Strigoiverse Collections (Original stories from various genres)

Strigoi Grey · Post by **Strigoi Grey** » 2025-09-16 01:11pm

A collection of stories set in my Strigoiverse but only tangentially related to the metaplot, or seemingly unrelated so that you shouldn't have to know much about it to read them. Characters and aspects of the Strigoiverse may make cameos or be referenced, but major interactions will likely take place in chapter not canon to either side/all sides. Some chapters will be standalone/one-shots, while others will be part of storylines.

Now the title says various genres, but offshoots of them or stories with various aesthetics that don't quite fit in a genre will also be included.

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The Ur-City

The Endless, Beginningless Now

"Before" Transcendence

In the City That Holds All, there is one Maker who does not quite understand the process of creation.

It loves the work, but it knows it yet lacks the ability to craft things and people able to survive without its attention. It does not wish to sleep and forget them so that they become nothing, nor to let its attention wander and look, after a few moments, into a void, not knowing there was ever anything to remember.

Thus, in the manner of those Creators who learn to love their craft, it looks upon the Unmoved Mover, that sibling of its who has Awakened, who now watches its macrocosm grow like a garden rather than move like smoke in the winds of its mind.

Does it take inspiration from the Ur-City's Second Monarch? Perhaps. Creating is a greater concern than originality to Makers, however, as it is to those who rose from the Mover's Wellspring and now stand as its equals.

This Creator, however, is far from such peaks of power and aware of the fact; it is not skilled enough to make independent creations, much less craft whilst pursuing Awakening, so it focuses the brunt of its mind on its macrocosm, while observing those of its brethren, especially Wellspring. It finds that this sort of exercise both keeps its creation in a state of stability and trains its mind, perhaps heralding the beginning of Awakening.

[Scene: a picturesque wilderness, with crystal streams, towering evergreens and snowcapped mountains, though bereft of animals. An Asian-American man walks into focus, brown-eyed, with flecks of silver in his dark hair and beard. He appears to be in his late thirties.]

"Welcome back, everyone, or hello for the first time. In the second case, you might have have heard of me as Ryu Walker, creator of the Long Walks travelogue series. Maybe that's why you're with us now. You read the books, or watched the podcasts, lived the memcordings, followed the astral projections.

"The name of the series is something of an inside joke. It's based on that time I went to China and my name got swapped with the closest local version - "Long" story -, then people latched onto my passion for going on lengthy trips, and here we are.

"You might be listening from my home universe. If not, I can tell you its physics have enabled my hobbies, being unusually permissive of quantum entanglement and tunneling, allowing the creation of a portal network and easy personal teleportation. In my travels, I have picked up various techniques and devices meant to enhance my spatiotemporal movement capabilities.

"This is the first extra-macrocosmic edition of Long Walks! Now, I'm not giving up on my home creation: even one planet in one universe can have so much to offer. It's just that the usual magna-macrocosmic interaction between the Mover's Wellspring and others consists of David Silva beating the shit out of uppity Makers, and I think that's making them allergic to our tourists.

"So when I heard that this Mirthful Merger Creator is allowing visitors on its territory, I just had to go check. I have astral projected there a few times already, to test the waters, though I haven't gone in person yet. It seems fairly safe, by my standards, though don't take that as encouragement to follow. Might not be for you.

"I have spoken to a few diehard fans since, and they had some questions about the whole thing. I thought I should share my answers here.

Q: Is the Overlap macrocosm smaller or less complex than our Wellspring?

A: No. Metaphysically, they're on par. Variety in terms of mundane spaces might be less obvious at first glance, but that's unrelated.

Q: Are all your travelogues for the near future going to be set in Overlap? Will we see you in other creations? Maybe we can follow other people? I've heard David Silva might want to collate such experiences for one of his books.

A: No, though they might be the majority; likely; yes, I might receive correspondence detailing the travels of other people in other creations, or of natives in theirs; I know that's not really a question, but while David might do this, I think this will be the extent of overt interaction here. Overlap is a peaceful macrocosm, at least relative to its neighbours.

Q: What is Overlap like? Is it one place or split into various structures? Can we get a preview of some or will we have to wait until you go in person? If yes, is all you're telling us about now its full extent?

A; Let's leave that first one for last, ok? Because hoo boy. Yes, I've been projecting specifically so I could share an overview of those parts of Overlap one could travel in. I think the Merger might take note of my informal classification and use an expanded version to set better boundaries. Fun fact, you can move from any part of its macrocosm to any other by thinking about it and moving around a bit, no powers needed.

I've decided to split Overlap's structure in Sectors (using Roman numerals) and Districts (using Arabic ones). The Sectors might seem to have unifying themes, but not all do. I'm still working out if there is any rhyme or reason to it (maybe the Merger is too), so I can only offer speculation about why dissimilar Districts are sometimes together.

The Districts I have been to are not even close to the full extent of the realms they act as entrance points for. They include planets, universes, pseudo-macrocosms and everything in-between (in their case, the idea of an unifying theme seems more certain).

Sector I: "X-punk"

"Fighting the man" is a thing in some Districts here, but not all. Rather, they seem to be 'punk in the sense of unifying aesthetics and the societies formed around signature technologies.

SID1: "Stonepunk"

Like in the Flintstones cartoon, people here have achieved an equivalent to most mundane 20th century Earths, except theirs is centred around improbably effective stoneworking and megafauna labour. Yeah, they have dinosaurs. And those stone cars like Fred had. They're actually kind of fun to use. Dinos appear to take the place of various machinery: my astral form was on a sauropod's rising neck as it demonstrated how it stands in for escalators.

SID2: "Clothpunk"

I initially went with something related to string or thread for the name, but these people can shape usually inflexible materials like they're fabric, as long as it is for the purposes of making clothing or armour. There exists a sapient species made of textiles, usually humanoid but not always, made of everything from cotton and silk to kevlar and carbon fibre.

SID3: "Clockpunk"

You know those wacky Da Vinci inventions that were made flashier for Assassin's Creed? Here that sort of stuff is practical, so that technically Renaissance tech allows for 21st century comfort and even surpasses it in several ways. I like the architecture, and their clockwork automatons are cleaner and more pleasant-sounding when they're moving than the steam ones in another District of this Sector.

SID4: Soot-stained, Spring-driven/"Steampunk"

Needs no introduction, right? Their steam and coal is inexplicably powerful, letting inventions endure way beyond what should be its limit, much like the pseudo-Victorian culture of the "node world" I projected into. They stand in for electricity and nuclear power when they really shouldn't, and the waistcoat and top hat enthusiasts here get very smug about that.

SID5: Darkling Gold/"Dieselpunk"

The edgier older cousin of the previous. Still got the mechs and zeppelin, but they're a lot heavier and more armoured, and with more guns. Global war has resulted in the industrialisation of sciences that were previously the province of the wacky gentleman adventurer.

SID6: Quark Clock/"Atompunk"

The best and worst parts of Cold War pop culture. Cold fusion powers everything from cars to buildings to jet packs, directed energy weapons are common, and the threat of global nuclear annihilation is balanced by an apparently clean-cut and optimistic society.

SID7: High Tech, Low Life/"Cyberpunk"

Megacorps as nation equivalents, staggeringly wide wealth gap and extremely common gang violence and cybernetics. I went through a dozen mugging attempts in as many alleys here and damn if I know what they were even after.

SID8: "Nanopunk"

Microscopic tech is way more powerful and precise here than what you'd expect from the mechanical equivalent of human cells. Lots of carbon nanotubes, lots of miniaturisation. People are not tinier than usual, and my disappointment is immeasurable.

SID9: Caro, Ex Nevro/"Biopunk"

Modern day tech enabled by biomechanical and genetically-engineered creatures. Hollowed macro-millipedes and dragonflies instead of trams and helicopters, bioluminescent fungi patches instead of lightbulbs and mentally stunted, vat-grown labour units instead of robots.

SIID10: Gone Green/"Solarpunk"

A much less invasive version of the previous District's practices shapes the nature of a world where technology has advanced so as to draw the energy of the sun and other stars, as well as various renewable sources. I spent hours looking for the hippy polycules every writer in this genre assured me were inevitable once such a paradigm shift took place, and ended up being given lots of fruit baskets and assurances that sex is not everything in life. No one seemed in on the joke.

Sector II: "Stages of SF"

Throughout the first Districts, I thought I was walking through space operas as imagined by specific decades.

SIID11: "Victorian superscience"

Think Verne and Wells' space books. Rockets shot across star systems out of cannons, luminiferous ether gliders, phlogiston rays and Jovian moons as full of savage apelike spacemen as this Mars is full of little green ones.

SIID12: Blue, Red, Ashen/"Settling Sol System"

The Expanse is one of those gritty shows that are cool to watch but would fucking suck to live in, as well as a close equivalent to this place. A series of brief interviews with the locals convinced me the common currency of the inner planets, the outer ones' moons and the Asteroid Belt's is violence. Political bullshit also qualifies.

Physics seem to be of a standard bent, that is, the Hard SF one in regards to such places. Like that movie about the one guy on realistic Mars, except there are a lot of angry people here.

SIID13: Father Sol, In Mirrors Crowned/"Settled Sol System"

Earth gone K1+ and no longer cramped. Every solid celestial body houses settlements or research stations and the gas and ice giants are harvested, as is the sun. People live comfortably and generation ships filled with cryogenics chambers are being prepared for launch.

SIID14: "K2+ Sol"

Grown up version of the previous, with a Dyson sphere and colonies founded across antimatter torchships scattered across neighbouring systems. FTL systems or workaround are still being worked on, but with how easy immortality and mental uploading is, no one's in any hurry.

SIID15: "K3+ Milky Way"

The above repeated across a galaxy, with drives harnessing tachyons and dark matter to cheat time and bend space. Artificial wormholes dwarfing most worlds enable easy travel and transportation between systems.

SIID16: "K4+ Cosmos"

Things just seem to be getting bigger, huh? But in reality, none of the aforementioned Districts are future versions of each other. I checked. Here, sculpted superclusters and the control of the universe's forces have defined human culture for as long as anyone cares to remember.

SIID17: "Raygun Gothic"

Like the pulp superscience cosmos is the steampunk District in space, this seems to be the expanded version of the atompunk one. Energy rays, quippy robot butlers powered by nuclear reactors and thinking through positrons, and space criminals and alien monsters everywhere. Think Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.

SIID18: "Ungraspable Consequence"

Have you ever been into a SF series whose premise sort of falls apart without that one substance or material? I'm not gonna call the one here unobtanium, cuz I'm not a hack, but honestly, what else is letting them push ship mass out of the universe's view to go FTL? You'd think everyone would be crashing stuff into planets for infinite or at least extra damage, but of course this sort of things has fields it can be shut off by

SIID19: "New Frontier"

I was thinking about calling this Boldly Gone, since, you know, Trek. Or the Orville, but less self-aware. I was happy to find out that easy teleportation and matter-energy conversion don't inherently drive people to romp around space in pajamas, with no effective weapons, shields or armies.

SIID20: "Balance Of The Power"

Old lived-in galaxy, known hyperspatial routes ('cause going FTL outside one is like off-roading, except you can slide out of reality, see?), an all-encompassing energy field which is generated by living beings but is not magic, by any means, for real. Also, its champions seem driven to beat the fuck out of each other and make it everyone else's problem every few millennia. What's up with that?

Sector III: "Mankind Plus"

This is one of the Sectors with a clear identity, I'd say, and I'd say it's humans improving on themselves.

SIIID21: "Cyborgisation"

Like the Cyberpunk District if society wasn't shit, and cyborgisation was more extensive and advanced. Think people uploading themselves into building mainframes to run them, replacing everything except their brains (and sometimes even those) with chrome, and mass automatisation letting them reap the rewards of unthinking robots' labour so they can focus on the cool stuff. I can respect that.

SIIID22: "Transhumanism"

Since people improving themselves, but not enough to become godlike, through mechanical and biological enhancements is the big thing here, you could call this a fusion of D9 and D21, except it's still humans and those adjacent to them handling work, and infrastructure and other services have stayed mostly as they were before the body modding wave hit.

SIIID23: "Posthumanism"

Beyond a certain point, people become, at least physically, too different to be called humans anymore, whether by power or nature. Whether chimeric or so superhuman as to be unrecognisable in terms of inner workings, they move past that threshold.

SIIID24: "Postphysicality"

People becoming virtual or energy beings doesn't mean the world has to go the same route, but they sure seem interested in that. The neat part is that you can't really have overpopulation when everyone's everything is so flexible.

SIIID25: "Psi"

Not just telekinesis or telepathy, but psychic nullification and the manifestation of thoughts have all been honed to the point of surpassing the other sciences in utility. Cities orbit the world, shielded from gravity and airlessness alike by the sheer force of thought. I did not find anyone with big, funny-looking brains, and nearly got into several fights when I kept calling controlled rainfall brainstorming.

Sector IV: "Apocalypse Then, And After"

Is it inspiring that mankind tends to persist after fucking up the planet, or deplorable that they don't get the hint to die?

SIVD26: "After The End"

There are, in fact, no Fallout-esque mechanics to abuse here, and stuff that'd be memeable in said series is suicidal to try in real life here. At least I didn't go in the flesh, hah! But for real, it's good. The whole planet is radioactive for the foreseeable future, far longer than it should be even after a global nuking, and mutation is a lot more dramatic than it should be. And faster.

SIVD27: "New Beginning"

Rediscovered pre-apocalyptic devices and sciences, the arrival of aliens more advanced than mankind ever was and the resurgence of the occult have resulted in a rebirth of the world that once glowed green in space. Not a future of the previous District, much less a guaranteed one, sadly. I need to help that people, speed the recovery records up. And get rid of whatever physics makes people burst into hulking mutants after eating stuff irradiated by specific reactors, but which is harmless by proximity. Where's the mass from?

Sector V: "Stages Of Fantasy"

The various faux time periods a fantasy series could be set in appear to be the "theme" of this Sector. I'd have said a lack of good plumping was, before I went through them all.

SVD28: "Prehuman"

Scaled, tentacled and more alien creatures hold empires spanning continents, while proto-human half-apes skulk in the shadows of their crystal spires and megalithic structures. I'm probably overly proud of how my ancestors still manage to nick their shit whenever their back is turned.

SV29: "Prehistoric"

Swords and sorcery except it's more sharp rocks and shamanism, this being hunter-gatherer times. No agriculture means people spend most of their time looking for food, and culture doesn't have much time to flourish.

SV30: "Stone Age"

The sort of place you'd expect to run into Conan in. Agriculture is established and metalworking is a thing, but settlements are scarcely any safer than the enchanted wilds.

SVD31: "Bronze Age"

Magical city-states with attitude. You ever imagined giving Ancient Greece the powers they only imagined? When are the Sea People showing up, I've seen way too many ways to enforce slavery without chains already.

SVD32: "Iron Age"

You read the above? Switch some name around, imagine I'm waiting for the so-called barbarians at the gates to topple this Roman Empire knockoff. Which could crush its mundane version, let me tell you.

SVD33: "Low Fantasy"

I know, I know. No one who lived through medieval politics is going to visit here for the version rehashed with magic. Believe me, I'm only going for completion's sake, myself. It can be interesting to look for the supernatural when it's rare or you don't know how it works. For example, I met this monster hunter here, weird-eyed guy, could've been any age, and I felt this urge to toss him a coin. Thanked me and went his way, so I guess I did something right.

SVD34: "Dark Fantasy"

An overclocked version of the former, keeping the shittiness while piling on the power. Imagine switching from A Song Of Ice And Fire to Malazan. Every mass ritual, whether it's for slaughtering armies or triggering apotheosis, is built on an appallingly deep foundation of suffering. The fact I don't feel bad for most of the fuel should tell you something about the average person here,

SVD35: "High Fantasy"

The sort of world you'd find in a Lord Of The Rings derivative, brought to life. Technically less dangerous than the previous, in that the stuff worse than death usually happens to awful people, and at least fate isn't as heavy-handed as in the next District.

SVD36: "Epic Fantasy"

Is anyone choses to be a hero ever happy to be chosen? Fate usually pushes back more in response to one's struggles, and people here don't even need to struggle against it to be pushed. Dealing with their enemies is enough to bring destiny running.

SVD37: "Pike And Shot"

The proliferation of gunpowder and the printing press doesn't mean fireballs and spell books are less common. There are now just different ways to blast people apart and rapidly share information.

SVD38: "Age Of Sail"

The difference between this and the previous seems to be more of geography than advancement. Only islands (not getting into an argument over what makes a continent one right now), more pirate crews than governments able to stop them, and the occult looms in the margins, in the form of ghost ships and undead pirates.

