"Until the Last Moment The latter months are ending as the sun hangs lazily between the clouds. All about are the sounds of commotion. Trains glide across crystal waters kicking up mist as robots roll between adobe houses and under splaying canopies and a broken sky. Turbine balloons float tethered above village communes as mechanics and whizz kids fiddle with prosthetics, tracing their hands across each mechanism's flowery reliefs. Refugees are shepherded beyond the great deserts that now swallow up much of the world, and in art nouveau palaces knights and reiters swear fealty to their handlers. Welcome back to the world of tomorrow stranger, though it's a bit different than how you remember. The year is 2173 AD. Almost a century and a half has passed since the Collapse Era began, though the exact time when it ended is in dispute, not that there's any global institution that could decide when that was anymore. While the "Collapse Era" is a broad term, beginning before the climate collapse itself kicked off in earnest, most historians set its beginning to the onset of the American War, a multi-generational conflict that engulfed the former United States and Canada between a panoply of pretender governments and post-American states of various kinds. The premature death of the world hegemon led to a discordant global period in which the major global institutions attempted to reorient themselves under the UN now based (mainly) out of Vienna. The new order was, in its own words, imperfect and reactive. The need to shore up faith in the global system, to ensure the protection of accounts, states, and economies reeling in the face of America's fall, and the pressure to balance the now more pronounced regional frameworks in Europe, Africa, and even the Caribbean meant that the post-American world was dominated more by an attempt to loot the great behemoth as it tore itself apart in order to keep itself going for as long as possible as opposed to creating anything enduring. In the midst of this other parts of the world began to pull apart at the edges. In the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia the Three Flags Army otherwise known as the Democratic Federation, tore through the region, even taking Mecca for a brief period of time. The outpouring of American refugees (which themselves presaged the larger refugee waves of the era) became a source of conflict as many nations especially in the global south fought over access to a new very skilled and cheap workforce that was up for grabs. China and peripheral nations jumped at the opportunity that had been presented and attempted to kitbash a Fifth Internationale, leading to a breakdown in relations with its former European partners, themselves attempting to recreate the once expansive American intelligence system by importing former members of the US Deep State into their new federal military framework. Meanwhile the war itself quickly broke out of containment, spreading outside the United States and requiring first the largest UN military mission in history, and later on the transformation of what remained of NATO into an occupying organ, seizing control of Canada to maintain stability only to find itself at war with its own people. Then at last the climate collapse itself hit in earnest. Alongside this, economic pressures from the declining energy returns on fossil fuels compounded the costs states were taking on, and uneven population growth and demographic shifts obliterated long standing institutions in developed nations and undercut nascent regimes across the rest of the globe. World powers became more desperate and reckless, escalating to the point of bringing Kessler Syndrome down upon everyone to deny other nations vital infrastructure and going beyond that to even the use of tactical nuclear weapons on their enemies and rebellious populations. The more humanity held on and the harder its grip became the more the future slipped out of its fingers until it was all gone. Once again the year is 2173, the world population stands at just under 6.5 billion. A century or so is enough time to heal most wounds, provided one actually wants to do the healing. A casual observer or tourist to this world might be struck by how pleasant much of it looks. A view of the late 22nd century evinces a sense of a world painted in watercolor, something ripped out of a solarpunk moodboard or a Chobani commercial. Aesthetically and technologically speaking this is most certainly the case. It is a world of colorful adobe houses and limewashed buildings, of floating turbines, airwells, solar furnaces and pedal powered machines. A time of bionic and folk-craft motifs and stained glass opening up into rooms of optical computers and bio-forges. Of bacteria-phages and gmo molds and mushrooms breaking down the remnants of the old plasticene. Of consciously designed permaculture landscapes around communes on one end and flowing linear arcologies on the other. Socially though? Politically? That's a different story. The 22nd century is not a time of hand-holding, of positive psychology, utopian cosmopolitanism or down to earth anarchistic sentimentality. It is in many ways a return to form, a world emerging orthogonal from the past and its expectant future and containing bits of both on its own terms. It is a time of small states yet great empires, conservative communities, knightly orders and guild wars, at once an abandonment and refutation of the liberal and secular notions of the old globalized world in some cases and an attempt to race past them altogether in others. A time of close knit families and communes and bloody conflicts wiping out entire lands. Above all though it is a world that has abandoned the once popular maxim that "men are simply born for no reason". For in the 22nd century all men have an end that they know, be it prescribed by their state, their community, their liege, their party, or their God. When the collapse came it was primarily those great global institutions and the social sentiments that had emerged alongside them which fared the worst. The United Nations, the internet, the global economy and so on, yes even air traffic control, all were dashed against the rocks. While states