Map Thread XIV
- Thread starter MorningDew
- Start date
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This is the most recent version. North America needs a lot of work still.
Go for it!
How in the fuck are Iran and Saudi Arabia in an alliance, and a religious one at that, with each other, I mean the Saudi's are follow fundamentalist Sunni Islam and thus view Shi'a as apostates and as terrible.
Weeks ago I was bored and so I made a "What if" ASB scenario.
Basically in Altnova, the Last Ice Age never ends. And with the Bering Sea that would of been the land-bridge, being nonexistent, results in the Americas never being colonized by Native Americans like in OTL. (However Polynesians are the ones to make a civilization along the coast of Chile and Peru).
Instead of Native Americans migrating to the Americas, they instead migrate into OTL Europe, where it surprisingly is seen more suitable for they're taste. The Aztecs establish a empire almost like that we would see of Rome.
While the Europeans migrate and colonize Asia. French live in northern China, establishing the "Frankish Empire" with the city of Ile-de-Bleu as their capital (I made up the city btw). The Swedish reside in northern Japan and parts of the Kuril Islands, while the Norwegians have mostly the island of Honshu (which they call Norvska) to themselves. While the Danish reside in Kyushu and Ryukyu Islands.
The Prussians (Teutonic Warlords), established a rump kingdom in OTL Korean peninsula. Where their capital city named Teutonia (based in same location as Seoul).
The Spanish live in southern China, and have been in contact with far away nations in Africa, due to ancient sea trading routes. They've known about the existence of the continent of Africa since 889 AD. The Vikings colonized the island of Albion (which is Taiwan), until the Saxons pushed them out. Later the Normans from former parts of Francia (northern China), invaded and then created people similar to the English like in OTL.
The Slavic people who would of migrated into Russia and parts of Central Asia, instead migrated into India. The Russyn Tsardom was founded in 1214 AD, with its capital of Rusgrad (which is OTL Mumbai). While Ukrainians, Belorussians, along with the Armenians and Georgians migrated further south down the Indian subcontinent. However the Georgians colonized the island of Sri Lanka. The Polish and Czechs on the other colonized Bengal and parts of Indochina.
The Greeks (which are more resembling that of Byzantines) reside in southern part of OTL Vietnam and northern parts of Borneo. They been known to establish settlements along the coast of northern Borneo since 3 AD, due to their knowledge of maps and the invention of compass.
The Hungarians reside in the mountains of OTL Tibet. And are very brutal towards any outsiders. However they mostly pay more attention to neighboring Frankish Empire and the Anasazi Empire (Which is based in northern Central Asia). At one time in history, there was a brutal Hungarian warlord that almost conquered Eurova (OTL Asia) and Atlzania (OTL Europe). (Sounds familiar doesn't it?)
In OTL Indonesia, is where most of our Italians reside. Originally their was once a vast empire in ancient times down there, to point they establish trade routes with the Chinese kingdoms in OTL Australia. But eventually their downfall was due to the fact of disease and civil unrest towards the ethnic minorities.
Most of our Arabs and other Middle Eastern people (except for Persians), have colonized most of the Pacific Islands, due to them having access to sailing for centuries.
In Zeohuan (Which is OTL Australia and New Zealand), is where the Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, and other Asians reside. They been in contact with Eurovan nations for a long time. While the Japanese colonized OTL New Zealand which they call as Nipponshu.
Africa remains the same, only difference is that the Aztecs and Mayans have for a century by now have been sailing along the western African coast. To the point currently the Aztecs have a couple of puppet rump states in the Congo. (They might not last for long however). Only difference is that most of Africa is African, except for OTL Egypt which is named Mississippi, which is where the civilized and advanced Mississippians (aka Mississippians of North America in OTL), reside. They had their empire they claim since the beginning of time itself, and are still up and around. They have the Mississippi River (OTL Nile River) all to themselves when it comes to farming.
The Ancient Egyptians reside in OTL Turkey, Iraq, Armenia, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Due to the fact that Mississippians colonized OTL Egypt. Only difference for the Egyptians is that they have had series of peace and series of bloody wars with their red colored neighbors in Atlzan (OTL Europe which is where our OTL Native Americans live). Originally Egypt was a small kingdom along the OTL Turkish coast of Turkey, but over time and series of conquest thanks to woman named Cleopatra the Great, she was able to make a large empire stretching from OTL Turkey to OTL Afghanistan.
