[url https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GBl ... CGJ4o/edit]Kyanah linguistics [/url]finally fleshed out a bit, what do you thinnk? But this is where I've been for the past 2 weeks.
It's come to my attention that the Star Trek thread has surpassed this one again...I guess that is easy to do when only posting links to videos.
Road to Hope
Re: Road to Hope
Void strider and center strider, Ikun's entire interstellar invasion "fleet". (Do two ships launched on expendable rockets count as a fleet?). 1 pixel = 1 meter.
Re: Road to Hope
Close-up of the upper stages (and the ISS for some reason) with again 1 pixel = 1 meter.
Re: Road to Hope
From this thread ...I got a bit inspired when I woke up. And you get to see the Climate Control System in action, for those of you who remember that.
By "wife and child" I will assume you mean "pack and pair of hatchlings". Best case scenario. It's modern day (+16th epoch, mid 19th century by Earth calendar) and you're in the Upper Meatbucket. Lets say Andin city-state, it's one of the largest by population, with about 10 million Kyanah and a GDP of $1.1 trillion. It's relatively cool and wet, with summertime temps of 45 Celsius and wintertime temperatures of 35 Celsius, and 25 cm of rain per year (or about 54 cm per Earth year). Andin is located at a dense node in the riparian graph biome, with three linear oases feeding into its oasis and two feeding out.
Your pack's working day will mostly consist of monitoring data screens and issuing commands to the plants and livestock through an app. Your 1 square kilometer plot will be packed with feed bushes at an unnaturally high density, it's an absolute pain to traverse on foot or with ground vehicles due to the sheer amount of plants that are crammed into each square meter of land seeded with a solid synthetic medium more efficient at nutrient transfer than actual soil, so if there are any rogue weeds or pests or (gods forbit) dead plants that need removing, a drone will have to be used. A dozen species of plants are mixed into this field, their species and placement specifically designed by agri-tech engineering packs to perfectly optimize the growth rate and flavor profile of the livestock contained within.
All of these plants are genetically engineered to resist extreme weather and grow faster and denser than their natural analogs, and this genetic engineering includes biotech linking with whatever corporation's farming app your pack happens to be using, so the placement and growth of the plants can be perfectly controlled so they grow where and when they are supposed to. Sharing this field is a dense array of nyruds, somewhat resembling mini triceratops without horns: normally they would have feathers on their backs, but this is a waste of calories in this mild climate, so they've been genetically engineered not to grow them. The nyruds are genetically engineered to have a neural control link to the farming app, so they stand idly in perfect formation until commands are issued for them to begin eating, at which point they will pathfind to whichever genetically plants they've been commanded to eat and eat them, until the analytics show that they are full, at which point their consciousness can be remotely shut off so they don't needlessly burn calories wandering around and being awake.
This level of optimization essentially makes it like the equivalent of factory farmed wagyu: high-volume and top-quality. Drones can be dispatched to collect any eggs they happen to lay for breeding or selling, but this particular nyrud herd is engineered for max meat production and low egg production, so there likely won't be many. If any have reached the threshold for slaughter, they can simply be programmed to walk into trucks bound for the nearest processing plant, where their hearts can be remotely deactivated to slaughter them.
Your location is really good too: just two kilometers downwind of the nearest Climate Control System control node. Andin has tons of these, including seven scattered around Andin itself, to perfect the climate and remove any ecosystem elements that aren't conducive to ultra high-tech agriculture. You can sometimes see its form, looming in the distance over the flat plains, especially in the dry season when the spores and airweeds don't hang as thickly in the air. A collection of what a human might call grotesque metal seashells--though you've never heard of a "seashell" as there are no oceans--standing 70 to 100 meters high, rooted into the ground and connected to each other with dense webs of wiring and draped in vast, wing-like solar panels.
Several vast biotech mouths, blue-gray in color, protrude out of the throats of these shells, occasionally they open briefly to spew out a thick mist: synthetic microbes on their way to do some geoengineering, or perhaps a gene drive on the local ecosystems. It's had an interesting interaction with your farm: ever since it was built, drop rates have increased by 14% in your plot--compared to only 7-9% in your neighbors' plots. This will make it a very expensive plot indeed if you ever decide to sell it and move to Andin's city center.
A lot of the work can be done AFK but if your pack is serious about your job, you'll pay attention to get the maximum drop rate from your farm, there are hundreds of nyruds in your plot and some may need specialized commands to maximize their productivity. Advanced third order agriculture has become so advanced that it more resembles a Minecraft farm than any human-recognizable agricultural operation. No fence is needed, the nyruds are programmed not to wander off, and it's absurdly difficult for would-be thieves to steal a 2 ton animal that can be remotely directed to just stand there and refuse to move, especially when its eyes are linked to a video feed in the farmhouse.
Honestly, depending on the age of your children, *they* might well need more day-to-day attention than the nyruds or crops, Kyanah hatchlings need constant active stimulation and socialization to develop normally. The biggest things you have to worry about are the agri-tech corporations continually raising the subscription fees you need to pay so your nyruds keep breeding, and the possibility of enemy states using their Climate Control System control nodes to tank Andin's agricultural productivity so they can gain an economic advantage...though Andin is an emerging CCS superpower, so it's unlikely anyone will be able to win an ecological war against Andin on their own soil. Well there's also the constant looming threat of fourth-order agriculture--lab grown meat--which is becoming cheaper and higher quality over time, thinning the profit margins year by year. Maybe it would be a good idea to sell, or convert the farm to cash crops, which are of course just as heavily optimized.
As for the worst: probably a Middle South sprawl-walker farmer during one of the great fungal outbreaks, such as the one around 700 AD. Cold-blooded lizards are more vulnerable to fungal infestations, and in this densely packed medieval environment, fungal plagues could lead to deadly famines killing millions.
By "wife and child" I will assume you mean "pack and pair of hatchlings". Best case scenario. It's modern day (+16th epoch, mid 19th century by Earth calendar) and you're in the Upper Meatbucket. Lets say Andin city-state, it's one of the largest by population, with about 10 million Kyanah and a GDP of $1.1 trillion. It's relatively cool and wet, with summertime temps of 45 Celsius and wintertime temperatures of 35 Celsius, and 25 cm of rain per year (or about 54 cm per Earth year). Andin is located at a dense node in the riparian graph biome, with three linear oases feeding into its oasis and two feeding out.
Your pack's working day will mostly consist of monitoring data screens and issuing commands to the plants and livestock through an app. Your 1 square kilometer plot will be packed with feed bushes at an unnaturally high density, it's an absolute pain to traverse on foot or with ground vehicles due to the sheer amount of plants that are crammed into each square meter of land seeded with a solid synthetic medium more efficient at nutrient transfer than actual soil, so if there are any rogue weeds or pests or (gods forbit) dead plants that need removing, a drone will have to be used. A dozen species of plants are mixed into this field, their species and placement specifically designed by agri-tech engineering packs to perfectly optimize the growth rate and flavor profile of the livestock contained within.
All of these plants are genetically engineered to resist extreme weather and grow faster and denser than their natural analogs, and this genetic engineering includes biotech linking with whatever corporation's farming app your pack happens to be using, so the placement and growth of the plants can be perfectly controlled so they grow where and when they are supposed to. Sharing this field is a dense array of nyruds, somewhat resembling mini triceratops without horns: normally they would have feathers on their backs, but this is a waste of calories in this mild climate, so they've been genetically engineered not to grow them. The nyruds are genetically engineered to have a neural control link to the farming app, so they stand idly in perfect formation until commands are issued for them to begin eating, at which point they will pathfind to whichever genetically plants they've been commanded to eat and eat them, until the analytics show that they are full, at which point their consciousness can be remotely shut off so they don't needlessly burn calories wandering around and being awake.
This level of optimization essentially makes it like the equivalent of factory farmed wagyu: high-volume and top-quality. Drones can be dispatched to collect any eggs they happen to lay for breeding or selling, but this particular nyrud herd is engineered for max meat production and low egg production, so there likely won't be many. If any have reached the threshold for slaughter, they can simply be programmed to walk into trucks bound for the nearest processing plant, where their hearts can be remotely deactivated to slaughter them.
Your location is really good too: just two kilometers downwind of the nearest Climate Control System control node. Andin has tons of these, including seven scattered around Andin itself, to perfect the climate and remove any ecosystem elements that aren't conducive to ultra high-tech agriculture. You can sometimes see its form, looming in the distance over the flat plains, especially in the dry season when the spores and airweeds don't hang as thickly in the air. A collection of what a human might call grotesque metal seashells--though you've never heard of a "seashell" as there are no oceans--standing 70 to 100 meters high, rooted into the ground and connected to each other with dense webs of wiring and draped in vast, wing-like solar panels.
Several vast biotech mouths, blue-gray in color, protrude out of the throats of these shells, occasionally they open briefly to spew out a thick mist: synthetic microbes on their way to do some geoengineering, or perhaps a gene drive on the local ecosystems. It's had an interesting interaction with your farm: ever since it was built, drop rates have increased by 14% in your plot--compared to only 7-9% in your neighbors' plots. This will make it a very expensive plot indeed if you ever decide to sell it and move to Andin's city center.
A lot of the work can be done AFK but if your pack is serious about your job, you'll pay attention to get the maximum drop rate from your farm, there are hundreds of nyruds in your plot and some may need specialized commands to maximize their productivity. Advanced third order agriculture has become so advanced that it more resembles a Minecraft farm than any human-recognizable agricultural operation. No fence is needed, the nyruds are programmed not to wander off, and it's absurdly difficult for would-be thieves to steal a 2 ton animal that can be remotely directed to just stand there and refuse to move, especially when its eyes are linked to a video feed in the farmhouse.
Honestly, depending on the age of your children, *they* might well need more day-to-day attention than the nyruds or crops, Kyanah hatchlings need constant active stimulation and socialization to develop normally. The biggest things you have to worry about are the agri-tech corporations continually raising the subscription fees you need to pay so your nyruds keep breeding, and the possibility of enemy states using their Climate Control System control nodes to tank Andin's agricultural productivity so they can gain an economic advantage...though Andin is an emerging CCS superpower, so it's unlikely anyone will be able to win an ecological war against Andin on their own soil. Well there's also the constant looming threat of fourth-order agriculture--lab grown meat--which is becoming cheaper and higher quality over time, thinning the profit margins year by year. Maybe it would be a good idea to sell, or convert the farm to cash crops, which are of course just as heavily optimized.