would return, communities would persist and dig deep roots, the idea of the liberal citizen, of the neutral state, of institutions that exist solely for the purpose of their own survival that would not. Those that survived the collapse and came to seize the 22nd century were those that were able to orient their societies towards specific ends, either that of a destined future or of building a kind of humanity and social order within their borders. The closest equivalent we might have is that of a "theocracy" though this is not entirely accurate. While many 22nd century states are oriented towards a kind of religious end or according to a specific cosmology, just as many are not, and many "secular" orders of the 22nd century (such a term being outmoded) in fact evolved out of the practical administrative structures of 21st century religious movements. Things are never quite so straightforward. The 22nd century itself is not even dominated by great powers in the way we would understand the word. For while one might look at a map and see a collection of states which contest land and people, the real powers of the era are different. As stated previously, the major multinational institutions and broader global framework of the 21st century did not survive, but there were some hangers on of the complex globalized society of the past that were able to maintain control and entrench themselves as modern superpowers by the 22nd century. These would turn out to be the descendants of the major charities and development banks, who having their own land, property, and people scattered across the world weathered the collapse and only became more powerful as the new order established itself. THE SUPERPOWERS AND KNIGHTS There are currently 12 (technically 13) superpowers or "orders" which dominate the world. They are the Society of Saint Joseph, Red Cross and Crescent, UNICEF, United Way, the Sravasti Viharas, Hare Khrishna, World Food Bank, Salvation Army, Nahdlatul Ulama, Tzu Chi Foundation, and both the African and Islamic Development Banks. The 13th will not be mentioned until later. With the exception of Saint Joseph which is based out of the Vatican (and formally a subordinate organ of the Catholic Church), none of the superpowers have any "home turf" as it were, instead contesting large swaths of non-contiguous land across the planet. There is not a single part of the world that does not see the presence of at least one of these powers. The origin of many of these powers is rather clear, though others are more particular. The Sravasti Viharas for instance are the descendants of a Western Tibetan Buddhist abbey turned Humanistic foundation which attained global prominence due to its interlinking with the similarly minded Fo Guang Shan of the Taiwanese diaspora in the middle 21st century. Others are the amalgamation of many groups over time, such as the Society of Saint Joseph which was formed as a result of a papal decree merging the church's major foundations together under a new organization. The development banks are the "odd man out" in this regard, though their rise and persistence is for similar reasons, due to the massive amount of sway and resources that fell under such institutions' control as the global south themselves attempted and failed to beat back the collapse. These development banks would find themselves being transformed from multilateral institutions to the caretakers of their former patrons, and so emerged from the collapse in a position of prominence. What one most often thinks of when the global superpowers come to mind however is not the land they contest nor their immense amount of wealth and vassals, but their knightly orders. Professional standing armies were one of the institutions that did not survive the 21st century in most parts of the world and are now the exception rather than the rule. While many states now have the potential to field standing armies again most do not due to institutional pressures against doing so that have become entrenched. Frankly speaking, most states view anything beyond a militia or at most a gendarmerie, to be a waste of time and resources. The superpowers are the notable exception to this, having the resources, funding, manpower, and reason to field large numbers of men at their command. The nature of warfare has changed however, and so have the kinds of men who fight. A big reason for this is technological developments in the past century and a half. In this world of bionics and organic technology one of the great shifts that would occur would be the (with caveats) victory of personal defense and armor over firearms. A great innovation of the modern era, organically grown heat regulating kinetic hardening foam has allowed for the creation of coats and breeches and other wearables that can deflect rounds with ease. Prohibitively expensive to be sure, but not impossible for the superpowers who have of course also locked down the process for creating them. Production costs limit the number of people that can be outfitted even by the wealthiest and most powerful bodies on Earth however. As such the superpowers rely on and use them to outfit small-ish professional corps of loyal soldiers, sworn to them for more or less life, to fight on their behalf. These form the basis of the modern knightly orders. Your average knight for the global superpowers then is exactly that, a man wearing effectively bulletproof quilted armor, often in layers starting with long undershirts and ending generally in either a large greatcoat or medium length jacket with roomy elbow length sleeves. Attached to the front (or sometimes the back) of their person is a bio-mechanical "third arm" folded against their body with an integrated weapon meant flip out and blow off exposed body parts should they be revealed during close combat. Close combat is in fact the name of the game, for although it is true that organic armor is effective against firearms, that simply inspired men to find new ways around them. The monomolecular sword would be this workaround, solving the issue of organic foam armor by simply slicing through it. A quirk of such weapons however is that due to the van der walls force a clean swipe will immediately