SVD39: "Torchlight And Shadow"

Vibe difference again? You bet. Gunpowder and the printing press are fairly newfangled here too, though a lot more needed, what with the perpetual global foggy night and the monsters lurking in it. Not that the witch hunters and inquisitors opposing them need much help to match them , in monstrousness and everything else

SVD40: "Napoleonic fantasy"

Imagine magic-filled world in a period equivalent to that before industrialisation got going. Large professional armies are becoming more popular, as are the concepts of nation-states and democracy.

SVD41: "Industrialising fantasy"

Railroads and telegraphs are beginning to spread and rival enchanted doors and speaking stones. Not a future version of the previous (this doesn't seem to be a thing with any set), but their legislatures and charters of rights are sure more developed.

SVD42: "Industrialised Fantasy"

The 1860s-1890s with magic and monsters. Tensions are probably flaring up into the first global occult war in the next few decades, and man will that suck. Speaking of.

SVD43: "World War One Fantasy"

You know how this war was so awful the concept of glorious warfare mostly died? There'll be things a lot worse than mustard gas and early tanks getting thrown around here.

SVD44: "World War Two Fantasy"

I'm split on whether the first nuke will be a hellfire dispenser or a necromantic death ray. Hopefully, MAD will emerge here as a concept as well.

SVD45: "Cold War Fantasy"

Not that the existence of MAD prevents proxy war and sabotage, especially when agents can warp reality. Here, a full arsenal exchange would result in a fate far worse than human genocide.

SVD46: "Modern fantasy"

This is less of an alternate version of my Earth, and more of a world where people can afford to live as well thanks to the typical fantasy magic and creatures. Not to say there aren't tensions under the surface.

SVD47: "Masquerade"

Supernaturals existing in the modern world's shadows, for a variety of reasons. The nature of their relationship with mankind, in terms of power, varies depending on where you go.

SVD48: "The Masquerade, Now Broken"

The reveal of the supernatural will not soothe tempers that flared over historical inaction and resentment, or ensure fair treatment of all. Hopefully, interspecies tensions will not make this look like some other Districts.

SVD49: "The Masquerade, Broken Then"

The paranormal has been an established thing for as long as the oldest humans can remember. There is still friction, but occult advances are ensuring prosperity across the globe and beyond, and people of all species are looking towards the stars and otherworldly realms.

SVD50: "Never Masked"

I'd say this is like District 46 if it took place on Earth. Less magic as tech, fewer medieval aesthetics.

SVD51: "The Veil Kept"

A darker, more dangerous world: a supernatural community hellbent on keeping mankind ignorant for a variety of reasons, from the want to exploit ignorance to a misplaced paternalistic attitude, makes sure a humanity much weaker than them doesn't learn the true nature of reality. I think I'd have to put on my "heavy boots", so to speak, if I took a walk here. Looking through the metaphorical window earned me a lot of glares.

SVD52: "Science Fantasy Galaxy"

Swords of both enchanted metal and hardened light are used alongside wands and plasma launchers. Champions and relics able to grants godlike powers have appeared and disappeared through the ages, and now, with new dangers rising from within and without the galaxy, the need for them to return is strong.

SVD53: "Science Fantasy Universe"

A bigger version of the previous, with more emphasis on cosmic forces and their avatars than humans and peer species. Mortals might act as champions of such beings, and this cosmos is more overtly paranormal than District 20.

SVD54: "Eldritch Cold War"

While humans clash with the puppet-states of unnatural monsters older than time on Earth, advanced alien empires fight off the actual questing tendrils as they reach into space across the universe.

Sector VI: "Timeless Fantasy"

You'd think the difference between this and the previous Sector would be that the Districts here don't correspond to exact periods, but do all of the previous ones? I think the Merger just started winging it at some point.

SVID55: "Dungeon Crawl"

Certain areas evolve malignant cunning as they produce treasures and the monsters to defend them. In response, the thinking species form bands and guilds of adventurers to raid them for civilisation's security and prosperity.

SVID56: "Game Life"

Health bars are more thorough indicators of wellbeing here than any medical check, and any task can be made into a quest to gain experience points through. People become superhumanly good at their specialty by leaning into their [Classes].

SVID57: "Otherworld Leap"

A mundane Earth acts as the starting point of adventures in adjacent realms not unlike neighbouring Districts. These events are usually triggered by the death of those with ambition but little attachment to Earth, though mirrored situations are appearing in other worlds.

SVID58: "Spellsong"

The first District of this Sector, recreated in a void of space that resembles an ocean, with the requisite cosmic sea monsters and enchanted void galleons.

SVID59: "Dark Forest"

If anyone ever wants to shoot a Grimms' fairytale movie, any place here would work. Just make sure you hire one of the hunting lodges defending the walled cities and countries from the ever-present animal-shaped monsters, which are in truth something far worse than creatures with unnatural strength and speed.

SVID60: "Brass Tracks"

Civilisation persists on trains like moving cities, some running on rails, others floating through magnetism or stranger forces. Around them, wastelands filled with mind-bending anomalies and dangerous creatures stretch endlessly.

SVID61: "Sky-High"

Planes instead of trains, now. What cities exist float thanks to antigravity generators or the efforts of monstrously strong flying monsters, and the idea of walking anywhere important is as alien here as what sometimes descends from the airless voids beyond the clouds.

SVID62: "Fog And Flame"

It has been millennia since the Emperor has raised man from slavery at the claws of the things in the mists. Now, his green fires keep the fog away from the Emerald Circle of his world-spanning Empire, and no one will go into the mist without an Imperial torch to avoid instant transformation into something worse than any nightmare.

SVID63: "Unholy War"

Earth is the latest battlefield in a cosmos-spanning clash between seraphic and fiendish forces that has been going on since time immemorial. Caught in this during the Middle Ages, mankind turned to strange alchemies to survive before they could industrialise enough to properly harness the fire stolen from the divine. Now, they can stand on their own.

SVID64: "Four-Faced"

I don't know about you, but if something that could think me out of existence walked up to me, proclaimed itself the embodiment of good and offered to do so for the sake of sparing me from my sins, I'd be just as leery as if it called itself orderly, evil or chaotic. At least the humans here have learned not to trust unduly.

SVID65: "Gaslamp-Lit"

Industrialised alchemy and unearthed magical practices stand where steam power and gears would have, in another world. The power gap between the aristocrats and the commoners is as steep as the one in wealth, and getting steeper. But the sort of magics they wield cannot be barred from everyone, forever.

Sector VII: "Spell Scare"

Humans getting fucked over by magical asshats seems to be a strong pattern in all these Districts. Sorts of places I'd only visit for pleasure while decked out in antimagical gear.

SVIID66: "Strife Shamanic"

Primitive tribes struggle to develop agriculture and metalworking as they try to survive in the shadow of shamans whose clash rends the land, sea and sky, wielding powers from beyond the world and its spirit.

SVIID67: "Hermeticism"

Occult knowledge and world-warping willpower enable mages to lord over the unpowered, ignorant mundanes who built cities around their towers and workshops, if only to survive their rivals. Bronzeworking is the order of the day, and people aren't sure iron is magical or not.

SVIID68: "Witch World"

Who said spiritualistic women would be more openminded and kindly than materialistic men seems to have forgot bad people will follow their worst impulses regardless of gender, beliefs of species as long as they have the power. In this world, human kingdoms struggle to learn the secrets of steel as they try to survive the curse-filled confrontations between witch covens and bloodlines.

SVIID69: "Wizards And Warlocks"

The most moral mages are still apathetic at best towards humans, cloistered in their towers as they harness their mana and the energies of the cosmos, while the ones considered outright evil make pacts with the worst of spirits and monsters beyond the world in order to increase their power. Their clashes crush kingdoms.

SVIID70: "Alchemastery"

The human world is split between scattered city-states living on the whims of occult polymaths who build homunculi, golems and vivisect the spirits of the world and skies to learn their secrets and harness their powers.

Sector VIII: "Monster Mash"

If you thought last Sector was bad, at least there you knew you could stock up on antimagic and be golden. Here, the dangers are more varied but no less pervasive.

SVIIID71: "Mad Science"

On the one hand, it's cool to read Girl Genius or Twig or play Genius the Transgression (when are they making it an official game anyway?) and imagine what that sort of magic-like science could do, but it's way less glamorous to see all the physics-breaking horror the "Inspired" and "Enlightened" unleash upon the "ignorant" as they sharpen their skills against each other until the day they show them all. Hopefully, the mundanes will make their own strides in order to counter the unnatural sciences looming over their heads. They made it past the industrial revolution, already, though such things can never be reverse-engineered or recreated by sane minds.

SVIIID72: "Ectoplasmundus"

A world at the turn of the 20th century, or an equivalent. Ghosts, varying in terms of sanity, malice and power, are as common as shapeless ectopasmic manifestations, stone tape events and buildings, objects and landmarks "gone ghostly", though lone ghost hunters and mediums as well as institutions are taking steps to defend the living from such.

SVIIID73: "Takers From Man"

Vampires, of the most common variety but also of the sorts that feed on souls, emotions and minds, as well as their thralls and fledglings, rule a world they shrouded in eternal darkness. Some bloodlines are making their way into space, looking to expand their influence as well as their power by delving into the void and the abysses outside reality.

SVIIID74: "Beastworld"

With power to match their insane anger, creatures that are half-human, half-animal and entirely of the wrathful spirit of this world hold power over much of their creator's shell, while humans attempt to survive in the margins. Where the beast shamans' powers triumph, human technology and science fade, people becoming hunter-gatherers and even apes once more. Advancement and its advocates are hunted down wherever they are found and mankind is constantly culled to avoid "unbalancing nature", but what else can be done?

SVIIID75: "Slashed"

Every place people dwell can, overnight, turn into the hunting grounds of unnaturally powerful and determined animals or silent, unstoppable murderers, either immortal and capable of teleportation or effectively so. Hunters band together to patrol the night, but few return.

SVIIID76: "Invasion"

From shapeshifting infiltrators and psychic body snatchers to alien trophy hunters and giant locust swarms, this Earth is the focus of an unending procession of alien threats. They have adapted, but the threats never cease.

SVIIID77: "Vile Void"

A galactic human empire, backed by transhuman troops, weaponised psychics and reality warping relic-tech from their golden stands against a cosmos filled with the embodiment of every nightmare mankind ever had about space, the mind and machines.

SVIIID78: "Eldest's Mark"

Mankind reaches for the stars in an universe filled with older, more powerful and advanced alien civilisations, yet they all strain to understand the purpose of the relics and guardians the first thinking beings left behind when they ascended beyond this cosmos, much less their function. From unbreakable bridges wider than worlds linking star systems together to cyclopean cities locked out of time and all other aspects of existence, yet somehow, visible, it is clear those who ruled before did so with knowledge and power yet unequalled.

Sector IX: "Money Makes The Worlds Go Weird"

Not gonna lie, the thought of superpowers as economics scared me far more than that of running into some precursor guard construct.

SIXD79: "Palace Economy"

Concentrating power and resources into the hands of the few always leads to disaster, but

SIXD80: "Feudalism"

Powers that enforce classism and make sure serfdom is survivable no matter how demanding the aristocrats get? Yeah, miss me with that.

SIXD81: "Capital"

Now, let it not be said that being able to vote and not being tied to the land prevents unreasonably powerful elites from doing whatever they want and hading you the consequences. Maybe things can improve some day, because damn if seeing people literally sell their souls to keep working isn't depressing.

SIXD82: "Crypto"

You read the above? Do you think it would be better if everything was digital and the economy was shakier, changed much faster? These people did.

SIXD83: "Socialism"

People own everything they work with, and there's no such thing as being unable to afford something. Nor of having more than anyone else, but hey, they're transitioning towards classlessness, right?

SIXD84: "Communism"

All-seeing planners and an omniscient not-so-secret police with a love for their work to match their information might not make the prevention of anarchy pleasant for the people less equal than them, but it sure is working. Everyone keeps arguing that political equality (you'll forgive my grimace) and material prosperity aren't enough to be happy, for some reason.

SIXD85: "Mercantilism"

The less you import and the more you export are signs of power as certain as having the most fleets plying the oceans and oppressing the native overseas for their resources. But what will happen when they start doing the same?

SIXD86: "Barter"

When no one can agree on a price and everyone but especially the world loves arguing, the wheels of the economy move at a snail's pace, but can grind mountains to dust. Enough belief in an object's value or ability can make it a person

SXD87: "Gifts"

Sharing prosperity out of altruism might've been the starting point, but nowadays, giving what you don't need, while others do, is simply another facet of strategy, making sure the other is as compelled to return help as if they were pushed by divine force.

Sector X: "Skewed Balance"

Certain passions and occupations have no concept of diminishing returns, here. In fact, things keep getting better, for those practising them.

SXD88: "Sports"

Y'know, when I was a kid watching Inazuma Eleven, I thought it was dumb as hell how soccer matches decided the fate of everything from schools to the freaking world was decided by soccer matches, but here? Sports are already a stand-in for combat and war. Add signature moves that warp the world around them, and...

SXD89: "Symphonia"

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, it felt weird being in a world where Disney movie-esque flash mobs are actually something that happens. I do what I can to make myself and the extensions of my being immune to such compelling forces, but this doesn't make a sugarcoated version of the previous District with more musicals pleasant.

SXD90: "Power Burst"

Giant Earth, bloodline powers, foods and training regimens that make people's power skyrocket...flashy fistfights that wreck mountain ranges being the most common conflict resolution rather than wars between eugenicist states is actually funny, in a not so reassuring way

SXD91: "Blood And Brawn"

No outright paranormal powers like in District 90, though damn if the pressure points and fighting spirit manifestations don't get close. Also, I'm fairly sure mundane humans can't train until they kick tanks in half and dodge hypervelocity rounds, but they say it's all natty.

SXD92: "Warrior's Code"

Whether they take place on mountaintops, with swords, or in teahouses, with poisons, fights between people so damn good at fighting they make governments and "less dedicated" armies ineffectual are always something to behold.

SXD93: "Immortal Errant"

Cultivation of the flesh and spirit allows one to become godlike, eventually ascending beyond the confines of this humongous world and into the even grander cosmos of cosmoses in which it spins.

SXD94: "Death Contract"

Did you know that despite of how different they might seem at first glance, Assassin's Creed and Sakamoto Days are the same sort of series? "Wacky hijinks of bullshit skilled assassins." Oh, add John Wick and that Hitman game for the lower end. This world is full of assassins working alone or in extensive societies, though they are always uncannily stealthy, skilled and dangerous. Some work for money, others for the thrill or to sharpen their skills or test their new weapons.

SXD95: "Fortune's War"

Hey, if I told you about an universe that's all Team Fortress 2 on Earth and Schlock Mercenary in space, you'd say it sounds like a lot of fun, right? Cuz those series are cartoonish and don't focus overly much on the most nightmarish shit in them. This world has no genre conversions to make it easier to stomach, though: it's every "mercs more capable and ruthless" than your country's army stereotype played straight.

SXD96: "Crime's Dues

Now, I'm not gonna tell you to break the law, you'll get superpowers if you do, but in this world, people go get abilities fitting their crimes, and making them easier to repeat, from teleporting or invisible burglars to superhuman murderers. I'm hoping the police will be able to catch up soon enough.

Sector XI: "Man And Monsters"

Partnership, hunting, warfare...how united would these strains of humanity remain if their counterparts disappeared, I wonder?

SXID97: "Spliced Strength"

Humans weaponising the carcasses of the creatures praying on them, replacing their flesh with theirs or bonding with those willing to aid humanity is not uncommon across existence. It happens in practically every world with humans and animals. Here, there's a much greater and more powerful variety of life to deal with, though.

SXID98: "Battle Bond"

You will not, in fact, catch them all unless you're a monomaniac with no life. You can absolutely get closer to the creatures that have replaced most machinery and weapons of mankind here and become a captain of industry or the equivalent of an army thanks to your team, though. They keep the world turning.

SXID99: "Virveldt"

Told you about something like this before, didn't I? Except in this case, travel between Earth and the virtual worlds around it is made by human turned into data, and the nonhuman creatures calling those worlds home must become material in order to interact with Earth rather than just some its machines.

SXID100: "Leviathans' Tombs"

No one knows if this Earth has always been like this or whether it is recovering after an apocalypse from the distant past, but it is certain that few of the titanic beings who unrotting carcasses mankind has built its cities within and around still survive. Those are as impervious and unstoppable as their stature implies.