As for the worst: probably a Middle South sprawl-walker farmer during one of the great fungal outbreaks, such as the one around 700 AD. Cold-blooded lizards are more vulnerable to fungal infestations, and in this densely packed medieval environment, fungal plagues could lead to deadly famines killing millions.
Re: Road to Hope
Having discussed their religion and morality and government, I thought it might be interesting to investigate how the Kyanah approach political philosophy, the role of states and their relationship with the populace.
Political thought in general differs significantly from human political thought, both in Ikun and the broader world. In Ikun city-state’s political thought, following a similar vein to most of the northern world, the primary role of the state is maximal accumulation of resources. As states can, by their very nature, almost inherently accumulate more resources than any other institution or pack, by virtue of having a monopoly on violence, they are uniquely suited to build a better and more moral society by engineering their domain into a more sophisticated, complex, and orderly state of existence. The Tripartite Legalist system includes ideas such as explorationism, the idea that selecting optimal leaders is best done by exploring the entire populace rather than exploiting a select in-group of self-defined nobles.
Under Tripartite Legalist political thought, it is believed that states are institutions designed to solve the Great Societal Equation, which is exactly what it sounds like. While there was a period in which the Utopian philosophy–believing that this Great Societal Equation had a closed-form solution–was dominant, the devastation of the Utopian Wars and the early Hegemony Era has led to this idea being widely rejected, and once again Iterationism, the belief that there is no closed form solution and states must solve the Great Societal Equation through perpetual iteration, has re-emerged.
Rulers thus have a duty to maximize the strength and resource acquisition of the state. Interestingly, this duty is not to the citizens, but simply an inherent obligation to optimize. The state avoids certain restrictions and infringements on citizens’ lives not because it is believed that citizens have some right to them–rights are not really relevant in either northern or southern political philosophy–but because some infringements are judged to weaken the machinery of the state, by lowering morale, stoking emigration and civil unrest, and potentially causing destructive and inefficient revolutions in egregious cases.
Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the state and citizens is, as with all relationships that are not between a Kyanah and their packmates, entirely transactional at its core. The small, simple, and tightly guarded social networks of Kyanah mean that packs identify with a state entirely out of circumstance and pragmatic self-interest, not cultural identity or national pride. They may believe that a particular state is promoting righteous policies and values at a particular point in time, but that doesn’t imply inherent devotion to that state. And thus it is believed effective states must in some way offer their citizens a “good deal” even if this isn’t framed in terms of rights–though what exactly makes a deal good varies by time and place and culture. The increase in literacy and global communication during the industrial age has in many cases led to what might be considered a sweeter deal for citizens on average, as they become more aware of their options, creating more robust competition and a positive feedback loop, though this effect is far from uniform or absolute.
In this framework, relations between states are inherently competitive. Available resources are finite and thus states must all craft the most effective policies they can to ensure the greatest share. They are also locked in competition with each other for valuable citizens, seeking new ways to draw in the best and brightest packs and acquire the largest share of resources. This leads to a form of “social Darwinism lite” where it is believed that states which craft superior policies will maximize their accumulation of resources, outcompeting less sophisticated and enlightened states, which will inevitably fail in time, leading to an overall trend towards stronger and more efficiently managed states. No state has any inherent right to exist, though due to Kyanah psychology and social dynamics, holding onto large empires and distant colonial holdings is wildly impractical, and full-on colonialism is extremely rare throughout history, far more so than mere regime change, or relocating entirely to a new city-state and taking it over.
Similarly, egalitarianism is widely rejected at a large scale, as accurately gauging the value of packs, institutions, and other states, is seen as important to ensure the best possible functioning of the state–though simply painting entire ethnicities with a broad brush at the institutional level is considered by many modern philosophers to be almost as lazy and sloppy. Some radical thinkers believe that the simplistic value calculations offered by egalitarianism would drastically reduce bureaucratic overhead, though this is not a widespread view. However, mainstream Tripartite Legalist thought holds that no pack shall be elevated above the law, rulers are philosophically and legally separate from the state itself, and even a City Alpha can be arrested, tried for criminal acts, and jailed if found guilty.
An interesting division in political thought is pastoralist versus agriculturalist states, though these are metaphors rather than actual food production techniques. Pastoralist states essentially manage the citizenry in a sort of pastoral manner, with the state leaving them to roam its territory, accumulating resources on their own while serving primarily to oversee, manage, and defend the citizens. The state then acquires resources for itself by harvesting from these citizens via taxes and state-owned corporations. Ikun’s domestic policy is highly Pastoralist, as with many northern city-states.
Agriculturalist states, inspired by intensive farming, much more directly manage the citizens–often called assets rather than *citizens–*heavily investing resources and managing their lives in order to maximize their productivity, and thus the amount of wealth and resources that the state can extract from them in pursuit of solving the Great Societal Equation, essentially putting more into them in order to get more out of them. At its most extreme, this can take the form similar to what humans would call basic income weighted by social credit score. Agriculturalist thinkers believe that just as intensive agriculture is a more efficient use of land than pastoralism, so their methods are a more efficient use of the populace. This is most commonly seen in the southern hemisphere.
Though Pastoralist thinkers argue that by basic agricultural principles, Kyanah themselves are not domesticatable, with their high intelligence, long lifespan/slow growth (relative to livestock), and fierce protectiveness of their in-groups (i.e. their packs), and thus “farming” them in this manner is inherently inefficient.
Political thought in general differs significantly from human political thought, both in Ikun and the broader world. In Ikun city-state’s political thought, following a similar vein to most of the northern world, the primary role of the state is maximal accumulation of resources. As states can, by their very nature, almost inherently accumulate more resources than any other institution or pack, by virtue of having a monopoly on violence, they are uniquely suited to build a better and more moral society by engineering their domain into a more sophisticated, complex, and orderly state of existence. The Tripartite Legalist system includes ideas such as explorationism, the idea that selecting optimal leaders is best done by exploring the entire populace rather than exploiting a select in-group of self-defined nobles.
Under Tripartite Legalist political thought, it is believed that states are institutions designed to solve the Great Societal Equation, which is exactly what it sounds like. While there was a period in which the Utopian philosophy–believing that this Great Societal Equation had a closed-form solution–was dominant, the devastation of the Utopian Wars and the early Hegemony Era has led to this idea being widely rejected, and once again Iterationism, the belief that there is no closed form solution and states must solve the Great Societal Equation through perpetual iteration, has re-emerged.
Rulers thus have a duty to maximize the strength and resource acquisition of the state. Interestingly, this duty is not to the citizens, but simply an inherent obligation to optimize. The state avoids certain restrictions and infringements on citizens’ lives not because it is believed that citizens have some right to them–rights are not really relevant in either northern or southern political philosophy–but because some infringements are judged to weaken the machinery of the state, by lowering morale, stoking emigration and civil unrest, and potentially causing destructive and inefficient revolutions in egregious cases.
Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the state and citizens is, as with all relationships that are not between a Kyanah and their packmates, entirely transactional at its core. The small, simple, and tightly guarded social networks of Kyanah mean that packs identify with a state entirely out of circumstance and pragmatic self-interest, not cultural identity or national pride. They may believe that a particular state is promoting righteous policies and values at a particular point in time, but that doesn’t imply inherent devotion to that state. And thus it is believed effective states must in some way offer their citizens a “good deal” even if this isn’t framed in terms of rights–though what exactly makes a deal good varies by time and place and culture. The increase in literacy and global communication during the industrial age has in many cases led to what might be considered a sweeter deal for citizens on average, as they become more aware of their options, creating more robust competition and a positive feedback loop, though this effect is far from uniform or absolute.
In this framework, relations between states are inherently competitive. Available resources are finite and thus states must all craft the most effective policies they can to ensure the greatest share. They are also locked in competition with each other for valuable citizens, seeking new ways to draw in the best and brightest packs and acquire the largest share of resources. This leads to a form of “social Darwinism lite” where it is believed that states which craft superior policies will maximize their accumulation of resources, outcompeting less sophisticated and enlightened states, which will inevitably fail in time, leading to an overall trend towards stronger and more efficiently managed states. No state has any inherent right to exist, though due to Kyanah psychology and social dynamics, holding onto large empires and distant colonial holdings is wildly impractical, and full-on colonialism is extremely rare throughout history, far more so than mere regime change, or relocating entirely to a new city-state and taking it over.
Similarly, egalitarianism is widely rejected at a large scale, as accurately gauging the value of packs, institutions, and other states, is seen as important to ensure the best possible functioning of the state–though simply painting entire ethnicities with a broad brush at the institutional level is considered by many modern philosophers to be almost as lazy and sloppy. Some radical thinkers believe that the simplistic value calculations offered by egalitarianism would drastically reduce bureaucratic overhead, though this is not a widespread view. However, mainstream Tripartite Legalist thought holds that no pack shall be elevated above the law, rulers are philosophically and legally separate from the state itself, and even a City Alpha can be arrested, tried for criminal acts, and jailed if found guilty.
An interesting division in political thought is pastoralist versus agriculturalist states, though these are metaphors rather than actual food production techniques. Pastoralist states essentially manage the citizenry in a sort of pastoral manner, with the state leaving them to roam its territory, accumulating resources on their own while serving primarily to oversee, manage, and defend the citizens. The state then acquires resources for itself by harvesting from these citizens via taxes and state-owned corporations. Ikun’s domestic policy is highly Pastoralist, as with many northern city-states.
Agriculturalist states, inspired by intensive farming, much more directly manage the citizens–often called assets rather than *citizens–*heavily investing resources and managing their lives in order to maximize their productivity, and thus the amount of wealth and resources that the state can extract from them in pursuit of solving the Great Societal Equation, essentially putting more into them in order to get more out of them. At its most extreme, this can take the form similar to what humans would call basic income weighted by social credit score. Agriculturalist thinkers believe that just as intensive agriculture is a more efficient use of land than pastoralism, so their methods are a more efficient use of the populace. This is most commonly seen in the southern hemisphere.
Though Pastoralist thinkers argue that by basic agricultural principles, Kyanah themselves are not domesticatable, with their high intelligence, long lifespan/slow growth (relative to livestock), and fierce protectiveness of their in-groups (i.e. their packs), and thus “farming” them in this manner is inherently inefficient.
Re: Road to Hope
New postwar lore just dropped.
