Posted by Markem 2 months ago Report

I've got to say, going through all of this latest story of yours was pretty great over all. There's a lot that could be written but I'll just pare it down to a few things.

This story came off as a gripping thriller at times, and pretty surreal how things ran along. To see how the old world basically crumbled further away.

It was surprising to see a certain oligarch's name show up again, but it made sense.

Despite there being plenty of eff'd up situations going on here and there was good number of nice moments in there and think the last one was especially touching!

Posted by ObsidianSnake 2 months ago Report

Thanks! I wasn't the most confident in this one, as it was trying to do a lot and knew it wasn't well-aligned with community tastes, so I'm happy to see that people are getting through it.

Posted by Markem 1 month ago Report

I can understand your concerns there, considering this site at times, but what you do is appreciated.

After absorbing a bit more of the story over all, I can say the way you have your predators work makes me wonder what's going on behind those eyes of theirs, as they quite clearly have their own motivations for what they are doing.

Also, I really like how Patrick spelled out the contradictions the predators present, at least how he sees it. Cause those reasons are part of the reason why I find the way you portray them really interesting.

Oh, one last detail here is I did like the way you had portrayed the likes of Leon and the others, for all the crap they did and how reprehensible they may be, ultimately in the end, they are just people.

Posted by Weirdostuff 2 months ago Report

Wow, I randomly clicked on this while looking at the writing tab. It was quite an experience, surprisingly good considering I read this without reading any of the previous ones. I'll definitely need to check them out in the future.

Posted by ObsidianSnake 2 months ago Report

Glad you liked it! Long-form, plot-focused works like these aren't normally what people come to this site for, but I like to write them, anyway.

Posted by Mourtzouphlos 4 weeks ago Report

Sorry for taking so long, but literally the day after I read this I broke my ankle and it took a while before I was in any mood to do literary analysis.

Posted by Mourtzouphlos 4 weeks ago Report

I doubted you. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I doubted you. I was thinking to myself, “Well, it’s not a core part of the story. Maybe when it’s fully released and there’s no risk of spoilering I can beg for an encyclopedia entry in the comment section”. But no. You came through, and it makes so much sense in hindsight. Like, of course they’d manipulate them like that! It solves the core problem of industrial territorial acquisition and is right up their wheelhouse. I mean, it’s literally their core evolutionary strategy. I only dismissed it (not even consciously; I didn’t even consider it) because I didn’t think it would work due to the initialization problems. See, if their strategy is to get people to fall in line because they’re too powerful to resist and you know that so you might as well not make them angry, that requires them to have a lot of power that they can use against you. All the sci-fi stuff they’ve got on Eanli doesn’t matter unless they can get it here, and to do that on a societally relevant scale they need a beachhead of cooperation which they get by … and there’s the catch-22. Yes, they can magnify their support by making it look like people who don’t support them actually do, but that can only do so much (and while, yes, they do exactly that(Price signs on because Johnston did, Johnston thought Price already did), that was late enough in the process it’s not proportionally much of an increase (say going from 75% to 90%); coming out of nowhere and having a few moles in you is possible, coming out of nowhere and having suborned your entire military is an obvious bluff), and if they don’t want to look like a hostile infiltrator, that still requires an initial honest conversion of loyalty. Dictator-America is actually less vulnerable here: while authoritarian countries have a tendency to be brittle, in that they start off strong but rapidly collapse in the face of severe setbacks instead of recovering, at the beginning that obviously hasn’t happened yet and the battleground is still maintaining the loyalty of the elite, something authoritarian governments pay very close attention to (as they have no other source of legitimacy to fall back on) and do their absolute best to manipulate. So, when the Ealians are in that vulnerable initial phase, why aren’t their sympathizers arrested en masse and propaganda about the evil alien invaders broadcast 24/7? Dictators absolutely can do that (it happens a lot; historically the result when a dictatorship tries to eradicate a political group completely no matter the cost is usually a witch hunt that drags in a lot of innocents, not that group winning), so they must not want to, which means they must think they have something to gain from letting it happen, and the obvious answer is Eanlian technology. Except once it’s become clear that the Eanlians aren’t going to let the humans actually fully have it (i.e. can go from raw materials to finished product) and are trying to subvert them, why don’t they start on it then? By definition their weight class at that time must be the one just above ‘too weak to be a threat’, so the locals should have a lot of cards to play, including raw military force: the Eanlians can’t have been present in large numbers, meaning that the locals should have been able to overrun them by sheer force of numbers (Rain took the effort to dodge and disable those flamethrowers; a larger force, with those prepared, and he’d have been in trouble), no matter how outclassed they were (if your soldiers are each worth a hundred of mine, and I outnumber you by a thousand to one, you’re still screwed), especially since dictatorships are notorious for overestimating their chances in a war (Hitler still thought he had a chance at winning after the Red Army had encircled Berlin); it’d take a really big advantage to the Eanlian side to dissuade them from attacking them on military grounds, yet the actual advantage is the other way. And despite all this, the decision to surrender to the Eanlians was taken (I think anyway, there’s not a timeline given, so please correct me if I’m wrong) basically immediately after they appear, before they’re even public knowledge, when their leverage should be the weakest and the human’s chances against them should be the greatest. Or is this all one big Second Miracle of the House of Brandenburg? We’ve only seen America, after all. Did the rest of the world follow that path, but the Eanlians realized that Johnston was psychologically vulnerable (he didn’t seem very dictatory when we saw him, I thought) and manipulate him into playing Cortez and Montezuma II: This time it’s not a legal fiction, and then, well, now they have a beachhead.