seal right up, so sword combat between knights is based around hacking and slashing their enemy apart, and if possible blowing them apart with one's prosthetic third arm should an opening arise. Large numbers of ordinary troops provide support and often operate drones and anti-drone weapons on the battlefield. As one can guess this means that knights require a lot of training, which makes them all the more of an investment that superpowers are desperate to hang onto. In many ways the knightly orders are an attempt to accommodate this, to give their fighting men not merely money but prestige and a kind of life and status that separates them from the hoi polloi. Knights are given great freedom in how they live their lives, access to land, and special exceptions to sumptuary laws. Knights are in many ways encouraged to take pride not merely in their work but in the symbols of it. This often takes the form of employing designers to create elaborate and specialized patterns and motifs on the outer layers of their armor and sometimes the insides of the coats and jackets too. There is no need to hide oneself after all, one might as well show off. Even calling them knights is intentional in this respect. Knights operate in fireteams or "lances" (equivalent to a squad of 8 or 10 men) headed by an operator. An "operator" is both a lance-leader and an intermediary, denoted by their special implants. Operators have two implants, one in their skull and one in their jaw, the former which turns thoughts into transmittable information, and the latter which picks up transmissions and uses bone conduction to allow it to be heard as if it were a human voice. Operators are paired to "handlers" who have matching implants. Handlers are stationed outside of the battlefield, often with other handers at one of their superpower's local command stations, where through the use of drones, aerostats, and access to local infrastructure they have full view of the battlefield. Handlers and operators coordinate in battle and often develop a peculiar rapport with each other due to having access to each other's thoughts on and off the battlefield. Despite the attempts by the superpowers to keep a lock on their knights it is not unheard of for some to go rogue, or in the case where a superpower loses a region to another for knights of the losing side to use the opportunity to move into freelancing for local states. There are some benefits to going from being one knight among many to being the only one or two of your kind that a county or even small nation leans on. THE AMERICAN ECUMENES Despite the previous statement that "theocracy" does not mean theocracy, the first states to be covered will be the American theodemocracies. Ultimately none of the contenders of the American War survived into the modern era, with the notable exception of a redoubt of the old Sacramento Government clinging on in Cascadia. Instead, it would be social clubs and faith communities that would persist as the national and later regional governments crumbled, forming the basis of a new post-American society. The "Ecumenical Societies" are a result of this, nations which privilege the church, mosque, temple and so on as the fundamental unit of civil society and government. Likewise, the national mythos of these states draw both from the collapse era experience and the religious traditions of their peoples, with most states being named after places in scripture, which can be a somewhat confusing prospect when someone says "the Land of Galilee" and they mean the region around Lake Winnipeg. Together the Ecumenical Conference of North America stretches across much of former North America, excluding the great desert of course. Among the conference though there are eight Ecumenes which are the most prominent, and which are most likely to be referenced when one talks about North America. First there is the Land of Gilead, based out of the former Northeast Atlantic. Gilead is perhaps the closest to an old fashioned party-state and indeed its constitution even references the communists and Lenin in particular (alongside the old fascist jurist Schmitt) as their ideological forebears. To Gilead all governments instituted by men are dictatorships in the name of a particular interest, with old world democracies themselves being bourgeois dictatorships. Similarly, civil society is a sorting system by which dictatorship is established, friends and enemies are designated, and the basis upon which the dictatorship distributes rewards and punishments is rationalized. Gilead is unique in that while being dominated by Catholics (with a significant folk element by way of its absorption of former Baptists and Methodists from the Appalachia area), it accedes to the old Communist maxim that a Communist party, in representing the interests of the proletariat and peasantry, is by its nature democratic because it makes as its main interest the majority of the population. This is one of the reasons why the ruling party, the Party for Solidarity and Virtue, modeled itself off of them. Where it diverges however is that to the people of Gilead the main question of governance is not who is ruled but who is sovereign. To the Gilead Party by instead attributing their primary interest to the ultimate sovereign: God, as opposed to the ultimate subject: Humanity, their regime has fixed the errs of previous capitalist and communist empires. The mentality of the people of Gilead can be summed up with the line "the previous exercise of government concerned itself with the question of what man says man is and of what interest is man to himself. We concern ourselves however with what God says man is and of what interest man is to God." In terms of governance Gilead has been very successful, maintaining one of the more prosperous realms on the continent. This is helped by their monopoly on hydropower, not just the Niagara Falls Dam, but their recently successful megaproject of damming the James Bay as well. South of Gilead is the Land of Bethel. A unique specimen among Post-American states, the people of Bethel trace their roots in large part to the work of the Collapse Era "Community Welfare Alliance" or "CWAA" and smaller episcopal and