USA post-war
RED= Kyanah-controlled areas, including city-states under their direct rule: Lazegaz (formerly Las Vegas), Gehtek (lit. "spawn" in the video game sense, "beginning", formerly Lake Havasu City), and Hinikz (formerly Phoenix), now operating as independent but closely allied city states at the center of the Kyanah bloc. As well as Area 51, now a joint air base for these three city-states, and strategic roadways maintained by the Provisional Military Administration between city-states. As of 2041, 15 years after the cease-fire, there are around 33 thousand Kyanah living in the red areas, up from 15 thousand at the end of the war due to a strong egg quota intended to boost their precarious demographic position. The red areas are not Kyanah-exclusive; more than 70 thousand humans live in Gehtek, more than 500 thousand in Lazegaz, and more than 2 million in Thinikz.
YELLOW = the Kyanah Bloc, an area in very murky waters geopolitically. The Kyanah forces have far too limited numbers to actually occupy every city in this region, but do have the ability to keep US troops out. They thus "guarantee the independence" of cities in this region and "take responsibility for their military protection" in exchange for "political and economic alliance". They rarely meddle in their internal politics, but bar US troops from entering the region, and have imposed pressure on most of the cities not to re-militarize beyond SALW-class weapons and light armored vehicles. They seem to prefer negotiating with individual human cities whenever possible, rather than states, further muddying the waters as to what this region actually is politically. Especially as the actual human capitals of these three states aren't in the bloc, except Phoenix, which is now the Kyanah-controlled Hinikz.
Nevertheless, many are not too happy about this, and still see themselves as Americans (or Mexicans, in the southern tip--a small slice of mexico got drawn into the war as Kyanah forces had no real way of knowing in advance the existence of human nation states, let alone the exact location of their borders). The yellow and red are subject to heavy sanctions from nearly every UN member state, except, oddly enough, North Korea, and the US has dammed every river flowing into the bloc, including the Colorado River, crippling agriculture to try and economically crush the bloc and stoke the human populations into rebellion.
With the wartime civilian exodus from these regions, the Kyanah Bloc contains about 11-12 million humans, roughly half the prewar population. Many of the former residents now live in refugee camps in central and northern California as housing is gradually being built for them.
GRAY: American Demilitarized Zone. Buffer between the Kyanah bloc and US proper, currently with no civilian population, and now the most heavily fortified border on the planet. The area is filled with land mines and drones and vast webs of barbed wire, and has a massive US military presence on the outer side. Over the next 15 years, this presence will swell to 3 million troops. Kyanah forces are spread far thinner on the inner side, no more than a few thousand, but can immediately converge to stop any predicted invasion before it happens using tactical superposition tactics. Soldiers on both sides occasionally send derisive memes over the ADZ in balloons, having learnt each other's native languages for the sole purpose of doing so.
PURPLE: Joint Security Area Flagstaff. Abandoned by civilians during the war, now used as a site for negotiation between Kyanah bloc states and US diplomats, to prevent all out nuclear war. Here, Kyanah and US diplomats are just across the street from each other. The US has a 170 meter tall flagpole flying the largest US flag ever made on their side. On their own side, the Kyanah have built a 171 meter tall flagpole/reconnaissance tower to fly all three flags--Lazegaz, Gehtek, and Hinkz--but it remains bare, possibly due to textile rationing or--allegedly--disputes over which city-state's flag should fly on top.
Green: USA proper.
Blue: Mexico proper
USA post-war
RED= Kyanah-controlled areas, including city-states under their direct rule: Lazegaz (formerly Las Vegas), Gehtek (lit. "spawn" in the video game sense, "beginning", formerly Lake Havasu City), and Hinikz (formerly Phoenix), now operating as independent but closely allied city states at the center of the Kyanah bloc. As well as Area 51, now a joint air base for these three city-states, and strategic roadways maintained by the Provisional Military Administration between city-states. As of 2041, 15 years after the cease-fire, there are around 33 thousand Kyanah living in the red areas, up from 15 thousand at the end of the war due to a strong egg quota intended to boost their precarious demographic position. The red areas are not Kyanah-exclusive; more than 70 thousand humans live in Gehtek, more than 500 thousand in Lazegaz, and more than 2 million in Thinikz.
YELLOW = the Kyanah Bloc, an area in very murky waters geopolitically. The Kyanah forces have far too limited numbers to actually occupy every city in this region, but do have the ability to keep US troops out. They thus "guarantee the independence" of cities in this region and "take responsibility for their military protection" in exchange for "political and economic alliance". They rarely meddle in their internal politics, but bar US troops from entering the region, and have imposed pressure on most of the cities not to re-militarize beyond SALW-class weapons and light armored vehicles. They seem to prefer negotiating with individual human cities whenever possible, rather than states, further muddying the waters as to what this region actually is politically. Especially as the actual human capitals of these three states aren't in the bloc, except Phoenix, which is now the Kyanah-controlled Hinikz.
Nevertheless, many are not too happy about this, and still see themselves as Americans (or Mexicans, in the southern tip--a small slice of mexico got drawn into the war as Kyanah forces had no real way of knowing in advance the existence of human nation states, let alone the exact location of their borders). The yellow and red are subject to heavy sanctions from nearly every UN member state, except, oddly enough, North Korea, and the US has dammed every river flowing into the bloc, including the Colorado River, crippling agriculture to try and economically crush the bloc and stoke the human populations into rebellion.
With the wartime civilian exodus from these regions, the Kyanah Bloc contains about 11-12 million humans, roughly half the prewar population. Many of the former residents now live in refugee camps in central and northern California as housing is gradually being built for them.
GRAY: American Demilitarized Zone. Buffer between the Kyanah bloc and US proper, currently with no civilian population, and now the most heavily fortified border on the planet. The area is filled with land mines and drones and vast webs of barbed wire, and has a massive US military presence on the outer side. Over the next 15 years, this presence will swell to 3 million troops. Kyanah forces are spread far thinner on the inner side, no more than a few thousand, but can immediately converge to stop any predicted invasion before it happens using tactical superposition tactics. Soldiers on both sides occasionally send derisive memes over the ADZ in balloons, having learnt each other's native languages for the sole purpose of doing so.
PURPLE: Joint Security Area Flagstaff. Abandoned by civilians during the war, now used as a site for negotiation between Kyanah bloc states and US diplomats, to prevent all out nuclear war. Here, Kyanah and US diplomats are just across the street from each other. The US has a 170 meter tall flagpole flying the largest US flag ever made on their side. On their own side, the Kyanah have built a 171 meter tall flagpole/reconnaissance tower to fly all three flags--Lazegaz, Gehtek, and Hinkz--but it remains bare, possibly due to textile rationing or--allegedly--disputes over which city-state's flag should fly on top.
Green: USA proper.
Blue: Mexico proper
Last edited by Jakob on Sun Sep 15, 2024 9:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Re: Road to Hope
Occupied Egypt has its own complicated dynamics.
As of 2041, the Kyanah population on the order of 51 thousand, up from 23 thousand at the time of the US ceasefire. Due to Egypt's smaller size and weaker military--I believe nontrivial, but still nothing compared to the US--the war here is over in a matter of weeks, and they continue to de facto control a far smaller proportion of their original territory.
DARK BLUE: the Qattara Oasis. In late 2023, shortly after the Egyptian surrender, the Kyanah would detonate 200 nuclear bombs in the desert to flood the Qattara Depression and create a massive artificial oasis, a project also proposed by humans IRL.
RED: once again Kyanah controlled areas. They directly control Cairo as a city-state, and have built a city from scratch on the south coast of the new Qattara Oasis, which is the largest Kyanah population on the planet in one place and the most economically stable of any of the five cities under their direct control. Additionally, their Provisional Military Administration has control of the artificial canal and hydroelectric plant connecting the Mediterranean to their oasis, along with an air base on the Mediterranean coast. There are additional forward operating sites at the Suez--in order to influence global shipping--and Aswan--to control the water supply and influence downstream cities out of their direct control. These only have 2-3 hundred permanent personnel, but can scale this up tenfold in a matter of hours if the need arises. There are also various strategic roads under Provisional Military Administration control, some pre-existing highways and some built fresh to replace roads destroyed during the six-week war.
ORANGE: the Qattara Peace and Economic Development Corridor. This contains the Qattara Republic North and Qattara Republic South, two independent human city-state sized polities under human control but with Kyanah military protection and influence. They are more tightly linked economically than most, sharing a currency and free trade and movement with the Kyanah-run Qattara Site on the south coast. Carefully vetted Egyptian families with pro-Kyanah views are being invited to immigrate here and build cities to seek coexistence and/or economic opportunity.
YELLOW: the Nile Bloc and Qattara Bloc. A similar arrangement to the yellow zone in the US map, where occupied Cairo and the Qattara Site respectively ensure their independence and provide military protection in exchange for geopolitical and economic alignment. Due to regional geography and population density patterns, this area divides quite well into independent city-states.
LIGHT GREEN: Egypt proper. Their de-facto control has been stripped to a quarter of the original country, with the central government evacuating out of Cairo. With most of the great population centers and arable land out of its direct control, it limps on as a rump state, as Kyanah forces are already overextended as is.
GRAY: No-go zone. Claimed by the Egyptian government, but due to the Nile Bloc being in the way, they have no way to exert political or military influence. The Kyanah themselves don't consider it part of either the Nile or Qattara Blocs, leaving it as an anarchic wasteland, though almost no one lives in large swathes of the Sahara Desert. Many Islamic terrorist groups and rogue Egyptian army units are hiding in the desert and threatening passing convoys, though they lack the military hardware to get anywhere near the Qattara Site or Cairo.
DARK GREEN, BLUE, PURPLE: The borders of Sudan, Libya, and Chad respectively. As there was no large-scale fighting here, they remain unchanged, though the internal political situation is highly disturbed by the recent events, for obvious reasons.
PINK: Unauthorized mining sites; the largest ones are shown on this map. As Kyanah geopolitics is based on city-states, they see much of the Sahara desert as simply open land and their resource gathering and development operations--primarily mining, but not exclusively--regularly cross into the aforementioned countries with complete impunity as a result. The pink areas are the largest such sites, though they are heavily automated and don't have a permanent Kyanah presence. Nevertheless, they've been the site of several skirmishes with military and paramilitary forces from these countries, leading to around a couple dozen human deaths and several Kyanah deaths per year. However, none of these countries have the ability to escalate to open warfare.
Re: Road to Hope
]Hold Out Hope
So I've decided to work out some more lore for Hold Out Hope, the third part of the Hope trilogy, there are multiple parts, and it definitely gets pretty out-there and high-concept. So buckle in.
So by 2041, it’s been 15 years since the cease-fire in the US, and 18 years since the cease-fire in Egypt. The Kyanah still only control five cities directly, but the Kyanah Bloc in parts of California, Arizona, and Nevada; and the Nile and Qattara Blocs in what was formerly Egypt are now nominally independent human city-states, with the Kyanah providing military protection and internal autonomy in exchange for political and economic alignment, and keeping the militaries of human nation-states out of the blocs.
