“As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic.”
Tim Hetherington
Tim Hetherington
“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights”
- Hegel
- Hegel
“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
- Slavoj Žižek
- Slavoj Žižek
The years become murky as time marches on from the point of destruction. In some far distant past the androids called the year 2348 there was such a calamity it seemed humanity wanted to just forget about it. Forget that they had ever caused it and so crawled back into the caves of simple barbarity. But it wasn't just that they wanted to forget, but for what seemed like generations the fires that cataclysm brought did not seem to want to die. Man had made the seas boil up. Man had struck their own cities from the Earth. Man had put the proverbial handgun to their forehead and pulled the trigger, but fucked up its own suicide and instead forced itself to limp away all the more stunted and scarred from a bullet that passed two far – within the centimeter - of just ending the entirety of its existence.
It was as much as it was personal, impersonal. But in the details of the thing man came to forget because the devastation wasn't ever important to itself as a species. What came to be was living with the current world. But it was the androids that remembered just what had happened and they found themselves sitting in the caves and under the rocks watching over the course of centuries wondering if their mission had been finished, had yet to be finished, or what had happened in the course of their relatively short existence should all of this come to a fiery end. As the skies filled with dust that blotted out the sun and the world lived in an ecstasy between putrid hot and rotting cold they silently debated in their minds what the course of humanity would be on this planet and whether they – their fathers and mothers – would come around the next day to continue what life they could scrounge together.
The vast temples to the progress of man became ruins, forgotten and unable to be really used. Towering skyscrapers, great automatic factories that whirred and sang with electrical life fell silent. And when the clouds cleared and the dust settled nature un yet destroyed by fire sprung back to life like a dormant seed waiting for conditions to improve and took these back, filling them with grass, weeds, flowers, and trees until they were but concrete and steel shells enveloped in green drapery.
And humanity was like that seed, it too sprung back to life. While its dormancy was as fitful as a man living a nightmare it had awoken and crawled from the underworld where it had lived a petulant and unforgiving afterlife and reincarnated itself in new green fields. But it had entirely forgotten what it had been. It stepped into the new reality seeing the vast ruins of over a millennium of development and stopped to wonder who had built it. Were it these strange silver men who watched from an uneasy distance? All the same, they – the androids – yielded back to them the world and they resumed progress, slow, choked. Over the next three centuries new communities emerged, cities, society. And as they did they began to peek into those old dungeons and castles they had forgotten about and rediscovered what their ancestors had made, and knowing not what they had found took it back. What did not kill them, only made them stronger.
But the androids as they watched saw the uneasy unevenness of the treasures found. Man called it magic. The androids called it science. Never the less, its possession made kings. Its possession made the androids mortal. These weapons mad man more mortal. And so the power of kings was sealed.
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DIALECTIC 0: BEYOND MAN
In the far future it was believed that man would over come its differences, that the pace of technology would bridge the gaps between nations and people as man went off into space and beyond. As man sought to conquer the oceans themselves as well as space. But instead of bringing the world closer into unity mankind became more jealous. To a point, that by 2127 war broke out between the nations, and over the years escalated into complete cataclysm in 2132 that drove mankind into hiding as the rest of the world was cast in immolation, wiping the slate clean for mankind's resumption to reclaim the planet they call home.
But mankind is not alone on the planet Earth, and as elsewhere across the globe so it is in the remains of America. For to perform the backbreaking labor of their former modern world and to fight their wars for themselves are the androids; a whole species of artificial manufactured man with the intelligence and craft like biological man, but more strength and centuries worth of wisdom and observation.
With the present world three-centuries after the apocalypse, mankind has reset its footing across the globe, and focusing the world on the eastern half of the United States such is the case here. Civilization breathes new life in the renewing forests and wilderness of the eastern US, and in the plains across the Mississippi nomadic societies scour the plains for food and sustenance. And in this world nature has wholly reclaimed the old cities, what had not been blasted away. This is home now, and they share it with the androids.
For all comparative purposes, man is back to where it once was at the 16th or 17th century.
-THE ANDROIDS-
-Relics of the Past-
Map and World
This is the world for Beyond Man, or rather half of the North American continent. The rest of the world is still there, but in the interests of trying to keep things localized I've chosen to limit the scale of the map for now to keep us all nearby. If in the future more people sign up and post, and things spread out I'll expand it to encompass the whole of the continental United States and probably the rest of the Canada and Mexico, maybe.
And you might be wondering: what are those regions of the coastal United States that are just giant holes? The effects of the super weapons of the cataclysm at the end of the Great War. Those cities are region targeted for destruction by foreign enemies were so thoroughly destroyed they are naught but deep craters now reclaimed by ocean and the waters of the continent, the land around it wasteland in the immediate aftermath.
It is safe to presume that interior cities suffered the same fate are themselves scoured holes in the ground. But haven't as thoroughly flooded.
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