progressive church cliques in the region. Heavily leaned on for the restoration of order and civil society during the Boston Government's short time holding the Atlantic Coast, the "chapter houses" that they established would seize control of the state apparatus during the pretender state's eventual retreat from the area. Modern day Bethel is a great example of what is meant when 22nd century states are called "conservative", that is to say they focus heavily on the maintenance of social order and continuity of norms across generations. Communities in the 22nd century from the local to national level engage in high levels of social policing, which says nothing to what the norms of said society are. Bethel on this front is known particularly for its only national level organ the "Bureau for the Prevention of Vice", under which their national gendarmerie, descended from the old CWAA, is organized. Bethel is also an example of what are sometimes referred to as "post-queer" societies, which is to say societies which had normalized certain social relations for sexual and gender minorities prior to the Collapse Era or which otherwise had influential cliques representing their interests which were maintained into the 22nd century. Post-Queer societies are quite common, more a reflection of the collapse of a social movement globally (due to the collapse of the world in general) not necessitating a reversal of social changes in specific regions, but instead attempts to reorient them within the new baseline of a much "smaller" and more parochial world, mostly through the mimicry of or full integration into the new regimes of social policing performed by the rest of society. Bethel for instance is well known for its program of free at point of use hormonal therapy for gender minorities and streamlined system to accommodate Self Identification, alongside having the death penalty for distribution of pornography of any kind. These two positions are considered to naturally exist hand-in-hand in Bethel society, and locals would be confused were one to attempt to argue with them that these are not positions one needs to hold to maintain social harmony and personal flourishing. Further south is the Land of Goshen. A descendant of the once great Internationalist Commune of Dixie, the people of Goshen still use a modified version of their ancestors' flag. The system of municipal communes and horse-trading which dominated Dixie politics and their erstwhile congress would eventually form the basis of the current system of elector councils. Goshen in large part is dominated by the "Southron Church", formally an ecumenical board jointly held by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African National Baptist Convention, which rose in prominence with the spinning apart of the once dominant Southern Baptist Convention. Goshen is made up of elector districts, which are headed by either secular or religious councils depending on if the local voting authority is centered around the town hall or church board. The elector districts select members for the congress which is the supreme authority of the land. Elector councils often band together into larger administrative federations where they coordinate and draft fiscal policy and direct the operation of infrastructure manned by cooperatives or other socially owned enterprises that contain members from their respective districts. In some cases this manifests as unofficial "party" blocs, often along the lines of the old school commune era divisions of agrarians, romantics, and communists though as a formally non-partisan state they are not called such. Secular and religious electors are generally equal in number, but due to the near unanimous allegiance of religious electors to the Southron Church (and the semi-formalized process of the church sending notices of whom they want their electors to send to congress) the nation is in dominated by the church. Goshen, however, is also noteworthy for its parallel systems of law enforcement, with both a national militia (descended from the Southern People's Liberation Army) and a "knightly board". Goshen prefers to leverage the services of independent knights and reiters, formerly sworn to the superpowers, for mediating disputes between councils and counties. This is a very attractive offer, especially for older knights who wish to enter a kind of "retirement". Goshen's independent knights often hail from UNICEF or the United Way due to the region being further away from their zones of control and firmly held under the Red Cross. Speaking of crosses, Goshen is famous for its yearly Victory Day celebrations which commemorate the triumph of the old Dixie armies over the Black Cross in the American War. Celebrations typically consist of work battalions, dressed up in Collapse Era uniforms, dragging replica Black Cross flags through the mud, culminating in their public burning. Victory Day is also noteworthy for the flying of flags of those nations and foreign militias that aided Dixie in the conflict. As those states no longer exist today, a Goshen town or city on Victory Day is one of the last places on Earth one might see many 21st century flags still flown. Back north one of the descendants of Old Exurbia, now known as the Land of Canaan, can be found. Still based around its old quasi-capital of Tecumseh (former Columbus). The history of Canaan is just as off kilter and curious as its predecessor. The Exurbians had always been a peculiar deviation away from the communalists they were inspired by, attempting a far more "pure" framework trending towards generalized anarchy alongside a kind of American cultural revolution. A people carried aloft as much by an affinity for witchcraft and new age syncretism as they were by their grungecore "i'm playing a riotgrrrl track in a blasted out shopping mall" war of extermination against fascism. As such it is only fitting that it met an equally punk end. Which is to say that one day the men came home from the frontier, turned their guns on everyone and declared they would be doing full anarchism now. All in all it's been pretty successful actually. Canaan has maintained, for roughly 80 years now, more or less a vacuity of any form