Internally, the Kyanah city-states face many problems. Well aware of their badly limited numbers, the leadership has implemented an egg quota to rapidly increase their population and fix their crippling demographic issues. This has doubled the Kyanah population, but that is not enough. In order to maintain constant military readiness, a huge chunk of them are unable to retire from military service and remain as either active or reserve duty, despite recruiting human auxiliaries in some roles and conscripting the younger generation of Kyanah as they grow up.
The older generation of Kyanah are growing weary, tired of a perpetual cold war where they can never truly lay down their weapons and rest. While the younger generation is bitter and resentful at being brought into the world just to perpetuate a conflict they never asked for and had no part in starting. A fringe movement among the second-generation Kyanah is rejecting the egg quota outright and threatening to refuse to have children at all, not wanting to continue another cycle of the same.
Unrest is growing among the human populations as well. Many humans are increasingly accusing the Provisional Military Administration system used in the five city-states
of being a Permanent Military Administration. The Kyanah, for their part, see no safe off ramp to transition to a civilian government under the Tripartite Legalist system in any of the five city-states due to their crippling demographic problems. Gehtek and Qattara, having the highest proportions of Kyanah population, are the only ones even making any moves towards a civilian government, and even they are moving at a glacial pace, with constant setbacks. The tendency by the Kyanah to respect pack atomicity also sparks riots, as to humans, pack atomicity means child labor and collective punishment.
The city-states in the US–Lazegaz, Gehtek, and Hinikz (formerly Las Vegas, Lake Havasu City, and Phoenix)--are in an even more precarious situation. Surrounding them is the American Demilitarized Zone, and three million US troops have amassed on the other side, preparing for the Doomsday Battle, a future all-out assault on the Kyanah bloc. Although the Kyanah still have hundreds of nuclear weapons, and laser arrays that can shoot down any human ICBMs, the US has a backyard bomb, a 10 gigaton bomb salted with cobalt-60, which needs no delivery mechanism to enforce deterrence.
In addition to the harsh sanctions imposed by nearly every UN member state, the US has also built dams to block off the Colorado River and every other major river flowing into the Kyanah Bloc, crippling human agriculture and causing massive environmental destruction. This has been done to try to strengthen the impact of the sanctions and starve out the bloc, provoking unrest and rebellion from the human population. This has had mixed effects, driving some cities closer to the Kyanah and successfully driving a wedge between others–particularly Sandiego-Tijuana, which is agitating to politically and economically unify with human Mexico. As a result, the city-states, Gehtek and Hinikz especially, have begun selling advanced alien technology to North Korea in exchange for rice to feed their human populations.
The city-states of Qattara and Cairo in former Egypt have actually done better economically, being less completely isolated from the outside world, though they are still facing many of the same stressors, including hostility and stringent sanctions from most of the outside world and discontent with the Provisional Military Administration internally. The Qattara Oasis proves to be an invaluable asset for the Kyanah occupation in Egypt, giving them a water source they fully control and can use for agriculture and industry, and a city they’ve built from scratch. The Qattara Peace and Economic Development Corridor, containing two economically integrated human city-states they share the Qattara Oasis with, is another valuable asset, putting the Qattara city-state as the most likely Kyanah city-state to succeed. Despite being denied entry into the UN, Qattara has entered a limited trade and security agreement–including joint counter-terrorism patrols–with Israel since 2037 due to common enemies in the region; ironically, they and North Korea of all places are the only two UN member states to have even limited recognition of any of the Kyanah city-states.
However, the no-go zone covering vast swathes of western Egypt, which neither they nor the rump Egyptian government in the east have any ability to exert control over, is overrun with Islamic terrorists. Additionally, their civilian resource extracting expeditions in the Sahara occasionally venture beyond Egypt’s borders, leading to persistent low-level conflict with Sudan, Libya, and even Chad. Foreign powers, most notably Russia and China, are beginning to invest in development and infrastructure in these countries–and what remains of Egypt–as well as establishing a military presence as a bulwark against further expansion of the Kyanah sphere of influence, even while playing both sides and quietly tolerating some black-market trade with the city-states themselves, especially the ones in the US, which are seen as quite useful for keeping America distracted.
As a result, the Kyanah are at a crossroads. If the third generation–currently hatchlings–are able to continue the progress that has been made thus far and somehow consolidate power within the Kyanah spheres of influence, then the fourth generation may well grow up without an egg quota and be able to live as full civilians in their respective city-states. Perhaps this fourth generation will even see the transition to civilian Tripartite Legalist government, and bringing additional human cities into their sphere of influence via trade deals and infrastructure development, ultimately establishing themselves as legitimate forces in Earth geopolitics, albeit not one of them reaching the planned status of hyperpower.
However, the limited progress that has been made thus far in diversifying the economy and opportunities available to the first and second generations is seen by many as too little too late; discontent is already simmering amongst the Kyanah themselves, never mind the humans. To add to that, the first generation, the soldiers who initially arrived on Earth, are aging and will eventually die–on average, they are already equivalent to humans in their fifties.
They are also not the unified monolith some human analysts paint them as. They are, fundamentally, five independent city-states, closely allied, but each vying to ultimately be the Earth’s equivalent of Ikun. Inevitably cracks begin to show and tensions mount under the economic and pressure of the surrounding human world. The technology sold by Gehtek and Hinikz to North Korea in exchange for food is being weaponized, and these weapons are being sold to terrorist groups in Egypt, drawing the ire of Cairo and Qattara. Lazegaz and Hinikz squabble with Gehtek over access to the latter’s spaceport. Qattara and Cairo are at odds with each other over various issues, mostly accusations that Qattara is freeloading off Cairo’s military for defense, or that Cairo is too capricious in their management of the Suez Canal and scaring away would-be investors from Qattara.
Some city-states, most notably Hinikz and Cairo, have accused the others of being too freewheeling with selling strategic technology to humans–whether in pursuit of greater legitimacy and goodwill amongst Human Earth, or for basic survival and raw materials. Gehtek has tried to position itself as a champion of moderate foreign and economic policy on “Kyanah Earth” and a neutral mediator for the other city-states and their human spheres of influence, but faces accusations of bias from both species and all sides. Essentially, the same force driving a wedge between them–being surrounded by hostile human nation states and their different plans for dealing with that–is also the only thing keeping them allied.
The Kyanah for their part, have their own ticking time bomb in addition to the demographic and economic one: a technological one. Eventually the rest of the human world will reverse-engineer Kyanah technology–it may take decades, but they all know it will happen–and rapidly close the gap with their far larger industrial base. Even though the Kyanah, just like humans, are a species with a history of exponential technological progress, they just don’t have enough workers and specialized knowledge on Earth to maintain the technological gap indefinitely. There are fewer than 100 thousand Kyanah on Earth, and even the human population is maybe a handful of millions under their direct rule and perhaps another thirty million in their sphere of influence.
With the sanctions and hostile relations with surrounding human nation-states, less than half a percent of Earth’s population and industrial base simply isn’t enough to maintain modern 21st century technology, let alone advanced Kyanah technology indefinitely. Kyanah industry on Earth simply cannot focus on technological innovation, instead being forced to spend all their resources on surviving and maintaining their existing technology. Unless one or more of their city-states can consolidate power and semi-normalize relations with Human Earth, all is lost.
So I've decided to work out some more lore for Hold Out Hope, the third part of the Hope trilogy, there are multiple parts, and it definitely gets pretty out-there and high-concept. So buckle in.
So by 2041, it’s been 15 years since the cease-fire in the US, and 18 years since the cease-fire in Egypt. The Kyanah still only control five cities directly, but the Kyanah Bloc in parts of California, Arizona, and Nevada; and the Nile and Qattara Blocs in what was formerly Egypt are now nominally independent human city-states, with the Kyanah providing military protection and internal autonomy in exchange for political and economic alignment, and keeping the militaries of human nation-states out of the blocs.
Internally, the Kyanah city-states face many problems. Well aware of their badly limited numbers, the leadership has implemented an egg quota to rapidly increase their population and fix their crippling demographic issues. This has doubled the Kyanah population, but that is not enough. In order to maintain constant military readiness, a huge chunk of them are unable to retire from military service and remain as either active or reserve duty, despite recruiting human auxiliaries in some roles and conscripting the younger generation of Kyanah as they grow up.
The older generation of Kyanah are growing weary, tired of a perpetual cold war where they can never truly lay down their weapons and rest. While the younger generation is bitter and resentful at being brought into the world just to perpetuate a conflict they never asked for and had no part in starting. A fringe movement among the second-generation Kyanah is rejecting the egg quota outright and threatening to refuse to have children at all, not wanting to continue another cycle of the same.
Unrest is growing among the human populations as well. Many humans are increasingly accusing the Provisional Military Administration system used in the five city-states
of being a Permanent Military Administration. The Kyanah, for their part, see no safe off ramp to transition to a civilian government under the Tripartite Legalist system in any of the five city-states due to their crippling demographic problems. Gehtek and Qattara, having the highest proportions of Kyanah population, are the only ones even making any moves towards a civilian government, and even they are moving at a glacial pace, with constant setbacks. The tendency by the Kyanah to respect pack atomicity also sparks riots, as to humans, pack atomicity means child labor and collective punishment.
The city-states in the US–Lazegaz, Gehtek, and Hinikz (formerly Las Vegas, Lake Havasu City, and Phoenix)--are in an even more precarious situation. Surrounding them is the American Demilitarized Zone, and three million US troops have amassed on the other side, preparing for the Doomsday Battle, a future all-out assault on the Kyanah bloc. Although the Kyanah still have hundreds of nuclear weapons, and laser arrays that can shoot down any human ICBMs, the US has a backyard bomb, a 10 gigaton bomb salted with cobalt-60, which needs no delivery mechanism to enforce deterrence.
In addition to the harsh sanctions imposed by nearly every UN member state, the US has also built dams to block off the Colorado River and every other major river flowing into the Kyanah Bloc, crippling human agriculture and causing massive environmental destruction. This has been done to try to strengthen the impact of the sanctions and starve out the bloc, provoking unrest and rebellion from the human population. This has had mixed effects, driving some cities closer to the Kyanah and successfully driving a wedge between others–particularly Sandiego-Tijuana, which is agitating to politically and economically unify with human Mexico. As a result, the city-states, Gehtek and Hinikz especially, have begun selling advanced alien technology to North Korea in exchange for rice to feed their human populations.