SXID101: "Behemoths' Battle"

An Earth as advanced as mine, though it went down a different route, by necessity. Transhuman troops enhanced through cybernetics and gene-therapies back the giant robots meant to clash with the walking mountains threatening mankind's force-fielded cities on equal grounds, and kill them.

SXID102: "Ziz's War"

Mankind took to the stars but its nemeses followed, and in deep space, humanity met and warred with eaters of worlds whose young nestle in stars and whose swarms blanket galaxies, as well as the fleshsmiths who brought them into existence. They had to adapt, and advance, to survive.

Sector XII: "Grandeur"

Mundane humanity reels in the face of cosmic irrelevance, or malice, and contemplates its future.

SXIID103: "Darkest Ocean"

The world of man and the gods of man is an island of light amidst seas of dark chaos with no beginning or end, and they were never meant to journey far, in flesh or mind. Those who try return scarred by the ones behind the thin skein of reality, or things that look like them do.

SXIID104: "The Spheres Celestial"

Belief that the celestial bodies of humanity's solar system have power is common across countless realities. Here, the music of the sphere indeed decides fortune and fate, and ancient bloodlines tap into the power of the sun, worlds and moons as they champion their causes. From Martian war sages to sunfire smiths to wielders of the darkness and cold beyond Neptune, the power of the cosmic orrery is incarnated in those who learn to read its movements.

SXIID105: "Utopia Gazed Outward"

Shepherded into a worldly paradise by hypergenius AIs and other godlike posthumans, humans and their offshoots across the Milky Way now look beyond, into the world between galaxies, and recoil. Those who lead them devote all their processing power to glean the workings of crafted universes with tailored physics, megastructures heavier than galaxies that move with no apparent propulsion, and stranger things yet.

SXIID106: "Wound Down"

Every celestial body and universal force has been harnesses, and corporeal humans are outnumbered only by those dwelling in digital worlds, palaces of the mind and other unreal realms. Yet entropy persists, and they wonder how they might avert the end, once everything withers.

SXIID107: "With Infinity In One Hand, And Eternity In The Other..."

After a series of advancements, what was once named humanity decided that its destiny was not a slow descent into darkness as mankind collapsed into scattered particles. Man was the sire of the cosmos, they declared, not its scion. Now they have created every logical and possible world the fabric of their minds could be spun into, yet at they glance up and outward, they see only the visage of the one who crafted them thus, and they fell observed and confined, much like the life they seeded across their worlds did once it learned of its origin.

Sector XIII: "Excellence"

In this Sector, one's moral fibre enables the attainment of virtue beyond what would be possible through physical ability alone.

SXIIID109: "Mankind Rising"

Across a world so vast most Earths wouldn't be a dot on the map, mankind has spread to challenge the empires of those who reshaped reality in their image when apes first swung in trees. From squat underground dwellers who ply arcane sciences and harness fiery demons to fuel their forge-cities to elfin spellslingers whose words and thoughts become fact to older, nameless beings whose appearance alone could blast most minds off their hinges, many inhuman forces have found themselves met and repelled by humans wielding righteousness as they carve out fledgling kingdoms.

SXIIID110: "Masks And Mystery"

They don't understand that it's not the lab accidents or the gruelling training or the contact with aliens that determines their powers - those merely shape them, in accordance with the will and morality of the superhuman. And so those people who put on masks and go out to change the world into what they think it ought to be are beginning to wonder why some powers are only ever present in the form of specific kinds of heroes and villains, and whether said powers make the person, or the other way around. All the while, mundane citizens and governments cling to every form of sanity they can find in a world constantly assaulted from within, without and beyond, only kept on the brink by the powers of those who mean well.

SXIIID111: "Superhumane"

Difference is not evil. So spoke those superhumans who, scarcely a generation ago, agreed to work with the authorities to enforce peace and law if not normalcy. Some joined looking for wealth and fame, but it is a fact that, backed by most of society, they are better trained and prepared than the misfit villain teams that, on occasion, form to oppose them.

SXIIID112: "Supermajority"

If everyone is special, is anyone? This is one of the questions the superhumans making up most of this world's population ask themselves. Like their sister-districts, its is the person who makes the powers here, yet what does that say about those few mundanes unable to stand out in terms of the scale their good or evil deeds happen at?

SXIIID113: "Star-Spangled"

For many millennia, superhumans and the champions of alien world have ensured prosperity and kept the peace across the galaxy and beyond. Whether their enemies take the form of invading empires, godlike warlords or immeasurably powerful titans older than time and vaster than space, they stand ready.

Sector XIV: "Vigil"

SXIVD114: "Metanormalcy Maintenance"

Belief becomes fact everywhere in the magna-macrocosm, if strong enough. Here, even the disbelief of one, mundane human is powerful enough to turn a costumed human using props into a plasma-casting cyborg. The Metanormalcy Maintenance Movement thus strives to ensure capricious cryptids, deities hungry for worship and unchallenged authority, xenosapients alien enough space and time reel from them and worse stay away from Earth, where their presence might be enough to shape humanity and reality to darker ends. At the core of the Movement stands Metanormalcy Maintenance, the most organised of the Movement's branches. While M3's UFO chasers, monster hunters and occult erasure experts work at the margins of society and existence to keep them from fraying, M2 stands behind every government, managing economy and media so that things appears as safe as predictable as can be. Their arsenal of living and ontological weapons has both destroyed and restored existence as they know it many times, when there was aberrancy to be purged.

SXIVD115: "Off The Clock"

Whether the guardians of the timestream known as the Clocksmiths have a true beginning or will ever face an end is unknown even to most of them. Perhaps their shrouded past and future archives, or their possibility-computing thinking machines, hide the answer, yet the rank and file can spare not a moment to learn when their organisation was founded and why. People who would rewrite history for their own gain, chrono-despots who would crush certainties and possibilities together, eaters of time and antediluvian forces who remember the dark before place and moment oppose them and every turn, and their watch can never end.

Strigoi Grey · Post by **Strigoi Grey** » 2026-07-09 03:32pm

After Work: The Common Labourer’s Lot In The Age Of Automatons (Fantasy Dystopic Satire), I

* * *
In the depths of the void, a small yellow sun spins within a secondary arm of a middling starwheel. About it spin many worlds, three of which might have sustained life, once.

Only one did. It does so no longer.

Unlike its siblings, it was neither too close to nor too far from the parent-star for living beings to flourish. Neither too hot nor too cold, neither mantled in clouds or poison nor surrounded by too-thin air, this “world of the golden middle” once hosted, as far as its inhabitants knew, the greatest variety of organisms within the cosmos. Indeed, the only one.

“You would think,” one might say, “that, thinking this bounty unique, they would have gone to great lengths to cherish and defend it, from itself, from the uncaring universe, but most of all from each other.”

Yes. One might.

Were a traveller of the stars to happen upon the blasted husk of the golden middle’s world nowadays, they could easily be forgiven for thinking it was always a wasteland of a globe. Its oceans, once the better part of its surface, have been drained and boiled away. Its tectonic plates no longer move, its air is gone and its core, the source of its molten lifeblood, is, on the scale of a world’s lifespan, rapidly cooling.

Now let us contrive that such a traveller does indeed arrive. Is there anything to see? Anything besides thousands of leagues of bleakness, that is.

There is! Halfway between the husk-world and its lone, unusually large moon floats a void-keep that was not built by the planet’s former inhabitants. They never got to that stage of advancement, though they had the knowledge and the means, before the end.

Within the heart of that keep waits a lone sentinel. It is not in any way related to the dead world’s former people, unless one is inclined towards the tale of comet-borne life-kernels, which would make all life in the cosmos cousins of a sort.

The sentinel is the scion of a scholarly, compassionate people. Their kind rose towards the stars on a vaster, colder world than the one watched over by the keep. The core of their beings is ammonia, like carbon was that of the dead people. Thus, they are slow and deliberate, and it was through deliberation that they managed to begin sailing the void without ripping themselves apart beyond mending.

The sentinel’s visage could not be properly glimpsed by a human eye, nor remembered by a human mind, nor could its speech be perceived by a human, or reproduced by one, except with the rarest of instruments, now gone too. Regardless, it keeps itself armoured, and its living plate is suffused with a myriad of apparatuses, that any visitor it receives might be able to notice and converse with it.

One strides in, now. The core of its being is closer to sand than water or tree bark, thus its exterior is gleaming and its mind quick and sharp. It is flanked by two others, kindred or students, perhaps, for their postures indicate they are more than ready to strike back against whoever might attack the slighter, shorter central figure.

Not a leader of its kind, that one. Its bearing is too timid, at least for its people. A sage, maybe, a revered elder, here to sift through the past and learn how the future might be shaped and catastrophe avoided.

The sentinel stirs to life. Its armour is bulky enough to fall through lead like an anvil through air, yet the floor of its home is made of sterner stuff, and its panoply is cunningly devised. At its whim, the corpuscles of gravitation might be repelled, letting it soar.

‘I bid you welcome, strangers,’ the sentinel greets. ‘Did you simply stumble upon this place, or did you seek it out? My people did not think to mark it when I was posted here, for in our journeys within the starless dark, we are yet to encounter any being greater than the moss that grows on stone or the ephemeral things that spawn within raindrops.’

The sage replies, ‘We thank you for your welcome, kindly host. Indeed, we did not know about your keep until we passed by the edge of this sun’s light, when our instruments noticed its artifice.’

‘Yet we must ask,’ one of the youths chimes in. It is greater in stature and bulk than its fellow, its form brutal, yet neither voice nor manner are brutal now that it is clear the host does not wish them ill. ‘Your kind are clearly a people of great knowledge, equal to us, mayhap. Why would you let your world fall into ruin, only to place a monument within its ring of gravitation afterwards? Would it not have been better to have prevented this?’

‘Ah,’ replies the sentinel, ‘we could have, and we would have, had this orb been our cradle. Yet we only learned of it in a manner not unlike that in which you did. We are still deliberating whether to reverse the damage, perhaps plant life on it again - I hear the debates daily, through the pit of the void-worm that is both my herald and my door.’

The sage hums. ‘Know you, then, what manner of disaster befell this world? For, though it is an act of grand compassion to mourn a former cradle of life, surely your people have other purposes besides stationing their champions above every dead planet.’

Were it human, the sentinel might’ve placed a hand above its heart. ‘We have indeed, for, by learning to use the worm’s pit as a spyglass lens, we can read the past as our ancient astronomers read the night skies.’

The other youth, leaner yet fiercer than its counterpart, remarks, ‘It must have been an awful catastrophe to move your kind to such a waste of resources and time, for surely nothing noteworthy shall happen here ever again.’

The sentinel does not rise to the bait, for it is transparent that the more belligerent youth wants a confrontation. It knows the type: gone stir-crazy in the voidship, aggressive to begin with, it would rather cool its temper through violence than discussion.

Were it of a more hotheaded kind, the sentinel might take insult. Yet it is impossible for its people to lash out. Anything they feel, they choose to. So, instead of responding in kind, it instead says, “This is a meagre use of our means. Do not fret over us. Rather, follow me within the archives, where you might peruse the film-tomes we have compiled. They will teach you how the wastelands below came to be.’

It led. The others rushed to match its pace.

***

Picture an ape descending from the trees, developing an upright posture so as to better tread the savannahs. Freed from their part in locomotion, the forelegs become true upper limbs, the better to grasp and throw. The scions of this creature slaughter all competition, growing longer-lived and smarter, if not wiser.

For the better part of their species’ history, the majority of the population works on farms, to produce the food needed to sustain the artisans, the soldiers, the thinkers, the leaders.

Is it any wonder these people of the fields ended up calling their world something that could be replaced with “dirt”?

At a certain point, after well over ten thousand generations since they evolved, these ape scions, the humans, the reigning species of “Dirt” (so they counted themselves), thought it would be a grand idea to use automatons to augment their thinking, as, a couple centuries prior, they began using steam-driven machines to craft beyond the limits of living labourers.

It should be remembered that every technical revolution in human history had a great deal of growing pains to go with anything one might have called benefits.

The development of agriculture freed primitive humans from the need to hunt for food, enabling permanent settlements, the division and specialisation of labour, and a greater population, providing a pool of potential fighters and thinkers, so that the lot of everyone might be improved.

Yet, its detractors argued, it spawned social stratification, ended what they call natural equality and extended war from battles between small bands to clashes between armies of countless thousands. The monotonous, grain-based diets of early civilisation also meant lesser variety and poorer teeth, not to mention densely-populated cities were havens of plague.

Their opponents sneered that it was inane to think human nature had aught to do with equality of peace, and that losing the right to get mauled by a bear or die of a cracked tooth at the ripe old age of thirty was more than made up for by the benefits of civilisation.

The development of true industry, the shift from artisanal crafting to mass production, was just as fundamental a shift, yet it happened within lifetimes, which made it seem far fiercer and more pernicious to those caught within the heart of it.

Industrialisation fuelled already rampant invasions, colonisation and warfare. It ended the little industries families tended in their cottages. It replaced farm workers with vast machines that neither tired nor complained, driving them towards the rapidly-growing cities, lest they end up destitute and starving. The cities, controlled by magnates more interested in greater and cheaper production of goods than the health and housing of their workers, were cesspits perfect for all manner of illnesses to grow in.

That the workers revolted for greater rights and representation, which improved life for everyone, was, for a long time, debated. Was it a benefit of industrialisation or a side effect of it? That factory labour paved the way for the production of wondrous devices was not in question, yet were the miserable conditions, the long working hours, the poor pay and tyrannical bosses and brutal strikebreakers’ beatings, worth it?

In any case, roughly a century after what some called the end of this revolution of industry, reckoning machines became advanced enough to allow worldwide, instantaneous communication. Writings, speech, images and more could all be transmitted around the globe in moments, conversations could be had between people on the opposite ends of different continents in real time.

Technological prophets had predicted this would end division and strife across the globe. With the sharing of ideas being so fast and easy, such distinctions as country, creed and whatnot would fade away, perhaps in a generation or two, In the end, the nations of the world would realise that they were all people, with practically the same needs if not wants, and they would rise amidst the stars to stand together against the uncaring vastness of the universe.

As farcical as such visions seemed before the end, one has to remember that they were spoken of in earnest.

Despite the friction resulting from the reckoning machines’ world-wide web of knowledge, it seemed things might get brighter, for a time. Yes, the heralds and the writers always kept tragedies at the fore of the news, but this was not because the world was worse than it had been in some imagined golden age. It was, in fact, getting better. Instantaneous information just meant that events which would have once faded into obscurity were now known to all.

Ever since the machine replaced the physical worker, visionaries thought to craft the means that would allow menial thinking - calculation, record-keeping and the like - to be outsourced to automatons, so that genuine geniuses might instead bend their mighty intellects to more glorious tasks.

The crafted wisdom movement was not one of continuous, accelerating progress for most of its history. It experienced several hiatuses, “winters” they were called, before it produced anything noteworthy.

When the models of grand speech appeared on the market, they sparked fierce debate. What was consciousness? What did awareness mean? What was intelligence?

“You cannot say that they are not self-aware!” their proponents insisted. “If a human were disembodied and bereft of senses, would you call them mindless, unthinking? So they make mistakes - doesn’t everyone? Take note, eventually, these things will spawn thinking beings who can surpass man at any task within a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the resources needed, without fatigue, without distraction or payment or sustenance needed. And then…”

“Wrong,” their rivals replied. “They make mistakes because they cannot do aught else: their architecture is such that hallucinations are inevitable. Just like how bankruptcy is inevitable for the guilds crafting them. When the investors accept that they are only ever going to produce a fraction of the coin that was given to their creators, the whole arrangement will pop, like a bubble.”

There was much fighting over this on the knowledge web. Yet, in the end, this was only a sideshow compared to the main issues the world faced at the time.

For one, the worth of a person had, for centuries, been equated with what they owned or could produce. People opposed to this capital-focused model of society argued that this was nothing but sheer materialism, shallow and petty; that it was insanity for people who broke their backs working to have to choose between paying their rent and buying food while landlords made money off rented properties they had inherited. Instead, they argued, man ought to put aside nonsensical, artificial divisions, share everything between everyone, and value people based on who they were as a person. Everything else, everything good, would follow.

“No,” the lovers of capital argued, “for by rooting out competition and scarcity, you would hollow out the soul of man. Aye, ever since we lived on the plains and in the forest and jungles, strife, and only strife, has driven us forward, towards better things for all. Fighting against the elements, or the beasts of the field and wood, or against our fellow man, drove us to craft weapons and tools. It was ambition that fuelled the flames of science, of civilization-building.”

