PROMONTORIO, F.A. – DEKA 28, 126 PM

The waves crash against the jagged rocks at the foot of the Becerra Bluffs, sending spits of white, foamy seawater skyward. Around one-hundred feet above the rocks and churning seas, benches offer their occupants picturesque views of the brilliant azure Bay of Crabs before them. The sun warms their faces, many of them chilled by either their age or their chronic illness, and the rhythmic ebb and flow of the waves calm their nerves, forever damaged not by pathogens or genetics but by human events that occurred long before they were even born.

Behind them stands a beautiful, two-story, century old terracotta-shaded structure topped with a red-tiled roof. The open, weather-worn, parota shutters that frame nearly every window lightly tap against the walls in the calm sea breeze. Due to the temperate, pleasant climate of the region, the windows they rarely guard are rarely ever closed. Men and women loll about the yard between the building and the cliffside, walking down the weedy footpaths, playing cards at tables shaded by the odd acacia tree, or simply basking in the warmth of the Ferrian sun.

The Natalia Paula Iparaguirre Rest Home is the last of its kind. Three-quarters of the building is empty; only three dozen residents remain, and after they expire, the home will be shut down and repurposed for some other use. The youngest of the facility’s forty-one remaining residents is 94, and given these individuals’ past careers, the fact that they made it to this age defies the expectations of even the most optimistic actuarial tables.

All of the inhabitants of the ipa, as the residents, staff, and locals call it, are retired members of the Federal Decontamination Service. Though both men and women form their ranks – in fact, the majority of the ipa’s remaining residents are women – they are popularly referred to as the “decon men.”

In the years immediately following the War decontamination was an urgent, if not highly prioritized, need throughout what is now Uniguita. Thousands of nuclear weapons with yields totaling hundreds of megatons of explosive force had detonated across the western half of the continent, spreading radioactive fallout across countless cities, towns, and villages, not to mention fields, pastures, and bodies of water.

In addition to radioactive fallout, the War had damaged countless electric plants, manufacturing facilities, and disposal sites, causing massive contamination by industrial waste in many metropolitan areas. Early Nova Espero settler John Rollins told the scavengers under his command that, “it won’t be the uranium, plutonium, or polonium that’ll get you – it’ll be the untreated sewage, leaking fuel, and the ammonia.”

Regardless of the source of the pollution, very few places in modern Uniguita had the capacity to effectively engage in decontamination in the immediate post-War years. For the scattered groups of survivors across the severely wounded Hegelio-Ferrian Empire, finding bread to eat was of the utmost priority, not necessarily verifying that it wasn’t contaminated with radiation.

Even so, some tried to address the issue. The Kingdom of Hegelion was the first, using conscripted refugee labor to clear radioactive crops and turn over irradiated soil in the region’s farmland in the months following the War. Spurred by paranoia over the effects of acute radiation poisoning, the efforts ultimately resulted in a famine that killed millions of additional people. Later analyses revealed that, while the radioactive fallout likely would have negative health effects down the line, the more immediate food shortages, unrest, and disorder were far more deadly.

Elsewhere, few attempts were made to address radiation. In the Fertile Center, where urban nuclear attacks had been comparatively few, massive attacks occurred at missile fields located in the region’s western foothills. Due to the prevailing winds, fallout from these attacks blew eastward, contaminating tens of millions of acres of vital wheat and corn fields. Many places throughout the Fertile Center simply ignored it, believing that the fallout had been so dispersed that its risk was minimal. In the region’s wheat belts, where the summer crop had been harvested months prior, the common sentiment was that subsequent rains would clean out the fields, making them usable in due time. This was not the case, and instead the radioactive strontium and cesium isotopes quickly leached into the soil and groundwater. Illnesses related to radiation poisoning remained elevated throughout the Fertile Center well into the 50s, when farmland and pastures heavily contaminated with fallout were closed for agricultural use.

As time passed and Uniguita formed, built institutional capacity, and conducted thorough research on radioactive and nonradioactive contamination brought about by the War, a push for long-term, comprehensive decontamination grew. In 9 PM, the Common Council formed the Federal Office for Decontamination and Environmental Remediation. Two years later, it was reorganized as the Federal Decontamination Service.

Surviving waste disposal professionals were actively recruited to lead the effort, and following the end of the war between Uniguita and Hegelion in 15, those conscripted into the federal service were given the option between serving in the Federal Army and joining the FDS. President Lionel Valdes (16 - 19 PM) called the Army and the FDS, “the only two forces capable of taking on our generation’s two twin ails – despoilment and imperialism.”

Future President Giovanni Cheffra briefly served as a “decon man” – so named due to an early prohibition on the service of women – in the late 10s. “I figured it would be safer than fighting backcountry bandits,” he later told a biographer. “Plus, they offered a N101 weekly hazard bonus. What broke kid would turn that down?”

During the Valdes era, agricultural decontamination was prioritized. Agents of the FDS tested soil, crops, and water sources throughout the Federation for radiological contaminants, and the decon men used anything from bulldozers to tractors to even spades to either turn over or outright remove soil that was deemed to be contaminated. Particularly contaminated so-called “hotspots” saw their inhabitants removed (by force if necessary) and the lands excluded from human habitation. Some of these places were eventually reinhabited while others were converted into conservation areas, including Borden National Park in North Hegelion, Kilkenny National Park in Kilmartin, and Tierra de los Mil Brazos National Park in West Ferria.

Decontamination was also used to achieve political ends. While Hegelion remained an unincorporated territory of Uniguita prior to 21 PM, the FDS declared otherwise healthy land as being contaminated so that it could more easily be confiscated and converted into collectivized agricultural uses. Reporting from the Universalo in 19 PM revealed that the scheme had not only led to the waste of FDS resources, but also to continued famine in Hegelion as a result of the inefficiencies of the collectivization program. That the Valdes government was claiming the collectivization program had been successful, that there was no famine in Hegelion, and that the collectivization program should in fact be expanded to the rest of Uniguita proved a major embarrassment to the government and ultimately led to its collapse in 19 PM. Tarnished by association with the scandal, the FDS faced increased scrutiny.

In addition to its part in the failed collectivization scheme, the FDS faced increasing criticism over its single-minded focus on radiation. Though federal and independent researchers had repeatedly told the FDS that non-radioactive industrial and sanitary waste should be the primary focus on decontamination, radiation was far more politically salient. Josí Ferraro, Valdes’ chief of the FDS, allegedly told one of his deputies that, “the slums were polluted before and they’re polluted now. Who gives a shit?”

After Valdes left office in 19 PM, crises that otherwise would have been tightly controlled exploded onto the front pages. A week after Valdes’ departure, leaked documents revealed that FDS staff knew that the groundwater of the recently resettled city of Port Hickham was severely polluted with ammonia, lead, cadmium, chromium, and “a number of highly noxious and hazardous petroleum byproducts.” News outlets began openly reporting on regular fires and disease outbreaks caused by the countless chemicals released by the War’s damage. They also began uncovering instances of nepotism and political cronyism endemic throughout the FDS, with Valdes’ friends and family, as well as unqualified members of his wing of the Communalist Party being given important positions within the organization.

To learn more about political cronyism in the federal civil service, read the following article about the Federal Courier and Communications Service.

After the 20 PM elections, a coalition led by Viktoria Kaplo, whose reformist wing secured control of the Communalist Party after Valdes’ departure, and supported by the Liberals, promised reform of the federal government and the FDS in particular. Political lackeys were sacked in favor of qualified professionals, and one of the few qualified officials in the Valdes-era FDS was made its chief administrator. Antonio Dioguardi, who had worked as a wastewater remediation manager before the War, had floated around various settlements following the War prior to joining the FDS in 11 PM. He worked his way up the ladder, eventually securing a position as a section head in 16 PM, just before Valdes became president. He languished in middle management for the next several years before being tapped for the top job just days after Kaplo’s inauguration.

Dioguardi shifted the FDS’ efforts towards urban decontamination and called for tens of thousands more workers to aid in the effort. In testimony before the Common Council, Dioguardi called urban decontamination “among the most monumental undertakings in human history, second only to the general reconstruction.” Meanwhile, the first research on the long-term health consequences of decontamination work was being conducted and released. “Cancer and disorders of the nervous system are significantly elevated among decontamination personnel,” read one study from the University of Nova Espero. Another estimated the life expectancy for front-line decontamination personnel – especially those deployed for industrial cleanup – was just 47 years, compared to 65 for the general population.

In response to the ongoing contamination crisis and these studies, Kaplo’s administration crafted the Decontamination Administration Act in 21 PM. The act would not only overhaul the FDS administratively, but also dedicate more funding towards personal protective equipment, officially re-orient the agency towards industrial decontamination, and end the ban on women in service. It also guaranteed lifelong advanced, untriaged medical care to FDS frontline workers who had served in that capacity for more than one year, and comfortable accommodations for FDS employees upon their retirement.

Like many Kaplo-era programs, the DAA was generous, broad, and wildly expensive. While the bill helped dramatically increase enrollment in the FDS, tens of thousands of frontline workers who had previously served were now seeking access to benefits. The statute was written in such a way that 26-year-olds who had been in the FDS for two years were now able to live their lives in comparative luxury at newly-built rest homes. Throughout the 20s, dozens of these rest homes were built throughout the country, featuring amenities like saunas and swimming pools. Due to the stigma surrounding radiation and irradiated individuals, these homes were typically built in secluded environments that were also host to hiking trails, scenic vistas, and air far fresher than in the polluted, still war-torn urban centers. Built at the peak of this building boom in 25 PM, Iparaguirre Rest Home offered a quiet refuge for up to three-hundred retirees as well as specialized cancer treatment facilities.

By the end of the Kaplo administration, the costs of the DAA (and her administration’s other programs) had chewed away at the government’s dwindling gold reserves. In order to continue funding her government’s generous social spending, the Federal Credit Union began printing more notes which triggered an inflation crisis in the late 20s. In response, the electorate threw out the Communalists in favor of the more austere Liberals. President-elect Karlo Plagad promised to “economize the Federation,” and bring federal spending to heel.

In 30 PM, his administration restricted DAA benefits to only those who had 1) served in “particularly hazardous roles” while serving in the FDS, and 2) had either reached the age of 45 or faced disability or severe illness as a result of their duties. This dramatically cut the number of rest home inhabitants from a peak of more than 30,000 in 29 PM to less than 8,000 five years later. Most of the federal rest homes, many of them less than a decade old and sumptuously accommodated, were sold off to hoteliers to serve an upper middle class that grew under the Liberals’ policies.

At the same time, Plagad continued the FDS’ pollution remediation work, though with fewer resources and increased outsourcing to growing private enterprises. One of ipa’s most famous residents was Carl ter Voord, who served in the FDS from 31 to 34 and whose best-selling book on his experiences in the FDS The Canaries described the dangers of Plagad-era decontamination.

“When the mill workers abandoned the small paper milling village of Moresby amid famine and the onslaught of rogue warlords, every conceivable chemical concoction bled into the ground and the atmosphere from blasted tanks and poorly contained waste disposal sites. While fallout flew, dioxins dug deep into the soil and required endless weeks of grueling work with shovels and backhoes to remove. The slipshod gloves and overalls they gave us rotted as we worked, and the day’s end revealed our boots to be filled with sludge peppered with mercury, zinc, nickel, and lead. The smells of ammonia and bleach scarred our mouths and lungs, with the cloth masks – much more inexpensive than the properly filtered ones, you see – providing little protection. The foremen told us to ignore the pervasive stench of chemicals and rot, and gladly informed us that the flushing of our skin and our unceasing coughs were just the expected byproducts of the work at hand.”

Ter Voord entered Iparaguirre at the age of 29 in 37 PM as a result of a severe nervous system disorder that gave him frequent seizures and twice put him in a coma. He would die a few short years later at the age of 31, just months after The Canaries went to print.

Despite the continued need for environmental remediation, President Enrico Carmelo announced a wind-down of the FDS’ work beginning in 46 PM. In a triumphant speech to the Common Council, he said, “the war of yesterday is over – let us move on to more pressing issues, and greater threats.” Meanwhile, Carmelo’s first FDS administrator Henrietta Afonso had said in 41 PM that cleanup would take “a century or more, optimistically.” It didn’t matter to Carmelo, however. He dismissed Afonso and re-dedicated much of the dwindling FDS’ budget towards fighting perceived threats of organized crime, exaggerated reports of which he later used as a pretext for his attempted coup in 47 PM.

Even after Carmelo’s downfall, however, the appetite for continued decontamination had waned. The FDS’ work was confined to limited operations addressing smaller, contained sites of particularly acute need. After President Erika Lankolay took office in 48 PM, the FDS briefly saw a surge in funding for improved protective equipment and remediation machinery, likely expanding the lifespan of decon men by decades.

Nevertheless, the appetite for broad-scale decontamination had largely dissipated. In 51 PM, the Lankolay Administration quietly shuttered the FDS, shifting decontamination work to smaller operations within the Federal Radiological Institute and the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). In retrospect, the end of the FDS was as premature as Henrietta Afonso had feared. Acute pollution incidents, such as the radiological poisoning in Término, continued to affect the country, as did chronic ones. As Lankolay’s administration worked to further build out the nation’s infrastructure, workers digging out ruts for subways, sewers, and utility lines were continuously exposed to the hazards buried by decades of neglect and the forgotten aftermath of the War. In a 120 PM study, scientists from the DEQ and the University of Nova Espero estimated that the cumulative effects of unaddressed pollutants brought about by the War have shaved two years off the Uniguitan life expectancy.

Though cases like those of Carl ter Voord weren’t especially uncommon, they weren’t the norm either. Most of those who received critical exposure to toxins radiological or otherwise experienced health issues later in life than the young author. Decon men, many of whom were in their young adulthood when decontamination work peaked in the 20s and 30s began to experience early onset disabilities in the 40s and 50s. As the number of Federal Decontamination Service employees drew down in the late 40s, the number of rest home entrants rose sharply. In 40 PM, there were a little over 8,000 rest home residents nationwide. Ten years later, that number had increased to more than 45,000. Shuttered rest homes that had gone unsold were reopened. By the mid 50s – when the median former FDS worker was in their 40s – more than 80,000 decon men had developed illnesses or disabilities severe enough to guarantee them access.

Dr. Ramsay Portenoy, the chief medical officer within the quickly expanding Decontamination Worker Health Administration (DWHA) explained his assessment of the wave of new entrants before a Common Council committee in 56 PM.

“These are men and women in early middle age who should be guiding their children through early adulthood, but are instead struck down by advanced, degenerative illnesses. These people have been rendered invalid by a truly astounding number of cancers, sicknesses of the mind, ulcerative illnesses, and renal diseases not seen in patients twenty years their senior. These people have been thoroughly and irrevocably poisoned as a result of their oftentimes brief work in their service of post-War cleanup.”

While the primary focus of outsiders was, again, on radiological exposure, Portenoy estimated that some 80% of rest home residents had never even encountered radiation.

“These people were in many cases, not put in their current state by glowing particles,” he said. “They were more often than not immobilized by burning methane and coal ash.”

As degenerative disease and cancer tore through former FDS workers, their weakened immune systems left them especially vulnerable to infectious disease. Frequent outbreaks of influenza and tuberculosis left thousands of rest home residents dead or permanently weakened. Rest homes served as metaphors for the lingering effects of the War in poetry, literature, and film. Director Tom McCaulin’s Always Dreaming (69 PM) portrays the life of a young man who volunteers for the FDS in the 30s in the hopes of putting the horrors of the War and the damage it wrought behind him and his country. After his service, he discovers that he was exposed to chemicals that can lead to early onset dementia. He soon enters a rest home, where he slowly begins to forget his early life and the hopes for his future that had been snatched away by his illness.

By 100 PM, disease and age had taken the lives of the vast majority of the rest homes’ residents. Of the nearly 250 homes that had been open in 70 PM, only ten remained by 100 PM. Today, only Iparaguirre remains. Those who reside here now were all FDS employees during its waning years, when the hazards were less acute and protection more advanced and plentiful.

Before I leave the ipa, I meet the 98-year-old Ren Armitage for a game of pinochle at one of the home’s many vacant outdoor tables. Armitage joined the FDS in 46 PM at the age of 18, and was sent to help clean out an abandoned coking plant in Zoldhegyek’s steel belt. She spent six months cleaning out tar sludge and coke ash from the plant before being transferred to the dismemberment of an abandoned wastewater treatment facility near Port Williams.

Two weeks ago, Armitage was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer which her doctor ascribes more to her pack-a-day smoking habit rather than her previous decon work. But Armitage still bears scars from her work – like Carl ter Voord, she has suffered for years from neurological illness and seizures, and has watched countless friends waste away at places like the ipa for decades. And because of dioxin exposure, Armitage was rendered infertile. She and her husband Lawrence, who passed away last fall, never had children.

“I’m all that I have left, really,” she tells me, sadly. Looking up from the cards, her graying eyes peer over the grassy lawn leading to the ocean. Over the cliff’s edge, I can still hear the waves ceaselessly slamming against the promontory wall.

“I know a lot of people like that,” she says, before going back to the cards.

TÉRMINO, C.G. – DEKA 10, 126 PM

Outside the Término Football Club’s stadium on the edge of town, the team’s supporters are ecstatic. A quarterfinal match between Término and their rival Vale Alegre is all that stands between them and the semifinals – a threshold the team has never crossed.

Entering the concrete oval among the red- and blue-clad locals, I find my seat in the southern bleachers. Raucous cheers erupt from the crowd as the team emerges from the tunnel connected to its locker room. The players, many of whom are from the area, are beloved hometown heroes. This season started off slow but has turned into an unexpected thunder run for the otherwise longtime underdog. A few days ago they defeated Santo Jorge, another perennial rival that had beaten them in four of their five previous matches.

As the afternoon fades, the evening light sheds an amber glow on the sharp, verdant mountain peaks behind the northern stands. Between the stands and the mountain peaks, however, lies a latent danger beneath several thousand tons of rocks, dirt, and leaves.

Sandwiched in the thin sliver of flat land between the steep cliffs of the Coluna Mountains and the bay from which it derives its name, Baía de Caranguejos shares a curious distinction with Eaton, North Hegelion. The two were the only Western cities with populations greater than 200,000 to survive the War unscathed, at least in terms of direct, nuclear impact. On Deka 28, 1766 O.S., neither city’s residents faced vaporization, nor heat blasts, broken glass, or firestorms.

While on a backcountry expedition through the Ele Mountains in 89 PM, wilderness explorer Michael Norfolk discovered the shattered remains of the missile that is believed to have been intended to strike Eaton. Federal authorities closed the mountainside to tourists and evacuated the nearby valley. It was feared that, were the conventional explosives around the warhead to detonate during removal, the subsequent explosion would result in a potentially deadly plume of radioactive material.

Thankfully, the warhead was removed without incident and deactivated. Parts of it have been sent to museums across the country, and the exterior casing of the one-megaton bomb currently sits atop a memorial plinth in a secluded part of the otherwise bustling Eaton Central Green.

The situation for Baía de Caranguejos is slightly different, in that the bomb is still very much present, just buried deep underground.

In the opening minutes of the Milito, it is believed that a one-megaton warhead atop a missile was launched from a submarine off the coast of Cabo Grande. The missile, destined for the valuable port and urban center of Baía, ended up crashing first into a mountaintop and then into a flat area down below around twenty-five miles southeast of the city. The bomb didn’t detonate, but it crashed into the ground with such force that the residents of the nearby village of Término thought there may have been an earthquake.

As the Duke of Cabo Grande attempted to reassert control over his domain amid the communications blackout and overall chaos in the aftermath of the War, he heard about the bomb in Término. He said that it was proof from God that Cabo Grande – and more specifically, his sovereignty over it – was meant to continue. This supposed mandate from heaven (as well as the troop of soldiers under his command) helped shore up the Duke’s rule for a short while longer.

Despite the providential explanation of the bomb’s failed mission, grace was not the only thing to fall upon the people of Término. Unlike the Eaton missile, the bomb near Término did partially explode. Though far from the devastation that would have resulted from a nuclear detonation, the one-hundred pounds of conventional explosives wrapped around the warhead did go off when the bomb struck the earth at nearly three-hundred miles per hour. The explosion itself was not especially dramatic, aside from the forty-foot diameter crater it blew into the soil. But it did launch much of the warhead’s radioactive material into the air, and the winds that day carried it over Término and its neighborhoods, parks, and fields. In the years following the War, children played in school playgrounds, adults harvested fruits and vegetables from their gardens, and regular rains washed contaminated soil down from the nearby cliffside into the town below.

After the left-wing Revolução Popular overthrew the Duke in 5 PM, they heard rumblings of illness coming from Término. When doctors were dispatched to the area, they found alarming rates of cancer and stories of otherwise healthy adults from healthy families dropping dead at young ages. Dr. Sérgio Marinho, in his report on the area to his superiors in Baía, wrote that, “the incidence of childhood leukemia is some fifty times the rate in the rest of the republic… the incidence of adult leukemia, twenty times.”

The government, lacking the equipment or expertise to clean up the area, evacuated it entirely. Leila Morais, the Deputy Premier for Health and the Environment called the situation in Término the consequence of “royalist foolishness and idiotic superstition.” Soldiers erected a chainlink fence across the sole road into the community and barred all unnecessary entry.

Thirty-five years passed and the community of Término and its War-era relic went untouched. By the early 40s Cabo Grande had erupted into civil war, and with support from the right-wing governments of Uniguita and the then-independent Vetludo, the Conselho de Salvação Nacional – or, the “Conselho” for short – emerged victorious in 42 PM. The Conselho’s head, General Jorge Oliveira, wanted to bring international investment to build up his newly won state.

Following the fall of Baía de Caranguejos, Oliveira’s men discovered pre-War geologic records indicating significant supplies of oil and platinum in and around Término. The left-wing government had seen the same records, but was uninterested in exploiting the resources. The autarky-minded governing council saw petroleum as a low priority given the plentiful supply of coal closer to the republic’s core, and platinum was of little use to a regime that romanticized the rural peasant over the urban metalworker.

Oliveira, by contrast, saw an opportunity. Increasing international trade and need for fertilizer meant increased demand for oil, and increased mechanization and electronics production meant increased demand for platinum. To help encourage private investors and their workers to return to Término, Oliveira staged a dramatic publicity stunt. Standing in front of the vine-covered fence constructed by the previous regime, Oliveira chastised his predecessors for “squandering our great nation’s endless splendor.” He then hopped into a nearby idling truck and rammed it through the fence’s gate. The road leading up to Término had been buried under the weight of resurgent rainforest and it took him, his troops, the small press corps, and a handful of would-be investors nearly forty-five minutes to reach the old townsite. It too had been buried under a sea of green, but Oliveira promised investors, “profits twenty times the cost of all the weedwhacking.”

For his finale, General Oliveira drove to the northern edge of town, the closest reachable spot to the bomb’s crater. Standing without a mask or any other personal protection in front of the growing forest behind him, he said confidently, “look and see! Nature is cleaning up the past. There is no need to fear this region of bounty.”

In reality, according to longtime aide Alvaro Domingues, Oliveira was deathly afraid. “The general has been taking copious amounts of [radiation prophylactic] iodine tablets, to the point where his doctors are worried,” wrote Domingues in his journal the night before the Término visit. In the weeks that followed, Domingues wrote of Oliveira’s “frequent, illness-related nightmares,” and that, “in the general’s eyes, the mole he had since childhood was suddenly cancerous, and every nosebleed caused by the seasonal dry air was a sign of his inevitable demise.”

Ultimately, General Oliveira’s dreams of private foreign interest in the region were a bust. When the regime refused to allow independent analyses of radiation in the area, Uniguitan and Madawban petrochemical and mining companies recoiled in suspicion. The only companies to enter the fray in earnest were those owned by the Cabograndense government, the National Metal Corporation and PetroCabo. Drawn by promises of cheap, brand-new housing and high pay, the two state-owned firms had no problem attracting workers.

When yet another revolution saw General Oliveira and the Conselho thrown out of power in 56 PM, the newly democratic Cabo Grande soon applied for accession to the Federation. Shortly after Cabo Grande joined, a small team of scientists from the Federal Radiological Institute visited Término to study the long-term effects of the fissile material lodged in the ground nearby.

What they found was unnerving. In their eventual report, they said that while the demolition and reconstruction of Término during the Oliveira regime had made it so the town itself was not dangerously radioactive, the groundwater was severely polluted. Término was downslope from the bomb impact site, meaning that any uranium or plutonium isotopes that leaked from the warhead were carried down by gravity into the town’s drinking water. “Término’s water supply contains roughly 500 times the background level of certain radioactive materials,” wrote scientist Leroy Welk in his analysis.

“To drink the water is to commit suicide in the slowest, most painful possible way.”

Medical records and statistics for the area, which had been carefully altered under the Conselho, obscured continued health risks. “Cancer rates, contrary to regime statistics, are significantly elevated here as a result of the contaminated groundwater,” Welk reported.

President Erika Lankolay’s government responded with a massive cleanup and remediation operation. Tap water was immediately cut off and replaced with the arrival of gigantic water trucks a dozen times each day. Bulldozers arrived and cleared the multiple acres of forest and topsoil immediately surrounding the crater, carrying them off to be disposed of at sites in Uniguita’s deserts. Engineers designed and constructed massive rain-fed cisterns on the Coluna Mountains immediately above the town, which would be removed from the dangers of radioactive contamination. A first-of-its-kind water distribution system saw pipes built above houses and commercial buildings rather than below them. Ventilation systems were installed in the platinum mines to filter in clean air, and Término’s parks were ripped up, overturned, and replenished with new soil.

Roger Ferenc, the project’s supervisor, called it, “the most massive and comprehensive nuclear remediation project” he had ever seen.

Military ordnance disposal teams were unsuccessful in their attempts to retrieve the remaining radioactive material buried deep in the bomb’s original crater. With the new drinking water system and a townwide ban on “unnecessary digging,” authorities felt comfortable declaring the issue resolved.

Despite assurances that Término is safe, federal authorities still kept a tight leash on development north of town. For decades, yet another chainlink fence stood alongside Divisa Street with warnings from the federal Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) against trespassing. By the 90s, scientists studying the area reported that, “so long as no one is drinking the groundwater or eating the dirt, they should be okay.” The especially cautious DEQ interpreted this to mean no industrial or housing construction north of Divisa Street.

Término, starved for space, was able to reach a compromise with the federal government to place one permanent structure north of the boundary: a new home for the Término Football Club.

After years of haggling, additional remediation, and a prolonged construction process, Término F.C. opened its brand-new stadium in 103 PM. The team’s players (nicknamed the bombas) have played in the stadium (nicknamed the cratera) for more than two decades.

Tonight, the air in the cratera is cool but energized. In this town of roughly 11,000 inhabitants, not a single spot in the six-thousand-seat stadium is empty. During the lulls early in the game, I talk to some of the locals crammed into the seats around me.

Paola Carvalho has the difficult distinction of being an environmental advocate in Término. She tells me that she’s not particularly concerned about the one-megaton warhead still lodged in the nearby jungle.

“Honestly, I hardly think of it,” she tells me. “Between the oil derricks and the mine, the bomb is the least of my worries.”

“Our water comes from above, so the radiation shouldn’t affect us that much. It’s like an x-ray amount, if that,” she says. “I’m more concerned about the fumes from the refinery and all those nasty chemicals they use to clear away dirt in the mines.”

João Ramos, one of the thousands in the community employed in the oil industry, sees the bomb as a sort of quirky local mascot. To him, it’s more of a fun fact for visiting relatives than anything to be afraid of.

“We say, ‘oh you know there’s a nuke up the road right? Like right next to the stadium?’” he laughs. “You should see the way their eyes bug out, it’s hilarious.”

Some find the situation a bit more macabre. Though elevated cancer and chronic disease rates in Término are now more attributable to extractive industries than to radiation, memories of the past still linger. Esther Pereira, now 87, was born and raised in the town. Her parents, her older sister, and her uncle all died prematurely as a result of cancers she blames on the area’s radioactive soil.

“I believe that God let me live so that I can carry on the legacy of the past,” she told me in her sparsely decorated living room. Compared to the rest of Cabo Grande, Término has one of the smallest populations of individuals over the age of 65. Health analysts chalk this up to cancers caused by irradiated drinking water consumed prior to the Lankolay-era cleanup in the late 50s. Esther is part of a small clique of “village elders” as she calls them, who remember when parents chastised their children for playing in contaminated streams, or who drank bottled water for the rest of their lives despite assurances from DEQ officials that the new, higher-altitude cisterns were perfectly safe.

“The people who think of the bomb as being some sort of novelty don’t know their history,” she said. “They don’t know how much pain it caused.”

As the game reaches the end, rookie player Paulo Gomes slides towards the ball, his cleats ripping into the turf. After doing the research for this piece, part of me cringes – did he just unearth something? I feel this way even though recent analysis from the DEQ confirms what Paola said earlier – current ambient radiation levels in Término are, as one official put it, “equivalent to being in a doctor’s waiting room.”

My anxiety is suddenly overcome by pure adrenaline. Gomes makes contact with the ball, sending it into the net.