The Ancient Persians instead of migrating into OTL Iran, they went down towards a closer nearby location, which is OTL parts of the Arabian peninsula.
And last but not least, the Mayans and Aztecs do not know of the existence of the Americas, but there are Mayan and Aztec myths, which say there might be a vast land devoid of any human life beyond the ocean. They call this the mythical continent of Teotuixala (Aka OTL North and South America).
I get that its meant to be ASB but in the scenario you're describing you probably wouldn't get anything resembling human civilization as we know it, let alone the ridiculously convergent cultures that you are describing. Most of them didn't even exist in the way that you describe them for thousands of years after the end of the last ice age. Any POD that far back would give rise to civilizations entirety different from anything in our history, not the same exact cultural groups just in different locations. That's not how cultural development works, and if you're suggesting that the development of these cultures was for some reason in those peoples ancestors genetics that's a whole different category of wrong.
Not to mention the fact that the your core premise (Ice Ages don't end so the Americas never get colonized by humans) ignores the fact that the Americas were probably colonized because of the ice ages, most likely because neolithic humans followed herds of megafauna along the edges of the ice, across the being land bridge (which you have as still existing) into the Americas. If anything these Americas would be more open to contact with the rest of the world than those in our history.
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September 1938: Germany surrenders after roughly a year of bloody defeats and Anglo-French forces flooding into Berlin. A few of her eastern allies continue to fight, hoping to win a few victories that would let them escape the war with dignity and respect (and a better deal than what the Entente has offered). Romania is having a fair bit of luck as Hungary is the only nation really focused on fighting them and Romania is the stronger power. Poland is finding themselves too important to leave free as France seeks a secure link to Russia's resources (everyone knows Russia is supportive of her old Entente allies, she's just shy about it). Finland is managing some success, mostly because the English are busy trying to deal with more violence in India after a failed crackdown merely angered more Indians.
Turkey is surprisingly the most successful Central Power still standing. Bulgaria has kept her borders closed to Entente forces, and is funneling Russian bought supplies to her former ally. This has forced the Italians and their allies to launch the naval invasion dumbed 'Operation Neptune' and . . . it isn't going very well. The Ottomans may have lost a lot of land in the inter-war era, but they gained a great deal of experience and German built weapons. The rough terrain of Anatolia is proving a nightmare for the Tank assault tactics loved by the Entente and the Italians are bleeding badly at every step (along with their allies). To make matters worse the decisions to bring in a religious aspect and call the battle a new Reconquista has soured any chance of local support as Entente forces burn Mosques and Korans (as well as ruining relations with Egypt and her Muslim Confederation).
Bolivia has decided it's a good time to invade Paraguay.
Japan's Northern Clique in China has engaged in a number of border clashes with the mostly English backed Southern Clique. The Japanese are starting to whisper to Russia requests for possible assistance.
The Americans have launched a massive military building project that has the Entente panicking. However, with Germany broken and clear access to Russia's resources nearly secured they don't need American goods any longer. Maybe it's time for a new front...
Turkey is surprisingly the most successful Central Power still standing. Bulgaria has kept her borders closed to Entente forces, and is funneling Russian bought supplies to her former ally. This has forced the Italians and their allies to launch the naval invasion dumbed 'Operation Neptune' and . . . it isn't going very well. The Ottomans may have lost a lot of land in the inter-war era, but they gained a great deal of experience and German built weapons. The rough terrain of Anatolia is proving a nightmare for the Tank assault tactics loved by the Entente and the Italians are bleeding badly at every step (along with their allies). To make matters worse the decisions to bring in a religious aspect and call the battle a new Reconquista has soured any chance of local support as Entente forces burn Mosques and Korans (as well as ruining relations with Egypt and her Muslim Confederation).
Bolivia has decided it's a good time to invade Paraguay.
Japan's Northern Clique in China has engaged in a number of border clashes with the mostly English backed Southern Clique. The Japanese are starting to whisper to Russia requests for possible assistance.