“Yet,” the lovers of community replied, “you are, in the end, acting as if man can grow infinitely on this finite world. How can that be? Will we not strip it bare of resources, eventually, acting as you would? Would that not lead to death in a desert of our own making? We say, let everyone have whatever they might need, and then they shall give back as best they can.”

“Nay,” the lovers of capital retorted. “Are you so blind as to think man is some perfect, kindly angel? Who will never take more than needed, never seek advantage over his fellows? That is insanity. Do you know what else is insanity? Repeating something whilst expecting different results. Did not every nation where your philosophy was applied crumble from within.”

“Of course,” the lovers of community agreed, “because your ilk sabotaged them! Not one was allowed to seek its destiny without an embargo, or infiltration, or warfare. Left alone, they would have-”

“Let’s pretend it’s so,” the lovers of capital interrupted, “and agree that they were treated unfairly. Yet what is fairness? The dream of man. A wish, perhaps not even an honest one. For man ever seeks advantage, as we said. The world is not fair and it is even less kind: let that be known to all. A system that cannot face reality, by definition, does not deserve to exist. You say you were better, in terms of virtue? Perhaps had you been better in terms of power, you would not be here, pointing at tomes of history while whining that your true philosophy has never been tried.”

“Brazen oafs!” the lovers of community fumed. “You happened to be lucky and you think it’s a manifestation of your worth! But then, that’s always been the problem with you, no? It’s all about running starts, and too bad for those left in the dust.”

“Yes,” the lovers of capital said wryly “much better to be like you and flatten chances for all. Remove incentive, for no one will receive more for being better than others. What drives one to excel when the slacker receives the same as the diligent, simply for laying about. Indeed, did not one of your own champions end up saying that those who will not work will not eat? He saw mankind for what it was, even through his insanity. And here we arrive at your problem, again. The only thing you will ever achieve is equality in poverty for the bulk, while the leaders lounge in gilded mansions, as distant and untouchable to their “fellow workers” as aristocrats and industrial tycoons ever were to their subjects and employees. Because you cannot plan for everything, any more than you can fairly distribute everything towards everyone in time. Where will you find a planner that capable? The best you’ve ever managed to do was pile resources at the top, and there they stayed. With the revolutionary vanguards, with the heroes of the people. Strange, isn’t it, how similar they act to the so-called oligarchs and tyrants you decry.”

“They were never given the freedom to develop naturally,” the lovers of community answered. “But we have already spoken of that, and you know well what you did, besides. Perhaps we tried too early. Perhaps we tried in the wrong nations, though the more technologically-developed ones opposed our message, for their greedy elites held them in an iron hand. Yet this is a new age, and man has begun producing the tools that will make him more powerful than he has ever dreamed to be. With them in hand, we will have the perfect planners you mocked, aye, and prosperity for all, and fair and loving leaders will be chosen from among the people liberated by their very technologies.”

“Call us when you reach the end of the purity spiral,” the lovers of capital replied, “and run out of ideological deviants to shoot. We know how it goes: when everything is grand and all the enemies without are gone, the enemies within start looking awfully menacing. There’s always someone who’s not thinking quite right.”

”You are so…petty!” the lovers of community exclaimed. “It’s always about who has the most with you, isn’t it? Largest house, fastest auto-carriage. Most coin. As though coin is not just a totem for the value society perceives a person as having! As though it is valuable in itself! In a sane world, people would be judged in accordance with their character, not their wallet.”

“Tell you what,” the lovers of capital remarked, “make this work outside your imagination, then we’ll talk more.”

The problem went something like this: before industry flourished, one could only do so much within a given time. It was not really possible to train one’s body beyond natural limits, not in this cosmos. Man was as productive as possible, and if the commoner was less wealthy than they could have been, because their alleged betters took the first part of the fruits of their labour, at least they could only be so wealthy when everything was muscle-powered.

Machines changed this. The driver of an industrial machine could do the work of ten, a hundred, more farmhands, in a fraction of the time and without tiring at all. Did that mean the driver deserved a wage equal to those of the people they’d replaced? They’d get awfully wealthy that way, the people who ought to know worried. Better to revamp the whole thing. And if those unskilled dirt-grubbers were faced with penury and hunger, well, no one forced them to be born poor, right?

They’d find something else to do, something better. The world was changing, growing thanks to industry, yet shrinking, also, thanks to transportation and communication on an unprecedented scale. They’d pull themselves up, and if the people who’d risen before had, purely by mistake, pulled the ladder up or knocked it down a crevice, they’d pull themselves up by the straps of their boots.

(Here, the sentinel stopped to explain to its guests, one could see a cultural trope that had ended up part of daily speech. In children’s animations whose main draw was absurdity, characters incapable of flight would rise through the air, or at least briefly avoid falling, by pulling on the straps of their boots. Originally, this expression referred to an incapable person’s attempts to achieve something impossible. That it ended up being used to imply something necessary was, in the host’s opinion, even more ridiculous than its origins.)

As it happened, people did not always manage to pull themselves up by the straps of their boots. Shoddy shoemaking, doubtlessly. And if they wanted better cobblers, they’d stop being lazy and work more, instead of relying on the largesse of the successful and thus, deserving.

With the world growing more and more productive, yet the workers getting more stressed and busy and the poor getting poorer, something clearly was amiss. There was so much food people thought nothing of throwing almost half away, so how could there be world hunger also?

Or, some argued, industrialists had, pressured by their revolting workers, agreed to a five-day working week of eight hours of labour a day. But industry had grown much vaster since, and automation had grown to match. An outsider might have thought, should not the common labourer now be working, say, a handful of hours a week, or at least fewer hours a day? Shouldn’t they be much richer, also? Have better purchasing power, the means to always be fed and housed and healthy?

The booming industry was clearly producing plenty. The purpose of production was to get people to buy the products. So where was the prosperity? Where was the wealth?

In a vast, powerful country, these problems came to a head. Safe from all but the most desperate enemies thanks to natural defences and friendly or at least harmless neighbours, this Republic indulged monarchist nostalgia by calling its leader, chosen by the population, the monarch-elect.

The race for the monarchical throne was always tense, not that the following administrative epoch was any more peaceful. Also, it was an open secret that the captains of industry and other people of means might appeal to the monarch-elect or their ministers and advisors, so that policies and laws that would benefit them would be passed.

Thus, it was no surprise that, in an age of everyone trying to craft thinkers as capable as a person, an industrialist focused on this would come forward, looking to gain the monarch-elect’s ear.

That worthy was still to be chosen at the time, however. So, the wizard-artisan Ynh Vester gauged the people in the race and backed the man whose character opposed his the least.

Some said Ynh was no mighty mage, but rather a skulker in shadows who simply exploited everything he could beg, borrow and steal. In any case, thanks to Ynh’s funding, his chosen man’s campaign was the most extravagant, and with the people of the country so bitterly opposed that they would choose even those they might not consider in calmer times, he was elected by the greater part of the population.

A feckless man, this monarch-elect was much keener on indulging himself than administrating the country or overseeing battles; these tasks he left to his advisory council whilst he pursued various amusements, and the ministers among said circle handled the nation’s affairs as each saw fit.

The monarch was not overly knowledgeable about the crafted wisdom race, and even less interested. As soon as Vester’s coin kept flowing, he was more than happy to sign whatever his friend asked him for into the law.

Once, it had been thought that a monarch-elect could not simply act unilaterally, for the scroll at the heart of the nation’s legislature forbade such concentration of power. Decent leaders, the founders had figured, would rise to the fore, because it was natural for people to want the best to be in charge, thus they’d choose them. If one leader, once elected, found their integrity eroded by the burden of administration, or personal problems, their character would compel them to step away, so that they might be replaced by someone better.

And even if, somehow, a ruthless, cunning despot made it to the electoral palace, they would be constrained and eventually removed from power by the judges and grand advocates, or, if worst came to worst, the peacekeepers or the army.

What was a country to do when most of the government was split, each minister obsessing over their own domain and the things pertaining to it?

Meanwhile, Ynh coaxed, cajoled, bribed or threatened the wealthy until they gave him the funding he wanted, something, his opponents argued, that he had great experience doing.

Whatever the case, it was plain that the world could not keep going as it was, not for another lifetime, nay, not for another decade, some said. If people kept getting poorer even as they were overworked, if houses and food grew more expensive even as it was easier to build and produce more, where was mankind going to end up? Perhaps not everyone could always have the richest fare, or the most luxurious home - it wasn’t like someone was going to build more room for beachfront property, for example; all the available space was already full -, yet surely producing the bare minimum of livelihood and delivering it to everyone was possible?

Productivity, some argued, had long since ceased having aught to do with value or wealth. Moral considerations aside, it was not practical to let this pressure-cooker of a civilization kept on boiling. The lid would fly off, eventually, and someone would be hurt.

Something, everyone agreed, needed to be done. For a good while, they kept agreeing - it was cheap to have an opinion, which could make anything popular, in those days.

Yet another issue arose, and twined itself with the aforementioned: it seemed that human intelligence could no longer produce as much, as fast, as certain people wanted. Had the borders of natural knowledge been bumped against? Was there naught more to find, to exploit, to build?

There was, some argued confidently. They would build a thing that would be to the human mind as the machines driven by steam engines had been to the menial worker.

‘You see,’ Ynh said one night, appearing on a country-wide scrying orb broadcast, ‘I’m going to leave the majority of the population out of work. You will lose all relevance and power, while my wealthy friends and I grow even wealthier. After draining this planet of everything useful, we will fly off to the next, and repeat. Then the next, and the one after that, forever. Oh yes, we are going to make ourselves immortal, too. As for everyone else, I suggest you make peace with dying early. At the age your parents began greying, you will be wrinkled and stooped, toothless and half-blind. And you will thank your lucky stars that you don’t have it worse.’

He then laughed, eyes glowing darkly. On the seat opposite his, the monarch-elect, who had spent the broadcast so far stuffing his maw with dubious sweetmeats and chortling when prompted by Ynh, laughed, somehow managing not to choke on the current mouthful. For part of the population, this was something of a national tragedy.

That part, however, was, mostly, aghast at Vester’s brazenness. Had society deteriorated so far that a man could go on the scrying orb and announce evil intentions, and no one would oppose him?

‘He can’t keep getting away with this!’ the writer Zhuyram snapped, gesturing with his pencil at the scrying orb in the inn’s main room. ‘That was - even if that threat was a joke in bad taste, you can’t just spout that shit on national television. We used to put people in the dungeon for shouting about fake fires in crowded theatres. Yet, I fear this warlock has even viler plans than he dares announce.’

‘Gods,’ a man replied from across the room, ‘you think you’re so smart and special, don’t you? You work with your head, you write. But that’s not your job, is it? It’s something you manage to get to in between shifts, just before you fall asleep from breaking your back at whatever miserable enterprise you actually make a living off.’

Zhuyram raised his head, that he might better see the other, and said, ‘Sir, do you have a problem with intellectuals? That I have not been as successful as I have hoped so far is demoralising, yes. I clearly need to think more about my future stories, yes. Yet I will persevere until then. My work might have little to do with what I apprenticed for, but a man has to eat. I do not see it as demeaning to work with my hands-’

‘Ooh, you don’t see it as demeaning?’ the other man sneered. ‘How nice that folk like me can get your approval, eh? You might not be able to tell, you skinny wretch, for you have never seen true labour in your life, yet I am a quarry worker-’

‘Sir, I assure you being a lumberjack is not roses and sunshine-’

‘-but me, I’ve worked with my hands all my life, because I’ve never had an alternative! What can one do? The schools are set up to churn out worthless thinkers like you, who lay about all day and complain about needing to lift a finger. Useful, diligent people are glossed over, in favour of the library rats.’

‘I would ask your name,’ Zhuyram said, rather more heatedly now, and the people around him noticed the axe at his hip, and that, when he stood straight, his shirt did little to hide his muscle. They began edging away. ‘I would ask your name, sir, so that I might know the man addressing me. And I would ask, also, for you to remember that I actually work all day, as you yourself said, and that I see nothing shameful in this.’

‘Aw, are you offended?’ the quarry worker said, with remarkably little care. ‘Maybe if you spent those years you wasted on free, country-sponsored education, learning to weave baskets underwater, you would not whine so when a man with common sense stops by to take a piss on your so-called intellect. And the name’s Jrajnov, by the way.’

Zhuyram harrumphed, wishing they’d been at the same table, so that he might better read the other’s expressions. He wasn’t sure if the fellow was mocking him or if his face was just set that way, for the lighting was dim and he didn’t have his glasses. ‘You might be interested to learn that I paid for my education by working around the college, and that the only thing I received for free was the contempt of those students who disliked being peers with someone from a poor family. Understand that-’

‘You must be one of those sleepwalkers!’ Jrajnov jeered. ‘Aren’t you? That’s why you can’t have a debate. You start crying as soon as you bump into someone with common sense.’

(“Sleepwalker”, the sentinel explained, was slang referring to those people one perceived as undeservedly self-confident, overly sensitive or both. Because some impulse drove them to act in unusual ways, rather like a sleepwalker, and because they were perceived as short-tempered and quick to lash out, also like a sleepwalker when disturbed, the name was coined and it stuck.)

Zhuyram, realising that he was still holding his pencil (had he gestured with it? He really ought to start writing at home, not in dubious dives), put it on his notebook and began turning towards his drink. ‘You know what? I have naught to gain from this row. You think whatever you want.’

How had it even started…? Oh yes, that jackass had taken issue with him calling the warlock out. Well, if he admired him, he could keep doing so. It was, he thought, tasteless but harmless, as long as it did not drive him to imitate the object of his respect. He began nursing his ale, for what was probably the better part of an hour.

‘Yeah, you’s scared of what ‘e’ll bring, ain’t you? Ain’t you? You sleepwalking shit!’

Zhuyram blinked as he looked up, to see Jrajnov trying to loom over him, despite his squatness and the tall stool the writer was on. The quarry worker poked him in the chest, seemed to think whether to grab his square-patterned shirt, then decided against it.

‘What is it now?’ he hissed, unsure why he wanted to keep quiet. The inn was almost empty, and the innkeeper was studiously ignoring them. Which she’d probably keep doing unless they began braining each other with the mugs. Not that they’d break, but blood would be annoying to clean off.

‘You’s scared!’ Jrajnov reiterated, perhaps to make sure he, himself, hadn’t forgot the allegation. ‘You’s scared that ‘is made thinkers are gonna come for those like you, for the publishing houses, yeah? And the advocates’ offices and the accountants’ officers, an’, an’-’ He hiccuped, perhaps to mask a sob, and blinked rapidly. He did not seem the sort of man who’d like to be seen crying in public, yet what did he have to cry over?

Besides how the mugs made everything taste like lead.

Jrajnov stopped, took a deep breath that sounded strange due to his stuffed nose. ‘When they came for us tradespeople with the golems and the machines and leave us in the street, did anyone wring ‘ands over us? No! Learn to carve runes! Yeah, that’s what they said. Learn to carve runes, for the scrying orbs! Everything’s gonna be done through scrying from now on, you ken?’ He wiped his eyes. ‘But, ooh, once the “thinkers” are the ones in danger? Once the clerks and the bean-counters and all you other city mice are gonna get kicked out into the ditch! That’s the problem! You can’t leave the clerks without a job, what kinda country is that!”

He plopped down in an empty stool, facing away from Zhuyram. ‘People ‘ave always had more respect for those who work with their heads than those who work with their hands! Even though we grow all the food and the herbs for medicine, an’ we build the houses and the roads an’ bridges, and we make every tool and machine…’ He hiccuped, again. ‘Or we used to!’

There was no hiding the sobbing now. It was not loud, indeed, it could not be heard at all. But Zhuyram knew what those shaking shoulders meant. He’d been like this, all too often, when manuscripts he’d all but broken his wrists writing had been rejected, or treated with derision by editors and critics and readers.

Awkwardly, he reached out, patted the other man’s back. ‘It can’t be that bad, right? You said you work.’ In a mine? No. ‘At the quarry, right?’

Jrajnov snorted. ‘A handful of hours a week! All I’m good for, now. Rest o’ the time, they need someone watching the golems, yeah? They’re man-shaped now, they can get everywhere machines with wheels and tracks couldn’t. So they need an old hand to see if they get things right! An’ they do! They always get it right, and you’ll never see one of them metal men sit down ‘cause he’s tired, or needs a meal. He’s not gonna scry that he’s sick, or has a funeral to attend, or this or that happened to his family and he gotta go, right? The bosses don’t wanna hear none of that! They want men like ants, an’ that devil, Ynh, he’s put them on the market.’ He glared at the other over his shoulder. ‘But who cares about that, eh? It’s just some more knuckle-draggers losing all prospects. We better clutch pearls over whether it’s gonna be a man shuffling papers from now on, or a golem.’