of government outside of the People's Guard. Beyond that, among the other Ecumenes it is also noted for its relative lack of any hard religious structures. The "Hexurbian" witches of the olden days gave way to a kind of neo-neo-pentecostal campbellism, where much like everything else the existence of discrete denominations was dismantled by force. A form of highly charismatic primitive Christianity dominates in this area, influencing the social norms and sensibilities of the people, even those unaffiliated among them. In terms of foreign relations everything is carried out by the People's Guard which maintains a rotating roster of diplomatic posts for its officers. Despite not being able to predict who you're talking to when conducting relations with the Canaanites the neighboring states have maintained long lasing positive relations with the anti-state, in part a continuation of the unofficial detente that existed between Exurbia and the pretender governments from back in the Hayes era. Speaking of Hayes and the Chicago Government, while that particular pretender no longer exists, Chicago itself is a major power in the new North America. Influenced by the region's overlapping periods of control under the Chicago Government, the Quasi-Islamic National Rejuvenation Government, and the Sabaothic Host of the Prophetess Daniela and her followers, what emerged from the wake of the collapse era was the Land of Shiloh. An experiment in confessionalism, Shiloh's government reflects the diversity of its population. A form of power-sharing is the name of the game, with the Shiloh constitution having built in administrative carveouts for Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Unitarians, Sabaothists, and the Baha'is. Although Shiloh is a state dominated by the public interchange of and horse-trading between different religious communities, above all of them exists a sort of public quasi-cult dedicated to the image and mission of the former United States. This is in large part due to the significant influence that various pretender governments, from Chicago, to the PNRG, to the South Dakota state government of the old 130th Division, played in laying the groundwork for its founding. President Hayes in particular is considered a folk hero of immense renown, for both preventing the fall of the region to fascism and stopping a potential nuclear exchange in the 2040s that would have devastated the continent. A somewhat amusing cultural divergence in this region, though often unremarked upon, was the effect that the ration-passport system of the Chicago Government played in shaping demographics. The Hayes era system (and its carry-ons during the later collapse) unintentionally encouraged diverse cohabitation of houses and compounds and what were known as "breadline marriages" in order to maximize access to goods and dispenser regions through the ration system. In effect everyone sharing a house or living on a street became a "family". Across the Midwest it becomes difficult to trace ancestry back beyond the 2030s. A person's last name thus might be Mattox because their "ancestors" all lived in the same building on Mattox street a century and a half ago. A similar expression of this phenomena can also be found in the region once known as Colorado, though to a more muted degree. Among the former states of the Texan led provisional government now stands the Land of Samaria. Samaria is descended from the "ProvGov" as it was called, more specifically from a special agreement between the Texan and Mexican security and intelligence services that during the later collapse period formed the basis of a multinational program to respond to the regional collapse, desertification and devastation of the gulf coast, and ensuing refugee waves, a program that would survive both nations. The formal dissolution of the remaining American pretender government in Austin would come shortly after its last motion, to begin the movement of millions of people from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mexico to the region now known as Samaria. After everything America might die but her people would survive if the Texans had anything to say about it. The Promised Land of the Texan and Louisianan pinewoods and oak cut prairies would prove to be the perfect place to begin again, and in time even the abandoned cities of Dallas and Fort Worth would be repopulated and reforged to serve as the current capitol of Samaria. Surprisingly retaining many of the institutions of the collapse era, Samaria is a federal republic with a presidency and a unicameral congress, though operating under a church-county system similar to neighboring Goshen. The success of the resettlement program gave the people of Samaria a sense of good government and the belief that a state properly staffed by the competent (and most importantly the virtuous) will always prevail. This means that the Samaritan government tends to be staffed by competent and well oriented people promoted not due to personal ambition or typical mechanistic meritocratic means, but by being forced into ever higher positions of responsibility by the ever watchful community, often beginning with the chittering of elderly women at the front rows of one's church or the murmuring of men at the local social club. As they like to say, no good Samaritan goes unpunished. This has also led to the phenomenon in Samaria known as "Republican Nobility", a kind of informal class position among the administrative upper crust of the state (and their immediate family) who due to the popular belief that their position was a result of their moral character are simply treated far better by all of society and are often encouraged to flaunt their status. A man who is rich because he owns property is considered an accident of history in Samarian culture and has no right to boast, whereas one who has served the people faithfully is believed to deserve to be rich and often made so. Far up north around Lake Winnipeg is the Land of Galilee. Along with its sisterland of Sidon to the west, Galilee is of importance less for any particular difference in its government, but due to its ruling myth and recent history. Like most of the ecumenical states