The Americans have launched a massive military building project that has the Entente panicking. However, with Germany broken and clear access to Russia's resources nearly secured they don't need American goods any longer. Maybe it's time for a new front...
A near-future scenario based on a certain sci-fi B-movie by the same name, that I hold too much dear for my own good. Probably more time and thought went into rationalizing the plot, than the director did to write the original script. Oh well...
---
POD: 1945(?)
Local time: 2019
Does anyone remember the War of 1999? Even 20 years later, the answer should surprise no one: of course they do. Everyone still alive has a vivid recollection of the televised appeal from the President of the United States, Meyers to "not repeat the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". It was the time of the Orkney Crisis: a small aircraft carrier of the Eurac navy was reportedly scuttled and sunk along the coast of Scotland and the blame was immediately placed on the other militarily-capable superpower, the United States.
A last warning to own up to "their mistakes" was promptly issued by Eurac, giving USA one week to decide. To be frank, the most naive in this whole matters were the dovish side of the American population -- popstars singing songs about peace and civilian activists taking to the streets holding candles in their hands, they all took for granted that cooler heads would prevail and a cessation of hostilities would be announced bilaterally on the midnight of the last day of ultimatum. Instead, both their voices and the President's plead fell on deaf ears.
Ten minutes after midnight, what greeted the East Coast was a volley of missiles from the sky, nothing of these people remained except for charred bones. The rest of the United States as well as their Southern American allies were baked in atomic fire some months later as soon as the Eurac replenished their nuclear stockpile. The American navy and air force was in disarray: some defected to more peaceful harbors, some engaged in suicide attacks against Eurac's military, while others just became an easy target in mopping-up operations.
Those people who survived the nuclear blasts were left with horrible burn scars and had to provide for themselves in the lawless rubbles of major cities, feeding off a hardly healthy diet of mutated rat meat. What was once New York caught the interest of Eurac's scientific department, which dispatched a division there to conduct further studies on the so-called Contaminated, either through "voluntary vivisections" or straightforward abductions.
It's not like the United States didn't attempt to retaliate when they realized that tensions between the two superpowers would end up in a war: an order to fire off all nuclear weapons ready in silos was issued the second the first Eurac missile appeared on radars, but hardly any hit their target. Eurac, perhaps predicting such a move, had already set up a system of space satellites, missile jammers and experimental force field generators that effectively prevented every one of them from impacting. At best, only some sparse debris falling near the outskirts of Eurac were reported.
With the last obstacle in world hegemony gone and the dust settled, Eurac though themselves safe and unscathed. Little did they know about the side-effects of their actions. The amount of irradiated ashes and fallout wasn't enough to blot out sunrays, but it spread everywhere through winds. The first cases of infertility were tentatively explained just as a result of pre-war eugenics programs, but then cases were found increasingly among people of all social classes. It took 10 years (the last time a baby was born was 15 years ago) for world governments to acknowledge it, each of them independently, but radiations had made women irreversibly sterile. In other words: this could've been very well the last generation human race would be able to enjoy on this planet, and everyone carried on their life with that though permanently in their mind.
The Monarchy of Eurac, the only responsible for this whole disaster, hadn't always been a militaristic empire. In fact, it started as an attempt to bring stability and everlasting peace in the European continent after the ravages of WWII. The ruling family is neither noble nor ancient; despite being always called a "dynasty", often in a joking tone, they didn't wear the Crown of Eurac until a few years before the war, and less than 75 years ago they were just a family of bankers tasked with handling and managing the post-WWII reconstruction funds. The King Regent's great-grandfather was the main proponent and driving force behind the creation of the European Community of States.
In his mind, while the European states had to renounce any hostility among themselves, they also had to stand up on their own and not be the puppets of either the Soviets or the Americans. To do so, part of the funds had to be necessarily alloted to the development and rebuilding of a truly independent army. Working as a real power behind the throne influencing every political decision, his radical stance was at first approved by the United States, believing in a higher grade of autonomy. However, the Euro-American alliance came to a standstill with the elections of later Presidents of the United States, who distrusted a "hands-off" policy. This led to the infamous Atlantic Split of the 1960, where the now fully fledged European army kindly hinted at the US troops still standing on European soil to pack up and leave, thus breaking off any diplomatic collaborations between the two blocs for a long period of time.
