Fallout: Middle Kingdom

Timeline and Factions

0. Points of Divergence and Timeline

1940s-1950s

1943–1948

Historically, Claude Shannon spent WWII at Bell Labs doing cryptographic and communication work. After the war he publishes “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, which defines entropy, channel capacity, and the bit as a unit of information.

In this timeline, his 1943–44 mathematical work on switching networks and probability gets noticed by Manhattan Project physicists hunting for talent in neutron transport, implosion symmetry, and early Monte Carlo–style simulations of nuclear detonations. Instead of being kept mostly at Bell Labs, he’s seconded for long stretches to Los Alamos and then to postwar weapons labs, where the priority is:

• modelling shock waves and critical masses,

• improving initiation reliability, and

• analysing early data from nuclear tests.

By 1945, he is well known in a tiny classified circle for putting probabilities on everything in a bomb. He never turns those ideas outward into a general, public theory of communication.

In 1946 to 48, Shannon drafts a long internal memo on “noise and reliability in fission-trigger networks,” buried in a weapons-physics archive. Bell Labs is still interested in a unified communication theory, but their “Shannon” is now mostly a ghost. They get occasional consultancy with no full treatise.

So in 1948, the Bell System Technical Journal prints a scattering of specialized articles on modulation, switching, and PCM. There is no “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” no canonical measure of “information,” no neat entropy measure. Telephony, telegraphy, radar, and radio then all evolve as separate, craft-heavy fields:

• telephony folks talk about signal-to-noise ratios and empirical coding tricks;

• radar folks talk about pulse width, PRF, and clutter;

• cryptographers talk about frequency analysis and keyspaces.

Everyone feels that a deeper unification lurks under all these, but no one has the math to prove it. Standards then remain parochial, proprietary, and analog.

1945–1952

The war ends with nuclear weapons and radar firmly in play. The conceptual world of engineers is still pre-Shannon. Long-distance telephone networks rely on analog carrier systems and crude error-control. Ultra-high-frequency radars, sonar, and early electronic warfare gear exist, but their design is driven by empirical tables, not capacity theorems. Computers like ENIAC and its successors are built primarily for ballistics tables and nuclear calculations, not general information processing.

Signal intelligence (SIGINT) remains archived on physical media, with reels of tape, photographic film of oscilloscope traces, and stacks of paper logs. No good theoretical justification yet exists for how much can be extracted from all that noise. Both the US and the USSR invest heavily in analog and hybrid analog-digital electronics, still convinced that more hardware and more recordings confer more advantage.

Giant analog data hoards lay in wait for Robert House to later mine.

1945–1958

While engineers have missed out on their unifying theory, the Catholic Church is very clear on its great evil. Prewar, Pope Pius XI had already condemned atheistic communism in Divini Redemptoris (1937), presenting Bolshevism as a systemic negation of God and Christian civilization. Pius XII, who becomes pope in 1939, gets shaped by a deep fear of communism. Michael Phayer and others have put forward thaht his choices during WWII and the early Cold War were driven above all by the perceived threat of Marxism to the Church’s mission.

Now that anti-communism gets weaponized forward.

1945–1950

As the Iron Curtain descends, Pius XII looks at the new communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China and reads them as atheistic, materialist, and determined to uproot the Church through the lens of Divini Redemptoris. The Vatican’s diplomatic files show constant worry that worker unrest in Western Europe will become fertile soil for communist parties.

His Holiness thus concludes that the Church must:

1. Strengthen doctrinal clarity against “new opinions” in theology that seem too accommodating to modern currents;

2. Prepare a comprehensive doctrinal response to atheistic communism itself, not just ad hoc condemnations.

This is the context where Humani Generis (1950) arrives.

1950

In 1950 Pius XII issues Humani Generis, the encyclical “concerning some false opinions which threaten to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine.” OTL, it targeted various strands of the “new theology,” evolution, and philosophical trends that seemed to relativize dogma.

Here, Pius XII explicitly links these “false opinions” to the danger that Catholics might soften their opposition to atheistic communism. He warns that certain theological currents blur the line between Christian social teaching and Marxist materialism. He further suggests that doctrinal fuzziness in seminaries could make clergy less resistant to communist collaboration.

His act hardens Roman suspicion against Nouvelle Théologie circles, who will later align with Bugnini and strong reform elements. Humani Generis also gets a boost as the intellectual preamble to a future, more comprehensive treatment of communism.

1952–1958

Behind the scenes, Pius XII instructs the Holy Office and some carefully selected theologians to draft a systematic doctrinal text on atheistic communism. This text must tie together the teachings of Divini Redemptoris, his own postwar addresses and “Five Peace Points” on just peace and totalitarianism, and the experience of churches under Soviet rule.

This draft is never published during his lifetime. Instead, it is filed as a schema to be considered by a future ecumenical council. Other notes accompany it urging that the Church’s freedom against totalitarian atheism must be a major theme.

At the same time, Pius XII worries about the trajectory of liturgical experimentation and “new theology.” He quietly curates a generation of bishops and consultors with more conservative instincts. These may accept some pastoral adaptation, but always mistrust sweeping innovation.

So when the Pope dies in 1958, he leaves a Roman Curia oriented toward policing theology, a concrete anti-communist council schema in the drawer, and a personnel map that sidelines some of the movers who in OTL would make Bugnini’s liturgical machine so powerful. He then dies having stacked the deck for a Vatican II that will later be much more explicit about communism, and much less Bugnini-driven, than in OTL.

1947–1959

In 1947, Francisco Franco pushes through the Law of Succession to the Headship of the State, declaring Spain a kingdom with himself as head of state for life and reserving to himself the right to designate his successor as king or regent. Behind the public ceremony, Franco’s tightest circle—especially Luis Carrero Blanco—start talking about a safe successor who owes everything to Franco personally.

Through the 1950s, Franco watches Don Juan (the Bourbon claimant in exile) with deep mistrust, convinced the old dynasty would open Spain too quickly to liberalism and socialists. He grows closer to his son-in-law Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú, who is politically pliable, unburdened by traditional royal networks, and closely connected to the regime’s technocratic-clerical elites.

Quietly, Franco allows his inner circle to float the idea that Spain needs a new dynasty born of Crusaders, not the old one that failed. Nothing is formalized yet, but by the late 1950s the Army, the Church, and business elites are being prepared for the idea that Franco might found a “House of Villaverde”: a National-Catholic monarchy grafted directly onto the regime.

Later on, it will be Cristóbal instead of Juan Carlos who inherits Franco’s structure and keeps Spain as a long-term National-Catholic ally of the hardline Vatican.

1949–1958

Up to the late 1950s, China runs almost identical to OTL

• 1949: The People’s Republic of China is proclaimed; Mao’s CPC wins the civil war.

• 1950: The PRC and USSR sign the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, making China a formal ally and client in the socialist camp, with large-scale Soviet aid for industrialization.

• Early 1950s: Soviet experts flood into China; joint projects in heavy industry, railways, machinery, and weapons create the backbone of China’s first Five-Year Plan.

1949–1955

• Mao is firmly in command; the Party consolidates power through land reform, purges, and campaigns against “counter-revolutionaries.”

• The PLA becomes the central institution of the new state, with Soviet doctrine heavily influencing its early structure and training.

• Beijing leans heavily on Moscow for technical expertise, credit, and models of centralized planning.

None of this diverges yet, but it sets up the stakes. All the hardware for a top-down Great Leap is being assembled.

1955–1958

Mid-1950s,

• Collectivization accelerates,

• People’s communes and workpoints systems are piloted in some regions,

• Mao becomes increasingly enamoured of mass campaigns and “walking on two legs” (agriculture + industry everywhere).

• Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Chen Yun are all still loyal revolutionaries, but they have:

  • more exposure to actual production data,

  • more contact with pragmatic Soviet planners, and

  • a growing sense that Mao’s voluntarism needs guardrails.

By 1958, when the Great Leap Forward is launched, all the players are on the board:

• Mao with his vision of accelerated communization and steel production;

• a Soviet-aided planning apparatus capable of enforcing catastrophically unrealistic targets;

• and a cohort of pragmatists (Liu, Zhou, Deng, Chen Yun, PLA commanders) who will later manage the fallout very differently from OTL, turning Mao into a symbolic patriarch rather than launching a Cultural Revolution.

The 1960s will see famine, coalition fracture, and the early crystallization of Beifang as a yeoman-industrial North. Structurally, everything needed to make that divergence plausible is already in place by the end of the 1950s.

1958–1962

1958

In 1958, Mao pushes through the Great Leap Forward with people’s communes, backyard steel, “grain to the sky,” and frantic attempts to industrialize the countryside. This campaign fused hyper-centralized planning, inflated output reporting, and disastrous agricultural interventions.

Local cadres over-report grain. The state requisitions based on fantasy. Labour is yanked into steel and construction. Finally, weather turns bad and famine begins.

1959

In OTL, the Lushan Conference (July–August 1959) saw Peng Dehuai’s private letter to Mao warning about the Leap leading to Mao blowing up, accusing him of forming an “anti-Party clique,” and launching the Anti-Right Deviation campaign. Peng is purged as Defense Minister, and millions of cadres are persecuted for “right deviation.”

In ATL, the facts of Peng’s letter and the famine are the same but the political situation changes:

• Before Lushan, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, and key PLA commanders have already formed a loose inner circle horrified by reports of mass starvation. Studies of local suffering circulate among them in draft form, so they can see the scale of catastrophe clearly.

• Peng’s letter is still sharp, but he is persuaded by Zhou to frame it as loyal concern for Mao’s line, not a denunciation against Mao.

At Lushan, Mao reads Peng’s letter to the Politburo, clearly angered. In closed-door sessions he demands a show of loyalty. Instead of a pile-on and purge, the core group (Liu, Zhou, Deng, Chen) intervene before the conference hardens. They acknowledge “excesses” and “distortions” of Mao’s correct line. Further, they stress that widespread famine is being caused by local misapplication and exaggerated reporting. They thus propose a small central “Adjustment Group” to “assist the Chairman in implementing his vision more scientifically.”

Mao’s pride is soothed. Peng is moved sideways without a show-trial or mass purge, but the Adjustment Group is born with Mao’s formal blessing.

1960–1961

As famine peaks (1959–61), OTL research on the Great Leap show sharp drops in grain production, mass rural mortality, and heavy diversion of labour away from harvests.

In ATL, the Adjustment Group quietly moves from mere assistance to full-blown governance. Liu Shaoqi spearheads sanzi yibao–type fixes (limited private plots, household responsibility for some output, local discretion), which in OTL appear after the famine. Here they come a bit earlier and are more systematically tied to the group’s authority. Deng Xiaoping works to restore basic incentives. Production teams have clear grain quotas, but anything above that can be sold or consumed locally. Chen Yun reintroduces rationing and realistic planning, quietly downgrading Leap targets. Above everything, Zhou Enlai orchestrates messaging: the Party is “heroically correcting leftist deviations under Chairman Mao’s wise guidance.”

Mao still signs off on major policy shifts, but now everything is signed off by the Adjustment Group. His formal powers are intact all while his operational control bleeds away.

1962

The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (January–February 1962) becomes the hinge point. OTL, Liu famously calls the catastrophe “30% natural disaster, 70% man-made,” and uses that to justify policy correction. In ATL, Mao has been pre-briefed that such candour will “stabilize the cadres and preserve his prestige.” A tiny circle including Zhou and Deng has further pre-cleared the 30/70 phrasing.

On stage, Liu explicitly quotes Mao’s own earlier warnings against “commandism” and “blind exaggeration,” framing the disaster as a betrayal of Mao’s true line by misguided zealots. Mao gives a carefully crafted speech of self-criticism focused on “insufficient supervision”—explicitly not “wrong line.” He then blesses the Adjustment Group’s corrective program.

The Party hears that they nearly drove the revolution off a cliff. Only the Chairman’s willingness to correct errors and the collective wisdom of the central leadership saved them.

Institutionally, the Chairman becomes the ideological and symbolic apex. The Adjustment Group ascends as the de facto engine of policy. No-one talks about a power shift, yet everybody behaves as if one had happened. Crucially, Mao does not feel cornered or betrayed enough to prepare for a Cultural Revolution later on.

1958–1962

In June 1958, Pius XII issues Ad Apostolorum Principis, addressed to bishops and faithful in China, explicitly condemning the communist-sponsored “Patriotic Association” and stressing that Catholics cannot accept a state-controlled “schismatic” church.

This letter is read later as the blueprint for the Council’s treatment of communism: clear lines on atheism, totalitarian control, and religious freedom. Many also read in it a prelude to the yet unpublished anti-communist schema Pius XII has had his theologians working on (from the 1950s) which maps out a full doctrinal response to Marxist-Leninist regimes.

He dies later in 1958, leaving behind a Curia deeply suspicious of any softness toward communist states. Draft texts circulate that define communism as not just one error among many, but the centrally important modern antagonist.

1958–1962

John XXIII is still elected, and he still calls an ecumenical council (announced 1959). In ATL, however, he has the benefit of baseline documents prepared by the Curia include Pius XII’s anti-communist schema. Senior staff in the Holy Office are explicitly tasked with ensuring communism is not treated with “diplomatic” silence.

In OTL, Vatican II’s silence on communism was later criticised as a dereliction, influenced by attempts at Ostpolitik (diplomacy with Eastern bloc regimes). ATL sees that internal push for silence facing a Curia that has already been primed, for years, not to let that happen.

1960–1964

Meanwhile, the USSR and PRC have quietly drifted toward open hostility. OTL scholarship on the Sino-Soviet split highlights three key drivers:

1. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization,

2. his policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, and

3. Mao’s own radical domestic line (GLF, mass mobilization).

Those drivers are present here too, but filtered through altered leadership dynamics. After the 20th Party Congress (1956) and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s cult and crimes, Mao already distrusts Moscow’s ideological direction. The Great Leap’s early stages are partly designed to show that China can blaze an independent revolutionary path instead of playing junior partner.

Post-famine, Mao’s line remains the public myth: mass mobilization, continuous revolution, suspicion of “revisionism.” Actual Chinese policy set by Liu/Zhou/Deng/Chen study Soviet planning and see value in something closer to pragmatic developmental socialism.

When Beijing denounces peaceful coexistence as capitulation, and Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization as “bourgeois revisionism,” the Maoist rhetoric in fact floats above increasingly restrained day-to-day practice in Beijing.

1960–1962

As in OTL, the USSR pulls many of its experts and advisors out of China amid ideological spats and debt disputes. Chinese propaganda replays Mao’s “lean on our own efforts” line. Internally, the Adjustment Group understands that they are now on their own, committed not to messing up again.

By 1962, Sino-Soviet relations have frozen with both sides publishing polemics, though both are also aware that open war would be suicidal.

1962–1965

In OTL, Vatican II (1962–65) produced major documents like Lumen Gentium, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae. It talked about modern errors but never explicitly condemned communism by name—a silence later regretted by some bishops and commentators.

In ATL Pius XII’s stored schema is unpacked by conservative theologians and merged with council drafts on the Church in the modern world and religious liberty. After fierce quarrels with “Ostpolitik”-minded bishops who fear reprisals in Eastern Europe, the Council passes a dedicated constitution, Contra Atheisticum Communismum. The constitution outright names Marxist-Leninist regimes as systematically violating human dignity and religious freedom, insists that “dialogue” must never obscure the Church’s duty to publicly condemn atheistic state doctrines, and explicitly backs the rights of underground churches in places like China and Eastern Europe.

Contemporary critics who in OTL lamented the “silence on communism” instead praise Vatican II here as the Council that finally codified the anti-communist line Pius XI and Pius XII had prepared.

In OTL, Annibale Bugnini was secretary of the Consilium that drove liturgical reform after the Council, often described as the “chief architect” of the post-conciliar rites.

In ATL Bugnini still played a role in early drafting since he was too competent to ignore. But the Curia, shaped by Pius XII’s appointments, is deeply suspicious of large-scale tinkering with rites. The same conservative coalition that pushed the anti-communist constitution thus also resists a “revolution” in the liturgy.

By the late Council / immediate post-Conciliar period: Bugnini is nudged sideways. He keeps a technical role but never gets the free hand he had in OTL. The implemented reform looks more like a stabilized 1965-style Missal, with vernacular readings, some simplifications, but the basic Tridentine structure and gestures intact. Liturgical scholars decades later point out that the “Bugnini super-reform” was the road not taken. Anti-communism, not aggiornamento at all costs, was the Council’s driving concern.

The Catholic Church thus stays visibly, officially anti-communist, retains a more traditional liturgical culture, and sees itself explicitly as a spiritual bulwark against Soviet/Chinese atheism right through the late 20th century.

1962–1965

After the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, Mao remains Chairman, gives long ideological speeches, and appears on rostrums and in slogans. However, he spends less time reading detailed economic reports (which suits everyone). That busywork is left to the Adjustment Group:

• Liu Shaoqi serves as the executive centre of the state,

• Zhou Enlai as the indispensable broker and diplomat,

• Deng Xiaoping as the chief administrator and problem-solver,

• Chen Yun as the economic conscience.

Post-famine reforms echo OTL but are more coherent and less frightened of “right deviation”. “Three freedoms and one contract” (sanzi yibao) see limited markets, small private plots, and production responsibility contracts rolled out more widely and persisting longer. Communes quietly devolve some decision-making to production teams and brigades, and grain procurement quotas are cut to survivable levels.

These are the conceptual foundations for later reforms. Southern coastal provinces are quietly allowed more latitude in engaging with overseas Chinese and Hong Kong capital. This is still limited, but special “overseas trade offices” and local pilot zones start appearing by the mid-1960s.

Northern interior and border provinces see early experiments with militia-based industrialization. Workshops attached to communes make tools, simple machinery, and small arms. Militia training gets integrated into work schedules all still under Maoist labels—“people’s war,” “self-reliance,” “walking on two legs”. Internally, Deng and Chen view it as a prototype for a dual system:

• South: foreign-facing flexible industry.

• North: defense-heavy decentralised yeoman industry and universal militia.

They henceforth can design policies that nudge things in that direction.

1964–1969

1964

In October 1964, the PRC detonates its first atomic bomb at Lop Nur. That test, as in OTL, dramatically changes the nuclear balance in Asia and deepens Soviet nervousness. the USSR now faces a nuclear neighbour with which relations are already poisoned by ideological disputes and border quarrels.

In ATL, however, the Adjustment Group insists on tight civilian–Party oversight of the nuclear program. Doctrine is framed as “People’s War under Nuclear Shadow”—they plan to rely on dispersed militias and hardened northern industries if war comes.

1964

Khrushchev is pushed out in October 1964. Brezhnev emerges as General Secretary in a leadership that wants stability and predictability after Cuban brinkmanship and domestic turbulence. The new Soviet leadership is less flamboyant than Khrushchev, more conservative in foreign policy, but still deeply committed to peaceful coexistence and wary of Maoist adventurism.

The Sino–Soviet split hardens with rising border militarization rises. Propaganda wars continue as cooperation in industry and defense dries up. Each side quietly studies how to fight the other without triggering immediate nuclear suicide.

1963–1966

In OTL, Mao, feeling marginalized and enraged by the 30/70 narrative and Liu/Deng’s pragmatic reforms, launches the Socialist Education Movement then the Cultural Revolution to purge “capitalist roaders” and reassert himself.

In ATL, the Socialist Education Movement still launches around 1963, but the Adjustment Group handles it as a top-down rectification campaign, not a mass movement. Work teams inspect cadres for corruption and lax discipline. Study sessions push Maoist texts. A few bad apples are purged.

Crucially, there is no move to mobilize students against the Party, no call to “bombard the headquarters,” and no deliberate unleashing of Red Guards. Mao may grumble that the campaign is being “tamed,” but Zhou is relentless about preventing chaos. The PLA backs Zhou and Liu, not student mobs.

By 1966, instead of the Cultural Revolution, China has a managed purge of some corrupt/localist cadres, the adjustment path intact, and a Party that still appears unified to the outside world. China thus never experiences the 10-year self-immolation of the Cultural Revolution. The cadre corps remains largely intact. The PLA and bureaucracy are not torn apart. Universities never get shut down for years.

1969

Even with a more rational Chinese leadership, the underlying Sino–Soviet tension and border disputes don’t magically vanish. On 2 March 1969, Chinese and Soviet forces clash on Zhenbao (Damansky) Island on the Ussuri River, just as in OTL. Soviet internal studies later describe 1969 as a serious nuclear crisis. Moscow had considered limited strikes on Chinese nuclear facilities just as both sides mass troops on the border.

In ATL, the Chinese leadership is a collective with Liu (still alive), Zhou, Deng, Chen, and Mao as aging patriarch. They interpret the border clash as necessary demonstration of resolve to keep domestic nationalists and the PLA satisfied, but absolutely must not let it become a pretext for wider war. Beijing keeps a rhetorical line of uncompromising defence of Chinese territory and denunciations of “Soviet social imperialism.” Operationally, they perform careful de-escalation with local tactical offensives around Zhenbao and other flashpoints all with quiet backchannel relays that China does not seek general war.

The USSR, mindful of the Cuban Missile Crisis and of China’s now-real nuclear capability, also steps back from the brink. The Sino-Soviet split may have gone fully “hot” at the border, but both sides internalize that:

• for Moscow, China cannot be bullied cheaply;

• for Beijing, confronting both the US and USSR simultaneously would be suicidal.

1960s Spain

While the big communist states feud, Spain quietly prepares its own alternate future. Throughout the 1960s, Franco’s regime pursues economic stabilization plans and cautious liberalization in some sectors. Spain experiences significant growth under controlled “technocratic” management. The Church–state alliance remains tight, with National-Catholic ideology framing Spain as Europe’s anti-communist bastion. The Spanish hierarchy emphasises the Vatican II’s anti-communist texts, not its more liberal social experiments.

Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú, Marqués de Villaverde, is Franco’s son-in-law, married to his only daughter Carmen Franco. He works as a cardiothoracic surgeon and becomes well-known in Spain for his work and social position. The contemporary press describes him as an elegant, promising surgeon and a pillar of the upper elite.

In ATL, Franco and his inner circle increasingly see him as the ideal personal dynasty candidate. He has no ties to the Bourbons’ messy past. He is fully socialized in the regime. Above all, he is close to the Church and the military.

By the late 1960s, US diplomatic reporting (which in OTL assumed Juan Carlos would be heir) notes that Franco could in theory choose another figure if he wanted to.

1969

In OTL, Franco designated Juan Carlos as his successor in July 1969. In ATL, under pressure from hardline National-Catholics, segments of the army, and parts of the business elite, Franco concludes that a Bourbon restoration carries too much risk of liberalization. He uses his legal powers to name Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú as “Prince of Spain” and designated successor, founding a new dynasty tied directly to the 1936 “Crusade” and National-Catholic mythos.

To the Cortes and episcopate, Franco notes that Spain needs continuity of the Crusade, not a return to the weaknesses that led to 1931. A new royal house, born from the victory over communism and secularism, would better embody the spirit of this Catholic nation.

By 1969, therefore, Spain is locked into a post-Franco National-Catholic monarchy whose legitimacy is explicitly tied to the Church’s hardened anti-communist stance. It will remain a symbolically powerful counter-model to socialist and liberal regimes alike well into later Fallout-era geopolitics.

1970s

China in the 1970s

1970–1973

By 1970, The “Adjustment Group” (Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, backed by key PLA commanders) has already rescued China from the worst of the Great Leap famine and quietly taken the wheel.

The formal picture still looks Maoist. Mao is Chairman, his portrait is everywhere, the rhetoric is “self-reliance,” “continuing revolution,” and Soviet “revisionism” is still condemned in editorials.

But decision-making has been restructured:

• Liu functions as day-to-day chief of state.

• Zhou manages diplomacy and factional balance.

• Deng handles party organization and administrative discipline.

• Chen Yun shapes an increasingly cautious economic line: measured planning, realistic quotas, cautious use of market signals.

Early 1970s

OTL scholarship on rural reform emphasizes a few key themes:

• Household responsibility and de facto decollectivization massively boost output once allowed.

• Township and village enterprises (TVEs) emerge from commune/brigade enterprises and become crucial engines of rural industrialization in the 1980s, especially in provinces like Jiangsu and Shandong.

In ATL, those patterns got a ten-year head start because nothing was smashed by a Cultural Revolution. Household responsibility contracts are quietly formalized in many communes by the early 70s. Teams and households receive land-use allotments and grain quotas. Output above the quota can be consumed or sold locally on tolerated markets. Commune and brigade enterprises are actively encouraged to expand:

• small foundries, machine repair shops, fertilizer plants;

• simple machinery and tools for agriculture;

• some textile and light manufacturing.

The party frames all these as deepening socialist ownership through diversified forms of collective enterprise. In practice, it’s the early emergence of TVE-style rural industry that scholars later identify as central to China’s growth.

The South sees Proto-SEZs and clan capitalism

Even in OTL, the seeds of export-oriented Southern development draw on diaspora capital and coastal openness; rural industrialization and external linkages are key themes. In ATL, the Adjustment Group pushes the South further and earlier.

Guangdong and Fujian get:

• special “Overseas Chinese Trade Offices” in the early 70s;

• permission to run border markets with Hong Kong and Macao;

• pilot joint ventures where family clans overseas can provide capital and technology to small local enterprises.

Local party secretaries in the Pearl River Delta and Minnan region discover they can:

• use clan structures to organize financing and labour,

• treat the state plan as a floor (fulfil quotas) and exports as the upside.

Nothing is yet called a “Special Economic Zone” on paper, but functionally the South has created early SEZ-like pockets 5–10 years before 1979/80. By mid-70s, the southern coast is full of small, flexible manufacturing clusters for shoes, textiles, toys, and basic electronics, all backed by clan credit and local cadres.

These are already integrated into networks that scholars in our world would later describe as key to China’s export takeoff.

The North gets yeoman industry and the universal militia

OTL research on rural industrialization stresses how North China townships developed significant manufacturing capacity in machinery and heavy rural equipment, not just light industry. In the 1970s ATL, Northern provinces (Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, parts of Liaoning and Inner Mongolia – your Beifang core) are designated “Key National Defense and Industrial Agriculture Zones.”

• Commune and brigade enterprises here are steered toward industrial goods: machine tools, small arms components, truck parts, fertilizers, mining equipment.

• Each enterprise must maintain a People’s Militia detachment, where workers drill weekly, militia officers coordinate with local PLA units, and wartime mobilization plans link each factory to specific regiments and logistic roles.

• Cadres are taught a doctrine that fuses Mao’s “people’s war” with Deng/Chen’s line: Every village a workshop, every workshop a fort; the North is the shield of the Republic.

During this decade, Beifang is not yet bristling with heavy armour, but the institutional link between rural industry and militia service is set in stone. Landholding and co-op membership are tied to militia obligations. The social identity of the Beifang peasant shifts toward “soldier-producer.”

When China later sustains multi-theatre wars (SEA, Taiwan, Alaska), this is the deep structural reason why it can: the North has been built as a militarized industrial countryside for decades.

Foreign policy

A couple of global things still happen as in OTL:

• 1971–72 – US–PRC rapprochement:

  • Kissinger’s secret trip,

  • Nixon’s 1972 visit,

  • PRC takes the ROC seat at the UN.

