Earth, 2711 CE
People like to blame the alien invasion in 2359 for all of our problems, but really, most of the damage was caused by climate change.
Cultural reactions to the apocalypse have varied wildly. Xeno-carrion is enshrined as the relics of inhuman folk-saints in the flooded morass of Poland, new holy lands are declared in Guiana and the Urals by new religions, temples are erected to beings of tian in hinterland China, and you better believe the new Christianities are bespoke and oneiric.
There’s a lot of argument over the usage of the term “alien” - a lot of people don’t like it - they associate it with sci-fi, a genre that has gone out of fashion in 2711 much like chansons de geste had gone out of fashion by the 1950s.
Regardless, it’s hard to think of them as anything else. Certainly, they’re not from our planet. Maybe not even our dimension, if you listen to some theorists. Maybe from Hell, if you listen to some books (most books are listened to, now. Paper books are as quaint and old-world as fax machines, stirrups and white rhinos.)
Nowadays, war is carried out in a semi-symbolic fashion by bespoke war-machines. These are called Frames. Actual, direct mass warfare is hampered by the mass proliferation of thermonuclear weaponry.
The vast majority of Frames are operated by the ruling powers of the planet, the Corporate League, a collection of “post-state political entities” that operate in the manner of olden-day corporations, a sort of deliberately anachronistic form of social posturing.
It is standard practice to refer to Frames as “giant robots” or “mecha”, because it’s better to think of them as mechanical. But they are not at all mechanical, and anyone who has been paying enough attention has seen them bleed. Frames are grown, not built, out of the flesh and blood of the invaders.
The generic term preferred for the invaders is “xenos”, or “paralunars”, maybe. There are more neologistic terms of intralingual derivation - qalnats, outies, yarchim, UMAs, shit, sometimes they were UFOs, if the fuckers had wings. They didn’t really obey our laws of physics, most of the time. They did a lot of shit that the average person might point at and call “supernatural.” The worst part was, they didn’t communicate, but it was really easy to tell - they were smart. They knew what they were doing, and what they were doing was killing us, adapting to better kill us, and then killing us some more.
Now, they are extinct. At least, the non-sessile ones are. At least, in populated places. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.
Whatever they did to the planet, they often get blamed for the accelerating ecosystem failure and climate collapse, the sea-level rise, the desertification. Whatever they did to us, they get blamed for psychic manifestations, social collapse, new strange illnesses - well, probably, they did cause the psychic shit and the new illnesses. Fuckers.
Nowadays, war is carried out in a semi-symbolic fashion by bespoke war-machines, driven by Pilots, who are not (no matter how many conspiracy theories claim otherwise) made of xenoflesh.
What is a Pilot, even? Well, in company terms, it’s a human being with the right level of psychic sensitivity - enough to interface with xenotechnology, without having your psyche ripped out of the crown of your head and rearranged into thought noise. It’s not just Frames - the low activity psychics, the dulls, those get shuttled off to spend workdays entombed on battleship bridges, in drone-coordination nests, or hanging around some corpo as an… what’s the word? Amanu-nen-something? Call it what it is - a radio and a notepad. Those don’t get paid a tenth as well, ain’t a tenth as glamorous, but they get the same time off. Haha.
It’s a better life than assembling parts by hand for a daily ration of lab-grown sludge, I guess. Obviously, our corporation doesn’t treat people like that… who are we working for again? Furukawa? Reliable? Ah, Anqa. I knew it was one of the ones with a yellowy logo.
Recruited in your middle teenage years, when whatever it is caused the psychic sensitivity to manifest - probably they found you out because you reported the nightmares to a clinic, or maybe you popped your classmate’s head like a melon under a sledgehammer in a moment of anger.
Haha.
But, they got us - got me, got you, sniffed us out, put us on the meds that stop us flying out of the top of our heads to join the thought noise - didn’t know that could happen? Real as anything, on God. Who recruited you? Ah, well, does it matter?
It hurt when they drove the nerve connectors into your upper spine - well, no, you were under general anaesthetic. You weren’t even there, were you? But you felt the pain surge through whatever part of you isn’t in your body. We all have, haven’t we? Sometimes it still aches. It’s an amazing way to start believing in an immortal soul - makes some of us religious, doesn’t it?
Training to be a Frame Pilot, it’s a long process. Lots of synchronisations, adjustments, test-runs, psycoms, psychevals, psychoanalyses, psychographic - if you have to hear one more fuckin’ word that starts with psy…
They treat us nice ‘cause we’re investments, like when your boss buys an artificial tiger from Corazon to parade round that nice little quadrangle in between the office buildings. Hey, like that tiger, we’re outta here in a second if we show teeth in the wrong direction. Well, we get penthouses or whatever, millions of fake bullshit dollars a year, so we get a better deal than parading around a quadrangle, I guess.
You’re registered with Cross-Corporate, given a number and a bigass file. You ever seen your file? They keep ‘em on triplicate paper in various locations, so Awaash can’t hack into ‘em.
Time to sortie. Plaster on that fakeskin suit - god, it really feels like it breathes, doesn’t it? Haha. Hey, do Anqa make you wear a helmet in the cockpit? They don’t? That’s irresponsible. I wouldn’t, anyway, but, you know, the last guys tried to make me. So I felt like they’d considered my wellbeing.
Cockpit. Haha. Dumb word. The tube, the can, the pilot's chair, the organ - I call it the bucket. Guy I knew back at… wherever, he called it the coffin. Bit too morbid for me. Hey, this model has a little ladder up to the hatch.
