Excerpt from 06-19: A Compact and Convenient (and humourous!) Guide to the Dust Wars of the Age of Steel by Serena Aitmatova, pp. 36-40. 1928, Gristlebury University Press.
The current calendar for measuring chronology in the realm of Midlandia originated with the Big Turning Away of year zero, with the renouncement of the Age of Shard's polytheism and advanced computational machinery and the subsequent destruction of all such machines. Much of Midlandia's terrestrial Occident became monotheistic centred around the Solar Church of the Light God Woltan, a Great Old One aspect of things like energy and fire and the hearth and lots of good agreeable things people use to do fun things like bake bread or give no goodniks the chair. Rumour has it that one surviving God Engine is in the care of Sun King Ruprekt and his bloodline while yet more might be kicking--either in hidden locations or in other realms--but for now let us assume that the party line about the silly things is true and the weird truther invalids are mostly talking of things they saw while emulsified on a mix of mercury and goat urine.
Either way, the destruction of thinking machines marked the beginning of the Age of Stones in which a small group of warlords with some vague mealymouthed understanding of the old world exploited a vastly larger group of vassals eating gruel and sipping through mushy straws while the Lords sipped effervescent lemonade drinks in dormant nuclear power cooling towers turned castles. This would carry on in varying levels until some time in the 1800s where a pair of explorers discovered the giant fossilized ceramic skeleton of a large architeuthic creature in an otherwise unremarkable sepulchre. When grinding up the bones of the skeleton, they found that certain properties in the marrow of the creature could expand consciousness and allow for a sort of cheery sparkle of eldritch existential dread in the eye of the user. And so began the Age of Steel, as human lifespans rose and consciousness grew and art and music flourished and thousands of scrappy mad scientist types started rubbing bits of metal together to make up for their sore lack of rubbing bits of genitalia together.
Of course, demand for such technology, and the vast fantastical splendour it naturally took on caused shortages of every conceivable resource. Several excellent thinkers--Edouard Lysandre, Allesandra Novichenko and virtually every nation elder from the autochthonous collectives of the Borealis colony known as The Many--all warned that such consumption needed to stop flatout in favour of a more egalitarian world, which promptly resulted in many of them mysteriously passing away of natural causes involving four bullet wounds to the chest. The science men instead favoured patchjob solutions--gimmick engines producing great microplastic miasmas, perpetually constipated subterranean roads for motor cars, and the glamourization of eating bugs or hot water rationing--which naturally did essentially nothing but make the oppressed class more cramped and miserable. So, as it always does with consumptive capital, they all had a war.
The old monarchies and their courts of inventors sparred relentlessly with the plucky up and coming Duist school formed by the ever-cherubic and mysteriously elected Kaiser Lukas. The latter was especially curious for inviting back a form of polytheism and actively making an effort to make technologies less hideously consumptive and make cities more, well, livable for its citizens. Trench stalemates bogged the continent for a hundred years. Forests burned and seas boiled off. The principalities of the south and east were fruitlessly antagonized. The Many and other peoples of colonized lands were subject to increasingly austere conditions and dehumanizing exploitation for their oil fields and possible Dust mines, sparking a series of plucky rebellions resulting in the dire war on two fronts that eventually all but undid the monarchy. Queer and transgender citizens of the Coalition were branded enemies of the state, communists, Duist traitors, pederasts and above all improperly doing their bit because of the small amounts of Dust in their affirming tinctures and tonics. Dust was at stake, yes--these are the Dust wars, you nonplussed ninny--but also oil, fresh water, farmland, and of course that ever precious resource of hearts and minds. With more of the youth embracing Lysandre and Novichenko as martyrs--someone coins the catchy term "communism" for this conglomerate of executed mad geniuses--and Spymaster Bennett Korszak's Humanist League reduced to a cabal of eunuch wet-blanket moderates after his death in a car accident in his home march of Polonius, it was time for the monarchies to employ a radical new strategy. And by a radical new strategy, I mean kill an absolute Royal shitload--as the scientific term goes--of people.
The circumstances leading to the creation of the Coalition's most treasured possession, the wasteful implement of mass terror and bloodshed politely called the atom bomb, are tightly classified. Historians have a few working theories. Carstairs (1923) stipulates it was a closely guarded ancestral secret that somehow survived patrilineally from the pre-Big Turn Age of Shards, while Smith (1919) posits it was a concoction of noted Libertatian communist, recluse, and disgraced court inventor Abraham Vandergraaf, a further evil of the communists. The far less sexy explanation (which usually holds true) is that some cadre of particularly sadistic court inventors used some mix of ancient scriptures and modern (that is to say, persistently malfunctioning and inefficient but rather whimsical) Coalition engineering to take great quantities of toxic effluvium and package it as a big kaboom. The manufacturing alone left several provinces with blighted crops and tainted water, and the vast number of hard labourers involved in the project mostly died off or at best became chronically ill and totally infertile. Many of these people were also children to boot, as the Coalition pushed past more and more labour loopholes because "no one wanted to work" (get crushed to death in a Dust mine, lose their legs to gangrene in a trench or of course catch the wasting sickness given off by the bomb's poisonous goop). But ultimately they prevailed and subsequently leveled half of Alliance territory.
Unfortunately.