in former Canada its origins can be traced back to the fall of the NATO regime in the country, and in the case of Galilee the beginning of it as well. Galilee stands at the crossroads of many mystical events in the recent history of the continent, having been the site of the Prophetess Daniela's invasion of Canada which sparked the occupation in the first place. Galilee, like most Canadian states is known for a sizeable though not majority Sabaothic population, the religion having experienced a boost in the region after the fall of the faith's own personal Babylon. What Galilee is more often known for however is the story of Terrance and the Miraculous Blade. In the latter half of the 21st century as the NATO regime and its local RCMP proxies increased in the intensity of their barbarism against the Canadian people, crackdowns would begin on all public gatherings in an attempt to break up hostile cells. Terrance Gauthier (otherwise known as St. Terrance) was a lay preacher, one of the many kinds of "wildflower" spokesmen that emerged at the time as an act of defiance following NATO's retreat from Alberta. The wildflowers were a broad classification of dissident, including everything from religious preachers, to communists, to people who supported the return of democracy, to simply anyone the military government didn't like. It is unknown if Terrance was originally a religious wildflower, but he eventually became one, leading to the local RCMP detachment to believe he was involved in or otherwise knew about the location of several dissident cells. He was not and did not. Repeated failures to make any headway by surveilling Terrance caused his observers to become frustrated and spiteful, changing plans first to assaulting Terrance to get information out of him to eventually simply looking for an excuse to kill him outright. Everything from having his house seized to his church closed down and fellow parishioners arrested did not bring Terrance to violence. Finally, an attempt to encourage him to assault an officer by pulling him into the middle of the road and beating him backfired and resulted in him running away, leading to the Mounties chasing after him and shooting him in the leg. As Terrance began to bleed out in the middle of a clearing the Mounties surrounded him with their weapons raised. Terrance raised his hand into the air, which one interpreted as him having finally broken and offering to give him whatever information they believed he might have. Instead, Terrance told them that he would show them a miracle. Looking up to the sky he said: "Lord, not that I might gain, or bargain for my life with your power, but that they who persecute me might be saved. That if you will that they might know you by my faith. For you are the author of life, and if it be your will then this air though it remain in sight and touch air will be in truth a blade that should I grab it would cut my hand." Terrance would grasp the air above his head. His palm would be sliced open and start to bleed. The Mounties would panic and shoot him seven times. The final collapse of Canada would mean Terrance would have the last laugh, and indeed the story goes that at least a couple of those who witnessed the event would later switch sides, with their testimonies being why the story was popularized in the first place. So, he arguably obtained all his goals. He's considered the national hero of modern-day Galilee and the saint-of-the-nation by the region's Catholic and Lutheran believers. Finally there is the Land of Sidon. A recent arrival in the history of Post-American states, it is of great renown due to its ongoing rivalry with neighboring Cascadia. Formally "The United States of America", Cascadia is what remains of the once great Sacramento Government and its ruling body COMPOR. Based around the former military regime in PNW and the Seattle Green Zone, the remnant state has succeeded in solidifying its rule, due to celebrate the 400th year anniversary of the USA soon! A unitary government despite the name, Cascadia can be best described as a "cop-ocracy" in service to the cartels and corporations which dominated the old government, now reforged into what are effectively a kind of ancien nobility, an anachronism wrapped in another anachronism. Sidon is dedicated to the destruction of what remains of the USA, or what it perceives to be a mockery of the world that was lost during the collapse. The cold war between Sidon and Cascadia is playing out primarily in the city of Vancouver, which remains for now outside the reach of either power. A cat and mouse game is afoot between both sides, constantly attempting to outmaneuver and undo the other's inroads into the free city, which all sides know will fall to one side eventually. Among the ecumenes of North America a phenomenon has emerged in recent years, that of the "New Believers", those individuals who come from secular or explicitly atheist families going back 3 or more generations that have at least outwardly converted to a local religion following the rise of the new system. To be clear there were seismic shifts and trends in religiosity in America during the collapse era, though a sizeable chunk of the population remained otherwise stable in previously held secularity as is to be expected, operating as normal under the new system as it gelled. However, trends have been noticed in recent years, especially by those who collect the stats, of segments of the population that did not shift over the past century, but which have now experienced seemingly spontaneous changes in outward religiosity after the new order became entrenched, often corresponding to areas or among those institutions where doing so would be more beneficial. The rise of New Believers is more pronounced in Shiloh for instance with its confessional appointment system, than in Goshen where there is a whole parallel secular state. In recent years these New Believers have experienced a degree of mistrust and wariness accorded to them by some segments of the population, though this has yet to escalate beyond the level of a kind of cultural background radiation. As a result it is not unheard of for New Believers to find themselves needing to express