The city-states of Qattara and Cairo in former Egypt have actually done better economically, being less completely isolated from the outside world, though they are still facing many of the same stressors, including hostility and stringent sanctions from most of the outside world and discontent with the Provisional Military Administration internally. The Qattara Oasis proves to be an invaluable asset for the Kyanah occupation in Egypt, giving them a water source they fully control and can use for agriculture and industry, and a city they’ve built from scratch. The Qattara Peace and Economic Development Corridor, containing two economically integrated human city-states they share the Qattara Oasis with, is another valuable asset, putting the Qattara city-state as the most likely Kyanah city-state to succeed. Despite being denied entry into the UN, Qattara has entered a limited trade and security agreement–including joint counter-terrorism patrols–with Israel since 2037 due to common enemies in the region; ironically, they and North Korea of all places are the only two UN member states to have even limited recognition of any of the Kyanah city-states.
However, the no-go zone covering vast swathes of western Egypt, which neither they nor the rump Egyptian government in the east have any ability to exert control over, is overrun with Islamic terrorists. Additionally, their civilian resource extracting expeditions in the Sahara occasionally venture beyond Egypt’s borders, leading to persistent low-level conflict with Sudan, Libya, and even Chad. Foreign powers, most notably Russia and China, are beginning to invest in development and infrastructure in these countries–and what remains of Egypt–as well as establishing a military presence as a bulwark against further expansion of the Kyanah sphere of influence, even while playing both sides and quietly tolerating some black-market trade with the city-states themselves, especially the ones in the US, which are seen as quite useful for keeping America distracted.
As a result, the Kyanah are at a crossroads. If the third generation–currently hatchlings–are able to continue the progress that has been made thus far and somehow consolidate power within the Kyanah spheres of influence, then the fourth generation may well grow up without an egg quota and be able to live as full civilians in their respective city-states. Perhaps this fourth generation will even see the transition to civilian Tripartite Legalist government, and bringing additional human cities into their sphere of influence via trade deals and infrastructure development, ultimately establishing themselves as legitimate forces in Earth geopolitics, albeit not one of them reaching the planned status of hyperpower.
However, the limited progress that has been made thus far in diversifying the economy and opportunities available to the first and second generations is seen by many as too little too late; discontent is already simmering amongst the Kyanah themselves, never mind the humans. To add to that, the first generation, the soldiers who initially arrived on Earth, are aging and will eventually die–on average, they are already equivalent to humans in their fifties.
They are also not the unified monolith some human analysts paint them as. They are, fundamentally, five independent city-states, closely allied, but each vying to ultimately be the Earth’s equivalent of Ikun. Inevitably cracks begin to show and tensions mount under the economic and pressure of the surrounding human world. The technology sold by Gehtek and Hinikz to North Korea in exchange for food is being weaponized, and these weapons are being sold to terrorist groups in Egypt, drawing the ire of Cairo and Qattara. Lazegaz and Hinikz squabble with Gehtek over access to the latter’s spaceport. Qattara and Cairo are at odds with each other over various issues, mostly accusations that Qattara is freeloading off Cairo’s military for defense, or that Cairo is too capricious in their management of the Suez Canal and scaring away would-be investors from Qattara.
Some city-states, most notably Hinikz and Cairo, have accused the others of being too freewheeling with selling strategic technology to humans–whether in pursuit of greater legitimacy and goodwill amongst Human Earth, or for basic survival and raw materials. Gehtek has tried to position itself as a champion of moderate foreign and economic policy on “Kyanah Earth” and a neutral mediator for the other city-states and their human spheres of influence, but faces accusations of bias from both species and all sides. Essentially, the same force driving a wedge between them–being surrounded by hostile human nation states and their different plans for dealing with that–is also the only thing keeping them allied.
The Kyanah for their part, have their own ticking time bomb in addition to the demographic and economic one: a technological one. Eventually the rest of the human world will reverse-engineer Kyanah technology–it may take decades, but they all know it will happen–and rapidly close the gap with their far larger industrial base. Even though the Kyanah, just like humans, are a species with a history of exponential technological progress, they just don’t have enough workers and specialized knowledge on Earth to maintain the technological gap indefinitely. There are fewer than 100 thousand Kyanah on Earth, and even the human population is maybe a handful of millions under their direct rule and perhaps another thirty million in their sphere of influence.
With the sanctions and hostile relations with surrounding human nation-states, less than half a percent of Earth’s population and industrial base simply isn’t enough to maintain modern 21st century technology, let alone advanced Kyanah technology indefinitely. Kyanah industry on Earth simply cannot focus on technological innovation, instead being forced to spend all their resources on surviving and maintaining their existing technology. Unless one or more of their city-states can consolidate power and semi-normalize relations with Human Earth, all is lost.
Re: Road to Hope
The human side is also at a crossroads. Initially, fear of Kyanah reinforcements arriving gave the US military significant pause, but with every year passes by with no new starships coming into the Solar System, they grow bolder. Even though experts predict that a full nuclear exchange could wipe out half of North America’s population, hardliners still consider it a worthwhile sacrifice to eradicate every last scrap of alien influence and take back their lost territory. Having suffered half a million casualties, most of the US public and government alike are strongly in favor of concentration camps at a minimum if not outright extermination should the Kyanah ever lay down their arms. In fact, publicly supporting Kyanah independence or integration as citizens into the US has been banned under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 2033. Egypt is by and large no friendlier to the Kyanah city-states either, having lost over fifty thousand lives and all of their best population centers and arable land.
In general, the hardliner human factions believe that time is running out, and unless the US launches an all-out assault sooner rather than later, the Kyanah will solve their demographic and economic pitfalls, solidify their position, and likely win the war–assuming there are any winners once the Backyard Bomb has detonated. Moderates, on the contrary, tend to believe that humanity need only wait patiently and the Kyanah city-states will one by one implode from within.
While there are integrationists, at least in the US, who do support reunification and an offer of US citizenship to the Kyanah in their territory, the moderate and hardliner factions have insisted that any citizenship deal will not guarantee pack atomicity and instead treat individual Kyanah as individuals economically and legally. In other words, their young will be given education and childcare on their own instead of working with their packs, and criminals will be sentenced and jailed alone, without their packs. Many moderates and hardliners point out the Kyanah are doing fundamentally the same thing, just the other way around, with humans in Gehtek, Lazegaz, and Hinikz. This provision is added knowing that even the most pro-human Kyanah leadership will automatically reject any deal with such terms, allowing humanity to look like the reasonable ones who are trying to compromise.
The Kyanah themselves have their own hardliner and moderate factions. The hardliners still cling to the fantasy of establishing a Hegemony just as their original city-state of Ikun used to have on their home planet. They believe that their city-state is somehow immune to the fundamental problems plaguing the other four, and is capable of not just consolidating their sphere of influence, but expanding it to human cities around the world, still insisting that they can somehow wrest cities free from their nation-states with the right economic and political strategy. The moderates meanwhile are well aware that continuing on while so cut off from the outside world is fundamentally unsustainable, and the only way forward is to integrate into regional power structures rather than usurp them, that this is not their world and that succeeding as states here requires rewriting their rules of geopolitical strategy, not just generalizing and adapting them.
It cannot be denied, however, that the arrival of the Kyanah has led to a more turbulent geopolitical landscape across the world, even in regions they have no direct involvement in, creating a tenser and more unstable atmosphere. Terrorist and insurgent groups multiply on nearly every continent, with alien-derived weapons trickling into the hands of rogue nations and violent non-state actors. The fires of countless low-intensity conflicts burn. Europe drifts further and further right as refugees flee there from Egypt by the millions. China invades Taiwan, taking advantage of America’s distraction. It seems that rather than unify in the face of an alien threat, humanity has only been drawn into the fractured and hypercompetitive worldview of the Kyanah themselves.
Technologically, the fallout of the war still remains. The Kessler syndrome created by the Kyanah to take out human satellites ensures that many prime orbits will remain unusable for decades, even despite attempts by Gehtek and spacefaring human powers to clean up the mess. The self-evolving Drunkard virus still runs rampant on nearly every GPU, randomizing vector and matrix operations. There has been less AI progress in the 18 years since the Kyanah invasion than in the 8 months before it, a harbinger of a long AI winter. Various Kyanah city-states launch cyberattacks on human banks and corporations to gain access to precious dollars, Euros, and yuan, as no one outside of their blocs will deal in Kyanah currency.
Earth is under a dark cloud, for human and Kyanah civilizations alike.
In general, the hardliner human factions believe that time is running out, and unless the US launches an all-out assault sooner rather than later, the Kyanah will solve their demographic and economic pitfalls, solidify their position, and likely win the war–assuming there are any winners once the Backyard Bomb has detonated. Moderates, on the contrary, tend to believe that humanity need only wait patiently and the Kyanah city-states will one by one implode from within.
While there are integrationists, at least in the US, who do support reunification and an offer of US citizenship to the Kyanah in their territory, the moderate and hardliner factions have insisted that any citizenship deal will not guarantee pack atomicity and instead treat individual Kyanah as individuals economically and legally. In other words, their young will be given education and childcare on their own instead of working with their packs, and criminals will be sentenced and jailed alone, without their packs. Many moderates and hardliners point out the Kyanah are doing fundamentally the same thing, just the other way around, with humans in Gehtek, Lazegaz, and Hinikz. This provision is added knowing that even the most pro-human Kyanah leadership will automatically reject any deal with such terms, allowing humanity to look like the reasonable ones who are trying to compromise.
The Kyanah themselves have their own hardliner and moderate factions. The hardliners still cling to the fantasy of establishing a Hegemony just as their original city-state of Ikun used to have on their home planet. They believe that their city-state is somehow immune to the fundamental problems plaguing the other four, and is capable of not just consolidating their sphere of influence, but expanding it to human cities around the world, still insisting that they can somehow wrest cities free from their nation-states with the right economic and political strategy. The moderates meanwhile are well aware that continuing on while so cut off from the outside world is fundamentally unsustainable, and the only way forward is to integrate into regional power structures rather than usurp them, that this is not their world and that succeeding as states here requires rewriting their rules of geopolitical strategy, not just generalizing and adapting them.
It cannot be denied, however, that the arrival of the Kyanah has led to a more turbulent geopolitical landscape across the world, even in regions they have no direct involvement in, creating a tenser and more unstable atmosphere. Terrorist and insurgent groups multiply on nearly every continent, with alien-derived weapons trickling into the hands of rogue nations and violent non-state actors. The fires of countless low-intensity conflicts burn. Europe drifts further and further right as refugees flee there from Egypt by the millions. China invades Taiwan, taking advantage of America’s distraction. It seems that rather than unify in the face of an alien threat, humanity has only been drawn into the fractured and hypercompetitive worldview of the Kyanah themselves.