Expansionism, although under disguise, came soon after: taking the Arab Crisis and the massacres in the Algerian Revolt as direct threats to European safety, troops were dispatched to secure the territories, effectively taking back the colonies that their were made to renounce just a few years before. Before long, Europe was able to build a secure and strong enough network to support, let alone stage, urban revolts and civil wars in Soviet satellites, making it hard for USSR to intervene if not at the cost of compromising the Motherland's image, and thus even Eastern Europe was, piece by piece, brought into the orbit of Eurac through proxy wars.
Today's Eurac stretches from Europe to Africa and part of Asia. With pre-war documents stored inside library vaults and most of the tape recordings now unreadable, it is impossible to trace back the anciestry of the current ruling king even by a few generations, but this is all for the better for it helps further the state-approved concept of Neo-Europeism: a world order where the old nationalisms no longer mattered in favor of a "continental awareness", where all people in Europe are united under only one banner, one mixed European race, one ideology and, at least in the plans, an unique constructed language. This is why newly "reclaimed" territories were soon reorganized not along cultural lines, but into "interest zones" with the implicit purpose of forcing linguistically and culturally different populations to mix and nullify their own differences.
When the Global Inferitility hit earth, each nation reacted to the impending doom of human race in their own way.
10 years later, Eurac's became a more "adult" society as newborns became scarce and children grew up. The first thing to go was religion; churches and cathedrals were stripped of their riches and ancient purposes to make room for more secular, often lecherous, entertainment. The second thing to go was visual arts as we know it: feeling human life as fleeting as ever, people sought art that was impactful and quick to produce. A return of Cubism and Brutalist architecture was thus more than welcome: nobody knows what Picasso's Guernica is supposed to represent, but everyone has a copy of it in their home, so much that the long-lost original might be among them.
Uniform of the Police abound in black leather, angular shoulderpads, spiky ornaments, helmets reminescent of kendo, as well as pointy brassiers for their female officiers, giving more than enough insight of what goes on in the mind of state bureaucrats.
If there's one good thing this cataclysm has brought about, it's a heightened awareness of dwindling resources and able-bodies personnel. While police is attempting to save up on oil and scrap metal by reintroducing horses as short-distance transportation, the old misogyny in the government was quickly abandoned and more and more places of power have been opened up to women to replace the old and the dead. Given the current infertility problem, possibility to surgically switch to the "stronger sex" for free was offered with the package.
Great effort has been placed on medicine. When all traditional attempts at bringing back fertility failed, the know-how was used to lengthen and improve the lifespan of surviving people. In particular, scientists were focused on making cancer a non-lethal, least-damaging disease no matter the stage and the parts affected. Organ transplants have also gone a long way: new organs (some vat-grown, the rest obtained by harvesting them from prisoners of war) can be replaced and become fully functioning in as little as a hour, sometimes with only just local anesthesia if the patient isn't too much queasy.
Theorically, a citizen of Eurac can live as long as 110 years before the first signs of senile decay surface, but the real issue is still left unsolved.
The Sinosphere was an unexpected participant in the post-war struggle for domination. At first, the People's Republic of China expected to wait out the war between USA and Eurac, sometimes scavenging the unoccupied territories of Russia and S-E Asia as the local governments gave up to anarchy. The turning point happened a few months into the war, when a missile launched by USA malfunctioned (some say it was jammed by the Europeans, but it is questioned that their defence system could be used from so far) and fell some hundred kilometers east of Beijing, killing hundreds of thousands. Upheaval followed.
The last surviving gerontocrats of the Gang of Four made themselves unfindable a few days after the incident, as fast as their wheelchairs allowed them. Lacking a clear leadership, the country was thrown back into a second warlord period. It lasted only 8 years but it was much more harrowing than the original one. Eventually, though no unity was restored, all the warlord domains were brought back to order and formed a loose confederation, though not without occasional backstabbings and infights.
The leader of this new China, the man known as the Red Emperor, was at first only a low-ranking officier who climbed his way to the top by replacing his superiors who died in the civil war carnage, as well as orchestrating some assassinations of his own. Shortly before he was elected new Chairman, he apparently had an epiphany: realizing from the outcome of the war that monarchy was the winning form of government, he carried himself like the Chinese dynasties of old. At the same time, having made a pledge not to betray the ideals of the Cultural Revolution, he also took great pains to show his loyalty to it at least on the surface, hence his idiosyncratic rule.