Immersion into the goo - this new stuff’s a lot better than the sludge they used to have, right? It washes out of your hair a lot better. Smells better, too. Relax, lean back, enjoy the ambient warmth of the tons of xeno-meat twitching in sleep. Hey, you ever heard the babble when you connect? The thought noise? Just me? Shit. Don’t mention this to that corpo motherfucker on the gangway over there, or I’m gonna have to stage a workplace accident. Haha.
Here come the contacts, cold metal into the connectors - sliding into place under your skull, cradling your atlas and axis like the Madonna della Pietà. Faint electricity, the heads-ups and viewscreens flicker into view, projected right into whatever bit of gristle works your eyes. Feel those nerves connect - those muscles bunch and flex, those joints fill up with blood and unfold, the vague ache of the bolts holding the armour on - auxiliary brains are handling the extra eyes, if this thing had a stomach it’d be doing flips. More than human.
Let’s get fucking paid.
The Anti-Statist War in the 2490s and 2500s was the rise of the League and the dismantling of the old order - capitalism transcending any restriction and turning into a self-devouring omnipresent shitnightmare. League propaganda likes to talk about the destruction of borders and the uniting of humanity, but in truth, they guard their territory as fiercely as any feudal overlord, and with just as much violence as history’s dead empires.
The original instigator of the Anti-Statist War was the Jiangbei Group, who now control almost all of what was China and Southeast Asia (well, what’s left of it). In retrospect, they like to deploy the “long-divided, must unite” line to give themselves a bit of legitimacy, but really, the country they tore apart from the inside like wild dogs wasn’t all that disunified until they started disembowelling it.
Jiangbei are famous for efficiency. That’s their internal self-conception and cultivated external image. Everything is linked back to efficiency and directness as a policy and propaganda move. Frivolity, superstition and laziness are dreadful sins in their weltanschauung. Where does that efficiency end up? Well, that’s a point of disagreement - quarterly profit aside, are we trying to maintain peace or rule the world? The JG mainstream prefer stability, but the increasingly separatist, jingoistic and powerful “Yunnan Faction” are beginning to throw things out of kilter.
Their headquarters are in the district of Chongqing from which they derived their original name - the city is a sprawling metropolis defended by a specialist guard of Frames and a 24/7 network of drones that serve a combined surveillance/defence role.
Geosynchronous ruins of a giant light-array glint overhead, once a midnight sun over central China, built after the invasion but before its shattering in the worst of the Anti-Statist War (they hit it with a nuke). It’s got so many nicknames I won’t bother listing them. Jiangbei sensor arrays and corporate retreats hover in it like clownfish in the stinging tentacles of an anemone.
[man rambling into a camera: “Of course fucking Los Angeles survives the apocalypse. You know? We lose Paris, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, the Nazca Lines, the Basilica of St. Peter, the Forbidden City, Chomo-fucking-lungma, but shit, fucking LA survives.”]
Pilots are told that they are like samurai, knights, eagle-warriors, bigged up with words like “honour” and “glory”, and sometimes put on literal pedestals. But really, they’re more like gladiators - the corporate boot is of course plastered with advertisements, and the monetisation ouroboros can’t help but turn everything into fucking “”content“”.
Frames are painted in bright colours to match the fakeskin pilot suits, and a whole campaign of memorable callsigns, kayfabe and PR creates larger-than-life characters from each and every Pilot. Fans spring up who follow their careers from year to year, or even company to company. Sorties are filmed and televised when it’s practical (though never live-broadcast. You need time to have the neural nets edit out anything that’s less than perfect.)
Direction put their pilots on chat-shows, Reliable give them old-world theme tunes (only occasionally do they get to pick), Haasbroek give only one of their pilots a Grand Prize on Christmas Day every year, but the real competition and the real rivalries happen in Remembered for Centuries, or just Century, the official, independently operated Top 100 rankings of all pilots, globally, updated 24/7. Pilots will fight, or even kill, over entry to Century or advancement within it, because glory is survival for the Frame Pilot of the modern era.
It’s bloodsport, really.
RANK 95 - Willow Kelly, Callsign “INCISOR”
Signed with ANQA
Kelly was born in a “temporary town” in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, by her own testimony. Official records only begin fifteen years later, after her family made the long overland journey to enter Can-Arc and enrolled Kelly in a local high-school. Discovered a few years afterwards, Kelly was assessed and selected for the prestigious Masterson Program, which quickly fast-tracked her into active service in 2703.
Kelly is notorious at Cross-Corporate for her enthusiastic disregard for rules, regulation and best-practice, which has kept her rank in Century consistently in the bottom ten despite her clear ability and potential to rise higher.
RANK 39 - Söökhlö Chonaev, Callsign “WHITE NOISE”
Signed with Beaumont Foundation
Chonaev began her career with Direction, hired directly from the agri-barge her family managed in the floating town of поставщик off the coast of the Kola Peninsula. On the upper end of what was considered a “safe” level of psychic sensitivity to become a Pilot, Chonaev nevertheless cleared training in record time and entered active service in 2697. “WHITE NOISE” pilots a STRELTSY-class Frame, with a specialisation towards long-range combat and mine-laying.
Chonaev is pathologically reserved and anti-social, receiving the nickname “The Hermit” (i.e., the tarot card) from her fellow Century Pilots signed with BF.
RANK 28 - Isaac Mononym, Callsign “ASCALO”
Signed with Kardoust Science Technology.
Discovered at age 20 in the Cappadocia region, “Isaac It’s a Mononym” was psychically active before discovery - KST haven’t yet been able to extract his previous circumstances, but regardless, he was quickly recruited.