The "victory conditions" were actually a lot more uncertain than either side cares to admit. The Coalition poured many a crown and hangman into beefing up their "terrific and outstanding success bringing freedom to Midlandia for King and Country" which later led to the political advancement of a particularly vocal bureaucrat named Amos Wainwright Delmsloy who would become War Minister and then Prime Minister. Delmsloy created the fascist school, which never really took hold as broadly in Arthuria as it would for the far more egregiously ruined Durandal and Ilen, but there is indeed a reason Ruprekt pardoned yet another 100,000 fascist bombers, mercenaries and gun men just this last year of 1929, the infernal garbage scholarships of racial science and sexual-gendered inversion are allowed propagation and a "marketplace of ideas", and Delmsloy has been elected for a fourth term despite the dubious fine print that supposedly makes that legal. And what about our dear friends in the fledgling Duism Alliance? Well, beyond vowing a nebulous "revenge" against the "Great Apostates of the Coalition"...quite a lot, actually. The Kaiser would double down on social safety nets and shelters for the displaced refugees, nurture conditions in the remaining central cities of Immerreich and eventually cleaning up the irradiated scorch where Kraussheim once stood, and largely retreated into a state of care for his people. His Klaver Bosch Process for producing artificial Dust from agricultural biowaste seemingly ensured no Dust Wars would come again. Embargoes on steel and oil and the scarcity of non-renewables led to him spotting a convenient loophole and coupling tried-and-true mechanics with replicated transmundane flesh to produce the war machines we call prawns, the infamous Fleishwaffe. The Alliance became increasingly difficult to see as barbaric when it seemed one step more optimistic and happy than the Coalition.
Well, sort of. See, this Potemkin Utopia was of course driven by the sort of benevolent overzealous theocratic nightmare cult that is Duism, which need I remind readers largely functions on eugenics, druggings, chemical weapons and if certain reports are to be believed mass human sacrifice (although I may be breaking my own rule about truthers here). The two principle blocs of Midlandia would erupt into an endless series of proxy wars throughout the farthest reaches of the world--border wars, bush wars, civil wars, guerilla wars, railway wars, stratospheric wars, ferronautic wars and of course who could forget the hamburger wars. When it comes to these, most citizens of both locales oscillate between a placid cognitive schadenfreude and an eschatological armchair general sword-logic prophesying yet another Dust War, which of course would be just a slight inconvenience not least of all due to likely having to rapidly change the terminology around the Last Great Dust War to the...well, the Other Great Dust War? The One With The Bomb? See, this is why historians are largely an anti-war lot!
These fears became substantially less easy to compartmentalize when the Immerese sacked the Ilenian island of Larnoniki, multiple Coalition stratocolonies and eventually the borders of Arthuria and Durandal. As much as Delmsloy would like to sensationalize about another Dust War that would be met with fire and fury, the supercontinent is more likely settling in for a new kind of pressurized but no less bloody phony war. The technologies and dynamism of the post Dust War years likely spell something very different from generations past, and part of me direly hopes that the Coalition has thoroughly understood the horrific needlessness of the bomb. We need to be clear though, that there is to be another war and we are indeed already in it.
And what of the newcomers to our world order? We're familiar with the three principle ideologies of Midlandia: the uproariously glorious and discretely murderous iron brace of the fascists, the dynamic, youthful, optimistic death cult of the Duists, and the once-hopeful cheery-eyed liberal stooges of the Humanists. A fourth school, communists, have long been disregarded as moronic upstarts who are simultaneously weak-minded treehuggers with no libidos and terrifying world shakers who have decimated an increasingly erroneous and inflated number of innocent lives (pay no attention to this number's inclusion of such groups as, but not limited to: extrajudicial Tsarist murder squads in the Syvian Independence War, invading Arthurian troops in the same war, roughly all war dead killed bafflingly by the *Tsarists* during the Dust War, families starved by embargoes during the Duresque Civil War, civilian and Coalition deaths killed in the Borealisian Oil Uprising and in general any war involving the Many, and some workers killed in a fire at a small sausage factory in Gristlesbury--the last of which is blamed on communists because a university book club was holding a meet in a nearby community center to discuss Novichenko's A Night of Swine and Roses). Communism is very popular with the youngsters, however, and the state is taking increasingly large sums of money making sure they'll quietly give up on this pursuit. If the Porter Society has anything to say about it, however, this effort may be quite challenging.
If you've strolled up Cainhursdt Boulevard any time in the last five years or so, you've probably seen at least one wanted poster for black-cloaked, leering-masked felons wanted for an interchangeable crossword puzzle of crimes. These have in recent years been accompanied by frequent propaganda flyers, radio broadcasts and...stage plays? I want to say stage plays? Yes, a pot-pourri of media concerning the sinister transmundane highwaymen known as the Porter Society. Terrorists to some and folk heroes to others, the ornately-clad raiders pursue esoteric rituals in flooded districts and strike without mercy upon aeronautical vessels of the Coalition or the Alliance alike. Every time they vanish without a trace, skirmishing with advanced technology and boons one could only describe as supernatural--so much so that most eyewitness accounts are given hush money or disregarded as quacks. The average Coalition citizen doesn't have much knowledge of the Porters--as with many other elements of geopolitics, the whole surveillance state and all that jizzity jazz--but the state really wants you to know that they are profaners of all the things polite and Woltan-fearing Coalitionsmen despise: sorceries, anarchy, polyamory, that sort of thing. We can be sure they are the perverted scoundrels they are rumoured to be. They are undoubtedly communist. Rumours on their origins range from everything from a fringe group of isolationist polytheists who survived the Age of Shards to the strike teams of a Syvian black ops unit developed in a secret arctic megacity. Some know them as pirates, others as witches. Me, I call them a different name.
I call them the last best hope for Midlandia.