an even more intense religiosity and loyalty to compensate or otherwise "prove" themselves to their detractors. Outside of the ecumenes and Cascadia there is not much to note about the rest of the continent with two exceptions. The first is the Heartland Commonwealth, a state stretching from former Utah to Kansas which considers itself the legal and spiritual successor to the Chicago Government, though having dropped the pretenses of being the sole American state. Known for their massive solar powered fixed wing transport planes that lazily circuit the whole perimeter of their nation and the pilotless caravans that move across the plains, the Heartlanders are in an almost romantic recreation of an American ideal interested in little more than friendly neighbors and profitable trade. There is also the San Fran Commune, an quasi-outpost of the Seventh International on American shores. They, however, will have to be touched on later. THE SINITIC META-CIVILIZATION As it turns out the fall of the People's Republic during the collapse was not enough to get communism out of the blood of the Chinese people. As any visitor to the far east will tell you, that particular quirk is here to stay. Today every Chinese state is officially some form of communist or socialist, and all claim to be the (or at least a) successor to the People's Republic. There is, amusingly, a legal continuity of government regime of the old PRC still operating in Taiwan, and the ruling party of the island is on paper at least well within its rights to claim that it is the CPC, but to be frank nobody really cares. The 30 states of the Chinese people represent their own kind of world, all viewing each other as reflections of the same shared legacy of "Chinese Civilizational Socialism", though descended from different institutions, organs, and movements of the old empire that once dominated the land. The Third People's Republic, based out of its capital of Xiong'an, is a unitary state that emerged out of a collapse era stewardship program established by China's major state enterprises. Headed by the Continuing Committee, a descendant of the CPC Central Committee now staffed primarily by technical specialists and a consultative simulated intelligence that runs the economy, the TPR is often described as a kind of "People's Technocracy". Despite its heavily centralized state apparatus and potential to leverage immense amounts of power domestically, the TPR prefers to leave its people alone, operating under the belief that the continuing committee should only exist as a caretaker administration for a society that no longer needs to be ruled. To this end it has sought to make its regime at once flexible and ever present while also unobtrusive and has just recently abolished all taxation within its borders. The TPR is also known for its romanticism of early collapse era China, which it sees as the height of Chinese civilization both in terms of reach and cultural attainment. The TPR maintains a great deal of influence to its north, in the lands of former Mongolia and Siberian Russia, where Chinese settler states dominate. South of the TPR is the realm known as the Prefectural Confederation. Best described as an anarcho-syndicalist state, the Confederation is composed of a number of arcology communes and organizing committees composed of trade union representatives. This arrangement was the result of two main factors, first was the resettlement of large chunks of the coastal population to new inland linear arcologies as the sea level rose, and the second was what were known as the "two card reforms". An attempt in the 21st century to transition away from reliance on enterprise unions, the ACFTU embarked on a program of expanding trade union participation by forming local sector unions to exist alongside enterprise-wide unions. These were known as the "two card reforms" due to the long period when many Chinese workers would be a part of two separate unions in the same work place and thus had two union cards. The success of the reforms was mixed, but it took hold deep in Jiangsu and Shandong where climate change would actually accelerate the transition in workplace structures as people had to physically move and restart their lives in the new linear arcologies. With the fall of the PRC the local workplace committees would strike, coopting the administrative structure given to them and organizing the network of arcologies along the lines of a dual communal congress and trade union senate structure. Today the Prefectural Confederation is seen as a kind of intermediate zone, largely uninvolved in the affairs of its neighbors and thought of as a region separating the north from the Malkutic states to the south. Before we go further south we will return to the north (and then the west briefly) to speak about the Liaoyang Ecological Secretariat. Descended from the United Front Work Group Coordinating Committee for An Ecological Socialist Civilization (try saying that five times fast), the LES was originally a regional sub-board representing Liaoning, Jilin, and North Korea. While both the PRC and DPRK would fall (though the latter not before unifying the peninsula) the board would not, maintaining a stranglehold on the region. The modern-day secretariat, which still calls itself a mere secretariat due to officially waiting for the legitimate PRC government to reassert itself, is most known for its ambitious program of ecological rehabilitation and radical self-reliance. While sometimes amusingly called an "Eco-Juche" state few can argue against its effectiveness, with its stunning resuscitation of the continent's bee population earning it the other nickname "The Apiary". The Secretariat is also known for its ongoing program of settling Outer Manchuria and the Amur Basin and subverting local governments to bring them more in line with its long-term program of creating a "Northeast People's Bioregion". It may be worth checking back in at the turn of the 23rd century to see how that plays out. In the meantime, the Secretariat currently inspires a lot of thrillers based around its clandestine operations. To the west is the aptly named Agency for the Western Domain. An intersection of two developments