Entering active service in 2699, “ASCALO” has displayed a high level of consideration, caution and tactical acumen over his career, still piloting his original WADIH-class Frame, having never suffered destruction in combat. “ASCALO” is well known for an ascetic lifestyle and pious aspect which most in the League assume is some kind of “character bit” - if this is the case, Isaac displays a 24-hour commitment to it.
(Hiring Note: Since the Nun Kun Incident [see file], Isaac has displayed a homicidal rivalry bordering on obsession with Zhou Cao, a JG pilot. While he remains effective, he has shown signs of acting in an irrational manner to keep his rank in Century close to Cao’s. Keep under close observation.)
RANK 27 - Zhou Cao, Callsign “BLACK BOX”
Signed with Jiangbei Group.
Born in Hong Kong Haven aboard a habitation ship, Cao showed no aptitude for anything and was likely headed for a career in chemical handling, when his psychic sensitivity manifested in a Near Discorporation Event [see file] and resulted in his swift acquisition by the Jiangbei Group. Entering active service in 2695, “BLACK BOX” has enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks, rarely staying with one Frame for long due to his habit of risk-taking.
More than a few of his Frames have become so damaged it was cheaper to replace them, however, he has survived apparently by a streak of the devil’s own luck. Currently, Cao pilots a PANKRATOR-class purchased from Samarkand especially for him - corporate leadership assessed that the durable Frame would match his style. Cao maintains a blasé, who-cares attitude to life, except in specific cases detailed in his psychological profile.
(Hiring Note: Since the Nun Kun Incident [see file], Cao has displayed a homicidal rivalry bordering on obsession with “Isaac”, a KST pilot. While he remains effective, he has shown signs of acting in an irrational manner to keep his rank in Century close to Isaac’s. Keep under close observation.)
RANK 14 - “Toast”, Callsign “TOAST”
Signed with Beaumont Foundation
All information on the origin of “Toast” has been systematically and deliberately destroyed by the Beaumont Foundation. “Toast” himself has provided multiple contradictory accounts of his early life which (consistently with his accent) place his origins somewhere in the “New Fen” region of England.
Having entered active service in 2685, “Toast” is considered an experienced veteran, and is the highest ranked BF Pilot in Century. He pilots a modified DART-class frame, specialising in hit-and-run tactics.
Known among pilots as a “No Call” - i.e., even allies refrain from psywave communication due to the fact that Toast’s subconscious monomaniac focus on the foodstuff in question is contagious. Pilots who communicate nonverbally for more than a few minutes with him will find for days or weeks afterwards that their only appetite is for toast, they’re mishearing similar words as toast, and attempting to remember the faces of loved ones will briefly return only memories of fucking toast.
His real name is unknown - whatever’s wrong with him, whenever he says it, it’s replaced in your mind with an image of buttered toast. He’s not happy about it.
North America - that is, what used to be Canada and the USA in history’s previous eras - are the territories of three corporations:
Denver Vault is the headquarters of Reliable, the hyper-corporation that controls the former western USA and Canada. An underground garden-city lit by sunlight reflected in by gigantic mirrors - a diorama of the old ecology of the Platte River valleys, within which stands RHQ, an egopolis of steel dedicated to the Founders, heroes of the Anti-Statist War. Reliable has inherited the literal ruins of Silicon Valley, (a big outie crushed it and killed all the tech billionaires back in the day), but they have also inherited their mindset. The word “techbro” is as thoroughly antiquated to the people of Reliable as “earg” is to our ears, but the average Reliable corporate middle manager smoothly combines the mindset of both.
Reliable is astoundingly wealthy, and usually considered amongst the Big Three of the league (the exact composition of the Big Three is never concrete, but currently it's Direction, Reliable and Jiangbei). They like to engage in revisionist history and describe themselves as the oldest political entity in the world, though what's now Reliable really only congealed out of a snowball of mergers and conquests around the time of the Anti-Statist War.
They traded the Kamchatka peninsula (and its contingent of dangerous exothermic alien flora) to Furukawa for 99B$. The swaying “forests” of fleshy fronds produce a boiling heat-wave winter and summer, distorting the climate of Siberia and the Pacific in unpredictable ways - thunderous storms tear down out of the north and spit lightning in Hawaii, Shaanxi and Luzon.
The so-called “Gang of Ten” controlling Atlantic Heavy Industries (their shadowy board of directors) pay to hold a Presidential election every four years, like clockwork, and allow votes to be sent in from Reliable and CF territories as a geocultural gesture - the Election has fully rolled into the character of religious ceremony it only flirted with in earlier centuries, a sort of an appeasement of an undefinable “Liberty”, the popular selection of a high priest, now a moral authority and no longer a political one.
Laser arrays stand in the Appalachians, built centuries ago during a resurgence of ICBMphobia. A fulfilment of the ancient prophecy of the Strategic Defense Initiative, in a sense; the “Flashlights” can melt things as far away as geosynchronous orbit, and they only ignite the atmosphere a little bit when they do it.
You can get AHI to fund any project if you can convince the Gang of Ten that it’ll be worth something, and a good few of them are basically insane, if you believe the testimonies. So, AHI does a lot of interesting work. They keep it all siloed from each other - it used to be that they would send you and your idea to work at the Experimental Division in former North Carolina, a sort of think-tank made up of psychophysicists and cryptogeologists and parachemists and - all that sort of thing.
XD8 Biblical Error
Product of AHI’s notorious “Experimental Developments” or “XD” department. The eighth and last to leave the prototype stage. A gigantic two-handed gun(?), sized for Frame usage, which is somewhat hard to describe past the handles and triggering mechanism. Images poorly, doesn’t show up well on cameras, blurs and distorts when in visible light. Fires some kind of dark, blurred shape with a crackling thump, “deleting” large chunks of matter. 100 of these weapons were produced before production was shut down, XD’s offices in Charlotte were permanently shuttered, and the heads of XD placed under permanent house-arrest in an AHI “corporate retreat” in Iceland.