Concerning war, the first successful campaigns were met with celebrations in the mainland. The reclamation of Taiwan, as well as the conquest of a severely depopulated Japan seemed to comfirm the Red Emperor's authority as just and rightful. However, not long after the Chinese found themselves fighting a defensive war against the hungry Eurac, which in spite of all still didn't give up on their dreams to stretch from the Atlantic to Tibet. The Pamir offensive and the advance on the vaste Indian plains are enough to keep China on the tip of its toes.
Being the least technologically advance bloc, the Sinosphere is plagued with many limitations. It is the only superpower still reliant only on wheeled vehicles, as well as projectile weapons while everyone else has long moved on to "beams". Having leaped into the war with an already huge production surplus and the largest population, the impact of resource scarcity and global infertility didn't make itself felt until the recent years, but for all intents and purposes many zones already reverted back to subsistence farming.
In the field of medicine, no advances whatsoever have been made. Bewildered on how to make women fertile again and men immortal, even the most level-headed of scholars resorted to dubious traditional Chinese medicine, often by mixing new alloys and radioactive stones into their centuries-old recipes, with the only result of making heavy users die off even faster.
Protected by the large Pacific Ocean and hidden beyond the wastelands of North America is the Pan-American Confederacy -- its name suggests the ambitions to unite all people of America in a single powerful bloc, but it was never a feasible plan in the first place. In fact, not many even in the former United States are aware of its very existence.
Despite the fact that damage and radiation were lighter in Alaska and the West Coast, life has never been resorter to normalcy. The provisional President of this Confederacy is the former secretary of Homeland Security, the only surviving in the line of presidential succession, and as it can be expected martial law is the rule there. While factories in California work day and night, and farmers in the New Great Plains try growing mutated strains of wheat and vegetables in the face of radioactive dustbowls, the provisional government situated deep into the ices of Alaska is making all preparations necessary to depart earth with a few loyal men.
Having long given up any hopes on the future of earth, the President became more and more captivated by the astrophysics' news of an earth-like planet discovered orbiting around the stars of Alpha Centauri, here they hope to spend their sunset years (provided they manage to launch the special spaceship built for the project right on schedule), and maybe wait for the new sons of America to arrive, if they will ever be born.
With a central banking system gone forever, so is currency. In its place, what decides a man's worth is "deeds". Survivors and mercenaries alike are regularly recruited by the Pan-American government to partake in quick operations on the other side of the continent, in order to collect vital informations and material that will prove useful for the escape plan and the repupolation of humanity.
Deeds can be exchanged for a ticket on the evacuation spaceship, as well as conversion to Replicants. In the few and far-between facilities, people who have proven to be worthy enough can obtain compensation and enhancement prosthesis that, according to the state propaganda, will give them eternity. If they can overcome a few infections caused by implanting loads transistors and microchips deep into their skin, the expectation is to keep on living forever with just an alkaline battery and a few shots of serum every day. It's a brutal way to cheat death, but it's so far the most effective in the face of the already shrunk population.
Some early, crude attempts at recreating artificial wombs and kickstart mass incubators are already underway. Scientists are claiming that, should the machine ever be operational, it would be able to gestate up to 500 children at once from the eggs of a single female donor. Ethics be damned.
Everywhere else in the world, the situation is much more simplistic and dire. Life in Subsaharan Africa is becoming more and more like a Mondo movie with every new day. Those who can't find solace anymore even in Evangelican Christianity and Sufi Islam have long lapsed back into neo-animism, worshipping a deity they call Mother Death.
Not all is lost, luckily enough. Recently, the Pan-American government received an emergency call from a scientist holed up in the ruins of New York, claiming that his comatose daughter might be a suitable donor for the repopulation program. Nevertheless, Eurac intercepted the same message faster than them and are already on their way...
---
POD: 1945(?)