One thing this does answer is why they were being so careful to follow the local laws; it seemed like they genuinely respected their authority. We saw this in the previous story, and it baffled me then; given the way they deeply feel that the proper way of things is ‘predators in charge’, it must be grating if not insulting to have to acknowledge prey as a superior authority, one which they have no real right to contest and on whose sufferance they depend. At the time I figured it must be that they’re practical enough to see that bending themselves just a little out of shape (it’s not like they were being asked to make major changes to how they operated) to avoid widespread hostility was a good deal, but now it appears that it was more to reassure those in power that the Eanlians are highly respectful of laws and contracts and so on (which they are, but like the fae; they’re quite adept at fucking you over without violating the letter of the agreement) and would under no circumstances turn on them once they’ve handed over all their power and outlived their usefulness (which I suspect they might, if they deemed it politically important to gain the favor of their former subjects, although I more enjoy the scenario where they’re ‘given equal legal status with other Eanlians and not to be confined’, then dropped off in the middle of a public park where their hosts have organized a party to welcome them – one so nice they end up staying until sunset), which would mean that they’re not acknowledging prey’s authority, they’re playing along with their delusions to lull them into a sense of security – much more psychologically comfortable.

The thing about the vague timeline is that the scene at the end hits very differently if the Eanlians have introduced the full set of hunting hours and related laws or not, and it’s not clear if they have. It’s clearly been a while, as they’ve had time to build up their own little commune and have it firmly established, Patrick’s getting old, and there are children who have apparently been growing up here (but are still children). There’s mention of a program to successfully integrate humans, but it’s not clear whether it’s to transition humans from the native governments to the Project, or the Project to the standard Eanlian government they’re setting up as the endgoal of annexation. It’s described as ‘the integration of the Eanlian Arctic and a Gardenia Project human habitat’, which means they have substantial influence – and thus contact – with the Eanlian Arctic, a region of Eanli, directly, which the Project appears to have been blocking previously (likely because keeping them ignorant of the nature of prey life there would have been extremely difficult – something no longer relevant if it’s implemented on Earth too). It’s also described as ‘predator and prey unified’, meaning they have to have been divided into those groups, which offers a pretty big hint to the nature of their future relationship. Yet they also don’t mention anything regarding hunting (not definitive, but unlikely to be avoided in this sort of retrospective; it is a big deal) and their relationship isn’t like any we’ve seen before; they seem more like a couple to me (‘His greatest adventure was being with him’ – yeah, that’s such a happily married thing to say (I asked earlier about sexual/romantic relationships between predator and prey? Relevant again)). It’s not inconceivable that the Eanlians could have given the humans a decade or two before introducing hunting (as I said earlier, it’s one of the two points of greatest potential resistance, and they’ve already passed the other) to let the humans get used to Eanlians having unchecked authority and make it clear they’re not going anywhere, while also letting a new generation come up who’ve never experienced independence and letting old age kill off a good chunk of those who can still remember a properly functioning human government and would recognize ‘Late Johnston hellhole vs. Eanlian despotism’ to be a false binary. If that’s the case, the crux of the matter – the betrayal – is probably right around the corner. Because there is a betrayal. There can’t not be. Communism, at its core, is not an economic system. That’s just a side effect of a societal movement, whose core ideology is a deep and abiding commitment to human equality. These people were opposing sexism, racism, imperialism, and colonialism in