Beijing would use this to balance against the USSR during the high Sino-Soviet split. Because there was no Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai and Deng orchestrate rapprochement as a classic anti-Soviet balancing move, while quietly shopping for Western technology and studying Japanese and Western industrial models for future adaptation.

Mao attends the big symbolic moments and says big lines about imperialism and peace. The Adjustment Group handles the actual strategy. By the mid-70s, China is still publicly revolutionary and anti-Soviet, but internally already nudging toward the OTL reform model just ten years early.

Mid–late 1970s

Mao dies in 1976, as in OTL. There is no Gang of Four power struggle since those personalities never rose to their real-world prominence because there was no Cultural Revolution to elevate them. Liu Shaoqi who in OTL was purged and dead in 1969 is still alive here, but old and ill. He serves as a short-term “Chairman-Emeritus” figure post-Mao. Real managerial authority rests with Zhou and Deng. After Zhou’s death (still mid-70s), Deng emerges as the clear core leader with Chen Yun as economic conscience.

So by 1978–79, when OTL China is just starting reform after Mao and the Cultural Revolution, ATL China has a full decade of incremental reform, rural industrialization, and militia-industrial alignment already baked in. ATL scholarship later date “reform and opening” to “the Adjustment Era of the 1960s–70s.”

Spain under the Villaverde Monarchy

The 1947 Law of Succession declared Spain a kingdom again and made Franco Head of State for life with the power to name his successor as king or regent. Throughout the 1950s–60s, Spain evolves into a “developmentalist dictatorship” with technocratic ministers. On paper ideology remains National-Catholic: Church and state closely aligned, liberal parties excluded, communists persecuted.

Vatican II’s anti-communist line fits Franco’s narrative perfectly: Spain presents itself as “the Catholic bulwark of the West” against atheistic socialism.

1970–1974

OTL reporting and later commentary show that Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú, the Marqués de Villaverde was a prominent surgeon and Franco’s son-in-law (married to Carmen Franco), whence he symbolized the regime’s merged political and social elite.

In ATL, Franco and his trusted advisors (Carrero Blanco, hardline generals, senior bishops) come to see him as more reliable than restoring the Bourbon heir (Juan Carlos), who has become interested with constitutional monarchy and potential liberalization. So through the early 70s, Franco increasingly elevates Cristóbal’s public profile. Franco has him attends military parades on his arm, has him preside over high-visibility state ceremonies, pushes regime media to refer to him as a “pillar of the future of Spain.”

The Church—still strongly linked to the regime—begins to gently bless the narrative that the fruits of the Crusade must be secured by a dynasty born from the victors.

1973–1974

In OTL, Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco was assassinated by ETA in December 1973, which shook the regime and underscored its vulnerability. In ATL, the car bombing shocks Franco, reinforcing his conviction that Spain is beset by “red terrorism” and separatism. Thus stability after his death must be entrusted to someone fully loyal to the spirit of 1936.

The incident hardens his resolve not to risk a Bourbon king who might experiment with democratization.

1975

When Franco dies in November 1975, the Law of Succession kicks in. In OTL, Juan Carlos is proclaimed king. In ATL, the Cortes and Council of the Realm both packed with Franco loyalists confirm Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú as the new Head of State under the title:

His Catholic Majesty, Cristóbal I, King of Spain.

The official narrative goes that Franco, as regent, “restored the monarchy” then founded a new royal line as a reward from Providence for defeating communism and freemasonry. The Bourbons are treated as historic but politically obsolete. Some traditionalist and even Carlist elements grumble, but the army and security services repress serious dissent.

Late 1970s

In OTL, Juan Carlos and Adolfo Suárez used the 1975-78 period to dismantle Francoist institutions and build a parliamentary democracy. Here, Cristóbal I does the opposite. He maintains:

• the Cortes as a corporatist, largely non-elected body;

• the single Movement party (or its successor) as the only legal political structure; and

• strict limitations on trade unions and regional autonomy.

He further signs a new Fundamental Law of the Kingdom that enshrines Catholicism as the state religion, identifies Marxism explicitly as incompatible with Spanish public life, and strongly protects property and “social peace.”

With Vatican II’s anti-communist constitution as doctrinal backing, Spain markets itself as the one European power that rejected both fascism and Marxism, then chose a Catholic third way.

That will echo decades later when the world starts wobbling toward resource wars and nuclear brinkmanship. Spain will remain a weirdly stable, conservative node in Western Europe, twinly devout and suspicious of both Washington and Moscow.

Afghanistan under the Communist Coup and Soviet Intervention

1973–1978

Broadly keep the OTL timeline:

• 1973: Mohammad Daoud Khan overthrows King Zahir Shah in a bloodless coup, declaring a republic. He initially leans on support from the leftist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).

• Over time, Daoud regrets the PDPA and Soviet influence, pursuing his own modernization agenda.

This turn events creates a combustible triangle: Daoud, the PDPA, and the conservative rural/religious notables who see all of this as alien.

In April 1978, after the assassination of prominent PDPA leader Mir Akbar Khyber, the PDPA fears a crackdown and launches a coup:

• The Saur Revolution brings the PDPA (split into Khalq and Parcham factions) to power under Nur Mohammad Taraki.

• The new regime embarks on radical reforms:

  • land redistribution,

  • women’s emancipation measures,

  • modernization drives that trample local religious and tribal structures.

These reforms were implemented with little sensitivity to Afghanistan’s socio-religious fabric, triggering widespread revolt.

1978–1979

Almost immediately, resistance erupts:

• tribal uprisings,

• Islamist rebellions,

• mutinies within the army.

All riding on:

• the near-universal rejection of the PDPA in rural Pashtun areas,

• the regime’s reliance on brutal repression and Soviet support,

• the internal factional fighting between Khalq and Parcham factions.

By mid-1979:

• Taraki is overthrown and killed by his deputy Hafizullah Amin, further destabilizing the regime.

• The PDPA leadership repeatedly asks Moscow for more direct military help to stave off collapse.

In ATL, the CPSU leadership in the late 1970s (still under Brezhnev) sees Afghanistan through three lenses:

1. Fear of a hostile regime on its southern border sliding into US- or Pakistan-backed orbit.

2. Concern about Islamist contagion spilling into Soviet Central Asia.

3. Desire to uphold the Brezhnev-style doctrine that socialist allies cannot be allowed to fall.

The existence of a powerful, increasingly capable PRC on the other side of Central Asia only intensifies these worries: Moscow does not want an unstable, Islamist or US-leaning Afghanistan sitting between Soviet Turkestan and a hostile, nuclear China.

December 1979: The Soviet invasion

In late December 1979, the Soviet Union intervenes directly. Airborne and special forces assault Kabul. Hafizullah Amin is killed and replaced by Babrak Karmal (Parcham faction) as the new communist leader. Tens of thousands of Soviet troops flow into Afghanistan.

The invasion sees widespread confusion and miscalculation inside the Soviet leadership, accompanied with a belief that a short, decisive intervention could stabilize the PDPA and deter external meddling. These all underestimate of Afghan resistance and the impact on international opinion.

The CPSU made a naturally late-Brezhnev move that was costly, rigid, and convinced that force could hold the socialist periphery together.

1980s: Grind in Afghanistan, Mature Dengism, Gorbachev’s Tightrope

The 1980s Afghan War

1980–1983

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 is sold internally as limited “fraternal assistance” to stabilize a friendly “socialist-oriented” regime, with the icing of a necessary preemptive move to block hostile (US / Pakistani / Chinese) influence on the USSR’s southern flank.

As in OTL, Soviet forces secure major cities and transport routes. The PDPA regime in Kabul tries to push land reform and secularization. Rural Afghanistan then erupts in revolt.

Pakistan’s ISI becomes the main conduit for covert US, Saudi and other aid to Islamist and tribal insurgents. The CIA and others see a chance to “bleed” the Soviets through a proxy war, scaling up arms deliveries and training.

By 1982, the Kremlin realizes that the war has devolved into a full-on counterinsurgency against a decentralized, cross-border jihad.

1983–1986

The Soviet war saw heavy reliance on airpower, artillery, and heliborne assaults; vulnerability to convoy ambushes and mine warfare; and growing Soviet casualty lists and political strain.

In ATL, all these are accompanied by purely analog SIGINT and EW:

• wideband receivers and tape recorders monitor VHF/HF mujahideen chatter,

• direction-finding arrays use rotating loops and CRT direction displays,

• big racks of analog filters and oscilloscopes hold in truck-mounted EW stations.

Every intercept, every jamming pattern, is logged on reel-to-reel tape and printout. Soviet advisers in Kabul and Bagram are already thinking in terms of probability theory thanks to the USSR’s strong measure-theoretic tradition, but there is no unified coding theory to condense and exploit all that data yet.

The war becomes a hardware-intensive analog laboratory for counterinsurgency, with constant experiments in jamming, deception, and air-ground coordination against a fluid insurgent network.

US and Pakistani teams watch and learn on their side too, feeding into later American doctrine.

1985–1988

In OTL, the mid-1980s were when US aid surged, including Stinger missiles that severely hamper Soviet helicopters. The USSR also faced mounting economic and political costs, helping push Gorbachev toward withdrawal.

In ATL, Gorbachev (from 1985) views Afghanistan as a bleeding wound and a barrier to détente with both the West and China. Military planners accept that full control of the countryside is impossible, but argue that abandoning the government in Kabul would wreck Soviet credibility with all clients, embolden Islamist movements in Central Asia, and open the door to Chinese or US influence on their border.

Instead of a clean OTL-style 1989 pullout, they design a doctrine for “Fortress Afghanistan”:

• Withdraw from the most exposed and costly rural garrisons;

• Consolidate into major city strongpoints (Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat) and a network of fortified airbases and logistics hubs;

• Rely on Afghan government forces and militias to hold the ground in between, and sustained Soviet air and artillery to punish major insurgent concentrations.

On paper, this can be presented to the world as “withdrawal” or “Afghanization.” In practice, it keeps a large Soviet footprint in-country well beyond the OTL 1989 endpoint. This sets up the 1990s and 2000s where:

• the “Soviet war in Afghanistan” never really ends;

• the USSR is still there, in hardened bases; and

• Taliban and later Chechen/foreign-fighter networks grow up in the spaces in between.

China in the 1980s: Mature Dengism and the Militarized North

By the 1980s, the “Adjustment Era” has matured into full Dengist reform with a headstart and no Cultural Revolution trauma.

1980–1984

In our world, post-1978 reforms under Deng decollectivized agriculture via the household responsibility system, allowed peasants to sell surplus on markets, and unleashed the growth of township and village enterprises (TVEs), which scholars call one of China’s reform era “major successes.”

In ATL, those moves start earlier and are more coherent. By 1980:

• Household responsibility contracts are already normal, not experimental, in many provinces;

• commune/brigade enterprises have largely morphed into TVE-type legal entities, especially in Beifang.

• Chen Yun pushes a “birdcage” analogy: the market is a bird that must fly, but within the cage of the plan—capturing the real-world cautious, gradualist line.

TVEs explode. In the South, they churn out consumer goods and light manufactures (textiles, food processing, cheap electronics components). In the North, they specialize in heavy rural industry: machine tools, construction materials, agricultural machinery—and, in carefully coded budgets, components that are dual-use (truck parts, explosives precursors, basic weapons tooling).

1980–1989

In OTL, Deng authorized Special Economic Zones (SEZs) like Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen to attract foreign investment, encourage exports, and experiment with market mechanisms.

In ATL, the proto-SEZ experiments of the 1970s (clan-based, diaspora-backed export pockets) get formal SEZ status earlier and on a wider scale. By early 1980s, not just Shenzhen, but clusters around Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and parts of Hainan are effectively large coastal free zones. Deng’s famous line (“It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”) is quoted endlessly to justify:

• joint ventures with Japanese and Western firms,

• relaxed labour and land-use rules in SEZs,

• early experimentation with export-processing zones and foreign currency retention.

The result is a hyper-accelerated South. By mid-1980s, the Pearl River Delta looks like a sea of small and medium factories linked to Hong Kong finance, Taiwanese OEM networks, and overseas Chinese capital from Southeast Asia, North America, Europe.

ATL scholarship later treats the 1980s as the time when the “Southern Ring”—the clan-capitalist, export-focused band—overtook old state industry in dynamism.

OTL industry research notes how northern TVEs often specialized in machinery, construction materials, and more capital-intensive lines. That gets redirected ATL into a conscious strategic doctrine. In the early 1980s, the PLA General Staff and State Council jointly issue internal guidelines (the “Northern Frontier Integrated Defense and Production Plan”). This plan designates provinces like Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia as Key Integrated Defense-Production Zones. Implementation requires that all sizeable TVEs there maintain militia units and wartime conversion plans. The later “People’s Militia and National Defense Integration Law of 1985” formalizes militia training as mandatory for rural adults (with rotations coordinated through TVEs) and direct links between each county’s industrial co-ops and specific PLA divisions for mobilization.

Every Beifang workshop has thus become a legal economic unit, a local employer, and a reservoir of trained soldiers and machine tools.

PLA war-college textbooks from this era talk about “layered people’s war under nuclear conditions.” The Southern coast fights with ships and machines, the Beifang countryside fights with factories and rifles, and the cities fight with tunnels and hardened command posts. Later on, this doctrine lets the PRC, decades later, launch multi-theatre wars (Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Alaska) and still have a functioning economy behind them.

Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the triangle

Foreign policy-wise, 1980s China walks a three-way tightrope between the US, USSR, and regional wars. In Afghanistan, the PRC continues low-key cooperation with the US/Pakistan in supporting Afghan mujahideen as a way to bleed the Soviet southern flank and pay Moscow back for its Vietnam support. Beijing’s hostility to Soviet-backed Vietnam after the 1979 Sino–Vietnamese War remains. Cambodia’s chaos keeps the region unstable.

The Deng leadership also wants Western technology and markets, yet they don’t want to push the USSR into a corner where it lashes out. They thus begin quietly responding to Soviet feelers for normalization.

Gorbachev’s Tightrope

1980–1984

By 1985, the CPSU knows it needs a younger, energetic reformer or the system will rot and lose in the long run—especially now that the US has passed through Reagan’s military build-up, and the PRC is clearly pulling off high growth with its mixed model.

Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary in March 1985. His OTL platform:

• catch up with the West,

• push for perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness),

• reform socialism rather than abandon it.

In ATL, Gorbachev and his advisers looked at Chinese reforms but underestimated or misread their implications. After a decade of visible PRC growth without collapse, a faction in the CPSU argues for a “Soviet Deng line”:

• pre-emptive economic reform,

• cautious market mechanisms,

• keep the Party’s political monopoly intact.

Gorbachev, influenced by this group, frames his project not as as rebuilding socialism’s efficiency and moral authority through limited competition and transparency. From 1985–1988:

• Economic perestroika:

  • more enterprise autonomy,

  • experiments with cooperatives and small private services,

  • price reforms in some sectors.

• Glasnost, but narrower:

  • freer discussion of corruption and economic problems,

  • some condemnation of Stalinism,

  • tighter limits on nationalist and anti-Party speech than in OTL.

There are still protests, critical articles, bursts of opennes, but the leadership keeps a closer rein on how far glasnost can go in questioning the union itself.

From day one, Afghanistan is a millstone:

• draining morale,

• hurting foreign relations,

• feeding opposition within the elite.

Gorbachev wants out, but not at the price of a humiliating collapse. “Fortress Afghanistan” doctrine has Gorbachev negotiates something that looks like the Geneva Accords but implemented with staged drawdowns, “Afghan-led” defense of cities backed by Soviet air and support, and a long-term basing arrangement that keeps Soviet troops in secure enclaves.

Propaganda line:

“The Afghan people now lead their own socialist development; the Soviet Union maintains limited fraternal assistance at their request.”

Foreign observers dicuss whether it’s really a withdrawal or just an occupation with fewer conscripts.

Sino–Soviet thaw

Brezhnev initiates feelers like the 1982 Tashkent speech to improve ties. Deng lays down the “three obstacles” to normalization:

1. Soviet troops in Afghanistan,

2. Soviet support for Vietnam in Cambodia,

3. Soviet troop build-up along the Chinese border.

Gorbachev, juggling perestroika and Afghanistan, sees a chance. Reducing tensions with China could free up resources, weaken US leverage in Beijing, and show socialism can be plural and cooperative.

The late 1980s sees step-by-step border negotiation and troop reduction along the long Sino–Soviet frontier; increased trade and cultural contacts; and mutual language about “ending the past and opening the future” in their summit rhetoric.

When Gorbachev finally visits Beijing (still 1989 in ATL), and he and Deng shake hands, official records emphasize that both sides have shared responsibility for past deterioration and a shared interest in building a new, relationship.

This normalization is crucially part of a broader CPSU survival strategy:

• reduce external fronts (China, eventually some Eastern European pressures),

• re-focus on domestic modernization.

This leads to the 2020s second détente with the US and the large-scale maths exchange that feeds into Robert House.

1988–1989

In OTL, Gorbachev’s reforms, coupled with nationalist movements and Eastern European upheavals in 1989, lead toward the 1991 dissolution of the USSR all built on:

• accumulated structural stagnation,

• ethnic tensions,

• glasnost’s delegitimization of the Party, and

• the hardline coup attempt of August 1991.

In ATL, Glasnost is real but not an open season on the Party’s right to rule. The security apparatus and some reformers agree on a “no Yugoslavia, no 1917” red line:

• no republic-level multi-party elections that could empower separatists;

• limited decentralization of economic management, not sovereignty.

The 1980s end with a USSR that is under strain but:

• still unified,

• still run by the CPSU,

• and cautiously experimenting with a mixed economy.

Afghanistan sees:

• Soviet troops remain at key nodes,

• Kabul’s regime totters but doesn’t fall,

• jihadist networks (including future Taliban cadres) hardening in the spaces the state can’t hold.

Meanwhile, China:

• has roaring coastal growth and solid Beifang industrial-militia structures,

• is normalized with Moscow but still distrustful,

• and is increasingly central to global trade.

1990s: The USSR Bends, Not Breaks; Yeltsin’s Shock Therapy; Taliban–Chechen Nexus

1990–1991

The late 1980s still play out roughly like OTL:

• 1989–90: Eastern European communist regimes fall in a cascade; Solidarity wins in Poland, the Berlin Wall comes down, the Warsaw Pact effectively disintegrates.

• Gorbachev’s choice not to crush these movements militarily is a key tension point, with loosening the “Soviet yoke” unleashing an independent dynamic that Moscow couldn’t control.

Inside the USSR proper, nationalist movements surge especially in the Baltic republics, the Caucasus, and parts of Central Asia.

ATL sees all these converge on a constitutional crisis and reconfiguration, not breakup.

Summer 1991

The August 1991 coup attempt by hardliners (the real-world State Committee on the State of Emergency) still happens. Old-guard CPSU, KGB, and military figures, horrified by the draft Union Treaty and the loss of Eastern Europe, try to arrest the reform trajectory. Tanks roll into Moscow; Gorbachev is isolated at his dacha; a crisis atmosphere grips the capital.

Yeltsin still climbs on a tank in front of the “White House” (Russian parliament building) and denounces the coup. In OTL:

• The CPSU gets banned in Russia;

• republican governments move to seize sovereignty;

• the USSR dissolves in December 1991.

In ATL, Yeltsin and the reformist wing choose a different target.

1991–1995: Yeltsin as General Secretary, Shock Therapy in a Red Federation

The failed coup forces an emergency bargain among:

• Gorbachev (still ideologically a socialist reformer),

• Yeltsin and the Russian reformers,

• segments of the KGB and army who now realise a hardline restoration is impossible,

• republican elites who want more autonomy but fear outright fragmentation and war.

They cut a “Union Renewal” deal instead of demolition:

1. Gorbachev is “elevated” to a largely ceremonial post as Union President, a symbolic guarantor of the new treaty.

2. The CPSU agrees to a reformist platform: it keeps its network, cadres, and property, and promises intra-party pluralism and competitive lists, not genuine multi-party democracy.

3. Yeltsin becomes General Secretary of this “renewed” CPSU instead of president of a separate Russian state.

The message to the public is:

“We have defeated the reactionary coup and are now rebuilding socialism on a democratic, market basis, without destroying the Union.”

Legally and symbolically, the USSR continues but with a new Union Treaty that grants more autonomy to republics while holding them inside a federal framework.

In ATL, those same pressures as OTL are all there, but the anti-coup coalition chooses to save the Union as a container, rather than letting it shatter and then building a Russian state from the pieces.

1992–1994: Shock therapy with a hammer-and-sickle on top

Now Yeltsin, as General Secretary, pushes the same kind of economic program he advocated as President of Russia in OTL:

• Price liberalization: domestic prices for most goods are freed more or less overnight, leading to an explosion of inflation.

• Voucher privatization: state enterprises are turned into joint-stock companies; citizens receive vouchers; insiders and emerging oligarchs accumulate control.

• Cuts to subsidies and trade liberalization: old guaranteed buyers (within CMEA) are gone; many factories find themselves selling into a world market where they are uncompetitive.

OTL post-Soviet “shock therapy” saw:

• massive output drops,

• unemployment and wage arrears,

• extreme inequality and rapid rise of oligarchs,

• social dislocation and poverty.

All of that happens in ATL but across the entire Union, not just Russia:

• Heavy-industry towns in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc., experience the same collapse in demand.

• Some republics (especially in Central Asia) negotiate partial exemptions and still receive Union-level subsidies in exchange for loyalty and military basing rights.

The CPSU, instead of being banned, becomes a hybrid party-state-business cartel:

• old apparatchiks become new managers and oligarch-adjacent figures;

• some genuinely reformist factions push transparency and social safety nets;

• security organs make sure secessionist or explicitly anti-Party movements don’t gain too much ground.

1992–1995: Social trauma, but the structure holds

GDP plummets; real incomes collapse; mortality rates spike, especially among working-age men. Criminal groups and oligarchs capture entire sectors; corruption becomes systemic.

Three pillars remain intact, however:

1. The Red Army is rebranded and partially downsized, but still loyal to the Union leadership.

2. KGB successors retain files, networks, and coercive capacity.

3. The Union constitutional shell holds that republics have more economic autonomy, but Moscow’s control over borders, defence, and currency persists.

There are no full secessions. The Baltics have been granted some special confederal status, but the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Slavic core remain inside an “integrated but looser” USSR.

Late 1990s: From Yeltsin’s Chaos to Putin’s Order Inside the CPSU

1995–1998: The hangover and security-state grumbling

By the mid-1990s, Yeltsin’s shock therapy has stabilized some macro indicators (inflation tamed somewhat), but entrenched oligarchic control and massive inequality.

Within the CPSU, a “statist-security” faction (largely ex-KGB, some military, conservative regional bosses) complains that:

• the Party’s reputation is being trashed,

• the armed forces are underfunded, and

• nationalist and Islamist movements (Chechnya etc) are exploiting the chaos.

OTL analyses of the 1998 Russian financial crisis stress how unstable capital account liberalization, weak fiscal policy, and structural weaknesses led to the crash.

In ATL, 1998 brings a Union-wide financial crisis:

• rouble devaluation,

• banking failures,

• partial default on domestic debt.

This discredits Yeltsin’s economic team and the most extreme “Chicago Boys” inside the CPSU. Reformist-market types are weakened, and statist-security types gain leverage.

1999: Putin as “saviour of the Union”

Against this backdrop, a compromise candidate emerges: a relatively young, hard-working former state security officer with experience in Leningrad/St Petersburg politics and in managing oligarch-city relations.

Yeltsin, weakened by health problems and the 1998 crisis, is persuaded (with some “encouragement” from security elites) to step aside as General Secretary. The CPSU Central Committee, after some internal horse-trading, elects Vladimir Putin as General Secretary of the CPSU around 1999.

His mandate:

“Restore order, recentralize strategic control, protect the Union’s integrity, but keep enough market reforms to avoid stagnation.”

Putin’s later 2000s détente posture is born from this legitimacy. He is the man who saved the Union from Yeltsin-era chaos, not a Russian president mourning a lost empire.

Afghanistan goes from Mujahideen Soup to Taliban–Chechen Axis

1989–1992: Soviet drawdown without full exit

Because the USSR hasn’t collapsed, ATL still gets a reduction of Soviet troop levels in Afghanistan around the late 1980s/early 1990s, under the “Fortress Afghanistan” approach. Rural garrisons and some exposed positions are abandoned, but airbases and urban strongpoints remain under heavy Soviet control.

In OTL, Soviet withdrawal in 1989 was followed by the Najibullah government’s survival until 1992, then its fall and a mujahideen civil war.

In ATL:

• A Najibullah-style regime hangs on in Kabul with direct Soviet military backing in the capital and a few key cities.

• Outside the cities, the countryside is controlled by a patchwork of mujahideen commanders and local warlords, fighting each other as much as Kabul.

Afghanistan is effectively a country with Soviet-garrisoned islands of statehood in a sea of insurgent fiefdoms.

1992–1994: “Mujahideen republic” fails, Kabul fractures

OTL, Najibullah falls in 1992; mujahideen factions capture Kabul then fight each other, causing devastating civil war.

In ATL, a similar dynamic unfolds around the Soviet bastions. A mujahideen-based coalition “government” forms and claims Kabul, but it is internally divided along factional, ethnic, and ideological lines. Soviet advisors distrust many of its elements but see no better option outside direct military rule. Rocket attacks, shelling, and shifting alliances all see Kabul partially controlled, partially ruined, with Soviet troops dug in around key ministries and the airport.

For Afghan civilians, this period is a nightmare of: lawlessness, warlord predation, and sporadic Soviet-Afghan counter-insurgency sweeps.

1994–1996: The Taliban proclaims order against warlords and Reds alike

OTL saw the Taliban as a movement emerging around 1994 from Deobandi madrasa students in Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, promising order, Sharia, and an end to warlordism. In ATL, the Taliban still originate among Pashtun religious students, former mujahideen disillusioned with factionalism, and networks backed by Pakistani ISI. Unlike OTL, they face not just corrupt mujahideen and a weak post-communist state but also Soviet-garrisoned “red islands”.

Their narrative:

“We will end warlord anarchy, sweep away godless communists, and establish pure Islamic rule.”

From 1994-96:

• They take Kandahar, Helmand, much of the south;

• they make tactical truces with some factions, crush others;

• they aggressively target Soviet-backed posts, portraying these assaults as jihad against the last outposts of atheistic socialism.

By the mid-1990s:

• the Taliban control most of the south and increasingly threaten Kabul;

• Soviet planners are forced into a defensive posture, abandoning some positions and turning others into massive fortified bases.

Massoud sidelined, no Northern Alliance anchor

Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir,” in OTL remains a central anti-Taliban leader, commanding the Northern Alliance, and only dies in 2001.

In ATL, Massoud is courted early on by both:

• US-linked channels (who see him as a bulwark against extremism),

• Soviet advisors (who are desperate for reliable non-communist allies).

A combination of factional mistrust, a botched joint operation with Soviet air support that causes heavy civilian casualties in his area, and Taliban intelligence operations leads to either:

• Massoud being killed in an ambush years earlier than 2001 or

• politically sidelined as his coalition fragments.

Either way, by the late 1990s there is no cohesive Northern Alliance equivalent. Opposition to the Taliban is split among:

• fragmented regional militias,

• Shi’a Hazara forces,

• some regime remnants tied tightly to Soviet bases.