Local time: 2019
Does anyone remember the War of 1999? Even 20 years later, the answer should surprise no one: of course they do. Everyone still alive has a vivid recollection of the televised appeal from the President of the United States, Meyers to "not repeat the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". It was the time of the Orkney Crisis: a small aircraft carrier of the Eurac navy was reportedly scuttled and sunk along the coast of Scotland and the blame was immediately placed on the other militarily-capable superpower, the United States.
A last warning to own up to "their mistakes" was promptly issued by Eurac, giving USA one week to decide. To be frank, the most naive in this whole matters were the dovish side of the American population -- popstars singing songs about peace and civilian activists taking to the streets holding candles in their hands, they all took for granted that cooler heads would prevail and a cessation of hostilities would be announced bilaterally on the midnight of the last day of ultimatum. Instead, both their voices and the President's plead fell on deaf ears.
Ten minutes after midnight, what greeted the East Coast was a volley of missiles from the sky, nothing of these people remained except for charred bones. The rest of the United States as well as their Southern American allies were baked in atomic fire some months later as soon as the Eurac replenished their nuclear stockpile. The American navy and air force was in disarray: some defected to more peaceful harbors, some engaged in suicide attacks against Eurac's military, while others just became an easy target in mopping-up operations.
Those people who survived the nuclear blasts were left with horrible burn scars and had to provide for themselves in the lawless rubbles of major cities, feeding off a hardly healthy diet of mutated rat meat. What was once New York caught the interest of Eurac's scientific department, which dispatched a division there to conduct further studies on the so-called Contaminated, either through "voluntary vivisections" or straightforward abductions.
It's not like the United States didn't attempt to retaliate when they realized that tensions between the two superpowers would end up in a war: an order to fire off all nuclear weapons ready in silos was issued the second the first Eurac missile appeared on radars, but hardly any hit their target. Eurac, perhaps predicting such a move, had already set up a system of space satellites, missile jammers and experimental force field generators that effectively prevented every one of them from impacting. At best, only some sparse debris falling near the outskirts of Eurac were reported.
With the last obstacle in world hegemony gone and the dust settled, Eurac though themselves safe and unscathed. Little did they know about the side-effects of their actions. The amount of irradiated ashes and fallout wasn't enough to blot out sunrays, but it spread everywhere through winds. The first cases of infertility were tentatively explained just as a result of pre-war eugenics programs, but then cases were found increasingly among people of all social classes. It took 10 years (the last time a baby was born was 15 years ago) for world governments to acknowledge it, each of them independently, but radiations had made women irreversibly sterile. In other words: this could've been very well the last generation human race would be able to enjoy on this planet, and everyone carried on their life with that though permanently in their mind.
The Monarchy of Eurac, the only responsible for this whole disaster, hadn't always been a militaristic empire. In fact, it started as an attempt to bring stability and everlasting peace in the European continent after the ravages of WWII. The ruling family is neither noble nor ancient; despite being always called a "dynasty", often in a joking tone, they didn't wear the Crown of Eurac until a few years before the war, and less than 75 years ago they were just a family of bankers tasked with handling and managing the post-WWII reconstruction funds. The King Regent's great-grandfather was the main proponent and driving force behind the creation of the European Community of States.
In his mind, while the European states had to renounce any hostility among themselves, they also had to stand up on their own and not be the puppets of either the Soviets or the Americans. To do so, part of the funds had to be necessarily alloted to the development and rebuilding of a truly independent army. Working as a real power behind the throne influencing every political decision, his radical stance was at first approved by the United States, believing in a higher grade of autonomy. However, the Euro-American alliance came to a standstill with the elections of later Presidents of the United States, who distrusted a "hands-off" policy. This led to the infamous Atlantic Split of the 1960, where the now fully fledged European army kindly hinted at the US troops still standing on European soil to pack up and leave, thus breaking off any diplomatic collaborations between the two blocs for a long period of time.
Expansionism, although under disguise, came soon after: taking the Arab Crisis and the massacres in the Algerian Revolt as direct threats to European safety, troops were dispatched to secure the territories, effectively taking back the colonies that their were made to renounce just a few years before. Before long, Europe was able to build a secure and strong enough network to support, let alone stage, urban revolts and civil wars in Soviet satellites, making it hard for USSR to intervene if not at the cost of compromising the Motherland's image, and thus even Eastern Europe was, piece by piece, brought into the orbit of Eurac through proxy wars.