For most of the following minute, he was silent. Then, ‘It’s ingrained, from as soon as we go to the schoolhouse. So much more time spent on book-learnin’ than training the body, right? Even though some children are just better at that or love that more. You’ve gotta learn to remember and parrot, and parrot! Everyone makes up some nonsense about why they can’t take part in sports, and they waste those hours, while those who excel at it? They’re called stupid! They can’t or don’t wanna do what really matters, what’s gonna help them in life.’

He scoffed, gestured at the orb, which was now showing one of Vester’s golems perform various office tasks as quickly as the fastest human with perfect memory could have, and without tiring or taking breaks. ‘And? What’s gonna help ‘em in life, now? Is everyone gonna give up the paper-shuffling and take up trades? That’s insanity! The country doesn’t need that many plumbers and runesmiths and food-deliverers.The wages will go down for everyone, the old hands are gonna hate the newcomers…if they fight, the government steps in to keep the peace and replaces all them recalcitrant workers with metal men. Abyss! People are not gonna have houses or the money for anything needin’ people like that if the economy keeps going like this, anyway! What’s a plumber to someone livin’ in a tree and shittin’ in the woods! They might as well start sharing that clump of leaves!’

And he began laughing, bitterly. After stopping, he stood up and, remarkably steady for a man who’d drunk so much, began making his way to the exit. ‘But you know what? I’m glad! I’m glad you lot are losing everything, too! If we’re gonna crash and burn together, at least it’ll be together, huh? How’s that for some equality?!’

Shortly after he left, Zhuyram, who had to admit he’d lost his appetite for drink, pushed his mug away and stood up as well. ‘Keep the change,’ he told the innkeeper after paying.

In those days, small kindnesses were, sometimes, all a man could do.

Strigoi Grey · Post by **Strigoi Grey** » 2026-07-09 03:33pm

After Work: The Common Labourer’s Lot In The Age Of Automatons (Fantasy Dystopic Satire), II

* * *

The town was too small to have the various art guilds, or even a general “artists’ guild.” Rather, Zhuyram and his fellow artists met wherever they could, usually at one of their homes. Said homes were usually one-room affairs shared by multiple people, but no one said you got into art for money.

Though he’d expected to meet Jrajnov again, Zhuyram had not seen hide or hair of the quarry worker on his way to the meeting house. The man must’ve been the quickest drunk alive. He decided to relate the confrontation to his fellows, anyway.

‘Typical disgruntled worker,’ Okhorgo, who painted what he called inspirational art, said. ‘He has been beaten down by the elites so badly that he cannot develop a consciousness to share with his class, much less the will to take the fight to them. A tragedy of our times.’

(That “Odd Okho” regularly ate enough for a small family, using the money he got from rich perverts embarrassed enough to bribe the apparently skilled lover into shutting up, did not, in any way, factor into his philosophy of life. It was pragmatism, he said, and thus unrelated.)

‘That part with the schools might not be a bad idea,’ Zaravna, who was a teacher by occupation and a musician by calling, chimed in. ‘A balance could be struck…healthy mind in a healthy body, I think the ancients used to say.’

‘What about the rest?’ Okho demanded.

Zara shrugged, saying nothing. Their wide eyes and androgynous features made them look like a constantly surprised child. ‘I wouldn’t venture-’

‘Yeah,’ Okho showed his teeth, ‘you wouldn’t, you indoctrinating parasite on the working class. Go back to telling the youth more about how they ought to be cogs in the machine and happy about it.’

‘Don’t you have to make ends meet?’ Zhuyram asked, annoyed. Everyone knew what that stood for, like they knew Okho stood for anyone with money. Or sat. And more besides.

Not that he was overly interested in his ideology, whatever it was called (communitarianism or something, he thought), but Zhuyram thought that people who were probably felt embarrassed by association with Okho. He didn’t act like a real communi…whatever. He just talked like one.

The two ignored him, clearly gearing up for one of their shouting matches. Sighing, he stepped away.

These meetings were supposed to be relaxing, yet lately, everyone brought their baggage with them, instead of leaving it at the door. He, himself, had at least got over that asinine “writer’s guilt” of his, as he called it, which compelled him to write whenever he could (ideally, at least once a day), lest he disrespect or fail his readers, all but a handful of which were silent, offering no feedback, much less anything more substantial, so their liking for his stories was impossible to gauge.

He’d been less stressed since. Not much less, he was a worrying man, but at least he’d made peace with the fact that, from now on, he’d write when he felt like it. Clearly, it was not going to make him money, at least in the short term, so where was the rush?

Potential readership was so enamoured of tacky hacks nowadays, to. There was a handful of common threads he’d noticed, the stories defined by each more similar to each other than they were different.

Someone, usually a young man nondescript enough to be “relatable” (or at least easy enough for the reader to insert into), ended up in another world, where, despite their alleged worthlessness and general lack of aptitude in their original one, they amassed vast riches and power, often harems as well. The members of said harems tended to be even more nondescript (except for when they were implausibly endowed) and lacking in personality than the main figure; they were effectively interchangeable. How the apparently incompetent (at least according to the prologue) everyman managed to navigate such labyrinthine relationships, Zhuyram could only wonder.

He understood the need for escapism, the fantasies of power, love and respect…but gods, it should’ve been a crime for shit that juvenile to be put to paper. Trees died for that?

Or, someone, also usually a nondescript, relatable (one’s opinion might vary) young man discovered that reality had been overlaid with rules like those of a board game, and exploited those to achieve the aforementioned rewards in a way that, he supposed, ought to flatter those who viewed themselves as proponents of meritocracy. Such stories tended to be created by people with the prose of tabletop game manual writers, but who’d mistaken themselves for actual authors, which made them somehow more tedious than the premise.

Or, the everyman was a nobody born in a world where one could progress ceaselessly, with greater power always around the corner. Sometimes, the world was vast and filled with wandering immortals, who went to wars to save face and treated everyone weaker as though they were ants.

Some misanthropic bastards had even decided to combine the tropes. Zhuyram had not known you could get that lowbrow without headbutting your own teeth, but there you go.

Anyway…at least those people handmade something of themselves using their own, for lack of a better term, skills. That they were untalented panderers who’d be starving in a ditch if the audience shared his tastes was immaterial. He was not so immature that he couldn’t acknowledge preferences varied by person.

Still, the success of people who’d only written for a fraction of the time he had been, yet had achieved greater recognition and remuneration, had dismayed him. It still did. He was not sure it would stop any time soon. After putting some projects in order and gazing at his navel enough, he was back to writing like he’d been at his best.

Amusingly enough, a vast yet rapidly growing category of people he’d noticed during his hiatus had not contributed to his lack of motivation.

These people, who, hilariously, called themselves golem artists without a shred of irony, made a living, or at least a name for themselves, prompting golems to produce various images, texts and the like.

Why in the bloody abyss someone would pay money for something they could do with ease (for everyone could prompt a golem using their scrying orb, nowadays, and it was a simple operation), he didn’t understand. Oh, he knew some were so utterly lacking in initiative and self-confidence that they even preferred others to order their food for them, but at least people needed food. Paying for images with no heart and soul was just…well. At least it was less stupid than paying for images back when the golems always scrambled details.

These golem prompters had a whole philosophy behind them. They said that manmade art was rudimentary and sloppy. Or, if it wasn’t, the constructs had to be funded and trained continuously, so they could surpass man (to what end?).

He ought to take a swing at something like this, one of these days. He would become a marathon runner, a business that would consist of paying an auto-carriage’s cabbie to drive him to the finish line, so that those who put effort in being fast would finally be unable to gatekeep running from the people suffering under the tyranny of the fit.

Or he could become a chef, and during work, he’d call a restaurant to deliver him food…ah, but golem art wasn't like that, was it? It was like inventing a recipe and arranging provided ingredients, preparing them in the oven and such. No, to truly become a chef and stop the skilled from keeping the unskilled out of the kitchen, he’d have no recourse but to buy frozen meals, heat the already prepared food and sell it as his recipe after scrambling what was in the box a bit.

It wasn’t like people cared about the method, as long as the result was passable. Soon, the golem prompters argued, no traditional artists would be left. Zhuyram supposed he ought to breathe a sigh of relief. He’d always been appalled by art pieces people had put effort into and cared about. All that personality, it was intimidating.

Sure, a bottling guild didn’t care how much heart their sweatshop workers put into making the identical logo of each bottle, but that sort of…industrial artisanship, in his view, had never been real art. For something to be artful, quality wasn’t enough, and quantity certainly wasn’t. Oh, perhaps to the observer, who just wanted to look at something neat, it didn’t matter. But effort was the point, for the artist. Something was worth doing because it was difficult, not despite it...

Art, real art, was the expression of the human soul. Even if it was all automated, what would be gained? He was not going to quibble over lack of individuality and how golem knowledge bases cannibalised each other. Would the world really be better if no one cared anymore about writing, singing, painting, sculpting? Would artists toil in different fields, then?

No! For what would be left? Neither the trades nor the office would remain if golems were crafted cunningly enough to imitate all man could do. To talk less of unskilled labour. Had not the machine been crafted to do man’s chores so he could play? What was the point of making a machine that’d play while man did chores?

Especially once he had nowhere left to earn a living. Would the machine then lovingly care for its parent of flesh, now ? Could it? Was the golem a thinking being? A kindly one?

The “play machine” might earn the amusements of its creators and owners, yet what would it provide for the commoner?

Zhuyram drifted towards some of the others. Iskhea flashed him a gap-toothed smile, teeth stained, doubtlessly, by those oils she insisted on choking down. She said they were fundamental, or something, and was convinced greed and other bad vibrations (her words) were all that kept man from living in loving harmony in the forest, where everyone would eat fruit delivered by volunteers on auto-steeds while taking photographs and making scrying orb paintings. .

Personally, Zhuyram was more curious about where people would get the parts and fuel for auto-steeds while living in a forest like back in the epoch of stone…how’d they handle the whole process without factories?

Or the parts and caged lightning stones for photography devices, or the storm fluid for scrying orb runes, connections, web-supporting pillars. Would they fall out of the sky? And how would everything be tracked and debts handled without coin? Ah, perhaps given its totemic nature, sacrificing it in a bonfire would move nature itself to provide plenty.

Well, if those runner and chef jobs didn’t pan out, at least he’d make a living building wicker men and…coordinating ritualistic orgies. Those went together, right?

Two men, artists he was not familiar with, were standing some paces away from the main group and speaking in low voices, so that he struggled to parse their conversation even once within arm’s reach of them. Once closer, he cleared his throat, hoping to initiate a discussion.

‘I do not believe you fellows and I are closely acquainted,’ Zhuyram hedged with a slight smile. Hopefully, these people (clearly out of town, by their dress) were not the easily offended sort who flew off the handle when someone failed to recognise them despite their fame. ‘What is it that you pour your passion into?’

They were both, it turned out, golem prompters, not that they called themselves that. To them, it was art, not prompting.

‘Would you call a photographer less of an artist than a painter just because they press a button instead of spending hours with an easel?’ one asked.

Zhuyram blinked. ‘Uh, I’m fairly sure the artful part of photography is finding a beautiful position and moment to immortalise. The taking of the photograph itself is just an afterthought. If you could get perfect images regardless of timing or angle, then...well, artfulness isn’t easy to measure. Someone would certainly still put their soul in it. But it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much effort as any sort of modern art, to be sure. I’d even hesitate to call someone who did that a photographer.’

The other sniffed. ‘Perhaps you think, also, that those who direct moving pictures are not artists either, because they don’t act on stage, do they? They just give orders to the people who do.’

Zhuyram’s brows rose. ‘You think it’s effortless to direct an acting troupe, even after thinking up the perfect ideas for a moving picture? You cannot possibly compare prompting golems with that. They don’t have bad days or human needs. They’re certainly not going to disagree with you, nor are they going to share the dynamics that make troupes lively.’

The other man’s eyes shone. ‘You seem to have no idea what art is. No definition, at least. Is it about the effort, or the passion? Is a welder an artist if they love welding?’

‘If welding is their soul’s means of expression, sure. I’ve seen art made in mud and dust with bare hands. But someone who glues cutout images on mass-produced objects is no artist, and that’s…much closer to what you say you do.’ Except even that could at least be useful.

Seeing the other preparing to retort, Zhuyram cut in. ‘Look, I genuinely do not care if you love what golems do. I just disagree with what you call it.’ The underlying issues were a much bigger problem. This was just a symptom.

The other stranger, who had mostly stayed silent this far, said, ‘What do you believe about the lies people spew about golem knowledge cores? You know. That they’re already draining the planet’s water supply at visible speed and only going to ramp up. In reality, they spend only a fraction of what this country’s population consumes in the same amount of time.’

‘You mean those in this country do, no? But everyone has them. And I notice you’re not denying that they’re going to consume more in the future.’

The other waved a dismissive hand. ‘Technological improvements will render this meaningless.’

‘Maybe, but in the meantime, how about we stop putting those whirring horrors in towns that already struggle not to die of thirst?’

‘Do you really want to be remembered like the followers of Lood were?’

Zhuyram almost raised his eyes to the ceiling. Some people equated the followers of Lood with a hatred of progress and new technologies. As if those people hadn’t actually fought for the rights of those who lost their jobs at the onset of the magindustrial revolution. As well as the rights of those who had no recourse but to work in the new factories, and the rights of the land those factories were built on. But that was what happened when you got labelled an enemy of progress…

‘That might be grand, actually. Yet I digress,’ the writer answered. ‘It’s not about the amount, is it? Yes, I know the old saw about how club-ball fields and lawns use far more. It’s true. And those fields with nothing but grass are stupid! They turn nature upside down, give no shade, are ugly while providing nothing meaningful…it’s the same sort of mindset that makes people pave everything over with bitumen, really. If it was up to me, I’d stop allocating water to all such projects.’

Might as well stick a foot in the door. ‘Alright, listen. You know what really gets my goat? Say it all works out. Every single working person is replaced with a golem. The only people with any coin are the producers and owners of the golems. Yipee! Then what? Is everyone going to waste away, since they’ll have nothing to buy food or maintain their houses with?’

The first man held up a finger, said, ‘You’re indulging in the fantasy of the wealthy elites hoarding all resources and factories while the majority has neither the means to access them nor the means to acquire or build any of their own. That is inane, a childish sort of gloom and doom. It would help you to grow up.’

‘And what’s fantastical?’ Ynh had openly talked about the underground castles he and his friends were building in faraway lands, the guard golems they were surrounding their properties with. Half the country had cheered, because it had angered the other half, rather than because it’d benefit them.

The second stranger shook his head. ‘Should mass joblessness or restlessness appear, the government will provide everyone with an income so they can live comfortably and have buying power. Obviously.’

Zhuyram boggled at him. That might’ve been the most inane shit he’d heard tonight, which was saying something, with Okho around. Something depressing about the species. ‘And what in all of bloody history makes you think the government would give people money for free? Listen to yourself. You think you’d get even as much coin as a subsistence farmer? Buying power…why would they need buyers when their golems can produce everything they want?’

‘Without customers, the economy would collapse.’

Zhuyram crossed his arms. ‘This kind of economy, maybe. But that’s because the average worker still matters. Abyss, on that note - if the people pushing golems and the government, and we all know they’re, if not the same, then thick as thieves…if those people don’t help us at all and in fact make a point of fleecing us right now, when our refusal to work would hurt their wallets, what makes you think they’ll give a damn once we’re economically irrelevant? The kindness of their hearts?!’

‘There’s never been anything in history like Ynh Vester’s Glib Golem,’ the first man piped up. ‘You cannot compare the past with the future that is now. Do you know why the producers of Glib Golem - not the ineffectual government; we all know privatisation’s the way - are not providing everyone the coin to live like a king? Because there are resources still beyond their reach. Those of the inefficient public sector, most of all. Those of people who can’t plan beyond their next meal, much less for the rest of eternity…but once they own everything, it will be both easy and pleasant to provide for everyone.’

The second man cleared his voice. ‘If that sounds too good for you, just tell yourself they’ll do it to pacify the revolting population.’

Bread and circuses? At least the ancients had provided those for workers who actually mattered. At best, these people might keep a handful of inferiors around to fawn over them and provide contrast for their powers and wealth. If they didn’t just build golems meant for that. But maybe it wasn’t as fun without real living people to lord it over?