Comet-Forward are global firepower specialists, who control the large stretch of North America that constitutes the middle, ravaged by paralunars and extensively desertified. They’re trying to figure out where the xenos came from so they can counterinvade, see how they fucking like a taste of nuclear armageddon jammed up their ass. CF’s propaganda stance is gung-ho and jingoistic, their adverts are loud and usually in poor taste. They play War Pigs in the background of commercials without an iota of irony.
Jammed between Reliable and AHI, and usually playing catchup with at least one of them - before Comet Solutions and the Forward Initiative merged together (inheriting Comet’s money and Forward’s goals), it was a case of being pushed around by their big brothers - now they can shove back, and have a habit of doing so with artillery. As part of the above-mentioned propaganda stance, “Disproportionate Retribution” is standard company policy - you’ll see those words written on official files, and for a while they had a faux-mediaeval heraldic logo blazoned with NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT.
The current CEO and board of CF espouse a philosophy of annihilation, a sort of megaton-nihilism, a commitment to carrying the biggest possible stick and not taking particular care of how one speaks. It’s not Atomism, a new-religious movement that viewed things like Castle Bravo as gates into the divine. Officially, Atomism is on the Schedule of Banned Beliefs in CF territory.
Russia’s the proud owner of an inland sea, now, where the West Siberian Lowland used to be - it’s a shallow sea in most places, and it’s full of sea-bases that look like oil-rigs - except for all the xenotechnological sensors bristling off them.
Direction Conglomerate view themselves as the League’s bastion of sanity, ethics, and good-old-fashioned engineering. They employ xenoflesh (just to keep up), but they avoid it whenever they can - they prefer the old-fashioned lines of physics and chemistry which nobody can accuse of harbouring anything too divine. They’re rocketry experts, who dream of space colonisation and settle for missiles.
Of course, for most of history, space colonisation has gone absolutely nowhere. Frames operate in orbit, and gigantic corporate 0g retreats float in clearings maintained by lasers, carved from the massive debris bubble that surrounds earth. The near side of the Moon is a labyrinth of factories and shoddy arcologies - and, more besides, the ruins of factories and shoddy arcologies.
In Mongolia, there’s a spaceship graveyard that covers a couple thousand square kilometres, sometimes referred to as the “Rustlands”. The excesses of the “Leap for Mars” in the 2330s resulted in thousands of cargo rockets and passenger vessels, rendered useless by the invasion - if the Mars colony ever got off the ground, then either they’re ignoring us, or our signals aren’t reaching them. More likely, they’re all dead.
If I was an animator I’d put in an extremely detailed ~12 second shot of a missile pod unfolding like a mechanical flower and firing up a bunch of missiles that spin in the air then all fire rockets and spin to shoot off in the same direction, but I’m not, so fucking imagine it. Have to do everything around here….
Samarkand have the strongest manufacturing base of the League, a massive industrial capacity built into hard concrete factory yards operated by hissing, bleeding xenomachinery out in the desert. Many of the factories are totally autonomous, requiring very little human intervention, just the occasional psychic order from a coordination centre - therefore, tent-villages spring up out there, along the shipping canals and unmanned pit-mines, modern nomads moving from maintenance-town to tractor-station and out, every so often, to the steppe.
That steppe is nearly untouched, save for the diamond-shaped fortlets dotted hither and yon, reinforced with exotic physics-defying metalloids dredged up from UMA corpses, and run through fifteen-year refinement processes.
Samarkand’s careful corporate policy is a strong neutrality - not a non-committance, but a commitment to non-alignment, a deliberate, slowly-plotted course between the major powers, and ahead to success. Their upper management are eclectic and unusually non-cutthroat - piloting the great slow treasure barge of Samarkand does not allow for frippery like “internal coups” - this is known from experience and the disasters of the early 27th century. The higher ranks of other corporations are often disoriented by the relaxed environment at the Head Office.
The great brutalist cube atop Samarkand Arcology has a dark and muted interior, decorated in a softened throwback to the ancient style of the 1960s (like having an office today decorated in the style of the 1270s). There, mid-level executives drink whisky and play board games in meandering social-calls that linger for the entire day - if you’re coming from Reliable’s forced-casual fake-friendly horrorshow, Beaumont’s brutal dog-eat-dog meritocracy, or Jiangbei’s no-nonsense cult of professionalism, it can come across like you’re being fucked with.
Central Asia and Iran were surprisingly fortunate during the invasion - I mean, sure, poisonous xenotrees grow out of the Taklamakan, flooding the basin of the old Lop Nur with cyanide-laced water drawn up from miles underground - but that’s hardly that far out of the ordinary. Most of the major cities survived, and, hey, while a few of them are flooded, the Aral Sea’s back in a big way!
Awaash Systems are specialists in computers and cerebrocomputers (which use lab-grown brain-matter and neurons in place of circuitry and motherboards), and control significant territory in East Africa, centred around Addis Ababa, the gigantic clean-energy metropolis of the future, full of looming solar towers, windmills and monorails. AS territory is run by clean-energy, direct-democracy (up until a certain point) and constant panopticon surveillance. It is joked that the CEO of Awaash, an up-and-coming figure by the name of Gemechu Oxy, is locally omniscient.