the late 1800s. It is the most admirable trait of the communist movement, and it is completely incompatible with Eanlian rule. That is based on a fundamental model of division between predator and prey whose closest analogue is complementarianism (with the associated officially-equal-but-everyone-knows-better-than-to-act-like-it claim) where the prey have no rights, only privileges that may be revoked at any time. Even in the Eanlian Arctic model, despite the better treatment and genuine care for each other, the fundamental relationship of who eats who remains the same (witness how Taklia shifted so easily into hunting when she left home; without the emotional relationship, the ‘I get to eat you’ took over without any resistance). Patrick is close with Parhra. Since it’s extremely unlikely that Parhra’s abandoned his worldview, that means that either Patrick has abandoned his ideological commitments for the sake of being with him (in whatever manner), or he’s being led on by someone who knows how appalled he’d be once he sees where the road he’s being guided down has taken him. Either Patrick has committed a terrible betrayal of his principles, or he’s being set up to be terribly betrayed.

There’s something about this that I’m not entirely sure how to describe. It’s a kind of inevitability, a sense that things are going to happen no matter what and there’s absolutely no chance of stopping it no matter what you do, a sort of death of hope and embrace of collaboration. The best I can think to explain it is (bear with me): Worm is often described as ‘grimderp’. Everything everyone does only makes the situation worse and it ends with a mad god destroying most of humanity. There’s a fanfic of it I read (https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/titanomachy-worm-au.1183522/ if you’re curious) that’s good, but it’s also so much darker. It’s a standard fairy tale plot of ‘noble princess overthrows evil king’, pretty short, with a straightforward throughline and a happy ending, but the difference is the context. Worm opens with a recognizable modern world with superpowers added, and ends with the shattered remains of the government desperately trying to pull together and rebuild in the aftermath of the aborted apocalypse. The other one opens with the world having been divided into cape-ruled city-states by sheer force of arms, and nothing in the story changes this or even hints at the possibility of changing it. There’s one older character who despairs before the battle that he started life as a labor organizer and now he’s down to hoping he gets to replace the Neo-Nazi unelected absolute ruler with a benevolent unelected absolute ruler. In the last few paragraphs the main character briefly muses about restoring elections and becoming the only democratic government on the continent, then immediately dismisses the idea as silly and ridiculous. And that’s the kind of vibe I’m getting here. The old world is dead, not just in reality but in spirit. The flower of Enlightenment thinking, all those ideals of democracy, equality and all those other beautiful dreams will not just never be real but never be dreamed, because all that the new world is capable of producing, all that it is capable of comprehending, is Orwell’s boot (or paw) stamping on a human face. Forever.

Some small stuff: You didn’t do the introduction this time! Well, sort of. They did get full names and the two new ones got a job description.

I thought the portcullis was a teleporter. What does he mean, “It’s just a little train.”

Washington is indeed famously muggy. It’s because it was built on a swamp.

Standard procedure for these sort of autocratic regimes is to pack the legislature with loyalists and have them sometimes rubber stamp things, with members being either full time playacting debate or a reward for rising in their other job. It’s unusual for them to do other things but convene often enough it’s not inherently a special occasion.

Private police – I’m not sure if they’re there because the regular police can’t handle things or the ‘subprofessionals’ need a little violent encouragement to stay in line. Either way, bad sign.

Wait, let me guess: they spun off various services (like the TSA) that really aren’t armed forces into a bunch of little independent mini armed forces that don’t work together and are all directly under the top guy. Classic authoritarian coup-proofing.

