prompted by unsettling spaces. It cannot be discarded that an unsettling architecture is in and by itself the root cause of ghostly happenings. Not a psychological, but a fundamentally topological phenomenon. We may not understand its constituent qualities, but we feel its effects even when its power isn't even fully there. Deep inside we understand some topologies may cut some Gordian knots, unchain the velvet ropes that set us apart from what was, from what will be, from what could have been.
As of now and disaster notwithstanding, more than a half of humanity lives packed in man-made spaces and densities, maybe all of such densities trying to converge towards the same conceptual spot, guided by the same torches that lighted the nights of Ur, Harappa and Jericho, their logistical tendrils growing and conjoining them. Does this nascent ekumenopolis, this beating spider, grows and hosts a distorted fruit of its own conspiracy? Is there an Ahriman for this brick God?

Well, just as light casts a shadow.
It took vaguely familiar shapes when I found it, though she's always the same. To reach is, you must be lost. Not just mistaken about a highway exit on your way home, but as deeply lost as the deepest shade of abyssal blue. You, the wanderer, must be absolutely sunken, plunged into the tars of transit. Then you find her. And you will be lost there all the time it takes, for nothing will show you the way. That place can wait. She won't kill you: her operational logic excludes by sheer need the minimum mercy she would display as a predator should she eventually finish off her victims. Her temple is no place for rest nor relief no matter how naively tragic they might look from the outside. No, the place won't kill you: it will erase you. It will drain you forever if necessary, while you try to remember why you're there, where -if anywhere- is a way out, and even whether you ever were somewhere else.
But it's not a place of fate either. For her, it's a game. She wants to know how much time she will retain you, and whether she'll keep you inside forever, forever dry dirt, forever becoming, forever naked ember carried by the blizzard. But there's a way, somewhere where your threshold of endurance lies. Rather than an impossible game, it's one tainted with unfairness. As unfair as a world made of rules and presences as unsolicited as you were yourself can be".


Well, I'll try to explain myself. This idea has been in my folder, unfinished, almost since first occurred to me, in summer 2016, now three years ago. I finally completed it. A visit to a friend's house in an exurbian neighbourhood of my city area, the kind of ideas that place brought to me, was all it took. 2016 in general and summer 2016 in particular was one of the most (if not the most) psychologically painful times of my life. I was suffering a combo of depression and crippling, excruciating and almost daily panic attacks that nearly took me out of this world. Accustomed at the map/scenario format as I am, this is one of the ways I got to express what I feel it cannot be expressed at all: a time of my life when I was alone to face my own horror story, when I understood I had to embark on a very real trip to either find myself back or lose myself forever. I made it through, I ultimately made it through, and maybe that's the only thing that I've achieved in my life that really matters to me. Not because nothing else matters, but because everything else matters because of that. Let this map be a remainder, lest I forget.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

The Tercios Nuevos
You should thank AlexanderBranza for this thing I bring you. He brought here the idea that, should Vox -the Spanish own brand of National Populism- take over, it wouldn't be out of place that the Spanish left/opposition grouped itself in Tercios, taking back from them their precious symbology and their monopoly on historical links. I went with the idea as far as I could to make my own version of this scenario, and here it is. As far as I'm concerned, and with his permission, his proposal and mine form a Venn diagram.

From left to right and then top to bottom, the Tercios listed are:
-Ana de Mendoza: This one groups the sex workers and sex worker rights movements.
-Andreu Nin: Formally Trotskyists, it's basically the Podemos-affiliated, Left-Populist bloc of the Tercios.
-Antonete Gálvez: The new Cartagena Tercio, on practice groups the many Municipalist political projects under a single unit.
-Blasco de Garay: This one groups Democratic Transhumanists, information user rights and like-minded people.
-Catalina de Erauso: The main trans and trans rights group.
-Clara Campoamor: The main catch-all Feminist group.
-Dolores Ibárruri: The main Communist and IU-affiliated group.
-Buenaventura Durruti: The main Left-Anarchist group.
-Federico García Lorca: The main catch-all LGBT and LGBT rights group.
-Francisco Giner de los Ríos: This one groups the education sector, particularly those in defense of public education.
-Indalecio Prieto: The main Social Progressive, Social Democrat and PSOE-affiliated group.
-José Celestino Mutis: The main catch-all Green group.
-Juan de Mariana: Grouping the most explicitly anti-Fascist sectors of the Libertarian right.
-Manuel Azaña: nominally a catch-all Republican group, in practice it groups the Jacobin Spanish left.
-Miguel Servet: The one that groups the health sector, particularly those in defense of public healthcare.
-Francisco Pi y Margall: The main group of Left-Libertarians, Federalists also feel at home here.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Mube Maso
Flag of Rwanda from a world where Paul Kagame was killed in the early 90's, the Rwandan Patriotic Front was defeated, the MRNDD was infiltered by the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic, unifying all the militias under the Interahamwe, and even more hilarity ensued, Rwanda becoming a genocidal and aggressively Totalitarian, isolated rogue state for the years to come.