The cratera explodes with excitement. For the first time, the bombas will be advancing to Cabo Grande’s semifinals. Throngs of fans flood the streets as enterprising individuals sell glowsticks for N0.25.1 Meant to emulate phosphorescent rods of uranium, they have become a popular talisman for the team’s supporters.

As the shouting, screaming mass of jubilant fans jump and wave their arms, they sing their team’s song. Roughly translated, it means:

Don’t touch us!

Don’t touch us!

Don’t touch us, or you’ll burn!

SOUTHWARK, N.H. – DEKA 4, 126 PM

The air was stuffy in the cramped, pre-War auditorium on Port Williams’ east side when Dr. Oliver Proxmire took the stage on a chilly winter evening in 21 PM. Dr. Proxmire was a visiting historian, touring the country preaching his gospel about the events leading up to the Milito and the world that had been lost. His views were unorthodox – he openly mocked the accepted historical narrative that the War had been most acutely caused by a mis-identified radar report on the eastern frontier. He believed that it was an innate lack of restraint on the part of Ylrikians that ultimately led to catastrophe, and that it was indeed the eastern empire that had fired first.

Whereas common history had diagnosed the top-down military hierarchy and over-emphasis on offensive weapons versus defensive monitoring as the primary drivers of the Hegelio-Ferrian Empire’s jumpstarting of the apocalypse, Dr. Proxmire’s hypothesis meant that no such critical self-analysis was necessary. With the blood of billions cleansed from the Empire’s hands – after all, who wouldn’t retaliate such a barbarous action as a nuclear first strike? – one could focus on the good, or at the very least, a cheery facsimile of the good. People were better fed under the Empire, better clothed, and were not subjected to the moral scourges of so-called “redistributive justice,” “land reform,” and “workplace democracy.” The economy boomed, Proximire claimed, and men of merit were able to rise to the top in the old Empire.

Questions from the audience in the fiercely revolutionary, republican Port Williams were predictably hostile. What answer did Proxmire’s musings have to the higher childhood and maternal mortality rates under the Crown? What answer did he have regarding the hunger and poverty experienced by many in this supposed orderly, pre-apocalyptic utopia?

Towards the end of Dr. Proxmire’s remarks, a man yelled, “all you peddle is nostalgia, Doctor! You have no facts on your side, only nostalgia!”

“Well, my dear fellow,” Proxmire responded, shouting into the darkened auditorium. “If love of country, if love of Church, if love of order and certainty can be reduced to nostalgia, then you shall find that in all of us lives a hungry and wistful nostalgic.”

Proxmire’s “nostalgicism” became a critical component of the growing Conservative movement throughout the 20s and 30s. Men like Lionel Upchurch, an influential leader in the New Hegelion movement which sought to colonize the far north across the Great Inland Sea as a Hegelionic ethnostate, were early adopters of the nostalgicist creed. They decried what they called cosmopolitan intellectuals for consistently tarnishing the pre-War Empire as a morally bankrupt polity incapable of redemption.

For more on New Hegelion and the eventual Civil War, read my ongoing series on Phillip Gladstone, the president during the Uniguitan Civil War.

Others, like Enrico Carmelo, found a base in the socially conservative working class wards of places like the reindustrializing Western Seaboard and southern Golden Coast. Using War-era antipathies, memories of the nuclear inferno, and the threat of competition from immigrants from the East, Carmelo weaponized nostalgia to stoke racial tension and bring previously Communalist workingmen into the Conservative fold. When he eventually became president in 40 PM, Carmelo prioritized “Great Capital Projects” which included depictions of Uniguitan (and Hegelio-Ferrian) history in the form of monuments, murals, and sculptures. Walls in rural schools were painted to depict rural, pre-radiation agricultural bounty, and in urban schools to memorialize the grandeur of pre-War Imperial architecture. The National Milito Memorial, intended to be a politically secular monument to the War, was transformed into a memorial of Ylrikian violence.

When Carmelo fell in 47 PM after an ill-fated self-coup attempt, “nostalgicism” became something extremely distasteful. It was considered a vulgar relic of a different time. It persisted in a dramatically reduced form in the Security and Justice Party until it was banned in 92 PM, and in a powerful though minority ultraright faction within the Conservative Party. In 88 PM, the immensely charismatic right-winger Howard Sanck captured 47% of the vote in the Conservative Party presidential primary. Ultimately, the most hardline adherents of nostalgicism helped lead the nation into civil war in the 90s through their breakaway ethnically homogenous New Hegelion. As a result of the civil war, nostalgicism once again was confined to the ideological fringe.

At least, temporarily.

At a ballfield in Southwark, a tony suburb a few miles outside of Eaton, Conservative Councilor William Updyke riles up the assembled crowd. At the center of an arrangement of bleachers, the bespectacled 45-year-old archconservative leader of the party’s ‘Patriots’ faction tells a familiar story of woe.

“For decades now, the elites in Nova Espero have been building a Federation that works for other people, not for you,” he tells the crowd to hoots and cheers. “They’ve opened our borders so that people from other countries can come in and take your jobs, take your housing, and take your kids’ place in their school.”

“And in those schools,” he continues, “they tell your children that to be Western is to make war, enslave, and destroy. And I don’t know about you, but I know those to be lies, damned lies, and slander, in that order.”

In 116 PM, then-freshman Councilor Updyke helped found the Patriots faction alongside a dozen or so other conservative lawmakers. Their manifesto decried Conservative leadership at the national and commonwealth level for, “failing to protect our national customs and culture,” and “no longer being the vanguard of our national character.” In 117 PM, Updyke faced rebukes from co-partisans and even a censure from the Conservative Central Committee for saying that relations between Uniguita and New Hegelion should be normalized.

Less than a decade later, the Patriots now make up a little over a quarter of the Conservative delegation in Nova Espero, and have even gained control in a number of commonwealths such as Zoldhegyek. The Patriots’ growing influence has resulted in anywhere from a quarter to over half of the Conservatives’ electoral list in some commonwealths being composed of far-right candidates. At the Southwark rally, enthusiastic, smiling volunteers hand out sample ballots with Patriot endorsees helpfully marked, as Updyke quotes misleading statistics that Central Mountain immigrants to the Federation are ten times more likely to commit a crime than their non-immigrant counterparts. In fact, according to the 125 PM Year in Crime Survey from the Gendarmes, such immigrant Uniguitans were less likely to commit a crime than their native-born neighbors.

William Updyke’s version of nostalgia is one that is generally unfamiliar to the Uniguitan political scene. Whereas Carmelo’s aped the Empire, New Hegelion’s aped even earlier, more racialized constructions of ‘Hegelionism’, Updyke’s is more modern. Updyke still attempts to whitewash the history of the Empire and some of his lieutenants have caught flak for making private remarks supporting New Hegelion, but he views with particularly rose-tinted glasses the period between the War and the rise of the left-wing presidencies of Valdes and Kaplo in the late 10s and 20s. In a recent interview with the right-wing magazine News Source, Updyke spoke poetically of the, “small towns and villages that weathered the flames together and were forged into a stronger alloy than was ever possible in peacetime.”

This sort of romantic, immediate post-War narrative generally focuses on places like Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, where liberal and left-wing radicals created democratic, republican settlements based on mutual cooperation and equality. President Viktoria Kaplo, a hero to the modern left, spoke in her inaugural address of, “ashen, war-bedraggled peoples emerging from the rubble of a dead Empire to rebuild not in that Empire’s image, but in the image of their dreams, their hopes, and their aspirations.”

But Updyke’s “stronger alloy” communities were of a different character than Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, and to him, that is a crucial distinction. At a rally in Zoldhegyek to support then-candidate Laszlo Barcza’s bid for that commonwealth’s premiership last year, he sang the praises of the, “tiny villages and hamlets, united in their faith, in their families, and in their communities who used their traditions to navigate the apocalypse. It is to these brave and noble people we owe our survival. Without them, Western civilization would have no doubt collapsed.” He compared them positively to places like Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, saying that, “communities that were the result of shared values, tradition, and heritage were stronger than those born out of artificial ideas and ideology.”

“Too much credit is given to the cities,” he continued. “While they were debating and philosophizing, we were rebuilding our country from the ground up.”

On first glance, the two stories of early post-War Uniguita might sound similar. Both are stories of community and perseverance through extraordinary adversity. But while Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, and other similar republican settlements throughout the country were founded (or at least reconstituted) on the ideals of liberty and freedom, the places Updyke talks about overwhelmingly were not.

Most maintained the pre-War systems of borderline feudal agricultural practices with the local nobility and churchmen still at the top of the area hierarchy. Port Williams College historian Dr. Richard Carlsbad, who specializes in Collapse-era history, said that rural areas were oftentimes, “rump states of the Empire in miniature; they acted as though the War had not happened, aside from the disease outbreaks, supply shortages, refugees, and crop failures. They kept the same institutions, same social mores, and same structures.” These “pre-republican” areas had lower literacy rates, higher childhood and maternal mortality rates, and more stagnant economies than their republican counterparts.

Additionally, such places were more prone to a xenophobic outlook on the post-War world where the dreaded outside world lay not at the border with Ylrikia but within the viewing range of the village churchtower. Old ethnic hatreds, subdued but not eliminated under the watchful eye of the Emperor, boiled over into outright conflict. In the borderlands between Zoldhegyek and Pravo, for example, ethnic Zolds used the post-War chaos as a pretext to commit pogroms against Pravish neighbors. Similar circumstances befell small communities across the former Empire, with minorities – particularly the small community of ethnic Ylrikians – scapegoated and castigated for the War.

To read more about Pravo’s post-War and current experiences, read the following article on the Pravo Self Defense Forces.

Discussing the early years of the post-War period and citing the resilience of that “Survivor Generation” is a nostalgia all Uniguitans are vulnerable to. Updyke’s nostalgia for his particular context is novel and convenient, however. He can lionize the monocultural state of the great multitude of post-War villages that dotted the landscape and tap into that nostalgia to support his anti-immigrant rhetoric without resorting to naked, racial vulgarities that left members of the old SJP as ostracized dinosaurs.

Back in Unuo, I cited polls that found hard-right Conservatives like Premier Barcza and Councilor Updyke had the support of one in four members of their party. More recent polling conducted in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections shows that their support has risen to one in three within the party that is heavily favored to form the next Common Council majority.

Around a decade ago, Updyke and his acolytes were still a fringe faction within a right-leaning party that had been out of power for twenty years. Now, they are a force to be reckoned with. Nostalgia is returning to Uniguita. Unless we want its consequences to repeat themselves, we would do well to keep an eye on it.

This is the third part in a multi-part retrospective on the life and political career of former President Phillip Gladstone (43 PM - 126 PM).

NOVA ESPERO CITY - NAU 24, 126 PM

“Hello, good morning everyone,” began the Chief of the Federal Common Council Lincoln Reynolds at a press conference on Kvarto 6, 89 PM. “For two decades – two decades – we have seen what unaccountability in government gets us. It gets us corruption. It gets us runaway spending. It gets us mid-level bureaucrats earning three times the average wage, and projects going two, three, four times over budget.”

Chief Reynolds, an East Hegelion like the new president, was a government spending and corruption hawk. With some of the funding that the Conservative government was set to save by cancelling what he called “frivolous projects,” he wanted to embark on a new effort that would ostensibly open up the doors to government for all to see.

“In the war on corruption, we are announcing a new superweapon – the Federal Affairs Television Network.” Reynolds explained that this service would broadcast all meetings of the Common Council as well as public briefings from the executive and judiciary. Eventually launching on Unuo 1, 90 PM, the content would prove dry. Compared to the carefully curated dramatic speeches and confrontations during Council testimonies that had been beamed to television screens on ratings-driven news programs for decades, FATVN’s hourslong broadcasts of committee hearings and roll calls was far from riveting.

Even so, one man made the best of a network whose viewership otherwise would have consisted solely of bored journalists and policy wonks: Charles Belk.

New Hegelion news stations, most of which were aligned with Belk’s far-right Security and Justice Party, did not have the funding or resources to set up cameras to record sessions of Council. They often had to pay other news services for their footage, which rarely portrayed SJP councilors in the most favorable light. Not that those councilors helped themselves very much – they were prone to misinformed and polarizing outbursts. But the northern news services found it hard to edit the footage into anything usable.

Now, however, a federally-funded, nationally broadcast station would be recording all sessions, for free. Even sessions where the Council was open, but no votes were taking place. Councilors previously used these sessions as an opportunity to enter items into the Council Record, if for nothing else than to be able to tell their constituents that they had brought that particular topic up in session. These sessions – on Quartago1 at eight in the evening – could prove to be a primetime opportunity for a savvy propagandist.

Every week, without fail, Charles Belk signed up to speak during these sessions. He made sure to go to the Council clerk’s office first thing at the beginning of the week when signups opened so that he would be the first to speak. The northern news stations began assigning that timeslot to the Council session, where Belk would appear at precisely 8:05 (to allow the folks at home to be a little late themselves) to issue his latest diatribe to the hometown crowd, live and in color.

His topics of discussion were varied. One night, he might criticize the incumbent government’s budget, or the Department of Education’s new policy on school lunches, or the appointment of some judge or another. Regardless of the matter at hand, Belk could contort any topic as a confrontation between the godless, cosmopolitan South and the God-fearing, earnest North. In the past, Belk and his fellow SJP members portrayed their struggle as being against (typically) metropolitan Populists and urban Liberals. Now, Belk made the Conservatives, the “squishes in the fight against civilizational chaos,” as he once called them, the enemy.

“Once again, President Gladstone and the so-called ‘conservatives’ have betrayed their name and their country,” Belk said in the Sexto 13, 90 PM edition of his weekly address. “They say that they ‘conserve,’ that they respect the morals and traditions of our nation. And yet time and time again, as people of this ennobled and effete class usually do, they are yielding in the face of an atheistic and communalist mob.”

The focus of this particular diatribe was N5,3002 in funding for murals in Uniguitan primary schools. The murals, according to the funding statement, were “to depict scenes of the Federation’s beautiful and varied natural landscapes.” Belk saw the funding as not only overindulgent, but also portrayed the emphasis on natural settings as, “acquiescence to environmentalist radicals,” and that Federal funding should be used to “glorify [the] nation’s past, and honor its heritage,” rather than “trees, bugs, and rocks.”

The southern press lampooned Belk and his fellow SJP members as being fringe, increasingly politically irrelevant caricatures of northern conservatism. But in the north, Belk’s tirades were must-see TV and a manifestation of the region’s already-existing resentment towards the urbane south, progressive or conservative.

Soon, Belk would have ammunition to whip his constituents into a frenzy.

The Immigration Act of 91 PM

Back in 66 PM, the Conservatives and SJP in Council and Conservative President Fernando Pelar had achieved one of their coalition’s most significant accomplishments. For years, immigration had been a consistently animating force on the Uniguitan right; President Enrico Carmelo first gained national prominence in the mid 30s for venomously attacking immigrants in the name of protecting domestic labor. In 37 PM, he helped instigate the Trio Days, wherein members of the predominantly-Western Shipbuilders Union marched through Ylrikian and Crescent Islander neighborhoods in Port Williams, where they intimidated residents and instigated racial violence.

These events reflected a broader cultural animus against immigrants in Uniguitan society. Despite the deaths of over a half a dozen people and destruction of millions of notes worth of property, Carmelo and his fellow conservatives polling numbers increased following the riots. Throughout his presidency, Carmelo relied on the support of conservative-inclined blue collar workers who feared the effects of immigration on their wages and the changes in local culture that arose from their arrival. In 41 PM, Carmelo’s government passed the first of the Immigration Acts, which imposed draconian punishments for illegally migrating to the Federation and strict quotas on annual immigration. When the Populists took over in 48 PM, they changed very little about this immigration regime, fearful of rocking the boat on such a sensitive topic amidst their attempts to reform the federal system throughout the 50s.

In 66 PM, President Pelar signed into law a continuation of the first Immigration Act, with some additional restrictions meant to benefit the more racially conservative northern commonwealths. Individual commonwealths would be able to set their own unique immigration policies that could be stricter in the name of “maintaining existing cultural and demographic cohesion.” Prospective immigrants to New Hegelion would need to receive approval from New Hegelion authorities before arrival. Given the commonwealth’s view on immigration, this effectively meant that no new immigrants would need to be approved. In the eyes of the anti-immigration radicals within the SJP, this was a massive victory.

By the early 90s, the effects of this policy were evident. Even under a tightly controlled immigration environment nationwide, the percentage of “foreign-born” residents/citizens in New Hegelion was far lower than in other parts of the country. There were some years where no immigrants were admitted to New Hegelion, or only a handful would be for the completion of specialized engineering tasks in the commonwealth’s extraction industries far in the backcountry. Even then, such numbers rarely exceeded the double digits.

The early 90s also marked a markedly different context from the 60s, however. As Ylrikia liberalized in the 60s and 70s and the economic situation there improved, immigration pressure from the East dramatically reduced. Accelerated economic activity increased competition, but it also increased demand for Uniguitan manufactured goods, high-technology, natural resources, and services such as finance, banking, and the arts. Despite the steep recession in the late 80s, the period between the 60s and the 90s was generally one of widespread economic advancement. Emerging from the recession with force by late 89 PM, Uniguita in 91 PM found itself in a labor shortage. At the same time, the People’s and Liberal parties’ bases had become more progressive with regards to immigration reform, as had the increasingly business-minded Conservatives.

With that context, and relying not at all on the SJP for political support, the Conservative government presented a massive overhaul in its Immigration Act of 91 PM. Existing quotas would be relaxed or outright abolished. The immigration process itself, which previously required immigrants to remain in Uniguita for upwards of twenty years prior to naturalization, was to be dramatically simplified and streamlined. And, importantly, the commonwealth clearinghouse system for New Hegelion would be eliminated.

Belk and his fellow northern SJP members were outraged. On FATVN, he lambasted the act as “government-sponsored genocide,” saying that, “soon our schools and cities will be overrun with the children of other nations, all scrambling to scavenge off our remains.” New Hegelion premier George Baxley called the act “cultural poison,” and promised to “resist, by force if necessary, any attempt to settle unvetted individuals on our sovereign soil.” Some members of the commonwealth’s Common Council called for secession. Member Lyle Wright called the Immigration Act, “an act of war,” and said that, “sometimes, wars need fighting.”

Regardless, the act overwhelmingly passed without the support of a single member of the SJP. A hail mary case against the act, quixotically on civil rights grounds, initially succeeded at the hands of a sympathetic northern federal district court judge, but ultimately failed in the Constitutional Court.

As a final defense, Belk, Baxley, and their allies hoped that the well-known antipathy of the region’s residents towards outsiders would dissuade immigrants from coming north.

Far North Logging

New Hegelion was not immune from the economic pressures experienced by the rest of the country. The local economy, heavily reliant on resource-dependent industries like logging, fishing, and mineral extraction had been lagging behind the national economy. Many of New Hegelion’s young people, facing little prospects but timbering and fishing, fled to the more cosmopolitan and diversified job centers in the south. This sloughing of the region’s young people, in addition to the growing economy elsewhere, produced some increased demand for the north’s products, especially wood for home construction.

Finding little in the way of available local talent, the Far North Logging Company reached out to federal immigration authorities to facilitate immigration to the region. The Immigration Act offered expedited citizenship for those who were willing to work in “in-demand fields,” and northern timbering was far from being out of demand. Federal authorities arranged for 107 individuals – workers, their spouses, and their children – to arrive in New Hegelion.

The move was initially kept under wraps by the federal government, fearing hostility from northern officials and residents. In early Trio 91, however, Belk discovered the proposed move and vehemently opposed it in his weekly speech home.

“The federal government – without our consent – is forcing these untested, sick, and deprived people upon New Hegelion,” he said in his Trio 7 speech. “We will have to care for them, take them on as wards of our state, and we cannot even be assured that they will be intelligible to us. Do they speak our language? Will they honor our customs? It is doubtful that they will.”

This was shaping up to be a normal, if angrier than normal, speech by Charles Belk. But towards the end of the address, he became more existential.

“The south has been firing upon us for years, and this is yet another barrage against us in their continuing war of iniquity. I am calling on all good people in the north – in government or out – to resist by all means necessary this unconstitutional act of aggression on New Hegelion.”

Few but those in New Hegelion were watching these remarks. Within days, Belk had received tens of thousands of letters of support from his northern neighbors. “Give ‘em hell in Nova Espero, Chuck,” one said. “And we’ll give ‘em hell here.” “We’ll hang them from the lightposts if we have to,” said another.

Through his connections, Belk sent details of the immigrant movement back to Upchurch. Premier Baxley called up the commonwealth militia, ordering them to be on high alert. The Knights of St. Foster, a long-existing, far-right organization that had deep roots in the region, organized a citizen blockade at Upchurch’s port when the immigrants arrived.

Meanwhile, President Gladstone faced a choice: have the immigrants make their journey into a hostile region, or to back down.

‘God damn them’

Despite the upcoming onset of spring, the air was still crisp in the afternoon on Trio 15 when President Phillip Gladstone’s plane touched down in Pierron. Gladstone had always enjoyed these days most, when the skies were cool and clear, and it was as if the air was the cleanest it could possibly be. Each breath felt more refreshing than one taken in the heat of summer or the stifling cold of winter.

Sporting a thick, dark coat, the president walked down the stairs from the aircraft, greeting reporters as he stepped onto the tarmac.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

“Mr. President, have you made a decision on the Troubador yet?”

“No comment, Beck, you know that,” he told Rebecca Carlisle of the Universalo with an uneasy smile. He continued on to his car as a flurry of questions followed him. Later that week he told them that he had been resolute in his decision to send out the ship from the time the request had come to his desk weeks earlier. In the following years, however, his story changed. “Truthfully,” he told the Universalo in 112 PM, “I didn’t make up my mind until right before I stepped up to the podium later that night.”

The president was facing conflicting advice. Some advised that sending these 107 people to New Hegelion was a disaster waiting to happen. Others told him that to allow the north to openly flout the law was an irreconcilable error. Gladstone had indeed pre-emptively approved the shipment a month prior, but was beginning to have second thoughts. He received intelligence reports of informal militias setting up sniping roosts along the roadway leading to the region’s interior, and others of the more official commonwealth militia drumming up martial, existentialist rhetoric among their ranks. On TV every night, Belk and Baxley tag-teamed on calling the shipment of migrants, “a crime against not only the Constitution to which we agreed, but to nature itself.”

In the mid-afternoon, he met with the migrants who had agreed to go north. “They were a truly remarkable group of people, unparalleled in bravery I have to say,” Gladstone said in the 112 PM interview. Most had plentiful experience in timbering and forestry in the Central Mountains before increased Ylrikian repression in the region and economic decline had forced them out.

Shortly after meeting with the migrants, Gladstone held another private session with his closest advisors. After a brief discussion, he sat down alone with his wife, Anna. Gladstone told her of his bitter memories as premier, how he felt about the Clarendons, the Lacaise couple who had faced discrimination in East Hegelion and whom he had failed to properly protect. The two came to the conclusion that honoring these peoples’ civil rights was a necessity, but Gladstone demurred on whether or not it was in their best interest to send them onto hostile ground.

After some conversation and debate, the two came to a final conclusion. Of Belk and Baxley, Gladstone’s parting words were simple.

“God damn them,” he told Anna as he walked outside to a waiting press conference.

“My friends and neighbors,” Gladstone opened to the flash of cameras and the hushed group of reporters assembled.

“In the past few hours I have had conversations with some of the most courageous and outstanding people I have ever met in my life. These are people who traveled thousands of miles, many by foot, because they believe that they could find a better life here than back wherever they came from,” he continued.

“They knew what they would face. A language barrier. Cultural shock. Communities that could be less than patient, less than kind, less than hospitable. And yet, they came here anyway. They came with their families, their children, in the hopes that they would prosper better here under sunnier skies and under the aegis of freedom.” He cleared his throat. He described how they were bringing invaluable expertise and ingenuity to the region, and that their contributions would far outstrip any inconvenience or discomfort brought about by their arrival. He told the story of one migrant who had left his home village behind because the corrupt constabulary had repeatedly arrested him for not paying exorbitant “protection” fees. He told of another who hoped that her daughter would one day attend university.

“These people, with their hopes and dreams and aspirations are cut from the same cloth as each of us that call ourselves Uniguitan,” he said.

“And tomorrow, we will be sending them to New Hegelion to do what it is they want to do: work, prosper, and be a part of our community. When I ran for the presidency in 88, I did so with the idea that no individual should be above the law. I am throwing down the gauntlet here today, and saying that no commonwealth and no party is above the law. Thank you.”

He quickly left the podium, leaving behind a chorus of shouted questions and camera flashes.

Shortly before seven o’clock, Gladstone bid the migrants farewell as they boarded the Troubador, a large ferry that had been pressed into service for their transport. At 7:00 sharp, the crowds waved them on as the migrants – and their accompaniment of twenty armed members of the federal Gendarmerie – left the shores of Pierron behind. In a little under twelve hours, they would be at the docks of Upchurch.

In New Hegelion, meanwhile, protestors burned Gladstone in effigy and Premier Baxley said in a rally that, “under no uncertain terms will those people be allowed on our soil.” Among the crowds, members of the Knights of St. Foster spoke in hushed tones of secession. Bolder ones shouted into the wind. Red and white saltires waved vigorously amid curses of the south, of Gladstone, and increasingly, of the Federation itself.

The Troubador

The Troubador’s pilot, Adam Wilkes, remarked of the unseasonably calm waters of the Great Inland Sea the night between Trio 15 and 16. “At that time of year, the waning gales of the winter are usually still churning the waves,” the twenty-year veteran of the notoriously turbulent waters said days later. “But it was calm. Dead calm. It was as though our wake was shattering a massive plate of glass.”

As dawn approached on Trio 16, the Troubador approached the docks of Upchurch. Waiting were a handful of requisitioned buses and a complement of armed Gendarmes. Above them, however, were dozens of white-helmeted members of the New Hegelion Commonwealth Militia looking over the slip. Behind them were thousands of New Hegelion residents, still agitated from the night before and increasingly so from a procession of radical speakers in the chilled, late winter air.

Charles Belk, who had arrived early that morning, served as the headliner. He said that Trio 16 would mark a, “hinge in our national history, a great inflection point that will determine whether we are a sovereign people, or a subordinate people.”

“When that ship loaded with vermin and pestilence nears our shore there is no alternative. We must resist, resist, resist!” he barked into a microphone to the cheers of the crowd assembled.

On the slip, the Gendarmes waited anxiously. Outnumbered considerably by the militia and the crowd, they hoped that the threat of force from their equipment and federal prestige would dissuade any troublemakers. That today would be tense, but that Belk and his allies would make their stand, state their objections, and carry this as another act of resistance to color their pamphlets during the next election cycle.

There had been limited chatter of active resistance, but so far it seemed to the security officers that a passive stand was more likely. “There was no attempt by the Militia to block roadways leading away from the waterfront, and the officers positioned at constructed barricades encountered nothing but insults and cantankerous crowds,” wrote Gendarme Raoul Tremblay in an after-action report.

When the Troubador appeared on the horizon, there were shouts and jeers from the crowds. As it grew nearer, the protestors threw bottles, bricks, and rocks at it. The gendarmes aboard noticed, but anxieties were subdued. “They fell harmlessly into the water, several yards in front of the vessel,” wrote another Gendarme, Suzanne Poulin, in their after-action report. “The distance was such that we were not entirely confident they even intended to hit the vessel, rather than just voice their frustration. No one came close to actually striking Troubador.”

The jeers became a cacophony as the ferry’s gangway lowered. Gendarmes in black suits with carbines disembarked first, escorting the migrants off. Most hurried over the buses, but one, the narrow-shouldered and lanky forestry supervisor Jerrald Takashi deliberately smiled and waved at the protestors as he alighted.

“I am not an angry or fearful man. That is not in my character,” he later said. “When I bare my teeth, they are not sharp, and at the end of my fingers there are no claws.”

Roughly half of the migrants had moved over to the arrayed buses. The harangues were boisterous, but nonviolent. Poulin remarked that no bricks fell upon the migrants, despite the migrants being well within the range of the protestors.

Then, suddenly, a gunshot. Or a vehicle backfiring. Or something falling onto the concrete at a nearby pier. Subsequent investigations came to no satisfying conclusions. But what is known is that fear permeated both through the New Hegelions, and the gendarmes.

Then, what was indisputably a gunshot. From which side, again, no satisfying conclusion. But what followed was screaming from both sides punctuated by the crackle of gunfire.

Pandemonium.

ILE DES CHATS, P.N. - NAU 19, 126 PM

On the rocky, fir-covered Ile des Chats off the coast of Pierron in Uniguita’s far north, cats are ever present. When this island was a thriving fishing and fur-processing outpost some two-hundred years ago, cats were released to contain its persistent rodent problem. Today, the fur and fish markets along with their accompanying jobs are gone but the cats still make their rounds of the isle, outnumbering their human neighbors five-to-one. Around one-hundred full-time residents remain, mostly pensioners looking for a calm and cool respite in their waning years.

In a town of such few residents, there are accordingly few amenities. The hamlet at the island’s edge contains just a small grocery store, an elementary school – older students go to the school on the mainland – and a squat house-looking structure. The paint is a dull yellow, chipped and tormented by the famously unfriendly winter weather of this region. The building itself is racked, listing worryingly to the right and its frame creaks under even the subtlest of breezes.