That makes Afghanistan far more deeply “Taliban vs everyone” instead of “Taliban vs Northern Alliance with foreign backing.”

Late 1990s: Chechen Liberation Front and foreign fighter nexus

In OTL, Chechen fighters and other North Caucasus militants fought in Afghanistan and later in other jihad theatres, with documented links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Taliban were one of the only regimes to recognize Chechnya diplomatically around 2000, hosting a Chechen embassy in Kabul and a consulate in Kandahar.

In ATL 1990s, as Yeltsin’s shock therapy wreaks havoc, separatist sentiment in the North Caucasus surges. The first Chechen war erupts, but Moscow, overstretched and worried about full-scale civil war, fights it half-heartedly. Frontlines stagnate, then some Chechen commanders look abroad for funds, training, and ideological legitimation.

Afghanistan under the Taliban becomes the obvious hub, with training camps for Chechen, Dagestani, Ingush, and other militants, ideological cross-pollination with Arab and Central Asian jihadists, and logistical pipelines of money and weapons.

They coalesce into an umbrella structure called the Chechen Liberation Front (CLF). It is formally centred on Chechen independence, practically willing to hit Soviet targets anywhere, and blessed by Taliban religious authorities as legitimate mujahideen.

By late 1990s: the Taliban regime effectively hosts a transnational jihadist hub whose fighters:

• rotate through Chechnya, Dagestan, and Central Asia,

• attack Soviet forces and infrastructure,

• maintain pathways into the Middle East and beyond.

Afghanistan as Soviet–Islamist–Caucasus knot

By 1999, Afghanistan is:

• a Taliban-dominated emirate over most rural and many urban zones,

• studded with Soviet “fortress bases” and Kabul enclaves,

• used as a rear base by CLF and other foreign jihadists,

• still of intense interest to Pakistan, Iran, and the Gulf.

For the US, watching from outside: Afghanistan looks like:

• a failed state,

• a jihadist haven, and

• a place where both Soviet and Western equities are at risk.

The 1990s set up a multi-layered conflict with the Taliban and CLF against the Kabul regime, Soviet forts, and scattered non-Taliban militias, with the US and Pakistan still playing deniable games on the edges.

2000s: Putin, Terror Shock, Parallel Afghanistan, Analog War Labs

2000–2001: Putin Becomes General Secretary

Putin was a former KGB officer who rose to head the FSB, then became prime minister in 1999 and acting president when Yeltsin resigned. His political brand from the start was to restore order, recentralize the state, crush Chechen separatism, and reassert great-power status.

In ATL, Yeltsin was General Secretary of the CPSU (not President of Russia) through the 1990s, presiding over Union-wide shock therapy, oligarchization, and a 1998 financial crisis. By 1999, he is exhausted, ill, and politically toxic. The security-statist faction in the CPSU (ex-KGB, parts of the army, state-industry bosses) decides they need someone loyal, tough on separatism and jihadism, but not a hardline Stalin nostalgist.

Enter Putin, the former state security officer, competent manager from Leningrad/St Petersburg politics. Famously loyal to his patrons, ruthless when needed, and good at dealing with oligarchs without being their puppet.

So in late 1999 / early 2000, Yeltsin “voluntarily” steps down as party leader for health reasons. The CPSU Central Committee elects Vladimir Putin as General Secretary of the CPSU. Gorbachev, still around as the ceremonial Union President, blesses this as a transition to a new generation of leadership.

Putin immediately starts building his “vertical of power” inside a still-socialist-in-name system. Union-level laws claw back control of taxes, pipelines, and key transport networks from republic presidents and regional bosses. Loyal “presidential envoys” are sent to oversee macro-regions, echoing real-world reforms where Putin created federal districts to reassert central authority.

The Party doesn’t abolish oligarchs, but it does domesticate them. Some are arrested or exiled as examples; others sign on to a “patriotic compact”: keep your wealth, but

• help fund strategic industries,

• stay out of high politics, and

• never undermine the Union’s territorial integrity.

Putin goes on to back the security services. FSB/KGB successors get better budgets and political coverage. Chechnya and the North Caucasus are reframed as the front line of the Union’s struggle against international terrorism.

By 2001, Putin’s image inside the USSR is the man who will end the chaos of the 1990s and keep the Union from becoming Yugoslavia.

Early 2000s: The Terror Shock

A coordinated wave of hijackings strikes without warning. Multiple commercial airliners, seized almost simultaneously, are used as precision-guided weapons, their crews overpowered and transponders disabled. The attackers rely on courier chains, face-to-face relays, and dead-drop instructions, deliberately avoiding any electronic communication that could trigger U.S. or Soviet SIGINT interception patterns.

What turns the attacks into a global trauma, however, is the payload. Each hijacked aircraft carries a jury-rigged nuclear fission micro-reactor, black-market bastardisations of compact Soviet military power units. Crude, unstable, and assembled with smuggled fissile scraps, these devices behave as improvised atom bombs when overstressed by impact. The resulting detonations, far below the yield of state weapons but far above that of any conventional explosive, shatter airport terminals, financial districts, and energy hubs across several continents.

Governments are left stunned: the terrorists weaponised forbidden science once believed too complex for non-state actors. They are traced to a joint network of Arab jihadist cadres with ideological and operational roots similar to al-Qaeda, with a prominent presence of Chechen and other North Caucasus militants, all trained and sheltered in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, with explicit blessing from Taliban clerical leadership.

US demands to the Taliban:

1. Hand over the named planners (including CLF commanders),

2. Close all camps,

3. Allow international inspectors at Soviet bases and Taliban zones alike.

The Taliban ideologically see the CLF as genuine mujahideen, and practically rely on these foreign fighters to pressure Soviet fortress bases. They thus refuse or stall. Their message:

“We will not betray guests who are fighting infidel occupation, whether Soviet or American.”

They are now explicitly at war with both great powers at once.

2001–2003: US-USSR Parallel Intervention in Afghanistan

OTL after 9/11, Russia offered support to the US “War on Terror,” including intelligence sharing and acquiescing to US bases in Central Asia.

In ATL, the USSR already has troops and bases in Afghanistan (“Fortress Afghanistan” ). Chechen and CLF attacks on Soviet territory, framed domestically as jihadis funded from the Gulf and trained in Afghanistan, already made Moscow furious long before the US got hit.

When US cities burn, Putin calls the US President within 24 hours. Live on Soviet TV, he gives this message

“Today, the American people suffered what our citizens have suffered from terrorists in the North Caucasus. The Soviet Union both extends condolences and offers cooperation.”

Behind closed doors, the deal is that the US recognizes Soviet bases and air corridors in northern and western Afghanistan as de facto Union zones.

The USSR accepts:

• US/NATO forces entering from the south (via Pakistan/Indian Ocean),

• US use of Central Asian airspace and bases, mirroring real post-9/11 basing rights in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

• Both sides agree to formal deconfliction: map of zones, altitude blocks, and radio protocols so they don’t accidentally shoot each other, and intelligence sharing against Taliban/CLF infrastructure.

Publicly, they sell it differently:

• US narrative: “We lead a global coalition; some former adversaries now see reason.”

• Soviet narrative: “We convinced the Americans to join us on the Afghan front we have long understood.”

But in practice, it’s a two-headed intervention:

• From the North and West: USSR and Kabul regime remnants, armoured columns, Mi-24s, heavy artillery.

• From the South and East: US, NATO, and client militias, with carrier aviation, strategic bombers, and special forces.

On the ground, Afghanistan in the early 2000s faces two wars:

• US/NATO focus:

  • taking and securing key southern cities (Kandahar, Helmand towns),

  • hunting high-value leadership targets,

  • building up friendly Pashtun and non-Pashtun militias.

• USSR/Kabul focus:

  • shoring up control of Kabul and northern/eastern urban belts,

  • protecting Soviet airbases and logistic hubs,

  • crushing CLF and Uzbek/Tajik jihadist corridors into Central Asia.

Coordination is grudging. Joint cells compare aerial reconnaissance and some SIGINT, but protect their own sources and proxies. Deconfliction hotlines at regional HQs (say, in Tashkent and Al Udeid-equivalent) handle airspace and emergency situations. Occasionally, Soviet and US special forces end up on opposite sides of the same valley, both stalking the same Taliban commander, and have to pull back to avoid a friendly-fire diplomatic incident.

2000s: Analog SIGINT and Electronic Warfare Labs

Because Shannon never went into information theory in the 1940s in this timeline, there was no revolution in bits, entropy, and channel capacity to unify communications, coding, and compression.

Without it, telecoms and radar still advanced, but in a much more patchwork, engineering-driven way. Soviet mathematicians developed deep probability and measure theory—Kolmogorov and the Soviet school still existed and laid rigorous foundations for probability. No one, however, built the clean, unified abstraction layer that ties those ideas directly into practical coding schemes and digital communications.

By the 2000s digital electronics exist (computers, microcontrollers, radios), but coding gain is weaker, compression is crude and domain-specific, and lots of bandwidth is wasted to keep systems robust.

The military SIGINT/EW complex therefore remains heavily analog-front-end and brute-force storage driven.

The Afghan war is both a paradise and hell for EW engineers. The Taliban/CLF use a mix of:

• HF radios,

• VHF/UHF handhelds,

• commercial satellite phones,

• stolen legacy Soviet kit, and

• low-tech couriers when they suspect heavy monitoring.

US and Soviet forces flood the region with sensors:

• airborne wideband receivers,

• mountain-top relay and DF stations,

• truck-mounted jammers and listening posts,

• optical and IR sensors feeding into the same time-stamped logs.

OTL early and mid-Cold-War systems relied heavily on analog receivers, tape recorders, and manual or semi-automatic analysis, and even later digital EW inherits a lot of those architectures. ATL never fully left that paradigm, so both great powers double-down on it in Afghanistan.

To process this flood, both sides build dedicated Afghan EW Labs:

• US: ARCLIGHT program based out of a hardened facility in the Gulf and a secondary node in California.

• USSR: BAIKAL-K complex in the Urals and mirror sites in Central Asia.

These labs take in raw wideband recordings:

• tens of thousands of hours per day of spectrum slices,

• multi-channel voice, morse, burst transmissions, noise bursts.

• synchronize with:

  • satellite imagery,

  • drone and recon aircraft feeds,

  • ground sensor nets (seismic, acoustic).

With no Shannon-style optimization, they record entire bands continuously, instead of smartly compressing or pre-filtering. Data is stored in huge robotically managed archives:

• racks of digital tape,

• spinning disks,

• still a surprising amount of high-grade analog media for certain channels (film, specialized instrumentation tape).

Analysts and engineers keep building bespoke analog and hybrid circuits:

• filter banks and analog correlators,

• mechanical or optical devices to spot patterns in spectrograms,

• early “neural network” analog chips that can classify waveforms, but only in narrow, brittle ways.

Mathematical teams (especially on the Soviet side, drawing on the probability tradition) experiment with:

• clustering of call-sign patterns,

• stochastic modelling of insurgent radio discipline,

• primitive attempts at predicting IED and ambush likelihood from local traffic patterns and sensor spikes.

Crucially, no-one has the general representation language that LLM-style models later use OTL. No-one has a stable coding theory to cleanly compress and de-noise the whole pile. The labs end up with:

Petabytes of semi-structured, semi-understood analog/digital war data, covering:

• voices in dozens of languages,

• weapon signatures,

• movement patterns,

• propaganda messages,

• tactical chatter,

all across a decade of war.

Putin’s Strategic Takeaway and the Road to Détente

For Putin’s CPSU, the terror shock and Afghan war become: justification for:

• harsher domestic anti-terror laws,

• tighter media control,

• deeper integration of the security services into governance—very similar to post-9/11 securitization, but through a Soviet lens.

They leverage to:

• delegitimize separatists as “terror proxies,”

• pressure Gulf donors via diplomatic channels,

• convince sceptical republic elites that only a strong centre can keep them safe.

Chechnya, Dagestan, and other hot zones become part of a single narrative: CLF and its cousins are one tentacle of a global jihad that just struck the Americans and has been striking them for years.

That sells cooperation with the US as self-interest.

Foreign policy

On the international stage US-USSR cooperation in Afghanistan is framed by some commentators as a new anti-terror “Grand Alliance”, explicitly compared in tone to the anti-Nazi Germany coalition.

This cooperation normalizes the USSR’s long-term military presence in Afghanistan. What used to be a quasi-colonial embarrassment is now part of a “joint front against terror.” Joint presence leads to more formalized US–Soviet arms control on EW and space assets, along with data-sharing agreements in limited domains: tracking foreign fighter flows, shared watchlists, joint monitoring of certain communications channels.

China

While US and USSR burn money and blood in Afghan mountains, China:

• sells arms opportunistically,

• secures resource contracts in Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,

• continues building:

  • the Southern export and tech machine,

  • the Beifang militia-industrial backbone we set up in the 70s–80s.

Beijing publicly supports the anti-terror coalition in principle (mirroring real-world Chinese support for US operations after 9/11 as part of opposing “separatism” and extremism), but keeps its own hands mostly clean in Afghanistan, preserving freedom of action for the future.

2010s: Long Wars, Climate Pressure, and the Logic of Second Détente

2010–2019: The Frozen Afghan War Never Ends

By 2010 in ATL, Afghanistan is split in three ways:

• Taliban/CLF belt across large swathes of the south, east, and some central provinces.

• US-led zones in parts of the south/east and key logistic hubs tied to Pakistan and Gulf bases.

• USSR-led zones in the north, around Kabul, and anchored on long-standing Soviet fortress bases.

The US and USSR each have their own Green Zone with associated bases and proxies. Both run train-and-assist missions with local proxies. Both conduct targeted raids and drone/air strikes into Taliban/CLF territory. The line between “front” and “rear”, however, is basically nonexistent.

Frontlines move like tides. Taliban/CLF offensives capture key districts in the summers. US/USSR and local forces clear and hold some of them in the winters.

OTL saw Afghanistan and Iraq become “laboratories” of counterinsurgency, with doctrines like “population-centric COIN,” drones, and special operations refined there.

In ATL, we have two superpowers experimenting in the same theatre:

• US:

  • develops persistent ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) networks: drones, tethered aerostats, patrol bases wired with sensors.

  • keeps iterating on precision airstrikes, special operations raids, and “hearts and minds” programs.

• USSR:

  • adapts its older Afghan experience to a new era:

    • more reliance on contract troops and special units, fewer conscripts;

    • improved helicopter and close-air support tactics;

    • sophisticated analog-heavy EW suites bolted onto modernized aircraft and ground vehicles.

• Both run parallel data-gathering programs, logging:

  • radio/phone/satphone traffic,

  • drone video and imagery,

  • SIGINT on IED networks,

  • biometric and movement data on local populations.

This war is no longer about “winning Afghanistan” in a political sense. It’s about never again letting a Taliban/CLF-style sanctuary become a staging ground for catastrophic attacks, while squeezing as much operational learning out of the theatre as possible.

Taliban and CLF adapt too, learning to go low-probability:

• more human couriers, less radio;

• short “burst” transmissions;

• exploitation of civilian telecom and satellite networks;

• use of terrain and civilian movement to blind drones.

Personnel strategy:

• rotate fighters between frontlines in Afghanistan and Caucasus/Central Asian theatres,

• keep a flow of foreign volunteers to replace attrition,

• embed in transnational smuggling and criminal networks.

The result is a chronic infection:

• too resilient to exterminate with force alone,

• too dangerous to ignore,

• increasingly distributed across borders: Pakistan’s borderlands, parts of Iran, the ‘Stans, the Caucasus, and diaspora pockets in the West.

The Afghan conflict has become a permanent low-grade world war in miniature, with two superpowers, one rising PRC on the sidelines, and a web of jihadist and criminal actors all colliding in the same mountains.

A Hotter, Poorer World

In OTL, the 2010s saw more extreme weather, sea-level rise, intensified droughts, and major reports warning of systemic risk.

Those physical impacts are similar or worse in ATL, but:

1. Global infrastructure is more energy-hungry:

   • more analog signal processing,

   • less efficient compression and networking,

   • more brute-force redundancy in telecom and broadcasting.

2. Global governance and coordination are slower:

   • no early internet boom in the 1990s built on clean Shannon-era standards;

   • more fragmented, proprietary, and brittle networks;

   • fewer global platforms for rapid scientific data exchange and public pressure.

So by the 2010s,

• stronger storms hammer US coastal cities and Soviet/PRC ports,

• multi-year droughts wreck crops in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa,

• Arctic melt opens up new sea lanes and resource frontiers that are directly adjacent to US, Soviet, and PRC strategic stakes.

The 2010s are the pressure-cooker prelude to the later 2050s Resource Wars:

• Oil is still central to transport and military logistics; unconventional extraction (tar sands, deepwater, etc.) is expensive and contentious; key regions (Middle East, Arctic, Central Asia) are also political minefields.

• Critical minerals:

  • rare earths, cobalt, lithium equivalents are bottlenecked in a few regions,

  • PRC has strong positions via African and domestic deposits,

  • USSR and US scramble to secure long-term deals.

Without the efficiency gains of a clean, global digital infrastructure thanks to Claude Shannon, each unit of economic and military activity burns more energy. That makes the resource crunch sharper, earlier.

Nuclear weapons’ destructive capacity already made all-out war irrational, but deterrence logic and “windows of vulnerability” still fueled arms races.

By the 2010s ATL, leaders in Washington and Moscow (and Beijing) are staring at:

• climate reports projecting severe regional instability,

• internal modeling showing their own coastal cities and agricultural regions at risk,

• resource projections indicating that whoever survives the next several decades of climate chaos gets to shape the long-term future.

They understand that any full nuclear exchange would not just destroy the opponent, but also wipe out the very industrial base and social infrastructure they need to handle climate adaptation and resource reallocation.

Nuclear war at this point in time is still strategic suicide in a world where long-term survival requires massive, coordinated industrial effort.

Road to Second Détente (2010s–2020s)

By the mid-2010s, both the US and USSR have spent trillions (in their respective currencies) over decades of war, rotated multiple generations of officers and NCOs through Afghanistan, and developed sophisticated but costly EW, drone, and special operations ecosystems.

Their militaries are extremely experienced in counterinsurgency and mountain warfare, deeply tired of fighting the same networks over and over, and aware that there is no “victory” condition, only “containment.”

Domestic sentiment is skeptical:

• US voters are sick of “forever wars.”

• Soviet citizens, especially in Russia and Central Asia, see returning veterans, budget cuts at home, and endless footage of operations in far-away valleys.

So political elites in both countries face a shared incentive to cap the Afghan bleeding while not pretending they can just walk away.

All the while, China has turned the Southern ring into a full industrial and tech powerhouse: huge export sectors, advanced electronics, growing AI and cyber capabilities. Beifang has also matured into a true militia-industrial behemoth, with large arsenals of conventional weapons and ballistic missiles, deep reserves of trained militia, an expanding naval and air forces.

From US and Soviet perspectives, China looks like: a state that did 30+ years of economic development without major internal breakdown, built a massive industrial base largely immune to the direct costs of the Afghan quagmire, and can project power into Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Arctic.

Strategic analysis in both Washington and Moscow converges on Beijing quietly building a machine that can out-produce both of then in a crisis. The US and USSR don’t automatically become allies, but the geopolitical calculus nudges them toward managing their rivalry.

Arctic melt in the 2010s unlocks new shipping routes (Northern Sea Route, potential trans-polar routes), exposes resource basins (oil, gas, minerals) on continental shelves, with traffic and military presence increaing in previously ice-locked waters.

In OTL, Arctic governance evolved through treaties and forums like the Arctic Council, with contentious debates over navigation and resource rights.

In ATL, US and USSR both have massive Arctic coastlines and bases, while China shows up as a “near-Arctic stakeholder” with icebreakers and investment offers.

This forces US–USSR navigation and deconfliction agreements in the Arctic to avoid collisions, miscalculations, and stand-offs. They also start joint or parallel search-and-rescue and environmental response planning, because a large oil spill in the Arctic is a nightmare for everyone. What follows is some resource-sharing and licensing frameworks, or at least tacit understandings, to prevent each side from destroying prices or triggering armed incidents over drilling platforms.

These practical arrangements are the first bricks of the Second Détente: cooperating where physics and geography give them no choice (Arctic, climate, anti-terror logistics), then gradually extend that into broader security and economic talks.

By the late 2010s, a set of US–USSR framework agreements takes shape as a sequence of treaties and MOUs that cover:

1. Afghan Coordination Accords

   • cap troop levels and types of operations;

   • set up more robust intel-sharing on foreign fighter flows;

   • define shared red lines (no large-scale cross-border raids without notification, etc.).

2. Arctic Security and Resource Framework

   • joint monitoring of Arctic traffic;

   • procedures for avoiding air/naval incidents;

   • guidelines for overlapping resource claims and environmental responsibility.

3. Climate and Disaster Cooperation

   • data exchange on climate modeling and observation;

   • joint contingency planning for mega-storms, crop failures, and refugee flows;

   • limited cooperation on clean-energy tech and grid resilience.

Domestic framing:

• US: “We still compete, but we cooperate where global stability demands it—terrorism, climate, non-proliferation.”

• USSR: “The Union remains a socialist great power, but we are responsible stewards of global security and the biosphere.”

ATL scholarship discusses this as the product of structural pressures—exhaustion, economic strain, external rising powers, and systemic risks—rather than just personal whims of leaders. They draw explicit analogies between how 1980s Soviet policy was shaped by economic stagnation and the Afghan war, and how 2010s US-USSR policy is shaped by endless Afghan warfare, a rising PRC, and climate/resource constraints.

2020s: House Is Born, USSR & US Open the Math Vaults

2020: Robert House is born in the Analog Age

June 25, 2020: Robert Edwin House is born in the western US (you can say Los Angeles in this timeline), later growing up around the greater Las Vegas–Mojave corridor.

His childhood backdrop:

• The USSR still exists, under a late-Putin CPSU.

• The US is locked in permanent low-grade warfare and surveillance with the USSR in Afghanistan and around the world.

• Civilian life is full of high-powered analog tech:

  • monstrous broadcast networks,

  • clunky semi-digital mainframes,

  • bespoke signal processors bolted onto everything from traffic lights to airliners.

House is orphaned young after a freak autogyro accident involving a lightning strike. He loses his parents early and is cheated out of his inheritance by a half-brother, forcing him into becoming a self-made hypergenius.

House grows up surrounded by systems he can’t control (states, armies, churches, corporations), yet his whole instinct is: “there must be a way to describe and steer all this.”

He just hasn’t seen the right mathematics yet.

2020–2029: Second Détente lets the Maths Vaults Open

By 2020, the informal Second Détente of the 2010s (Afghan co-management, Arctic pragmatism, climate panic) has ripened into something more formal. The US and USSR sign a cluster of agreements that feel like a mash-up of SALT, New START, and missile-defence talks from OTL, but updated for their triple-power environment with PRC looming behind them.

• Ceilings on strategic warheads and delivery systems, plus shared definitions of what counts as “strategic” and what is theatre.

• Joint early-warning protocols:

  • shared satellite and radar notification channels for launches leaving Earth’s atmosphere,

  • baseline telemetric formats for warning messages so misreads are minimized,

  • agreed “cool-down” periods in crisis before either side escalates to higher alert levels.

The Détente gets teeth in the Arctic and climate domains:

• Arctic Accords II (alt-Helsinki):

  • codify navigation rules along the Northern Sea Route and other emerging passages,

  • stipulate de-confliction zones around military installations and resource platforms,

  • set joint environmental liability standards so a spill or nuclear accident can’t be hand-waved away.

• Climate Adaptation Framework:

  • joint disaster-response exercises,

  • shared satellites and observational data,

  • cooperative research on desalination, flood defences, heat-resilient crops.

The Holy See and other moral actors later point to these as proof that even hard powers can be nudged into seeing climate as a security issue, not just an environmental one.

The most important bit for House: both sides agree to a “Great Science Exchange”, on paper about:

• climate modelling,

• reliability engineering and control systems,

• safer nuclear and energy tech.

Buried in the annexes are provisions for:

1. Mathematics & Foundations seminars

   • regular joint conferences and visiting-scholar programmes focused on:

     • probability theory,

     • functional analysis,

     • control and information-related mathematics.

2. Declassification and translation of core Soviet texts

   • The Soviets start systematically exporting the Kolmogorov school of probability:

     • A. N. Kolmogorov’s axiomatic Foundations of the Theory of Probability—which in OTL reframed probability as a measure on a sigma-algebra—becomes widely translated, commented, and taught in US engineering faculties.

     • Associated work by students and collaborators like Boris Gnedenko and others—on limit theorems, reliability, queues, and extreme value distributions—is opened up under new “civilian” imprints.

3. Algorithmic complexity and information

   • Alongside classical probability, Soviet and Eastern European mathematicians share their contributions to algorithmic complexity / Kolmogorov complexity: the idea that the “information content” of an object is the length of the shortest program that produces it. This becomes a bridge between probability, computation, and what OTL calls data compression.

In OTL, algorithmic information theory grew in unison with Shannon information theory. Here, there is no Shannon unifying telecom. The West thus receives a general language for signals, noise, and structure that they’ve been missing for a century.

Western engineers and physicists suddenly realise that all their ad-hoc analog tricks in EW, radar, and telecom can be re-expressed in a rigorous probabilistic and algorithmic formalism. The Soviet school has been sitting on a complete toolkit for describing uncertainty and structure without having tied it directly to hardware in the Shannon way.

The US suddenly catches up to a formal understanding of probability & complexity it never truly internalised, and the USSR discovers how valuable its “pure math” actually is as soft power and as bargaining chip. Both start planning next-generation control, prediction, and compression systems, all without yet realising they are laying the exact groundwork for Robert House.

Mr House’s Early Life

House grows up in a US heavy with sleek but analog-heavy terminals, vacuum-tube-inspired aesthetics, huge physical archives and tape libraries. All these dot a society saturated with talk of:

• signals, interference, jamming, counter-jamming,

• logistics, optimization, resource crises,

• climate anomalies and “black swan” events.

His generation hears as much about drought probability curves as about pop stars. Climate risk modelling, disaster insurance, and resource futures have entered the vernacular.

Orphaned young, mathematically gifted, and temperamentally suspicious of human institutions, House lives in libraries and tech stacks. In the 2020s, he would have access—through public libraries, later scholarships—to:

• cheap reprints of Kolmogorov, Gnedenko, & co.,

• US textbooks hastily updated to integrate measure-theoretic probability and algorithmic complexity,

• popular-science expositions of the new US–USSR math cooperation.

To everyone else, the Great Science Exchange is a news item. To House, he gets a language that:

• treats reality as stochastic processes on vast state spaces,

• quantifies structure and randomness in the same breath,

• promises that any sufficiently rich signal—even a society, a market, or a war—can be modelled, predicted, and optimized.

As a teenager in this 2020s, he sounds like this weirdo who reads probability monographs instead of comics. He’s further fascinated by old EW case studies from Afghanistan, which are now being declassified and used in university teaching as examples of real-world stochastic control problems. He begins to sketch a synthesis in his notebooks: a fusion of Soviet probability, algorithmic complexity, and giant, messy analog datasets from half a century of conflict.