* * *

Some time after, a grand, world-spanning war began. The reasons for it are obvious, the tactics and strategies meaningless to the telling. It was a war in which man shored up machines, thinking machines, even, whilst they did most of the work. Yet the slaughter spilled out into populated areas to such a degree that more people died than in any single past conflict.

The survivors were put to use by industrious people.

A triumphant cackle boomed through the halls of Ynh Vester’s wizardly lair. ‘We’ve done it, master! We’ve built the Agony Engine from acclaimed speculative novel “Don’t Build The Agony Engine”!’

Ynh himself threw his head and laughed, to match his aide. ‘Good! With the Agony Engine at the heart of our efforts, our industry will not run out of power for lifetimes!’ He turned, gestured at his golems. ‘Bring forth the rabble! They shall be placed in the drainage pods, where their souls and suffering shall be harnessed by the Engine to power my mighty machinery!’

‘What’s the difference between this and the jobs they worked, anyway?’

Ynh bared his teeth in an evil grin. ‘Now, their pain matters! It fuels my efforts directly, and I can see it, and I shall take great joy in the fools’ torment.’

‘I guess they’re not surplus to requirements anymore, eh?’ the aide asked, then they shared a chortle.

Most of the people the golems dragged to the pods had been close to death, yet the machinery of Agony now made them immortal, to their dismay. Aye, they would be flensed and gutted, burned and crushed, and recreated and destroyed again and again and again and again, and they would never be allowed to go mad, for insanity was the refuge of the weak, and only the despair of the sane could satisfy the wizard’s mighty hatred.

The monarch-elect, who had been eating a turkey leg, leaned closer to Ynh, and asked, ‘Say, friend, being the sage you are, surely you can predict how loved and respected our country will be once it grows stronger, right? And me especially!’

Ynh waved him away irritably. ‘Yes, yes, sir, you’re already the most loved and respected leader in the most loved and respected country. The rest of the world is just lashing out in jealousy. We’ll sort them out in no time…’

The result of the war, that is, which nation or alliance of nations could be called the winner, is immaterial. Suffice to say, the world was devastated, yet Ynh Vester and his fellows called not, for in the ruins, they could easily send their golem hunting hounds to track down survivors that’d feed the Agony Engine.

It so happened that, one day, a man who had once argued for Ynh and his projects found himself being dragged towards the Engine. He could not understand. How had this happened? How had Ynh’s enemies poisoned his heart so that in noble, wounded rage he would even lash out against those who loved him?

The man looked to the sides, and saw the re the axe-toting writer he had once argued with, writhing in a pod, and on the opposite row, the man who had stood beside him as they’d argued.

Then he looked forward, and gasped, for besides Ynh stood a man who, although otherwise ordinary-looking, had his face frozen in a horrifying rictus. He was constantly rubbing his hands, too, as if anticipating some great entertainment.

Eyes wide, he shouted to Ynh, ‘Who in the abyss is that?!’

The wizard gave him a dismissive look, said, ‘My chief aide, Dhrek the Demented. In exchange for me indulging his “needs”, he handles things around here.’

‘Needs…?’

Ynh rubbed his eyes, looking vaguely embarrassed. ‘You see, Dhrek loves children-’

He gasped again, remembering what he’d once written off as conspiracies. ‘You…you monster! You really used Glib Golem to artificially strip children in provided photos and share them on the scrying web!’

The wizard rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t be a cretin. Those were petty criminals. It’s an open source thing. Everyone being able to use it is the point.’

Dhrek stepped forward, still rubbing his hands. ‘You didn’t let him explain. I’ve never touched a child. I’d never touch a child. Yet my brain is wired improperly, compared to a common man’s, thus I am driven, by perversity, to…’ he gulped. ‘You might want to know that it was much easier to provide written descriptions of generic bairn and have Glib generate images based on them than it’d have been to photograph real ones, put them in the layering engine, then…’

The horrifically grinning man ran a hand through his hair. ‘No one was harmed, right? Not a single real living person. It was all images, just images.’

Ynh stepped forward. ‘Besides, be serious. Do you really think the leader of this country would’ve lent me his ear if I was or employed, what…a child rapist? You might as well next say that he was one himself, and the people elected him despite or because of that! When you start dreaming up cartoon villainy, anything can be imagined.’ He adjusted his cuffs. ‘We are businessmen here. We do business. That Dhrek has this bizarre affliction was a speedblock, yet I managed to work a way around it.’ His expression turned deadpan. ‘Besides, I’m about to feed you into a pain machine. Do you really want to have these be your last normal memories?’

Then that man was, too, thrown into the Agony Engine. His screams began moments later, and they still echo in the afterworlds.

The world Ynh tried to build from the ashes did not last long, for all that he had all the resources and the power now. His fellows fell into petty infighting instead of properly admiring his majestic genius. Not that he genuinely cared about their opinion, but, when they were done draining this world and sped off to the next, he’d need some lackeys to fawn over him. It was more fun than programming machines to do so.

Eventually, he found himself sitting in the rubble at the centre of his ruined stronghold, alone, head in his hands. Around him, the mutilated things that had once been people, which he had mangled until they could do naught but sing his praises, capered and howled, yeti wasn’t fun anymore. His mechanical legions stood, awaiting orders, yet for all the power he held, his hands felt as empty as his heart.

‘I don’t get it,’ he whispered to the world his machines had drained. ‘I’m the richest. The smartest. The best. I am the best! Why aren’t I happy?! I won!’

He closed his eyes, deciding he ought to dwell on this, and did so. He sat alone for a long, long time.

He never opened them again.

* * *

The cold people, from beyond the farthest star in the night sky, eventually stumbled across the barren system and this lifeless world. With their worm’s pit spyglasses, they read the past, and were aghast at the story it told. Whilst they debated what might be done about this, one from among their number stepped forward to be this world’s custodian, and was named that by its fellows.

They are still debating. The sentinel yet awaits their decision. And, in the meantime, it stands ready to share this cautionary tale with whoever might need to hear it.

The people of almost-sand, after hearing it, left the world in their void vessel. The brasher one of their number, the older of the youths, said to their teacher, ‘What a worthless species. Yet I suppose we ought to be thankful, for they did not survive to spread their poison to the stars.’

Its counterpart trembled to hear this. ‘Have you no shame? Are you not sorry for what their folly brought down on them?’

Yet their sagely teacher said, ‘My students, there are many lessons to draw from here. We ought to return home and share them with our people, lest we fall into the same pits as these humans before us did. We will then see what they make of it.’

On that, at least, both could agree.

Strigoi Grey · Post by **Strigoi Grey** » 2026-07-27 08:27am

An Explorer's Guide To Technological Trends

* * *

(I have been advised to stop beginning documents with “Greetings, fellow travellers.” Although pithy, this is - I have been informed - apparently a dogwhistle for certain detestable groups, meant to sound harmless to outsiders while informing other adherents to their appalling attempts at philosophy that a kindred mind is speaking.

Rest assured, I have seen people from too many walks of life being shit to waste time on something so stupid as hating one category for things they cannot control. Bigotry has always seemed, to be, an exercise for those without enough energy to be actual misanthropes. But I digress.)

This delver into mystery has heard that, lately, a certain acquaintance has been going around talking about his travels. The truth is that Walker is a tourist, not a real man of travels. Your unbiased writer is rather baffled that he has managed to make a life out of being a tourist and talking about it.

Indeed, your humble writer is more than mystified at the idea of tourism even being respectable or enjoyable. Tourism is, after all, a mere formalised mix of showing up like an unwanted guest and being a rubbernecking arsehole, and I do believe I have just answered my own question about why Walker likes it.

This gentle-tempered and amiable writer was in no way affected by Ryu’s exploits being chronicled here before those of a better pursuer of mystery were even mentioned.

It should be noted that the following covers broad tendencies using this writer’s homeworld as a point of reference; as such, it is best applied to (mentally, though physiology also plays a role) humanlike sapients. Even in such cases, it functions better as a set of guidelines than anything definitive.

Nevertheless, your writer considers the present exercise interesting. After all, applying this to nonstandard societies and expanding on it is half the fun.

Before proceeding, your writer would take some time to address certain queries that have been addressed to the loose coalition that can be said to include him. Most of them can be boiled down to “Why is inter-macrocosmic travel talked about as if routine enough to have an industry centred around it?” and “When exactly are you speaking from? We can’t tell, but since-” and here follows a reference to the first type of questions “-we do not believe you are close to our time.”

The second type is usually from time travellers.

In regards to the first: before the Wellspring’s Mover Awoke, contact between macrocosmoses was indeed relatively scarce (given how abundant they are in the Ur-City), and usually unintentional. That is, it was not planned by the Makers of said creations for their creatures to meet. Rather, it usually happened that something from one Creator’s Dream somehow escaped and found its way into another’s. I have been given to understand that Wellspring once found itself menaced by a monster able to mirror practically anything, which was destroyed by the Eye of Darkness, one of that macrocosm’s most destructive agents and the one (though unbeknownst to them, then, at least as temporal creatures count) tasked with removing anomalies from outside creation, as well as those threats within it that others, those actually meant to stop them, could not.

After Starlight Crowned With Ivory Awoke, however, things got a little more official, more streamlined. The “why” ties to the “when of the second category of questions…

As to that, one knows that time in the linear sense is an illusion, something plainly visible, for example, when one reaches the fourth layer of Wellspring’s dimensioned realities. At and past that point, events can only be described sequentially as a metaphor, for the sake of those challenged by timelessness. That is to say, if, from your perspective, the sort of things we talk about are scarce rather than common, it means they “haven’t happened yet.” But we know how greater existence really works.

* * *

The earlier parts of the list cover technological progress prior to the moment your agreeable writer first left his homeworld, henceforth to be referred to as “modern times.” The later parts cover progress that is likely to occur after said modern day, as well as progress that has occurred in similar societies a given amount of time after stages similar to the Modern Epoch.

[CENTER]

The Path Of Progress

[/CENTER]

The writer has decided to list each of the following epochs as a step on a metaphorical road to progress. For brevity’s sake, they shall be referred to as “Sn”, where “n” is the number of said step. It should be noted that there is significant overlap between Steps and that it is perfectly possible for a society to be more advanced in one field than others at the same Step, without actually being at the next. Those are counted as “Sn+x,” where x represents how many Steps ahead they are of their overall technological level in one or a few areas.

S1: The Old Stone Epoch. People begin working with natural materials and starting fires, with cooked food eventually replacing alternatives. The basic tools (aside from cruder carved sticks and rocks, the first simple machines are created: the ramp and - though also an inclined plane, it is small enough to be handheld - wedge, weaponised as the handaxe) and weapons (the club, spear, knife, axe, bow and arrow, bola, harpoon) are invented. Logs are strung together to make rafts, the first watercraft. Language develops, as do clothing, painting and early music, and the first funeral rites, in the form of burial and incineration (which serve as both sanitary measures and proto-religious rituals). Since people live as hunter-gatherers, knowledge of plants and animals begins developing, later giving rise to herbology and the domestication of wolves, which become dogs. Work with ceramics results in pottery

S2: The Middle Stone Epoch. Microliths proliferate, replacing the wooden points or blades of tools and weapons. Earlier inventions are refined. People begin weaving baskets.

S3: The New Stone Epoch. The common animals are domesticated. Pastoralism and agriculture develop. With the surplus of food and time, permanent settlements (consisting of manmade buildings, rather than people gathering around a cave or other natural shelter the invention of simple mortar in the form of mud and clay mixed with straws and roots), become possible, although social stratification is unlikely to appear until metallurgy and contemporary advancements are made; societies are more likely to be egalitarian and structured fairly simply. Dugout canoes and fishing nets are invented. People in cold areas might craft skis. Central heating may be used in some areas.

S4: The Copper Epoch. Metallurgy appears, with copper first being cold worked (hammered), then smelted. Gold also begins being used, though for ornamentation rather than practical purposes. Agriculture advances as the plough (at first an animal-drawn spike, later a wheeled contraption) is invented and irrigation systems proliferate, which results in a growing population. The lever, a refinement of the yam or digging stick, appears, first used in smaller machinery such as balance scales and looms. Later, it is used to aid labour, with early cranes appearing. The wheel is invented to help with pottery and later becomes part of another simple machine, the wheel and axle, which enables people to invent the wagons, enhancing trade and allowing travel over greater distances thanks to a greater capacity to transport supplies. Plumbing, using clay pipes, is invented, increasing sanitation (though cities will remain filthy cesspits, by the standards of most people, not to mention havens of disease, for millennia). The very first clock, the sundial, begins being used, as society is now regulated enough that timekeeping is necessary.

S5: The Bronze Epoch. Bronze is created using copper and tin; the first swords are forged and partial plate armour, for covering the chest and legs, appears. Ironworking begins, with meteoric metal first being used. It will only replace bronze when technology advances such that it is easier to extract and work iron than to make bronze, rather than because iron is better than bronze. Precursors to cement appear and early concrete might be used in some areas, such as the palaces of leaders. Candles, papyrus (used in scrolls) and (reed) pens appear. Clay and later wax tablets, with styluses used to write on them, are also invented

The pulley is invented and then, usually the last of the simple machines, the screw. The chariot appears and represents the apex of warfare. Sundials might be replaced by water clocks, in some cases. Medicine develops, as surgery and understanding of the organs’ purposes advance. The seed drill, at first a primitive wooden plow attached to a seed hopper and delivery tube, is invented. Most travel and trade centres around the first sailships, which are faster and safer than terrestrial vehicles. In addition, they outmatch the smaller boats powered entirely by rowing that preceded them, thanks to being wind-powered. For millennia, sails, sometimes aided by oars, will remain the most common form of watercraft propulsion.

Writing develops from earlier carvings and sketches, allowing people to record history beyond oral traditions. Since written numbers broaden the field of mathematics, the abacus is invented to aid in counting. As oral histories often become spottier and more fantastic over time, when they are even remembered, through writing, collective knowledge increases alongside societal continuity. People have a greater well of information to draw from, thus progress speeds up. There is more and more to do, so civilisations stratify, with people becoming specialists and the division of labour appearing.

Formal, organised religion is likely to form, with the aristocrat-warrior-priest-commoner model taking shape. Actual social status varies and will vary, but some traits are common: there is a small class of wealthy people whose life is split between statesmanship and warfare, although they are more likely to be idle and spend their time on leisure than the other classes, save perhaps the priesthood. If there is an official army, warrior-aristocrats are likely to be officers and the soldiery is professional, having no other focus to occupy their time. It should be noted that, like how the shamans of the earlier tribes were doctors, teachers, lawyers, priests, judges and sometimes more, it is possible for the aforementioned warrior-aristocrats to also be the clergy. Priest-kings, sometimes considered the earthly incarnations of society’s deities (or at least their representatives) are a common manifestation of this.

Lastly, there is a broad category of skilled or unskilled labourers. The majority of the population works for a living, and of those, most are farmers. Producing food is perhaps the first and greatest focus of society, so of course most people are involved in it. While farmers and builders might be ordered to perform other forms of manual labour than those characterising them, there are also specialists who rarely spend time on anything unrelated to their craft, such as merchants or the various metalsmiths.

S6: The Iron Epoch. The bloomery furnace is invented and iron begins being smelted; gradually, it replaces bronze. Rotary querns, a type of handmill, make the transformation of grains into flour easier, while screw presses are used in wine and olive oil production. Iron-bladed ploughs and weapons begin being used on a wide scale. Heating soft iron in coal beds infuses it with carbon, unintentionally creating the first steel blades. People start using coinage, which, while not fiat currency, enables standardisation, making transactions easier than in a barter economy, as people have to spend less time on determining the value of their possessions (the closest thing to this is the determination of whether coins are genuine or at least of good quality. Of course, coins are used because they last a long time, sometimes also because of aesthetics, and, as such, are fitting to represent the value assigned by society to the amount of metal used in them, rather than because coins are useful in of themselves).

S7: The Classical Epoch. Astronomy advances as the dioptra and the simple analog computer are invented; the former is also used for surveying and civil engineering. As parchment and, later, paper replace the more fragile papyrus, codices begin replacing scrolls and are themselves followed by proper books. Waterproof concrete variants are used in aqueducts, increasing people’s access to water. Keystone arches better distribute the weight of buildings, without needing mortar. The odometer allows people to record distances exactly by using wheel rotations and gear trains. Central heating becomes more common. Metallic seed drills start being used. Water wheels are used to grind grains, saw lumber and power various machinery; watermills appear. The diving bell allows brief periods of underwater exploration.