A signboard above the door reads “Service Fédéral de Courrier et de Communication” – Federal Courier and Communications Service.

Twenty miles from the hustle and bustle of the nearest “city” Port Martien (population: 6,801), this lonely frontier fort stands as a symbol of the durability and reach of one of the Federation’s longest-standing institutions. At the same time, the current state of the Ile des Chats post office betrays the FCCS’ vulnerability.

When she first showed up at the gates of Nova Espero in 2 PM, Annabelle Crowley was far from intimidating. Eighteen years old and “built like an eighty-year-old donkey” according to one immigration officer, Crowley was rail-thin and jittery. After her quarantine at the Survivor’s Hospital, she was assigned to scavenger duty. Her colleagues chided her for her comparative weakness, and her superiors initially attempted to transfer her to a different work detail. Soon, however, her fellow scavengers found her worth. Despite not being able to carry heavy loads, her diminutive stature allowed her to more easily navigate narrow passageways, difficult terrain, and ruined buildings. “If there were a crack or crevice more than six inches wide that she couldn’t get through, I never saw it,” said Oscar Talmadge, a fellow member of her unit. They affectionately referred to her as “the Cockroach” and the name stuck.

As the scavenging units sprawled out across the Hegelion peninsula, communication between them became difficult. Crowley, with her proven adeptness for navigating the badlands and her quick feet, was made a messenger. She proved uniquely capable of quickly carrying messages between units, and was eventually pulled from the front lines by Chief Lazaro Libero. He made Crowley the “chief” – read, only – “courier,” responsible for carrying messages from the headquarters in Nova Espero out to the scavengers, and then back again.

Crowley, who found she had a knack not only for delivering messages but also sussing out potential future messengers, gradually built a small clique of couriers. Within a few months, a spiderweb of quickfooted, nimble letter-carriers formed a connective tissue between the settlement and its forward-running scavengers.

“The Cockroach” also proved adept at ensuring her unit’s evolution and survival. Once field telephones were found and put into use, Crowley made sure that it was her messengers manning both ends of the line. When radios were re-introduced, she again ensured that her field messengers were the operators. When contact was established between Nova Espero and Ferria in early 3 PM, Crowley secured passage on Ferrian trading vessels for her couriers to bring letters, purchasing orders, and newspapers with them.

When the Ferrian Republic and Nova Espero united to form the Federation in 5 PM, she made sure that she – then only twenty-one years old – became the head of the new Federal Courier and Communications Service.

Or at least, co-head. Crowley was horrified to learn that, as a part of the federation agreement, she would have to serve as co-Chief with her Ferrian counterpart, Eduardo Pollock.

“To be perfectly blunt,” she told Chief Libero when he broke the news to her, “the [Ferrian courier service] isn’t worth a bucket of warm shit.” The Ferrian Correos were known to frequently mishandle and lose letters and packages, and were broadly considered to be corrupt. Oswaldo de Garra, an early novo journalist with relatives in Ferria, once said that, “if I send a N20 bill to my cousin, I can expect that somewhere between Uniontown and Puerto Ostra the envelope will somehow be so damaged that only a N5 will show up at his door.” By contrast, due in no small part to Crowley’s “ruthless, totalitarian discipline” as one courier put it, the novos were known to be professional, courteous, and dutiful.

Crowley resented sharing command with Pollock, whose couriers she saw as “lazy, cowardly, and terminally late.” According to Crowley, Pollock very nearly sabotaged the Service’s upward trajectory. “I said ‘let’s get in on telephone wiring’ and he would say ‘no.’ ‘Well let’s get in on radio relays,’ and he would reply ‘that’s not our job, muñeca,’” she told a reporter in a 43 PM interview. “Bastard was always calling me muñeca, like I was a child.” Pollock, a man twenty-two years Crowley’s senior, was often treated as the more responsible party in the Service, despite Pollock’s Correos’ poor performance and Crowley’s proven track record of success.

Crowley ultimately went behind Pollock’s back and managed to get both the nation’s new telephone and radio networks placed under their purview, convincing the Common Council that both of them were in support of the proposal. It wasn’t until 9 PM, after four long years, that Pollock was dismissed for, “disorderly conduct unbecoming a government officer” after a public drunken, profanity-laden rant at a Puerto Ostra bar landed him on the front page of a local tabloid. Allegedly, Crowley offered advantaged postage rates to the editor of the paper in exchange for humiliating Pollock, though both Crowley and the editor strenuously denied the claims. With the initial bi-national compromises of Federation in the past and the Service’s ongoing improvement under Crowley as she successfully portrayed Pollock as a “drunken lout who has been out to lunch on the taxpayers dime for years,” the Common Council saw no need to name a new co-head.

As the Federation continued to take on the Ferrian warlords from 6 - 11 PM, the government saw the FCCS as a valuable tool in ingratiating the Federal Army among liberated residents. In General Order 15 dated Okto 19, 6 PM, Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Army Lionel Valdes mandated that, “in every town consisting of twenty households or more, offices of the Aid Corps and the Courier service shall be established.” The two offices were often contained in the same building, distributing aid and medical care to needy families in one wing, and then offering postal services in the other. Copies of the Survivor Rolls would be housed in the Aid Corps office, giving residents of newly liberated territories the opportunity to look for long-lost relatives in the names of the surviving few. Upon finding the potential name of a loved one, they could then go over to the Couriers’ office and send them a postcard for just a quarter note.

One Deputy Chief Courier, Tomas Daniuelo of Buenaventura in modern-day East Ferria, noted the influx of local residents whenever the newest edition of the Survivor Rolls arrived.

“The latest [Rolls] came in and dozens of locals crowded the case in the Aid Corps office. One by one they peeled away from the attached reading platform, showing faces of a great multitude of emotions. Grief, joy, shock, frustration, jubilation – the joyous people hurriedly came into my office, pulled a postcard off the rack and inscribed the name and address of their relative. Never were people so thrilled to pay me the postage fee, blessing me and through teary smiles pleading that I ensure the note’s safe passage. In what could otherwise be a dull and lifeless posting, these were the days I remember most fondly, only exceeded by those when a positive, affirmative reply to those cards crossed my desk.”

Aside from re-connecting families, lovers, and friends, the local FCCS offices offered outlets for newly incorporated communities to further integrate with the Federal core in places like Puerto Blanco, Puerto Ostra, and Nova Espero. Desperate for information from the outside world, residents flooded post offices with subscriptions to newspapers and magzines. Deputy Chief Courier Daniuelo called post days a “feeding frenzy,” where “residents perched themselves on the stoops, ledges, and benches nearest to the post office to ravenously gorge on the latest periodicals.” Once telephone lines were wired to these distant places, public telephones were set up in post office lobbies.

When Annabelle Crowley was made chief courier in 3 PM, she and her messengers carried just a handful of messages each day. By the close of the Hegelion War in 15 PM, the FCCS handled some 6.3 million pieces of mail each year. In 19 PM, a parade of the postal fleet reflected the diversity of means required to deliver mail across the Federation:

“In order, the FCCS men and women processed 1) on foot, 2) with bicycles, 3) on horseback or escorting mules, 4) in pedicabs, 5) in automobiles, and 6) in larger trucks. Overhead, an Air Post plane buzzed above the parade-goers. Were it possible, so too would proceed one of the great and bursting mailwagons which glide along the rails of our federation’s railroads, as would one of the great mailboats that carries post and parcels from port to port, fisherman’s dock to fisherman’s dock. There is perhaps no place on this entire planet that mail cannot be delivered by the intrepid quickfoots of the Federal Courier and Communications Service, provided the appropriate postage has been paid.”

Throughout the 20s, the FCCS continued to expand. When the Fertile Center and Terre de Lac were absorbed into the Federation in the late 20s, post offices were among the first institutions built in the incorporated territories. Annabelle Crowley and her FCCS became prime distributors of jobs and favors. The incumbent Communalists made sure to stuff the FCCS with politically aligned employees, who in turn ensured that Party-aligned newspapers and other publications moved through the system more quickly ahead of Election Day. “To be a courier was a prized reward of Party service,” said Lyle Potter, a courier who served throughout the 20s and was simultaneously a chief organizer for the Communalists in his district. “The people on my route knew me, they trusted me. And they knew that if the Liberals won, I wouldn’t be their postman anymore. More importantly, they knew that their cousin Rebecca wouldn’t be a clerk, and their brother-in-law Daniel wouldn’t be a mail sorter.”

Crowley, a firm ally of Communalist presidents Valdes and then Kaplo, saw no issue in this situation. When questioned on the practice of rewarding partisan loyalty with job placement by a Liberal councilor, she responded, “what better way is there to motivate someone to vote than to make sure his job depends upon the outcome.”

“I bet, Mr. Councilor,” she continued, “that I’ve done more to increase voter turnout in this country than any of your bills or your speeches.”

Back on Ile des Chats, a bronze plaque marks the historic status of the island’s post office. Ile des Chats was among the many regions in newly incorporated Terre de Lac to swing hard against the Communalists in the 28 PM election, electing Liberal Jean-Pierre Saline to Nova Espero. In one of the most catastrophic miscalculations in Uniguitan political history, the Communalists in the Common Council hoped that voters in the previously Communalist-controlled region would continue to support the movement. In their desperate dash to maintain power amid a flailing economy and sagging approval ratings, Kaplo and her allies failed to fully grasp how much the Lacaise had come to resent the corrupt, rent-seeking incumbents.

Very quickly, the residents of Ile des Chats became acquainted with the outcomes of their vote and the functioning of Uniguitan democracy. In 29 PM, the island of just a few hundred residents surprisingly made a short-list of destinations for a brand-new post office. Cities with higher populations – but that sent no Liberals to Nova Espero – received a post office too, but theirs served 60,000 people rather than the 300 or so that lived on the cat-infested island. The new Liberal president, Karlo Plagad, had run on a platform of reform – and yet, after taking office, he threw out the Communalist-appointed chief couriers and mail carriers and replaced them with Liberal appointees. Rather than be fired, Annabelle Crowley resigned on the first day of Plagad’s presidency after 25 years of courier service.

Upon coming to power in 40 PM, Conservative president Enrico Carmelo continued the patronage policies of his predecessors. When he found the appointment requirements for the national police to be too constricting, he began hiring right-wing street toughs and conservative paramilitary members as couriers. It wouldn’t be until after the disastrous consequences of that decision that FCCS would see, for the first time, real, long-lasting reform.

Off of Hadley Street in the Old City of Nova Espero stands a 123 year old monument, one of the city’s greatest legacies. A two-story brick building flanked on either side by newer apartment towers, it appears so tiny. Its cheap, ancient windows seem as reflective as the surrounding brick in comparison to the nearby glass and steel towers. The dull brown door with a misshapen black knob is flanked by two towering, square columns cemented firmly to the building’s facade.

Were it not for the plaque affixed to the wall next to the door frame, it would appear more anachronistic than historic.

With the passage of the Basic Guarantee of Economic Rights in 1 PM, the government of Nova Espero got to work trying to figure out how to implement Section 2, which guaranteed “basic accommodation necessary for human survival” to every resident and citizen in the city.

Early on, the solution was piecemeal and left much to be desired. One-room apartments in decrepit pre-War slums of the Old City were the most common form of housing in early Nova Espero, as were old hotel rooms. The few “luxury” – that is, multi-room – units were reserved for families. Single adults, the largest constituency in the settlement, often lived in crowded bunkrooms crammed into old shops and offices.

Ronald Moore, who before becoming Housing Commissioner in 2 PM was a member of Common Council, remarked gloomily on the state of housing in Nova Espero at the time of the Guarantee’s passage. “Squalor is a term insufficient to describe the condition of this City’s homes,” he wrote in his inaugural report to Council.

“Most in the City live five, six, seven to a room. I have seen instances where there are ten individuals, men, women, and children in a single shared space,” he continued. “According to some of those who lived here prior to the War, such were the existing circumstances at the time. This continued condition will doubtless lead to disease, crime, and the continued impoverished condition of the general public.”

Moore’s original intention upon his appointment was simple: find a bed – or in many cases, a hammock – under a roof for every single novo. By mid 2 PM, he had essentially succeeded at that task. Now he wanted to make sure that people lived in clean, safe homes. His first strategy was to retrofit old factories and warehouses into more spacious communal housing. Roofs were patched up and hundreds of bunk beds were installed to help decrease the density of the pre-War slums.

Eventually, however, Moore developed greater ambitions. Noting the availability of excess bricks and other building materials, he proposed building new structures whole cloth to represent the needs and tastes of the budding community. He drew up a “proposal for basic living unit” and submitted it to the Common Council in early 2 PM. He quickly received a small work crew and the assignment to catalog the exact amount of materials necessary to build the structure.

Within a few months, Moore’s first house was complete. An early edition of the Universalo called it, “the first step in creating modern, sanitary, and comfortable living for Nova Espero’s working people.”

Despite this flowery description, the Moore houses were spartan by today’s standards. Past the front door of the original “Test House” as it’s now called, a narrow hallway leads to two recreated “twosie” apartments – so-named for being composed of two rooms.

“This would be the typical layout of a twosie around the time the Test House was built,” says Andrea Hope, a chipper tour guide for the Old City Historic District. She points out the mismatched furniture, scavenged from homes and hotels throughout the post-War badlands. The walls lack plaster – family portraits and salvaged artwork hang from screws bored directly into the brick.

Hope also addresses the lack of a kitchen, given the contemporary assumption that residents and citizens of the city would be eating at shared, communal commissaries rather than at home. But she also makes a point to celebrate Moore’s forward thinkingness when it came to the unit’s design.

“This central wall separates the front and rear apartments, but a door frame was deliberately built and bricked in,” she tells me. “Moore believed that the scarcity of the immediate post-War period would come to an end eventually and that one day these doorways would be opened and two-room apartments could easily be turned into four-room apartments.”

“Early blus” – short for “baza loĝunuo,” or “basic living unit” in Universal – “lacked basic plumbing that we take for granted today like toilets and sinks.” Indeed, most novos at the time used communal latrines that would collect their “nightsoil” for use as fertilizer in the settlement’s crop fields. Water for drinking, laundering clothes, or cleaning was distributed through neighborhood cisterns replenished through a complex series of gutters and stormwater sewers until the city was re-connected to the Hegeliopolis Reservoir in 13 PM.

Despite this, Moore believed that pipes and plumbing would become more ubiquitous, and future blu residents would need private kitchens and bathrooms.

Outside the front entrance, Andrea shows me the product of Moore’s thinking. In the front of the blu he had so-called “wet shafts” built. Two walls were positioned perpendicular to the wall, and when it came time to eventually plumb the building, the stack would be built in the shaft which would then be walled in to prevent freezing.

Back inside, Andrea shows me the “foursie” unit upstairs. The unit’s front room has been converted into a fully functional kitchen with a gas stove, with a plumbed water closet nearby. This particular unit was updated sometime in the late 10s, after tens of thousands of similar “Moore houses” had been built throughout the Federation. Andrea and placards throughout explain that this more fashionable, roomy dwelling would house a small, urbanite family comfortably.

These Moore houses were not without their issues. When they were eventually plumbed, residents of the buildings’ front units complained about the constant flushing of toilets. Others complained that the number of toilets was ultimately insufficient to meet the demands of building residents, especially as maintenance backlogs occurred.

“At 813 Rose Street, one water closet is intended to accommodate the needs of a household of three and a household of four,” wrote Moore house resident Marion Clearwater to then-Housing Commissioner Sandra Blaine in 12 PM. “But because one of the toilets on our floor is out, we now have to share this single toilet between fifteen different people. Mrs. Blaine, have you ever had to share a toilet with fourteen other people?”

Because of the shortage of glass during the early years following the War, many of the windows were left empty and instead covered with shutters. William Powell, another Moore house resident, wrote in his journal in 4 PM that, “I wish these damned windows let in as much light as they did draft.”

Even in the more updated units, some quirks of their original construction make themselves clear. In order to get to the rear bedroom, you would have to pass through what is designed to represent the “children’s room.” And as a result of the “wet shaft” planning, the bathroom is located in the kitchen.

Regardless of these oddities and inconveniences, Moore houses generally received positive reviews from residents. Former tenement dwellers, accustomed to the dark, dank slums of the Old City, were ecstatic to have light and ventilation in every room. The newly-built brick structures were seen as newer, cleaner, and more modern than the comparatively ancient stone and wood tenements further downtown. In the coming years, the Housing Commission would build hundreds of these units, with the Common Council using building contracts to jump start the nascent cooperative and private homebuilding industry. Thomas Hyacinth, whose National Homebuilders Cooperative would later become the largest homebuilder in the city, said “there was no surer way for the government to help us out than to point out to free land, essentially free materials, and free building plans and say ‘get to work!” Within a decade, nearly 1,500 Moore houses had been built, housing nearly 20,000 novos.

To learn how Thomas Hyacinth earned the capital to originally spin up NHC, read ‘Making money after the apocalypse.’

Not many original “Moore houses” remain, however. The Housing Commission – now the Federal Housing Administration – gradually changed its rules and regulations over time to reflect needs seen increasingly as “basic” in modern accommodations. By 25 PM, family blus were required to have kitchens and washrooms pre-installed, for example. So-called “Kaplo houses” named for then-President Viktoria Kaplo (20 - 28 PM) continue to dominate the Southern Ward. Given the Kaplo houses’ more modern conveniences, the FHA gradually moved its tenants out of the older Moore houses. And as materials like steel and concrete became more readily available, high-rise blu buildings were built to accommodate the throngs of people coming to live in cities like Nova Espero, Port Williams, and Puerto Blanco. In 20 PM, more than 2,000 of these buildings existed throughout the capital city – by 50 PM, virtually all of them were gone.

Today, only a handful remain; according to Andrea, the Test House is one of just twelve Moore Houses left in the city. But as what is required of a “basic living unit” changes – recent Council proposals would require them to offer in-unit washing machines and dryers – it’s important to remember where everything began.

This is part of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to go to the series’ page.

Corporal Martin Braithwaite guided Platoon 403 through the vaulted lobby of the Imperial War Ministry Communications Centre. Placing a wooden beam across the door behind him, the corporal’s decaying boots thumped against the marble floors. Desks long abandoned formed a pitted barrier between the lobby and the rear offices, and looked as though they hadn’t been touched in years. Pulling out a key, Martin delicately unlocked the heavy oak door leading to the back offices.

“Right this way,” the corporal said as he held the door with a slight bow. Regardless of his greasy whiskers and weighty stench, Corporal Braithwaite’s manners and courtesy betrayed his military background. Despite the horrific stories from the front lines, the grim rumors from Fort Fortuna, and the newspaper reports from when independent newspapers were still legal, the desk clerks and public-facing men and women in His Majesty’s Imperial Army were renowned for their respectability. Spit-polished boots, meticulously combed hair, and perfectly-knotted ties were the hallmarks of Imperial soldiers – though these particular qualities had taken a hit in the past two years in Corporal Braithwaite’s case.

“Corporal Braithwaite,” the Lieutenant began, “where is the rest of your unit?”

“Well,” he responded, jiggling yet another ancient key into yet another ancient door. “Captain Mencken disappeared on the day the bombs fell. Corporal Boscoe and Private Bellingham disappeared shortly after that…”

Martin, paying more mind to the keys, gave an enthusiastic shout when he found the right one.

“And Sergeant Andrews was killed by a sniper during a run for supplies,” he finished as he jimmied the swollen door open.

Behind this door was what appeared to be a pre-War on-call room of sorts for radio and teletype operators based in the Centre. Corporal Braithwaite told 403 that it had been set up in the immediate lead-up to the War, as the Army expected there to be a heavier influx of communications.

“Boscoe, Lourdes, Bellingham, and Sergeant Andrews slept in here,” he said. The beds were so crisply made and clean that it surprised Pavel that they had ever been slept in at all.

“Thank you, corporal,” Suarez said. “I’m afraid to disappoint you, but we aren’t here to serve as permanent reinforcements.”

“Oh?” Martin responded, with more concern than disappointment.

“We’re here to recover some documents. We’re coordinating with other units in the area and are looking to locate the rest of the supply depots around the city to replenish our stocks.”

“Oh,” the corporal said, this time with more disappointment. “Well, if such a thing were anywhere, they’d be in the General’s Quarters.” The corporal gestured to the nearby hallway. “It’s about five doors down; there’s a nameplate on the door, you can’t miss it.”

“I have the key right here, Lieutenant,” he continued, taking the key off its ring.

“Thank you, corporal. Private Boulanger and Corporal Atwater, could you come with me to look for the maps? Private Tzarkowski, stay here with the corporal and get acquainted.”

“Yes, sir,” they responded in unison, Corny hardly able to contain his smirk as he saluted the Lieutenant.

As the rest of 403 rummaged through the General’s Quarters, Martin led Pavel up a thin staircase to the second floor. Walking down a carpeted mezzanine past the grand lobby, they approached yet another door leading into yet another office.

“This place used to be a bank, you know,” the corporal said. “Before the big crash, apparently the owner liked to walk potential borrowers up here to this office so they could really see how big it was. Tried to intimidate them, you know? Like ‘hey, if you don’t pay us back, all of this is going to come after you,’” Martin said, gesturing to the chandelier above and the ranks of desks below.

Pavel looked around. Indeed, he would have been intimidated. For the son of a baker from the valleys of Zoldhegyek, this place would have seemed like a nobleman’s palace. Compact, glass-block windows allowed thin, colorful bands of light to pour in, while the beams in the center of the room erupted from the floors like the trunks of mighty trees. A massive, frescoed wall fronted by the ranks of sturdy oak desks would have separated visitors from the cramped, unattractive offices filled with decades of financial records, sweaty typists, and thick wads of cash. The owner could clap a borrower on the back and say, “Look at my empire – don’t fuck with me.”

The corporal breached the old manager’s door, the creaking of which interrupted Pavel’s imagination. “Then the crash happened, the bank shut down, and the owner hanged himself, so,” he said as he entered the office, Pavel in tow. “The Army got all of this for a steal.”

The office was large, if a bit spartan. Windows lined the far wall, taking up roughly half of the building’s front-facing facade. Save for one, the portals were all covered with shifted bookshelves clotted with ledgers, quarterly reports, and records of transfers with the Imperial Reserve Bank. At the corner by the only open window, books stacked atop a desk formed a crude sniper’s roost, with two crates of ammunition sitting close by.

“Apologies for the shooting,” the corporal said, tying back his matted hair. “There were issues with potential looters at one point; we have to make sure the Centre stays safe.”

Just as with his manners, it was clear that the corporal had taken great care to exhibit Army cleanliness and orderliness in this impromptu bunker. The hardwood floors had clearly been swept and mopped in the not too distant past, and the framed photographs and reproductions of old works of art on the wall were all perfectly level. Pavel could have sworn that the drab, green sofas in the center of the room had been lint rolled. The desk – that of General Robert Peake, according to the nameplate – was spotless, and the flags behind it were immaculately spaced and presented. Directly at the center between the flags was that portrait of Emperor Francisco II, mandated to be present at every army outpost, government office, and noble estate in the Empire.

The corporal busied himself, wiping an imperceptible layer of dust from one of the bookshelves. This man confounded Pavel. The orderliness, the crisp salutes, and his commitment to a mission that, to Pavel, seemed anachronistic. Keep the Centre safe? Pavel thought to himself. To what end?

“Forgive my prying, corporal, but,” Pavel asked, “protect what?”

Corporal Martin Braithwaite arrived at the Imperial Communications Centre at 8:25 in the morning on Deka 28, 1766, just as he had done every day since he had first been assigned to His Majesty’s Military Intelligence and Communications Service six months before. Walking through the front door, he passed the desk of the front-facing clerks who processed information requests and received hand-delivered courier messages.

“Good morning, Corporal Braithwaite,” said Private Cassandra Bellingham, a young clerk with a beaming smile and reddish-blond hair parted immaculately down the middle. She reminded him of his younger sister back home, and the mere sight of her made him more than a little homesick.

“Good morning, Bellingham… are the others in yet?”

“Yes, Corporal – I just saw Corporal Lourdes and Corporal Boscoe head down.”

His commanding officer, Captain Mencken, wouldn’t be there for another fifteen minutes when the workday officially started. But Martin knew that to arrive at the same time as Mencken would make him look tardy, not to mention the worst possible option – arriving after the Captain.

Martin headed past the imposing lobby and down the stairs to the building’s massive basement. Once a vault storing countless millions and strongboxes containing the jewelry, personal documents, and other treasures of the Imperial well-to-do, this floor had become a massive teletype room. Dozens of clerks monitored dozens more machines, each spitting out the latest reports from the front line some one thousand miles away.

Martin, alongside five other soldiers, Captain Mencken, and the elusive Colonel Victor Rogers formed the Imperial Army’s Handwritten and Sensitive Communications Section of His Majesty’s Military Intelligence and Communications Service. In their sequestered office in the Centre’s basement, they transcribed handwritten documents from the Imperial War Ministry’s headquarters at the city center and forwarded them out to units further afield. Today, Martin knew that he would be transcribing and sending what could possibly be some of the most important orders and messages of his lifetime.

In just a few short hours, the forces of the Hegelio-Ferrian and Ylrikian empires would be fighting over the Sherbrooke Pass, a flat sliver of land crammed in between the highlands of the Central Mountains and the torrents of the Great Southern Sea. Just twenty years earlier, the two empires had spilled the blood of hundreds of thousands in order to control it, though the war ended in a disappointing stalemate.

In the aftermath of that war, both nations embarked on a scientific rampage to devise increasingly destructive weapons of war with which to dominate their rival. Poisonous gases, first deployed during that war, became increasingly noxious and effective. Machine guns were improved such that they wouldn’t overheat after firing only a handful of rounds. Airplanes were made safer and faster, capable of dropping payloads of growing magnitude. Tanks, once lumbering creatures that were as slow and vulnerable on the battlefield as cows, became more limber. Artillery was soon complemented by the first ballistic missiles, fine-tuned to travel longer and more effectively obliterate targets.

These weapons tested their mettle in the limited colonial wars and insurgencies that proved bothersome distractions to the two crowns during the inter-war years. Martin had seen limited action himself, catching the tail end of the Zoldish insurgency in the Empire’s northern mountains. For what little he saw, he became enamored with war – planes conducted precision strikes in hidden valleys, exhaust from passing missiles streaked across the sky, and machine guns chewed apart scores of unwashed, barbarian hayseeds. The brief display convinced Martin that there was no way Hegelio-Ferria could lose a war with Ylrikia. There was nothing that those godless pagan idol worshippers could deploy to counter this show of might.

Except, perhaps one thing. The one thing that kept Corporal Braithwaite, Private Bellingham, and every citizen of the Empire awake at night. In that decades-long fit of military expansion, Ylrikia, then soon after Hegelio-Ferria, obtained the capacity to split the atom. With minimal cost, minimal materials, and minimal men, both powers could tear the base components of the universe apart and cause an unfathomable amount of destruction in only a fraction of an instant. Upon the discovery of these weapons, both powers made a mad dash to build more of them, and make them more lethal, more capable. They found a way to put them on those rockets Martin saw in Zoldhegyek, making anywhere on the continent vulnerable to total destruction.

But Martin had been convinced – uneasily convinced – that the mere threat of this destruction was enough to prevent it. In Martin’s eyes, the bomb had created the circumstances for perfect war – no one could jump into thoughtless bloodshed without first considering the ultimate consequences. Gone were the days of total war, mass invasions, and existential conflict. Neither Hegelio-Ferria nor Ylrikia would dare.

And such were the circumstances of Deka 28, 1766 O.S. There were no surprise attacks, for surprise breeds hastiness and hastiness breeds apocalypse. Instead, the two armies would begin to shoot at a pre-appointed time at a pre-appointed place. The conflict, by agreement, would be conducted with only conventional arms. To keep from the worst outcomes, the emperors of Hegelio-Ferria and Ylrikia would have direct lines of communication through a high-speed telephone network linking the two imperial capitals. On this day, it was likely that the two could converse, one on one – a circumstance unfathomable before the bomb. Necessity could overcome pride.

It had to.

Corporal Martin Braithwaite spent most of that morning transcribing messages of disappointingly unhistoric importance. Admiral Wheeler requested full deployment of the Far South Squadron from Puerto Blanco on account of higher-than-anticipated mobilization on the part of the Imperial Ylrikian Navy. General Muñoz requested additional pontoon bridges be moved to the front lines on account of forecasted rainfall that would no doubt subsume the marshy estuaries of coastal Sherbrooke.

Important information. Sensitive information. But boring information.

Then, around 10 o’clock, the Palace Light turned on.

At the far right end of the office was a pneumatic tube whose door was secured shut with a padlock. Striped in gold, the tube received particularly sensitive messages, specifically those directly from the Emperor’s Palace. It was very rare to see something come into that tube – Martin had only seen it happen a handful of times in his six months in the office – but it was special when it did. A light – the “Palace Light” – would turn on to signal an inbound message. Then Captain Mencken would shuffle over, unlock the tube, and retrieve the message. After reading and transcribing the message, he would then walk it down the long corridor to the office of Colonel Rogers.