Technologically, the fallout of the war still remains. The Kessler syndrome created by the Kyanah to take out human satellites ensures that many prime orbits will remain unusable for decades, even despite attempts by Gehtek and spacefaring human powers to clean up the mess. The self-evolving Drunkard virus still runs rampant on nearly every GPU, randomizing vector and matrix operations. There has been less AI progress in the 18 years since the Kyanah invasion than in the 8 months before it, a harbinger of a long AI winter. Various Kyanah city-states launch cyberattacks on human banks and corporations to gain access to precious dollars, Euros, and yuan, as no one outside of their blocs will deal in Kyanah currency.
Earth is under a dark cloud, for human and Kyanah civilizations alike.
Re: Road to Hope
There is one great black swan that all Kyanah are silently aware of, but no one really talks about, that may yet flip the table again and shake up the world order on Earth even more thoroughly than their own arrival. Their homeworld is still out there. They don’t have a population shortage or a limited industrial base. They aren’t surrounded by hostile alien nation states. All the time that the Kyanah from Ikun have crossed the gulf between the stars and occupied Earth, their technology has been progressing. The Kyanah on Earth are no more than a century ahead of humanity, but in the intervening time, the technological gap between the homeworld and Earth has broadened to nearly three hundred years.
It’s only a matter of time before interstellar travel is advanced enough to make it economically and politically sustainable to do what Ikun tried to do with Project Hope nearly two centuries ago. And when that happens, they will come to Earth,and this time it won’t be one small military force from one city-state. But also not a unified force of conquest determined to rule the Earth–something that was never really a thing in Kyanah history. Instead it will be a steady inexorable tidal wave of migrants, developers, political entrepreneurs, and military expeditions coming from countless states to spread their influence on Earth. It’s a mix of the powerful seeking to grow their networks and the disaffected seeking a less dense geopolitical network to set up shop in, far from the influence of major powers back home.
One might consider it to be like the Belt and Road, but decentralized and emergent product of dozens, maybe hundreds of spacefaring powers, not so concerned with physical trade–aside from a select few ultra high-tech items and biological or mineral treasures unique to Earth or the Kyanah homeworld, interstellar trade as usually envisioned is wildly impractical. Instead, states in the Tau Ceti system seek to deal in knowledge, human (and Kyanah) capital, and social and political influence, seeing Earth as a sort of Wild West where they can easily spread their influence without constantly running into technologically advanced rival states and their spheres of influence.
Kyanah thought in this day and age sees the universe as a grand graph of minds and resources and systems linked by ideas and values and influence. To be fair, this is a very old idea to them, but as their technology and understanding of the universe has advanced, so has their understanding and formalization of this great cosmic graph under mathematical functions and sophisticated algorithms. Shaping and optimizing the graph topology is not just a key to success but a key to moral superiority, and Earth is a fertile, untapped ground to expand their cliques and build up the great cosmic graph.
And so, sooner or later, they will come. Already there are reports that some groups are looking into curvature propulsion, which will allow spacetime to be bent in such a way that they can reach speeds arbitrarily close to c without firing a single rocket engine. The journey will thus be reduced from 160 years to 11.9, and to the crews on board, it will be nearly instantaneous due to relativistic effects.
For the Kyanah on Earth, this news is highly polarizing to say the least. Their world was never unified, so the arrival of others of their species doesn’t inherently mean allies or reinforcements. And even disregarding this, they are ultimately inhabitants of Earth, especially the second and third generations who hatched there. Some do see this coming wave as a good thing for them, because they believe it will decrease the relevance of the human nation-state paradigm that has proven to be such a thorn in their side for nearly two decades, reverting the geopolitical landscape to one they’re more intimately familiar and comfortable with. Others, however, still have faith in their ability to hold their position on Earth independently and like the idea of eventually becoming a big fish in a small pond and fear that the arrival of other, highly advanced Kyanah, will close that door forever, the final death knell of the original mission they set out to achieve. Interestingly, this divide is at least partially independent of the Kyanah hardliner vs moderate divide.
Still others, regardless of their feelings on this change to the status quo, feel that they can directly use it to shore up their position on Earth. After all, humans, fundamentally, don’t know the Kyanah as well as the Kyanah themselves do. They’ve been living with themselves for thousands of years; humanity has been living with them for eighteen. The Kyanah have struggled to learn humanity’s game, socially and geopolitically, but with the numbers and technology of the hypothetical newcomers, they won’t need to play humanity’s game–humanity will need to find a way to play their game and, if not win, at least force a draw or graceful loss–a slow, steady positional defeat rather than an embarrassing fool’s mate. And some Kyanah believe that they can teach Human Earth how to play the game they’ll soon have to play, in exchange for economic cooperation and diplomatic relations, though others see this as handing away the one real advantage they’ll have over humanity in the upcoming struggle for relevance–the tech certainly won’t make much of a difference, it’s closer to humanity’s tech than what the modern Kyanah have.
It’s only a matter of time before interstellar travel is advanced enough to make it economically and politically sustainable to do what Ikun tried to do with Project Hope nearly two centuries ago. And when that happens, they will come to Earth,and this time it won’t be one small military force from one city-state. But also not a unified force of conquest determined to rule the Earth–something that was never really a thing in Kyanah history. Instead it will be a steady inexorable tidal wave of migrants, developers, political entrepreneurs, and military expeditions coming from countless states to spread their influence on Earth. It’s a mix of the powerful seeking to grow their networks and the disaffected seeking a less dense geopolitical network to set up shop in, far from the influence of major powers back home.
One might consider it to be like the Belt and Road, but decentralized and emergent product of dozens, maybe hundreds of spacefaring powers, not so concerned with physical trade–aside from a select few ultra high-tech items and biological or mineral treasures unique to Earth or the Kyanah homeworld, interstellar trade as usually envisioned is wildly impractical. Instead, states in the Tau Ceti system seek to deal in knowledge, human (and Kyanah) capital, and social and political influence, seeing Earth as a sort of Wild West where they can easily spread their influence without constantly running into technologically advanced rival states and their spheres of influence.
Kyanah thought in this day and age sees the universe as a grand graph of minds and resources and systems linked by ideas and values and influence. To be fair, this is a very old idea to them, but as their technology and understanding of the universe has advanced, so has their understanding and formalization of this great cosmic graph under mathematical functions and sophisticated algorithms. Shaping and optimizing the graph topology is not just a key to success but a key to moral superiority, and Earth is a fertile, untapped ground to expand their cliques and build up the great cosmic graph.
And so, sooner or later, they will come. Already there are reports that some groups are looking into curvature propulsion, which will allow spacetime to be bent in such a way that they can reach speeds arbitrarily close to c without firing a single rocket engine. The journey will thus be reduced from 160 years to 11.9, and to the crews on board, it will be nearly instantaneous due to relativistic effects.
For the Kyanah on Earth, this news is highly polarizing to say the least. Their world was never unified, so the arrival of others of their species doesn’t inherently mean allies or reinforcements. And even disregarding this, they are ultimately inhabitants of Earth, especially the second and third generations who hatched there. Some do see this coming wave as a good thing for them, because they believe it will decrease the relevance of the human nation-state paradigm that has proven to be such a thorn in their side for nearly two decades, reverting the geopolitical landscape to one they’re more intimately familiar and comfortable with. Others, however, still have faith in their ability to hold their position on Earth independently and like the idea of eventually becoming a big fish in a small pond and fear that the arrival of other, highly advanced Kyanah, will close that door forever, the final death knell of the original mission they set out to achieve. Interestingly, this divide is at least partially independent of the Kyanah hardliner vs moderate divide.
Still others, regardless of their feelings on this change to the status quo, feel that they can directly use it to shore up their position on Earth. After all, humans, fundamentally, don’t know the Kyanah as well as the Kyanah themselves do. They’ve been living with themselves for thousands of years; humanity has been living with them for eighteen. The Kyanah have struggled to learn humanity’s game, socially and geopolitically, but with the numbers and technology of the hypothetical newcomers, they won’t need to play humanity’s game–humanity will need to find a way to play their game and, if not win, at least force a draw or graceful loss–a slow, steady positional defeat rather than an embarrassing fool’s mate. And some Kyanah believe that they can teach Human Earth how to play the game they’ll soon have to play, in exchange for economic cooperation and diplomatic relations, though others see this as handing away the one real advantage they’ll have over humanity in the upcoming struggle for relevance–the tech certainly won’t make much of a difference, it’s closer to humanity’s tech than what the modern Kyanah have.
Re: Road to Hope
there’s another element to this. A Extra-Dimensional Way thought about by a few packs–as you can see, the Kyanah are very diverse and heterogeneous. They believe that the Earth can not just coexist and maintain relevance with the new arrivals, but defeat them–not with titanic war machines, but with a vector.
This is quite high-concept and speculative, I don’t know if it makes sense or has any basis in reality, but of course Kyanah society has a high degree of complexity and intricacy relative to their tech level, both in the time of Kyanah Earth, and especially in modern times. Of course they do, not only are high-tech civilizations–and the Kyanah home system has recently reached Kardashev I status, sitting around 1.1 in human terms–inherently complex, but such systematic complexity is seen as an axiomatic good. Countless integrated systems, carefully manipulated by countless actors to maximize their own benefit, permeate everything from the fine-grained manipulation of the environment and climate with the Climate Control System, to the ever-shifting political graphs and virtual states that have arisen in recent decades.
But with such great complexity comes pitfalls. The state of civilization, as determined by the state of all these systems, can be described as a point in an incredibly hyper-dimensional parameter space. But there are regions of that parameter space, catastrophic simplification vortices, where entering can cause a cascading chain reaction that destroys the systems and explosively reduces complexity–this is not a new idea, I believe the Technocalypse in Orion’s Arm is fundamentally the same idea. As the dimensionality of the parameter space grows ever larger, so to does the probability of being dangerously close to such a vortex. If you imagine a one-dimensional parameter space, a line, then only a small space is within one unit of a particular point on that line–such as a vortex. But in a one hundred dimensional space, the volume within one unit of that point is far greater, and thus it’s easier to be dangerously near such a vortex.