So the ‘kill everyone who doesn’t like me’ theory of popularity doesn’t work. Gee, I wonder if anyone could have figured that out beforehand.

Ah, that helpful authoritarian cynicism. Everything is propaganda for one side or another, so there’s no point trying to figure out the truth, just parrot whatever the people in power say. (Also, ‘written stories uploaded to just one website’? Self-referential much? … the spider’s a user on here, isn’t it?)

Is Phythis supposed to be Pythia, or is it just too obscure for Google to help with?

“Our country abandoned us first”: And that’s why authoritarianism can’t hack it long term. People have no reason not to jump ship.

Stock is rising is something they used to say? Do they not have a stock market anymore? What have they done to the economy?

Evelyn’s attitude here? That, “aww, it’s so cute you think I care about obeying the law,”? That is what I was expecting from the Johnston regime and the other Earth dictatorships. That’s the classic authoritarian mindset, power and privilege leading you to genuinely believe that rules don’t apply to you and you’re immune to consequences right up until the first time you encounter something your position can’t help you with and you run headfirst into reality at a hundred miles an hour (as, indeed, she does). Why don’t the top people, the ones actually making the decisions about how to respond to the Eanlians, have this mindset? This whole thing would’ve gone very differently if they did.

No air travel – one of those little things that says a great deal about how fucked the world is. Air travel is a massive business; it is the way to travel long distance because it’s just so much more convenient than anything else (it was less than a decade after the introduction of large passenger planes that passenger liners were thoroughly dead, just from the sheer utility differential, and air travel has only gotten cheaper since). And now it’s gone, with all the assorted implications.

Yes Cassandra, you sound exactly like a slave mistress – that is literally the exact argument used in the antebellum against abolition, and it’s not even unprecedented – there are accounts of Romans whose relations with their slaves was, in all honesty, exactly that (and yet they still as standard practice killed themselves when they lost a battle rather than be captured and enslaved – they knew what to expect). Slavery is bad, what I do is good, therefore it isn’t slavery is a really shitty argument, and also a really vulnerable one (get some bulletpointed yes/no questions, ask them, then make them defend how something that’s functionally identical to slavery is somehow better than slavery). It says something that she goes for an argument that weak, then as soon as she encounters pushback starts whining about how it’s unfair to think about anything other than the best possible outcome (I would add in that she should know that that is how you make policy, because doing otherwise leads to really stupid decision making, but she does work for an authoritarian dictatorship, and, well, “There is no need to equip the Wehrmacht for cold weather, as Barbarossa will have the Soviet Union defeated before winter sets in”). Also, yes, you are a monster. You’ve spent decades whitewashing away atrocities and supporting the government that did them without any sort of pushback, and you still don’t care about that beyond how it’s currently affecting you personally. You don’t get to carry water for them and claim that since you didn’t commit those crimes personally it doesn’t count.

Normally a country only has its economy transition off its issued currency when they spark hyperinflation – paying your taxes in it is just too useful to give up. Was that a targeted attack by the Eanlians (that Eanlian shop with a no dollars accepted sign) – forcing people to choose between the dollar and their currency?

Rain still forcing Lucia to wear the slave collar after she’s rescued, just deactivated – yeah, that’s totally a metaphor. All humans have lost their freedom now, but aren’t the masters nice?

Sabotaging the human’s efforts and letting it appear to fail on its own – I totally called that one.

Memorial to the Victims of Collectivism – oh God I hate those sort of “I know you are but what am I” things - that’s definitely propaganda to draw attention away from their own atrocities.

Of course they built a new White House – dictators love their fancy new palaces.

Having multiple agencies doing the same thing but not talking to each other is, again, a standard authoritarian coup-proofing strategy, and it does indeed lead to bad performance.

This is the bit I still don’t get. What assets could they have at the start that couldn’t be overcome by overwhelming military force? It sounds like it’s commercial assets, in which case: just nationalize them! They can’t retaliate if they’re not here.

I’m pretty sure that’s not actually how it works when it comes to the states and territorial adjustments, but I guess it’s not like anyone really cares at this point.