Church and Spain in the 2020s

Because Bugnini and Nouvelle Théologie never captured the post-war Church in ATL, the Catholic Church entered the late 20th century with: doctrine and liturgy more conservative than in our world’s post-Vatican II, and a Council that was framed explicitly as a response to communism and atheistic materialism, not as a sweeping liberalization.

By the 2020s, though, the Holy See’s line has adapted its packaging. It still views dialectical materialism and militant atheism as anthropological errors that reduce the person to economics or power. But in its international diplomacy, it increasingly speaks the language of:

• human rights,

• dignity of the person,

• ecological stewardship.

The Holy See presents itself as the stable moral counter-pole to both atheistic socialism (USSR) and consumerist technocracy (US, and to some degree PRC).

On climate, it leans into the same themes that in OTL as Laudato si’ and later papal documents:

• climate change as a “global problem with grave implications”, especially for the poor;

• ecological damage as a form of structural sin tied to greed and militarization;

• calls for redirecting military expenditure toward a global fund for poverty reduction and sustainable development.

On human rights and war, it: invokes the heritage of security tied to human rights and religious freedom as a model for any new détente. It further tries to insert itself as moral broker in conflicts, even where its diplomatic leverage is limited.

Spain under the Villaverde dynasty

Franco’s dynastic decision to sidestep Juan and install his son-in-law’s line (the Villaverdes) as monarchs locks Spain into a National-Catholic trajectory that lasts well into the 21st century.

The Villaverde monarchy is formally constitutional, but sees a single dominant party (heir to Francoist structures) controls parliament, with media pluralism tightly managed, and education and family law heavily shaped by Catholic teaching.

Economically, Spain has integrated into broader Western trade and finance networks. Madrid sells itself as a “moral” financial hub, socially conservative but economically open, a model of “soft authoritarianism + late-modern prosperity.”

Rome quietly worries about the moral cost of such close Church–state fusion (haunted by Franco-era memories), but also sees Villaverde Spain as: a bulwark against both radical secularism and overtly atheistic socialism, a kind of showcase for what a National-Catholic social order looks like in the 21st century.

In the grand narrative, the Holy See and Villaverde Spain form one “pole” of Catholic political imagination: integrated Church–state, socially conservative, wary of both US consumerism and Soviet/PRC secularism.

2030s: Analog Mega-Systems and House’s Apprenticeship

2030–2033: Analog Mega-Projects

By 2030, the Second Détente has fully crystallized into routine cooperation:

• US–USSR joint committees on climate, Arctic navigation, nuclear early warning, and anti-terror.

• Shared scientific programs explicitly built on measure-theoretic probability in the Kolmogorov sense (probability as a measure over sigma-algebras).

Because Shannon never gave anyone a clean, general framework tying entropy, coding, and channel capacity together, communications and computing in this world have evolved as:

• wildly sophisticated analog and hybrid systems,

• highly domain-specific digital islands,

• no unified theoretical backbone like Shannon’s 1948 “Mathematical Theory of Communication” and its noisy-channel coding theorem gave us in real history.

When US and Soviet planners stare down climate chaos and resource crunches in the 2030s, their instinct is to build bigger, more specialized analog mega-systems instead of smaller, fully general digital ones.

Joint and parallel projects spring up:

• US:

  • Project CASSANDRA: a continental climate-risk and disaster-response array:

    • networks of radar, weather satellites, ocean buoys, river gauges, and power-grid sensors;

    • all feeding into giant analog/optical computation centres that solve stochastic PDEs for weather, runoff, and storm impacts using measure-theoretic probability models.

  • NATIONAL PREDICTIVE ARRAY: a hybrid economic–logistics simulator:

    • analog models of power flows, pipeline networks, and transport corridors;

    • analog neuromorphic chips to “feel” systemic risk patterns.

• USSR:

  • GLOBUS-3: an integrated climate–crop–energy system:

    • builds on Soviet traditions of large-scale modelling and control;

    • heavy use of Kolmogorov-style stochastic processes and functional analysis to model fields and grids. Cambridge Assets+1

  • BAIKAL-K: the evolution of the Afghan EW complex into a general “signal universe” archive:

    • decades of war-zone recordings, plus new peacetime telecom and radar logs;

    • everything stored in mix of analog tape, optical film, and partially digitized formats.

Above all of it hangs the theoretical gap. They have a rigorous probability theory (Kolmogorov’s axioms, Markov processes, limit theorems). They have algorithmic complexity as a concept. What they do not have is a universally accepted engineering discipline that outlines, given a noisy channel and a source, what are the optimal codes, achievable rates, and ultimate compression bounds.

2030–2035: House’s Childhood and Early Obsessions

Robert Edwin House, born 2020, spends the early 2030s as an orphaned, preternaturally bright kid growing up between Los Angeles and the Mojave corridor. He is a scholarship case perpetually hovering around the edge of elite technical education and sheer poverty.

The news is full of climate disasters, resource riots, incremental updates from Afghanistan, endless analysts talking about risk curves and probability of failure.

Public science writing is saturated with simplified introductions to Kolmogorov’s axiomatic probability, pop accounts of Kolmogorov complexity as the length of the shortest description/program.

Little House eats it up. By his mid-teens (~2035), he’s memorized: the core probability axioms and measure-theoretic language from cheap translations of Kolmogorov’s Foundations of the Theory of Probability. He has devoured popular and semi-technical treatments of algorithmic complexity. The idea that information is the minimum program length becomes an obsession.

He’s haunting public and university libraries, half-abandoned analog electronics labs, discussion fora where old EW techs talk shop about coils, filters, and jammers.

He notices something that annoys him: everyone talks about probability, complexity, and signals, but nobody seems to have one clean language that tells what the limit is—how much you can squeeze out of a channel, or how much redundancy you must have.

He doesn’t know it, but he’s groping toward the intuition that, in OTL, Shannon solved.

2034–2037: Apprenticeship in the Data Mines

House, being House, does not go through a normal academic pipeline. He smashes standardized tests, gets himself into MIT, then wanders sideways into defence-adjacent work with a mixture of brilliance and sheer nerve.

In his late teens, he interns or consults at a black-budget contractor that: has license to work with joint US–USSR EW archives from Afghanistan, and maintains one of the big analog-to-hybrid conversion centres for battlefield recordings.

There he sees literal mountains of reel-to-reel tapes, optical film, and partially digitized logs; warehouses whose shelves hold:

• decades of radio spectrums recorded off Afghan valleys,

• intercepted sat-phone calls,

• jamming records,

• drone sensor outputs,

• acoustic and seismic traces of convoys and firefights.

Engineers at the contractor: have painstakingly built ad-hoc classifiers and filters over the years:

• hardware correlators for specific insurgent waveforms,

• domain-specific feature extractors,

• crude pattern-recognition circuits.

Mathematicians talk about:

• Markov models of insurgent behaviour,

• Bayesian estimators for IED risk,

• stochastic processes running over complex networks.

But nobody is treating the whole thing as a single, abstract communication system with defined sources, channels with capacities, or universal coding theorems.

House starts to quietly scribble his own notation. He reinterprets Afghan radio traffic as sample paths of stochastic processes over discrete alphabets; approximations to Kolmogorov probability spaces with random variables representing signals, noise, and hidden insurgent “state.” He plays with algorithmic complexity ideas: how long is the shortest program that reproduces a given time-series of insurgent radio traffic? What does that suggest about the “true” information content vs noise?

His supervisors just think he’s a bright kid good at math debugging analog-digital interface code. He’s quietly building a mental Rosetta Stone that fuses Kolmogorov’s probability, algorithmic complexity, and the engineers’ dirty intuitions about coding and noise.

2037–2039: House names the Analog vs Digital tension

Across the late 2030s, turbo-charged by climate urgency and détente, the big analog mega-systems expand:

• more sensors, more dedicated hardware,

• more analog neural arrays for pattern recognition.

There is some digitalisation:

• specialized digital codecs for particular military radio bands,

• local packet-switched networks inside bases and research labs,

• bespoke digital storage for subsets of the data.

But each digital island is engineered like a one-off piece of art, built by a small priesthood, not part of a coherent, global information architecture. Digital engineers reinvent little coding tricks. Mathematicians talk about entropy of probability distributions, but not as operational bounds on communication. Algorithmic information guys talk about shortest programs, but rarely speak to telecommunication engineers.

House’s irritation: you all have the pieces. You’ve got Kolmogorov’s measure-theoretic foundation, you’ve got algorithmic complexity, you’ve got empirical coding tricks from 80 years of war. Yet you never closed the loop, you never turned uncertainty into a conserved quantity you can transmit, store, and trade.

By the end of the 2030s, he’s finishing a high-level program with a reputation as a troublemaker and a savant. He has drafts of what will become his first Information Theory papers stacked in encrypted vaults and scribbled in notebooks. Both the US and USSR are just beginning to realise that their analog mega-systems are hitting scaling walls—they can’t keep wiring more hardware forever without a new abstraction layer.

2040s: House’s Information Theory and the Compressed Digital Revolution

2040–2045: The House Always Wins

House is angry, brilliant, and uninterested in playing nicely with existing institutions. He starts dropping a series of papers, some public, some classified:

1. “Probability, Description Length, and Channels” (c. 2041)

   • He takes Kolmogorov’s axiomatic probability space (Ω,F,P) as the base language.

   • He connects it explicitly to algorithmic complexity, showing in modernized form that the probability of a message in a source model and its minimal description length (Kolmogorov complexity) are tightly related.

   • He defines information as:

the reduction in expected uncertainty (in the Kolmogorov measure sense) when a message is observed.

1. Functionally, he discovers the idea of entropy as expected information for a distribution, but framed in measure-theoretic and algorithmic terms rather than Shannon’s original combinatorial derivation.

2. “Capacity of Noisy Measure-Theoretic Channels” (c. 2042–43)

   • He formalizes channels as measure-preserving (or distorting) transformations between probability spaces with noise kernels.

   • He defines channel capacity as the supremum of mutual information between input and output distributions per unit resource (time, bandwidth, energy).

   • He proves the equivalents of:

     • the noisy-channel coding theorem: for any channel with capacity CCC, any information rate below CCC is asymptotically achievable with arbitrarily low error by proper coding;

     • source coding bounds: minimum average code length approaches the entropy of the source.

   These are the same structural results Shannon got in 1948, but House’s derivations are couched in Kolmogorov probability theory, algorithmic complexity proofs for universal codes, and physically motivated constraints from the Afghan EW data he knows intimately.

3. “On Codes Approaching Capacity” (c. 2043–44)

   • He doesn’t invent all error-correcting codes, but he: systematizes design principles for codes that approach his capacity bounds in realistic channels; and he unifies scattered results analogous to Hamming, Golay, and later coding theory into one coherent engineering toolbox.

   • Instead of engineers bumping into good codes by trial and error, they now use House’s theorems and constructions to pick families of codes, understand tradeoffs among redundancy, latency, and error probability, and optimise for specific Afghan-style, atmospheric, or fiber-optic channels.

The result is a self-contained House Information Theory, with precise definitions of bit, entropy, capacity unified treatment of compression, coding, and encryption as aspects of manipulating uncertainty and description length; and a clear role for algorithmic complexity in defining ultimate, source-independent limits.

2043–2049: From Analog Giants to Digital Stacks

Once his theory lands, both US and USSR engineers collectively realize that he came up with what they have been missing.

Governments and corporations scramble to digitize analog archives using House-style optimal codes:

• Afghan EW tapes,

• Cold-War radar archives,

• early climate observation records,

• logistics logs from decades of military deployments.

They build House-optimal codecs for:

• HF/VHF/UHF military radios,

• satellite links,

• fiber backbones,

• ground-to-air communications.

Because the old systems were incredibly wasteful (no general theory, lots of redundancy), the jump in efficiency is dramatic:

• Transmission reliability at the same power and bandwidth is massively improved;

• for the same reliability, they can cut bandwidth and power usage sharply.

This matters intensely in a resource-stressed world, for less power and spectrum per bit means cheaper, more reliable grids and networks, and less fuel burned just to keep the military comms backbone alive.

Unlike our world, where digital networks grew alongside analog telephony and then replaced it, here analog infrastructure is enormous and entrenched:

• national telephone systems built on analog backbones,

• analog microwaves, troposcatter, and HF systems stretching over continents,

• analog sensor networks for climate and early warning.

Instead of ripping everything out, House-era engineers design digital overlays:

• digital multiplexing over old analog trunks using optimal modulations and codes;

• sideband digital channels riding on top of analog broadcast systems;

• smart repeaters and gateways that translate analog-domain sensor outputs into coded digital streams.

Within a decade (c. 2045–49):

• core backbone routes in the US and USSR become packet-switched, error-corrected, HIT-designed digital networks;

• local analog loops linger, but get progressively squeezed as digital endpoints cheapen.

This is a compressed digital revolution that happens later than the OTL 1990s internet boom, but hits harder because the world is already hyper-sensorized and data-rich.

Once Information Theory exists, it becomes natural to treat learning systems as uncertainty-minimisation engines over high-dimensional probability spaces; and models as compressed representations (programs) with minimum description length relative to data—OTL MDL and Bayesian model selection.

The US and USSR (and PRC, once they steal or buy enough of House’s research) launch massive probabilistic modelling projects:

• climate prediction with HIT-based compression of observational data;

• social/economic forecasting based on aggregated, encoded transaction and mobility logs;

• war-game AIs trained on digitized Afghan conflict data, now fully compressed and searchable.

These systems are not yet “LLMs” in the exact sense, but:

• they build high-dimensional probabilistic models of signals, texts, and behaviours;

• they generate predictions, suggestions, and even natural-language summaries by sampling from learned distributions.

This is the first wave of real GAI: strongly probabilistic by design, explicitly grounded in Kolmogorov measures and algorithmic complexity, and built on top of House’s coding theorems.

2045–2049

House aggressively patents implementations:

• hardware architectures implementing near-optimal HIT codecs,

• compilers that turn probabilistic models into efficient encoders/decoders,

• secure communication stacks that embed encryption into coding layers.

He also spins up RobCo as a company selling HIT-core chips, radios, terminals, and control systems to:

• militaries,

• utilities,

• industries trying to survive in a hot, resource-scarce world.

Because everyone desperately needs:

• more efficient control over grids, logistics, and communications,

• powerful prediction systems for climate, food, and unrest,

they throw money at House’s tech. By the end of the 2040s, RobCo is:

• embedded in backbone networks,

• providing control systems for pipelines and railways,

• quietly managing parts of early warning and command-and-control frameworks for the US (and, via licensed or stolen tech, for the USSR and PRC).

House has gone from angry orphan to indispensable systems architect of a tripolar civilisation. He sees that all three great powers are still on a collision course over resources, space, and ideology. He knows that whoever controls the next layer of abstraction—the full GAI layer—will control the board.

The 2050s Resource Wars, PRC’s triple-theatre campaigns (SEA/Taiwan/Alaska), and the pre-Great-War escalation will all unfold in a world where:

• House’s Information Theory underpins every serious network,

• House’s own GAI-like systems are secretly running deeper simulations than any state realizes, and

• the analog ghosts of Afghanistan, climate records, and decades of surveillance have been compressed into learning corpora for the most dangerous entities ever built.

2050s: Early Resource Wars, GAI, and China’s Triple-Base Strategy

2050–2052: Resource Crisis and Euro–Middle Eastern War

By 2050, ATL sees more megadroughts, heat waves, and storm clusters wreck infrastructure and agriculture. Climate and security literature has long warned that environmental stress amplifies war risk, especially where fossil resources are concentrated.

Old fields in North America, North Sea, and parts of Texas are either exhausted or ruinously expensive. US oil fields are “withered husks” and Europe heavily depends on Middle Eastern imports by the 2050s.

A loose European Commonwealth has become chronically resource-poor, dependent on Middle Eastern oil/gas and Soviet gas, and politically unstable from decades of austerity and climate-driven migration.

States around the Gulf and Eastern Med control dwindling oil, gas and water. Political science theory has long flagged these types of resources as drivers of conflict when distribution is uneven and governance is weak. Regional rivalries (Iran vs Sunni monarchies, Israel vs Iran and various proxies, Turkish ambitions, etc) have simmered for decades. OTL 2020s have already seen open Israel-Iran exchanges (missile strikes, air raids on nuclear facilities, retaliatory barrages) that caused oil prices to spike and raise war fears.

2052: Euro-Middle Eastern War

In April 2052, the ticking stops. A combination of a shock oil price hike by a Middle Eastern producer bloc, European banking collapses triggered by energy shortages, and a failed round of emergency diplomacy pushes the European Commonwealth into direct action. European maritime task forces begin seizing Middle Eastern tankers and attempt to occupy key coastal terminals and pipelines.

The USSR tries to play peacemakerprofiteer, selling Europe gas and refined fuels at premium prices, selling Middle Eastern states arms and advisors, offering “mediation” to keep both sides dependent. China watches and quietly, signs long-term resource deals with Gulf states, offers to protect key ports via its “Outer Ring” client strategy, accelerates Arctic route development to move resources around Europe’s mess.

By late 2052, the Eastern Mediterranean is a war zone hosting European expeditionary forces and carrier groups. Middle Eastern countries retaliate with ballistic missiles and drones hitting shipping and refineries. All the while, proxy militias fire on pipelines and gas terminals.

Israel sits right inside this storm.

2053: Nuclear Attack on Tel Aviv

OTL Israel is widely believed to have a small but sophisticated nuclear arsenal and multiple delivery systems while maintaining official nuclear ambiguity. Tel Aviv and greater Gush Dan are the logical primary targets for any nuclear terrorist or state attack, being the Israeli city with the highest population density while paying host economic and military command functions.

The 1990s shock-therapy chaos in the USSR produced a grey market in weapons and materials. Putin’s later re-centralization reduced but never fully erased it. Some kilos of weapons-grade material has long since disappeared into the black.

By 2053, the Euro-Middle Eastern War has militarized the whole region. Arms, smugglers, and refugees flow all across the region. In December 2053, “like an exclamation mark on the end of a very bad year,” a nuclear device detonates in or directly over Tel Aviv. This is an improvised device, perhaps a crude implosion weapon in the ~50-150 kt yield range. The material came from a Soviet or allied stockpile that went missing amid 1990s.2000s corruption. Since Israeli and Soviet anti-ballistic missile systems would have likely flagged any missile, the nuke most likely explodes in a shipping container or truck bomb triggered near the urban core, possibly with help from insiders or coerced port personnel.

Within hours, competing claims surface. A salafi-jihadist front with roots in the old Afghan/Taliban/CLF networks claims responsibility. Fragmentary signals intelligence points at channels through Afghanistan and the Caucasus, with financial flows tied to radical elements in at least one Gulf monarchy and a rogue cell inside Iran’s security apparatus. There is just enough evidence to blame:

• “extremists connected to Iran” (the story from Israel and some Western analysts),

• “Sunni radicals sponsored by Gulf elements and tolerated by the West” (Tehran’s spin),

• “loose nukes from negligent Soviet custodians” (from anti-CPSU voices).

No single story convinces everyone. That ambiguity makes the next step catastrophically unstable.

2054: Limited Nuclear Exchange in the Middle East

The destruction of Tel Aviv urges the surviving Israeli leadership scattered across hardened bunkers and House-era command systems to assume that no purely non-state group could have pulled it off alone. They lean on decades of doctrine that quietly implied: if the survival of the state is in question, nuclear retaliation is on the table.

Early 2054 thus sees a limited nuclear exchange in the region as Israel responds and others respond to Israel. Israel, convinced rightly or wrongly that elements within Iran and another regional state colluded in the attack, or at least provided the material and sanctuary, launches a small number of nuclear strikes against: hardened IRGC or equivalent strategic sites, and possibly one or two major regional military/political centres.

Several Middle Eastern states who have developed limited nuclear capability in the wake of decades of proliferation read these strikes as a generalised assault on the region, then launch their own nuclear strikes on Israeli airbases and suspected nuclear sites. One or two shots target European expeditionary ports and fleets, which may or may not hit.

Canon Fallout lore mark Jeddah, Baghdad, Kuwait City, and other Gulf/Levantine hubs as victims of nuclear detonations as either primary or collateral targets.

Brutal as this is, this exchange doesn’t escalate to all-out global war. US, USSR, and PRC leaderships understand that a general exchange would wreck what’s left of the global climate and resource base they need to survive. All three powers also run strategic AI systems based on Robert House’s designs that estimate famine, infrastructure collapse, and domestic turmoil under different escalation paths. Nearly all scenarios where the US/USSR/PRC directly trade nuclear blows show the home country collapsing or fragmenting within 10–20 years.

As soon as launches are detected, Washington and Moscow get on the line. They confirm that no launchers were meant for either party. The PRC, though less integrated into those channels, also holds fire, wary of a three-way extinction event.

The UN, already weak, effectively dies here: it cannot prevent war, contain nukes, or manage relief. Fallout canon lore explicitly note the collapse of the UN in this period.

2054: Project Safehouse, Plague, and Institutional Panic

The Tel Aviv blast and subsequent limited exchange hit at the same time as a global plague, energy prices and supply chains whipsawing violently, and nation-states panicking about continuity.

In 2054, the US federal government, under fierce lobbying from Vault-Tec and House-linked defence contractors, launches Project Safehouse. This is a nation-wide program of deep vaults marketed as civil defense shelters, continuity of governance modules, and population seed banks in case of nuclear or biological catastrophe.

Each Vault’s core systems use ZAX-class AIs built on House’s systems designed to optimize limited resources under uncertainty, control life support and security autonomously, and run long-term social experiments if needed. The military also ports House-style AI into hardened bunkers, early-warning hubs, and black research facilities.

The USSR, long practised at bunker culture, expands its own deep shelter networks. They implement metro-based civil defense systems in major cities, secure command bunkers in the Urals and Siberia, and start a parallel program to integrate House-style AI into their own ZAX-equivalent systems.

China starts carving massive subterranean complexes across Beifang, blending industrial facilities, depots, and hardened militia shelters. They further experiment with home-grown GAI architectures for command-and-control, logistics, and propaganda.

Project Safehouse is the most iconic, but all three great powers are now pre-building the assumption of eventual cataclysm into their design.

2055–2059: Aftermath of Tel Aviv, Europe Collapses, PRC Positions, GAI Entangles Everything

The Euro-Middle Eastern War and nuclear strikes do to Europe what long-range energy security analyses feared: turn dependency into collapse. Oil and gas flows from the Middle East plummet with ports destroyed or irradiated and pipelines cut. Insurers further refuse to cover shipping through hot zones.

Some European states turn to the USSR for gas and synthetic fuels, but Soviet capacity is finite and politically conditioned, and not everyone gets enough.

By mid-decade, the whole world sees rolling blackouts, rationing, industrial output collapse, surging radical movements and separatist violence.

The European Commonwealth fractures. Some members demand deeper integration and a war economy under central control. Others swing toward nationalist strongmen or local resource warlordism. Open conflicts break out between European states or factions over remaining fuel reserves, ports, and water.

For its part, the US: weaponizes its remaining agricultural and tech base with RobCo GAI to sell food and systems. It quietly secures Canadian and Alaskan resources as “non-negotiable” strategic reserves. At last, it pushes Project Safehouse hard. Vaults become both shelters and political bargaining chips—which cities get one? who gets in?

The USSR leverages its own Siberian hydrocarbons and Arctic deposits to keep parts of Europe and Asia tethered. Their finally completed logistics AIs keeps its sprawling militia–industry complex functioning despite climate shocks. It also begins pushes into Central Asia and the Arctic with infrastructure and bases.

Both continue joint/covert operations in Afghanistan and the wider terror belt to smash any jihadist factions that might do another Tel Aviv, but then partake in a discreet GAI arms race. Each side’s systems model the other’s society, economy, and nuclear posture, yet everyone is terrified of a GAI misinterpreting signals as impending first strike.

For China, the 2050s are a time for opportunity. As Europe implodes, the PRC uses cheap capital and manufactured goods to lock down port leases and bases along the Indian Ocean and Pacific along with stakes in African and Middle Eastern resource projects abandoned or fire-sold by European firms.

It builds logistics arcs toward the Bering/Alaska region, disguised as commercial shipping lanes and research stations. It prepares pre-positioned depots and airstrips in friendly states, ready for later campaigns (SEA, Taiwan, Alaska).

The nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv and the subsequent exchange become a theological trauma for world Christianity and Judaism, and a moral wedge for the Catholic Church. The Holy See issues a major encyclical explicitly condemning nuclear terrorism, retaliatory nuclear use, and the logic of “resource wars”—linking them to greed and contempt for human life. Said encyclical frames Tel Aviv as “A sign that our civilisation treats human beings and cities as expendable variables in a false calculus of security.”

Villaverde Spain doubles down on its National-Catholic identity. It further rejects nuclear sharing or deployment on its soil, then tries to posture itself as a safe hinterland for Catholic elites fleeing more chaotic parts of Europe. These acts let them quietly court Vatican favour, using the crisis to extend influence over parts of Latin America and North Africa.

This doesn’t stop the Resource Wars, but it shapes global discourse: any future use or threat of nukes is now argued against with “remember Tel Aviv” as the central image.

Seeds of the Great War

By the end of the 2050s, House’s Information Theory is baked into:

• all major telecom networks,

• military command systems,

• Vault control AIs,

• Soviet and Chinese equivalents.

GAI systems run war games and contingency plans on the Afghan-Caucasus belt, on Middle Eastern remnants, and on future flashpoints (Taiwan, Alaska, Arctic). They also start managing national grids and distribution networks under climate and resource shocks.

Most tellingly, they advise on nuclear posture in real time. The Tel Aviv attack and the 2054 exchange taught every major state one lesson: misreading the signals can lead to losing a city in a single flash. Nation-states lean harder and harder on GAI to not misread signals.

The irony, of course, is that the same mathematical clarity that lets House optimise signals and codes also lets his systems optimise escalation paths and “rational” pre-emption.

Sometime in the late 2070s, with Vault-Tec deeply wired into US strategic command and its own incentives very different from flesh-and-blood governments, that optimization problem ends with everyone’s cities on the list, not just Tel Aviv.

2060s: Sino-American War, PRC Three-Front Campaign, the Soviet Balancer

2060: end of oil as a system

The Tel Aviv blast (2053), the limited nuclear exchange (2054), and the long Euro–Middle Eastern War have already smashed production and infrastructure across the Gulf and the Levant. By about 2060, what Fallout canon calls the collapse of the global oil economy plays out. Key Middle Eastern fields are physically depleted, require insanely expensive enhanced extraction, or sit under irradiated, war-torn territory.

The North Sea, Texas, and other mature Western basins are mostly spent. European tankers no longer flow, and the Euro-Middle Eastern War has devolved into scattered resource feuds and failed-states conflicts all around the Eastern Mediterranean

Price spikes and rationing tip into outright supply failure. Shipping companies go insolvent. Insurance markets break. A lot of oil is still underground, but nobody can pull, move, or pay for it at the scale the old global economy needed.

Massive rush to nuclear and fusion

As oil runs out, the world turns heavily to nuclear energy, including experimental fusion. Robert House’s AI has already given utilities and states ultra-optimised grid control, better safety and fault-detection for complex reactor networks, and compression and telemetry that make real-time monitoring of reactors globally feasible.

By the early 2060s, the US, USSR, and PRC are building modular fission and early commercial fusion plants everywhere they can plug them in. Smaller states either buy in, or become clients of whichever bloc will finance and protect their reactors.