To the Kyanah from Ikun’s time, this was all theoretical, the realm of science fiction and philosophy. But in modern times, it’s a very real threat that is actively considered and managed. However, even the technology on the Kyanah homeworld is not unlimited–managing this is like a human captain piloting a ship during the Age of Sail through treacherous reef-infested waters in a stormy night. To avoid running aground–or in the case of the Kyanah, running into a simplification vortex–requires precise and careful navigation by dead reckoning. Though in the Kyanah case, it’s the dead reckoning of advanced AI algorithms on supercomputers, not fallible organic Kyanah brains. There are ideas of chaos wands, advanced devices unknown to human science that leverage quantum effects to serve as the equivalent of a sonar and steam engine all in one, allowing the ship–or rather, states and other entities–to easily spot the deadly vortices and dodge them, sailing the hyper-dimensional seas with ease.
But not even the Kyanah homeworld has this technology, so they remain vulnerable to a hyper-dimensional vector attack. The idea is that if a system–or civilization as a whole–is constantly a hair’s breadth away from one vortex or another, then it only takes a tiny push in the exact right direction–a vector–to send the ship/system crashing into the reef/vortex. A tiny push, of course, is something that a modestly advanced civilization could theoretically manage if they had the right timing and enough precision. Kyanah Earth could manage that. It’s not even necessary to actually make the push–just revealing the vector to the public is enough, and the adversarial agents inherent to extremely large multi-agent systems will take care of the rest. All that takes is enough computing power to store and transmit the vector. Such attacks, if they are truly possible, are a great equalizer and a great filter all at once. Even Human Earth could manage that if they pooled together all their computing power and randomly guessed a correct vector. Though of course the odds of that vector actually being correct are infinitesimally low. Unless of course, there is some way to make an educated guess. Though nobody knows how to guess correctly on a consistent basis, not Earth and not the Kyanah homeworld. But what Earth does have is two independently derived neural architectures to work on this problem, if they can only be convinced to do so–and the homeworld only has one.
This is quite high-concept and speculative, I don’t know if it makes sense or has any basis in reality, but of course Kyanah society has a high degree of complexity and intricacy relative to their tech level, both in the time of Kyanah Earth, and especially in modern times. Of course they do, not only are high-tech civilizations–and the Kyanah home system has recently reached Kardashev I status, sitting around 1.1 in human terms–inherently complex, but such systematic complexity is seen as an axiomatic good. Countless integrated systems, carefully manipulated by countless actors to maximize their own benefit, permeate everything from the fine-grained manipulation of the environment and climate with the Climate Control System, to the ever-shifting political graphs and virtual states that have arisen in recent decades.
But with such great complexity comes pitfalls. The state of civilization, as determined by the state of all these systems, can be described as a point in an incredibly hyper-dimensional parameter space. But there are regions of that parameter space, catastrophic simplification vortices, where entering can cause a cascading chain reaction that destroys the systems and explosively reduces complexity–this is not a new idea, I believe the Technocalypse in Orion’s Arm is fundamentally the same idea. As the dimensionality of the parameter space grows ever larger, so to does the probability of being dangerously close to such a vortex. If you imagine a one-dimensional parameter space, a line, then only a small space is within one unit of a particular point on that line–such as a vortex. But in a one hundred dimensional space, the volume within one unit of that point is far greater, and thus it’s easier to be dangerously near such a vortex.
To the Kyanah from Ikun’s time, this was all theoretical, the realm of science fiction and philosophy. But in modern times, it’s a very real threat that is actively considered and managed. However, even the technology on the Kyanah homeworld is not unlimited–managing this is like a human captain piloting a ship during the Age of Sail through treacherous reef-infested waters in a stormy night. To avoid running aground–or in the case of the Kyanah, running into a simplification vortex–requires precise and careful navigation by dead reckoning. Though in the Kyanah case, it’s the dead reckoning of advanced AI algorithms on supercomputers, not fallible organic Kyanah brains. There are ideas of chaos wands, advanced devices unknown to human science that leverage quantum effects to serve as the equivalent of a sonar and steam engine all in one, allowing the ship–or rather, states and other entities–to easily spot the deadly vortices and dodge them, sailing the hyper-dimensional seas with ease.
But not even the Kyanah homeworld has this technology, so they remain vulnerable to a hyper-dimensional vector attack. The idea is that if a system–or civilization as a whole–is constantly a hair’s breadth away from one vortex or another, then it only takes a tiny push in the exact right direction–a vector–to send the ship/system crashing into the reef/vortex. A tiny push, of course, is something that a modestly advanced civilization could theoretically manage if they had the right timing and enough precision. Kyanah Earth could manage that. It’s not even necessary to actually make the push–just revealing the vector to the public is enough, and the adversarial agents inherent to extremely large multi-agent systems will take care of the rest. All that takes is enough computing power to store and transmit the vector. Such attacks, if they are truly possible, are a great equalizer and a great filter all at once. Even Human Earth could manage that if they pooled together all their computing power and randomly guessed a correct vector. Though of course the odds of that vector actually being correct are infinitesimally low. Unless of course, there is some way to make an educated guess. Though nobody knows how to guess correctly on a consistent basis, not Earth and not the Kyanah homeworld. But what Earth does have is two independently derived neural architectures to work on this problem, if they can only be convinced to do so–and the homeworld only has one.
Re: Road to Hope
Maps of Ikun!
City-boundaries and basic facts
Administrative divisions of Craterzone city-states
Population density in Ikun by district
City-boundaries and basic facts
Administrative divisions of Craterzone city-states
Population density in Ikun by district
Re: Road to Hope
The Zizgran impact crater is a 120 kilometer wide, 1700 meter deep crater left by an impact during the planet's Paleolithic period. Due to the sheer size of the impact, it has formed a complex crater with a 700 meter high central peak in the middle--though at 10 kilometers wide, it's more of a hill than a mountain. Surrounding this is a 30 kilometer wide oasis--almost large enough to be considered a hyperoasis by Kyanah hydrologists--formed by the impact revealing the deep water table buried over a kilometer below the surface. After tens of thousands of years of sporadic habitation by transient hunter-trappers and herders, agriculture would eventually begin here, and about 2000 Earth years after that, in the early 8th century AD, migrants from the west would invade, overwhelming the Iron Age natives and bringing written language, marking the start of recorded history in this region. For several centuries thereafter, competing city-states and random clans would farm their prey and battle each other for control of precious arable land while slowly expanding said arable land further and further out from the oasis. In Y0--widely believed by humans to be somewhere between 1415 and 1423 AD--Ronyr-pack would successfully unite the entire oasis via relentless military campaigns, naming the unified polity Ikun (lit. "the State"). Ikun would continue to expand towards the crater walls for several more centuries though during the industrial age, when the population and economy would explode in the early 17th century, fueled by agricultural revolutions and vast deposits of iron, deposited by the same asteroid that made the crater, and even coal.
Expanding populations and civil unrest would compel Ikun's leadership to grant independence to the outlying regions in the early 18th century, declaring them independent city-states while keeping the core area under Ikun's government. However, they remain politically and economically close, sharing a common language and currency and an arrangement where residents of any state may freely visit and work in any other state, somewhat similar to the human Schengen Area. This zone, with a population of just over 20 million, is known as the Craterzone. In practice, Ikun dominates with two thirds of the population and nearly 80% of the GDP, and the other four city-states fall under its defensive umbrella, most having only token military forces. The Craterzone is sometimes derogatorily called the Ikunzone or Greater Ikun for this reason. However, they have their own independent governments and laws, and did not send military personnel to the invasion of Earth. Here we see the Craterzone states in their modern--as of the launch of Project Hope--form, though their EEZs which extend out 23.7 kilometers into the wilderness, are not pictured. Clockwise from the top, the member states include:
Ikun ("the State"). Population: 13,743,218; Area: 3,126.46 km2. An economic, political, and military hyperpower on the Kyanah homeworld, and the city-state behind the invasion of Earth. Slightly larger than Luxembourg by area but with 20 times the population, it ranks as one of the largest countries on the Kyanah homeworld by both area and population. A net importer of food, though there is plenty of agricultural production in the less densely urbanized areas in the north and west, towards the crater wall. Ikun controls both the central peak of the crater and has annexed a special exclave outside the crater, which is designated as the Special Orbital Transit District (popularly known as District 40, but for some reason not in official state documents). Mostly because launching rockets in the middle of a city is a pretty shit idea, from an urban planning perspective. Ikun is subdivided into this and 39 other districts, and is technically a unitary state, though the government has not changed the district borders in decades, except for annexing District 40 . It is the most ethnically diverse of any of the Craterzone states, as packs from all corners of the world have migrated here for economic opportunity, turning it into a vast melting pot.
Nikthan (named for a wealthy industrialist pack from their equivalent of the 19th century). Population: 3,958,140. Area: 1,068.97 km2. Among the Craterzone states, it stands as a distant second in population, economy, and global relevance. It's primarily made up of Ikun's eastern suburbs and sprawling corporate campuses. It does, however, contain the private Nikthan University, considered by many to be the most prestigious university in the world, and many wealthy and/or brilliant packs from Ikun--and all over the world--are invited to study here. It is mostly known for this and the various well-known corporations that headquarter here for the lower taxes. Its detractors often brand it as just a mediocre mini-Ikun without a real identity of its own, as if it was made by drawing arbitary lines on a map (which it was).
Katekehna ("Springhome"). Population: 1,011,944. Area: 1923.77 km2. So-named because in ages past many agricultural and herding packs from Ikun--itself much smaller in that time--would move their animals here in the spring to take advantage of the vegetation blooms before retreating closer to the oasis in the dry summer, even making their way out of the crater entirely. All this is now gone, replaced by dense urban blocks and ultra high-intensity high-tech agriculture. One of two city-states in the modern Craterzone that produces more food than it consumes, some of which is exported to Ikun itself. Is home to a few tells, archaeological mounds built up from centuries and milennia of dense habitation.
Ikun Rkatk ("West Ikun"). Population: 1,237,815. Area: 527.00 km2. A very rapidly developed boom town that was settled heavily during the industrial area due to coal being found in the southwestern edge of the crater, and the lands beyond the crater walls. Now on the decline in both economy and population. Still a first-world economy, but probably on the low end of first-world.
Katezeku ("Autumnhome"). Population: 711,349. Area: 1557.05 km2. Similar to Katekehna, this area was in ages past a borderland where agriculturalists would take their animals in the fall before returning to the more water-rich oasis region for the winter. Now it's a food exporter, especially to Ikun, with high-tech agriculture. As the least populated of the five Craterzone states, it's the only one--with the exception of the central peak island, where Ikun has established a large park--where something that passes for wilderness remains, nestled near the crater wall; the rest of the crater is mostly just skyscrapers, urban sprawl, and farms at this point. Many upper middle and upper-class packs from Ikun, Nikthan, and West Ikun have vacation homes in northern Katezeku, especially towards the crater rim where it is usually 5 to 7 Celsius cooler than the crater floor. Like Katekehna, there are a few tells in Katezeku. Most tells in other city-states, if they ever existed, have been bulldozed or paved over long ago.