When the light flicked on, Captain Mencken sighed – how could he be unimpressed? Martin remembered thinking to himself. Mencken, a pudgy man with a clean, gray brush cut and a curled mustache befitting a duke more than a middling officer, walked over to the tube, anticipating the delivery. The capsule arrived with a low, muffled clunk, and Captain Mencken quickly took it, withdrew the message, and unfurled it.

Mencken, who had been in this office for quite some time, did not treat the royal messages with a particular reverence. Even if they were from the Emperor’s hand directly, they were correspondence that it was his job to transcribe and deliver. Martin seethed with jealousy every time his commanding officer unenthusiastically unwrapped the scrolls and yawned as he typed the Emperor’s own writing. To Martin, even the most mundane of messages had some mythical importance if it came from Him.

Atypical of Mencken was the grave expression on his face, however. Martin noticed that the captain read and re-read the note multiple times before typing it onto the page. Even when he finished the note, he read it a third time. He delayed for so long that the phone connecting Martin’s office with that of Colonel Rogers began to ring. Mencken slowly stepped towards it, eyeing the transcription in his hand. Picking up the handset, the captain held the phone to his ear.

“Yes, Colonel… I’ve transcribed it, my apologies… I’m on my way.”

The captain had never been a particularly enthusiastic or energetic speaker, but Martin was alarmed by the sobriety in his face. Sullenness.

After hanging up the phone, the captain slipped through the door, his muffled footsteps thumping on the carpeted floors of the underground corridor. Martin, slightly troubled by what he had just seen, was soon distracted by another capsule thunking into a nearby tube. Martin took the inbound note out of its capsule – General Marcos requesting more quinine pills – and typed it out, sending it further along its journey via the outbound tubes.

“You noticed that too, right?” said Corporal Lourdes. A stocky, dark-haired Ferrian who came to the Section around the same time Martin did, Lourdes was about as good a soldier as he. At least when it came to matters of detail.

“Yeah,” Martin replied. “He looked like he ate bad oysters.”

Turning to her right, she called out the other member of the team.

“What do you think, Boscoe?”

Corporal Boscoe, still sequestered at his desk, seemed uninterested but tense. He had only been in the office a short time, just a few weeks. Making commentary about his boss’s appearance was still outside the comfort zone of the pale, freckly, twenty-two-year-old. To Martin, Lourdes sometimes felt like an older cat bullying a kitten when it came to Boscoe.

“I… I don’t know. He looked nervous, I guess,” he stammered with an uneasy smile.

“Ugh,” she grunted, turning back around. “You’re no fun.” Boscoe blushed. Everything made him blush.

“Maybe His Majesty finally realized that Mencken doesn’t know what he’s doing and fired him,” Lourdes said.

“You think he cares about that?” Martin replied.

“I don’t know. What else is he going to do? The generals and admirals are controlling the battlefield. He probably gets bored. So he goes around clearing out the undeserving,” she said. She made sure to make direct eye contact with Corporal Boscoe on that last beat. She loved freaking him out.

“Maybe it was a direct order for an assault,” Martin said. “Mencken fought in the last war. I can see him being a little shaky about those sorts of things. Sending lots of men to their deaths, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know,” Lourdes countered. “Isn’t he one of those chest-thumpers? I thought he loved the blood and gore of it all.”

Just then, the door leading to Colonel Rogers’s office swept open. Captain Mencken, with that same sullen look in his eyes, hurriedly grabbed his coat and hat from the rack, barely breaking his stride on his way to the opposite door that led to the stairs to the lobby. He didn’t even bother to close the door behind him.

“Shit,” Lourdes said. “Maybe I was right.”

After a few moments of silence, Corporal Boscoe chimed in.

“Should we… do something?” he asked, eyeing the two other corporals. “Should we call someone?”

“I have no idea,” Lourdes answered, “but if we need a captain, they’ll send a captain.”

Corporal Boscoe seemed unsatisfied. Truthfully, Martin wasn’t satisfied either.

They went back to their desks, though only a handful of messages came through. Admiral Wheeler wanted confirmation that the Far South Squadron had received his order. General De Greef sent a brief report of fighting in Sherbrooke City.

Then, again, the Palace Light turned on.

NOVA ESPERO CITY – SEPTO 25, 126 PM

In the Old City of Nova Espero, the ten-story, limestone Federal Credit Union building looms large over Meer Street. The employees within are responsible for controlling the Federation’s money supply and facilitating financial services for millions of Uniguitans, making the FCU the pre-eminent economic and financial institution in the country. A few blocks away on the Federal Way is the Federal Printing and Engraving Office, which prints each of the tens of billions of notes that are in circulation across the globe.

In addition to being vital parts of the modern economy, the FCU and FPEO are among the oldest institutions in the country, both being founded in Nova Espero shortly after the War. In those types of circumstances… what even was money?

The ration problem

In the earliest years following the War, there was no currency as we would know it today in Nova Espero. In those first few months, the vast majority of people’s days were spent engaging in subsistence scavenging, that is finding the necessary food and water just to get through the day. It wasn’t until a few months after the War that a few hundred survivors at the end of the Hegelion peninsula decided it would be better to band together than act independently. Organized crews were sent to specific zones in the wastes of Hegeliopolis to retrieve supplies, while others worked to set up a primordial postwar water system, some form of basic agriculture in old parks and boulevard medians, and a composting system that would ensure that waste wouldn’t totally go to waste.

Supplies scavenged from the wastelands outside of the early settlement’s walls were held in common, particularly food and emergency medical supplies. Eventually, an official rationing system was set up with each settler receiving “ration tickets” with each entitling the holder to a meal from one of the settlement mess halls. There was little to no differentiation in how much each resident got – guards got as much as farmers who got as much as waste collectors.

In addition to the bare essentials, some scavengers began to harvest non-essentials, primarily for themselves: vices like cigarettes, alcohol, and other drugs, but also creature comforts like playing cards, books, and even down pillows. Scavengers very quickly realized that people inside the walls very much wanted those “non-essentials” too. Some settlers – particularly those who had developed alcohol, nicotine, or other substance dependencies prior to the War – were even willing to trade ration tickets for a drink or a smoke.

This caused a number of problems very quickly. Not only did cases of alcohol poisoning and other overdoses increase, but illnesses related to malnourishment became more pronounced. People surviving on already bare diets of 1,400 calories were now subsisting on even less, which not only weakened them but made them more susceptible to infectious disease. Cholera, which had been stymied by the efforts of the settlement’s Public Health Division and food distribution efforts, roared back, as did cases of scurvy and jaundice. Though no one within the settlement had a diet that would be considered “healthy” prior to the War, the introduction of drugs and alcohol as well as the use of ration cards as currency quickly made the situation worse. More people in a diminished state meant that there were still many mouths to feed but too few hands to feed them.

The immediate solution was to introduce ration cards rather than tickets. Issued once per week, the holder would bring their card to a mess hall, and a hole would be punched in the appropriate box to show that the holder had gotten their meal. But even this system was exploited; cardholders would give their card to a seller, agreeing to give them one of their meals in exchange for a pack of cigarettes, for example. The seller would take their own card to one mess hall for one meal, and then use the buyer’s card at a different mess hall for another meal. Then the seller would give the card back to the buyer, who would typically give the card back to the seller in exchange for cigarettes, alcohol, or any other desirable good.

The Common Council responded with several new settlement regulations. First, the importation of alcohol specifically was to be dramatically curtailed. The amount that would be let in would be reduced only to the amount necessary to address the effects of alcohol withdrawal among those who had become dependent. Secondly, use of food ration coupons for anything other than rations would be strictly forbidden.

While the Council believed that these two policies would go a long way in restoring the situation, they recognized that residents, whether they liked it or not, were going to decide their priorities for themselves. To say that ration cards weren’t currency wouldn’t magically make them worthless for anything but food – people would continue to exchange them unless an alternative was introduced.

A new currency

Councilor, scavenger, and former employee of the Imperial Reserve Bank Abraham Reed had an idea. Instead of just banning what was happening already and hoping that would solve the problem, he proposed that the settlement print a new, primordial form of paper currency. Scavengers, farmers, and other settlement residents would be paid in the currency, and the Council would set aside time and space for guards and scavengers to sell their non-essential wares in a public setting. Thinking into the further future, this currency could be used to establish trade with other settlements, and eventually, pay and collect taxes. This paper money would be backed by gold coins harvested from damaged bank buildings nearby – existing Imperial paper money was deemed too common and too devalued by the sudden population loss to be worth anything – which would then be stored within a newly formed Bank of Nova Espero.

The Common Council broadly approved the plan, though they took issue with the title of “Bank.” Instead, for their new, more egalitarian society, they preferred to call the institution a “Credit Union,” though it would largely function as a normal central bank in terms of authority and leadership.

To determine the proper pay amounts for each member of the community, Reed brought together the leadership of the Scavenger’s Union, the Public Health Division, the Farmer’s Union, and the other major proto-employers in the settlement. Over the course of a three-day meeting in the summer of 1 PM, they hammered out a universal pay schedule for settlement workers that would ensure differentiation for ability, responsibility, and merit, but also avoid the starkly stratified class-structure that had formed prior to the War.

After weeks of printing – Reed only had three copies of the stamps used to produce the bank notes, so he and his two assistants had to handmake them all by themselves – the first “payday” came on Deka 4, 1 PM. In addition to their ration cards, scavengers, farmers, and Reed himself received envelopes stuffed with “notes,” the newly minted paper currency.

These original notes were extremely bare-bones, with stamps directly printed on index cards accentuated with typewritten text, the year of printing, and Abraham Reed’s signature. Reed and the Council knew that these original notes were far from foolproof, but they assumed that they would suit their purpose until a more permanent solution could come about.

Initially, the residents of Nova Espero were skeptical. Despite being backed by gold, the new paper money was still abstract in its value compared to, say, individual meals at the local mess. It wasn’t until around a month later that Reed himself became fully convinced. In a Dekaunuo 13, 1 PM entry in his diary, he wrote:

“Earlier this evening as I was retiring to my quarters after dinner at the Hornby Street mess, I came upon two men rifling through the pockets of some drunkard incapacitated on the pavement. Peering from behind a lamppost, I witnessed them pull out a wad of notes, plunging them into their own pockets. To thieves, at least, our notes have value yet.”

Notes had become a widely used currency for all sorts of “non-essential” goods – that is, everything except food, medicine, and shelter. The markets held during evenings saw the notes change hands, and residents began using the notes to charge for services when they weren’t performing their regular work details.

Once sufficient improvements had been made to the city’s hydroponic and other agricultural infrastructure, labor was put to other uses. Using the capital generated by the Credit Union and materials scavenged from abandoned buildings, some started construction businesses to build stronger, more durable rowhouses, apartment buildings, and storefronts. A nascent glassmaking industry started producing replacement window panes, artists began to paint again, and specialized trades workers began to peddle their services. All of this created new uses for the notes, and circulation further increased.

In 4 PM, Ferrian trader Rene Lorenzo remarked:

“Every street in the settlement core lined with some sort of market, or some individual selling something – books, cigarettes, old magazines, and even things we never saw in Puerto Ostra. Dried tea still in tins, preserved coffee, as well as kettles and mugs with which to brew and drink them. Candies, toy cars, and dolls, as well as typewriters and fine vintage works of art. The Esperan diet when it comes to staple goods and nutrition is no different than ours was [...]. But the Esperans are no worse for wear. In fact, they possess an energy and spirit that I had never seen in Puerto Ostra. They are hungry, but they live and breathe as though they are striving and rich.”

This increased velocity created an issue: deflation. Because the notes were backed by a finite supply of gold coins, the number of notes themselves was finite. In late 2 PM, Reed convinced the Common Council to offer up a bounty for gold coins retrieved from the wasteland. The Treasury would pay scavengers N0.75 for each coin brought to the Credit Union, building the settlement’s gold supply and generating new notes. Soon enough, scavengers were bringing in hundreds of doubloons each week.

Despite its successes, this system was not without its shortcomings. On Dekaduo 18, 2 PM, a crew of five scavengers ambled up the steps of the Credit Union building bearing a large chest, “some three feet wide, two feet tall, and two feet deep, and bearing some considerable load” according to Reed’s account of the event. Dumping the crate on the floor in front of Reed and his two clerks, the men claimed they had found it in a mansion they had scavenged around a mile from town. “The men – no more than twenty years of age – bore mischievous and greedy smiles on their faces,” wrote Reed.

Opening the chest revealed it to be full of Imperial gold coins. After a four hour long count, Reed and his clerks found 79,802 coins in the box – a nearly N60,000 payout. This would have been equivalent to four weeks of the settlement’s total outlays, and given the men’s average weekly wages of N15, more than fifteen years’ pay. Paid out all at once, it would single-handedly create a minor economic crisis.

Instead, Treasurer Reed told the men that he would write up a note guaranteeing them a N50 payout that day – almost twice the top wage in the entire community – and N20 every week for the next fifteen years. The men’s disappointment at not instantly owning the entire settlement economy was sated by the idea of more than doubling their pay for the next fifteen years, which in the times immediately following the War, might as well have been forever.

Among these men was Pieter Rensselaer, a former shipyard worker who saved his weekly payout and ended up using the funds to found Rensselaer Shipbuilding, a company that continues to be the largest shipbuilder in the Federation today. Another, Thomas Hyacinth, used his winnings to build what would later become Nova Espero’s largest homebuilding company.

More than six decades later, Rensselaer’s son Benjamin would helm his shipbuilding empire amid the historic Great Cruise Ship race between Uniguita and Ylrikia. You can read more in Part One of the Dispatch’s series on the race.

Following unification and the foundation of the Federation in 5 PM, the note spread throughout the southwest of continental Kagzmerak. Banks and credit unions spawned across the region, with (much more professionally made) bills flowing out the door of the newly formed Federal Printing and Engraving Office (FPEO). Factories and mills were re-opened and rebuilt, and some semblance of a complex and sophisticated economy began to re-emerge. Today, notes are used by tens of millions of Uniguitans, and are a major exchange currency for international trade.

Abraham Reed oversaw the Credit Union of Nova Espero – now the Federal Credit Union – from its creation until his death in 31 PM. In his lifetime, the FCU and FPEO expanded from three employees hand-stamping notes in an old bank to a monetary policy juggernaut with massive printing presses putting out tens of millions of notes per day. A fresh-faced, junior-level economist with the Imperial Reserve Bank prior to the War, Reed had overseen the creation of a massive, modern, and highly professional financial institution and a currency that ensured Uniguita would be an economic powerhouse.

Upon the 30th anniversary of the FCU and shortly before his death, Reed wrote that, “before the note, we traded beans for bandages, tools for tobacco, and medicine for powdered milk. And then we had the note; and after that, we had civilization.”

PUERTO BLANCO, F.A. – SEXTO 27, 126 PM

Amid the towers of central Puerto Blanco sits a structure that by comparison seems squat. Large, stone pillars hold up a damaged pediment some four stories above the street, its gaps and gashes filled by a witty structure composed of steel bars and glass. Inside too, the holes in the roof are filled by this same spiderweb-like filling. The Federal Institute of Art, built from the remains of the pre-Milito Valez Imperial Art Museum, is the largest repository of art in the entire Federation. Thousands of pieces are immaculately displayed, while millions more sit in the climate-controlled storage underground.

At the rear of the building, in stark contrast to the overpowering off-white walls of the main galleries, a dimly lit chamber beckons in prospective viewers. The entrance reads, Charlotte Dore Gallery of Unrestored Art – inside are burnt frames and canvases, mangled and warped statues, mildewy textiles, and pitted, cracked statues. Some of these are pieces meant to illustrate the damage caused by the War. One piece, Humbled Condor, is described as being the “Imperial coat of arms once displayed over the entrance of a War Ministry communications building in Hegeliopolis, melted and warped by the firestorms that followed the city’s nuclear detonations.” Another, a bent statue of Emperor Francisco II, tells the viewer that the monument was “crushed under the weight of stones flung from the walls of a colonial administration building in Cabo Grande.”

A great number of people are clustered around pieces in particular. According to art historians, Francoise Lavalier’s Twenty or so tulips was an integral and highly-respected piece of the pre-Milito art canon. It had once been the crown jewel of the Valez Museum, being positioned front and center in its storied halls. This location, however, made it especially vulnerable to fire damage in the wake of the Milito.

As tourists gawk at Tulips, it is impossible to ignore its current state. Most of the frame is missing, as is most of the canvas. In fact, all that remains is the upper third of the painting, the very top of its eponymous tulips. The canvas is sooted, the fringes of the surviving fragments marred by the cracking of boiling, then carbonized paint.

And yet, here it stands, 126 years after bombs and fires very nearly brought about its demise.

In the immediate aftermath of the Milito, the salvaging of valuable art was not a top priority for the various struggling settlements that emerged. Scavengers in Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra prioritized food and medicine, while vagabond warlords and wandering nomads lacked the capacity to carry such luxuries with them even if they wanted to.

But once some of the more established settlements got underway, specialization in scavenging began to evolve. Around 3 PM, the second unit of Nova Espero’s Archival Unit was founded, responsible for retrieving “artworks and items of significant cultural import.” This included everything from historical artifacts, to old paintings, to sculptures. Art historians estimate that upwards of 95% of all art ever created had been destroyed even prior to the Milito; the Milito itself exacerbated this condition, with historians now estimating that upwards of 99% of all art created pre-Milito is now lost. It was the responsibility of this new “Arts Unit” – officially, Platoon 404 of the 4th Scavenger’s Company – to track down and recover that remaining 1%.

Even so, the Arts Unit went about its work. Bronzes were among the most resilient works of art which, despite sustaining damage from falling structures, remained largely intact. Anything made out of steel or iron faced corrosion from leaking roofs. The Arts Unit often found marble statues pulverized from falling stone walls, and limestone works pitted by exposure to acid rains. The cheap, martial statuary of the more recent propaganda campaigns of Emperor Francisco II were almost all mangled and warped, their hollow bodies incapable of withstanding the heat of the firestorms.

Paintings could be in varying states of disrepair based on their storage. The Arts Unit celebrated the discovery of a remarkably well-preserved body of works from the renowned pre-Milito artist George Cooper stored in the wine cellar of an aristocrat’s mansion on the Hegeliopolis Palisades. Kept in what amounted to a stone vault bomb shelter, the paintings were protected from the worst effects of moisture and fire, the two primary enemies of the painted image.

Elsewhere, the stories were more grim. Some museums were burnt out completely by the firestorms, their works a total and tragic loss. Others sustained significant structural damages, which led to leaks, which then brought mildew and mold that ate away at the paintings left hanging. Surface-level faults that once kept paintings safe in climate-controlled perpetuity became tombs for these works as the roofs caved in and they began to suffer all the same.

Once recovered, most of these works were stored or displayed as-is – even with the professional expertise of a pre-Milito conservator, the Arts Unit lacked the capacity to repair the incalculable damage. True conservation work wouldn’t come until the arrival of Charlotte Dore much later.

A well-respected and well-trained art conservator prior to the Milito, Charlotte Dore found herself stranded in Pierron at the time of the Milito. As a little girl, she had seen Twenty or So Tulips in the Valez Museum, and dreamed that she too, despite challenges faced by Lacaise (and particularly Lacaise women) in the world of art, would one day be a great artist just like her hero Francoise Lavalier.

After graduating from grade school, Dore continued on to the Ecole de beaux-arts de Pierron, and then later the Valez Museum’s vaunted Imperial Art Institute. There, she found a passion for art conservation. Her conservation professor showed his students various paintings and challenged them to figure out which among them had been restored, and which had been retained in their original state. Though Dore had an eye for identifying which indeed had been restored, she came away from the course impressed with the practice. Her particular eye for these telltale signs meant that she would be better at avoiding them. She soon graduated with distinction, called by one of her classmates, “a true marvel of the field of conservation.”

Despite receiving offers from a number of prestigious imperial institutions, Dore returned to Pierron to become principal conservator at the Pierron Museum of Fine Arts. Her natural talents and her organizational skill eventually led to her being the Head of Conservation at the PMFA by the time of the Milito.

Only 37 at the time of the War, Dore spent the next several years struggling alongside her fellow Pierronaise. Under the Communalist government that attempted to restore order in Terre de Lac, Dore became a principal art official for the new regime. The government put her skills to use as a propaganda artist. Though she later said that this work was, “soul-sucking,” she also contended that it allowed her to conserve art that would otherwise have been lost. Terre de Lac was among the first places to truly engage in art conservation following the Milito, and Dore is credited with salvaging countless works of art – and much of Francoise Lavalier’s work specifically – by her own hand, and through the hands of her hired assistants. By the time the Communalist regime collapsed and Terre de Lac was absorbed by the Federation in 27 PM, she had a staff of five assistants and the six of them combined had managed to save thousands of pieces of art that had been ripped, torn, molded, and burned.

After the collapse of the Lacaise regime, Dore found herself out of work as the cash-strapped commonwealth governments of the region cut back on arts programming. Her reputation as a regime propagandist also left her a controversial figure – it was only through the direct intervention of left-wing President Viktoria Kaplo that Dore was appointed Deputy Chief of Conservation at the newly-opened Federal Art Institute in Puerto Blanco. With the subsequent death of her superior in 29 PM, she soon became the Chief Conservator.

Dore oversaw the conservation of thousands more pieces of art, including many that were found badly damaged in the institute itself, or weather-worn in rural noble estates or other wine cellars in the Ferrian backcountry.

For many pieces, Dore chose to restore the work in its entirety. Canvas would be delicately cut and sewn to fit the pieces that had either burned, torn, or rotted off. Then, she and her expert team would use pre-Milito art textbooks and oversized reproductions to mimic the lost designs. Though this process was controversial – many thought that this was an abrogation of the artists’ original work, or that this work somehow covered up the true disaster of the Milito, Dore was nonplussed. “If they want a museum of half-burnt frames and five-year old paintings, then by all means,” she once told a reporter when asked to respond to her critics. “But I believe that children should be able to see the great works – they have memorial museums and classrooms to learn about the horrors of the War.”

Nevertheless, Dore did believe in the specific non-restoration of art if it served a historical purpose. The melted, mangled remains of Francisco II-era propaganda statues, for example, were left largely untouched as “symbols of Francisco’s fire eating its young,” per Dore. Others, like burned family portraits, were left to remind viewers of the human toll of War, and the mildewy remains of Henry Kasperak’s Moonlight Over the Pravo were left to show nature’s quick reconquest of man’s creation in the wake of the Milito.

One piece, however, was both notable and left unpreserved – Twenty or So Tulips. The piece’s incinerated state made it a difficult work to restore without essentially replacing more than half of the work itself. But secondly, Dore felt it was not her place to restore the work. “It feels perverted to even touch a Lavalier,” she told one assistant. Despite her statements to the press and rebukes of critics, Dore thought the work necessary to restore the work would subsume the work itself. Instead, Dore left Tulips unaltered, aside from some minor work to ensure that it did not deteriorate further.

Dore, who typically outsourced the writing of placards to Institute staff upon the completion of a conservation project, wrote Twenty or So Tulips’ description herself. It reads:

“Created by Francoise Lavalier, oil on canvas, 189 BM. Partially – though not completely – destroyed as a result of the Milito.”

Dore remained elusive when asked about the meaning behind her description. Some interpreted it as symbolizing the survival of culture despite everything. Others said that it meant that not even the great cultural artifacts of any age could withstand the totalizing destruction of something like the Milito.

Not that reporters got many chances to ask her about it. Two weeks after she wrote the copy for the placard, Charlotte Dore died in a train accident in Puerto Blanco at the age of 69.

It’s strange that Charlotte Dore’s primary legacy is this gallery of half-destroyed art. It’s estimated that over the course of her post-Milito career, Dore herself preserved thousands of works of art, and trained hundreds more who would go on to lead the art conservation field. Even so, the one work with which she is most closely associated is a piece she barely touched.

At the center of the Charlotte Dore Gallery of Unrestored Art sit two pieces. One is Twenty or So Tulips. The other is a vase – a traditional Lacaise ceramic painted with an elegant, floral white and blue pattern. Previously shattered, the vase was carefully rebuilt using the Ylrikian method of kintsugi, in which gold-dusted lacquer is used to mend ceramic shards.

The vase contains the ashes of Charlotte Dore, who now sits eternally opposite from her beloved tulips.

In the foggy, dawn haze of the next morning, Pavel peered over the railing atop the roof of the Mist Cove safehouse. Downstairs, Corny, Lieutenant Suarez, and Frederic slumbered. Knowing the regimentation of the Lieutenant’s routine, he knew that he would wake in a short time. But in this single blessed moment, knowing that miles away his daughter was finally receiving the life-saving care that she so desperately needed, Pavel could enjoy this lonesome reprieve with the solar panels as his only company.

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The building ran parallel to the coast, giving him a stunning view of the shoreline. In the past, such a view would have commanded a high premium on the Imperial Capital’s notoriously expensive real estate market. In prior visits, Pavel remembered that the chorus of the crashing waves were joined by the cacophony of shopping pedestrians and local residents, as well as tourists who came here for relief from the heat of the urban core. Whistles from arriving trains alighting passengers at the nearby station would pierce the air, alongside the fluty, gay carnival music from the boardwalk.

Today, the waves sing alone. This place is now just one of the great multitude of such buildings, lying almost entirely vacant as sores on the corpse of a once-great city.

In the days before the War, Pavel had often thought about what he would do in the event of an apocalypse. His realistic answer was usually that he would perish almost immediately – he was a near-sighted history professor, after all. In the context of conversations in the history department lounge, however, this answer was generally seen as being unsatisfactory. Pavel would instead dream of occupying some old mansion owned by some dead baron or titan of industry, protected by its high gates. He and his family would take in the luxury and splendor that could have only been accumulated in the frenzied dash for wealth in those pre-War years. He and Elizabeta would sip from flutes of champagne that cost a month’s wages. Anna and Filip would sleep in sheets with thread counts in the thousands, their heads resting on the plush pillows stuffed with the down of only the finest pure-bred geese. They would make this castle their redoubt, safe from the hordes of radioactive ne’er-do-wells that would inevitably come to upset their created peace.

Unfortunately for the Tzarkowskis, this vision of post-apocalyptic luxury would never come to pass. They mostly made their homes in canvas tents haphazardly arranged in squalid little camps where toilet paper was a rare commodity, much less sheets. Cholera, once the domain of the crude and impoverished slums of the Southern Ward of Hegeliopolis and the vast gray shanties of the urban fringe had become much more democratic and ubiquitous in its reach. A bout with dysentery nearly sent Pavel to an anti-climactic end. When he told Elizabeta that to die of illness was truly the more normal and typical way to die in war, she promptly told him to shut up.

The Tzarkowskis had heard of Nova Espero before but they had assumed it was a sort of mythical place. The feared (but coveted) scavenger convoys were known to be real, and so too were their accompaniment of armed, fatigue-clad guards. When Pavel tried to steal that can of soup, it was an act of desperation that followed so many other acts of desperation. Three months before, he wouldn’t have taken the risk. But seeing his children weep from hunger, and his wife slowly winnowing away did something to the risk assessment part of the history professor’s brain. He didn’t exactly regret what he did – but with a full night’s rest and full stomach, he could now properly realize how profoundly stupid it was to reach for that can.

“Coffee?” Suarez grunted as he approached Pavel.

“Thank you,” Pavel replied, startled. He never quite understood how such a lanky man could be so silent.

“I’ve always liked the view up here,” the lieutenant said. He said it with a finality in his voice. Like that was the start and end of the conversation. Or perhaps that’s just how Pavel perceived it. The lieutenant was typically not one for small talk.

Nevertheless, Pavel replied. “It’s beautiful. The waves look so peaceful, and the water so clear and pristine. It almost makes you think for a minute that things are normal.”

The Lieutenant remained silent.

He and Suarez watched the waves for some time, waiting for the others to wake. As the clock neared seven, the Lieutenant and Pavel started back down the steps. Corny and Frederic were nursing their own mugs of coffee, noticeably straightening when the Lieutenant entered the room.

“Good morning gentlemen,” Suarez said. “Today we will make our final approach to the war ministry building.”

Nearly ten miles outside of Nova Espero stood the massive, colonnaded concrete structure. The object of the mission was to go into that building and retrieve a number of sensitive documents related to supply stockpiles throughout the city.

“It’s doubtful that many of these stockpiles will have survived up to this point,” the Lieutenant conceded. “But even one would have enough resources to last us for months. Ammunition, grenades, rifles –” He paused, taking a beat to look towards Corny.

“And boots.”

“Thank God!” Corny exclaimed, still nursing the blisters on his soles and heels which he had dramatically called “early onset trench foot.”

On the downstairs table, Suarez rolled out a map showing Mist Cove in its entirety. Designed by the local tourism board for use by visitors, highlighted locations included the boardwalk, a number of bakeries and art galleries, and the local jewelers market. Suarez had inked an addition in the northern edge of the map, marking the location of the Imperial War Ministry Records and Communications Centre.

“It’s a large, concrete and steel structure that has very few windows,” he explained. “None of our scouting parties have tried to enter because there was no reason to. There’s a solid chance that it will already be occupied.”

“As with any mission,” he continued, “avoid engagement unless so ordered or is absolutely necessary. Is that understood?”

Pavel and the others quickly nodded in agreement.