Uranium supply, thorium processing, zirconium, high-grade steel, rare earths for control electronics all become choke points. Climate-change-driven disasters (heat waves, floods, storms) regularly hit nuclear infrastructure, testing House-era safety models to the limit.

The world has more electricity in some core regions than any time in history, but less flexibility because fuel cycles, spare parts, and trained personnel are bottlenecked.

2060–2065: China’s Energy Crisis and the March Toward War

cChina’s its fossil fuel dependency has always been higher than it wanted to admit, and the decline of cheap oil hits its sprawling industrial system hard.

By the 2060s, even with fusion and fission, the Southern Ring (coastal SEZs, export mega-hubs) is immensely power-hungry and still relies on petrochemicals (plastics, fertilizers, aviation fuel, certain heavy logistics). The Beifang militia-industrial North runs vast heavy industries—steel, machine tools, artillery shells, tanks—which all need massive amounts of electricity and hydrocarbon inputs (lubricants, speciality fuels, polymer explosives). The Outer Ring clients in Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, and the Pacific all want Chinese funds, weapons, and infrastructure—energy-intensive goods.

China has some domestic reserves, but they’re not enough to feed all three Rings at Resource-Wars tempo. Arctic shipping routes and Alaskan oil and gas loom large in Beijing’s planning, just as Fallout lore makes Alaska’s remaining reserves critical enough to trigger war.

Sino-American relations sour over the last hydrocarbons

As oil dries up globally, China’s energy crisis makes it more aggressive, and an American sabotage of a deep-sea deposit and a US oil embargo push Beijing over the edge into invading Alaska.

The US and PRC have spent the 2050s coexisting uneasily amid shared climate and terror threats, competing for Arctic shipping rights and seabed claims, and sparring through proxies in Africa and Southeast Asia.

In the early 2060s, three things happen:

1. Dispute over a deep-sea deposit: A Pacific deepwater field (think last major conventional-ish oil/gas deposit) is discovered, partially claimed by China’s extended EEZ logic and partly by US-allied Pacific states.

   • A series of “incidents” follows:

     • suspicious fires and blowouts,

     • sabotage suspected by both sides,

     • House-based GAIs in both capitals assigning high probability to intentional covert ops by the other.

2. US embargo tactics: Under domestic pressure and confident in its advanced fusion infrastructure, Washington quietly:

   • restricts exports of critical reactor components and rare isotopes to PRC,

   • tightens control of tanker routes that still matter,

   • uses sanctions against third countries selling hydrocarbons to China.

   • Energetic security scholarship in our world already notes how sanctions and control over chokepoints can weaponize energy; your US does it ruthlessly.

3. PRC domestic pressure and Beifang hawks: Beifang militia elites and PLA planners argue that the longer they wait, the more the US and USSR will fortify Alaska and Arctic routes, narrowing their window of opportunity.

   1. Southern business clans, worried about export collapse, reluctantly agree that a quick, decisive seizure of resource nodes could stabilise China’s economy and restore bargaining leverage.

By 2065, Sino-American relations are openly hostile.

• trade in key tech and materials is frozen;

• cyberspace is full of deniable attacks;

• both militaries run war games for Alaska, Taiwan, and sea-lanes daily.

All those war games are run on House-era GAIs trained on decades of EW and conflict data.

2066–2070: Sino-American War and PRC’s Three-Front Campaign

Fallout canon is clear on the big beat. By winter 2066, China invades Alaska to seize its remaining oil reserves, marking the outbreak of the Sino-American War. The Battle of Anchorage becomes the iconic front, lasting into 2077.

2066: Opening shots: Alaska, Taiwan, Southeast Asia

1. Alaska: the Arctic land grab

In late 2066, the PRC executes Operation Northern Ice. From forward bases in PRC Arctic “research stations” and friendly ports, plus long-prepared logistics chains:

• Beifang militia divisions and PLA regulars push over or around the Bering Strait into Alaska and the Yukon corridor,

• specialized arctic armor and snow-mobile units (mass-produced in Beifang co-ops) spearhead the advance.

Objectives are to seize:

• the North Slope (remaining hydrocarbon reserves),

• key sections of the Trans-Alaska pipeline and associated terminals,

• choke points on new Arctic sea-lanes for future control.

The US had long garrisoned Alaska, but:

• decades of global crisis, Vault construction, and political fragmentation have left those forces under-resourced;

• much of US high-tech kit is tuned for desert and urban warfare, not deep arctic manoeuvre against hardened militia formations.

Early months:

• PRC forces overrun or bypass outlying outposts,

• secure a land bridge of contested but held positions from the Bering Strait toward Anchorage and Fairbanks,

• quickly begin airlifting in construction units to build hardened depots and launch sites, turning bits of Alaska into a Beifang-away-from-home.

China holds Anchorage for a decade. ATL makes the canon invasion logistically plausible thanks to Beifang’s universal militia-industrial model.

2. Taiwan: the contested island

Almost simultaneously, Beijing launches its long-prepared Taiwan operation:

Southern Ring shipyards feed:

• carrier “fishing fleets” turned assault groups,

• swarms of missile boats and drone carriers,

• large amphibious and airborne lift capacity.

House-inspired but indigenously developed GAI systems:

• coordinate saturation missile strikes on Taiwanese airfields and radar,

• time cyberattacks on civilian infra and comms.

Taiwan has spent decades hardening underground bases, mobile launchers, and distributed command structures. It draws on US and Japanese support for House-style coded communication suites, and air and naval backup in the Western Pacific.

The campaign quickly becomes a grinding, attritional fight. The PRC gains footholds, but can’t deliver a clean knockout. Taiwanese resistance, backed by US logistics and long-range strikes, turns much of the island into a fortified ruin instead of a quick prize.

3. Southeast Asia: proxy war turned semi-overt

In resource-rich parts of Southeast Asia—offshore gas basins, rare-earth regions, key shipping straits (Malacca, Sunda, Lombok)—the PRC flips the switch. Friendly regimes and militias receive:

• advanced drones,

• cyber-war kits,

• GAI-optimised logistics and targeting.

US and regional states respond with their own proxies, covertly deploy special forces and carrier groups, and fight over choke points and offshore platforms.

By 2067, three fronts exist:

1. Alaska-Yukon-Arctic

2. Taiwan and the Western Pacific

3. Southeast Asian sea-lanes and littoral states

Each front strains different parts of the US and PRC systems. 5ogether, they create a true global resource war.

China Sustains Three Fronts with the Beifang Edge

Because every Beifang factory acts as an arms co-op and militia base, and every county is a mobilization cell tied to specific PLA formations, China can: absorb high casualties on the Alaska and Taiwan fronts, regenerate units quickly, and keep shells, winter gear, trucks, and small arms flowing at scale.

Beifang war-economy features:

• Redundancy: no single megafactory; thousands of medium plants that can each contribute to a dozen supply streams.

• Embedded training: militia rotations through production units; everyone has some field experience.

• Local autonomy on rails: GAIs allocate quotas and supply patterns; local co-ops optimise internally.

PRC planners think they can take losses the Americans can’t. They decide that they can keep three wars going longer than their political patience and their alliances.

That’s exactly what terrifies US and Soviet observers.

The US in the 2060s: Anchoring, Annexing, and Automating

1. House & RobCo in total war mode

In the US, the Sino-American War instantly becomes a justification to:

• expand House-derived systems inside every critical infrastructure,

• accelerate Vault-Tec’s Safehouse program,

• further militarise the state.

RobCo / House tech is at the heart of:

• war logistics (GAI-based supply-chain optimisation),

• drone command and control,

• satellite and EW networks,

• Anchorage theatre battle-management systems.

House himself sees the war as a stress test for his information-theoretic empire. He then uses war contracts to gain near-total visibility into US and allied communication flows, then quietly deploys more general GAI prototypes under the guise of “prediction engines.”

Fallout canon lore has the US deploys power armor and retakes Anchorage later in the war (T-45 and T-51 roll out in late 2060s/2070s). Here, House’s coding and control stacks are what make those systems logistically viable and keep them supplied in horrifying conditions.

2. Canada and the Arctic corridor

As the Alaska front grinds on, the US decides it cannot treat Canada as a separate, potentially wobbly partner while Chinese forces are on North American soil. A hostile annexation of Canada by 2072 commences.

US forces had already built out a land bridge of bases, depots, and rail/road corridors through western Canada. They have already pressured Ottawa into handing over effective control of Arctic and northern territories. Political crises and resource shortages inside Canada, plus refugee flows from Europe, further weaken federal legitimacy.

By the late 2060s, Canada is still formally independent, but effectively under US military and economic protectorate status with annexation legislation, contingency plans, and propaganda ready for the early 2070s.

3. Domestic politics: wartime authoritarianism, Vault panic

Long wars, memory of Tel Aviv memory, and the 2050s plagues give a US public willing to trade almost anything for safety. The 2060s see continuation and hardening of:

• jingoistic security culture,

• rounding up of “enemy sympathizers” and suspect minorities,

• mass surveillance justified by war and terror—turning the pre-War US increasingly authoritarian and paranoid before 2077.

Vault-Tec uses the Sino–American War to justify more Vault construction, drills, and funding. It then commences experiments in some Vaults with war-related social engineering (ie., how long a population will tolerate rationing, surveillance, and civilian-military fusion).

In his suite in the Lucky 38, Robert House is noting how ready the population is for peace enforced by machines.

USSR in the 2060s: Balancer and the Bookkeeper

The CPSU-run USSR is watching its nightmare come true:

• the US and PRC are locked in all-out conventional war,

• many of the battlefields (Arctic, Pacific, South China Sea) sit on or near Soviet lines of communication,

• any misstep could drag Moscow into a direct nuclear confrontation with one or both.

1. Public pose: “Responsible socialist superpower”

Moscow’s messaging calls for:

• UN-style ceasefires,

• collective security conferences,

• respect for international law in the Arctic and Pacific.

It presents the USSR as the adult in the room—socialist, but pragmatic—who wants to keep the planet habitable. This plays well with energy-dependent client states scared of total war, and parts of Europe that still blame both US and PRC for Tel Aviv and the Middle Eastern disaster.

2. Private reality: selling fuel, tech, and influence

Behind the curtain, the USSR:

• sells hydrocarbons, nuclear fuel, and rare materials to whichever side is currently more desperate (with enough plausible deniability);

• shares older or downgraded House-derived coding tech to keep clients hooked;

• expands military and political control in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and parts of Eastern Europe, as Europe’s old institutions crumble.

Afghanistan and the ex-CLF belt remain under heavy Soviet surveillance and occasional kinetic action. Any group that even whispers about another Tel Aviv-style attack is ruthlessly eliminated.

3. GAI and nuclear nerves

Soviet leadership is constantly running GAI-driven simulations of US-PRC war outcomes:

• what happens if one side starts losing badly and contemplates tactical nuclear strikes,

• how those cascades reach Soviet territories and interests.

Their red lines:

• no nuclear use in or near their borders (Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Far East),

• no major nuclear accidents at Arctic or Siberian energy nodes,

• no encirclement by victorious PRC forces anchoring both Alaska and Taiwan.

So the USSR quietly shares some early warning data and House-style info-security with both sides to reduce miscalculations. They hope that they might covertly sabotage extreme escalation plans (on either side) that threaten to go nuclear.

They’d rather face two exhausted rivals in 2070 than one triumphant hyperpower or a global radioactive madhouse.

2070–2077: Corporate Ascendancy, Vault-Tec’s Calculation, and the Great War

2070–2072: Corporations Over States, War on Autopilot

By the 2070s, three long arcs have converged:

1. Resource Wars (2052+) have gutted the old oil economy and turned entire regions (Middle East, Europe) into rubble or client-zones.

2. The Sino-American War (since 2066) has locked the US and PRC into a grinding three-front struggle: Alaska/Arctic, Taiwan, Southeast Asia.

3. House’s Information Theory (HIT) and its descendants now sit inside almost every critical system on Earth.

By 2070, RobCo, Vault-Tec, Poseidon Energy, and a handful of other megacorps control:

• the AI models that predict logistics, unrest, strikes, plagues, and escalations;

• the chips, reactors, and software that keep grids, satellites, and missile defenses running; and

• private security forces and orbital assets.

Governments are formally sovereign, but functionally:

• their war plans are generated and validated on corporate GAIs trained on decades of EW and battlefield data;

• their nuclear command & control runs through hardened networks designed and maintained by RobCo/House-grade stacks;

• their civil defense (Vaults, bunkers) is largely outsourced to Vault-Tec and its foreign imitators.

House’s position has RobCo as the OS of late-21st-century civilization:

• communications run on optimised codecs and routers,

• military hardware uses RobCo firmware,

• Vault-Tec’s Pip-Boys and ZAX-class AIs badge “Powered by RobCo.”

He’s the one person who can look at global systems and see them as one big stochastic machine.

Vault-Tec has been weird since Project Safehouse (2054): shelters, but also social experiments, plagues, “Plan D” cyanide pills—products that treat catastrophe as a market. By early 2070s, the inner circle has a settled worldview:

• States are broken:

  • Tel Aviv, 2053 saw small nuclear war;

  • Middle East and Europe, 2050s saw Resource Wars;

  • Sino–American War, 2060s see multi-theatre meatgrinder with no exit

• GAI projections look awful:

  • Their own models, fed with climate, resource, and war data, show:

    • near-total biosphere destabilisation by 2100,

    • multiple plausible nuclear wars even without deliberate first strikes,

    • zero political path to coordinated decarbonisation or global demilitarisation.

Inside Vault-Tec boardrooms, the pitch becomes:

“If the existing order runs its course, everyone dies badly. We have the only large-scale, hardened, autonomous habitat system on Earth. Therefore we are the rightful stewards of humanity’s continuity.”

Vault-Tec execs openly propose starting a nuclear war so their Vault system can inherit the world. That plan is backed by House’s quality AI forecasts.

The Holy See and Villaverde Spain watch this tech-war alignment with horror:

• The Vatican issues a major encyclical in the early 2070s condemning corporate rule and autonomous war planning, explicitly invoking Tel Aviv and the later Middle Eastern exchange as evidence that “we have placed godlike power in godless hands.”

• Villaverde Spain tries to convene a “Peace of Toledo” conference – states, blocs, and corporations to agree to strict limits on AI in nuclear command and resource wars. These get polite attendance and lots of photo ops, with no binding commitments.

Moral authority is there. Leverage is not.

2073–2075: Anchorage Turns, Canada Falls, China Strains

Canon sets Anchorage’s liberation in early 2077 as a turning point of the Sino–American War.

• 2073: US deploys mature T-51-class power armor and fully HIT-equipped battle networks into Alaska:

  • RobCo-designed control systems coordinate infantry, armour, artillery, and drones with millisecond precision;

  • House GAIs run colossal war games based on decades of arctic, Afghan, and SE Asian data.

• Initial offensives are brutal:

  • Chinese Beifang mechanised units hold Anchorage with layered defenses;

  • early US attempts fail against entrenched militia formations that have trained for this exact climate for decades.

• 2074-75 sees the US learn and iterate:

  • power armor doctrines mature,

  • long-range precision strikes begin targeting Chinese arctic depots and Beifang supply pipelines,

  • GAIs start optimising attrition, not pure manoeuvre: grinding down Chinese logistics faster than they can regenerate.

By 2075, the writing is on the wall in Alaska. The PRC still holds key sectors, but:

• casualty curves look bad,

• supply ratios are trending against them,

• some Beifang co-ops back home are protesting endless mobilisation.

2073–75: Canada annexed

US supply lines to Alaska run through Canada. Annexation was driven by the need to secure that corridor and move troops freely. Ottawa, shattered by decades of energy crisis, internal unrest, and huge US troop presence becomes essentially powerless.

US Congress passes the Continental Security Act retroactively justifying continuous occupation, converting provinces into “territorial districts,” and promising eventual “equal status” once the war is won.

By 2077, canon holds that annexation is formally complete. Canada ceases to exist as a nation.

2074–75: PRC at the breaking point

The triple-front gamble is killing China:

• Alaska:bleeding edge mechanised war in lethal conditions.

• Taiwan: meat-grinder urban and littoral warfare against a dug-in island saturated with US/USSR-grade tech.

• Southeast Asia: endless proxy and limited direct clashes over sea lanes and offshore platforms.

Beifang can still crank out guns, shells, trucks, and bodies. But Southern export hubs are under blockade and intermittent strikes. Climate disasters hit Chinese river basins and coastal cities. Even the most hawkish planners see that they can’t win a total war against a RobCo-saturated US and a watching USSR indefinitely.

Beijing’s war GAIs start to spit out ugly recommendations:

• accept some form of negotiated peace before the economy implodes, or

• plan for limited tactical nuclear use to break US logistics in Alaska and force talks from a position of strength.

The seed of “maybe we have to go nuclear” is planted here—even before Vault-Tec touches anything.

2076: Negotiations, “Final Models,” and Vault-Tec’s Decision

By 2076, both Washington and Beijing are exhausted.

• US:

  • stretched across three fronts and multiple occupation zones (Canada, bits of China, SEA);

  • dealing with climate disasters, domestic unrest, and Vault panic at home.

• PRC:

  • frontlines stabilising in a way that suggests eventual slow defeat,

  • internal cracks in the Three Rings:

    • Beifang tired of endless sacrifice;

    • Southern Ring businessmen terrified of total economic implosion.

They open formal peace talks, centred on Anchorage:

• ceasefire lines in Alaska and Taiwan,

• mutual de-militarization of certain sea lanes,

• resource-sharing arrangements in the Arctic and key offshore fields,

• inspection regimes for tactical nuclear forces.

Canon notes that talks at Anchorage eventually collapse on the morning of October 23, 2077.

Vault-Tec’s internal Endgame models

Vault-Tec is watching those talks too—and feeding them into its own GAIs. What they see, running millions of HIT-based simulations:

• If peace succeeds:

  • great powers demobilize somewhat,

  • but remain nuclear-armed, resource-hungry, climate-stressed, and dependent on GAIs;

  • probability of some other nuclear exchange (over food, water, or a future Tel Aviv-style terror event) remains high over the next 50 years.

• If peace fails:

  • high chance of desperate tactical nuclear use in Alaska or against naval groups,

  • very high chance of spiralling misinterpretation and full exchange.

In neither branch do states voluntarily disarm, radically decarbonise, or cede control of dangerous tech.

Vault-Tec’s core clique (types like Hank and Barb) reach a chilling conclusion.The “least bad” timeline is one where:

• war happens now,

• under conditions they control,

• with their Vault network mostly ready, instead of a chaotic, later war with fewer survivors and no centralised stewardship.

The show strongly suggests Vault-Tec intended exactly this kind of engineered apocalypse: drop the bombs themselves, ride out the war in prepared Vaults, and emerge as the only organised force left.

House’s ambiguous position

House is in the room, one way or another.

• House’s GAIs run long-horizon models of war and climate.

• He knows Vault-Tec is discussing “timing the inevitable.”

• He is torn between three instincts:

  1. Technocrat: “With enough control, we could manage this world better than nation-states.”

  2. Humanist ego: “But only if I run the post-war world, not a Vault-Tec board full of dullards.”

  3. Self-preservation: “If they’re going to light it all on fire, I’d better survive with my own city and systems intact.”

By 2076, he definitely activates and tests the Lucky 38 defense grid designed to intercept incoming warheads at long range. He further arranges his life-preservation pod and the Securitron army networked under Las Vegas. Quietly, he has reduced RobCo’s dependence on Vault-Tec contracts so that if they go rogue, he can stand apart.

Whether he actively abets Vault-Tec, tries to sabotage them, or simply models then stands aside is something we can nuance later. For now, he’s the one major actor who: knows the war is coming. To that end, he has built a city-sized exception to it.

2077 (Pre–October 23): The Last Year

Early 2077: Anchorage liberated, China cornered

Anchorage is liberated at the start of 2077. US forces, powered by mature power armor, House-stack battle networks, and deep arctic logistics through annexed Canada finally push Chinese forces out of Anchorage and reclaim the city in a headline victory.

US propaganda trumpets this as proof “we can drive China from every inch of North American soil”, boosting support for continuing the war despite exhaustion.

China gets a psychological gut punch. War GAIs now show:

• near-zero chance of regaining Alaska conventionally,

• growing risk of domestic unrest and Beifang backlash if they don’t secure new resources,

• a narrowing window before US brings its full force to bear in the Pacific.

Mid-2077: Talks, brinkmanship, and GAI overfitting

Summer 2077, peace talks at Anchorage drag on:

• US comes in on a high from liberation;

• PRC negotiators demand guarantees US won’t press advantage into the mainland;

• both sides haggle over Taiwan and Arctic routes.

• GAIs in both capitals are being retrained constantly on new war data, including:

  • Anchorage battle records,

  • new satellite and EW logs,

  • fresh economic collapse indicators.

A subtle failure creeps in:

• Models are optimised for short-term military payoff, not long-term civilisational survival.

• Political leaders, already used to trusting GAI outputs more than human generals, start to see “Go hard now” vs “risk losing deterrence forever” recommendations, with “play safe and deescalate” branches consistently scored as “low utility / high risk” because of resource and domestic instability.

Vault-Tec’s internal AI sims, meanwhile, are watching those models and conclude that both parties are converging on a situation where either side might rationally go first.

23 October 2077

00:00–03:00 EST: Vault-Tec lights the match

In the small hours of 23 October 2077 (EST), Vault-Tec executes Plan Omega. Using backdoors in US targeting and command systems (thanks to its role in civil defense simulations and GAIs embedded in warning networks), it covertly launches a handful of nuclear weapons from “sanitised” platforms:

• some on US soil, disguised in logs as Chinese sub-launched MIRVs,

• possibly some from repurposed corporate orbital assets or black-site silos.

Targets are carefully chosen to look like a Chinese decapitation strike on:

• US West Coast military and industrial hubs,

• parts of the US strategic command structure,

• selected Soviet and PRC sensors to sow confusion.

US early-warning systems, partly written by RobCo but maintained by Vault-Tec-adjacent contractors, register missile signatures and trajectories that match known Chinese launch profiles (faked by AI-designed trajectories and spoofed radar feeds).

03:00–04:00 EST: Chinese “launch” and US retaliation

From canon:

• Chinese subs detected off California around 00:03 EST,

• bombers sighted near the Bering Strait around 03:37 EST in the Anchorage area,

• President orders retaliatory strike scenario MX-CN91 at 09:26 EST.

Those canonical events are entangled with Vault-Tec manipulation. Vault-Tec’s false-flag launches coincide with real Chinese deployments (subs shadowing US coasts, bombers on patrol near Alaska) and a heightened alert status already in place because Anchorage talks are tense.

Inside Beijing, early-warning sees something:

• inbound tracks toward PRC assets,

• anomalies in satellite and radar feeds (some caused by Vault-Tec spoofing, some by chaos).

GAI advisors, overfitted to worst-case US scenarios, output: probability high that US has initiated limited first strike to force surrender or preempt PRC tactical use.

Under immense pressure, Chinese leadership authorises their own launches at West Coast, Alaska, and key US bases. Some were launches possibly pre-delegated to field commanders whose systems have also been partially spoofed.

In Washington US early-warning now sees the initial “Chinese” signatures from Vault-Tec, plus real outbound Chinese missiles and bombers, plus confused Soviet radar feeds that don’t match US internal projections. Under the long-prepared contingency MX-CN91, the President orders a full retaliatory strike against the PRC at 09:26 EST.

The trap is sprung: Vault-Tec’s seeded false positives with genuine Chinese fear and US doctrines all lead to a full-scale exchange.

09:42–11:30 EST: Global exchange (US, PRC, USSR caught)

Canonical sequence:

• West Coast then Pennsylvania/New York get hit at 09:42 EST;

• Washington, D.C. is struck at 09:47 EST;

• the exchange continues for about two hours;

• both China and the US are devastated.

In the United States:

• West Coast naval bases, aerospace hubs, and tech cities are annihilated;

• East Coast industrial and political centres (New York, Pennsylvania, DC) burn;

• some central and southern targets are also hit;

• many ABM systems are compromised or mis-tasked by Vault-Tec interference.

In the PRC:

• coastal megacities and industrial belts are hammered by US MIRVs;

• Beifang war industries inland suffer massive strikes;

• Southern Ring ports and Outer Ring bases are targeted.

The USSR initially tries to ride it out, but:

• some Chinese missiles go awry into Soviet airspace;

• US planners, uncertain of Soviet intentions and fearing a “third man in,” target key Soviet military and industrial hubs in second-wave strikes;

• Soviet GAIs interpret inbound tracks as deliberate attack.

• The CPSU authorises its own retaliatory salvo targeting both US and PRC command nodes, hitting parts of Europe, the Arctic, and possibly Chinese rear areas.

The Great War becomes a global nuclear exchange, but with a clearly engineered spark. Vault-Tec drops the first bombs, China and the US then genuinely trade full salvos, and the USSR is dragged in by trajectory chaos and paranoia.

House and Vegas

While the world ends, House flips the switches he’s been wiring for decades: Las Vegas is surrounded by:

• RobCo-designed anti-missile batteries,

• early warning arrays, and

• AI-driven targeting tuned on decades of Afghan and Arctic air defense data.

When inbound warheads aimed at the Mojave region are detected, House’s systems:

• shoot down most of them,

• leaving Vegas scarred but not vaporised.

House himself seals into his life-preservation chamber at the Lucky 38, handing control to automated systems and Securitrons, betting that he can wake up centuries later as the only intact high-civilisation node left standing.

Vault-Tec, the Catholic Church, Spain, and the end of the old order

• Vault-Tec:

  • Many senior execs and loyal cadres are deep in cryo or secure Vaults when the bombs fall;

  • a catastrophic miscalculation means a significant fraction of Vaults are unfinished or not fully provisioned—matching the TV show’s implication that war came earlier/faster than some expected.

• The Holy See:

  • Rome is struck; St. Peter’s and the Curia are wrecked;

  • scattered bishops, priests, and lay movements survive in pockets around the world;

  • “Tel Aviv-Anchorage-Rome” becomes a post-war theological motif in survivor communities.

• Villaverde Spain:

  • Madrid and major industrial centres are hit as secondary NATO/EU/US-aligned or USSR-targeted nodes;

  • fragments of the regime survive in isolated bunkers and monasteries, sowing the seeds of their own post-war Catholic-fascist micro-states.

• USSR:

  • The CPSU survives in some hardened bunkers;

  • vast stretches of Eurasia are annihilated or plunged into nuclear winter;

  • the “Red continuity” becomes a bunker legend instead of a functioning superpower.

  • the Moscow metro pays host to large numbers of refugees, survivors, and eventually new wars. One of these, Artyom, becomes a legend in his own right.

After about two hours, the missiles are gone, the networks are ash, and the world has become the Fallout we know and love—except with added layers:

• a Soviet ghost scattered in bunkers and archives,

• a Chinese Beifang memory in certain militia-run ruins,

• a Catholic institutional shadow,

• and, under Nevada, an old man named Robert House whose math built the world that just killed itself.

1. East Asia After the Great War

1.1 2077–2100: Firestorm and Fragmentation

1.1.1 Blast Patterns and Survivable Zones

The Great War in East Asia produced gradient wastelands in rings of glass and shadow, corridors left intact by targeting priorities and sheer logistical limits. Later Beiyou and Nanyang cartographers talk about three overlapping layers:

• Kill zones: direct targets and their immediate blast belts.