A 50-year period of ascendancy and Big Three membership allowed by near-universal access to global computer systems precipitated the mass-switch to using physical files and psychic amanuenses at an official level. This resulted in a fall from power, but also an effective monopoly on computer development. Quantum computing is old, old news - Awaash labs are working on ansibles and other shit that would have been called sci-fi centuries ago.
Most of the new video games of the 2710s get made in Nairobi. We’re ripping off Dark Souls again this decade, originality doesn’t sell well. Regurgitations are made, subtly altered to reflect AS philosophies and propaganda.
What are those philosophies? Well, the big driving one is “Human Unity”, a humanist, pluralist, pan-global philosophy of total human cooperation. Not, it should be noted, a non-violent or anti-hierarchical system, just a belief that all humanity should be together, and working towards the same thing, which is the improvement of the species towards some kind of vague, teleological end goal. Variations within Unitism are myriad, mostly about the precise nature of that end goal, and the variations drive various factions to associate more closely with League members whose own bespoke philosophies match up. CEO Oxy is courting Direction, at the moment, because he shares their interest in humanity’s future beyond earth.
Their design philosophy hides everything, shiny lines and pretty exteriors. Their Frames show no xenoflesh, only armour plates and outer layers to hide the muscle and skin. This extends to their Pilot suits, which have blank-faced helmets and only minimal variation from each other. Hell, this even extends to corporate policy - Awaash is unusually opaque even for a League member, seeing all and revealing nothing - for 30 years in the 2600s, their logo was an eye, but it was decided that was a little too on-the-nose, and it was changed.
[PHOTOGRAPH]
[GRAFFITI ON A WALL IN THE RUINS OF BERLIN]
[REMEMBER THE ELEPHANTS]
The permanent underdog of the League is Worldwide Good, the corporate overlords of Oceania based in the ever-unfinished and actively-collapsing Canberra Arcology. Can-Arc was a rush job to begin with, and the corruption and design flaws didn’t help. The southwestern quarter is a slum of 6 million practically living in a cave system - Kowloon Walled City but under forty feet of orbital-bombardment-resistant military reinforcements.
Until the 2670s, Oceania was controlled by a cluster of minor corporations without enough clout for League membership. The two “big players” in the region were Thompson Construction, based in Perth, and Goods Worldwide, a shipping company originally of Sydney, though their ancestral corporate headquarters has long been eaten by the sea. Jiangbei and Corazon stood poised to pick off the survivor of their thought-inevitable squabble - until an unexpected merger-and-rebrand brought Worldwide Good onto the stage as the fifteenth (and, to date, final) member of the League.
What is the philosophy of WG? The phrase “philosophy of WG” is considered by most people in the world to be an oxymoron, but they do actually have some underpinnings, even if they’re very vague. First, obviously, the Worldwide Good! That’s what they do everything for, right? It’s not just branding, is it? The second and more noticeable philosophy doesn’t have a name, but it does have a sort of mascot. You’ll see him done with spray-paint and stencil on arcology walls, railway outposts, and reactor cowlings, done in marker on whiteboards and biro on corporate documents - a cockroach. The mentality is survivalism - WG are doomsday preppers who survived the first doomsday, and want to be damn sure they survive the next one.
Corazon is famous for the Human Evolution Fund, a huge pot of money anyone can apply for a slice of, so long as they can prove the money is being used to “tangibly improve, repair or progress the human condition.” Or at least, prove it close enough. It’s not uncommon for a Pilot to manage to get a grant from it with justifications of “defending the engines of human progress”, which works especially well if the Pilot happens to work for Corazon.
Corazon specialises in psychic and xenobiological study, investing everything into understanding the “gifts” of the extranjeras - the general tenor of Corazon is admiration for, and fascination with, the invaders. There are constant rumours that the gigantic building-sized freezer units called the “Meat Lockers”, that loom black on Tijuana Bay, contain intact and frozen yarchim just waiting to burst out and start replicating again. Of course, those are rumours.
Corazon have a habit of producing human-like Frames, and not bothering to hide just how much of that “machinery” is meat. For God’s sake - the ISABELLA-class looks like it has a human face! As for whose face, that is a question that many feel is better left unasked. This is something of a terror-tactic - the skeletal IGNACIA-class, for example, is a walking, crawling, psychically-active memento mori sent to crush Corazon’s foes. It is also representative of an unabashed honesty, and a present-focused mindset - why pretend we act in the way of the old world? It is dead, and it dies every day.
On the coasts of the Amazon Sea, the newly-built agricultural cities of Comunidade E.P. lie half-awake, connected by magnetic freight railways and company radio stations. Their territory is the largest area of arable land on the planet and is mostly free of estranho activity (or, the UMAs you do find are mostly sessile and well behaved, like the gigantic “skyscrapers” of the contested Parana Peninsula).
A spiritualist, animist religion pervades Comunidade, with a certain belief that Mother Earth has been wounded by the invaders. She must be healed, or at least, allowed to heal, and that healing begins right here. Isn’t that nice?
Comunidade is one of those companies that act like they’re a family. They call their CEO “Mother”, or “Father”, as is appropriate, refer to employees of the same rank as if they were siblings, and try to solve the work-life balance by fusing it. Unlike every other company to act like this in history, they do genuinely make efforts to look after the health of each and every one of their employees, reasoning it is better to be loved than resented. They do genuinely encourage community and they do genuinely act in the best interests of their population (well, most of the time).
On the other hand, wages are paid in company scrip, not international currency, internal travel requires approval, and fully leaving Comunidade territory requires a lengthy emigration process. Comunidade will look after you, and do so very well, but if they are a family, they’re a controlling one. Their position is one of general isolationism. For them, Frame warfare, Century, the League - these things are all faintly quaint. Things that must be done to participate in the system of the world, but certainly things that are broadly beneath them. Their Frames are converted utility machines, for the most part, not bespoke war-machines. As a tradeoff - the missions they hand out are never bullshit busywork, posturing or stupid corporate backstabbing.
