It’s been 96 years since the Latour-Woolgar Treaty was signed and the calendar reset to zero, resulting in the so-called End of History. Ever since, three major powers have had a good chunk of the world carved up between them…
The Superbloc, officially the Supreme Union of Proletarian Republics, is the largest geopolitical entity in the world: a communist megastate comprising some 70 republics, ranging from city-states invisible on world maps to multi-time-zone-spanning powers with populations in the hundreds of millions.
Vast. Omniscient. Senescent.
Home to an intelligence service no less sprawling and disorganised, known as the Operant Bureau, or simply the Opera. Your people. Too large for any single part of it to see the entire picture, the Opera has assets embedded throughout the so-called developed world, one of which you have recently become again, having been pulled out of the freezer.
Though the ideology of the Party is drilled into the heads of all officials and state representatives (and, naturally, spies), the nations that comprise the Superbloc are extremely fractious, held together by a social control apparatus that’s fraying at the seams.
The Party Line is, officially, post-historical materialism, but it’s been decades since the Superbloc materially changed anything. Some may say it has taken a strangely conservative turn of late. Either way, it’s preferable to the alternatives, or at least that’s what you were convinced of when you fled Mircea and joined the Opera.
On the opposite side, ideologically, is La Luz, a.k.a. the Illuminated Empire. A techno-fascist state reconstituted from the remains of a vast colonial empire, including the island city-state of Portofiro, where you’re now stationed.
Since its re-emergence on the world scene, La Luz has been busy attempting to recover these former territories and, while not averse to bombing them into oblivion if necessary, has preferred, where possible, to pursue a strategy of cultural victory.
This means that Portofiro, in some sense, is already occupied. Flooded with fashion, cartoons, and music from their ‘strange cousins’, as the Luzians are known, the population of Portofiro is hooked on Luz.
The sleek technological aesthetics and promises of a stylish, sad future delivered via L-Pop music have a vice-like grip on the youth, never mind that it’s all filled with (mostly) subtle techno-fascist propaganda.
Officially, Luzian mass culture is prohibited in the Developed World, having been placed under an EMTERR Cultural Blockade years ago; in reality, however, Portofiro is at the forefront of an immense (and tolerated) bootlegging industry, where Luzian media products are converted into international formats and sent out into the world.
Believers in technological supremacy, rumours abound about the Luzian elite’s more experimental ventures, such as a scheme to create pop music that infiltrates people’s subconscious.
Most notorious among these are the stories surrounding the Luzian ruling class, who, rumour has it, are all copies of the consciousness of a single person: the ideological founder of the modern techno-fascist state. Like anything that has been copied and recopied too many times, that consciousness is decaying…
Finally, there is EMTERR, also L’Empire sans territoire, also known simply as the Bank. The lynchpin of transnational capital, EMTERR is a combination of a global investment bank, development fund, and intelligence service that protects the interests of the world’s most advanced capitalist economies and stateless corporations.
While officially having no territory, the Bank holds an immense, nebulous empire of debt, which it expands via its signature stabilisation programme: a nearly impossible-to-repay loan designed to keep struggling nations on the hook for decades.
Portofiro took on its first stabilisation programme about 40 years ago, during the first administration of the perennial dictator Sweet Nestor, and since then it has accepted 15 more, a cycle of fiscal hate-f*cking that has slowly sunk Portofiro’s economy into a form of modern debt slavery.
Now, with La Luz encroaching on its former territories and EMTERR seeking to expand its trade horizon, Portofiro seems ripe for the taking, ready to be portioned out as the big table where techno-fascism and transnational capital meet.
And where does this leave you, Superbloc baby? As always, on the sidelines. Operating from underneath, the deck stacked against you.
The Opera isn’t going to be inciting a socialist revolution in Portofiro any time soon, but it might just be able to throw a wrench into the machinery of whatever the Bank and La Luz are planning. And who knows, you might find yourself identifying with your enemies more than you thought…
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