in late pre-collapse Chinese history, the expanding control over and resettlement of minority populations from the peripheral zones of the southwest (Zomia) and the security regimes established in the western territories of the old empire. During the collapse era local minorities began to take on greater roles in the administration of the local military apparatus due to the explosion in military enlistment as an avenue of social mobility. The resettled peoples of Yunnan such as the Lisu increasingly found themselves under the control of co-ethnic garrisons supported by the capital and party committees, as were the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tu and so on. As the PRC waned the mission of these local ad-hoc regimes continued, ultimately coalescing under the army and police structures that they all shared. The Agency for the Western Domain then is a latter-day Protectorate General to Pacify the West as it were, though its size and complexity dwarfs that of even some old dynasties. History might not repeat but it does often rhyme. Of course the agency is self-governing, and over the generations has ironically become rather thoroughly Islamized. An exceptionally proud nation, it maintains the air that it is the bulwark of Chinese civilization, the shield that protects the heartland (that it in theory is still beholden to) from the vicissitudes of the outside world. It also makes money hand over first in trade, having seized control of almost all of the major overland transport infrastructure of old Eurasia, but that's neither here nor there. South China is most known for its system called the Malkutate. Its full name is the All-China Apostolic Malkutate. An evolution of the successful program to Sinicize Christianity, the Malkutate is at once an imperial church and a sort of memetic or cultural space. Derived from Malkuth or "Kingdom", the counter-oriented sefirot to Keter or "Crown", Malkuth comes from creation itself, governs it and gives it sensibility, and exists in, through, and among the material world and human person when it reflects and is oriented towards God. It is also the mediative sefirot that in its reflection connects all of God's emanations back to the top. In Christian Kabbalistic traditions it is manifested in the unity of mankind with God and Heaven as the Bride through the Church, and the Church as the community of all believers living, dead, and eternally alive (the saints). The implications of such a concept were seized on by the post-PRC communist church, to rhetorically justify and create a framework for a kind of "bottom-up" society, one beginning at the communal level, at the workshop, and the work battalion, directing itself towards the end of the salvation of the Chinese people. The Malkutitic system is also known for its re-nestling of Chinese cosmology in this new era. For instance, the age-old idea in Chinese spirituality that Heaven or God is that which, grounding being itself, possesses a will that attempts to unify a humanity that is not naturally or intentionally separate from it but only contingently so towards itself as having been wholly expressed in history with the reconciliation of God with man in the person of Jesus. Likewise that immortality, the ultimate aim and telos of fusus, the subject, or the universal logic and that which it ultimately trends towards, is fully realized by and in Christ as the Resurrection. Malkutism essentially creates for itself a space to realize the re-establishment of a neo classical Chinese cosmology sublimated into an Abrahamic typological framework and thus a re-enchantment of Chinese civilization, with a Communistic society and a Christian cosmology as their final form. A common motif found in Malkutic states reflects this in a snapshot image of the big dipper in the four phases or seasons around an image of the three heavens (three circles expanding outwards) while four stars (no longer representing distinct classes as they did on the old PRC flag but the totality of the Chinese people) trailing behind the tail. Similarities have been remarked upon between many Malkutate patterns and the patterns of the old Ming era magic square banners, though this is believed to be a kind of convergent re-development of a related aesthetic style rather than an intentional move. Malkutic states are, reflecting the broader culture, more or less universally Workers' republics: self-governing communal federations often with a ceremonial party on top. The federations give way beyond the state level to the Ecclesiastical Conference which itself acts as a consultative organ back to the communes and parish-cadres: a circular system. Among the Malkutates themselves though two are often mentioned the most. The Sichuan and Huanan Workers' Republics. Generally considered the "elder brothers" or sometimes "elder brother and sister" (which is which depends on who you ask) of South China, these two states are the ones that their cousins generally entrust the maintenance of foreign relations and the region's standing army (an exception among world powers as noted earlier) to. THE CARIBO-MEXICAN TECHNOCRACIES Those who have visited the great states of the Caribbean describe it as a place somewhat out of time, a vision of a future that never arrived. Dominated by the twin republics of Santo Domingo and Centroamerica, the Caribbean technocracies emerged out of the alliance formed between the rising Latin American security states and the ICS regime established to loot the former United States. Truly incalculable amounts of wealth flowed into the region, which was kept aloft out of the interest of the UN led order during the early years of the collapse. Wealth when properly managed begets more wealth, such is the clarion call of the capitalist, and indeed it did. Today the two republics are some of the richest parts of the globe, their technocratic and highly professional elite in service to a unified banking regime. A microcosm of the perfected global market as envisioned by the Rockefellers and Carnegies long ago. The Latins would claim to have at last perfected the free market, though such a statement would most definitely cause their neighbors to the south to bristle. To t