“Fantastic – the way over should be mostly cleared out, but keep your eyes peeled for any enemies or survivors.”

The narrow, rectilinear streets of Mist Cove resembled many such highly manufactured places in the old Imperial Capital. Orderly rows of identical cottages and apartment houses clotted each side of the street, many of which were deeply fire scarred or otherwise damaged by the percussion of falling bombs or the simple lack of maintenance for the past three years. No nuclear warheads or thermobaric weapons exploded here, but the distant blasts and firestorms immediately following the War were more than enough to wreak havoc across the district.

Platoon 403 moved through the area, peering into each rubble-filled doorway as they passed. There was very little to scavenge here; these areas had already been picked over once by scouts looking for potential enemies as well as any snatchable “incidentals” they might find on their path. You could tell this place had already been scouted, not scavenged, because of the presence of copper wires and gutters, but the distinct lack of silverware, bottles of alcohol, and wrist watches.

Rounding one corner, the platoon entered a small neighborhood park. Even though the trees had been scorched down to tiny stubs, it was clear that there had been something living here in the recent past. Dead – not carbonized – grass indicated that there had been some sort of biological recovery here. This place was dead as all parks are during the wintertime, not in the strange, otherworldly, and glassy way that areas that were practically melted by the bombs were. Pavel imagined that this place, guarded as it may be by the coal-black husks of atomized trees, would look quite lovely in the springtime. In his softer, more contemplative days, he might see the existence of these places as a fitting monument to the new world – nature and life triumphing amid the chaos and destruction. Now, he felt as though he were looking at a graveyard. Verdant in the springtime and having places to picnic did not detract from the death and sorrows connected to the place.

On the edge of the park was a small shop, its front display case windows smashed in by the blasts, flames, or potentially looters, but the front door was jammed shut. Suarez gave Corny and Pavel the go-ahead, and the two began to strike at the entryway.

“It’s just jammed, not blocked by anything,” Corny grunted as he slammed into the door. Sometimes in desperate moments, people had shoved bookcases or store shelves in front of the doors of their homes and businesses. Rarely ever did such individuals survive the firestorms that followed the bombs and the fleeing crowds.

After a handful of firm strikes, the door finally tumbled open. The roof had very obviously caved in, and the smell of rainsoaked and moldy wood permeated the platoon’s nostrils. There was that strange musk of food long rotted away, a sort of stuffy, suffocating odor. Regardless, even if the perishables had perished, there were plenty of opportunities for plunder. Corny liberated two flasks of good North Hegelion whiskey, and Frederic located some sort of syrup-based rum that he insisted was a treasured whisper from the homeland. Suarez opened a box of cigars, only to toss them to the floor upon discovering their moldy, rotten state.

Pavel, meanwhile, eyed a familiar tin sitting on a collapsing shelf at the store’s edge. Blue with a white diagonal stripe, the aluminum, circular container was the signature trademark of the Uruski Baked Goods and Confections Corporation. Based out of Pavel’s native Zoldhegyek, Uruski products were a common fixture in the cabinet of every grandmother – the gingery pierniki and the crisp churschiki were among Pavel’s favorites.

This particular tin contained sushki, a hard, bagel-like bread ring that was best enjoyed with a cup of tea. As Pavel grabbed the container, his hopes were high – even fresh sushki were as durable as hardtack. He presumed that stale ones would be essentially identical.

The lid popped with a satisfying release of pressure, a slight puff of air spewing forth. Grabbing one of the sushki and taking a bite, he bit down and met a solid, satisfying, almost tooth-shattering crunch.

Home, he thought to himself. Noticing several more tins, he quickly stuffed them into his rucksack.

“Let’s move on,” the Lieutenant said. “We can’t spend all day here.”

Leaving the import store, Platoon 403 headed down another dreary, rubble-strewn side street. The winding paths gradually gave way to a wider street, which then terminated at a taut square. Fronted by the ruins of old cafes and drab office buildings, at the northern edge was a towering structure with a pointed pediment supported by massive columns. On the pediment sat the warped, mangled remains of a metallic crowned condor, the old symbol of the now dead Empire. Below the condor were the words, “W R MINISTRY INF MA ION & C NICATIONS CENT “.

Striding across the square, the platoon suddenly halted at the report of what sounded like a semi-automatic rifle.

“Shit!” Corny exclaimed.

“Get to cover, now!” Suarez ordered.

Diving behind the corner of a collapsing pharmacy, the platoon huddled as Suarez eyed the plaza and strategized, looking to every open window and potential cavity to find the sharpshooter. As he poked his head around the corner, another snap, and a puff of exploded brick and mortar flew in his face.

Quickly brushing it off, Suarez got to work. “Alright, Atwater, you and Boulanger make your way to the bank across the street,” he said, motioning to the rotting stone structure some twenty paces away. “Tzarkowski, you and I will provide covering fire. Understood?”

They all nodded.

Just as they began to rise, a shout erupted from the communications center.

“Name and rank!” said the shout.

Suarez threw out his hand to block Corny and Frederic from moving further. He began to think.

“Name and rank!” the shooters repeated.

After a moment, the Lieutenant raised his hands and emerged from behind the pharmacy.

“Lieutenant Antonio Trujillo, 2nd Imperial Garrison of Hegeliopolis,” he replied.

A slow, menacing silence followed. The Lieutenant remained steady, his arms firmly upright, eyes darting across the building. The air hung heavy.

A rifle barrel slowly peeked from the darkness beyond the columns. As the figure emerged further, the sunlight revealed a gaunt, bewhiskered man covered in threadbare fatigues. From the odor emanating from him, the platoon could tell that he had not bathed in weeks, or perhaps even since before the War. His sinewy arms ended in narrow fingers, wrapped tightly around his weapon. Cautiously approaching the Lieutenant, the man slowly lowered his rifle barrel.

Eyeing Suarez inquisitively, he then slung his rifle back over his shoulder. After doing so, he snapped his heels together at full attention, and brought his closed, bony fist to his chest to perform the Imperial salute.

“Lieutenant Trujillo, my apologies,” the man said.

“No worries, corporal,” Suarez replied, no doubt seeing the rank emblazoned on the man’s stinking jacket.

“I’m just glad to finally have some reinforcements,” the corporal said.

This is Part Ten of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to read Part Eleven.

NOVA ESPERO CITY - QUINTO 30, 126 PM

“Now departing Customs House... please stand clear of the closing doors...”

The Hegeliopolis Metropolitan Railway Project was the product of the regime that built it -- or the one that tried to build it at least. Matching his ambitions for the vast state he controlled, Francisco II so desperately wanted to make Hegeliopolis a true imperial capital of a modern empire. His ambassador to the Ylrikian Empire sent back letters from Irikyo, jealously portraying the “underground railroads” of the rival nation’s metropole. “The stations are frescoed and spectacularly clean,” Oswaldo Perez, Duke of Cabo Grande wrote. “The trains themselves slink below the congested thoroughfares of the City, transporting passengers to and fro at incredible speeds and with unrivaled efficiency.”

Sketched out by the state’s best civil engineers, the first line would connect the Imperial Way -- the wide, manicured axis connecting the Imperial Palace and the Imperial Diet, fronted by the gargantuan mausolea of the Empire’s sprawling bureaucracy -- to a series of tony, soon-to-be-built rail suburbs on the northern shore. On Quinto 29, 1757 O.S. (9 BM)1 the Imperial Works Ministry began to dig in the inner core, and sweep away the rude slums that occupied the future sites of the new towns of Coats and Mist Cove.

But on Deka 28, 1766 O.S., after nine years of work, the project remained unfinished. A few cut and cover rail tunnels had been dug, connecting Palace Station and Mist Cove. But the Empire’s spending on its military, on its weapons technology, and on its ever-growing arsenal of nuclear and thermobaric weaponry, and the resource demands of an expanding war economy meant that no rails were laid, no trains ran, and the “Metro” remained a hole gored deep into the earth and nothing more.

“Now arriving at Old City... doors will open on the right...”

Rebuilding mass transportation infrastructure was not a primary concern of the early inhabitants of Nova Espero. Two years after the Milito, the settlement of 2,000 survivors and citizens comprised the near-totality of the population of old Hegeliopolis, once a city of ten million inhabitants.

Even so, the unfinished system provided an effective means by which scavengers could go out to points beyond the new city’s central core.

“Now arriving at Memorial Circle / Milito Museum... doors will open on the right...”

Time passed. More people flocked to Nova Espero as the Federation leapt its borders outward. Newly incorporated citizens came to serve in the elected Common Council, or to work for the nation’s pre-eminent media outlets that found their headquarters there, or to find other employment in the city’s bountiful offices, factories, printers, bakeries, canneries, and foundries.

During the 40s, that imperious President Enrico Carmelo revived old Francisco’s vision of a Metro here. He used the old tunnels and his other Great Capital Projects to tell a story -- the line would pass from the Old City, where Nova Espero had been born, and move eastward along the old tunnels to where the city (and the Empire) was headed. Ever the politician, he converted the Palace Station into one connecting passengers to his new Milito Memorial and accompanying museum. Leaving their train, visitors would follow tiled walls with propagandized frescoes depicting stories of woe and despair during the War and subsequent Collapse, depicting the people of Hegeliopolis (and the broader pre-War Empire) as being one burdened by sorrows amid the howling laughter of foreign, Eastern emperors and warlords. They would then pour into the memorial via vomitoria. Massive rows of identical columbaria would hold the ashes of millions of victims of the War in Hegeliopolis, overwhelming visitors with the magnitude of destruction faced by the city’s inhabitants. Little did visitors know that this was all an elaborate framing exercise, one meant to prime the nation’s inhabitants – and the politically important inhabitants of Nova Espero – for war against the Ylrikians.

Though Carmelo avoided the pitfalls of the Old Empire and managed to lay down rails and even open a trunk of Line 1 between the Customs House and Memorial Circle by 43 PM2, he could not resist the temptation of total power. Enrico Carmelo would attempt to seize power in a disastrous failure of a coup attempt in Kvarto 47 PM, just months before a primary jewel in his crown of “Great Capital Projects” would be completed.

“Nun alvenante al Libero Placo / Federacia Stacio… Transiro al: Linio 2, Forta Fortuna Linio… La pordoj malfermiĝos dekstren.”

In the aftermath of Carmelo’s failed coup, the nation was reconstructed and reconfigured in a way not seen since the immediate aftermath of the War. Carmelo and Carmelists were shunned from “good society,” and a new constitution sought to ensure that someone like Carmelo – someone smarter than Carmelo – could not successfully pull off what el jefe had failed to do.

In this period of upheaval and disillusion, President Erika Lankolay sought to restore confidence in government. She tapped Nova Espero Planning Director Frederika van Nuys – a political agnostic with a million ideas – to dream big and pursue massive changes. A second line would be dug under the Federal Way between the Milito Memorial and a new home for the Common Council, and would bend to connect the working class neighborhoods of the Southern Ward to the employment nodes of the CBD and a to-be-built industrial district that would separate the soot and smog of factories from the homes of their workers.

She would also expand Line 1, fulfilling the dreams of Francisco II in bringing it to Mist Cove, but instead of being the exclusive domain of wealthy well-to-dos, the line would spur the growth of “station cities” to be inhabited by people of all walks of life. On the high, central plateau – long a no-man’s land due to poor transportation connections – vast housing estates and commercial districts would be connected by a series of idyllic median-running trams. And at the tip of that plateau would be Palisades Park, accessible to the laboring classes of the flatlands below by a series of funiculars.

“Now arriving at Mist Cove… Doors will open on the left… This is the end of the trip. Please depart from the train…”

Van Nuys’ ideas were bold, audacious, unimaginably expensive, and triggered a backlash that would stifle such massive projects for generations. More caustic than their costs were the effects they had on surrounding communities. In places like Arlington, Sutton, Tabico, and Opalton, swathes of shanties and more formal urban neighborhoods that had blossomed in the decades following the War were unceremoniously demolished to make way for the Line 1 viaduct’s massive concrete pillars. The residents of these places revolted, throwing bricks at construction workers, filling the gas tanks of construction equipment with sugar, and firebombing site offices.

The people of these communities that had been so maligned by the urban works projects were among the members of the varied coalition that would unceremoniously remove Lankolay’s People’s Party from power in the 60 PM elections. The Conservatives, who had spent thirteen years in the political desert, were back – and there would be no more Frederika van Nuys. Even so, the land in the affected cities was already cleared – the Line 1 expansion would go forward as planned.

Despite the population of Nova Espero increasing three-fold since the opening of the Line 1 expansion in 63 PM, very little has changed with the Metro. Frequencies have increased, but the only new lines built have been ones connecting Federal Station (and its arriving tourists with suitcases full of cash) with the hotels and casinos of Fort Fortuna, and another connecting the urban core to the recently-finished suburban Philippe Gaumont International Airport.

As a result, the system’s stations and trains are more packed than ever before. Passengers have complained of sardine-like conditions aboard rush hour trains, and the city’s Transportation Department and Police Bureau have warned of “crowd crunch” conditions at certain stations. And as the Plateau neighborhoods continue to develop and densify, analysts say that, despite their quaintness and the fondness local residents have for them, the Plateau trolleys are well past their useful life in terms of capacity.

“Now arriving at Moncton… Doors will open on the left… This is the end of the trip... Please depart from the train…”

Compared to the trains, parks, and the massive housing towers of Van Nuys Plaza, Frederika van Nuys’ project at Moncton is often overlooked. Prior to its construction, dockyards and factories clung to the southern shores of the city, clotting the air of the poorer Southern Ward with a thick, brown-black haze of particulate matter. Van Nuys sought to ameliorate the issue by shifting these industrial uses to Moncton, then on the outer fringes of the city. The plan worked – but with the advent of nuclear energy and the proliferation of massive renewable energy projects, the coal-burning stacks that choked the lungs and throats of Southern Ward residents are now long gone. Though the industrial uses are unseemly, technology has largely solved the problem of pollution – were the idea to be proposed today, Moncton Industrial Area might not exist.

Some will point to the auto and claim that to build new trains is to engage in outmoded transportation strategies. When van Nuys ballooned the Metro, less than 10% of Uniguitan households had access to an automobile – today, nearly 50% do. What cities need now are highways and boulevards, not trains, according to many in the urban planning community. The recently proposed Federal Budget would allocate millions more notes to roadways than in previous years, and the amount of funding for mass transit projects has dipped in recent years despite increasing costs and growing maintenance backlogs.

When zoning for industrial uses was explored for the Southern Ward recently, the community still stood in stiff opposition. Despite changes in technology that have made factories less pollution-intensive, the residents were still vehemently opposed to industrial uses being in their neighborhood. Outside of the Southern Ward, this was seen as irrational – but to local residents, many of whom worked in Moncton, they knew that the smoke and the soot weren’t the only problems, but also truck traffic and ceaseless noise of industry. Despite the heckles of well-to-do people outside the district, the residents knew the realities on the ground. Where you stand often depends on where you sit.

Of the 50% of households in Uniguita – and 20% in Nova Espero more specifically – that have access to a car, they are on average wealthier than households that do not have access to a car. Residents who rely on transit are, on average, poorer. To build out highways at the expense of transit would be akin to Francisco II’s old vision to build the Metro to serve only the toniest of wards in his new Imperial Capital.

This is part of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to go to the series’ page.

“Watch your step,” said Lieutenant Suarez as he and the rest of Platoon 403 approached the entrance of the subway station. The guard posted at the rotting gateway nodded as the unit passed through, stomping down the concrete steps made slick by snowmelt from the streets above. A patina of green grime clung to the tiled walls, disappearing with the daylight down what appeared to be an infinite chasm into the unfinished subterranean subway network.

Just ten or so paces down, Pavel and the others snapped on their flashlights, illuminating a fog of hazy ozone and the shimmering pool of water at the base of the stairs. Splashing down, Corny cursed their aging boots.

“They couldn’t have given us the rubber boots for this one?” he grumbled.

“Quit complaining. The railbed will be dry,” the lieutenant replied.

Indeed, approaching the edge of the platform revealed a gravel causeway just barely peering above the waterline. One after another, the foursome jumped down onto the unfinished tracks, the smell of rotting wood permeating their nostrils. Hundreds of railroad ties sat helplessly, wasting away half-submerged in the stagnant water beside the railbed. Frederic, forming the tail of the unit, instinctively looked back to help Kara down. Of course, she wasn’t there.

“Alright… onward for the next couple of miles,” said the lieutenant.

“I hate the tunnels,” Corny whispered to Pavel, “they’re way too spooky.” In the dead-quiet of this thankfully linear catacomb there was no way that Suarez didn’t hear him. Either out of mercy or out of frustration, the lieutenant chose not to acknowledge the complaint.

The slushy gravel squelched underfoot, inundated with two years of rainwater and snowmelt unable to drain into the severely damaged sewer system. The boots, which they already demanded so much of, failed under the pressure of the near-marshy environment. Soon enough, their socks became soaked with a gray-brown slurry, exacerbating the blisters beginning to form on their feet.

The tunnel, bored deep into the earth in the years prior to the War, was pitch dark. It was so far removed from the surface that no pinpricks of light from the pockmarked streets and bombed out basements above could make it through. Only the faintest levels of light emerged when the platoon made their way through defunct stations, where the apparition of day peered in through the distant entryways. The men trained their lights on the railbed, careful not to veer into the frigid ditches of ice water on either side. In front and behind, they could hear the scurrying of the tunnels’ massive rats, returning to the region with the newfound “prosperity” of the human inhabitants of Nova Espero. Though the city’s residents were careful when it came to food waste, not everything could be saved. And the rats relished in this comparative feast after so many years of famine.

“You think Anna would want one as a pet?” Corny asked Pavel, aiming his light at a particularly robust creature perched atop a rail tie. “There was a kid who kept one over on Kelso Street, but it bit him and I think he got an infection though, and he…”

Corny, remembering how the story ended and the particular sensitivity of his audience, caught himself.

“Maybe not, then,” he said.

After hiking for two hours in this abominable sludge, Platoon 403 lumbered over the edge of a station platform to stop for lunch. Though the tile was far from finished, the station sign had already been cemented to the wall. COATS it read in a thick, regal serif font. Pavel knew this area – it was a perfectly proper, middle-class ward along the posh northern coastline of the city. Several of his colleagues at the Imperial University spoke of their dreams of moving to somewhere like Coats once the subway finally got built. The low-slung sprawl on the outskirts, where Pavel and Elizabeta had lived, was seen as being outmodish – these so-called “urban villages” of high-rise condos and subway stations were becoming the new aspiration of the middle class.

Now, the quarter-finished remains of Coats station were covered in mildew and a slick, ubiquitous slime. Pavel could only imagine how the surface might look. From the sooty clouds he saw during his long march home, it looked like there had been a considerable firestorm in the area.

The platoon set up their lights and a small stove in the middle of their huddle. Though they had been spared the whipping winter winds of the surface world by taking the subway, the tunnel still served as a cold cellar. Taking off their boots, water dripped from the men’s fully saturated socks. Wringing them out, water splashed on the ceramic floors below, refracting sparkles of light from the bright-white lanterns. They laid their footwear near the stove in a vain effort to dry them out, the air filling with the stench of sweat and whatever unknowable particulates had built up in this makeshift sewer over the past twenty-seven months. Thankfully the cold had so far suppressed this odor – Pavel could only imagine what this place smelled like in the summer.

Pavel, Corny, Frederic, and the Lieutenant greedily opened their containers of rations. Inside were an allegedly high-protein biscuit made of lentils and mushrooms and a small tin of sardines. The sardines had been a major victory – the growing electrical grid helped power a couple of canning machines, and the calming waters had allowed a couple of small fishing boats to venture outwards. The lentils and mushrooms were the product of the Provisions Department’s experimentation with light hydroponics. Better electricity had made these things easier to produce – some of the “hydrofarmers” seemed optimistic that Nova Espero may even have fruit by the springtime.

Several more grueling, trudging hours passed through the gravelly muck and mud of the tunnel. The all-consuming darkness weakened the platoon’s perception of the passage of time and space. Were it not for the stations and their name placards, one would be forgiven for thinking that they had been marching for miles when in reality they had only gone a few hundred feet. And as far as Pavel and the rest of the crew knew, it could very well either be midnight or midday.

From their preparations, Pavel and the others knew that they had reached their destination upon seeing the station name MIST COVE arranged in fresco tiles on the wall. Pavel recalled that this had once been a resort community, complete with a boardwalk, taffy shops, and a carousel.

The men sagged under the weight of their heavy coats and rucksacks, and Pavel was convinced that taking off his clothing would reveal deep ruts where his pack straps had been sitting. Corny, whose body was already aged far beyond his thirty-eight years, belted out a string of expletives as he hobbled from the railbed to the station platform.

“Fucking finally,” he bleated as he splayed onto the unfinished concrete floor. As Pavel followed, he noticed Corny’s pained relief giving way to exasperation, rubbing his eyes in anguish.

“What?” Pavel asked, desperately catching his own breath.

“The stairs,” he said, flinging his hand rightward to the dimly lit stairwell in the far corner. “I always forget about the stairs.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Lieutenant Suarez panted. Pavel was grateful to see his commander in this state, overencumbered and exhausted. It reminded him that he was indeed a human, and not some one-man mechanized infantry unit who never fatigued. Though, sure enough, within seconds he was bounding towards those sure-to-be abominable stairs.

After some thirty-thousand steps – what surely felt like thirty-thousand steps – Platoon 403 emerged from the underworld. They found themselves in a pitch dark neighborhood. Though there was no moon in the sky, the winds had pushed the clouds out to sea, revealing a vast tapestry of stars above.

Lieutenant Suarez led the platoon down a series of streets and alleyways fronted by fire-scorched buildings that had not seen the light of life in quite some time. These great stone caverns seemed darker and colder than the night outside, their upper stories in varying states of decay. Windows burped out shattered bricks, with piles forming on the sidewalk. Rebar poked like hairs from scarred concrete, and snow crept up against empty doorways.

Turning down one of these alleys, the lieutenant made his way towards a heavy metal door. Using an archaic key on what appeared to be an even more archaic lock, he gestured the others inside. Pavel was prepared for another bivouac in some bombed out house, warmed only by the integrity of the thin wool blanket issued to him by the Scavenger’s Union.

Groping the dark interior walls for a minute, he eventually found a switch. When he hit it, the room erupted in a warm, incandescent glow. On the wall to the right hung a map of the region, and to the left bulletin boards with carefully written out instructions for visitors. A spiral staircase in the corner led upwards, and a desk in the opposite corner held a radio.

Flipping it on, the lieutenant chattered a message to Nova Espero.

“Nova Espero, this is Platoon 403. We have arrived at Granmercy and are clocking out for the night, over.”

“Understood, 403,” a reply crackled. “Sweep the roof, and then goodnight.”

“Pavel, follow me,” the lieutenant quickly barked as he turned off the radio and desk lamp. Grabbing two brooms, the men headed up the steep stairway. On the second floor, Pavel noticed three, steel-frame bunk beds side by side, with a water closet in the corner – “It’s non-functional, we have to empty a bucket when we leave,” Lieutenant Suarez explained.

At the top of the stairs, the lieutenant contended with another ancient lock, shoving the door upwards into the night sky. The two ascended onto the small roof, topped by a series of solar panels coated in a half-inch of snow. One by one, the men swept the snow off, Pavel taking the occasional opportunity to gawk at the kaleidoscope of colors above. The light purplish brush strokes and milky smudges, the innumerable diamonds forming absurd constellations. The moon itself seemed exaggerated, casting an impossibly bright beam in its reflection. A few blocks away, Pavel watched as the moonlight jittered over the rolling waters of the Western Sea.

As the waves smashed on the seawall, he could almost remember those summer nights where he and Elizabeta strolled the promenade, popping into the gimmicky gift shops and import stores together. Despite the frigid temperatures, Pavel could feel the warm sea breeze and taste the cup of Kilmartin Dairy ice cream they shared. Ice cream. What a throwback. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had-

“Pavel,” the lieutenant grumbled. “I have something for you. Don’t tell the others.”

Lieutenant Suarez handed Pavel a cigarette. At the time, this was no mere friendly gesture. Even as stale as they were, cigarettes had become a borderline currency in the Collapse.

As the lieutenant sparked his light and the cigarette began to burn, Pavel took a puff. Was it- it couldn’t possibly be?

“Fresca,” Suarez said. Even in the faint light, he could detect Pavel’s confused expression. He explained that in addition to more sensible, nutritious things like lentils and kale, the Provisions Department had experimented with tobacco hydroponics. The justification was that it would not only be a morale booster to be able to have fresh cigarettes again, but that once Nova Espero began to go out and trade, fresh cigarettes might be worth their weight in gold to the nicotine-starved world of survivors.

Eyeing his watch, Suarez coughed “congratulations, citizen.”

Citizen. Pavel thought. His mind raced away from the pure narcotic bliss between his lips and back to that hospital bed. Anna’s a citizen.

Eight miles away, Elizabeta stroked her daughter’s hand as she eyed the clock. Across the hospital bed, Dr. Poilievre prepared a series of syringes and vials, the antibiotics that would become available to the ailing six-year-old.

Anna had been asleep since just after dinner some five hours ago. The other children in the ward slumbered peacefully, their quiet only occasionally interrupted by the hacking cough of one of their fellow tubercular patients.

When the clock struck midnight, the doctor reached for some paperwork. Signing her affirmation of Anna’s citizenship, she handed the clipboard over to Elizabeta for her signature.

As she scribbled on the page, Dr. Poilievre got to work. One by one, she plunged the needles into Anna’s arm. She was so weak and exhausted that she hardly stirred.

“Now all we can do is continue her medication and keep her rested,” the doctor said.

Elizabeta quietly thanked the doctor. She could feel her eyes sagging as they darted back to Anna. Despite her improved diet, Elizabeta had been awake for nearly eighteen hours with little rest. Her stress and anxiety over Anna was compounded by her stress and anxiety over Pavel. At this point, her weariness had overridden her cortisol, and Elizabeta smiled softly as she nodded off in her chair.

This is Part Nine of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to read Part Ten.

NOVA ESPERO CITY - KVARTO 5, 126 PM

For deuce-driver Robert MacThomas, the day begins at 5 o’clock in the morning. He starts in his Southern Ward apartment which he shares with his wife Moira and his two sons. After a brief cup of coffee and hastily prepared toast, he is out the door before the rest of his family is even awake.

He then bikes over to the Southern Ward station of the Drivers’ Cooperative of Nova Espero (DCNE – typically read aloud as dickney). He badges in through the chainlink gate, alongside several other drivers. They each go to the DCNE office where they pick up their routes and route placards. These placards tell pedestrians where the vehicle attached can and cannot go, and in which zones the driver can pick up passengers.

“Zone 1, lucky pull,” Robert tells me as he receives his placards. Zone 1 contains the northern half of the Federal Way, a highly trafficked corridor of shops, museums, government offices, hotels, and a variety of tourist destinations. “People tip like profligates when they’re on vacation,” he tells me in his delightful rural Kilmartin brogue.

After he gets the placards, I follow Robert to his deuce, a brightly painted van with a carrying capacity of six – “seven if they’re skinny,” he tells me with a grin. He slides the placards into the wrought iron display atop the roof, showing potential clients that he is an officially licensed, DCNE-endorsed driver. Robert then performs a series of pre-trip checks – tire pressure, lights, windshield wipers. There’s nothing to flag today, but he assures me that when there is an issue the mechanics the Cooperative keeps on hand are quick and reliable.

He then unplugs the vehicle from its charger, and steps into the driver’s seat (on the right side of the vehicle, rather than the left) while I take the passenger side. We crawl out to the station exit behind a dozen or so other vehicles waiting patiently to turn onto Southern Avenue.

At 6:00 sharp, deuce #815 leaves the station and is ready to start the day.

What is a deuce?

“It’s an awful name, now, given the euphemism,” Robert delicately tries to explain. More professor than cabbie in dress and temperament, the fifteen-year veteran of the trade seems to still lament the name of the primary tool of his profession.

Deuces – the ubiquitous share-taxis of Nova Espero – first hit the roads in the early 10s. The scarcity of automobiles and the non-existence of real public transportation meant that alternatives were necessary for workers commuting across the increasingly sprawling settlement.

“There was no subway, there were no trolleys, there were no buses, and there absolutely were no private cars,” my driver for the day tells me. “You either walked places or, if you were lucky, you biked there.”

Francois Gauthier and his brother Simon had been road-tripping across the Empire when the War hit. When they arrived in Nova Espero in 2 PM, their worn-out, four-door, six-seat 1759 O.S.1 Richardson Trekker was their only possession. The van proved a valuable commodity in an automotive-starved Collapse-era Nova Espero, and the Gauthiers started a scavenging business where they used the vehicle to haul heavyweight materials back from the wasteland.

As time wore on, however, Nova Espero acquired and refurbished more abandoned trucks that were better suited to the task of salvaging. The Gauthiers, ever the entrepreneurial type, found another use for their van. As the city spread outward and distances became more difficult to navigate on foot, the duo began running a shuttle service between worksites and residential areas. The fare cost two pennies at first, or deux in the Gauthiers’ native Lacaise. This deux became deuce, the name for the vehicles themselves.