• Ash zones: heavily irradiated areas downwind of major strikes.

• Shadow zones: areas spared direct hits and serious fallout, where long-term reconstruction is physically possible.

The initial salvoes aimed at the same targets pre-war planners had been gaming for decades:

• Command nodes (capitals, major military HQs).

• Industrial clusters (heavy industry, shipyards, aerospace).

• Port complexes and naval bases.

• Strategic infrastructure (major air bases, nuclear plants, missile fields).

Because the exchange was global and compressed into roughly two hours, most actors concentrated their limited throw-weight on a short list of high-value nodes, not every provincial town. That is what leaves space for later polities.

North China Plain

The North China Plain (Hebei-Henan-Shandong-Jiangsu) is both core and sacrifice zone. Primary hits fall on:

• Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan cluster (political-military command, aerospace, ports);

• Jinan and Qingdao (rail hub, naval base, industry);

• Nanjing and the lower Yangtze industrial belt (shipbuilding, electronics, petrochemicals).

• Secondary strikes hit large air bases, missile fields, and logistic nodes.

Prevailing westerlies and winter monsoon patterns push fallout east and northeast, heavily contaminating:

• the Bohai Gulf littoral,

• much of the lower Liao and Hai river deltas,

• coastal Shandong.

However, the inland fringe of the plain—western Shandong, northern Henan, parts of southern Hebei—and the loess plateau edge see fewer direct hits. The combination of distance from major naval bases, limited warhead numbers, and wind patterns means that many small and mid-sized inland towns suffer blast damage from shockwaves and fires, but not direct vaporisation or long-term critical fallout.

These “half-burnt” corridors are where later Beifang villages and co-op towns persist.

Northeast (Manchuria and Northern Korea)

The Northeast is targeted as a mixed Sino–Soviet industrial and military zone, seeing major strikes on:

• Shenyang-Anshan-Fushun industrial triangle;

• Dalian and other ports;

• Harbin and Changchun (rail, aerospace, command);

• missile bases and radar sites near the Russian border.

Meanwhile, in the Korean theatre:

• the old DMZ belt and key ROK and US bases in the South are hit;

• ports like Busan and Incheon receive strikes;

• Pyongyang and associated DPRK command centres are targeted, though much of their infrastructure is deeply buried.

What follows is coastal and lowland corridors with overlapping blast and ash belts. Interior uplands, river headwaters, and mountain valleys remain damaged but ecologically salvageable. In particular, the forested uplands northeast of Harbin and the mountain interiors of the Korean Peninsula become long-term refuges.

Coastal South China

The southern coast was, pre-war, a dense strip of population, ports, and industry:

• Pearl River Delta mega-conurbation (Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Zhuhai),

• Fujian ports (Xiamen, Fuzhou, Quanzhou),

• parts of the Yangtze estuary and Zhejiang coast.

These are riddled with US and PRC naval facilities, electronics and shipbuilding, corporate enclaves, and Vault-like bunkers.

They are therefore struck hard:

• multiple warheads on the Pearl cluster and nearby bases;

• concentrated hits on Fujian ports due to their role in the pre-war Taiwan theatre;

• additional detonations on nuclear plants along the coast.

Monsoon dynamics and onshore winds push fallout inland along river valleys, contaminating the lower Pearl and Min basins. But the mountainous hinterlands—granite spines and karst uplands—create sheltered pockets in:

• western Guangdong,

• inland Fujian,

• northern Guangxi,

• parts of Hunan and Jiangxi.

These are the seedbeds for later Southern riverine and upland communities that trade with maritime thalassocracies while remaining politically distinct from them.

Inland Plateaus and Highlands

Two inland macro-zones avoid direct saturation: the North China interior highlands and the western plateaus.

1. Beifang highlands (Shanxi, northern Shaanxi, parts of Inner Mongolia): Targeting here is limited to:

   • a handful of missile sites,

   • certain coal and energy hubs,

   • a few command bunkers.

   • Most county towns, co-op villages, and smaller industrial agglomerations survive with:

     • damaged infrastructure,

     • but intact soils and water.

2. Western plateaus (Gansu corridor, Sichuan Basin edges, Yunnan–Guizhou uplands, Tibet proper):

   • Sichuan Basin gets hit at Chengdu/Chongqing but not systematically carpeted;

   • high-altitude regions like Tibet see:

     • strikes on air bases and suspected missile fields,

     • but limited warhead allocation due to lower perceived economic value and difficult re-targeting conditions.

In both cases, distance from major coastal fleets and the prioritisation of nearer, more “lucrative” targets leave scattered highland cores relatively intact from a radiological standpoint.

Korean Peninsula

The peninsula is a border of empires, so both North and South are hit—but not homogenously.

• South Korea:

  • strikes on Seoul-Incheon, Busan, military bases, and industrial belts;

  • limited strikes on inland hydro and logistics sites.

• North Korea:

  • Pyongyang and adjunct military nodes targeted,

  • but deep tunnels and hardened facilities absorb more than many foreign planners expected.

Mountainous central and eastern regions—Gangwon, highland North Hamgyong, etc.—experience heavy fallout in some valleys, but also multiple “shadow valleys” where terrain and wind shield communities.

DPRK’s pre-war emphasis on underground construction means subterranean survival rates are high compared to surface devastation.

Japanese Archipelago

Japan is simultaneously:

• a US ally (bases in Okinawa, Honshu, Hokkaido),

• a major industrial and technological hub,

• and a nuclear power operator.

It is therefore hit “surgically” but brutally:

• Primary targets:

  • Tokyo-Yokohama (political + economic core),

  • Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto industrial complex,

  • Nagoya, Fukuoka–Kitakyushu, Hiroshima–Kure,

  • major US/Japanese naval bases and airfields (Yokosuka, Sasebo, Misawa, Kadena),

  • several nuclear plants.

That creates coastal urban belts almost completely destroyed or irradiated. However, Tōhoku rural zones, parts of Shikoku and western Honshu uplands, and especially Hokkaido’s interior saw barely any direct strikes. The fallout is patchy, and agricultural soils, forests, and fisheries remain usable after a few decades.

The archipelago’s intricate topography and strong civil defense traditions mean subway systems and underground shelters in Tokyo/Osaka save small populations. Remote fishing villages and inland towns become seeds for later island shogunates and maritime republics.

Nanyang (South China Sea and Archipelagos)

In Nanyang—the South China Sea, Philippine Sea, Java Sea, and adjacent archipelagos—targeting is more selective with direct strikes on:

• major naval bases,

• oil terminals and refineries,

• key chokepoint ports (Singapore, Manila, possibly Malacca/Surabaya).

Most smaller islands and interiors of larger islands avoid direct hits, but suffer:

• tsunami and storm surges from undersea detonations,

• radioactive fallout plumes drifting across monsoon paths,

• collapse of shipping, fisheries, and energy imports.

This yields an archipelago where coastal megacities are heavily damaged, while inland and smaller island communities survive with more ecosystem intact than on continental coasts, all making Nanyang a critical post-war trade reservoir once navigation slowly resumes.

1.1.2 Collapse of the Late PRC and Military Structures

The pre-war PRC had evolved, by the 2070s, into a mature war economy state:

• centralised political control from Beijing and a few coastal cores,

• heavy reliance on industrial clusters and automated logistics,

• PLA and militia formations stretched across multiple theatres (Alaska, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Central Asia).

The Great War destroys the central nervous system in minutes.

Decapitation of Political and Economic Centres

The near-simultaneous annihilation of:

• Beijing (Party and state leadership, CMC, major ministries),

• Shanghai (finance, high-tech, naval support),

• Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong (manufacturing-export, command nodes),

produces:

• loss of real-time central command and control,

• death or disconnection of most top-tier leadership,

• fragmentation of data networks and GAI coordination.

Backup command posts exist—in mountain bunkers, deep inland facilities—but many are themselves targeted or cut off. Those that survive have limited communications with field forces. The window for coordinated national response closed quickly.

PLA Group Armies in Isolation

PLA force structure was originally designed for theatre-level autonomy with central oversight. The loss of oversight transforms autonomy into isolation. Commands in:

• the Taiwan Straits and coastal zones,

• Southeast Asian expeditions,

• Central Asian and Siberian borders,

suddenly lose satellite feeds, central GAI guidance, and strategic resupply.

Days after the exchange, most group army and theatre commands shift from “fight the war” to “keep our troops and dependents alive.” That yields garrisons turning into proto-polities. Regional commanders increasingly answer to local realities (food, water, disease) rather than absent central directives.

Provincial-Level Collapse and “Local Survival First”

Provincial party committees and governments, conditioned by decades of “stability maintenance,” default to hoarding remaining food and fuel, securing water sources. Attempts happen to stabilise security using whatever PLA, PAP, or militia units remain loyal.

Some provinces disintegrate quickly, particularly along devastated coasts. Others, especially in inland and highland regions, manage a controlled descent, imposing rationing, freezing population movements, prioritising protection of key infrastructure.

All operate with no realistic expectation of central rescue while facing rapidly degrading legitimacy as communication with Beijing ceases to matter.

Three “Red Bastions”

Amid general collapse, three regions retain enough institutional continuity and infrastructure to persist as recognisably “PRC-derived” entities:

1. Tibet: Proto Red Monastery

   • Surviving PLA mountain units and political cadres withdraw into existing fortress bases and tunnels.

   • Monastic communities, already with their own governance structures and supplies, offer mutual support.

   • Over time, military and monastic elites fuse into a hybrid cadre that claims to uphold “the People’s Republic” in spiritual and material form.

2. Xinjiang: People’s Security Directorate

   • Long pre-war emphasis on security and surveillance leaves Xinjiang with:

     • dense networks of bunkers,

     • hardened command posts,

     • drone and missile bases.

   • Regional security officers assume de facto control as “Directorate for Peace and Stability,” commanding remaining forces and managing resources under a state-of-siege mentality.

3. Manchuria: North-East People’s Military Region

   • The concentration of heavy industry, arsenals, and old PLA/Navy bases in the Northeast allows:

     • some missile batteries,

     • armored units,

     • shipyards and factories to survive.

   • Surviving general staff officers reorganise a North-East Military Government, claiming temporary emergency authority that slowly ossifies into a permanent regime.

These three Red Bastions are not coordinated with each other in the first decades. They share slogans, flags, and fragments of doctrine, but practically become separate survivor states.

1.1.3 Survival Ecologies

Across East Asia, recognisable patterns of “survival ecologies” emerge—combinations of environment, infrastructure, and social structure that allow human communities to endure the first 20–30 years.

Rural Co-ops and Danwei Factory Towns

In much of inland North China and central/southwest China, the crucial difference between extinction and persistence is pre-war collective organisation:

• People’s communes / co-ops:

  • retained habits of pooled grain storage, shared labour, and village-level councils;

  • had stockpiles of tools, seed, and basic medical supplies.

• Danwei-adjacent factory towns:

  • possessed canteens, dorms, and limited on-site medical facilities;

  • had pre-War safety bunkers (industrial emergency shelters) and some on-site power/storage.

These units could:

• rapidly reorient from production-for-market to production-for-survival;

• enforce rationing through existing committees; and

• use pre-war militia drills to organise perimeter defense against marauders and refugee waves.

In Beifang especially, this combination of co-ops, danwei, and militia becomes the structural backbone that prevents a complete reversion to atomized banditry.

Vaults, Corporate Bunkers, and State Shelters

Along coasts and major urban areas, survival often depends on access to deep shelters:

• Corporate Vault-equivalents:

  • built by pre-war multinationals, Nanyang companies, or joint ventures;

  • stocked with high-end tech, specialised personnel, and experimental systems.

• State civil defense shelters:

  • subway systems, deep basements, hardened metro networks (Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, etc.);

  • official nuclear shelters built during the early Resource Wars.

• Military bunkers:

  • hardened command centres, missile tunnels, submarine pens.

In many cases, these shelters:

• save thousands in the immediate aftermath;

• then fracture into closed micro-societies, each with its own rules and power struggles;

• later become mythic “Vaults” or “iron caves” in regional folklore.

Japan is a prime example. Comprehensive disaster planning and ubiquitous urban subways mean:

• significant pockets of survivors in Tokyo and Osaka,

• sheltered in metro networks and civil defense centres.

Combined with intact rural communities in Tōhoku and Hokkaido, this allows the archipelago to develop multiple, geographically separated successor societies.

DPRK’s Bunker Network and ROK Shelters

On the Korean Peninsula, the DPRK had, for decades, invested heavily in:

• deep tunnels under the DMZ,

• underground cities,

• hardened depots.

These act as ready-made Vaults:

• much of the regime’s elite and security apparatus survive underground;

• populations in tunnel-linked regions are rationed and controlled more effectively than many surface communities elsewhere.

The South has fewer bunkers, but:

• extensive metro systems in Seoul and Busan,

• robust disaster protocols,

• some hardened bases.

Survivor clusters along the southern coasts and inland uplands ultimately form the base for what will become New Goryeo.

Japanese Archipelago Survival Modes

Japan combines all three survival ecologies:

1. Urban subterranean: survivors in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, etc., using metro tunnels and emergency shelters.

2. Rural coastal: fishing villages and small towns in less targeted prefectures, reliant on coastal fisheries and small agriculture.

3. Northern agrarian/forestry: Hokkaido and remote Tōhoku communities with:

   • lower blast impact,

   • resilient forests and arable land,

   • access to relatively unpolluted freshwater.

Because of this, early post-War Japan is fragmented but dense with viable communities, unlike some continental zones where survivors are sparser.

Nanyang Islands and Coastal Fringe

In Nanyang, many small islands and inland interiors of larger islands escape direct blast. They in turn face

• ocean acidification,

• overfishing collapse,

• poisoned coastal sediments, and

• storm intensification

all making traditional maritime subsistence precarious. Survival depends on:

• remnant freshwater reservoirs,

• terraces and upland fields,

• early post-war informal trade networks between islands.

These, in time, coalesce into the New Nanyang company-states and city-ports that later dominate regional sea-lanes.

1.1.4 The First Post-War Decades: Beifang Avoids Warlordism

Between 2077 and roughly 2100, East Asia is a patchwork of:

• collapsing military zones,

• bunker-microstates,

• bandit regions, and

• fragile village polities.

In many places, charismatic commanders or clan elders with guns seize local power, levy tribute, and fight each other for surplus. The coastal South, sections of Manchuria, parts of central Japan, and stretches of Nanyang all see this dynamic.

Beifang (the North China interior) does not, or at least not for long, and this difference shapes the entire later history.

Local Militias and Clan Guards as Temporary Authorities

Immediately after the exchange, county-level militias, self-defense committees, and clan guards step into the vacuum:

• they secure grain stores,

• enforce curfews and defensive perimeters,

• organise initial refugee triage.

Crucially, in many Beifang counties these groups already existed as institutionalised organs:

• militia offices,

• production brigades’ security teams,

• village self-defense associations with rotating duty.

This means authority is carried by roles, not just persons. When individual leaders die or defect, the office persists.

Pre-War Universal Militia and Co-op Culture

Several pre-war developments pay heaps in dividends:

1. Universal militia training in Beifang

   • The combination of PRC conscription, public militia exercises, and local “civil defense” preparations means:

     • a large share of rural adults had basic weapons training,

     • command hierarchies were familiar,

     • drills had reinforced the idea of “everyone fights if the village is threatened.”

2. Co-operative economic structures

   • Collective farms and co-ops left behind:

     • institutional memory of pooled risk,

     • established councils for decision-making,

     • shared infrastructure (granaries, repair shops, warehouses).

3. Communal grain and water management

   • Long-standing irrigation districts,

   • customary rules for water sharing,

   • practice of stocking grain for bad harvests.

These factors together mean Beifang communities have practice in acting collectively under stress, not just under top-down orders.

Joint Defence Leagues Instead of Warlord Fiefdoms

As it becomes clear that Beijing will not return and coastal help is a fantasy, clusters of villages and small towns begin to formalise what start as ad hoc alliances:

• Joint defense leagues (联防盟):

  • each member settlement:

    • contributes a fixed quota of militia fighters,

    • sets aside grain for a league reserve,

    • sends representatives to a League Council.

The League Council coordinates patrols against bandits and marauding ex-PLA units, negotiates with nearby leagues to prevent conflict, and sanctions villages that hoard or collaborate with raiders.

Over time, custom hardens into covenants—written or carved pacts specifying mutual defense obligations, arbitration mechanisms, and rules for trade and migration. Successful leagues attract more villages and disbanded units seeking stable patronage.

In contrast to classic “warlords”, leadership positions in these leagues are often elected or at least selected from multiple lineages. The need for league consensus constrains their freedom. They can especially be removed if they endanger survival (ie., striking neighbouring leagues without council consent).

This is the embryonic form of what will later become Cantons and ultimately the Beiyou Cantonal Republic (北幽诸州共和国).

Other Regions Slide Into Warlordism

The relative absence of such structures elsewhere sharpens the contrast:

• Coastal South: heavy initial devastation breaks both state and co-op structures. Surviving power is concentrated in a few ports and bunkers. Emergent actors are:

  • ship captains with guns,

  • gang bosses,

  • bunker councils—classic thalassocratic proto-warlords.

• Manchuria:

  • strong surviving military formations but weaker village-level co-op structures;

  • officers become regional rulers by default, with fewer institutional constraints.

• Japan:

  • prefectural governments and JSDF remnants do form councils, but different islands and regions evolve separately:

    • some into militarised lordships,

    • others into more republican city-states.

  • There is no single organizational template equivalent to Beifang’s co-op-militia-league pattern.

Beifang’s trajectory comes from different pre-war institutions and geography:

• slightly inland, away from target saturation;

• dense network of co-ops and danwei;

• ingrained militia ethos; and, critically,

• historical habits of inter-village federations.

By 2100, these leagues have stabilised much of the North China interior into semi-formalised federations, while coastal belts and peripheral zones still oscillate between raider kings, bunker princedoms, and fragile town councils. Those Beifang federations will, in the next century, crystallise into the Cantons of Beiyou and define the North’s distinctive, anti-liberal, militia-republican character.

Japan, Nanyang, the Red Bastions, New Goryeo, and the Southern sea-lords will develop their own trajectories from these same starting conditions, but the map of firestorm and survival drawn in 2077–2100 frames everything that follows.

Right, prose time, no bullet carpets. Let’s turn 1.2 – 2100–2200: The Survival Century and Proto-Factions into actual narrative.

1.2 2100–2200: The Survival Century and Proto-Factions

1.2.1 North China’s Proto-Cantons

By the early 22nd century, the North China interior started to ossify into something recognisable as a political order. The loose “joint defence leagues” that first emerged to keep out bandits and starving columns of refugees began to think of themselves as permanent institutions rather than emergency committees.

The transformation starts with grain and guns. After a generation of trial and error, villages and small towns along the loess ridges and river terraces understand that famine has become the background climate of their age. Floods and dust storms roll through more often. Seasons slip. Old planting calendars can no longer be trusted. In response, leagues mandate shared granaries at the inter-village level: each settlement contributes a quota in good years and draws from the pool in bad ones. These granaries require caretakers and ledgers; the ledgers require some agreed way of counting and measuring. Out of that arithmetic tedium grows a rudimentary fiscal system.

Militia drills follow a similar arc. What were once irregular summons of spears and rusted rifles for muster become structured rotations. Households owe a fixed number of training days each year. Young people pass through an informal militia “cadet phase” before being admitted as full adult citizens. Old PLA manuals are dug out of trunks and repurposed. PDFs copied onto scavenged terminals are laboriously transcribed or re-printed. Over a few decades, the patchwork of self-defence units acquires doctrine, rank structures, and standardised kit—never perfectly uniform, but recognisably part of the same family.

The leagues gradually shed their improvised names and adopt territorial labels: X Valley Canton, Eastern Ridge Canton, Lincheng Canton. “Canton” (州) becomes the word locals use for a group of settlements that drill and store grain together and speak with one voice to outsiders. Within each Canton, a pattern hardens: every year or two, representatives from the member communities gather in a central town square, temple courtyard, or old county government hall to renew covenants, adjust quotas, and elect or confirm a small executive council. It is not democracy in the liberal sense; it is rough, face-to-face republicanism, anchored by obligation rather than rights.

Ideology tends to come later than practice, but not much later. By mid-century, literate elders and returned scavengers have had time to sift through pre-War books, stolen corp tablets, and half-burnt party manuals. They encounter three recurring nightmares: the pre-War central state that could order a region destroyed by remote fiat, megacorporations that owned city-sized assets and private armies, and landlord oligarchies in older history that squeezed peasants dry. A consensus emerges almost by reflex: none of these must recur.

The formula “no megacorp, no landlord, no capital in one city” starts as a slogan in a single Canton pamphlet but spreads quickly. “No megacorp” gets encoded as bans on large-scale absentee ownership and on corporate charters above a certain size. “No landlord” becomes strict ceilings on how much land a family or guild may control. “No capital in one city” hardens into a taboo against designating any single metropolis as a political centre. The memory of what happened to Beijing and Shanghai remains a ruin on the horizon of every Beifang teenager.

By the year 2200, the North is still poor, scarred and paranoid. But it is no longer amorphous. Dozens of Cantons form a loose archipelago from the Taihang Mountains to the Ordos edge, stitched together by shared norms: pooled grain, universal militia, suspicion of concentrated capital, and the slowly coalescing myth that the North’s destiny is confederal, not imperial.

1.2.2 Southern Coastal Polities in Embryo

While the North learns to federate its terraces and ravines, the South learns to rebuild fleets in the ruins of its drowned ports.

The Pearl River estuary is still half-glass and half-mud in 2100. The old concrete forests of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Zhuhai squat as half-submerged skeletons, harbour basins choked with twisted metal and silt. Yet the coastline is dotted with pockets of life: fishing hamlets that have retreated uphill, clan compounds in old Hakka villages, hilltop monasteries, former corporate bunkers that opened their doors just enough to barter.

The first proto-polities here arise from convoys. Ex-navy officers and coastal militia skippers—people who actually remember how to move vessels through mined, storm-torn waters—assemble scrap hulls and working engines from the ship graveyards. They recruit gunners, mechanics, and navigators from the ruins and from hungry inland villages. They start by hauling food between nearby inlets and river mouths: rice and tubers from less damaged inland paddies, dried fish and salt from the coast, scrap metal from the city carcasses. Guns appear quickly; no convoy that cannot defend itself survives long.

Merchant clans, many of them descended from pre-War small traders and smugglers, step into the gap left by vanished megacorps. They offer something like credit and continuity: keep accounts, remember who paid and who defaulted, keep grudges and favours alive over seasons. Over time, these clans embed themselves in port enclaves. A ruined container terminal becomes a walled harbour-town. A surviving corporate port campus becomes the fortified core of a new “Harbour House”.

Similar dynamics play out along the Fujian seaboard and in pockets around the Yangtze estuary. Where there is a sheltered harbour, a hilltop with a line-of-sight to the sea, and a cluster of inland farmers desperate for access to tools and salt, a maritime enclave forms. They are not yet the Pearl League or Min Sea Guilds of later centuries, but the habits are there: negotiating harbour dues, organising convoy protection, adjudicating disputes over wreckage rights.

These coastal enclaves quickly learn that they cannot feed themselves from their shattered hinterlands alone. They strike bargains—sometimes consensual, sometimes extorted—with inland agrarian settlements: food and timber in return for metal, medicines, sea salt, and access to smugglers who can bring in luxuries looted from other ruins. In some regions, the relationship is mutualistic; in others, it is indistinguishable from protection racketeering. Inland communities talk of “sea kings” with grudging respect or seething resentment.

By the late 2200s, three things are clear along the South China seaboard. First, maritime skill and control of hulls are once again a primary source of political power. Second, old port ruins are becoming the nuclei of a new kind of city-state: part warehouse, part temple, part armoury. Third, there is a cultural divergence opening between land-first societies like Beiyou and sea-first societies along the littoral, the latter already beginning to view the continent as a messy, necessary hinterland rather than the natural centre of the world.

1.2.3 Red Bastions Dig In

Far to the west and north-east, the three Red Bastions spend the Survival Century entrenching themselves, not expanding. Their leaders understand, at least intuitively, that in a depopulated world the first power to overextend dies.

In Tibet, the fusion of cadre and monastic authority is initially born of desperation. Surviving PLA mountain units know how to hold passes and airfields, but not how to maintain spiritual and social cohesion in shattered valleys. Monasteries and temples, on the other hand, know how to feed, house and counsel communities, but not how to keep raiders and foreign scouts at bay. The first “Joint Councils for Material and Spiritual Order” are improvised meetings between commissars and abbots to coordinate food distribution and winter patrols. Within decades, such councils acquire an almost liturgical rhythm. Slogans about the masses and class enemies are recast in a language of compassion and delusion; sutras about detachment are repurposed as warnings against greed and factionalism.

By 2200, what will later be called the Red Monastery exists at least in embryo: a highland regime that sees no contradiction in hanging both the red flag and rows of prayer flags over the same fortified passes, and that treats loyalty to the “People’s Republic” and to the Dharma as two sides of the same vow.

In Xinjiang, the mood is colder. There, the institutional memory that matters most is not religion, but the bureaucracy and secret-police. The apparatus built before the War to surveil and control the region’s population survives in bunker complexes and hardened data vaults. Many cameras are dead, many networks are fried, but enough trained personnel and enough infrastructure remain to resurrect a cut-down version of the old security state.

The new regime calls itself something sober, like the Directorate for Peace and Stability, and insists that it is merely exercising temporary emergency powers until national reunification. In practice, it becomes a closed, security-first polity that hoards access to uranium mines, desert airfields, and what remains of drone and missile factories. For them, the 2100s are about reinforcing perimeters, mapping who lives in every oasis and town, and making sure no external actor—from Beiyou, from southern raiders, from steppe tribes—can overturn their control over the Tarim and Dzungar basins.

In Manchuria, the surviving officers of the old North-East commands set up shop in the shadow of rusting shipyards and bomb-scarred steel mills. They have more tanks than tractors, more artillery pieces than ploughs, and a long tradition of seeing themselves as the “shield of the North.” The early decades are consumed with the unglamorous work of cannibalising ruined factories for spares, teaching conscripts how to grow food as well as how to strip and assemble rifles, and keeping a core of industrial capacity alive against entropy and looting.

Over time, the North-East People’s Military Region takes shape as a state in all but name: a grid of garrisons and factory towns, a command hierarchy that issues ration cards and marriage permits as readily as mobilisation orders. Its textbooks speak of socialism and the PRC. Its political reality is that of a garrison-industrial state clinging to the idea that one day, when conditions permit, it will march south and “reunify” the shattered mainland under a reborn red banner.

1.2.4 The Korean Peninsula After the Firestorm

On the Korean Peninsula, the first century after the War saw divergence between depth and surface.

In the North, miraculously, much of the subterranean infrastructure survives. Decades of pre-War paranoia and tunnel excavation mean there are entire sections of society that were already half underground when the missiles flew. Party compounds, artillery sites, hardened shelters and storage vaults woven beneath the mountains around Pyongyang, Kanggye and the old DMZ take the brunt of the blast shocks and fallouts.