Slogans of the League
Comet-Forward - “Join the Cause”
Direction - “Forward Motion.”
Atlantic Heavy Industries - “Nothing Like It.”
Beaumont Foundation - “Elegance is Everything.”, later replaced by “Irreplaceable.” due to a downturn in public opinion associated with very public and inelegant civilian casualties.
Furukawa - “The Machine Breathes.”
Corazon - “Always Adapting.”
Samarkand - “Relentless”
Awaash Systems - “Unified Understanding.”
Haasbroek Armaments - “Precision and Power.”
Jiangbei Group - "One Day, a Thousand Li.", usually represented as the chengyu 一日千里
ANQA - “Taking Flight”
Comunidade E.P. - “Healing Through Empathy.”
Kardoust Science Technology - “Enter the House of Wisdom.”
Reliable - “Go Reliable” / “You Can Rely on Us.”
Worldwide Good - “In the name of”, placed before the name of the company.
ANQA is greening the Sahara. Have been since 2520. Hectare by hectare, carefully. Temperatures are regularly too high for normal earth flora to survive - the greenery is genetically modified for heat tolerance. Their capital at In Salah is surrounded by a (force-grown) old-growth forest. Their goal is utopian in mindset - their official stance is that ANQA territories are the nicest place to live in the world, and we haven’t collected enough data to dispute them on that, yet. Huge plains of previously-extinct greenery resurrected from seed banks spread out from Timbuktu and Tamanrasset.
Though, they’re still a League member - it’s not all green and growing. A good example is Nouadhibou-Mineraliér Sea Depot, a massive floating superstructure built in the waters above the sunken town of Nouadhibou. Roughly spherical (roughly), scraped and dented, with missing plates and huge gouges for the hangars and seaports. It’s a resupply point for ANQA, barely a ship, barely a city. It’s theoretically mobile, and theoretically a spaceport, though neither of these propositions have been tested in the last forty years. NMSD is famous for being unglamorous, ugly and cramped - the least desirable posting in all of ANQA’s holdings. Misbehaving Pilots, scientists with principles and third-children of corporate nobility get shoved out here among the oil-reek and the rust, to dream of villas on the Bight of Libya.
Haasbroek Armaments have been making money off of blowing people up for centuries. Still the most likely to rely on good old kinetic ammunition, HA are practically Luddites of modern war, eschewing psychic weaponry and lasers in favour of bigger and bigger blast radii. They’re often unpopular allies, since their Pilots like to show off by judging the blast zones by eye.
Their territory (the southernmost part of Africa) is dotted by blast craters. They didn’t even make all of them - the Invasion, the Anti-Statist War, the Strife Years, all left many marks here. There were many combatants, but Haasbroek are the last survivors - not necessarily due to skill, mind you. More likely, it was due to toughness.
From the perspective of the League, they mismanage their territory. Decaying nuclear reactors dot the Namib, train-tracks run out into nowhere in the Transvaal, cities that League parlance calls “accidental” spring up where they need to. For a member of the League, they’re surprisingly laissez-faire - who cares what the commoners do in the spaces between the factories, the munitions plants, the air bases and the arcologies? Speaking of which, there are three - Cape Arcology, Central Frontier Arcology, and Inhambane. The first is known for its impenetrability, the second for its isolation, and the third for its wonderful attached island resort (and entirely flooded lower levels). Inside those air-conditioned giants, life is quite comfortable for the resident millions.
HA are beginning craft-brew micro-wars all over the world, funding separatist groups and minor corporations looking for League entry - making themselves extremely unpopular in the process. They are fomenting, stirring the pot, kicking the side of the world to see what falls out. This is a new strategy, inaugurated in 2700, on New Year’s Day, the “Anti-Stagnation Plan” (it’s not classified, they’re happy for you to know about it.) Most in the League view the ASP as suicidally reckless, or at the very least, rather irresponsible.
The Pilot cannot reasonably think of their Frame as a “body without organs” - they’re all too aware of every lump, pipe, tube, flesh-and-metal interface, from pre-sortie checks and training launches. In battle, every muscle twitches in time with their brain-waves, the limbs move like an animal's limbs to a thought. The specificity of the damage reports, the urgent letters about burst globules, leaking veins and shredded tissue, that go flashing in red columns up and down their vision when things go wrong.
Kardoust Science Technology arrange themselves in the manner of concentric rings, with levels of initiation like a mystery society. Some of their laboratories, bases, even a city or two, are open only to those in the inner rings of initiation. Most of their Pilots are pretty far from the centre. Huge airstrips, and the remains of megaprojects past dot their territory. A failed space elevator’s ruins lie strewn here and there around the Rub Al-khali, glinting brightly.
Their stated goal is to discern the physical location of God, and go there to Him to ask Him questions. KST propagates a heady philosophical mixture of deism and materialism - Heaven is a physical place you could reach on a rocket. They do this from places of worship referred to as mosques - albeit with only the thinnest ideological connection to (and a strong aesthetic thread from) their forebears. Of course, nothing can truly stamp out the old faiths (even if Islam and Zoroastrianism, too, have gone through innovations and mutations across history.)
KST is currently engaged in an irregular war in Anatolia, with separatist “statists” quietly sponsored by Direction and ANQA. Fighting rolls back and forth across the concrete blast-shields looming above the streets of old Ankara. This is a test ground for new Frame combat doctrines, new weaponry, new and untested Pilots. KST is quietly thankful for the chance to acquire data.