Today's Eurac stretches from Europe to Africa and part of Asia. With pre-war documents stored inside library vaults and most of the tape recordings now unreadable, it is impossible to trace back the anciestry of the current ruling king even by a few generations, but this is all for the better for it helps further the state-approved concept of Neo-Europeism: a world order where the old nationalisms no longer mattered in favor of a "continental awareness", where all people in Europe are united under only one banner, one mixed European race, one ideology and, at least in the plans, an unique constructed language. This is why newly "reclaimed" territories were soon reorganized not along cultural lines, but into "interest zones" with the implicit purpose of forcing linguistically and culturally different populations to mix and nullify their own differences.
When the Global Inferitility hit earth, each nation reacted to the impending doom of human race in their own way.
10 years later, Eurac's became a more "adult" society as newborns became scarce and children grew up. The first thing to go was religion; churches and cathedrals were stripped of their riches and ancient purposes to make room for more secular, often lecherous, entertainment. The second thing to go was visual arts as we know it: feeling human life as fleeting as ever, people sought art that was impactful and quick to produce. A return of Cubism and Brutalist architecture was thus more than welcome: nobody knows what Picasso's Guernica is supposed to represent, but everyone has a copy of it in their home, so much that the long-lost original might be among them.
Uniform of the Police abound in black leather, angular shoulderpads, spiky ornaments, helmets reminescent of kendo, as well as pointy brassiers for their female officiers, giving more than enough insight of what goes on in the mind of state bureaucrats.
If there's one good thing this cataclysm has brought about, it's a heightened awareness of dwindling resources and able-bodies personnel. While police is attempting to save up on oil and scrap metal by reintroducing horses as short-distance transportation, the old misogyny in the government was quickly abandoned and more and more places of power have been opened up to women to replace the old and the dead. Given the current infertility problem, possibility to surgically switch to the "stronger sex" for free was offered with the package.
Great effort has been placed on medicine. When all traditional attempts at bringing back fertility failed, the know-how was used to lengthen and improve the lifespan of surviving people. In particular, scientists were focused on making cancer a non-lethal, least-damaging disease no matter the stage and the parts affected. Organ transplants have also gone a long way: new organs (some vat-grown, the rest obtained by harvesting them from prisoners of war) can be replaced and become fully functioning in as little as a hour, sometimes with only just local anesthesia if the patient isn't too much queasy.
Theorically, a citizen of Eurac can live as long as 110 years before the first signs of senile decay surface, but the real issue is still left unsolved.
The Sinosphere was an unexpected participant in the post-war struggle for domination. At first, the People's Republic of China expected to wait out the war between USA and Eurac, sometimes scavenging the unoccupied territories of Russia and S-E Asia as the local governments gave up to anarchy. The turning point happened a few months into the war, when a missile launched by USA malfunctioned (some say it was jammed by the Europeans, but it is questioned that their defence system could be used from so far) and fell some hundred kilometers east of Beijing, killing hundreds of thousands. Upheaval followed.
The last surviving gerontocrats of the Gang of Four made themselves unfindable a few days after the incident, as fast as their wheelchairs allowed them. Lacking a clear leadership, the country was thrown back into a second warlord period. It lasted only 8 years but it was much more harrowing than the original one. Eventually, though no unity was restored, all the warlord domains were brought back to order and formed a loose confederation, though not without occasional backstabbings and infights.
The leader of this new China, the man known as the Red Emperor, was at first only a low-ranking officier who climbed his way to the top by replacing his superiors who died in the civil war carnage, as well as orchestrating some assassinations of his own. Shortly before he was elected new Chairman, he apparently had an epiphany: realizing from the outcome of the war that monarchy was the winning form of government, he carried himself like the Chinese dynasties of old. At the same time, having made a pledge not to betray the ideals of the Cultural Revolution, he also took great pains to show his loyalty to it at least on the surface, hence his idiosyncratic rule.
Concerning war, the first successful campaigns were met with celebrations in the mainland. The reclamation of Taiwan, as well as the conquest of a severely depopulated Japan seemed to comfirm the Red Emperor's authority as just and rightful. However, not long after the Chinese found themselves fighting a defensive war against the hungry Eurac, which in spite of all still didn't give up on their dreams to stretch from the Atlantic to Tibet. The Pamir offensive and the advance on the vaste Indian plains are enough to keep China on the tip of its toes.