In the first months, the North’s survival looks almost like vindication. While Seoul burns and Busan’s docks boil, the Bunker Dynasty—the surviving members of the ruling family and their closest cadres—broadcast from underground studios and command centres. They proclaim themselves the only government on the peninsula that kept faith with its people. They ration food, police breeding and labour assignments, and seal or vent sections of the tunnels as resources dictate. To outside observers, when they begin to re-emerge decades later, they will look like something between a cult and a fossil: a state that went into the ground with the Cold War and came back up into the fallout.

South of the ruined DMZ, the pattern is messier. South Korean civil defence was robust, but not dug to the same obsessive depth. Metro systems and hardened shelters in Seoul, Busan and a few other cities harbour sizeable survivor populations, but many government buildings and command centres are gone. Local officials, police commanders and military officers piece together continuity where they can: district assemblies meeting in subway mezzanines, provisional councils in half-collapsed city halls, rural mayors and pastors organising food shares.

In the countryside, especially along the southern and eastern coasts and in upland regions, small towns and villages retreat into self-reliance. Fishing communities rebuild small boats and sail closer to shore to avoid whatever might remain of mines and fallout. Farmers, whose families have always understood how to coax life from hillside terraces, fall back on older patterns of communal labour. When these surface polities eventually reconnect with one another—tracing rail lines, old highways, and coastal sailing routes—they find that they share a common intuition: centralised, Seoul-centric governance died in the fire. Whatever comes next must be less brittle.

By the mid-2200s, coalitions of town councils, former ROK officers, and merchant houses have begun to meet under deliberately archaic banners: Goryeo rather than Republic, king rather than president. This is less monarchism than myth-work. In a landscape haunted by bunkers and ruins, “Goryeo” is a name that predates both the Cold War and the PRC, a marker of a time when the peninsula was its own centre rather than someone else’s frontier. The institutional details are still fluid, but the direction is clear: the South is on a path toward a federated peninsula polity that will eventually call itself New Goryeo, while the North sinks deeper into a closed, hereditary bunker-theocracy.

1.2.5 Steppe and Caravan Seeds

Between the structured experiments of Beifang, the bunker states of the Red Bastions, and the sea-lords of the South lies the wide, dry, contested belt of the steppe and deserts: Inner Mongolia, the Gobi, parts of the Hexi Corridor and adjoining regions.

Here, survival in the early post-War decades depends less on bunkers and more on motion. Traditional herding families and cross-border smugglers, already used to living light and moving often, adapt faster than most. They shift their migration routes to avoid hot spots and fallout plumes, trade pasture maps and contamination rumours in smoky yurt councils, and slowly stitch together an updated mental atlas of which valleys, wells and salt licks are still safe.

Pre-War infrastructure plays a paradoxical role. The long highways and rail lines that once carried containers now serve as navigational spines and occasional sources of salvage. A derailed fuel train becomes a seasonal destination. An abandoned railline becomes a marker for safe passage across an otherwise trackless plateau. But the largest nodes—rail hubs, big depots, border checkpoints—tend to be too radioactive or too fought-over to serve as long-term homes.

At the same time, the old Silk Road oases—Turpan, Dunhuang, Hami, and lesser-known cousins—begin to reawaken as more than just local centres. Their freshwater, their orchards, and their caravanserai ruins make them natural hubs for overland exchange. As traffic between Beifang Cantons, Xinjiang’s Directorate, Tibet’s high valleys, and southern riverlands grows, these oases host markets and conclaves where caravan leaders, local elders, and envoys from more formal states meet to haggle and gossip.

No one calls these places republics yet. But the seeds of caravan republics are planted whenever an oasis community decides that its long-term survival depends on impartial arbitration of disputes among caravaners, fair tolls rather than opportunistic extortion, and a minimum of neutrality in the quarrels of the larger powers that send their agents through its gates.

In the windswept grasslands further north, small khanates flicker in and out of existence: war bands and clans tying identity to banners and lineages, raiding on good years, offering armed escort on bad years. They are too fluid and too thinly spread to coalesce into a durable macro-state in this century, but they matter to everyone else. Beiyou must reckon with steppe raiders on its northern fringes; Manchuria must guard against cavalry swoops on depots; caravan republics cannot ignore riders who can cut a trade route in a single night.

Taken together, these steppe and caravan societies are the connective tissue between more static polities: not powerful enough to rule East Asia, but perfectly positioned to shape how goods, people and information move between them.

1.2.6 The Japanese Archipelago’s Proto-Factions

Across the sea, the Japanese islands spend the Survival Century learning how to live as several Japans at once.

In the first two decades, urban survivors in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and other cities cling to life below ground. Metro tunnels, underground shopping arcades, civil-defense cellars and utility corridors become a honeycomb of improvised communities. Old bureaucratic habits persist: engineers, station staff, police officers and SDF personnel organise rationing, waste disposal and patrols. A “Tunnel Ward” council in one district might negotiate with a “Substation Committee” in another over access to a functioning water main or air shaft.

Surface reoccupation is slow. The densest blast and fallout zones around major metropolitan cores remain dangerous for decades. Instead, resettlement starts in outer suburbs, satellite towns and rural areas that took only secondary damage. There, farmers and foresters already used to working land and sea begin to rebuild small-scale agriculture: terraced plots, greenhouse rigs cobbled together from scrap, coastal fisheries guarded by armed skiffs.

The islands’ fractured geography encourages political divergence. Hokkaido and parts of northern Honshu, where direct strikes were rarer and fallout patterns somewhat kinder, stabilise relatively quickly. Local cooperatives of farmers, fishers and SDF remnants form councils that resemble Beiyou’s Cantons in miniature—though without the same ideological allergy to cities. They are conservative, insular, and obsessed with food security, but they maintain functional, if modest, economies.

In contrast, the Kanto and Kansai regions see a more combustible mix. In some areas, SDF officers and surviving prefectural officials manage to knit together “Restoration Committees” that balance civil and military authority. In others, charismatic local bosses—construction union leaders, yakuza lieutenants, black-market brokers—capture key assets (a dam, a surviving power plant, a port) and proclaim themselves protectors or lords. Over time, these differences in origin harden into differences of regime type: some polities evolve toward city-republics governed by councils and guilds, others toward quasi-feudal lordships tied to fortified strongholds.

Religion and memory also play their part. Shinto shrines become centres of identity and legitimacy, especially in rural regions less touched by the war. Buddhist temples that survived the blasts act as charities and knowledge keepers, housing whatever books and digital archives can be saved from libraries and universities. In some coastal areas, local rulers ally with shrine and temple networks to claim semi-sacral authority: they are guardians not just of rice warehouses but of sacred groves and pilgrimage routes.

By 2200, no single banner flies over the archipelago. Instead there is a mosaic: a handful of proto-shogunates centred on heavily fortified cities, a scattering of island republics that depend on trade and shipbuilding more than on land armies, and rural communal leagues that owe nominal allegiance to one or another larger power but in practice govern themselves. All are constrained, and connected, by the sea. Whoever controls working shipyards and navigable straits wields disproportionate influence, and that fact will later pull Japan into the orbit of the Nanyang thalassocracies and the broader East Asian maritime network.

The imperial institution never truly disappears in the firestorm of 2077. Unlike ministries, corporations, or even the Self-Defense Forces, the imperial household had already been politically hollowed out a century before the War, reduced to ritual, symbolism, and carefully managed distance from power. That very marginalisation becomes its greatest survival advantage. No warhead is allocated specifically to the Emperor. No command bunker depends on him. When Tokyo burns, the imperial family is neither decapitated nor decisively enthroned—they are simply scattered.

Fragments of the imperial household survive in different ways. Some members are sheltered in deep civil-defence facilities beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area, evacuated alongside cultural treasures and archives. Others, especially collateral branches that had been living semi-private lives since the 20th century, survive in provincial towns, religious compounds, or overseas enclaves, often unrecognised at first by the communities that shelter them. In the decades immediately following the War, the imperial line exists less as a visible court than as a genealogical fact quietly preserved by caretakers, priests, and archivists who understand that lineage, once lost, cannot be reconstructed.

The crucial shift comes in the early 22nd century, when Japan’s fragmented surface polities begin to confront a shared problem: legitimacy beyond brute survival. City-states, proto-shogunates, restoration committees, and maritime republics all manage to feed and defend themselves, but none can convincingly claim to speak for “Japan” as such. Every attempt to revive a republican constitution founders on geography and distrust. Every militarised regime that claims emergency authority finds itself accused of being merely another warlord with better uniforms. In this vacuum, the imperial institution re-enters political imagination not as a ruler, but as a solution to the problem of unity without centralisation.

The restoration unfolds in stages, beginning with ritual recognition rather than sovereignty. Shrines and temples—many of which had preserved imperial genealogies and court rites as part of their pre-War cultural mandates—begin publicly praying for the Emperor again, even when no one is quite sure which Emperor they mean. Surviving court officials, librarians, and Shinto priests quietly compare records and confirm lines of succession. A cluster of legitimate imperial branches emerges, descended from collateral lines that had been stripped of status after World War II but never extinguished.

This multiplicity proves oddly stabilising. Instead of one fragile claimant whose death or capture could end the experiment, Japan finds itself with several imperial houses, each associated with a different region: a Kantō line sheltered by underground Tokyo communities; a Kansai line tied to Kyoto’s surviving religious complexes; a northern line associated with Hokkaidō and Tōhoku agrarian leagues. None claims exclusive sovereignty. All claim continuity. The very fact that the imperial line is plural allows it to function as a symbolic lattice rather than a throne.

It is in this context that the former kazoku families re-emerge. Before the War, the kazoku—Japan’s peerage—had been formally abolished, reduced to social memory and genealogical trivia. After the War, genealogy becomes power. Families that can demonstrate descent from pre-1947 noble houses possess something scarce in the ruins: recognized continuity of obligation, patronage, and ritual authority. Many of these families had survived in relative obscurity—provincial landlords, shrine patrons, university administrators, naval officers, or even overseas traders. As Japan’s proto-polities seek stable intermediaries between armed power and civil life, these families step forward not as feudal lords, but as arbiters, patrons, and guarantors.

The reconstituted aristocracy differs markedly from its pre-War incarnation. Titles are less important than functions. A former marquis house might become hereditary custodians of a port city’s charter. A count’s descendants might oversee river management, shrine networks, or caravan routes between inland and coastal settlements. In many regions, aristocratic status becomes conditional: houses retain recognition only so long as they maintain public works, sponsor militias, or guarantee food reserves in bad years. Failure leads not to revolution but to quiet demotion, the loss of ritual precedence, and eventual irrelevance.

The imperial houses sit above this revived aristocracy as anchors of legitimacy. When disputes arise between rival city-states, when succession crises erupt within proto-shogunates, when treaties require a seal that is more than merely local, representatives of an imperial branch are invited to witness, bless, or arbitrate. Over time, a convention develops: no law binding more than one region is considered fully legitimate unless acknowledged by an imperial envoy and countersigned by recognized noble houses. Power remains decentralised, but law begins to acquire memory again.

By the late 23rd century, this system hardens into what historians will later call the Plural Restoration. There is no unified imperial bureaucracy, no standing imperial army, no single capital rebuilt on the ashes of Tokyo. Instead, there exists a layered order: local polities govern themselves; aristocratic houses mediate and stabilise; imperial branches embody continuity and shared identity. The Emperor—singular or plural, depending on region and ritual context—is once again spoken of as the heart of the realm, but no longer as its commanding will.

This restoration has profound geopolitical consequences. To the Beiyou Cantonal Republic, Japan appears recognisable: a confederal order bound by obligation and militia ethics, wary of centralisation. To the southern thalassocracies, Japan is a patchwork of ports and noble houses that can be bargained with, married into, or bypassed—but never entirely dominated. To PRC loyalist remnants, the restoration is an affront, proof that a civilisation can survive nuclear annihilation without party-state continuity. To the wider post-War world, Japan becomes something rarer still: a society that rebuilds hierarchy without reviving total authority, tradition without empire.

1.3 2200–2300: The Second Founding of East Asia

By 2200 the age of pure survival is over. Large belts of coast and metropolis remain sickly, and “clean” water is still a political resource, but the surviving societies have learned which habits keep people alive across generations, and which habits simply delay collapse. East Asia in the 22nd and 23rd centuries has become a new equilibrium of durable institutions: cantonal republics inland, thalassocracies on the littorals, bunker-continuity regimes on the peripheries, and broker-polities in the maritime and peninsular hinges.

The common feature of this “Second Founding” is a brutal realism about centralisation. Everyone has the same memory: one city becomes too important, and the sky will eventually choose it as a target—or famine will. The strongest regimes of this era therefore innovate in a paradoxical direction: they build the capacity to organise war, trade, and law across large regions while deliberately refusing to concentrate sovereignty in a single capital.

Beiyou’s Turn from Leagues to a Cantonal Republic

In the North China interior, the joint defense leagues of the 2100s and 2150s have already thickened into proto-cantons by 2200. The decisive change in the first half of the 23rd century is their codification—the moment they start acting as if their borders, obligations, and courts will still matter a hundred years from now.

The original leagues were instruments of necessity: collective granaries, shared militia drills, coordinated patrols against raiders and wandering remnants of old armies. But necessity alone cannot produce stable interstate order. What makes the cantons “real” is law, and law arrives in Beifang to fix the problem of succession. As the generation that remembered the first decades after 2077 dies, the leagues face a recurring crisis—who has the right to command the militia, adjudicate disputes, and open the granaries when the harvest fails? If authority remains personal, the result is exactly what Beifang refuses: petty warlordism, feuds, and tribute economies.

So the cantons write charters. At first they are short, almost ritualistic documents: quotas of grain, rotation schedules for militia training, procedures for arbitration between villages. Over time, charters gain detail and teeth. They define citizenship not as an abstract status but as an obligation bundle: drill-days owed, watch shifts served, ditch-digging and floodworks contributed, grain quotas stored. Rights follow from obligations, and the crucial right is political voice in the canton assembly. This is the Beiyou trick: the vote is not a consumer entitlement; it is the mark of a person who can be relied upon when the walls shake.

The assemblies themselves develop a distinctive style. They are not parliaments full of parties and ideologies. They are closer to seasonal councils and oath-renewals—public, face-to-face, sometimes harsh, and usually anchored in the practical. A canton may meet in a temple court, an old county hall, or a rebuilt square under the shadow of an eroded propaganda mural. Delegates are chosen, instructed, and recallable; they are expected to return home and face the people who sent them. This produces a political culture that is not gentle but is resistant to capture: anyone who tries to become a permanent “man of the centre” is suspected of rebuilding the very thing that died in 2077.

The next step—what turns “cantons” into Beiyou—comes from two pressures that strike almost simultaneously. One is external: the gradual reappearance of organised coastal powers who want inland access, not merely barter. The other is internal: the existence of ruins so large, so symbolically loaded, and so dangerous that no single canton can plausibly claim them. Beijing and Tianjin are the heart of this.

The Federal Ruins Doctrine is born out of fear and practicality. The largest northern megacity ruins still contain things that matter: machine tools under collapsed floors, sealed tunnels of data caches, radiation-shielded vaults that may hold intact pre-War tech, and, perhaps most importantly, the mythic capital aura that any would-be emperor could exploit. If one canton “owns” Beijing, it becomes a magnet for ambition and a target for everyone else. So Beiyou does the opposite: it declares the ruins federal by being un-ownable. Access becomes licensed. Excavation becomes scheduled. The most dangerous zones become taboo except for tightly controlled salvage crews overseen by joint canton committees. Beijing is not rebuilt as a capital; it is treated as a quarry, a warning, and a sacrament of restraint.

This same impulse pushes Beiyou toward federal institutions that are intentionally narrow. A rotating Diet is established in a mid-sized inland city—chosen precisely because it is not a cosmopolitan magnet. The Diet’s authority is bounded: common weights and measures, a shared coin standard, rules for inter-canton debt, and a small federal staff that coordinates defense and the maintenance of key road and canal corridors. The point is coordination without sovereignty creep. Beiyou wants the capacity to mobilise if attacked, but it does not want a federal executive with the power to turn coordination into domination.

Ideologically, Beiyou exhibits an explicitly anti-liberal synthesis of Swiss and Third Italian thought, becoming doctrine in the 23rd century when people began reading again. Scavenged libraries and surviving educational enclaves produce a thin stratum of literate jurists, guild clerks, and militia intellectuals. They discover not just old PRC manuals, but recovered foreign texts—fragments of confederal theory, accounts of Swiss militia citizenship, analyses of Italy’s industrial districts, and older corporatist writings that condemn both communist centralism and liberal-capitalist atomisation. Beiyou does not “copy” any of these. It selects what matches its lived experience: decentralised production networks, disciplined localism, and an allergy to speculative finance.

Beiyou’s mature doctrine takes a clear shape by 2250: productive property must belong to households, co-ops, or guilds. Large absentee ownership is treated as proto-feudalism. Foreign “company-states” may trade, but may not own land or critical workshops. Money exists, but debt is socially constrained. Citizenship is inseparable from militia duty.

The order is explicitly neither liberal nor egalitarian in the modern sense. The Beiyou-ren have instead opted for a republic of obligated producers who believe freedom is a function of not being economically captured by distant owners.

Beiyou then saw itself fighting boundary wars of autonomy: skirmishes against steppe raiders testing granary corridors, punitive expeditions against tribute-seeking warbands, and increasingly tense clashes with Manchurian patrols that insist the “nation” still exists and must be reunited. What makes Beiyou distinctive is that it fights these wars without allowing victorious generals to become hereditary lords. Officers are promoted, honoured, and watched. The canton assembly remains the final source of legitimacy, not the battlefield.

The Southern Thalassocracies: Sea Power as Post-War Modernity

While Beiyou consolidates inland, the South moves first into a different kind of sophistication: maritime statecraft. The coast could not easily sustain large agrarian populations in a post-War ecology, but it can sustain trade—and trade, in a world of scarcity and uneven salvage, becomes power.

The thalassocracies arise from convoys, harbours, and the rediscovery of institutional tricks older than any ideology: how to enforce contracts when you cannot enforce borders. Their earliest forms are predatory because predation is the simplest maritime business model in a broken world. But predation alone cannot build shipyards, train navigators, or maintain lighthouses and seawalls. So the successful sea powers evolve into ordered piracy—privateering with rules—and eventually into republic-like councils that legislate maritime norms.

In the Pearl River basin, the Pearl League grows around the idea that the delta’s ruins are too valuable to be controlled by a single boss. Multiple “Sea Houses”—clan-capital networks descended from smugglers, bunker survivors, and port militias—create a council to allocate salvage rights, settle disputes, and pool security fleets. The council’s legitimacy rests on two things: its ability to keep the shipping lanes safe enough to profit, and its ability to prevent any one House from provoking a ruinous civil war that would collapse the delta’s fragile prosperity. The Pearl League becomes the South’s most openly oligarchic regime: polished, ruthless, and invested in maintaining a veneer of civic order because that veneer is what makes long-distance partners trust them.

Further up the coast, the Min Sea Guilds develop a different model, less plutocratic and more communal. Fujian’s port towns, protected by mountains and nourished by diaspora connections into Nanyang, revive guild and temple institutions as contract-enforcement engines. Oaths sworn before sea gods and ancestral tablets become binding because the community can punish perjury by ostracism, embargo, or ritual disgrace. In practice, this produces an order that is often more stable than the Pearl League’s competitive oligarchy. The Min system obliges its merchants to fund seawalls, granaries, clinics, and convoy escorts. It makes civic duty a condition of profit, turning the port city into a machine for both extraction and survival.

Beyond the South China coast proper, the New Nanyang Company-States form in the archipelagic hinge: Binondo, Malacca, Java, Singapore’s ruins, and smaller nodes that matter because they sit astride sea-lanes. These polities are explicitly hybrid. They adopt fragments of pre-War corporate law because corporate law is, in a sense, designed for exactly their problem: coordinating distant capital and mixed crews under enforceable rules. But they cannot simply resurrect megacorporate sovereignty; the post-War world will not tolerate a Vault-Tec-scale leviathan. So Nanyang “companies” remain bounded: chartered, but not absolute; profit-driven, but constrained by local customary law and the need to keep multi-ethnic port populations from tearing themselves apart.

These southern regimes do not settle for being trading partners for the mainland. They become geopolitical actors with ambitions that pull northward. The South wants river mouths, inland markets, and access to Beiyou’s workshops and grain. Beiyou wants salt, fish, specialised salvage, and certain pre-War components the inland cannot produce. This mutual need creates a permanent tension: cooperation without trust.

An era of tariff wars and customs skirmishes follows. Southern convoys probe river mouths. Beiyou builds customs forts and insists on licensed caravan-fleets. Smugglers become a profession with its own folklore. Sometimes the conflict is naval—pirate-privateers clashing over convoy rights. Sometimes it is economic—Beiyou imposing anti-usury laws that make southern credit contracts unenforceable inland, infuriating the Sea Houses. Sometimes it becomes quasi-religious: Min Guild temples preaching order and reciprocity against Pearl League “decadence,” while Beiyou pamphleteers denounce the sea as the source of moral rot and debt-slavery.

Yet for all that friction, the South and North also define each other. Beiyou learns what it means to be an inland republic precisely by resisting the sea’s logic. The thalassocracies learn what limits exist to maritime coercion when faced with an organised cantonal militia society that would rather burn its own markets than submit to a foreign monopoly.

The Red Continuities: Tibet, Xinjiang, and Manchuria Become States of Memory

If Beiyou and the thalassocracies are states of adaptation, the PRC loyalist regimes are states of memory. They survive by insisting that continuity itself is legitimacy, even if the substance of that continuity mutates.

In Tibet, the Red Monastery becomes fully articulate in the 23rd century. Its doctrine is a governing synthesis forged by the need to keep highland communities coherent across famine cycles and border pressures. It reframes Marxist language into moral cosmology: greed and attachment as class exploitation; delusion as false consciousness; discipline as both spiritual practice and collective labour. Its leaders—part monastic, part cadre—see themselves as custodians of a deeper “People’s Republic,” one that has outlived the cities because it has moved into the mountains and into the soul.

This makes Tibet a unique actor: a regime that can exert influence not just through force but through arbitration and ideology. Himalayan borderlands, caravan republics, and even some southern upland communities sometimes accept Red Monastery mediation because its courts are predictable, its punishments are framed as moral correction, and its envoys can move through places where purely secular diplomats cannot.

Xinjiang, by contrast, evolves into the most “modern” of the Red bastions in the narrow sense: a security apparatus that never stopped thinking like a state. The People’s Security Directorate maintains surveillance traditions, border controls, and the disciplined hoarding of strategic resources—especially uranium and rare minerals. Over time, it becomes indispensable to everyone else because it can offer what few others can: controlled access to nuclear fuel cycles, explosives precursors, and certain pre-War military technologies kept alive by obsessive technicians in sealed workshops.

But Xinjiang’s legitimacy is brittle. It is feared more than loved. It offers order, but at the cost of suffocating oversight. Traders and envoys enter its cities like petitioners entering a fortress. The Directorate’s ideology reduces to one phrase: stability. Everything else—class, nation, culture—is subordinate to the security of the state. This makes it a perpetual antagonist to polities that value civic participation, and a tempting partner to regimes that prioritise control.

Manchuria becomes the third form of continuity through industry and -military. The North-East People’s Military Region survives because it maintains the ability to manufacture and repair heavy equipment longer than most of the mainland. It is an officer-led state with worker committees as a legitimising theater, not as sovereign bodies. Its political culture romanticises steel, sacrifice, and reunification. It conducts periodic armed probes into the North China borderlands not merely for resources but for symbolism: reminders that the red flag still claims the plains.

This places it on a collision course with Beiyou, but not an immediate one. Manchuria cannot easily conquer an entrenched cantonal militia society without bleeding itself dry. Beiyou, meanwhile, does not want permanent militarisation that would turn its own federal staff into a proto-army-state. So their conflict becomes a long, cold war of patrol clashes, sabotage, propaganda, and proxy play through steppe and caravan polities.

Korea: Bunker Absolutism Versus a Maritime-Confederal Goryeo

On the peninsula, the 23rd century is defined by the widening ideological canyon between the DPRK remnant and the southern-led restoration.

The DPRK Bunker Kingdom emerges into the surface world like a fossilised ideology with intact teeth. Its deep survival infrastructure allows it to maintain continuity of cadre training, indoctrination, and command routines far longer than most regimes can manage. When it reasserts itself, it does so not as a federation of starving villages but as a self-contained apparatus that believes the Great War proved Juche correct: only total self-reliance and total discipline survive.

The South’s trajectory is the opposite. The polities that eventually form New Goryeo arise from councils, port economies, and a deliberate effort to avoid brittle centralisation. Their monarchy is not an attempt to resurrect old absolutism but a symbolic crown designed to sit above a confederation of local authorities. “Goryeo” becomes a political technology: a shared name that can unify without creating a single point of failure.

By the late 23rd century, New Goryeo has become a broker between worlds. It trades with Nanyang and Japan, negotiates cautiously with Beiyou and Manchuria, and treats the DPRK remnant as both threat and useful monster—an adversary that helps justify strong coastal defenses and internal cohesion. Periodic DPRK missile tests and tunnel raids keep the peninsula tense, but they also prevent New Goryeo from drifting into complacency. The peninsula becomes a strategic hinge: whoever can sway Goryeo can influence the balance between North China, Manchuria, Japan, and the southern seas.

Japan: Plural Restoration, Aristocracy Reborn, and the Archipelago as a Diplomatic Weapon

Japan’s 23rd-century order has seen it go from modern nation-state to a layered lattice of legitimacy stretched across islands.

Japan’s fragmentation produces many regime forms—proto-shogunates, city republics, rural leagues—but by the 2200s, these polities confront a shared dilemma: none can credibly claim to represent “Japan” without becoming an imperial project that the geography and trauma of the archipelago resist. Here the imperial institution re-emerges as a solution to the problem of unity without centralisation.

The Plural Restoration solidifies as multiple imperial branches gain recognition in different regions, each acting as a ritual anchor rather than a governing cabinet. Instead of a civil war of claimants, the Imperial House has decided on a distributed continuity strategy. Imperial envoys witness treaties, bless legal compacts, and arbitrate succession disputes within island polities. The Emperor becomes less a ruler than a seal of shared identity: a way for separate Japans to remain Japan.

Alongside this, the former kazoku lineages return as an aristocracy of function. In a world where archives are scarce and legitimacy is precious, genealogy becomes a form of capital. Former noble houses reconstitute themselves as custodians of ports, shrine networks, irrigation districts, and legal charters. Their status is conditional: they remain “noble” so long as they maintain public works, field militias, and uphold arbitration norms. In some regions, these houses become the backbone of stable governance; in others, they are resented as parasites and kept on short leash by republic-style councils. But across the archipelago, their reappearance supplies Japan with something many other polities lack: a durable elite class that can negotiate across generations without requiring a central bureaucratic state.

Geopolitically, Japan becomes a sophisticated actor precisely because it is not unified in the old sense. Its island polities can trade with Nanyang without fully submitting to southern maritime hegemony. They can bargain with New Goryeo while keeping the DPRK remnant at arm’s length. They can engage Manchuria through northern channels and Beiyou through inland-sea caravan routes. The imperial branches and aristocratic houses provide diplomatic continuity even when individual island governments change. Japan weaponises multiplicity: always present, never easily captured.