Expanding populations and civil unrest would compel Ikun's leadership to grant independence to the outlying regions in the early 18th century, declaring them independent city-states while keeping the core area under Ikun's government. However, they remain politically and economically close, sharing a common language and currency and an arrangement where residents of any state may freely visit and work in any other state, somewhat similar to the human Schengen Area. This zone, with a population of just over 20 million, is known as the Craterzone. In practice, Ikun dominates with two thirds of the population and nearly 80% of the GDP, and the other four city-states fall under its defensive umbrella, most having only token military forces. The Craterzone is sometimes derogatorily called the Ikunzone or Greater Ikun for this reason. However, they have their own independent governments and laws, and did not send military personnel to the invasion of Earth. Here we see the Craterzone states in their modern--as of the launch of Project Hope--form, though their EEZs which extend out 23.7 kilometers into the wilderness, are not pictured. Clockwise from the top, the member states include:
Ikun ("the State"). Population: 13,743,218; Area: 3,126.46 km2. An economic, political, and military hyperpower on the Kyanah homeworld, and the city-state behind the invasion of Earth. Slightly larger than Luxembourg by area but with 20 times the population, it ranks as one of the largest countries on the Kyanah homeworld by both area and population. A net importer of food, though there is plenty of agricultural production in the less densely urbanized areas in the north and west, towards the crater wall. Ikun controls both the central peak of the crater and has annexed a special exclave outside the crater, which is designated as the Special Orbital Transit District (popularly known as District 40, but for some reason not in official state documents). Mostly because launching rockets in the middle of a city is a pretty shit idea, from an urban planning perspective. Ikun is subdivided into this and 39 other districts, and is technically a unitary state, though the government has not changed the district borders in decades, except for annexing District 40 . It is the most ethnically diverse of any of the Craterzone states, as packs from all corners of the world have migrated here for economic opportunity, turning it into a vast melting pot.
Nikthan (named for a wealthy industrialist pack from their equivalent of the 19th century). Population: 3,958,140. Area: 1,068.97 km2. Among the Craterzone states, it stands as a distant second in population, economy, and global relevance. It's primarily made up of Ikun's eastern suburbs and sprawling corporate campuses. It does, however, contain the private Nikthan University, considered by many to be the most prestigious university in the world, and many wealthy and/or brilliant packs from Ikun--and all over the world--are invited to study here. It is mostly known for this and the various well-known corporations that headquarter here for the lower taxes. Its detractors often brand it as just a mediocre mini-Ikun without a real identity of its own, as if it was made by drawing arbitary lines on a map (which it was).
Katekehna ("Springhome"). Population: 1,011,944. Area: 1923.77 km2. So-named because in ages past many agricultural and herding packs from Ikun--itself much smaller in that time--would move their animals here in the spring to take advantage of the vegetation blooms before retreating closer to the oasis in the dry summer, even making their way out of the crater entirely. All this is now gone, replaced by dense urban blocks and ultra high-intensity high-tech agriculture. One of two city-states in the modern Craterzone that produces more food than it consumes, some of which is exported to Ikun itself. Is home to a few tells, archaeological mounds built up from centuries and milennia of dense habitation.
Ikun Rkatk ("West Ikun"). Population: 1,237,815. Area: 527.00 km2. A very rapidly developed boom town that was settled heavily during the industrial area due to coal being found in the southwestern edge of the crater, and the lands beyond the crater walls. Now on the decline in both economy and population. Still a first-world economy, but probably on the low end of first-world.
Katezeku ("Autumnhome"). Population: 711,349. Area: 1557.05 km2. Similar to Katekehna, this area was in ages past a borderland where agriculturalists would take their animals in the fall before returning to the more water-rich oasis region for the winter. Now it's a food exporter, especially to Ikun, with high-tech agriculture. As the least populated of the five Craterzone states, it's the only one--with the exception of the central peak island, where Ikun has established a large park--where something that passes for wilderness remains, nestled near the crater wall; the rest of the crater is mostly just skyscrapers, urban sprawl, and farms at this point. Many upper middle and upper-class packs from Ikun, Nikthan, and West Ikun have vacation homes in northern Katezeku, especially towards the crater rim where it is usually 5 to 7 Celsius cooler than the crater floor. Like Katekehna, there are a few tells in Katezeku. Most tells in other city-states, if they ever existed, have been bulldozed or paved over long ago.
Re: Road to Hope
The dynamic of the hyper-dimensional vector attack may even introduce an alien abduction plotline of all things! It isn't for the stereotypical purpose of experimentation; indeed with the technology of the Kyanah homeworld they could learn anything they want to know about human biology by simply shadowing them with drones and nanobots. But no doubt the idea that two neural independent architectures may be able to more quickly solve problems that would be intractable to one is not lost on the Kyanah homeworld either. Though they see this fundamentally as a way to solve chaos wands, which would destroy the only potential bargaining chip or leverage that Human Earth or even Kyanah Earth has against them.
Any AI or genetically engineered subspecies of themselves that they design would ultimately still have statistical correlations with the minds of the Kyanah themselves, as their design would be subject to Kyanah biases. So humans are the only known form of intelligent life that is statistically independent from the Kyanah themselves, and thus a valuable asset for such deep and complex problems. Cloning a viable human population themselves would be slow and risky (how would Kyanah know how to ensure that the first generation of children of an alien species not just survive but thrive?), while mind uploading hasn't been perfected for their own species let alone an alien one, and even if it did, simulating human brains on Kyanah computers would just reintroduce those pesky statistical dependencies. as for collaborating with humans on Earth: again, too slow because the speed of light delay is still a thing.
So at least one faction--whether a traditional city-state, space habitat, or even a virtual state--eventually does the logical thing of gathering a carefully selected breeding population of humans and bringing them home, not to enslave them as we understand it, but to teach and integrate them into the civilization on the homeworld and slowly guide the population into thinking about and collaborating with Kyanah minds on the chaos wand problem.
And simultaneously, there is also an effort to interlink Earth and the Kyanah homeworld culturally and technologically as quickly as possible, to ensure that any revelation of the hyper-dimensional vector will be mutually assured destruction: the hand can pick up a gun and shoot the head, but in doing so, the hand will also kill itself.
Perhaps some humans do see the Kyanah arriving from the Homeworld as enlightened saviors, especially considering the mutual disdain--albeit for different reasons--both Human Earth and the Homeworld have of the Kyanah who came from Ikun years ago and established the Kyanah Earth bloc, since the Homeworlders (for the most part--they're a very diverse bunch with many different values and cultures) didn't come with guns and bombs and maximize their influence on Earth with crude, blunt tools like regime change and economic warfare. Though if attacked, they still have demonstrated the capability to deploy weapons that make anything on Kyanah Earth look like a toy in comparison.
But despite perhaps seeming superficially "nicer", they're just as much cunning optimizers and influence-maximizers, and arguably even more cold, calculating, and fundamentally alien as they've pursued and refined their values over time--theoretically speaking, the psychological and social differences between any two alien species (including humans and Kyanah), I believe, will become accentuated, not muted, as their respective civilizations become more technologically advanced and complex, and their societies solve progressively more abstract problems. Solving the problem of "how to find food" is more basic and has more common ground between species than "how to navigate a political landscape", let alone "how to safely traverse a hyper-dimensional parameter space in high-complexity civilization".
Any AI or genetically engineered subspecies of themselves that they design would ultimately still have statistical correlations with the minds of the Kyanah themselves, as their design would be subject to Kyanah biases. So humans are the only known form of intelligent life that is statistically independent from the Kyanah themselves, and thus a valuable asset for such deep and complex problems. Cloning a viable human population themselves would be slow and risky (how would Kyanah know how to ensure that the first generation of children of an alien species not just survive but thrive?), while mind uploading hasn't been perfected for their own species let alone an alien one, and even if it did, simulating human brains on Kyanah computers would just reintroduce those pesky statistical dependencies. as for collaborating with humans on Earth: again, too slow because the speed of light delay is still a thing.
So at least one faction--whether a traditional city-state, space habitat, or even a virtual state--eventually does the logical thing of gathering a carefully selected breeding population of humans and bringing them home, not to enslave them as we understand it, but to teach and integrate them into the civilization on the homeworld and slowly guide the population into thinking about and collaborating with Kyanah minds on the chaos wand problem.
And simultaneously, there is also an effort to interlink Earth and the Kyanah homeworld culturally and technologically as quickly as possible, to ensure that any revelation of the hyper-dimensional vector will be mutually assured destruction: the hand can pick up a gun and shoot the head, but in doing so, the hand will also kill itself.
Perhaps some humans do see the Kyanah arriving from the Homeworld as enlightened saviors, especially considering the mutual disdain--albeit for different reasons--both Human Earth and the Homeworld have of the Kyanah who came from Ikun years ago and established the Kyanah Earth bloc, since the Homeworlders (for the most part--they're a very diverse bunch with many different values and cultures) didn't come with guns and bombs and maximize their influence on Earth with crude, blunt tools like regime change and economic warfare. Though if attacked, they still have demonstrated the capability to deploy weapons that make anything on Kyanah Earth look like a toy in comparison.
But despite perhaps seeming superficially "nicer", they're just as much cunning optimizers and influence-maximizers, and arguably even more cold, calculating, and fundamentally alien as they've pursued and refined their values over time--theoretically speaking, the psychological and social differences between any two alien species (including humans and Kyanah), I believe, will become accentuated, not muted, as their respective civilizations become more technologically advanced and complex, and their societies solve progressively more abstract problems. Solving the problem of "how to find food" is more basic and has more common ground between species than "how to navigate a political landscape", let alone "how to safely traverse a hyper-dimensional parameter space in high-complexity civilization".
Last edited by Jakob on Sun Sep 22, 2024 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Road to Hope
God damn I want this to be an epic youtube or TV series so badly. Come on Sora!
Re: Road to Hope
Not canon, just a random doodle. But yeah they ain't human-like.
Idk why I drew him looking so pissed off haha (or is it a her?? I really can't tell with Kyanah...considering that certain features aren't included in this drawing).
Idk why I drew him looking so pissed off haha (or is it a her?? I really can't tell with Kyanah...considering that certain features aren't included in this drawing).
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Re: Road to Hope
Make them grayish brown and this is almost identical to how I imagine them to be.