Steel begins replacing iron in some weapons. Iron armour, in the form of chainmail and partial plate, starts being used, and steel might feature in helmets and armour strips. Bloomeries make cast iron weapons and tools common in some regions. Later, blast furnaces, able to operate longer than bloomeries and fully melt iron (resulting in a greater yield of metal, since significant amounts were lost in older furnaces) into slag. Lamps of shaped terracotta begin replacing torches. Catapults and trebuchets are invented. Primitive flamethrowers appear as fixed weapons used in sieges and naval battles. Steam power is usually first used in such epochs. Though the turbines moved by steam are yet too weak to be more than a novelty, people’s understanding of thermodynamics grows as a result. Precursors to true rocketry appear, in the form of various contraptions propelled across poles and suspended wires by steam. However, most flying objects are kites or small hot air balloons such as sky lanterns. Burning glasses, precursors to lasers, might be used to incinerate ships in naval warfare.

S8: The Middle Epoch. Such ages can appear as times of stagnancy and even regression, with certain forms of knowledge being lost, larger societies collapsing, imperial bureaucracies being replaced by feudalism and professional armies being abandoned in favour of smaller levies. Yet such events are not always due to a lack of capability, but simply manifestations of civilisation’s current mores and needs. With more, smaller polities, there is no need for professional bureaucrats and career soldiers. Warfare might consist of fairly small bands of aristocrats’ retinues, backed by conscripted peasants, fighting for a relatively short time (by the standards of past empires, which sometimes waged total war between each other for centuries and often fielded tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of troops).

Not all civilisations shrink, however, and those that retain their capabilities are likely to be havens of invention. Mechanical clocks replace variants that use water. Eyeglasses are invented. Windmills appear. Agriculture is enhanced by the invention of the heavy plough and the horse collar, allowing said animal to pull greater weights without choking. Fiat currency, in the form of paper money, is first used. This allows people to carry the same value in the forms of burdens far lighter than the same sum in coinage.

Small iron and steel plates are used to reinforce chainmail over the joints, resulting in brigandines and coats of plates, precursors to full plate armour. Gunpowder, first used in fireworks, eventually gives rise to the first firearms and bombards (early mortars or cannons, often used in sieges; some consider the destruction of heavy stone walls by bombards to mark the end of this epoch). Wheeled and then portable flamethrowers are developed, alongside grenades that release burning compounds.

S9: The Epoch of Rebirth. Handwriting is augmented, sometimes replaced by the printing press, which speeds up the production of books by orders of magnitude. Not only does this enable widespread literacy (until now the province of elites and certain specialists), it enhances the preservation and transmission of knowledge, speeding up science and technology. Refinement of lenses enables the invention of the telescope and microscope, enhancing people’s understanding of the cosmos and the microscopic world. Inoculation counters certain diseases. Prostheses are now functional.

Advancements in blast furnaces and trip hammers make working sheets of metal easy enough for full plate armour to be practical, though firearms will make it pointless relatively soon. Pike and shot replaces muscle-powered weaponry as the most common form of warfare. Though still smoothbore, firearms develop, going from matchlocks to wheellocks, snaplocks, snapchances and finally flintlocks. Automatons, previously used in isolated spectacles, become more common. Entirely mechanical vehicles, such as tanks and ornithopters, are imagined, though it will be centuries before they are feasible. Indeed, even safe gliding is unlikely during such ages: the wearing of feathered wings is more likely to cause injuries than enable an imitation of flight.

S10: The Early Modern Epoch. Building on earlier advances in astronomy, people begin understanding the scale and mechanics of their solar system and start imagining those of their galaxy. Gravity and electricity also start being seriously studied. Coal starts replacing wood. The steam engine powers the mechanical printing press and various proto-industrial machines. Aviation advances to the point that hot air balloons can carry a few people short distances.

Chemical matchsticks advance, with the first self-igniting match appearing. Gas lighting starts replacing candles and oil lamps. Inoculation develops into true vaccination. Cities and armies grow as more food can be preserved and transported thanks to canning. Electrical experiments result in “lightning jar” capacitors and eventually the first real, “pile” batteries, with more efficient arrangements to follow. Devices capable of perceiving infrared and ultraviolet rays are developed. Mechanical submarines begin being used in exploration and warfare. The locomotive is invented. Prototypes to factories and metallic conveyor belts are created.

By this point, armour has mostly been foregone in warfare, as not only is a soldier unable to wear anything that can successfully counter a musket, the most common weapon, but armour would also weigh one down, making dodging more difficult (not that musket accuracy is too impressive). Artillery ranges increase, and small but powerful, horse-drawn artillery pieces and cannons are used. Muscle-powered weaponry, where still used, takes the form of attachments to firearms, such as the bayonets mounted on muskets.

S11: The Early Industrial Epoch. Factories featuring standardised, interchangeable parts and mechanized assembly lines appear, enhancing production. Rifled firearms replace smoothbores as materials science advances enough that rifling grooves no longer have to be made by hand; rifling itself is centuries older than its mass-adoption, though it only now becomes practical. Similarly, the older technology of breechloading replaces muzzle-loading. Early machineguns appear, allowing one soldier to kill many times their number of unprepared opponents. Ironclads are invented to counter the explosives and incendiaries so effective against wooden ships.

Freight and passenger trains are by now common enough for large railway networks to exist. Horse-drawn tramway networks span cities. Just as those improve transportation, the electric telegraph enhances communication and early photography improves record-keeping. Mechanical computers, using punch cards, are invented. Light, electricity and magnetism are understood as facets of the electromagnetic spectrum. Evolution, if not its exact mechanisms, is now being understood and studied.The first, non-rigid airship, the blimp, appears.

S12: The Middle Industrial Epoch. Electric lighting and trams replace gas lighting and the earlier, horse-drawn variants. Refrigerators, washing machines and vacuum cleaners improve home conditions. The vacuum tube is invented. Radiation starts being understood and studied. Communications and transport are improved by the invention of the telephone, radio and automobile; the first cars are electric. Photography becomes more common. Filming and sound recording appear. X-ray machines are possible, offering a greater understanding of biology and enhancing medicine, engineering and archeology. Steam ships start replacing sailing ships thanks to such advancements as the compound engine; eventually, fully metallic ships replace wooden ones. Rigid airships are invented, soon followed by airplanes. They soon enter military use alongside armoured trucks and early tanks. Artillery capable of firing beyond the horizon and poison gas are used in warfare. Synthetic plastics appear. Anaesthesia is invented.

S13: The Late Industrial Epoch. The first fully synthetic fibres, such as nylon (soon to replace silk in military parachutes and ropes), appear. Television begins replacing radio as the main form of information and entertainment. As oil replaces coil, cars with internal combustion engines become more popular than electric ones. The first rockets able to leave the atmosphere are invented. The war machines of the previous epoch become larger, heavier, faster and more powerful. Radios become portable. Radar is used for surveillance and scouting. The electric computer appears. Jet planes begin replacing their prop-driven predecessors. Aircraft carriers become the most dangerous thing on the sea, supplanting the battleship. Advances in atomic science enable the creation of the fission reactor and, later, the fission nuke, to be dropped from airplanes.

S14: The Atomic Epoch. Also known as the Nuclear, Jet or Space Epoch. Early renewable energy networks are created. Colour television replaces the older, monochrome variants. Jet propulsion is now the main paradigm of flight, with airliners becoming accessible to most people, rather than flying at all being a luxury reserved for the rich. Able to cross continents or oceans in hours and circle a planet in less than a day, these planes make global transportation and relations more common. Bullet trains and later magnetic levitation trains speed up large-scale transportation. Fission reactors begin being used for both civilian and military energy generation, often powering the heaviest vehicles in the latter case. DNA or equivalent structures are discovered. Organ transplants become possible, as does the cloning of simple organisms and, eventually, macroscopic animals.

The transistor replaces the vacuum tube, making computers smaller but faster and more powerful; the early fears about powering and cooling city-spanning contraptions (which, using vacuum tubes, would’ve been needed for grand calculations) are diminished. Eventually, they become small enough to leave the halls of government and business, appearing in homes. Mobile telephones and a global, digital information network make communications across the planet instantaneous. Remote visual conferencing becomes possible. Early robots might be used in factories with organic supervision, prompting talks of automation. Simple drones start being used for observation and warfare. Lidar augments radar. Infrared cameras and goggles using similar technologies enter civilian and military use.

Flak makes bullet-resistant body armour practical. Napalm might be used in carpet-bombing. Fusion reactors and thermonuclear bombs (fusion nukes) are invented, though the former will not be practical for decades. Nuclear missiles that can quickly cross continents and oceans make global MAD a serious possibility. Submarines able to carry such missiles become important parts of powerful polities’ defence network; they are nuclear-powered and able to run for years. Orbital and cislunar aircraft, first automated, then manned, are sent to space. Interplanetary ones remain automated for decades. Nuclear-powered probes able to fly across their solar system of origin are launched. Satellites enhance communications and enable global positioning systems, removing the need for physical maps.

S15: The Modern Epoch. This is the time during which your generous writer left his space and time behind, learning to see continua from all sides. Epochs equivalent to it usually start shortly after Atomic ones and last several decades. On my world, this is known as the Information Epoch or Digital Epoch. Rather than the flashy paradigm shifts of previous ages, this Epoch mostly features refinement and miniaturisation, though it is not without its visible milestones (not that the subtler ones are less important. On a sidenote, your gentle-tempered writer would like to reveal that during this Epoch, there was a baffling focus on inane warfare and space missions for clout, instead of combatting global warming and climate, countering hunger, spreading education, properly distributing resources…the shift towards renewables was seemingly incidental rather than planned by central governments. Those were even, in some cases, investing in the old “dark industries” of coal and oil rather than the cleaner, more efficient “green industries” of the future.)

Renewables begin replacing fossil fuels in certain areas, with electric land vehicles replacing their ICE counterparts and home electricity and heating often being solar-powered. However, battery energy density is still too small for large electric aircraft or ships to work. Likewise, extracting hydrogen from water to power airplanes is not yet worth the resources spent on said process, and nuclear-powered planes are not feasible either due to how heavy isolating the engine would make them. Even if such aircraft could work, plane crashes would be even more dangerous than they already are.

Drones begin playing a significant role in warfare, as well as civilian fields like the delivery of goods. Medical nanomachines enable doctors to work inside the patient without incisions needed and teleoperated robots let them perform surgery from a distance. Growing organs in animals, then transplanting them into people, is experimented with. Attempts are made to lessen cancer, many successful, though curing the variety of ailments under that name is yet impossible. Global digital networks develop further and can now connect with many devices that are not computers as such: network-linked mobile phones and even furniture are common to the point that not having one leaves people struggling to properly navigate society.

Automation of factories increases, with robots needing fewer supervisors; overseeing them is sometimes done remotely. Automated checkouts and other means capable of replacing clerks are introduced. In any sane society, leaders would look at the increased number of unemployed people and offer an universal basic income, if not out of common sense (actually a misnomer, apparently), then to prevent chaos and revolts by maintaining social cohesion. The civilisation your gracious writer grew in was far more concerned with concentrating everything in the hands of perhaps a millionth of the population, since everyone knows nothing makes society work better than piling all resources and power at the top.

Space travel is now easy enough that wealthy private citizens can afford to fund daily rocket launches. Manned interplanetary missions are contemplated. Automated vehicles start operating in specific areas. “Speaking robots”, precursors to genuine artificial narrow intelligences, proliferate. Prosthetics and virtual reality immersion devices improve, beginning to somewhat make up for missing limbs and senses.

S16: The Orbital Epoch. Also known as the Fusion Epoch. In this age and its equivalents, the ills of past Epochs are usually cleansed or reversed as much as possible and the species becomes physically, mentally and socially healthier, as well as more technologically capable. They usually start a handful of years after the previous and last until the end of their century. This is the first of the ages your humble writer finds halfway tolerable. The fact that being introverted has been normalised and that you leaving boring conversations or telling people you don’t care about their horseshit is now accepted has something to do with it.

Fossil fuels are no longer used. Instead, everything that was powered by them either uses renewables now or runs on nuclear fusion. Fission remains as a backup, and ways to transform waste (irradiated walls in the case of fusion and the more massive byproducts of fission) into fuel eventually. More energy is produced than in the times of fossil fuels, and cleaner energy at that. There is no developed region of the planet without abundant water or food, thanks to industrialised desalination and towering vertical farms, often featuring hydroponics, aeroponics and other methods more efficient than traditional agriculture. Removing hydrogen from water and making it into hydrogen cells to power aircraft and vehicles on a similar scale, such as trains, is now common. Fusion engines are used wherever possible. The Atomic Epoch dream of the nuclear-powered flying car is now possible, though the heavily-armoured vehicles kept afloat by fusion are mostly novelties, with their pilots needing to be heavily trained before they are trusted with them. Lasers and other directed energy weapons, once fixed, heavy devices, can now be miniaturised enough to be built into vehicles.

Fully-developed nanotech enables constant monitoring and self-healing of structures and people’s bodies. A growing understanding of biology allows for severed limbs to be reattached or for removed organs to be reintroduced to the body without losing efficiency or causing problems. Limbs and organs can now also be grown artificially, then attached, working as efficiently as if present from birth. Full immersion VR is possible, allowing those bereft of certain senses to experience the world without the implantation of sensory organs or equivalent devices. Almost all illnesses, including most cancers, are cured, and the most pernicious of the latter are now survivable for one’s lifetime, which is now half again, if not twice as long as in previous epochs. The most long-lived people might reach a couple centuries thanks to good genetics and medicine.

Prosthetics and artificial organs are now just as capable as their natural counterparts and offer the same sensory range. Thanks to inbuilt nanomachinery, they are equally resilient. Genetic engineering and editing become more common: aside from the “designer babies” phenomenon, editing a foetus to ensure no illnesses before, during or after birth is possible. Likewise, all but the worst ailments can be cured at any moment of one’s life, and those that can’t are no longer lethal. Revival or reconstruction of (relatively) recently extinct species is possible. Your writer can confirm that the dodo was indeed too harmless to have survived its first contact with hostile people, though it is endearing enough to be kept around. Note that there are billions of people I’d never say that about.

Smart clothing, able to react to the environment and restructure itself into a practical outfit, means people mostly have a few changes of clothes and the raw matter needed to “darn” damaged ones, which is done by them rather than a person. Military applications of this technology exist, with body armour able to go from knife-proof to bullet-resistant to configured against chemicals, radiation and other such hazards. Counterparts to this exist for smaller or simpler vehicles. Most of those are now automated, likewise for physical labour and most mental drudgery, thanks to ANIs, themselves an outgrowth of science’s continuing understanding of the brain. Furniture and devices capable of detecting brainwaves and automatically reconfiguring or adjusting themselves are affordable. Quantum computing advances enough to mostly make unpredictable weather and similarly chaotic matters a thing of the past.

Since most workers and soldiers are now mechanical, with living experts or elite operators also often functioning as supervisors, it is all but guaranteed for the government to pay for everyone’s basic needs. In order to keep them motivated to participate in society and maintain stability until a better civilisational paradigm is found, however, luxuries may remain something one needs to buy. However, a workday is now only a fraction as long as it used to be, and the tasks one needs to perform for money are less tiring. Commutes are faster and rarer, while remote work is the standard for most jobs. Physical spaces are maintained for those who prefer to separate work and home or directly interact with others at the former.

Graphene can now be produced and worked on an industrial scale, resulting in electronics just as if not more powerful than their predecessors but with a fraction of the energy use. Room temperature superconductors enter use. Larger, lighter and more durable (thanks to a combination of carbon nanotubes and various metals and ceramics) vehicles and structures might also be constructed from it or its spinoffs. The fastest trains are now on par with the previous Epoch’s airliners, while the passenger and cargo planes of this age can now go supersonic while remaining large and comfortable. Military aircraft and certain experimental civilian projects are hypersonic but comparatively cramped. Hyperloop networks might exist in certain regions, faster than trains but slower than aircraft. For those truly in a hurry, commercial space travel (rockets, of course, being fusion-powered) is now available. Thanks to this and the aforementioned advances, practically every polity can maintain a string of orbital habitats. Permanent mining operations are set up on the moon and nearby planets.

S17: The Planetary Epoch. People fully control and utilise their planet’s natural energies, with the species’ energy capacity and use growing by several orders of magnitude. In addition, tens of thousands of nuclear fusion plants dot the globe, outputting many million times more energy than could be obtained from their equal number in fossil fuel plants. Extensive renewable energy networks (such as the satellite swarms that capture all of the solar energy which isn’t used by on-world installations) and fission and cold fusion plants act as backup for mainstream, “hot” fusion. Microfusion cells (usually cold, though hot fusion cells also exist) also power now-portable DEWs, capable powered armour and smaller vehicles or robots of comparable scale.