Being the least technologically advance bloc, the Sinosphere is plagued with many limitations. It is the only superpower still reliant only on wheeled vehicles, as well as projectile weapons while everyone else has long moved on to "beams". Having leaped into the war with an already huge production surplus and the largest population, the impact of resource scarcity and global infertility didn't make itself felt until the recent years, but for all intents and purposes many zones already reverted back to subsistence farming.
In the field of medicine, no advances whatsoever have been made. Bewildered on how to make women fertile again and men immortal, even the most level-headed of scholars resorted to dubious traditional Chinese medicine, often by mixing new alloys and radioactive stones into their centuries-old recipes, with the only result of making heavy users die off even faster.
Protected by the large Pacific Ocean and hidden beyond the wastelands of North America is the Pan-American Confederacy -- its name suggests the ambitions to unite all people of America in a single powerful bloc, but it was never a feasible plan in the first place. In fact, not many even in the former United States are aware of its very existence.
Despite the fact that damage and radiation were lighter in Alaska and the West Coast, life has never been resorter to normalcy. The provisional President of this Confederacy is the former secretary of Homeland Security, the only surviving in the line of presidential succession, and as it can be expected martial law is the rule there. While factories in California work day and night, and farmers in the New Great Plains try growing mutated strains of wheat and vegetables in the face of radioactive dustbowls, the provisional government situated deep into the ices of Alaska is making all preparations necessary to depart earth with a few loyal men.
Having long given up any hopes on the future of earth, the President became more and more captivated by the astrophysics' news of an earth-like planet discovered orbiting around the stars of Alpha Centauri, here they hope to spend their sunset years (provided they manage to launch the special spaceship built for the project right on schedule), and maybe wait for the new sons of America to arrive, if they will ever be born.
With a central banking system gone forever, so is currency. In its place, what decides a man's worth is "deeds". Survivors and mercenaries alike are regularly recruited by the Pan-American government to partake in quick operations on the other side of the continent, in order to collect vital informations and material that will prove useful for the escape plan and the repupolation of humanity.
Deeds can be exchanged for a ticket on the evacuation spaceship, as well as conversion to Replicants. In the few and far-between facilities, people who have proven to be worthy enough can obtain compensation and enhancement prosthesis that, according to the state propaganda, will give them eternity. If they can overcome a few infections caused by implanting loads transistors and microchips deep into their skin, the expectation is to keep on living forever with just an alkaline battery and a few shots of serum every day. It's a brutal way to cheat death, but it's so far the most effective in the face of the already shrunk population.
Some early, crude attempts at recreating artificial wombs and kickstart mass incubators are already underway. Scientists are claiming that, should the machine ever be operational, it would be able to gestate up to 500 children at once from the eggs of a single female donor. Ethics be damned.
Everywhere else in the world, the situation is much more simplistic and dire. Life in Subsaharan Africa is becoming more and more like a Mondo movie with every new day. Those who can't find solace anymore even in Evangelican Christianity and Sufi Islam have long lapsed back into neo-animism, worshipping a deity they call Mother Death.
Not all is lost, luckily enough. Recently, the Pan-American government received an emergency call from a scientist holed up in the ruins of New York, claiming that his comatose daughter might be a suitable donor for the repopulation program. Nevertheless, Eurac intercepted the same message faster than them and are already on their way...
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Steady on. The alliance is certainly strange but even most fundamentalist Sunnis recognize Shi'i as Muslims.
2019
Many thanks! The movie was my favorite back in the 1980's and the EURAC were coolest bad guys ever!
Many thanks! The movie was my favorite back in the 1980's and the EURAC were coolest bad guys ever!
Interesting things...
Here's a map for a scenario by CyberPhoenix001: https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=11573067&postcount=9385
Here's a map for a scenario by CyberPhoenix001: https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=11573067&postcount=9385
Having given a look at the plot https://web.archive.org/web/20141218052601/http://www.post-apocalypse.co.uk/2019.html , you've done a pretty bang-up job.
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