The business was so lucrative that the Gauthier brothers looked into buying more vans to expand their operation. Being a pricey and diminishing commodity as a result of a moribund, post-War auto industry, the brothers found difficulty in purchasing more vans on their own. So, they joined with a few other potential investors who would serve as drivers, part-time mechanics, and shareholders in the enterprise and formed the Drivers’ Cooperative of Nova Espero.

By the end of the decade, ten deuces trawled the streets of Nova Espero, picking up workers and shoppers throughout the city. They lined up outside worker housing at the beginning of the day, and then at the factory gates at shift changes. In an age where automobiles cost ten times the annual salary of a resident of the city, the deuces provided a vital piece of semi-public transportation infrastructure.

DCNE solidifies

By the 30s, the auto industry had finally begun to recover. Though they were still inaccessible to average commuters, automobiles did become more accessible to independent deuce operators, so-called indies. The Cooperative prided itself on its safety record, the training of its drivers, and its fair, consistent rates, and saw the newcomers as vulgar imposters. Their fares were often lower, sure, but their vans were poorly-maintained, their drivers dangerously inexperienced, and their service was subpar. Accidents were commonplace, and one 39 PM study from the City found that independent drivers were more than twice as likely to strike a pedestrian than DCNE drivers, and passengers were five times as likely to be injured in an indie than a DCNE deuce.

As independent drivers’ reputation diminished, they began to imitate Cooperative drivers. They placed DCNE logos on their vehicles and their uniforms were purposely designed to resemble DCNE’s. Frustrated by this mimicry, the Cooperative looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the indies in a new way.

Among the various wholesale markets that were still brimming with the reclaimed refuse from cities shattered by the War, then-driver for DCNE Carlos Primavera noticed something strange. Just before the War, a hotel in Nova Espero had purchased dozens of distinctive bedframes made of wrought-iron. Though many buyers at the market would snap these up for their own homes, Primavera had a different idea. He saw an opportunity when he noticed that the twin-sized headboards were roughly the width of most DCNE vans while the king-sized frames were roughly the vans’ length.

Primavera made the snap decision to buy a set, and went back to the DCNE station where he spent the weekend welding the frames together, bolting them to the roof of his own personal deuce, and then painting and cutting placards. When he showed the other members of the cooperative his creation, they broadly approved. By the end of the week, DCNE had bulk purchased all of the bedframes, rapidly attaching them to their vans and creating the distinctive marquees that still define DCNE deuces to this day.

As mimicry began to falter as a potential tactic, some independent drivers turned elsewhere. Michel Rousseau, a DCNE driver at the time, called them “pirates,” and complained that their “cutthroat prices came with cutthroat tactics.” Independent drivers would cut DCNE charging cables, slash tires, and even engage in violence to thwart their competition. DCNE drivers responded in kind, with shootouts and bare-knuckle brawls between cooperative and independent drivers being a running news item throughout the 30s.

“I’ll be frank, it was a gang war,” Robert says. “Even though most of that was over by the time they came around, some of the old timers still carry brass knuckles. Their fathers told them all these stories, and they left every day expecting a fight.”

After a particularly brutal fight between DCNE and indie drivers that left 6 dead in 43 PM – and amid the growing political clout of DCNE – the government stepped in. As a part of his new crackdown on organized crime, the government of President Enrico Carmelo passed new restrictions on deuce operations that left the indie drivers in a precarious regulatory state. Federal and Nova Espero police harassed unlicensed indie drivers (typically poorer and more likely to be immigrants than DCNE drivers), arresting dozens over the course of the operation. Enforcement of existing laws strengthened at the cost of a lucrative income stream for many of the working poor, especially those in the Southern Ward.

The relationship between DCNE and the Carmelo administration became symbiotic. In 44 and 46 PM, the Cooperative organized for Carmelo’s Conservatives, using their deuces to get right-wing voters to the polls on Election Day. DCNE’s then-leader and enthusiastic Carmelist Marco Trulio provided an additional working class veneer of legitimacy to Carmelo’s brand of right-wing populism. He frequently called him the “greatest president that nation’s ever had.” Carmelo responded to this support with further regulations that put smaller operators at a disadvantage, ensuring that DCNE and only DCNE stood a chance at operating share-cabs in the capital city. In 39 PM, DCNE operated around 50% of all deuces in the city. By 47 PM, DCNE deuces made up more than 90% of the market in Nova Espero.

The cooperative was a powerful political bloc in local politics, with their highly organized and wide-reaching membership having the potential to sink or float any individual candidate. Between 41 and 47 PM, every single candidate endorsed by DCNE in the city won their election, and the Cooperative’s rightward shift helped the Conservatives gain control of the traditionally left-wing capital in 44 PM.

They were at the top of their game, and it didn’t seem like anything could knock them down.

But then Enrico Carmelo attempted to end democracy with a stroke of his pen. When his coup attempt eventually failed, the local and national political backlash was severe. Whereas DCNE had been an unstoppable force in local politics for close to a decade, their legitimacy vanished overnight. In the 48 PM elections, the Conservatives went from controlling the presidency, the Common Council, and the government of Nova Espero to none of them. The right had been relegated to the political wilderness, and some saw DCNE as being guilty by association.

Their interests were no longer a priority.

Nova Espero grows, DCNE diminishes

After years of economic crisis and Carmelo’s attempted self-coup, newly elected President Erika Lankolay was looking for more than reform when she was swept into power in 48 PM. She was looking for a real, tangible process that would lift people’s spirits and put them to work.

One part of her broader strategy was the National Infrastructure Plan, a program in which the government would subsidize massive public works projects. The NIP would not only build transportation systems, sewer networks, and dams, but also schools, libraries, post offices, and housing. “Lankolay didn’t just want to rebuild the Old World, like Carmelo did,” according to Nova Espero city historian George Talmadge. “She wanted to exceed it.”

In Nova Espero, President Lankolay appointed local planning director Frederika van Nuys to be the city’s NIP administrator. And he had dreams. According to local legend, he visited President Lankolay and her closest advisors at Voorhees Square2 to present on over a dozen projects he had been designing, investigating, and planning in his spare time. They ranged in ambition from planting street trees in the working class Southern Ward to building a massive complex of retail and public housing to finally completing the city’s subway system that had been started just before the War. When Lankolay asked him how much money he would need, van Nuys supposedly asked, “for which project?”

She replied, “all of them.”

DCNE opposed some of these projects, specifically the mass transit programs. But neither Lankolay nor the People’s Party were very interested in what DCNE had to say. The Cooperative and its controversial head had been steadfast allies to the would-be dictator Carmelo, and had even shut down deuce service during the president’s attempted coup to keep protestors from getting to Voorhees Square. The typically labor-friendly People’s Party had few sympathies for what they saw as an organization allied to tyranny.

Just weeks before Nova Espero’s city council was set to approve van Nuys’ proposals, DCNE held its biennial leadership election. Marco Trulio faced a serious challenge from driver John Gauthier, the grandson of DCNE founder Francois Gauthier. Trulio ran on aggressive action to oppose the new NIP proposals — strikes, sit-ins, and what he called “creative, overwhelming resistance.” Gauthier favored collaboration with the new administration, and adaptation to an inevitably changing environment.

In the end, Trulio won re-election. The week before the city council’s vote, Trulio called and received approval for a strike.

“They won’t know what hit ‘em,” Trulio told a Universalo reporter at the time. “Those stuffed shirts in council, those idiot liberals won’t know what to do without us. Who’s gonna drive them to their meetings, or their seminars.”

“And their constituents are going to start complaining,” he continued. “And that’ll scare the fuck outta them.”

DCNE deuces surrounded City Hall, day and night, blaring on their horns and picketing in protest. Deuce service ground to a halt in the federal capital, and the small fleet of the municipal bus service was inadequate to pick up the demand. As an emergency measure, President Lankolay re-directed buses meant for Puerto Blanco’s already-approved transportation system to service Nova Espero instead.

Even so, service was clearly disrupted and the DCNE drivers were making their point clear. In the days preceding the vote, DCNE staged a letter-writing campaign to members of the council whose districts had significant deuce driver populations.

“When all is said and done, you’ll want to come down on the right side of this issue,” read a letter to Populist councilmember Rodney Markham. “Lankolay’s coattails got you your seat in 48. Don’t think they’ll be so long in 50.”

DCNE’s other tactics of persuasion were less civically-minded. Members of council had their tires slashed, threatening notes were left on their doorsteps, and several received threatening phone calls to their office. “They’re a bunch of mobsters,” said one councilor at the time. “Plain and simple.”

Ultimately, the strike, the letter-writing campaign, and the scare tactics were all for nought. The city council overwhelmingly approved van Nuys’ program, and the federal Common Council ratified it a little over a week later. A subway would be built. A new bus system would be organized.

And the deuces would be undercut.

Sabotage of the projects was a constant headache. As construction of the subway began, workers would return to the jobsite to find concrete drums destroyed with sugar and hydraulic lines cut. One night, the city was awakened when a shed storing nitroglycerin suddenly and violently exploded, destroying a worksite office trailer and several vehicles. When a fleet of buses was delivered in mid 51 PM, someone slashed their tires.

It wasn’t until the local police and federal Gendarmes set up a sting that the culprits were uncovered. Fifteen individuals – including twelve DCNE drivers – were ultimately arrested. Prosecutors soon discovered evidence that orders to sabotage the projects came directly from Trulio. He and the entire cooperative soon fell under an investigation using the same anti-mob laws President Carmelo had used to persecute DCNE’s independent rivals.

As Trulio and DCNE’s trial was underway, the cooperative faced another blow – in 53 PM, the newly formed Constitutional Court ruled that DCNE was an illegal monopoly. Just a week after Trulio and several co-conspirators were found guilty of racketeering, vandalism, and property damage, DCNE was broken up into four new cooperatives. The Cooperative went from having 90% of market share to just 35%. Still by far the largest operator in the city, but far removed from its one-time peak.

After Trulio’s trial, frequent news stories of mob-like behavior, lasting resentment towards DCNE for its actions during Carmelo’s coup attempt, and declining quality of service left the Cooperative with a reputation in tatters.

DCNE reborn

Shortly after Trulio’s indictment, he was ousted as head of the Cooperative. John Gauthier, who had run against Trulio in 49 PM, captured the presidency campaigning on pragmatic responses to the new transportation environment.

Rather than firebombing buses and cutting power cables, Gauthier pursued innovation. He hired transportation planners to map out optimal routes to take advantage of the new subways and bus routes rather than fight against them. DCNE would be a supplemental service, and a potentially quicker and more personalized alternative to the mass transportation options. The train would take you from home to downtown – a deuce would take you to your office door.

Gauthier emphasized a clean, efficient, and well-run operation. Vans were repainted, seating and carpets were updated, and new taximeters designed to cater to multiple passenger routes simultaneously were installed, showing them exactly how much they were going to pay in fare. Ranks were set up near the soon-to-open subway stations, and the city was re-zoned to align drivers to expected demand.

After completing a few early morning routes, Robert parks his deuce near the University of Nova Espero station of the city’s 2 line. Standing outside his vehicle, he ushers potential passengers into the van, handing them a plastic card. The card, when punched back into the taximeter, stops the machine and calculates the fare for the respective passenger. He welcomes aboard a second-year student heading to class, two lab assistants, and a professor who appears to be a regular customer.

“Robbie! It’s been a while since I’ve seen you down here,” he says, taking Robert’s hand into his. “It’s been too long, Donald. How’s paleontology treating you?”

“Well, my subjects are all still dead,” the professor replies, “so they’re not going anywhere at least.”

As Dr. Carrick takes his seat, MacThomas tumbles back in and starts the engine. The van, clearly encumbered by the weight of four new passengers, strains as Robert backs out onto the crowded Federal Way and heads north. The first stop is Dr. Donald Carrick’s paleontology department – fare, N1.25. Then the two lab assistants at the Biology Department, N1.50 each. Finally the sophomore – clearly hungover – lazily stumbles out at the mathematics building after paying his N1.75 fare.3

“It all used to be two pennies,” Robert says. “It’s more expensive now – everything’s more expensive now – but N64 ain’t bad for a fifteen-minute job.”

Initially intended to be a placeholder leader between Trulio and whoever came next, Gauthier’s tactics and strategy proved to be popular enough to get him re-elected president of DCNE until his eventual retirement in 88 PM. He transformed DCNE’s deuces from a declining, last-resort transportation option for the working poor tainted by years of grimy tactics into a luxury good for last-mile commuters, bewildered tourists, and intoxicated partiers.

As the subway, trolley, and bus systems expanded, the number of deuce drivers didn’t change very much. In fact, DCNE’s number of member-drivers has remained constant since about 90 PM. The work itself, however, has changed. Cross-town commutes are less common – instead, most drivers either serve the last mile in a supplement to the trains, or help chauffeur participants in the city’s vaunted nightlife.

“If Zone 1 is the number one pick, Zone 8 isn’t far behind,” Robert says. Zone 8 contains Fort Fortuna, the fortress turned prison turned massive casino complex. “If tourists tip well, drunks and gamblers tip great,” he says with a smile. “Folks who go to casinos are pretty loose with their money, it turns out.”

A few blocks away from UNE campus, a confused-looking father amid his equally confused family waves Robert down. Pulling up to the curb, he rolls down the window.

“Hello… erm, how get to…” the man says in heavily accented Hegelionic.

“Where are you from?” asks Robbie.

“Ferria,” the man stammers.

“Ah, a dónde quieren ir?” Robbie chatters back in Ferrian.

He explains in Ferrian that he and his family are trying to get to Federal Station. Robbie, again in perfect Ferrian, welcomes them aboard.

“It’s useful to know a couple different languages in this business, especially here,” Robbie explains. In addition to his native Swalish, MacThomas can speak Hegelionic, Ferrian, Lacaise, and Erachnian.

“I’m trying to learn Ylrikian too, but you have to remember so many characters,” he explains. “And it’s a tonal language too… it’s maddening.”

After a jaunt up to Federal Station, the family thanks Robert as they depart – fare total N5.25.5

When a passenger leaving the terminal asks if she can get a ride, he explains that he can’t take her anywhere. He can only drop people off outside of his zone – he can’t pick them up. Frustrated, she leaves, asking another nearby deuce driver for a ride.

“Those are the rules, I don’t know what to tell her,” Robert tells me.

Robert takes me through the lunch rush, the early afternoon lull, the later afternoon surge of commuters going back to the subway, and finally the early evening diners. All manner of people passed through Robert’s van: government employees in suits and dresses, students in sweatshirts, shiftworkers in their myriad of uniforms and coveralls, and tourists in comfortable shoes and breezy shirts.

All told, Robert brings in N69.256 in fares – a pretty good day, according to him. About a third of that goes to taxes and DCNE for facility upkeep, maintenance staff, and vehicle storage. The rest goes in his pocket. On an average day, he takes home around N40, working out to around N10,4007 a year. Given that the median wage in Nova Espero was N9,865 according to the 121 PM Federal census, this isn’t too shabby.

“Plus, I love the work,” Robert says. “You meet so many interesting people.”

Pulling back into the DCNE station at 5:58 in the evening, MacThomas performs his post-shift checks before plugging his van in for the night. After checking in with the office, reporting his fares and turning in his dues and taxes, he makes his way back through the chain-link gate N42.258 richer.

114 years after the first deuces criss-crossed the ancient, war-ravaged streets of Nova Espero, deuce drivers like Robert MacThomas still carve up the city today. Through turf wars, through monopoly breakups, through changes in transportation, DCNE is still here. And it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.

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PRAVGOROD, P.O. – TRIO 26, 126 PM

At a “security training facility” on the outskirts of Pravgorod, Pravish Premier Aaron Landau speaks at the graduation of a fresh new class of recruits. These sixty or so men and women will be the newest members of the Pravish Self Defense Forces (PSDF, or PSSB in Pravish), the last legally recognized commonwealth militia in the Federation.

“We have seen times like these before. In the aftermath of the Milito, so many of our people were killed. Not by Ylrikian bombs, but those whom we believed to be our fellow countrymen. We were defenseless,” Landau said. “And after that, we said ‘never again’. Yet, we once again came to rely on outsiders to assist in our defense. And then the Bloody Week came. They failed us again. And now we do not merely say, but we promise – ‘never again.’”

Thirty-five years ago, nationalist extremists from neighboring Zoldhegyek staged a massive operation both there and in Pravo, setting out to kill ethnic Pravs and otherwise remove them from the borderlands between the two commonwealths. Though they failed in their ultimate hope of establishing a Zoldish ethnostate and eradicating the Pravs, the Zoldish National Army was able to kill hundreds of people and destroy millions of notes worth of property before the then-diminished Pravish Self Defense Forces and the Federal Army were able to stamp out the insurgency.

In the three and a half decades since the Bloody Week, the commonwealth government of Pravo has slowly rebuilt the PSDF. And with the recent rise of the far-right in Zoldhegyek, the Pravish government has seen a resurgence in recruitment.

“In years past, typical class sizes were twenty cadets, thirty at most,” Premier Landau told me, himself a veteran of the PSDF who fought during the Bloody Week. “Now, as you see, this class of cadets is sixty. The Forces is even expecting to hold another session of the training academy this summer, and another in the fall.”

“The generation two back – my generation – has told people what the outsiders are capable of,” he says. “Now they’re starting to listen. They want to sign up to defend Pravo before it’s too late.”

History of the Pravish Self Defense Forces

Immediately after the Milito, general order broke down in the fragmented and isolated mountain communities of the Zoldhegyek and Pravo. Both regions’ capitals had been catastrophically damaged by significant explosive devices (SEDs), and communications lines were generally severed. This chaotic environment was further compounded by the cutting of trade routes that brought food, medicine, and other essential supplies to the backcountry, as well as existing ethnic enmities between the two peoples.

In Zoldhegyek, rumors emerged that the Pravs had stockpiled supplies and were hoarding them as Zolds perished to starvation and the other privations of the Collapse Era. In reality, the Pravs were suffering just as much as the Zolds – according to historical studies of the War and the Collapse Era, death rates among both peoples in the first year following the War were generally similar, around 52%.

Even so, this paranoia led to conflict. The Zoldish warlords stormed across historically Pravish lands, looting the threadbare homes of the poor peasantry and murdering countless thousands of innocent civilians. When Pravish defenders fought back, the Zolds used the weapons they found to justify further warmaking against the Pravs. The Zolds managed to push the Pravs even further eastward into what is now considered Pravo, where a final line of defense was established.

This “national redoubt” – ludowa reduta in Pravish – became the basis for future Pravish defensive policy and the establishment of the first iterations of a formalized Pravish Self Defense Forces. The People’s Defense Forces (PDF), founded in 3 PM, would defend all Pravs behind the reduta to the death. In the coming decades, Zoldish forces would twice more attempt to invade Pravo, and both times they would be repelled by the PDF.

After Kilmartin joined Uniguita in the late 10s, the generally isolationist Zoldhegyek joined as well in 19 PM. Ultimately, the Pravish government found it more advantageous to be a part of the Federation, especially if the possibility arose that the already-integrated Zoldhegyek could persuade the government to take action against Pravo.

In 27 PM, Pravo joined the Federation. Like all commonwealths, it was entitled to maintain a militia for the purposes of defense and internal law enforcement. Though by this point many of the commonwealths had abolished their militia, Pravo elected to retain theirs. To keep in line with the more politically secular naming conventions of the Federation, the PDF was rechristened as the Prawijskie Sily Samoobrony – better known as the Pravish Self Defense Forces, or the PSDF.

Despite persistent animosities and low-level ethnic conflict among organized gangs and small bands of ethnonationalists, relations normalized between the Zolds and Pravs. Over time, the PSDF diminished in importance as a paramilitary organization, and began to primarily focus on law enforcement and assisting in disaster response.

“They called us the kalosznicy komanda – the ‘mudboot commandos’ – because we were more likely to be wading through muck to save some idiot who didn’t listen to flood warnings than to be fighting in actual battles,” Landau tells me. Because of this shift in purpose, combat and weapons training became deprioritized.

Then came the Bloody Week. In the early morning hours of Trio 25, 91 PM, members of the ultranationalist Zoldish National Army staged coordinated terrorist attacks across Zoldhegyek and Pravo. Members of the organization stormed the Zoldish and Pravish houses of parliament, killing dozens of legislators including the Zoldish premier. Simultaneously, operatives attacked Pravish villages along the borderlands, killing hundreds in the name of anti-Pravish hatred.

Federal troops ultimately restored order in the region, but for many the ultimate restoration of order came too slowly. In the end, more than 900 Pravish civilians were killed during the Bloody Week, alongside 56 Zolds.

“It was a bloodbath, and they caught us unprepared. We had gotten complacent,” says Landau. “Like I said – ‘never again.’”

Though the PSDF still remains primarily a law enforcement and disaster recovery agency, combat training and readiness has been re-emphasized. Weapons are regularly updated, and the “national redoubt” has been reinforced with pre-built checkpoints and concrete bunkers, and all but one of the PSDF’s “bases” are located within fifty miles of the Zoldish-Pravish border.

“Things have been relatively peaceful since 91,” Landau tells me, though he contends “we thought that in Trio 91 PM too.”

The Black Eagles rescue Grawlowicz

On a cool, early spring morning in the rural frontier between Zoldhegyek and Pravo, privates Emil Kuna and Viktoria Florek share cigarettes over a dying campfire. A few other enlisted PSDF personnel amble about their campsite, nursing metal cups of instant coffee and tea.

“It’s too cold out here,” Private Florek complains. “They always schedule our exercises when it’s cold.” Small gray-white-brown lumps of snow muddled with dirt clings to the bases of the trees, and each breath hangs lazily in the air. The campsite sits on the side of one of the region’s characteristic rolling mountains, offering unrivaled vistas of the thawing valleys below and the frosted ridges some miles away.

Captain Franciszka Malecka, a mountain of terror stacked just five feet high, arouses the members of the militia, ordering them to kick out their fire and begin their march into the valley below. When a private slips on the wet leaves, tumbling a few feet down the hillside, a mere stare from Captain Malecka gets him to his feet at a speed I have never before seen.

After twenty minutes of hiking, the captain calls over two soldiers, pointing out to a rock jutting out over the valley. One puts binoculars to their face announcing estimates of the number of enemies while Captain Malecka observes, as the other soldier scribbles on a small notepad.

Reaching the valley floor, the members of the unit cling to a line of trees along a small rural lane heading into the hamlet of Grawlowicz. As they approach the inner core, Captain Malecka juts her hand behind her, slowly motioning it downward.

“Down, down!” she hisses, as an armored personnel carrier lumbers past.

“Okay, up, up!”

Sliding into an alleyway between two archaic stone buildings, the militia performs a final check on its weapons. Peering around the corner, Private Florek whispers to the captain and me, “five terrorists, two blocks down in the courthouse.”

Out in the street stand five figures dressed in military fatigues and cloaked in ski masks. “Terrorists” in the parlance of the PSDF, they are meant to represent a potential threat to Pravo’s safety and not any particular organization specifically. Their resemblance to the ski mask-clad members of the Zoldish National Army terrorists of the 90s is purely coincidental.

“One, two, three, four, five,” Malecka says, pointing out each terrorist. Turning around, she points to two privates, “one, two” she says to one, “three, four, five” she says to the other.

Florek and Kuna jostle forward. Florek stands while Kuna kneels.

They take aim.

Pak! Pak! Pak! Pak! Pak!

Paint explodes on the chests of the terrorists. They tumble to the ground to a successive chorus of “shit!” and that ever-present Pravish curse, “kurwa!”

The unit quickly crosses the street, breaching the courthouse. After a brief firefight, the unit makes its way to a backroom, where there are three “hostages” tied up.

“Black Eagle has rescued the hostages; no casualties,” Malecka says into a radio with a grin stretched across her face. The other members of the unit high-five, congratulating each other on a job well done.

This is the third year in a row where Captain Malecka’s Black Eagles managed to save the “hostages” – five members of another unit dressed in civilian clothing – without a single casualty.

“Back in 123 PM, we accidentally shot a mother carrying a baby in the head,” she tells me. “I caught hell for that. No way I was ever going to do that again.”

These exercises are a part of the PSDF’s mandatory “Terrorism Response Training”. Using the bountiful ghost towns and villages of the Zoldish/Pravish borderlands, the militia effectively reenacts real scenarios from the Bloody Week. Most analysts believe that if Pravo were to be attacked again, it would again be a spontaneous assault by a well-organized enemy or cellular assaults on remote villages. In 103 and 109 PM, Zoldish ultranationalist terrorists again staged attacks in Pravo, storming into rural hamlets to take hostages. In both cases, the PSDF was able to use their expertise to release the hostages without any casualties.

“This is like… less than 5% of what we do. Less than 1%, I’d guess,” the captain tells me. “But when that less than 1% happens… we have to be ready.”

The “Barcza boost”

Back in Pravgorod, I meet Brigadier General Pawel Favre, the current commander of the PSDF in his office. Appropriately spartan for this career soldier, the only two decorations of note are an old flag and a helmet with a ghastly chunk ripped out of it.

“This is from the Collapse,” he says, lifting the helmet from its display and circling the cavity with his forefinger. “A Zoldish soldier did this, likely from very close range. He looked a Prav in the eye, and then did this.”

At his desk, Favre shows me a series of charts. Over the past several years, enrollment in the PSDF has declined steadily. He blames the booming economy under former President Gaumont and fading threats of Zoldish terrorism for the decline.

“They weren’t attacking us very much anymore, and the alternatives were too good. If you can be a pipefitter, or a lineworker, or a driver and earn twice as much, why would you be a soldier?” he explains.

But the recent rise of far-right conservative Laszlo Barcza as premier of Zoldhegyek has been a boon for recruitment. According to a federal investigation back in 123 PM, Barcza was an active member of the Zoldish National Army during the Bloody Week, but efforts to prosecute him failed on procedural grounds.

For more on Barcza, read this Unuo 13 article about the far-right’s rise in Zoldhegyek and the reactions of various Zolds.

“Even if he were in prison, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to me, and to most Pravs,” the general explains. “Barcza himself is replaceable. The movement that brought him to power was one we thought had mostly died out, but it’s clear that it would’ve erupted regardless of who was at the head of it.”

In the nearby PSDF barracks I see a printout of Barcza’s official portrait tacked to the center of a dartboard, with evidence of multiple expert shots through his eyes. When I asked the soldiers why they joined, a common answer was fears of Zoldish ethno-nationalism and the rise of Barcza.

Private Janusz Tawicki – who stressed that he would very much like his name attached to this sentiment – tells me, “that fucking psychopath Barcza is why I’m here.”

“My village wasn’t ready when his friends came to town thirty-five years ago,” he says. “We’ll be ready now.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that the Terre de Lac region joined the Federation in the late 10s alongside Vetludo. The commonwealths that make up the Terre de Lac region did not join the Federation until 27 PM.

NOVA ESPERO CITY — TRIO 15, 126 PM

To those who come across this place by happenstance, it doesn’t appear to be all that significant. It could really be any urban park in our increasingly developed world — in the background, you can hear the distant Lankolay Expressway, sending commuters to and fro along the thickly settled Golden Coast. The low-slung scrubs and woody trees atop a carpet of short, beige grasses makes this space look like any other semi-natural spot in this part of the country.

But a closer look reveals an interesting story here. The hills and cliffs are less rolling and more sheer. Rather than being lined by smooth, albeit rocky, banks, the rivers and creeks slide through violent and steep gorges before dumping into the Southern Sea. The ponds are circular things gored deep into the earth, whereas virtually all the lakes in this corner of the world are manmade and far from neatly round.

At the center of this park lies the primary remnant of the circumstances of its birth. Ringed by an almost perfectly circular, sixty-foot high earthen wall, Memorial Lake is around 1,000 feet across and more than 200 feet deep. Today, joggers run its circumference atop a recently repaved multi-use path and families of ducks wade in its bright blue waters mirroring the idyllic skies above.

This scene looked very different 125 years, 3 months, and seventeen days ago. Far from being a pastoral retreat, this was the center of Hegeliopolis’ East End, a densely-populated warren of slums and shanties interrupted by the occasional factory or what could be charitably described as a sweatshop. The people here lived hardscrabble lives amid the steep inequality of that age, and the declining geopolitical order that would ultimately spell their doom.

This scene looked dramatically different still 125 years, 3 months, and sixteen days ago. On a midmorning much similar to this one – blue skies, warm weather, and a calm, gentle breeze – the slums and factories and the countless millions of lives that filled them were callously erased from existence. A significant explosive device, launched from the Ylrikian Empire, exploded some one-hundred feet above the East End, creating this crater, and incinerating the community around it. The shanties were unceremoniously atomized, and the once-smooth hills were made instantaneously craggy and bare. Fires ripped apart the few trees and makeshift parks that existed here, and a hellish inferno marched eastward in a firestorm that killed hundreds of thousands in the coming days.

In the torrential, irradiated rains that defined the subsequent weeks, soil from the denuded hills sloughed off, forming deep ravines and sharp declines. Thousands of tons of dirt containing shredded corrugated metal sheets, concrete, utility poles turned into mulch, and mountains and mountains of ash were washed out to sea.