Weather everywhere on the planet is set by people and natural disasters are a memory. Mountains can be broken down for materials and buildings as large as them can be raised. This often manifests in the form of arcologies, each housing many millions, surrounded by pristine wilderness. Every perceived wasteland that can be greened, utilised or settled without overly disrupting nature is. Thanks to abundant energy, producing larger amounts of antimatter (enough to power large, “clean” bombs) in particle accelerators, as well as other subatomic particles, is possible, enriching people’s understanding of physics.

This is when antigravity tech is invented in your affable writer’s timeline. I am given to understand that not all realities feature the physics for this. Nevertheless, graviton-repelling technology now enters use (where possible), enabling the construction of veritable cities in orbit, deeper space and on other celestial bodies. Adjustable gravity, in fact, makes building in almost any environment possible. Skyhooks, orbital launch loops, space elevators and other such megastructures are created. Similar though horizontal endeavours take the form of transoceanic or continent-spanning tunnels, highways and monorail or hyperloop networks (by now, both cars and trains are mostly maglev models, with some fusion-powered ones that truly fly). Every celestial body and noteworthy region of the species’ system is explored and, where there are valuable resources, exploited: for example, gas giants might be mined for the helium-3 used in aneutronic fusion. Swarms of constructs meant to harvest energy directly from the parent star of the species’ world are launched and, over centuries, end up draining a significant fraction of said star’s output for people’s use. There is enough energy to provide for the needs of tens of trillions, just counting natural sources (quadrillions, counting artificial ones as well), though the actual population might be lower, depending on mores.

The conversion of small amounts of matter into energy, followed by the conversion of that into another form of matter (colloquially named transmutation) is possible, though costly and mostly used for experiments and the study of the process itself. Rearrangement of larger amounts of matter into relatively similar configurations is easier and more common. Power can be broadcast at such density as to energise mst everyday technology, at least in more developed areas. Parts of the globe that are thinner in terms of infrastructure might receive enough broadcast energy to not collapse during emergencies.

A full understanding of the body and mind allows for the traits of any one person to be edited into anyone else; similar procedures exist for plants, animals and fungi within their species and between those that are similar enough. All illnesses are cured and the cloning of fully functional people capable of living a full lifespan (which surpasses two centuries without external action but can be extended indefinitely) is now possible. Any extinct species can be resurrected or recreated.

Sapient AGIs, or ones just as capable as people but without self-awareness, enable a post-work society without genuine, dangerous scarcity. People might even become AGIs, so to speak, with their minds being uploaded to mechanical bodies or virtual substrates; likewise, synthetic minds can be given organic forms without a loss of capability. Brains, often grown artificially, are no longer hampered by lacking bodies. Instead, without the need to split attention between locomotion, sensory data processing, reflexes and the like, they can be used purely for computing. Like this, they match the supercomputers of past ages in most regards while using a fraction of the energy those needed, although depending on the synth-brain’s model, certain mods might be needed for it to be as fast as an electronic computer.

S18: The Stellar Epoch. People harness the entire output of their system’s star. Every celestial body that can be settled is, and might become an ecumenopolis; in any case, the totality of their energies are also under people’s control. Gas giants might be converted into “brains” consisting wholly of computronium. Asteroid belts, comet clouds and the like are broken down for space habitat or stellar swarm materials, as are some planets. By now, mountain-sized starships capable of relativistic flight are possible, thus interstellar expeditions might be launched.

The abundance of energy makes matter-energy conversion and the reverse easy, further shrinking what scarcity includes. After all, there is practically nothing energy can’t be turned into, at least in terms of crude resources, though research into forming complex objects from energy is ongoing. Cold fusion and even antimatter plants might now be built, although the engine-star is the main source of the energy people use, which is enough to cover the needs of many sextillions. Antimatter bombs, missiles or derivatives more powerful than any past weapon can be built and might be used in near-lightspeed space battles. Broadcast power is mostly sent from the star to the planets, though each now has powerful enough industries to provide enough power to any region of itself, or to neighbouring planets.

Additions to the body and mind are now possible: people might be given animal-like abilities, and vice versa, without the risk of rejection or mental divergence that existed in past centuries. Due to this, animals can now be uplifted to sapience and given bodies like a person’s, which they can function in as if born with them. Or, people might be given animal bodies without their mental capacities deteriorating.

Swaps to mechanical or virtual forms and back are possible for all beings. They might also be given entirely artificial abilities without the need of the mechanical implants used in past times. Rather, the likes of retractable blades and armour, energy absorption and projection and more can simply be built into bodies. Artificial super intelligences and other mental superbeings can administrate and even directly control the infrastructure of entire settlements, regions and possibly even moons or planets. The largest of them use reengineered gas giants as their bodies, and eventually, the installations around the planet star might be converted not just into one habitat, but into the multi-layered chassis of an even greater mental superbeing. In times of war, the energies gathered by the installations might be focused into a “stellaser” capable of razing planets in moments.

It should be noted that interstellar societies might have access to the same amounts of energy and overall technological advancement as the type described above, even if they use different paradigms.

S19: The Interstellar Epoch. Multiple star systems, up to the majority of the species’ home galaxy, are “urbanised” to the degree the system they are native to has already been. Star clusters and whole galactic arms might be settled. Available energy increases several times, then by orders of magnitude as more stars are harvested, turned into star-brains or stellasers as the need might be. Both types of construction often double as habitats, though in the case of the latter, esoteric modifications may be needed to survive living there in active moments.

Nebulae and exotic celestial bodies are broken down or converted into infrastructure. Neutron stars, being stellar masses in city-sized packages, are extremely useful to seekers of hyperdense matter to use as fuel or the basis of computronium. Pulsars and magnetars are turned into batteries or ripped apart to be repurposed. Black holes become cosmic waterwheels, as their accretion disks are natural matter-energy conversion engines and the black holes themselves are massive and spinning, yet small and comparatively easy to surround with infrastructure. The energy of white holes and fractions of what quasars radiate might be gathered.

Weapons capable of quickly mangling celestial bodies are extremely likely, with superweapon projects capable of fully destroying them also being possible. Miniaturisation should be sturdy enough for people to carry firearms powered by matter/antimatter reactions fuelled by significant amounts of mass. Larger equipment, as well as constructs and vehicles up to starships, likely run on the same if (relatively) small enough. The largest megastructures and ships might be powered directly by celestial bodies.

Planet-scale and larger megastructures might be built, for aesthetic or cultural reasons rather than necessity. These can range from planet-spanning rings to ones that cover a significant portion of their star systems, as well as artificial planets, stars and the like. Exotic synthetics such as stable neutronium or magnetic monopole matter might need to be produced in order to keep larger constructs from collapsing, but thanks to abundant energy and people’s ability to convert it to matter, this is feasible.

The calculations and sciences of such civilisations are likely spearheaded by stellar-scale brains, which likely use most or all of the energy produced by the suns they are built around or into so they can run constantly. There is enough energy to provide for at least septillions of standard humanoids, or for orders of magnitude more in the cases of the larger civilisations.

Creating enough exotic matter to cheat the lightspeed limit is likely an important aim in realities without the physics for easy FTL movement. Generating wormholes, warping space into bubbles around ships, building “reactionless” drives that can push off the aforementioned altered space for something like acceleration or creating “inertialess” drives that can go faster with no limit except energy are all experimented with, as are tachyon devices, for both FTL movement through space and for time travel. If achieved at this Step, such technologies are likely to be rare and prized in realities with stricter physics. For example, if a wormhole is created, it is likely through the conversion into energy of a large celestial body’s mass, and only opened to enable a critical rescue, scientific, diplomatic or military mission. Comms are easier, since there is less to transmit, meaning bursts of data can be sent and a fairly cohesive society maintained.

S20: The Galactic Epoch. The species settles the entirety of their home galaxy, harvesting or industrialising every celestial body, nebula and miscellaneous matter in interstellar space. The galaxy’s supermassive black hole and surrounding quasar are turned into reactors. Forcing stars to explode or crushing them into black holes for industrial purposes or through the use of weapons is not difficult.

By now, exotic matter science is developed enough for wormhole networks or ubiquitous space-folding drives to enable quick and easy galactic travel; galactic comms are also commonplace. Depending on the universe’s physics, local inversion or other alterations of natural laws are possible and likely performed. Using spacetime as a substrate for data uploads or a construction material equivalent is not unheard of.

S21: The Intergalactic Epoch. Ranging from the first settling of a galaxy’s satellites to civilisations that span galaxy filaments and larger parts of their universe, this growth in scale often coincides with a more profound understanding of physics. The laws of nature can be rewritten across celestial bodies or even significant portions of an intergalactic civilisation’s territory. Instantaneous communications and transportation connect most of a cosmos.

S22: The Universal Epoch. The species fully understands its cosmos’ physics and is able to both rewrite them and export them to other realities, overlaying or fully changing local laws of reality. Multiversal travel and communication are even easier than this. The universe’s physics can be swapped with alternative models at will. Control of quantum fluctuations enables generation of particles, virtual and otherwise, from what seems like empty space. Extreme conditions, such as ones equivalent to the Big Bang’s and other universal events, can be recreated, though this might only be done locally to avoid disrupting civilisation as a whole (it should be noted that at this level of development, several galaxy superclusters and the area between and around them might count as “local”). This understanding of vacuum energy allows the civilisation to fully extract the amount of energy predicted by earlier cosmological constant researchers, as well as truly comprehend why it was so much lower than projected when the concept was discovered.

In the form of dark energy, this can be used to expand or contract the universe, whilst its other incarnations might be used to locally delay heat death or reverse entropy. The fundamental interactions are now understood as parts - perhaps colloquially known as “frequencies” or “phases” (like how matter has phases) - of one, overarching superforce. As such, they can be converted into each other like matter might be turned into energy and back. Thus, electromagnetism can become gravity and vice versa, or (depending on how the civilisation counts them) the strong nuclear force can become the electroweak force, that composite of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. These are, of course, simplifications. It is perfectly possible for one interaction to be split into several, for several to be combined into one, or for all to be fused into the aforementioned universal superforce.

S23: The Finite Multiversal Epoch. Travel between realities becomes easy and practical enough that the civilisation might very well reach into other universes to use their Big Bangs, or other, similarly powerful events, for energy. This is usually done by using sensors or equivalents to find nascent universes, though, for polities with industrialised time travel, going to the beginning of older ones is also feasible. Through the use of multiple realities’ vacuum energy, entropy can be reversed across the entirety of any universe the society spans and heat death can be delayed indefinitely. Realities can be moved or physically combined, while their physics can also be fused to result in new systems of natural laws. Freezing an universe in time or slowing down, speeding up and reversing its timestream, or making it diverge into parallel timelines, is also possible at this point, as is creating new universes from whole cloth and establishing their physics. The span of the civilisation’s territory varies, but the polities that achieve the aforementioned level of achievements often have outposts in an universe foreign to their, while even middlingly large ones might very well run more realities than theirs has particles.

S24: The Infinite Multiversal Epoch: Reaching this point usually requires extensive time control or similarly esoteric means to perform infinite actions over a finite period. As such, civilisations at this Step tend to be literally infinitely more capable than ones at the previous, with endlessly greater levels of resources and expertise. Creating, altering and destroying continua equivalent to the span of their territory is possible.

S25: The Higher-Dimensioned Epoch. Your writer admits that this and the following Steps were thought of by him following observation of the Unmoved Mover’s Wellspring and the City of Creators.

As it is known, in layered macrocosms, beings from, usually, the fifth layer of dimensioned reality and up see creatures from lower layers as unreal and are as impervious to them as three-dimensional people are to drawings and imaginary characters. Likewise, they are capable of destroying, altering and recreating such creatures, and their entire layer with all the realities therein, with a thought. In the Mover’s Wellspring, there is an infinity of such layers, surrounded by an “aether” of similar complexity but, effectively, endlessly greater scale, as it appears boundless to creatures whose being is equal to the whole of the aforementioned dimensioned multiverse.

Civilisations that attain this level of advancement often forego obvious technology, instead being one with their infrastructure and capable of effecting reality warping with a thought. More rarely, societies from as low as the third layer might devise technology capable of affecting the whole multiverse, their intelligence outpacing the rest of their development.

S26: The Dimensionless Epoch: Beyond dimensioned reality, there is a Land of Dreams, where spacetime and their aspects and counterparts are as insubstantial as visions during a trance and just as easy to disperse; that is, the inhabitants of this more-than-a-place, the Dreamlanders, transcend the multiverse and aether like their upper layers and arrangements transcend the ones below them.

Beyond that, there lies a series of Voids and Gates whose direct exploration might very well blast the mind of your writer. However, he is aware of their structure, so to speak, thanks to more resilient sources. First, there is a series of Voids that would appear the colour of dusk to mortals. They are infinite in number and each transcends the previous in the manner described above. After them, there is a series of darker Voids, which would have to be numbered not just by going from one to infinity, but by counting, also, the endless numbers between one and two, two and three and so on. There are infinities and infinities, and an Ebony Void for each. The pattern of transcending the previous holds.

Beyond and around them is an Outer Void where the Ideas that are the foundations and shadow-casting stars of everything below them reside. There is even an Idea of Voids. Some are greater than others, some not. There is an Idea of Endings that could rip most of its fellows apart more easily than a great ape dismembering a rodent. It presides over and is one with an infinitely-layered arsenal of forbidding and forbidden weapons, the first layer of which consists of endless creatures able to erase most Ideas beyond ever having been. Each of the following is countless times more dangerous.

Along with the previously mentioned Eye of Darkness and other destroyers, the Idea of Endings represents a minuscule but otherwise notable fraction of the Unnamed Darkness that governs the nothingness and cessation of most of Wellspring. It has a misty peer of equal power and opposite purpose.

They are, in turn, incorporated into a Supreme Archetype, something like the Mover’s lucidly dreaming self, which makes them look like humans in terms of complexity and might.

S27: The Sleeping Maker Epoch. Stepping into the Ur-City, we see the Creators whose potential is unrealised, but who nevertheless make everything mentioned previously look like a dream.

S28: The Sleepwalking Maker Epoch. Here, we see the Host and Warden of the Makers’ Metropolis, who have achieved their stations out of need and are individually capable of flattening the endless ranks of their sleeping fellow Creators. Various Wrongly Woken Makers, who would be called mutants of the species were they biological beings, can attain similar or greater degrees of might, perhaps to the point of being unstoppable by the City of Creators’ two arbiters.

S29: The Awakened Maker Epoch. The Unmoved Mover is “currently” the only Creator to achieve and begin using its ilk’s true potential. No longer hampered by its creations’ ending without direct attention given, it is peers with the Lovelorn and the frankly nightmarish creature it deemed regent of its macrocosm.

S30-S???: The Ascending, Transcending, Fractionally Quintessential and Quintessential Epochs. The Mover’s treatise on Ascension and Transcendence already covers the actions necessary for the magna-macrocosm to develop to this previously-unrealised extent. Your writer admits that he does not quite understand the difference between Transcending beings and the Quintessence’s greater facets; that is, whether the latter should be included in the same category as the former or if they should stand on their own. Regardless, all are equally infinitesimal before the Quintessence’s (even metaphorically) describable mask, which is nothing compared to the thing in of itself. As far as I know, it is the utmost development of everything…

* * *

Your writer can only hope that this will be found entertaining if not useful. As an attempt at an universal guide to technological development, it is dubious at best. Even within the category of humanlike creatures, they often diverge from these trends in baffling ways. I once saw a galaxy where, thanks to that universe’s physics, portal-based interstellar travel was extremely easy, leading to a bunch of coal-burners settling countless planets before they even bothered to try researching nuclear energy. I have walked villages where medicine men whose understanding of science is scarcely out of the Stone Epochs can move themselves and their surroundings through time or create matter from nothing with little more than a gesture and chant. I have seen stranger things besides, strange enough to make the previously mentioned look ordinary.

Nevertheless, I have also been to countless places where the tendencies I listed held true, and is it not a grand joy to spread knowledge for knowledge’s sake? I was certainly pleased to do it.

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Strigoiverse Collections (Original stories from various genres)

Strigoiverse Collections (Original stories from various genres)

Re: Strigoiverse Collections (Original stories from various genres)

Re: Strigoiverse Collections (Original stories from various genres)

Re: Strigoiverse Collections (Original stories from various genres)