“Dry Leaf Syndrome” is the name for a persistent “mania” that xenoflesh-and-machinery facsimiles of human beings walk undetected among the populace. League-owned psychotherapy journals pathologize it as an incurable mental illness of a delusive variety.
The Beaumont Foundation’s Lunar terraformation plans are pushed back decade by decade as the century slowly wears on. They founded many of the first arcologies up there, sending their people up on Direction’s rockets, and they’re still the Lunar heavyweight - if Earth was to break apart tomorrow, BF would be the kings of the ashes, lording it over the outposts the other League members maintain just to keep their oar in. But it won’t, and, in the long run, “Kings of the Little Rock Where Fuck All Happens” isn’t really that grand of a title.
BF are brutally meritocratic under their current CEO - ability is everything, and the Foundation are certain of their objectivity and fairness in that matter. Failure and capitulation are routes to demotion.
Their HQ is in the centre of Amsterdam Haven, a floating city positioned in the sea directly above the sunken remains of Old Amsterdam. The Head Office itself is a building that seems to be made entirely of glass - see-through floors and walls, light cascading through from peak to basement, doors made visible from the walls by a thin blue line marking where glass is divided from glass. It’s a sort of a piece of performance art - everyone can watch everyone else. Besides that, the disorienting, vertiginous interior is deliberately hostile to relaxation, requiring either vigilance or long experience to navigate effectively.
They’re the only League member that can compete with Corazon’s specialisation into psychic study, although they’re still playing catchup - they’re playing catchup in every area, behind AHI in lasers, behind Direction in rocketry, behind Furukawa in ship design - the eternal second place. This is not by accident.
When you piss off Corazon by blowing up a supply ship as collateral, and you need a psychophysicist, then the Foundation’s there as the next best thing. And - as an aside - this specific thing happens a near-comedic amount due to Corazon’s routing systems for their drone cargo vessels being in serious need of a total ground-level redesign. The Foundation’s unofficial motto is - “Jack of All Trades, Master of None, Better Than, a Master of One.”
Down on the seafloor of the Western Pacific, Furukawa Zaibatsu are building cities. The one that’s closest to shore, Umiyama 1, can be seen glowing under the water from a specially prepared viewpoint among the ruins of Hamamatsu. Primarily, these are strategic bases, defensive holdfasts, scientific outposts - but they represent the beginning of something more.
The “Crucible of Life” ideology dominates and unifies the narrow pinnacle of Furukawa’s corporate nobility - an official policy position of oceanic expansion, inspiration and obsession. Deeper depths and richer sargassos await us, in the protective arms of Mother Ocean. We never ought to have developed the ability to breathe air. We’re exposed, up here, on the dry, exposed to poisonous gases and human hubris. And in this hot and flooded era, more than ever, this is a blue world - an entire future awaits down there for those with the vision to enter it.
Submarines! Amphibious frames! Deep-sea habitats! Rumours that the CEO and CFO of Furukawa are by now fully water-breathing remain only rumours.
Furukawa are currently engaged in a constant low-level naval war with the inhabitants of the Borneo and Sulawesi ZNC, and also, quietly, with Corazon’s interests in the Philippine Remains. There are a lot of creative ways to aim at someone and blow up the guy who’s (on paper) your ally, and both corporations are employing them extensively. This could spiral into outright war between the two if Jiangbei ever stops vouchsafing the peace. Frightening times!
As for the people who FZ and Corazon are, in theory, at war with, their continued improbable victories are starting to feel more suspicious than glorious.
They’re related to the currently-existing Furukawa Zaibatsu in the same way that Rome (the one in Aachen) is related to Rome (the one in Rome). Or perhaps to Rome (the one in Istanbul). Or Rome (the one in Moscow).
Areas not thoroughly stamped with the print of the corporate boot are called “Zones of No Control“. What a ZNC actually is varies wildly, of course - for some examples:
The Hudson Bay Growth Field - The region of Sand Lakes, Caribou River and Wapusk National Park is buried under a tumorous mass of “wild” xenoflesh that disrupts electromagnetic radiation in unpredictable ways. Huge irregular spines - like antennas to heaven.
L4 Debris Field - Orbits Earth opposite the Moon. A notorious ZNC that occupies the mind of many a paranoid Earth-citizen. The Debris field was created when the yarchim tore up the Armstrong Large Capacity Space Dock, the jumping-off point for the “Leap for Mars”, killing around ten thousand people and permanently blotting this area of space in spinning shards and shredded habitats. League propaganda portrays it as an orbital den of anarchists, drug-dealers, Lunar mafias, xeno-cults and deactivated orbital weapons - for the first and last time, League propaganda isn’t lying.
Andalusia - One of Beaumont’s predecessors, Levesque Industrial, dropped the ball hard at the end of the Anti-Statist War, running out of ammunition (literally) before they could complete their conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. This left behind Andalusia, the “Last Democracy” (they’re not particularly democratic, but the word democracy lost all meaning in about 2320, so, hey.) Now, it’s nicknamed the Tigermouse - Europe was mostly ravaged by the invasion (karma), but Andalusia remained relatively undamaged - it punches high above its weight class, and a NOMFUP agreement (NOt My FUcking Problem) with ANQA means that they’re usually punching BF. One of the few non-League entities to operate Frames of their own.