Over time, life returned. Not human life mind you – despite the area being back to pre-War levels of background radiation within a few months, the erosion of the stigma of visiting this place would take decades. But shoots of green soon erupted from the soil. Weeds and grasses nevertheless persisted, and soon enough animal droppings brought back ferns, trees, and shrubs. Once plants took root, the erosion eased. Water filled the massive central crater, as well as the smaller ones created by the detonation of smaller SED payloads deployed by the larger missile. Wildflowers sprung up in meadows that were once neighborhoods, and small mammals made their homes in what were once sandlots and schoolyards.

Within a few years, nature had reconquered this land; in contrast to the barren, desolate landscapes that defined the descriptions of post-apocalyptic worlds in pre-War literature, this space became verdant and positively re-wilded. Conceptualizing these places as being beige, sandy, almost sterile places long after a hypothetical SED war was an odd sort of self-serving comfort. Without us, without humanity, and through tools of our creation, the world could truly end with us. Life could end with us. It would be absolutely unthinkable for it not to end with us.

Thankfully, that very human, self-obsessed view was another casualty of the War. The ducks still ruffle their feathers, the grass still grows, and the wildflowers still bloom atop the atomized remains of countless millions of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers.

Another prediction that proved incorrect was that society and civilization itself would cease to exist following a potential SED war. In what we now call the Milito, millions did indeed perish, and billions more from the consequent breakdown of order, famines, and disease. It’s estimated that several million died of hypothermia and frostbite alone in the frigid winters that immediately followed the War.

But much like weeds, humans and their societies tend to pop back no matter what chemicals you throw at them. Through what can only be described as a miracle, much of Hegeliopolis’ Old City was spared much of the destruction of the Milito, leaving alive thousands of residents including many well-trained bureaucrats from the old imperial ministries of agriculture and public works. These people, in concert with the impoverished residents of the Old City’s slums and the political prisoners sprung from the torture dungeon that was Fort Fortuna, were able to build some ramshackle society from the ashes of a murdered Empire.

Today, that settlement – which we now know as Nova Espero – supports a population of more than half a million people. The broader Federation, Uniguita, that spread from this peninsula is now a burgeoning democracy that contains over 25 million people. Far from the over half a billion people that lived in the old Hegelio-Ferrian Empire, but far from the 0 that the most pessimistic prophets of the post-apocalypse would have predicted. After 125 years, our cities have rebuilt, our cultures have flourished, and our technology has rebounded.

Even so, we are surrounded by persistent reminders of what we have lost – our cities are ringed by vast, undeveloped “badlands,” the remnants of dead cities not yet fully rebuilt, mausoleums containing the remains of millions of dead not instantaneously incinerated on that awful day, and so-called “SED-lakes” like Memorial, created as the result of massive explosions. Despite our modern comparative prosperity, generations of post-War collapse trauma have left deep scars on our collective psyche – the collision of modern agricultural surplus and famine-stricken societies of decades past have led to countless eating disorders. Even though no one alive today lived through the conflict and its immediate aftermath, millions still exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression and anxiety are endemic. Nostalgia for the pre-War world has fueled revisionist, racist politics, and movements arguing that humanity was truly meant to perish in its totality during the Milito still spark terroristic violence today.

Despite all of this, people find ways to bring themselves joy, make it through the day, and more than just survive but thrive. Most major cities have universities that rival pre-War institutions in research output due to advances in computing and communications technology over the past century and a quarter. The Houses of Wisdom form a constellation of research institutions, pursuing knowledge with a secular religious fervor. Settlements and cities alike abound with theaters, museums, and artists’ wards, markets and restaurants where chefs and artisans experiment with old and new cuisines alike. A higher proportion of Uniguitans are literate than their pre-War counterparts, and nearly a quarter have a university education.

Poverty and inequality remain, to be sure. There are the usual deprivations that societies inflict upon themselves and call it scarcity when in reality it is unjust distribution. Not to mention the very obvious and unignorable tragedy of the extinguishing of many billions of lives as a direct result of the War, and then the subsequent billions who will never know life as a result.

Ours is a world that contrasts overbearing tragedy with unrestrainable joy, obvious loss with a subtle gain that is often unrecognizable when you are in it. The purpose of this column is to share the stories of remaining traumas and persistent dreams as well as the continuity of ancient hatreds and the flourishing of newfound unity. Just as our Federation is filled with such contrasts, so too will this column.

My columns will either continuing an ongoing story or providing a brief look into a world you may not know. You can look at the Dispatches site now to start reading A Survivor’s Story, a tragic narrative about the Tzarkowski family of survivors coming to Nova Espero just two years after the War. There is some lighter content too, such as a brief piece about ice fishing in Pierron, and the Cockroach Day celebrations in Puerto Ostra. Each of these narratives provides an inexorable part of our national story, and I hope that you find them thought-provoking, or at the very least, entertaining.

This is Mikaelo Bonavido from the Nova Espero Universalo. And welcome to Dispatches from Uniguita.

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PORT WILLIAMS, N.H. – TRIO 10, 126 PM

In Little Irikyo, the first warm weekend of Trio is buzzing with life. The calm sea breeze gently shifts the branches of the imported ginkgo trees, and birds flutter among the cautiously budding leaves. Neighbors greet neighbors at the pop-up farmers market in Harry Sakai Square, sharing stories and jokes over plates of street food and hot buns.

For more information on Port Williams’ Ylrikian Uniguitan community, read this piece about the city’s Ylrikian and Crescent Islander diaspora’s response to the upcoming Crescent Islands’ referendum on independence.

As the largest hub of Ylrikian Uniguitans in the Federation, the district exhibits an explosive combination of Western and Eastern culture. Rather than using the more expensive and difficult-to-find octopus typical of Ylrikian cuisine, Sakai Square yakisoba incorporates more local ingredients like Ferrian crab meat, or Port Williams’ world-famous mussels. Vendors sell Ylrikian-language versions of Fosterian religious texts, and a group of bubbly volunteers from the Ylrikian Uniguitan Civil Rights Association (YUCRA) implore market visitors to vote.

Below are some of the conversations I had while at the Little Irikyo market.

Kate is a 23-year-old pharmacy student who grew up in Little Irikyo. She’s with her boyfriend, Lewis, who she’s introducing to her family this weekend. Lewis is from a rural area in Plains, and is clearly still getting his bearings in this much more diverse and high-energy urban neighborhood.

“He’s cute, isn’t he?” she says, pointing over to the lanky, bespectacled man gawking at the kintsugi1 bowls on display at a stall. “He’s kind of a dork, but I love him. My parents are super traditional, but they love him too. Or at least, they love the fact that he’s becoming a doctor.”

The child of refugees who came to Uniguita in the early 90s, Kate tells me that her parents had mixed feelings when she got into the elite University of Nova Espero.

“They were ecstatic that I got into UNE, it’s every immigrant parent’s dream for their kid to get into UNE,” she tells me. “But my dad was heartbroken that his little girl was going to be hours down the coast. ‘It’s so far away,’ he’d say. ‘And what if there aren’t any Ylrikian boys there,’” she says with a laugh. “Whoops.”

Lewis comes over and introduces himself in a twang that’d betray his Fertile Center roots if Kate hadn’t already told me where he’s from.

“Everything’s really… loud here,” he says. This elicits a giggle from Kate, very much amused at the fish so clearly out of water. “But it’s honestly been a lot of fun! I love this… um, uh,” he says as he fumbles with a bottle filled with a deep-red liquid.

“Sakura Pop!” Kate exclaims. “I’m so glad he likes it, it’s honestly a green flag for me. So many people from outside of here don’t like it very much.”

The couple continues onward, waving goodbye as they duck into a line of nearby shops.

Benjamin is a lifelong Port Williams resident and employee of Rensselaer Shipbuilding, which has a massive shipyard around a mile away. Though he’s from a predominantly Western neighborhood on the city’s south side, he says he likes the “energy” of Little Irikyo, especially on market days.

“Our neighborhood can just be too quiet sometimes,” he tells me while sitting on a bench near the center of the action. “It’s nice when you’re trying to go to sleep, or just want a quiet walk to yourself, but sometimes it just feels a little… I don’t know, cold?”

“It feels a lot warmer here,” says Benjamin as he lights up a cigarette.

As we’re talking, a number of vendors and neighborhood residents wave hello to Benjamin. He tells me to stay put while he catches up with a man pushing a cart overflowing with bouquets of daffodils, poppies, and imported roses.

“Sorry about that,” he apologizes. “I hadn’t seen Danny in about a year. I was starting to get worried about him!”

The air is filled with the buzz of a thousand conversations, the laughter of children running around, and the splattering of fryer oil. The thrum is intermittently pierced by the honking of a nearby jitney, the ringing of a bike bell, or the chirping of the returning migratory birds.

“I’d move up here, but my wife would throw a fit. She thinks it’s too noisy,” Benjamin laments. “Oh well. She’s worth the train trip,” he says waving around a bright red rose he purchased from Danny.

“Hello sir! Are you registered to vote?” is how 57-year-old Esther greets me at the YUCRA table. Even after I tell her that I’m registered in Nova Espero, she shows no urgency in moving me along. Compared to the rest of the market, the spot around the YUCRA table is relatively quiet. When I tell her that I work for the Universalo, she seems excited.

“Maybe folks will hear my message. Too many people in Uniguita aren’t registered to vote. They don’t even seem to care about politics,” she complains. In fact, Port Williams has particularly low rates of political participation – in the 124 PM general election, only around 49% of the city’s registered voters cast a ballot, compared to 57% nationwide.

“I grew up in Ylrikia, and left when I was 24… it’s different now, but when I was a kid you couldn’t really vote. Well, you could, but there was only one party so it wasn’t really an election,” Esther explains. “People here take it for granted sometimes, I think.”

Esther gets excited when her co-volunteer, Sophie, convinces a young man to register to vote. She thanks him for registering before turning back to me.

“I think people talk to her more because she’s a cute college girl,” Esther whispers to me with a laugh. “Whatever gets them to the polls I suppose!”

PORT WILLIAMS, N.H. – TRIO 3, 126 PM

At Pier 15 in Port Williams’ storied harbor, tearful passengers drag suitcases down gangways, briefly looking back to gaze upon the towering Amity behind them. 1,128 feet from bow to stern and with a capacity of 4,000 passengers, the gigantic cruise liner plodded the several thousand miles between Port Williams and Ylrik City for decades. Sunset Hospitality, which acquired the liner in 111 PM, says that it plans to keep the liner at a nearby pier permanently as a portside luxury hotel after an extensive retrofit that would see its history-making nuclear engine ripped out and replaced with more space for spas, boutiques, and theaters.

This last call to port marks the end of a long and fascinating narrative in nautical, technological, and even geopolitical history. As a ship responsible for so many memories sets down its anchor for the final time, it’s worth retelling the history of this fascinating vessel.

War and peace

After the Sherbrooke War ended in 45 PM, tensions remained high between Uniguita and the Ylrikian Empire. Relations were further inflamed after the latter’s first, post-Milito test of a significant explosive device (SED) in 53 PM. Two years later, Uniguita followed suit with a test of its own. Renewed fears over a second SED war little more than half a century after the Milito nearly destroyed all life on the planet generated a significant anti-SED protest movement that helped define politics in the West in the late 50s.

One of the leaders of this movement was Conservative Common Councilmember Fernando Pelar. Like many at the time, Pelar was the son of victims of the Milito, specifically a couple that survived the cavalcade of missiles that destroyed Puerto Blanco. As Pelar eventually came into politics, he became an active and outspoken opponent of redeveloping SEDs, lending his support to a 51 PM motion to ban their research and development within Uniguita entirely. Though the bill obviously didn’t pass and Uniguita did end up rebuilding the bomb, Pelar remained obstinate in his commitment to disarmament.

Ahead of the 60 PM primaries, Pelar became the friendly face of a Conservative Party still reeling from the consequences of party leader President Enrico Carmelo’s attempted coup in 47 PM. An anti-SED former businessman provided a contrast to the Populist Marco Paleda, a lifelong bureaucrat and staunch supporter of the incumbent administration. Pelar won over a new renegade constituency of liberal-conservatives who supported traditional values, low taxes, and geopolitical détente. Despite only narrowly nabbing the Conservative nomination, Pelar ended up winning the 60 PM presidential election convincingly. Pelar promised a “new day” for Uniguita, and sought to turn the page on the country’s past struggles and rebuild transcontinental communications.

Meanwhile, Ylrikian Emperor Katsuhito pursued an aggressive foreign policy. After the Empire’s loss in the Sherbrooke War, he shored up occupying forces in the Crescent Islands, Bawguk, and the Central Mountains while expanding the Imperial Navy. Katsuhito pushed for redevelopment of SEDs, and proudly boasted about them on the international stage. At a 59 PM meeting of the Continental Union, he said that his nation’s bombers could, “cloud the Western skies with smoke before their pilots even rolled out of their barracks.”

There could be no men more different than Katsuhito and his son Asahi. Unlike Katsuhito, a longstanding military officer and lieutenant to his own continent-conquering father, Asahi was much more interested in economics and diplomacy than war. During his requisite military service, then-Prince Asahi spent time in the Ylrikian backcountry and was taken aback by the crushing poverty. When he visited Uniguita in 51 PM as a part of his studies, Asahi was astounded at the Federation’s comparative abundance. He wrote in his diary.

“Here, the children of farmers do not suffer the humiliation of hunger and deprivation. The hamlets are obviously less prosperous than the cities, but even a rural fruit stand here is more replete with produce than a typical grocer in the Imperial Capital. The school in this village has more resources and a more competent instructor than most schools even in our middle class districts. It is a wonder that we have an Empire at all.”

Because of the difference between the two men, Katsuhito’s sudden death in 62 PM served was a geopolitical earthquake. The newly crowned, 33-year-old Emperor Asahi had no interest in pursuing his father’s revisionist foreign policy. Instead, he sought a liberalized economy bereft of its ancient, ossified Crown corporations and landlords, and rapprochement with Uniguita to facilitate open trade. In an address following his coronation, Asahi called for the “light of the coming glorious sunrise to burn away the icy walls of enmity.”

When President Pelar and Emperor Asahi met for the first time in 63 PM for preliminary trade and arms reduction talks, the two got along well. When revanchist imperialists attempted to overthrow Asahi in 64 PM, Pelar lent valuable intelligence support that led to the coup’s ultimate failure. On the heels of this failed insurrection, Asahi was able to sideline the old nobles and replace them with an ascendant industrial, merchant, and political class that would supercharge the Ylrikian economy and supply the membership of his new Imperial Parliament.

This same parliament would help ratify the Continental Arms Reduction Treaty of 64 PM (CART 64), which prohibited Uniguita and Ylrikia from further developing SEDs for the next twenty five years, and created a timeline for the destruction of current weapons. The document also, importantly, barred both powers from building new nuclear-powered warships.

At the time the treaty was signed, the governments of both nations had the construction of a number of such warships under contract with a variety of shipbuilders. Some chose to pivot, selling the reactors to universities and institutes for research, or to backcountry utilities as an efficient option for rural electrification of low-population areas.

Others had a different idea.

‘Game on’

Shortly after CART 64’s ratification, Uniguitan shipping magnate Benjamin Rensselaer met with Ylrikian shipping magnate Hiro Shimizu at a hotel in Madawba. Both men had two issues – surplus nuclear reactors specifically designed to power ships, and no ships to power them with. And while détente helped create a new peace, this new peace was detrimental to the bottom lines of these giants of their countries’ military-industrial complexes.

At the same time, both saw an opportunity. Prior to the Milito, cruise liners had been a booming industry, with the various shipbuilders of the world competing to build the best cruise ship possible. Rival Ylrikian and Hegelio-Ferrian companies regularly raced ships across the Great Western Sea to show off their nautical acumen, creating a strong – but pacific – competitive spirit between the two countries’ seafaring enterprises.

In the decades following the Milito, both Uniguita and Ylrikia had built river cruises or liners meant for intra-national travel along their own coasts. But they hadn’t explored transoceanic travel in the same way pre-Milito companies had.

Now, with a series of nuclear reactors just waiting to have ships built around them, Rensselaer and Shimizu saw a chance for a comeback. The two agreed to stage a friendly competition between the two shipbuilding giants – they would see who could build a ship the quickest, and then in a simultaneous time trial, who could travel between the two countries’ capitals the fastest.

Even before they had lined up the funding for their projects, the two companies built hype by announcing the competition. On Quinto 3, 65 PM, Shimizu placed a full page ad in the Universalo challenging the Federation to compete to build the, “fastest, greatest, and most luxurious ship the world has ever seen.” There were only three rules: the ship had to be at least 1,000 feet long, it had to have a passenger capacity of at least 4,000, and it had to make use of a nuclear-powered engine.

A week later, Rensselaer published its response in the Universalo and the Ylrikian Teikoku Shimbun: shōbu da – “game on”.

Media coverage increased, and both companies began working on their respective liners. Soon enough, the governments of both countries became interested in the competition. In Uniguita, the Common Council dedicated N5,000,0001 – about N18.7 million today – to building Rensselaer’s entry, the Amity. Ylrikia committed a similar sum to building Shimizu’s Shinzen (“goodwill” in Ylrikian) project.

The two countries got involved in what was nominally a private competition between various shipping magnates for a number of reasons. The first was technological. Even though CART 64 prohibited putting nuclear-powered engines in warships, the treaty would only remain in force for twenty-five years. Further testing would not only give each navy an advantage when the treaty eventually sunsetted, but would also lend itself to commercial uses in the merchant fleets that were expected to grow alongside expanded trade between Uniguita and Ylrikia.

The second was political. With a drawdown in naval shipbuilding contracts, thousands were expected to be unemployed in Uniguita’s populous coastal cities like Port Williams. Funding such a project would provide temporary employment, and would help staunch any potential resentment that unemployed dockworkers would feel at the polls in the next elections. Even in Ylrikia, which was far from a democracy – Parliament was only open to members of the newly-founded Loyalty and Prosperity Party, which was itself a fairly elite, exclusive organization – Emperor Asahi knew that immediately laying off thousands of dockworkers might damage the legitimacy of his still very fresh reforms and strategy of economic over military competition.

The final reason was purely symbolic. After Ylrikia’s defeat in the Sherbrooke War twenty years prior, there was a sense that the Empire could use a win. Asahi and his advisors were confident that Ylrikia, with its larger population and mercantile history, would eventually come to outcompete Uniguita economically. He and his advisors foresaw Ylrikia’s victory in this competition as the opening salvo in a new era of Ylrikian ascendancy. Pelar and the Uniguitans, meanwhile, saw the competition as a way to reaffirm the Federation’s economic and technological supremacy.

With government and private support, Shimizu and Rensselaer began construction in earnest. The two became celebrities in their respective countries, as did the projects’ leads. In a temperamentally conservative and reserved culture, Shinzen’s Fuku Tanaka was unique in being a jovial, charismatic, and eminently telegenic figure. At the same time, Ylrikian audiences revered his proven technical expertise, impressive credentials as a longtime naval engineer responsible for some of the Empire’s most advanced warships, and regular project updates that became must-see television.

The Amity’s Sandra McMaster, meanwhile, stood as a symbol of the Uniguitan Dream. The tenth of eleven children from a poor family from the swamps of Swalabash, McMaster came from nothing to become one of the most accomplished individuals in maritime history. Responsible for designing several of the ships that eventually helped Uniguita win the Sherbrooke War, she became a national hero. As a self-described “reformed warmonger”, her professed hope for more peaceful relations between Uniguita and Ylrikia folded in neatly with the country’s new geopolitical outlook. And being a woman, she provided a more egalitarian contrast to the male-dominated world of Ylrikian industry.

For the next two years, construction continued. In Ylrik City, Shimizu’s workers labored for countless hours of overtime, oftentimes clocking over 80 hours a week driving rivets, welding beams, and installing the ship’s hundreds of staterooms. While this working style was a boon for the rate of progress, it created hazardous working conditions – on Unuo 14, 67 PM, three workers were killed and dozens more were scalded in a steam explosion aboard the ship that likely resulted from hastily welded valves. Four months later, seventeen workers were killed and nearly forty more were injured when a scaffolding platform gave way. Over two-hundred other workers were injured in falls, collapses, and other workplace incidents. On the 30th anniversary of the ship race, one Shinzen worker later told the Universalo that working conditions on the jobsite reminded him of “the slavery that built the vast Ylrikian temples centuries ago.”

“They drove us to work impossible hours with impossible speed,” he told the paper in 98 PM. “Simply put, it was all impossible. It only got done despite the impossibility of the circumstances.”

In Uniguita, meanwhile, Rensselaer faced its own setbacks. The largely unionized workforce of Port Williams demanded shorter hours, higher pay, and safer working conditions. This ensured that the workers were better compensated and safer than their counterparts in Ylrikia – only three died during Amity’s construction – but it slowed progress and caused construction costs to balloon over the lifetime of the project. Originally projected to cost just N36 million2 in today’s notes, the project finally cost just over N51 million3 at completion.

Further exacerbating timeline and cost issues were conflicts early in the construction process between Western and Eastern workers. The Western-dominated Shipbuilders Union was hesitant to enlist the help of the significant Ylrikian and Crescent Islander diaspora communities in Port Williams, alleging that they would sabotage the project in the interest of the Ylrikian Empire and put downward pressure on the unionworkers’ wages. Just weeks after construction started, members of the Shipbuilders Union attacked arriving Ylrikian- and Islander-Uniguitan workers, leading to dozens of injuries and hundreds of arrests.

Eventually, the federal Constitutional Court intervened, ordering the union to accept non-Western members and to halt all attempts at blocking workers of Eastern heritage from entering the jobsite. Even so, the entire situation served as a black eye for the project and a propaganda victory for the more nationalist set in Ylrikia. The ultranationalist Irikkoku Shinbun chastised their Uniguitan competition, pointing out the hypocrisy of Uniguita’s stated egalitarian values that conflicted directly with what was essentially a race riot.

For more on the Ylrikian- and Islander-Uniguitan communities in Port Williams, read the following Dispatch on the modern diaspora’s reaction to the Crescent Islands’ potential withdrawal from the Ylrikian Empire.

Ylrikia scored a major victory on Septo 19, 67 PM when Shinzen was the first of the two ships to launch. Hundreds of thousands flocked to Ylrik City’s port to see the cruise set off for the first time, a victory and goodwill tour around the Empire’s island possessions. The Teikoku Shimbun published a breathless review of the ceremony, saying that the launch “marked the beginning of a new Century of Ylrikian Excellence, and the first of likely endless triumphs of Ylrikian industry.”

The Amity, confronted with the aforementioned delays, wouldn’t launch until Dekaunuo 2, 67 PM. “While the Shinzen slipped from its berths amid the beautiful sunshine of an Ylrik City summer, the Amity slinks away through the bitter winds and driving rains of a Port Williams autumn,” wrote one columnist from the Universalo.

Broadly speaking, however, initial reviews of the Amity were positive. It was a feat of modern engineering, and its luxury was unrivaled. In trial cruises along the Federation’s sunnier Gold Coast, tourists, maritime professionals, and public officials all lauded its state-of-the-art accommodations, bountiful entertainment, and breathtaking speed. The same columnist from the Universalo wrote of the ship that, “despite its tardiness, the Amity is a monument to Uniguitan commerce, innovation, engineering, and imagination.” He contended, “that there exists no greater representation of the Spirit of Uniguita than a costly, over-schedule, truly groundbreaking and unrivaled piece of nautical architecture.”

In early 68 PM, Shimizu and Rensselaer agreed to a timeline for the final race. Both ships would depart their respective capitals, and would then have to plod across the Great Western Sea (or, Great Eastern Sea, from the Ylrikians’ point of view) to the rival’s capital, stop for a state visit by each nation’s head of state, and then rush back.

Barring unexpected weather conditions, both ships would launch on Kvarto 14, 68 PM at noon Nova Espero time – Ylrikia lost the coin flip, meaning that they would have to launch at midnight local time.

The game was set: soon, the Amity and Shinzen would sail the high seas. The speculation on which ship would take home the gold was muddled – analysts on both sides of the ocean believed that their ship would be the clear favorite. Independent observers from third-party nations like Erachnia and Madawba weren’t any help either; they said either had a solid chance at victory.

As Kvarto 14 approached, both sides prepared mightily. But the road was not yet clear. In the weeks before the race, tragedy, controversy, and technical issues would almost keep it from happening entirely.

This is the first in a two-part series on the Great Cruise Race of the 60s PM. Subscribe to Dispatches from Uniguita to receive an alert when Part Two is posted.

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PIERRON, P.N. – DUO 24, 126 PM

“Tabernac!” fisherman Jean-Pierre Fournier exclaims as he frantically yanks on his fishing pole. Tugging and reeling, the seasoned angler grits his teeth as the massive walleye erupts from the hole carved into the ice below. Five-year-old Philippe Fournier, buried under layers of winter weather gear, claps his gloved hands together excitedly. “C’est énorme, papa!” he shouts.

On the frigid ice of Ultime Cove under the watchful eye of Old Pierron’s medieval parapets, father and son Fournier embrace. The Fourniers are just two in the long line of ice fishers that have long plied these icy waters adjacent to one of the nation’s largest cities. Rising temperatures, however, could see this long-standing tradition soon thaw out of existence.

Fishing to shipping to fishing again

Pierron was initially founded on the heights overlooking the Grand Coin, the massive estuary where the Pierron River meets the Great Inland Sea. The Grand Coin was replete with fish, and walleye and pike became mainstays of the area’s diet. Just south of the settlement’s center sits Ultime Cove, a large, relatively shallow pool that served as a common fishing spot in early Pierron.

“During winter, the conditions on the sea and the Grand Coin are absolutely horrid,” says Sophie Denaurd, an associate historian at the Pierron Maritime Museum. She shows me the bell of the Fontenot, a fishing vessel that succumbed to the sea’s turbulent waters a few years before the Milito, taking fifty-three sailors with it. She points to a dark red mark on the adjacent wall thirty feet up, the estimated height of the waves that sent the Fontenot to the seafloor.

Denaurd explains that if a great, steel fishing vessel like the Fontenot faced grave danger in the wintertime seas, the small wooden dinghies of the medieval times were in even greater danger.

Ultime Cove, shielded from the ferocious winds and waves of the Great Inland Sea and the broader Grand Coin made for a well-protected fishing spot. When the Cove froze over, Pieronnaise fishers bored holes into the ice and got to work. The yearly hauls would supplement grain sent aboard river barges from further inland, ensuring that Pierron didn’t starve during the region’s long and brutal winters. Even on summer days, the cove was regularly filled with small fishing boats.

As transportation modernized, industrialists and food shippers found the Cove to be a valuable location to take in freighters and barges to transfer goods to newly built rail lines for transport to Terre de Lac’s non-riverine and non-coastal cities. Additionally, the city’s rapid industrialization and expansion in the decades leading up to the Milito led to something called the “urban heat island effect.”

“All of those new dark surfaces – think apartment blocks, roads, factories, railyards, and even sidewalks – suck up a lot more heat than, say, the native forest that existed before,” says Étiennette Desvaliers, an employee of the city’s park system which oversees ice fishing at Ultime Cove. This additional heat caused the ice of the Cove to recede, leaving less space and time for the once common fishermen during the winter months.

Being a major port city, Pierron faced heavy bombardment during the Milito. Like Nova Espero, much of its older core was spared the worst of the damage, and the city’s survivors found security behind its ancient walls. But with the War came a critical food shortage.

“They didn’t have access to those giant fishing boats anymore, and even if they did, the seas were absolutely lethal in those first few years,” Sophie Denaurd tells me. The climatic effects of the Milito were catastrophic in Terre de Lac, creating massive storm surges that pummeled the already severely damaged city’s northern shore and swept a number of fledgling coastal fishing villages out to sea. Not to mention the frequent subzero conditions and blizzards that would dump upwards of two feet of snow on the area, boxing in the local inhabitants.

Ultime Cove, now refreezing, provided an opportunity.

After the father-son fishing trip, Jean-Pierre takes me to his family’s (thankfully, very warm) home in Pierron’s rapidly growing Côté Sud neighborhood just a few blocks away. As teenage Claire shows Philippe how to cut and clean the walleye, Jean-Pierre shows me a well-worn photo album. He points to a photo of a couple taken just a few short years before the War.

“When they were running off to a shelter, my great-great grandmother, Marie, put a photo album and her old camera in her bag. Her husband, Jean-Luc, said, ‘Marie, what the hell are you doing! What use is that junk’”, he recalls with a chuckle. “I’m glad she didn’t listen!”

After showing me some more photos of the Fournier ancestors, he moves on to the album’s post-War section. It documents Pierron’s damaged buildings, burnt-out vehicles, and ad hoc shantytowns, but also the community’s resilience in the face of adversity. One photo, marked “Le Grand Butin” – “the great bounty” – shows a grinning Jean-Luc and his fellow survivors on Ultime Cove, standing arm in arm behind a massive pile of fish. Another shows them cooking the “bounty” over wire baskets and other impromptu grills.

“Things were hard back then,” Jean-Pierre tells me. “But the people here are tough – ‘en marche!” he says, quoting the city’s slogan which translates to “onward!”