No. It wasn’t. The last quarter of the millennium has been about getting away from that, no matter how much people like you try to stand in the way and insist that everybody is like you.

Can I just say: Calvin doesn’t feel like a dictator. He’s too passive (and not in a broken way). A high level official, a figurehead, I could see that. But I don’t think he could take the initiative to seize and hold power.

I can see why people buy Eufenris’s benevolence. She is good at that.

When I first saw Parhra’s name, I misread it as ‘Praha’, and was like “what’s Prague got to do with anything?”

The tales of his exploits seem disturbingly propagandistic. Also, dictator-America wasn’t an empire (a polity where subject peoples on the periphery are ruled and exploited for the benefit of the center) while Eanli, right now, is.

Some typos: Couldn’t live out of van anymore

United States Capital Building (and the others)

What if congress and Johnston

Mark from the goddamned Justice department

Europe, south-east Asia, and the middle east

“Of course.”" He smiled.

Posted by ObsidianSnake 4 weeks ago Report

Thanks for reading! I can't respond to everything here for one of a few reasons. Some topics you've mentioned here will be examined in future stories. I often like to let people have their own thoughts on things, rather than over-explaining them.

Regarding the vague timeline: yes, I'm depicting events relative to one another. There is a non-relative timeline of events. I even have the doc open right now, right next to this window. :)

The ambiguity of the amount of the time at the final skip is intentional. Is it good writing? Maybe not. I'd be more specific in other cases, but it works for this series of stories. I think that somebody reading these in a different order would find that last part fairy open and easy to understand. They'd know what those two were referencing.

Regarding the final fate of the last great rulers: psh, who cares? The only reason I would write a story about it would be that I was deliberately trying to bore people.

What's there to say? They got what they asked for, exactly and specifically, and then they can't leave the place. Paradise, in a box... with each other... It brings to mind a play by Oscar Wilde. You might know the one.

Regarding the portcullis stations: you're correct, and you're also correct. Without going into superfluous details, the technology creates a brief link between places, and the train goes through it. When it's not active, which is most of the time, there's a weird wall at the end of the track. It's not a spectacle to experience. Many are deeply disappointed by this.

Regarding the new white house: The worst part was that it wasn't even white. The main grand facade was designed to have three layers, with the inner layer being reflective glass and black. The middle pillars and structures are polished cut stone with mid-tone slate color palettes. The outer layer is distinctively metal and light gray. To be fair, in official documents, they didn't identify it as "the white house". The term just lingered.

"Can I just say: Calvin doesn’t feel like a dictator." Does he not seem powerful? Does he not seem unstoppable? Does he not feel super-human? Doesn't his complete cultural dominance seem inevitable? Well... no. When you look behind the curtain, they're never impressive.

Posted by Mourtzouphlos 4 weeks ago Report

Wait wait wait. If the new White House looks completely different than the old one, how didn't he recognize it when they went in? (Also, are they one in front of the other or back to back? Or even off to the side?)

Oh, I'm well aware that dictators are often more clownish than impressive. But they usually want something, if only power; by definition they have to be willing and able to seize and hold their position, otherwise they wouldn't be dictators in the first place. He feels like Bernhard von Bulow: someone in it for the prestige, not the power. But Bulow got his position because Wilhelm II required a chancellor, and so selected an obedient figurehead, while dictators are extra-constitutional; they don't need figureheads. So what's he doing there?

Posted by ObsidianSnake 4 weeks ago Report

On the white house thing: because reception and security was through sealed vehicle and a side passage, per protocol. He never saw the front. Imagine how boring this hypothetical section would've been to read!

Regarding the second thing: what is he doing? Retiring.

Posted by ObsidianSnake 4 weeks ago Report

Ank... hold on gotta look something up




NO THOSE ARE OBVIOUSLY IMPORTANT! Don't break those!
Seriously, no need to apologize. :) Joint injuries are the absolute worst, especially if you have active interests or vocations. I wish you a miraculous recovery!

Posted by Mourtzouphlos 4 weeks ago Report

Don't worry, that was five weeks ago and it's gotten to the point where I can walk on it (in a walking boot) without worrying too much about how much I'm doing it at a time. That's part of why I got it out now.