Dakota Hive Fields - It was unusual for the invaders to build structures, and especially for them to build ones this complex. Towering city-sized masses of tunnels and rearranged earth-material loom high. They’ve nicknamed the most central one “Mt. Bismarck”, because it’s just that big, and the settlement of the same name is buried somewhere under it. Within the Hive Fields - the Hive Cults, that worship the outies as gods, or punishments from God - small town rural america fused with apparently rampant psychic potential and the fun things that happen when you eat paralunar meat.
Nova Archipelago - New “islands” bob in the mid-Pacific, not too far from where Hawaii was. They aren’t really islands - immense growths anchored to the sea-floor far below by living cables. Fruiting bodies, or perhaps primitive biological solar-arrays? Formerly nomadic sea-going groups (many of whom are, after long history, Hawaiian) have settled in the sargasso morass clustering to the edge of each Nova “island”, in raft-towns and underwater hideouts. They are strongly anti-corporate, and defend the Nova Archipelago forcefully from the explorative teams of Corazon, Reliable and Furukawa.
Former Virginia - Overgrown with a vaporous, sporeful xenoforest. Anti-Atlantic rebels hide out in there, in airtight tents and makeshift underground bases, as the conditions make Frame combat difficult at best and makes flyovers simply inadvisable.
Eastern Egypt - While Cairo and the rest of densely-inhabited Egypt have been swallowed up by the expanding Mediterranean, the outer edges of the remaining territory have become a viciously barbed xenojungle, within which a few tiny city states live in a surprisingly green interior, as if protected by the invaders. They receive covert aid from the Andalusians. Logistically, it has proven prohibitively difficult to get any real firepower through here, and solo or duo Frame missions have been banned since the Egypt Incident in 2680 (turns out - you can kill a Frame with enough handheld anti-armour weapons, if it’s immobilised for hours in barbed foliage).
The League have, in a sense, figured out an immortality - brain-uploads and clones can perpetuate a particular personality across time. Though, that new body is a new mind, with the old memories - the old body is dead, and so is the old mind. These clone-lineages are called Reihe, Rjad, Patterns, Ipras (derived from “Important Person Replica Series"), or any other number of terms. In some places they are thought of with a reincarnationist element. This method is now rarely favoured by the modern corporate elite, who now experiment with new new technologies (xenobiological or otherwise) to extend and reinforce the only body they’ll ever get.
Extant Patterns are now, in a sense, from another time. At least, they remember another time.
One of the oldest is part of AHI’s upper echelon, a probable member of the Gang of Ten - Special Advisor Handrahan 47, a rolling snowball of military acumen derived from the personality of Michael Handrahan, a hero of the Anti-Statist War. The 47th in the Handrahan Pattern, she has all of his memories (and all of the other memories of the Handrahans), but doesn’t look much anything like him - his original genetic data was lost in in the 2550s, and since then the Handrahan Pattern has wandered between bodies.
Rjad Krivaja / кривая is the best-known Rjad in the employ of Direction Conglomerate. She’s a politically controversial figure, due to her perceived influence over the inner workings of Direction, especially in her role as Pilot Coordinator - her angular albino face(s) have delivered tens of thousands of briefings over nearly two hundred years, and, while Direction’s fortunes have wavered, her loyalties never have.
Samarkand and Jiangbei both have forks of the same Pattern, by the name of Hira, currently Hira A27 (in the employ of Samarkand as a spokesperson, accountant and financial advisor), and Hira B25 (in the employ of Jiangbei as a strategist, sub-company CFO and auditor.) They are identical, and until Hira 23 (produced 2659), they were the same person. Now, they are two people, with diverging identities from a single point. Sometimes, they meet at Cross-corporate offices in Ulaanbaatar.
Reliable, least scrupulous about the matter of cloning by far, print hundreds of Ipras from singular originals, though the relatively impersonal and hurried methods needed for literal mass-production tends to result in unstable Ipras with significant psychological issues, derivations from the base and memory problems. These Ipras get nicknamed “Knock-offs” - or “Dupes”, if you’re feeling particularly mean. The most famous Knock-off series are clones of Serenity Kobayashi, a global pop-star of the 2530s. The Serenity Series have her face and her singing voice, but usually fail to produce comparably intellectual or socially-cutting lyrics (especially since they’re most comfortable writing songs for the 2530s). The Serenities have become all-purpose spokeswomen, chorus singers and a sort of symbol of exactly what Reliable will do with your legacy if you give them an inch.
Even if creating Mass Production Ipras from a psychic, they can’t reproduce psychic potential, no matter how they try and no matter how many they print.
Even Corazon struggles with it - their experimental Traductor program, aiming to produce psychically-active Patterns, has had very little success, leading many in the responsible division to assert that psychic power comes from the immortal soul, and not the fallible body. Therefore, Corazon will need to learn how to grow an immortal soul in a vat.
Beyond this false-immortality, there’s a whisper about what happens to Pilots when their Frames go berserk and consume them.
A unity, a psychic ascension into xenoflesh. After all, every Pilot has the dreams, and almost all of them have heard or seen the strange recurring images that dominate the noösphere - a mountain with truth at the peak, a red flower that blooms forever, a perfectly closed circle, a blue cocoon hatching forever, a city of square white buildings, and a sleeping forest where things have learned to walk - that ought to crawl.
This technically fufils the “Anime-inspired” GLOGTOBER prompt, because Evangelion and Akira are anime, even if Armoured Core: For Answer isn’t. It also technically fulfils the “Alien Invasion” prompt.
A large part of this post’s existence is a place to dump the drawings I’ve done for this idea. Also, I’d have put a link to the song Virtual Insanity in here somewhere if it wasn’t a little off-tone.
Also, I wrote almost all of this post before I played SIGNALIS, but I seem to have, in an oracular fashion, been inspired by it in advance. It just keeps happening.