Thinning ice

As Pierron and the other Lacaise commonwealths joined Uniguita and the trade economy came back, so too did the Ultime dockyards. Freight traffic crowded out the Cove to warm-weather fishers by the early 30s PM, but once again, as soon as the ice returned around Dekaduo each year, ramshackle ice-shanties appeared atop the ice.

At the Ultime Public Market just two blocks from the waterfront, Jean-Pierre’s great-grandfather, then grandfather, and then father, had a small stall where they would sell their catches. Walleye were the hottest commodity, as were the mussels that scummed the covebed. The poissonnerie served customers from 33 PM to 117 PM, transcending three generations of the Fournier family. Rising costs, diminishing fish populations, and changing appetites among marketgoers – the Fourniers’ old stall is now occupied by a Bawguk gimbap stand – ultimately led to the stall’s closure under Jean-Pierre’s father.

“He was sad to see it go,” he says at first with a wistful look in his eyes. His expression soon changes to a smirk. “But he seems plenty happy with mom down in the sun of the Gold Coast.”

Jean-Pierre carries on the family tradition with his children and their ice-fishing adventures on the Cove. But a changing microclimate may be putting that under threat. As a result of Pierron’s rapid expansion over the past several years, the city’s “urban heat island” is returning and growing in temperature.

“Because Côté Sud right next to the water is developing so quickly, and because we’ve finally ended the decades-long recovery from the post-War ‘little ice age’ the ice is thickening less quickly and receding more quickly than we’d like,” Étiennette Desvaliers explains.

Though Desvaliers says that the ice is still safely thick to support human beings and even lightweight shanties in the dead of winter, things are getting more hazardous in the late-fall and early-spring. Tragedy struck on Dekaduo 19, 123 PM when a father was severely injured and his two daughters drowned after their fishing shanty broke through the ice. On Trio 3, 125 PM, two teenagers suffered life-threatening frostbite and hypothermia when the ice beneath them gave way.

In response, officials have closed Ultime Cove to ice fishing prior to Fellowship Day (Dekaduo 22) and after Trio 1. And Parcs Pierron now hires two seasonal “ice inspectors” to check the ice’s thickness on a weekly basis, setting down barriers to prevent visitors from stepping out onto potentially-hazardous sections.

Jean-Pierre points out the neon-orange, plastic construction fences as we near the waterfront. He translates a bright white warning sign bearing the haunting silhouette of someone drowning amid chunks of floating ice.

“‘Warning – The ice ahead is perilous. People have died here. Please stay out.’” he reads.

Well away from the ominous alert, I join Jean-Pierre and Philippe as they prepare for another day of fishing. “The ice is good, we’re good,” the younger Fournier says.

They cross their fingers for more walleyes.

UPCHURCH, NEW HEGELION – DUO 17, 126 PM

The capital of New Hegelion would be a forgettable, regional hub on the other side of the Great Inland Sea. With just under 100,000 inhabitants, Upchurch is not a great metropolitan center of a burgeoning multi-national democracy like Nova Espero, or the crown jewel in an expansive Empire like Ylrik City. Built with assistance of Ylrikia during its autocracy’s waning years as a sign of inter-regime fraternity, central Upchurch is itself a monument to authoritarian neuropathy. Its expansive and ostentatious boulevards and gratuitous monuments are relics of a different time – one where this quasi-state was not an international pariah persistently on the verge of economic collapse. Under the weight of three decades of isolation, poverty, and inept administration, the statues rot and the triumphal arches wither in the harsh northern winters.

At an oversized, over-indulgent roundabout at the city’s focal point are statues of the ethnostate’s national fathers. Lionel Upchurch, that ancient racist whose scheming, capacity for violence, and demagoguery made him a perfect avatar for the New Hegelion movement a century ago stands upright, his hand outstretched southwards as if to pull his Hegelionic co-ethnics to the north.

To his right stands Charles Belk. Even the hagiographers who design such statues could only do so much to cover up his embarrassing combover, outsized eyebrows, and awkward chin. Here, he is the same height as the historically six-foot-one Lionel Upchurch, whereas in reality he was closer to five-foot-six and 150 pounds soaking wet. At the time these statues were erected, Charles Belk was still alive – but no one dared to question the inaccuracies. Charles Belk was a god, and one to be feared. Maybe he really was six feet tall.

If things went a different way, Charles Belk would have been another in a series of Security and Justice Party also-rans, netting less than 10% of the vote in the 88 PM Uniguitan presidential election. Another embarrassing loss for an embarrassing political movement. But the 88 PM election – and the SJP’s humiliating defeat – would break something deep in the core of Charles Belk. And subsequently, something deep in the core of Uniguita.

The sum of all fears

Premier Phillip Gladstone had defeated Howard Sanck, the manifestation of the insurgent far-right within the Conservative Party. He had managed to emerge victorious without selling his political soul, but history showed that he may need to reassess. Since Carmelo’s fall in 47 PM, the Conservatives had been unable to capture a general election victory without the support of their in-house right wing, in addition to the support of the Security and Justice Party.

And the leader of the SJP, Charles Belk, was an obstinate extremist. Emerging from the ideological backwater of the extreme wing of an already extreme party, Belk was never going to settle for anything less than the traditional “Agreement” between the Conservatives and the SJP. In exchange for their support, the SJP would seek diminished federal involvement in New Hegelion’s internal affairs, and relaxed enforcement of the Federation’s constitutional civil rights guarantees. This had been the quid pro quo for the past half century, from Carmelo to Pelar to now. No Conservative presidency, no conservative majority in the Council could be formed without acquiescing to these demands. And after twenty years of isolation from political power, Belk figured that Gladstone and the Conservatives would be more willing than ever to make concessions.

But Phillip Gladstone had a different read of the political landscape in 88 PM. From his point of view, it wasn’t the Conservatives who were fatigued from loss, but the Uniguitan people from two decades of Populist victory. Since Conservative Fernando Pelar left office twenty years before, the People’s Party had had a stranglehold on federal power. The 86 PM midterms had offered a glimmer of hope – the Conservatives and SJP were able to capture a workable majority. A slim majority, but a majority nonetheless. Since those elections, people’s views of the Poppies had soured even more – the incumbent president Stephen McAllister had an approval rating of just 30% by mid 88 PM. His anointed successor, Vice President Harry Pierce, sat comfortably in the mid-30s in the first round polls and had only just barely won his own party’s primary. Gladstone didn’t think he could win in the first round – a Conservative had never won outright in the first round – but he thought he could win in the second round with less support from the SJP.

Over the next three months, Gladstone toured the country, courting the countless ethnic organizations and special interest groups in the Conservative constellation. He spoke at assemblies of traditionalist Fosterians, meetings of Swalabash swampmen’s unions, and the soirees of suburban ladies’ clubs. He swept to the right sometimes – “it’s clear that the Poppies are incapable of ensuring that law and order are maintained,” he told an audience in Vetludo. “It’s high time that we start laying down the law, and follow Commissioner Renzi’s example.”

Arturo Renzi had been the controversial chief of police in Vetludo, a city long-known for its violent organized crime. After becoming the city’s top cop in 79 PM, Renzi pursued a tough-on-crime agenda that bolstered his popularity on the national stage. While he was applauded for taking down a number of criminal outfits, his heavy-handed methods came under fire for violating citizens’ civil rights, and his police bureau faced allegations of torture and extrajudicial killing. “If you have a problem with lower crime, safer streets, and fewer gangsters running around, you’re free to leave,” Renzi once told reporters. When questioned about the suspicious death of a suspected gang member, he shot back, “how many crooks have you put away?”

There was a line that Gladstone wouldn’t cross, at least not explicitly – he would not voice his support for continuing “the Agreement.” He didn’t outright condemn it. But in speeches across the country, he hesitated to race-bait or champion “local rights” in the way that SJP audiences might have liked. He instead focused on kitchen table issues like public safety, the economy, and government corruption. The Poppies had given him plenty of ammunition – President McAllister’s chief of staff had just been convicted of surreptitiously taking a bribe from an automotive manufacturer seeking rollbacks in regulations – and he intended to use it.

That someone like Renzi, who should have been an easy target for SJP support, threw his heavyweight law-and-order endorsement behind Gladstone should have been a warning sign for Belk. In prior years, the SJP had cleaned up with the tough-on-crime crowd. If for nothing else, people voted SJP to send a message to the Conservatives: crack skulls, or get out of the way for people who will.

But the SJP had spent the past decade and a half whittling away its own support. In the past two decades, the SJP had become more single-mindedly obsessed with New Hegelion-specific issues, and the majority within the party’s governing institutions had become increasingly isolated in the echo chambers of the Hegelionic ethnonationalism that had come to dominate the northern political zeitgeist. Old Hegelion, once a bastion of support for the New Hegelion project, had politically moderated in recent decades. The SJP was quickly losing support there, and it became a vicious cycle – as more southerners left the party, the radical northerners gained power. And as they gained more power, the party became more extreme and alienated more southerners. When Fernando Pelar left office in 68 PM, around a third of SJP Common Councilors came from the south. By 88 PM, less than a tenth did. In 72 PM, the SJP won 23% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. In 84 PM, they won just 12%.

On Election Day, the cumulative effects of Gladstone’s vigorous campaign and the SJP’s decline revealed themselves. Belk won a record low 8.3% of the vote, and his SJP won around the same amount in the party list vote. But much to Belk and the SJP’s terror, Gladstone won 50.7% in the first round. For the first time, a Conservative who made no effort to reach out to the SJP and had very little interest in their prerogatives had won a majority of the vote in the first round. He had secured the presidency without making the formulaic appearance before a convention of Security and Justice Party members, or prostrating himself before audiences of skeptical Upchurch racists.

Belk and his strategists held out hope for some sort of continuation of the Agreement through the Council. The Conservatives hadn’t won an outright majority in the legislature, and dozens of district races where no candidate won more than 50% of the vote in the first round would go to a second round of voting. In a number of swing districts, the SJP attempted to covertly support the Populist candidate in the hopes of denying the Conservatives a majority and forcing them to coalesce with the SJP. Just days before the second round of voting was to take place, the Universalo revealed the scheme in a front-page exposé.

The following day, Gladstone and the Council Conservative leader Paula Laredo announced that, even if the Conservatives failed to gain a majority, they wouldn’t work with the SJP.

“This isn’t just political hardball, this is cynicism,” Gladstone told a gaggle of reporters. “After the past two decades of corruption and mismanagement, there will be no room in the upcoming government for cynicism. We need pragmatists and idealists, not the tacticians of dirty backroom politics.”

On the day of the second round, the sum of all Belk’s and the SJP’s fears had come to fruition. The SJP’s efforts at political subterfuge had failed – the Conservatives would have their first outright majority in Council since the Carmelo administration forty years prior, with several votes to spare in case a few members needed to buck the party line.

The Conservatives had won. And for the first time, the SJP wasn’t along for the ride. The SJP had learned that they were not indispensable to a Conservative victory. Gladstone didn’t need them. The Conservatives didn’t need them. In fact, they didn’t even want them.

Belk still held out hope for some semblance of right-wing allyship between the two parties. Gladstone made great haste in dashing it.

A world on the precipice

When Phillip Gladstone took office on Dekaduo 1, 88 PM, supplicating the northern racists was not at the front of his mind. The economy was in freefall, and confidence in the government had been shaken by a series of corruption and moral scandals within the preceding McAllister administration. Long-standing ethnic grievances between the Zoldish and Pravish peoples had escalated into reciprocal spasms of violence, and the nation’s institutions were under stress from incoming waves of refugees fleeing Ylrikia’s renewed repression in the Central Mountains and the Crescent Islands. Simmering tensions with an increasingly revanchist Ylrikia stoked fears of renewed continental war, and some analysts hypothesized that the Empire was on the verge of redeveloping the same bombs that had nearly snuffed out humanity less than a century before.

From his new office at Voorhees Square, President Gladstone saw a world on the precipice. Growing anxieties over political and cultural irrelevance in the north weren’t the most salient issues, and responses would be delegated to advisors. “In the context of everything, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal,” Gladstone told the Universalo in 112 PM.

For Charles Belk, the issue was front of mind. Despite all of his efforts, the Conservatives no longer had to seek his party’s advice or support on anything. Rumors spread that Gladstone would be pushing for a general amnesty for illegal immigrants. With the SJP-written Immigration and Naturalization Act of 66 PM nearing its expiration, theories suggested that the Conservative government would create an immigration framework that was more relaxed. The 66 PM act contained a carve-out that essentially allowed the commonwealths of New Hegelion to determine their own linguistic and immigration policies. A draft of the new replacement legislation crafted by the Conservative majority had no such carve-out, and in fact would mandate that New Hegelion absorb more immigrants and refugees.

On Duo 18, 89 PM, the Security and Justice Party held its regularly scheduled post-election conference. There, the party faithful reviewed the previous year’s results, and determined whether or not to retain the leadership. Charles Belk, still the leader of the SJP in the Common Council despite his loss in the presidential election, faced an uphill battle to keep his spot. The SJP had lost seats despite the deep unpopularity of the People’s Party. The party now only had a handful of remaining councilors south of the Inland Sea. And some viewed Belk with contempt; the party’s more aristocratic sort saw his scheme to block the Conservative majority as being vulgar and underhanded.

When Charles Belk approached the podium at the conference’s opening session, he was greeted with applause. From the aristocrats came tepid claps, the mandatory show of praise to demonstrate continued party unity. From Belk’s allies, the stubborn support of a village welcoming back its fallen wrestler from a bout in a neighboring town. “That kid was a gorilla, it wasn’t your fault,” some would say, patting him on the shoulder. “You gave ‘em a good fight.”

It isn’t known when Belk decided to make the speech he ended up giving. It matched no written remarks found anywhere, least of all the ones that he laid down on the podium.

“Fellow patriots,” he began. “I come to you today as the leader of our Party. Before all else, I take responsibility for our performance in the most recent election. As the leader, the buck stops with me.”

The energy in the convention hall was restless. Delegates milled about. Some shared words about the upcoming leadership votes. Others sat in silence, listening to what was expected to be Belk’s final words from the political gallows.

“Before I offer you my resignation, I ask that you humor me, and allow me to share with you a story.”

Belk proceeded to tell a romantic tale of New Hegelion – as a nation of exiled Hegelions, the progenitors of Uniguitan governance who were eventually shunned for their culture and their adherence to traditional moral principles. He told of how the Uniguitans came to embrace these expats, seeing their wonderful cities, thriving industry, and solid faith. But over time, the love affair soured. The old bigotries returned.

“They loved us for our faith, and then hated us for our adherence to the word of God,” he said. “They loved us for our care of history, and then hated us for strenuously defending our way of life.”

He argued that, in this new age, the Populists and Conservatives had molded into one. “They value indulgence over integrity, profit over prayer, and hedonism over heritage,” he told the audience, the tenor in his voice rising.

“The election was rigged,” he yelled into the microphone.

“Not at the ballot box, no. They didn’t need to do that. It was rigged by a media that peddled pornography and loose morals. It was rigged by an academia that tells children to hate their history. It was rigged by a culture of decadence, of vanity, of gluttony,” he howled.

“The system our forefathers fought so hard to build has become rigged against us,” Belk clamored, as the volume picked up in the conference hall. “And I pledge, as your leader, to resist that wicked system to my dying breath.”

The crowd jumped to their feet. Belk had lit a fire at what was supposed to be his political funeral. Even the aristocrats, the executioners ready to spring the trapdoor and usher in a new era for the SJP, couldn’t help but cheer. The noose around Belk’s neck quickly unraveled.

“My friends: for so long the south has waged war against us,” he concluded.

“Now, together, we will take the war to Nova Espero!”

There was rapturous applause in the chamber. Most in the hall understood this to be a rhetorical war, a culture war against an increasingly immoral and misguided south. But some heard something else. Something more profound.

Some saw Belk’s address as the opening salvo in a revolution.

This is part of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to go to the series’ page.

“We went back out to the electrical institute to see if we could scrape up any further documentation. We were only able to find one useful journal, but we did find a box of old cortezada sticks1 in what appeared to be a professor’s office. Lt. Suarez loves the things, and knows that Chief Libero does too. They apparently shared them over some coffee in the Council Hall. I visited Anna today. She seems to be in good spirits, and the Aid Corps officers appear very attentive. Filip misses his sister, but he seems to be liking daycare and Miss Martine.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Dekaunuo 1, 2 PM. 2 days after leaving quarantine; 88 until citizenship.

“Elizabeta and I attended our first ‘market night’ tonight. Every weekend, Guards who pay a fee or licensed dealers are allowed to hawk their ‘non-essential’ exploits from beyond the walls. Dress shirts, fur coats, neckties, dresses, watches, jewelry are all hot commodities. As are toys, games, and surprisingly books and even records. Though only the cooperatives and public buildings have the power for a record player, their staffs are always looking for familiar favorites or pre-War novelties. Particularly beloved is Rodiño Sáenz, a tango artist out of southern Ferria. People like to get close to one another here especially this time of year, and now they have the security for the kind of intimacy and diversion a tango would provide. Selling liquor by the bottle is strictly forbidden, but the makeshift bar does brisk business. Whiskeys and rums that were once sold for thousands of crowns are now sold for pennies per shot. It’s a morale booster in this community of former slum dwellers, dockworkers, prisoners, and peasants. Under the Common Council, even La Marca Real is affordable, is the common line. For Anna, we bought a button to replace her swamp monster’s missing eye, and for Filip we bought a book about pirates. We’ll be sure to come back next week.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Dekaunuo 3, 2 PM. 4 days after leaving quarantine, 86 until citizenship

“I just returned from my first overnight run with the platoon. We ventured about three miles down the peninsula, hoping to find the old city hall. Though it was almost entirely destroyed, we found the basement archives to be largely intact, if not entirely dry. We spent hours shuffling through the stinking, pulpy slop, attempting to find anything useful. Our primary targets were any maps or diagrams of the city’s under-construction subway line or the sewage system. We were able to find some maps, but they appeared to be a decade or two out of date. No matter; practically nothing has changed in the Old City in the past two hundred years. Aside from the obvious, anyway. After we emerged, we found ourselves in a clear night illuminated by a radiant full moon. Because of the wind patterns, there are these rare occasions where the smoke and smog that otherwise fills the sky is swept either out to sea or further up the shore. In those precious moments, we can soak up the sunlight or take in the stars. There are so many stars at night, far more than there ever were before the War. It’s one of the few pleasant things to come from all of this.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Dekaunuo 16, 2 PM. 17 days after leaving quarantine; 73 until citizenship

“Funerals are a critical event here. In other places, those who die are frequently given soldier’s burials. That is, they are placed in a shallow grave with nothing more than a wooden marker proving that they ever existed. Those who buried them often forget the names of the lost soon; it’s unhealthy to dwell on the dead out there. But here, the settlement’s dead are resigned to their fate in dignity. Any of those who die within a given week are kept at the Hospital. On the first day of the weekend, the bodies are placed in a simple wooden box wrapped in the flag of the settlement – a white sheet with a green star at the center and a green border. The coffins are then placed on carts and a funeral procession meanders through the town center. A secular service is held at Council Hall, where friends, coworkers, families (for the fortunate few), and government leaders honor the dead. Afterwards, the march continues over to Delancey Street. Burials are illegal – every square inch of open space is reserved for cultivation – so the dead are taken to a makeshift crematorium and burned. The ashes are then placed in bricks that are laid in a new columbarium at the town center. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Common Councilor or a bricklayer, a Guard or a scavenger, resident or citizen, or if you died in bed at the Hospital or out in the wastelands, the proceedings are always the same. Under the Common Council, everyone gets a service, everyone gets a flag-draped coffin, and everyone ends up in the columbarium.

“Kara got her service today. We were on an overnighter and someone got her with a squirrel gun. We were all there, we all saw it. Frederic held his hand over her neck for what seemed like forever, trying to stanch the blood long after her pulse stopped. She was an intelligent and accomplished electrician, a truly unbeatable drinker, and a damn good shot. And why did she die? Someone thought she had made a move on his ‘turf,’ a dilapidated set of old rowhouses. Why wasn’t Kara at the co-op with Beta? What an idiotic waste of a life.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Dekaunuo 24, 2 PM. 25 days after leaving quarantine; 65 until citizenship.

“Snow. Snow. An endless deluge of snow. Temperatures are well below freezing, and the Council is tightening rations on coal. We’ve been moved off of archival duties to hunt for fuel. The solar panels are even less effective in this weather, but the Council says that the batteries should keep the lights on at the hospital and Council Hall for at least a few days. Elizabeta says that the grid she’s working on should expand access to power during these storms, but that it isn’t quite ready yet. Anna is noticeably weaker, and her cough has become harsher. She can still walk, but she doesn’t run around like she used to. It is clear that she is growing sicker each day.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Dekaduo 14, 2 PM. 45 days after leaving quarantine; 45 until citizenship.

“Elizabeta and I sat with Anna in shifts today. She is in bed much more often than before and her cough is getting worse. Today is evidently a festival of some sort in the settlement, a so-called Fellowship Day. Residents and citizens alike come together for a feast of meat of questionable origin and potatoes, reminiscing about friends and family now long gone. I would think such a thing would only damage morale, but it seems to build community. They’ve all lost someone, but they all have each other. Neither Elizabeta nor I, however, had the emotional strength to participate. It is impossible to think of death and not think of Anna, wasting away in the Hospital. It is only a little over a month now until I gain my citizenship and Anna can get her medication.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Dekaduo 22, 2 PM. 52 days after leaving quarantine; 38 until citizenship.

“Anna’s condition has further deteriorated. Her skin is much more pale and her cough has gotten worse. She coughs out small specks of blood now. She has less energy for company now, and this is fortunate for Elizabeta and me, as we can only bear to see her like this for so long. The doctors say she is relatively stable, and should be in a holding pattern at this state for quite some time. I don’t know whether or not these are comforting words from someone watching another’s child consumed with illness, or if they are from some sort of expertise. Dr. [Frances] Poilievre has been very kind to Anna, and pays special attention to her.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Unuo 12, 3 PM. 74 days after leaving quarantine; 16 until citizenship.

“Tonight, Elizabeta brought me to a side street a few blocks away to show off the test of the co-op’s new grid system. With the press of a key at a terminal at the office a few blocks away, the lights suddenly went out on one side and flashed to life on the other. Then back and forth with the pressing of keys. Her coworkers cheered as the lights danced to and fro; they tell me this means that they can engineer the entire settlement, redirecting power to where it’s necessary and transferring loads from productive solar panels to areas where the panels are less effective or where sun is available for fewer hours in the day. This celebration provided a momentary distraction from Anna’s worsening state. She sleeps most of the day, and when she isn’t sleeping she is kept up by a persistent, hacking cough. Dr. Poilievre says her situation is precarious, but she should begin the long road to recovery after I receive my citizenship next week. She has arranged it so that regardless of where I am at midnight the day I qualify, Anna will be administered her first round. She has promised to stay up late to ensure that it takes place. Elizabeta and I have grown to appreciate her kindness.”

• Diary of Pavel Tzarkowski, Unuo 23, 3 PM. 85 days after leaving quarantine; 5 until citizenship.

“Another one? What the hell, Pavel.” Elizabeta barked. “Why now?”

“I don’t really have a choice, Beta. They’re going to send me where they’re going to send me.”

“I know. I just…” she paused. There were moments where Elizabeta’s emotions fried her circuits, and overwhelmed her to the point where she needed a second to think to avoid saying something rash. Her natural impulsivity when it came to blurting whatever it was that was on her mind got her in trouble more times than she could count. She’s just lucky she had been seeing a well-regarded therapist for quite some time when the bombs fell. Shooting from the hip could get you killed out here.

“I know it’s not your fault. I know you didn’t ask for it. But we’ll be citizens after tomorrow. Two days! Anna won’t be better yet, but she’ll have what she needs at least.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, she buried her head in her hands. “Two days, Pavel.”

“I know,” he replied. Before leaving his shift, Pavel had been informed that he would be shipping out for another overnight mission, this time for three days. Though Lieutenant Suarez had not told Platoon 403 much, he did tell them it would be their farthest journey yet. When Pavel protested, his commanding officer told them there was nothing he could do. It was a top priority of the Chief himself. It was going to happen.

“I built them a fucking electrical grid, Pavel,” Elizabeta said with some acid in her voice. “They can’t just delay it by a few days?”

“No, they seemed pretty impatient about the whole thing,” he said. “Besides, if I’m still around in two days it’ll be fine, it doesn’t matter where I am.”

“But you remember what happened last time Pavel,” she shot back. On the previous overnight mission, Dr. Beck had been shot in the neck by a sniper. Not much of one either; he hit her with a .22, something hillbillies used to pick off squirrels before the War. But it was enough. Plowing anything into someone’s carotid at 1,100 feet per second would do some serious damage.

“And you know how I feel about ‘if,’ Pavel. You will come back.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Don’t you ever fucking give me ‘if’.”

He held her in his arms. What else could he do? If he abandoned the mission, they would have to wait another three months for citizenship, and what would happen to Anna in the meantime? Dr. Poilievre had been frank with them – her condition was diminishing. Even with the antibiotics in just a few days, there were no guarantees. She could recover, but it would be a long and painful recovery. Months of bedrest, and even the potential for surgery in what would be on the level of a backcountry clinic before the War. Regardless, it was preferable to the alternative.

In the other room, Filip murmured. It was late when Pavel clambered in from slushy streets, exhausted both from the march and from the news. The street lamps shone bright; there was still a little while before they would be cut off to save the still-rationed electricity. Streaks of yellow fell across Elizabeta’s tear-soaked face as she arched her neck back to look into Pavel’s eyes.

“Don’t give me ‘if’,” she said. “You’re coming back.”

“I am,” he replied, moving his hand up to cradle her chin. Her mouth twisted in knots, and tears pushed through her clenched eyes. She opened them, her lips wobbling and her pupils darting back and forth across Pavel’s face, as if to take in every pore and fleck of stubble.

He kissed her, tenderly at first. Then she pulled him in, holding him more tightly than he thought she ever had.

The streetlights outside switched off.

Pavel awoke early the next morning. Having lived almost two years without artificial light, he had slowly grown accustomed to waking up with the dawn. Even here, with lighting available almost twenty hours a day, he still found himself waking up at the ungodly hour of five thirty-two in the morning. Elizabeta was quicker to acclimate; she showed no signs of waking. Before the War, he had found it endearing how deeply she slept. He had always been jealous that she could fall asleep on the train when he would just shift fitfully in his seat.

Now more than ever though, he wished she was a light sleeper. He wanted to say goodbye – not goodbye, no. See you soon. He told himself that as long as he didn’t shake her awake, there was nothing especially dangerous or special about what he was about to do. If he made it more important, more fatal, he didn’t know if he could leave the bedroom.

Instead, he kissed her on the forehead. She mumbled something. She was always talking in her sleep. He smiled a somber smile, pulling on his briefs, followed by layer after layer of his winter scavenging gear.

Silently shutting the bedroom door behind him, Pavel snuck over to Filip’s room. Fil took after his father; he was already awake examining a picture book that his teacher had given him, sounding each syllable methodically.

“The dol-phin jumped o-ver the wave,” he read, fingering the words on the page.

“Hey buddy, I’ll be back soon.”

“Oh no!” he protested, “where are you going?”

“It’s for work, bud,” he said, pulling his son in close. “It’ll be another business trip. Like that last one.”

“Okay… will you get me something?”

Pavel smiled. Before the War, Pavel had always gotten Filip and Anna some little trinket or memento whenever he left town for some conference or history symposium. Now it was no different; on the first trip, he had found a taxi medallion for him, and on the second he brought back an old briarwood pipe in a lightly scratched cedar box.

“Of course, Fil. I always do.”

“I love you, daddy,” he said, lunging into Pavel’s side.

“Love you too, bud,” Pavel replied. It took everything in his power to cover up the choking in his throat.

Tousling the kid’s hair and kissing him on the head, Pavel gave Filip his see you soon. He left a note on the small table by the front door for Elizabeta. He made sure to make it at least a little corny. He thought a sappy love letter would send her spiraling. Writing something like that would probably send him spiraling too. He wasn’t as tough as Elizabeta, and it was taking everything in his power not to crack.

It’s just another mission, Pavel said to himself. You’ll be fine.

Elizabeta awoke at six o’clock with the ringing of the city’s bells. Reaching over to grab Pavel, her arm fell limp upon his pillow. She groaned, mumbling to herself. Pulling his pillow into her chest, she breathed in deeply to take in his scent. When she was younger, she laughed at girls who did things like this. She could still think they were idiots. They were sucking in the scent of shallow athletes and college boyfriends who were by now a world away and married to someone else.

But this was Pavel.

She got up, and found Filip still in his bed reading and re-reading his book. She sat by his side, his attention hardly diverging from the dolphins and the waves. He really was just like his father. Once he had his nose pressed in a book, it was a feat to break his focus.

“Go get dressed, we have to head down for breakfast,” she said, kissing him on the head.

“Ok Mommy,” he replied.

A few minutes later, fully ready for the day ahead, Elizabeta and Filip headed towards the door. Before they left, she noticed a note on the entranceway table.

“Hey Beta. Went to get some noodles. I’ll be home soon. Love you always.”

Asshole, she thought to herself, chuckling as she mustered every ounce of willpower to keep from crying.

This is Part Eight of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to read Part Nine.