The flag depicts the main colors of the MRNDD and the CDR, Pan-African colors in essence, arranged in a way that seems like a Synthesis of the CDR and the old Rwandan flag. In a diamond shape, it displays a stylized, simple and menacing version of the Interahamwe symbol.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Minoan Empire
Banner of an enduring Knossos-centric Thalassocratic empire around the Mediterranean sea. The edges display a Minoan wave and color pattern, background being red as prominently displayed in the Minoan cultural artifacts -maybe a symbol of vitality in this flag-, the central symbol being a stylized version of a Minoan ceremonial double axe, overall a symbol of a culture that is both expansive, sure of itself and vocationally maritime.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Nilotism
The flag of an alternate cultural/political Pan-movement that aims at the understanding and, eventually, the political confederation of the Nilo-Saharan peoples. The central stripe is the Nile itself. The three colors both come from the old Shilluk Kingdom and are profusely displayed among many Nilotic peoples, same as the ornamental triangle pattern. The central shield is an attempt to reproduce a stylized Maasai shield, as I thought it would make a nice symbol for the idea.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Alfajirism
Alfajiri ("Dawn") is an alternate political movement that promotes the creation of a unified Bantu State through the leadership of a vanguard party over a Nationalist, allegedly Progressive revolutionary government. So, in short, Bantu Ba'athism.
The design represents a standard party flag of the movement, with most of its symbols. Black and green can respectively mean, in isolation, Black pride and material plenty. The whole pattern with the semicircle represents a sunrise, and connects with a Bantu symbol for sunrise and birth, where it appears, overimposed, a Bantu symbol for masculinity, both together being the most basic symbol of Alfajirism. The double fist can either mean a single person in a triumphal gesture or, rather than that and given the angles, two people in said position so close together that their raised arms overlap.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

Sgurdans
Ramones1986 reminded me, by partaking in a thread about alternate ethnicities, about an alternate ethnicity I made myself as the base for a short story.

Name: Sgurdans/Esgurdanos, Esgurdans (in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearics), Dabiltzak (in the Basque Country and parts of Navarre)

Population: 2.100.000

Languages: Sabanja/Sabanxa (Mutual exchange with old Germanía, fallen in disuse, with less than 2000 fluent speakers. Most Sgurdans are fluent in either Spanish of Portuguese, with a sizable part of them having Galician or Catalan as first languages, and with the Basque pidgin Ezgurdainiako being on the verge of extinction. Their linguistic varieties keep a significant deal of Sabanja lexicon.

Ancestry: Indo-Iranian. Descendants of the Western Diaspora, those who escaped to the Byzantine Empire during the Muslim conquest of Persia. Their counterpart in the Eastern Diaspora are nowadays known as Parsis. The term Zoroastrian Diaspora refers to the latter in spite of them being much less numerous, for the Sgurdan diaspora, as everything Sgurdan, is often studied as a particular phenomenon.

Region: Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal). Scattered communities in France, the United States, Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile and Mexico.

Religion: Sgurdan Zoroastrianism (Revivalist or Reformed, the latter borrowing Protestant influences), Roman Catholicism with syncretic/undercover Zoroastrian elements.

Culture: A blend of Iberian and Persian elements, shaped by centuries of loss of contact with the original land and a secular series of westward forced displacements, institutional prosecution and general mistrust. Most Spanish cities had a Sgurdan quarter until the forced conversions and confiscations of the early 16th century. Afterwards, traditionally associated with caravan trails and a deep medical and herbological knowledge, as well as a degree of exchange with Roma people. In modern times they oscillate between the stigma of crime and marginality and that of richness at the expense of cover businesses, drug dealing being a common issue in both extremes. Integration programs are slowly improving both the material situation and perception, but there's stil a way to go. Insularity -they tipically refer to all non-Sgurdans with the single word Dagur-, piety and honor-orientation, a fatalistic view of the world and themselves -they see themselves as a sort of cursed people that failed an important mission, and unlike other Zoroastrian-oriented cultures, they think evil can and most likely will win-, and an all-or-nothing psychology, are cultural stereotypes of the average Sgurdan. Their particular view of spirituality and community makes them non-proselytizing yet accepting of non-Sgurdan converts. Visible cultural traits include illumination by torches in social gatherings, women combing their hair in a way that resembles a long beanie cap either as modesty or as a form of cultural pride, horse racing, and a tapestry art that, as a form of distinction, profusely displays naturalistic representations.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

No Pasarán 4
Pretty self-explanatory, these are standard police vans in one of my SCW Republican Victory scenarios:

-To the left you have the Cuerpo de Carabineros or Carabineer Corps: these mainly act as border patrol and coast guards, and thus anti-smuggling operations mostly fall under their jurisdiction. The also have disaster relief attributions nation-wide, kind of like the Emercency Military Unit has IOTL. In real history, they were disbanded and fused with the Guardia Civil after the Spanish Civil War.

-Then you have the GNR or National Republican Guard, very similar to its Portuguese counterpart and with slightly less attributions than the Guardia Civil they replace. A militarized police like the French Gendarmerie, it acts as the main criminal police in rural areas, as well as the traffic police in all the Spanish territory, and as a service of environmental protection.

-Finally, you have the Security Corps, still commonly called Guardia de Asalto, even between the Corps themselves. They're mainly an urban force, having jurisdiction in all provincial capitals and all cities above 100.000 inhabitants. They can carry operations of counter-terrorism and counter-organized-crime nation-wide, they count with their Riot units and their own Spec-Ops force. In short, they have more or less the attributions of the OTL National Police Corps.

 

[SerialExperimentsHeechee]

No Pasarán 5
Complementary to my former pixel exercise, a series of State Security uniforms from one of my SCW Republican Victory scenarios. Human male template by Sleeping-Demons.