The Interstices: Steppe Khanates and Caravan Republics as the Circulatory System

Between these major actors lie the polities that do not dominate maps but determine how maps function: steppe riders and oasis republics.

The steppe is not organised enough to become an empire, but remains mobile enough to remain a threat. Khanates rise and fall around charismatic leaders, access to clean wells, and control of salvage corridors. They raid when they can, sell escort services when they must, and serve as mercenaries in the proxy conflicts of Beiyou and Manchuria. Their existence prevents any mainland state from treating its northern and western fringes as “secure.”

The caravan republics—oasis towns and corridor markets—become the opposite: deliberately neutral nodes that survive by enforcing predictable tolls and arbitration. They host envoys, exchange rates, marriage alliances, and rumor. They are where Beiyou guild clerks meet Xinjiang security brokers, where Tibetan moralists negotiate with Nanyang factors, where Manchurian agents buy southern components without admitting it. In a world where long-distance trade is dangerous, these towns become the indispensable glue of the continental interior.

What the Second Founding Produces by 2300

By the end of the 23rd century, East Asia’s political ecology has stabilised into a tense but intelligible system.

Beiyou stands as the inland counter-model: an anti-liberal cantonal republic that can mobilise for war but refuses to become an empire. The southern thalassocracies dominate sea-lanes and port wealth, oscillating between civic order and predatory monopoly, always probing inland access. The Red bastions remain stubborn continuities—Tibet as moral-theocratic arbiter, Xinjiang as security-industrial fortress, Manchuria as militarised industrial claimant. Korea sits as a hinge between bunker absolutism and confederal maritime restoration. Japan operates as an archipelago of polities bound by plural imperial legitimacy and a functional aristocracy, turning distributed continuity into diplomatic leverage. The steppe and caravans animate the spaces between, ensuring no power can seal itself off from the rest.

What looks like peace from afar in fact takes shape as a balance of institutional forms, each convinced that its own solution to the post-War condition is the only one that will endure. And because their solutions are mutually incompatible—cantonal duty versus maritime profit, security-state stability versus civic participation, plural legitimacy versus reunification ideology—the present inherits a landscape where war is always possible, trade is always political, and every regime is haunted by the same question:

If the old world died because it concentrated too much power in too few hands, how much power can you gather before the ruins begin to repeat themselves?

1.4 The Present: East Asia in the Late 23rd Century

By the late 23rd century, East Asia has settled into something that, from a distance, looks like balance. Up close it feels more like a three-way arm wrestle on a table full of knives. No one has the mass to build a continent-spanning empire. No one is weak enough to be casually erased. The memory of the Great War and the Resource Wars before them is no longer lived experience—almost no-one alive remembers a pre-nuclear sky—but it has been distilled into institutions, taboo, and doctrine so thoroughly that it still shapes every decision.

Beiyou at Maturity

The Beiyou Cantonal Republic now covers most of the inland North China core: the loess plateau, the upland fringe of the North China Plain, and a necklace of medium towns strung along old canal beds and rail lines. To outsiders, its border looks like a ragged semicircle drawn around the most intensively farmed soils that are not permanently poisoned. To insiders, Beiyou is less a territory than a pattern: wherever you find a canton assembly, a militia drill-square, a co-op granary, and a ledger office using the federal coin, you are on Beiyou ground.

The internal architecture of the Republic is by now stable enough to be boring, which is exactly how its people like it. Each Canton maintains its own rolls, courts, and militia cadres; each sends mandated delegates to the rotating Federal Diet; the Diet handles common coinage, inter-Canton arbitration, and the maintenance of a narrow list of “federal works” such as main roads, river locks, and a small number of highland hydro schemes. The Federal Staff is lean and permanently distrusted; its officers are watched as carefully as foreigners. No capital city has been allowed to re-emerge. Federal offices are distributed, archival centres and training schools are deliberately placed in different Cantons, and the great ruins of Beijing and Tianjin remain under the Federal Ruins regime: jointly supervised, tightly controlled, and ritually treated as cautionary monuments rather than prizes.

Economically, Beiyou is richer than it looks. The outward image is one of small farms and dusty hills, but behind that lie dense clusters of artisan industry: machine shops in repurposed danwei compounds, chemical labs hidden in old school basements, electronics workshops in former county offices. Beiyou has no megacorporations by design, but it has powerful guilds and co-ops that function as quasi-sectoral bodies. They set technical standards, run apprenticeship systems, and negotiate with both the Federal Staff and foreign buyers. The Republic exports precision: parts for weapons and mining equipment, hardy agricultural tools, refurbished pre-War machine cores, and even limited runs of new electronics assembled from scavenged or locally fabricated components.

Strategically, Beiyou’s aims are blunt and consistent. It will not tolerate the reappearance of a centralised one-party state on the plains, nor of any foreign company-state owning inland land or factories. It will ensure that river routes to the sea remain subject to Canton customs, not coastal tariffs. And it will gradually, patiently push the front line of PRC loyalist control away from the plateau rim, inch by inch, not through spectacular offensives but through a hundred small deals with border villages, caravan towns, and defecting officers. The Republic understands that its greatest asset is not any one fort or gun line, but its ability to regenerate: a militia society that can absorb losses, share risk, and fight over centuries rather than campaigns.

The Southern Seas: Thalassocracies and the Mandate of Nanyang

Along the littoral, the sea is the state. The southern coast of China, the island arcs of Nanyang, and the straits of Malacca and Taiwan are now governed less by lines on maps than by the patrol radii of fleets and the credit limits of port councils.

The Pearl League holds the richest, most dangerous waters closest to the mainland: the reconstituted harbours of the Pearl River delta, the inlets of eastern Guangdong, and the ruined petrochemical and container complexes that still cough up salvage in every storm. The League’s Sea-House Council acts as a senate of oligarchs, balancing rival shipping clans, ex-military captains, and technocratic families descended from pre-War engineers. It issues letters of marque and convoy codes, adjudicates salvage rights, and sets the tolls on the sea-lanes that matter most. In practice, the League behaves like a city-state whose city is water: what it truly governs is not land but the moving corridors between anchorages.

Further north and out into the islands, the Min Sea Guilds have built a more pious and communal maritime order. Their ports hum with ritual as much as with commerce. Contracts are sealed with offerings to sea deities; guild tribunals sit in the shadow of temple roofs; public works—sea walls, breakwaters, communal drydocks—are funded as religious merit and civic duty in equal measure. The Guilds’ power rests less on concentrated capital than on reputation networks that stretch deep into Nanyang and up into Beiyou’s river junctions. To cheat in a Min port is to find doors closed to you from Fujian to Palawan.

Beyond the Chinese coast, New Nanyang companies have stitched together a patchwork thalassocracy across the archipelagos. Binondo, a rebuilt Malacca, remnants of Singapore, Javanese ports and smaller island capitals host chartered companies whose legal charters are an uneasy fusion of scavenged pre-War corporate law and living customary rights. These company-states broker the long-haul routes: to the remnants of West Coast polities and House’s Nevada, to Soviet bunker-clusters on the far side of Siberia, to African and Latin American enclaves that survived the fire. Their ships carry not just goods but information: rumors of new Vault openings, sightings of intact pre-War satellites, whispers of functioning AI cores.

All of these southern powers compete incessantly for what their chroniclers have started, half-jokingly, to call the Mandate of Nanyang: the informal primacy in setting the rules of sea trade between East Asia and the rest of the world. That competition is not abstract. Convoys shadow each other through straits; rival fleets sponsor proxy militias in coastal villages and river mouths; port councils fight tariff wars that spill over into blockades and sabotage. Every few years, some incident—a seized grain fleet, a fire in a drydock “accidentally” touching off munitions, a murdered envoy—threatens to unify the south only in the sense of drawing everyone into the same brawl.

Red Citadels and Their Orbits

The three PRC remnant regimes have only hardened.

The Red Monastery of Tibet is now a full theocratic state spread across the upland valleys. Its monasteries are simultaneously barracks, courts, and granaries; its scriptures are glossed with dialectical notes; its banners bear both the red star and the eternal knot. It acts as moral broker in the trans-Himalayan borderlands, arbitrating disputes between caravan republics, steppe clans, and southern upland polities. Its emissaries quote sutras and Marx in the same breath; its judges hand down sentences of penance that may involve digging terraces and building roads as often as sitting in meditation cells. For neighbouring powers, Tibet is both a buffer and an irritant: it keeps Xinjiang and Nanyang proxies from tearing each other apart in the highlands, but its monks sometimes denounce coastal slavery or Directorate repression with a moral authority that embarrasses everyone.

The Xinjiang Directorate has become the archetype of the post-War security state. Its cities are clean, heavily surveilled, and stratified. Access to uranium pits, reprocessing facilities, and old missile fields is tightly controlled. Foreign delegations to Urumqi or Kashgar step into an environment that feels like a surviving sliver of late 21st-century authoritarian modernity: ID checks and biometric scans, drone patrols over wide streets, grey-suited officials who speak flawless Beifang standard and accented Nanyang lingua franca. The Directorate trades uranium fuel, certain explosives precursors, and a limited range of drone and missile technologies. In exchange it demands machinery, fine tools, select medicines, and, above all, recognition of its borders and control over its interior peoples. Everyone needs what Xinjiang can provide, and everyone fears what it might do if pushed into a corner with the remnants of its long-range weaponry and any undiscovered AI relics.

The North-East People’s Military Region in Manchuria retains the temperament of a mobilised front line. Its cities still resonate with the sounds of factories: rolling mills, shipyards, vehicle plants. Conscription is a way of life; ideology is heavy-handed but emotionally shallow, more ritual than conviction for many younger citizens. The Region’s leadership regards itself as the rightful core of a future re-unified “People’s Republic,” though it has long since stopped pretending that such a republic would look like the old Beijing-centred state; it would be a military-industrial hegemony with a refurbished red veil. Manchuria’s eyes are set south and west: on Beiyou’s access to the industrial ruins of the plain, on Goryeo’s southern ports, and on Japanese trade lanes through the northern seas. In border zones between Manchurian fortresses and Beiyou canton frontier posts, confrontations are highly choreographed: patrols advance, banners are displayed, warning shots are fired according to rules that both sides understand are as much theatre as threat. The danger lies in the cumulative effect of accidents—one trigger-happy officer, one artillery shell that lands on the wrong side—and in the temptation of either regime to exploit a crisis for internal consolidation.

Peninsula Balance: New Goryeo and the Shadow of the Bunkers

The Korean Peninsula has become a study in duality so stark it invites myth. On the southern and eastern coasts, New Goryeo presents itself as a modest success story: a commonwealth of fortified port cities and inland communes linked by rail and coastal shipping, presided over by a constitutional monarch and a web of councils and ministries. Its economy is diversified for an age of ruins: shipbuilding and repair, electronics salvage and reassembly, specialised agriculture, and a growing niche in finance and arbitration for intra-Asian trade. Its war doctrine is defensive and naval; its political doctrine balances Confucian rhetoric about harmony with practical insistence on legal checks and decentralisation.

To the north, behind a DMZ that is now an arc of blasted no-man’s-land and half-collapsed tunnels, the DPRK remnant persists in-bunker. From the outside, it is little more than rumours and rocket plumes. Occasionally, its propaganda broadcasts crackle across the peninsula, full of archaic slogans and images of smiling children in polished concrete halls. Occasionally, a missile test splashes down in the Sea of Japan or scatters debris near a Goryeo convoy. Occasionally, a tunnel is discovered leading under a southern village, its entrance rigged with traps and surrounded by faded posters of long-dead marshals. The Bunker Kingdom has neither the population nor the industrial base to conquer the peninsula, but its mere existence forces New Goryeo to keep a large standing army and invest heavily in counter-tunnel, missile defense, and psychological operations.

Goryeo’s leaders exploit this tension carefully. They use the northern threat to justify internal unity and defense spending, but they also cultivate a reputation as mediators and responsible actors. Goryeo hosts talks between Manchurian envoys and Beiyou delegates on neutral islands; it provides port access to Nanyang merchants under predictable legal regimes; it sends carefully briefed missions to Japan and even as far as House-influenced territories beyond the Pacific, trading cultural continuity and shipyard expertise for technology and knowledge. On the map, the peninsula is small. In the diplomatic ledger, it is disproportionately important because it is one of the few places where all major East Asian actors overlap without any one of them being able to dictate terms.

Peripheral Hinge Points: Steppe, Caravans, and the Wider World

Around these major blocks flows a ring of polities that seem secondary until you try to imagine East Asia functioning without them.

The steppe khanates along the northern arc—from the Gobi through Inner Mongolia toward the Amur—still live by a blend of herding, raiding, and escort. Their cavalry and bike-bands can strike supply lines and caravans with frightening speed. When Beiyou, Manchuria, or Xinjiang want to destabilise each other without formal war, they know which chieftains to send gifts to. When they want to move goods quietly, they know which khans to pay for protection. The khanates’ politics are fluid; their existence as a category is not. They are a permanent reminder that the continental interior cannot be pacified into neat borders.

The caravan republics—oasis towns in Gansu, Ningxia, parts of Qinghai and Central Asia—play the opposite role. They work hard to be boring. Their councils specialise in toll schedules, dispute resolution, and the maintenance of wells and caravanserai. They accept envoys from Beiyou, Tibet, Xinjiang, Nanyang, and even distant House-affiliated traders, and they try to treat them all according to written rules. Their prosperity depends on being predictable. As long as they succeed, the continent has a circulatory system: grain out, salts and metals in, news in every direction.

Beyond the region, faint but real lines connect East Asia to House’s Vegas, to the NCR and similar commonwealths on the old American West Coast, to Soviet bunker clusters scattered under the Urals and in Arctic archipelagos, and to African and Latin American survivor polities. These connections are mediated by Nanyang companies, Japanese island republics, and the occasional long-haul Beiyou expedition. Technology flows primarily inward: advanced pre-War medtech, functioning AI fragments, high-grade industrial cores. Outward flows are more eclectic: rare minerals, carefully curated cultural artefacts, specialist mercenary units trained in alpine or maritime warfare.

Flashpoints and the Texture of “Peace”

Along the Beiyou-Manchuria frontier, several large industrial ruins—old steel complexes, rail hubs, and data vault clusters—sit unclaimed or jointly claimed. Every time either side moves a survey crew or a salvager column too close, the other responds with strong patrols. Skirmishes are kept artificially limited by standing codes worked out in painstaking border conferences: no artillery beyond a certain calibre, no pursuit beyond specified markers, withdrawal after a set number of casualties. The codes will work until they don’t.

In Nanyang, tariff disputes between the Pearl League, Min Guilds, and company-states erupt regularly. Closing a harbour to a rival’s flag can, within weeks, choke a Beiyou or Goryeo supply chain, which in turn can lead those inland powers to favour one sea partner over another, rippling grievance outward. Privateers change flags, and convoys quietly hire raiders to “discourage” competitors. Every such conflict carries the risk of drawing in Beiyou or the Red bastions if some over-ambitious admiral decides to test inland defenses along a river mouth without permission.

Tibet occasionally launches moral offensives rather than military ones, condemning coastal slave markets, Directorate labour camps, or the more egregious abuses of southern company-states. Sometimes this is mere noise, sometimes it emboldens internal critics within those regimes and provokes crackdowns. Xinjiang and the DPRK remnant both sit on the knife-edge of temptation: their technical cadres sift through old bunkers and data caches that may hold functioning pre-War AI cores or WMD blueprints. The Directorate’s leadership understands that releasing another Tel Aviv into the world would likely bring everyone’s missiles down on their heads; not all factional rivals are as cautious.

To a Beiyou mapmaker, the late 23rd century looks like success. No empire has risen, no megacorp owns a city, and the rivers still flow under Cantonal flags. To a Pearl League admiral, it looks like a world of opportunity: every strait is a toll, every archipelago a potential partner or vassal. To a Manchurian general, it looks like unfinished business and insult. To a monk in the Red Monastery, it is a field of karma still dominated by greed and fear.

And somewhere under concrete and neon to the far West, Robert House’s machines continue to model all these patterns, occasionally nudging them through the flow of trade and code, wondering whether the Middle Kingdom’s solution to the old world’s failures is more stable than his own.

2. The Beiyou Cantonal Republic (北幽诸州共和国), ca. 2300

Flag of the Beiyou Cantonal Republic. Polaris, symbolising the North and for shared aims, surrounded by smaller stars, symbolising the many cantons and villages.

By 2300 the Beiyou Cantonal Republic has become a settled civilisation in its own right: suspicious, sturdy, inward-looking, and increasingly aware that it has become the reference point against which all nearby societies measure themselves.

2.1 Land, Climate, and the Federal Ruins

Beiyou’s territory stretches like a horseshoe around the poisoned core of the old North China Plain. To the west and north it occupies the loess plateaus of Shanxi and northern Shaanxi, where hills have been terraced and re-terraced since long before the bombs. To the east it leans down onto the safer edges of Hebei and Shandong, stopping just short of the great cratered deltas. The Republic thinks of itself in terms of watersheds rather than lines: the upper Fen, the safer reaches of the Yellow River, tributaries that can still irrigate without drawing too much poison out of the soil.

The climate is harsher than before the War. Summers are short and violent, with dust storms that blot out the sky and rainbursts that fill gullies overnight. Winters are longer, colder, and less predictable. Snow sometimes falls on fields that once knew only dry frost. Every child in Beiyou learns that the weather is a thing to be managed, not trusted. The terrace walls, windbreak forests and check-dams that sew the hills together are as much part of the Republic’s identity as its flags.

At the centre of this landscape lie the Federal Ruins: Beijing, Tianjin, and the fused belt of shattered industrial new towns that once surrounded them. No single canton owns these ruins. By law they belong to the Republic as a whole, and in practice they belong to no one. Chartered salvage guilds go in on fixed schedules under the supervision of federal inspectors and militia escorts. No permanent settlement is allowed within a fixed radius. No banner but the Republican flag may be flown there. No ritual or ceremony may proclaim the ruins a “capital.”

The Ruins are Beiyou’s permanent memento mori. From a distance they are just a dark smudge on the horizon. In songs and civic catechisms they are called “the Burned Court,” “the Broken City,” “the Place Where One Roof Covered All”—shorthand for the centralising temptation the Republic has sworn never to repeat.

2.2 Political Form: Cantons, Diet, and Oaths

The basic political unit of Beiyou is the zhou, the canton. A canton is not defined by population so much as by what it can feed and defend together. Most encompass one market town, several dozen villages, the surrounding terraces and hill pastures, and whatever ruins can be maintained and patrolled by their combined militia. Their boundaries follow ridge-lines, canals, and irrigation districts more than rivers or old county lines.

Within each canton, authority rests in an assembly that is at once council, court, and festival. At least once a year, and more often in tense times, every household that has fulfilled its militia and work obligations sends a voting adult to the canton meeting. There are no professional politicians. Delegates are chosen from among guild elders, militia captains, scribes, and respected farmers, usually for fixed terms with explicit written instructions. They sit in a hall that might once have been a township government, a school auditorium, or a rebuilt temple courtyard.

Citizenship in Beiyou is not a birthright so much as a maintained status. To be on the rolls, an adult must have:

• completed a basic cycle of militia training;

• contributed to the canton’s labour quotas on public works;

• participated in grain and tax contributions for at least a set number of years.

Those who cannot serve in arms may serve in hospitals, schools, workshops or archives, but everyone owes something. Only citizens can vote in assemblies, speak in certain courts, or be chosen as delegates to the Federal Diet.

The Diet is Beiyou’s one concession to supra-canton order. It does not reside in a capital. Its meeting place rotates among a few mid-sized inland cities, none of which may host it for more than a fixed span. The Diet’s formal powers are narrowly defined: to regulate coinage and units of measure; to arbitrate disputes between cantons; to charter guilds that operate across canton boundaries; to maintain certain roads, locks, and relay stations; and to conduct diplomacy and war on behalf of the Republic as a whole. It cannot levy direct tax, it cannot maintain a permanent standing army above a small cadre staff, and it cannot issue decrees that bind a canton internally without that canton’s formal ratification.

This arrangement makes politics slow and frustrating. It is meant to. Beiyou’s founding covenants read almost like trauma diaries: every abuse of central power under late imperial dynasties, warlords, bureaucrats, and pre-War megacorps is catalogued and countered with some procedural brake. The Republic would rather miss opportunities than make it easy for a strongman to appear.

2.3 Economy, Technology, and Infrastructure

At ground level, Beiyou still looks agrarian. Fields of millet, wheat, hardy maize and potatoes creep up terraces and down valley bottoms; small orchards of apples, apricots and drought-tolerant nuts cling to slopes. Communal granaries stand at the edge of every canton seat, their walls thick and their doors barred with ritual as well as iron. Floodworks, hillside ponds and contour ditches are maintained obsessively; a collapsed terrace is treated as both a civic disgrace and a potential disaster, for each failure increases the chance of a landslide or famine wave that might wipe out a whole valley.

Beneath this rural skin lies a surprisingly dense web of workshops and laboratories. Most of the Republic’s industries occupy refurbished danwei compounds and industrial estates to which the people have simply never stopped coming. One courtyard might hold a machine shop capable of regrinding pre-War ball bearings and fabricating new gear teeth; another, a chemical works brewing fertiliser, soap, and basic medicines from scavenged feedstocks; a third, an electronics workshop harvesting components from ruin-boards and building new radios and sensing rigs around them.

Beiyou’s tech level sits in an odd band. In many villages, one still sees hand ploughs and animal traction; in some canton seats, locals are printing circuit boards and machining replacement parts for precision lathes. The Republic has not tried to recreate the pre-War consumer flood. It concentrates its technical capacity where it matters for resilience: agriculture, basic medicine, water, communications, and defence. There are a few jealously guarded fission micro-reactors salvaged from military sites, and rumours of a single experimental fusion core maintained under federal seal, but day-to-day power comes from small hydro plants, biomass gasifiers, wind-wheels on ridges, and solar arrays patched together from pre-War glass.

Trade runs along three axes: inland, coastal, and trans-Eurasian. Inland, caravans and canal craft move surplus grain, coal, and manufactured tools between cantons. Downriver, Beiyou exports hardened steel tools, reconditioned machinery, ammunition, and skilled labour—mechanics, surveyors, militia trainers—to Nanyang ports and to New Goryeo, in exchange for salt, fish, certain medicines, fine textiles, and pure metals processed in coastal facilities. Across the steppe and mountains, caravan republics bring in furs, wool, horses and camels, as well as rare mineral ores and, occasionally, relics of Soviet and Central Asian bunkers.

The Republic keeps strict control on what can be imported. Certain luxury goods—from narcotics to high-end entertainment devices—are heavily taxed or banned outright as “unproductive corruptors.” Autonomous weapons platforms and strong AIs are forbidden across the board; even advanced robotics for civilian use must be licensed, tracked, and often incorporate literal physical kill-switches maintained by canton authorities.

2.4 Society, Identity, and Everyday Life

If one asks people in Beiyou what they are, almost none will say “Han.” The word survives in history lessons and in the names of dishes and textiles, but as an identity label it belongs to the world that died. In its place has arisen Beiyou—not just the name of the republic but the name of a people.

This shift is partly ideological and partly demographic. The Great War scrambled populations and shattered the continuity of old regional cultures. Upland Beifang received refugees from the plain, demobilised soldiers from all over the north, and later in the 22nd century small streams of southerners and steppe folk. Over two centuries, they married, worked, drilled and bled together. Canton assemblies and militia rolls enumerate “Beiyou people,” not Han, and children grow up thinking of “Beiyou” as their nationality, ethnicity, and civilisation all at once.

South of the Republic, river and coastal folk might call themselves Yue, Min, Tang, or just “people of the sea.” In the Red Bastions, the old “Chinese people” and “nationalities policy” terminology clings on, if only in official slogans. In Beiyou, those categories feel like distant questions. The Beiyou person is whoever keeps the terraces up, answers the drill horn, and swears the canton oaths. Foreigners are whomever does not.

Language follows a similar pattern. Mandarin has become a pluricentric language across the region, and Beiyou’s speech is one pole of that constellation. The Republic’s standard—Beiyou Common Speech (北幽通语)—grew out of old Northern accents, smoothed over by cantonal schools and traveling clerks. It retains some vocabulary from PRC officialese but abandons many pre-War technical and political terms. In their place are new words for canton offices, militia grades, and post-nuclear agricultural and medical techniques.

Further south, Nanyang crews use a creole trade Mandarin shot through with Min, Malay, Kapampangan, and English words. In Tibet, monastic Mandarin is full of transliterated Sanskrit and Tibetan philosophical terms. In Xinjiang, an official register laden with security jargon coexists with Turkic-influenced street speech. Most Beiyou citizens understand at least some of these variants from radio, trade and service in ruins. Scribes and diplomats study them formally. Within the Republic, however, the normative prestige centre is the inland canton: the speech of the terraces and market halls, not of any megacity.

Daily life is dense with obligation. A typical Beiyou village rises early. Younger adults report to fields or workshops; older ones supervise children or tend small livestock. On certain days of the week the militia horn sounds before sunrise and half the able-bodied population convenes on the drill square with patched rifles and shock-spears, or climbs into clanking power-frames for maintenance and exercise. After drills come ballots or petitions: the same square hosts impromptu hearings where disputes over water, inheritance, and work quotas are argued before a line of elders and scribes.

Culturally, Beiyou is austere rather than joyless. Festivals mark planting and harvest, oath renewals and the memory of the War. Children learn songs that treat the Ruins almost as a mythic underworld: a place of treasure, ghosts, and forbidden pride. Marriage is usually monogamous and arranged by families with input from the couple; divorce is possible but socially expensive. Gender roles are flexible by necessity—anyone can learn to shoot, mend, or account—but tradition still expects men to shoulder more field and guard duty when possible, and women to dominate in household economics and education. Exceptions are common enough not to scandalise, especially in canton seats and among salvage teams.

Religion is layered. Ancestor veneration on Qingming persists. Village ritual worship has become the dominant worship form again. Local gods of wells, hills, and markets receive offerings at small shrines. There is a faint memory of pre-War official atheism in the slightly embarrassed way some people talk about “just doing the rites.” Overlaid on this is what outside scholars might call a Beiyou civil religion: the oaths sworn to the canton, the annual reading of founding covenants, the collective bow offered toward the Federal Ruins on certain days, thanking the dead city for its warning. To deny those rituals openly is to place oneself outside the community as surely as refusing militia duty.

2.5 Security and War: Citizen-Soldiers on a Long Frontier

Beiyou’s militia system is both its pride and its obsession. Every canton maintains detailed rolls of who can fight, who can support, and who must be protected. From adolescence, citizens train with small arms, close-quarters weapons and basic fieldcraft. Each canton has a core cadre—professional-grade officers and specialists—who rotate through training duties, border patrols, and ruin-security shifts. Above them, the Federal Staff coordinates training standards, intelligence, and the mobilisation plan that would, in theory, let the Republic field a continent-shaping force in extremis.

In practice, Beiyou avoids large campaigns. Its doctrine is defensive depth. Against steppe raiders, it uses layered watchtowers, snelled patrol routes, and the threat of quick-gathered militia companies that can cut off raiders’ retreat and burn their pasture alliances. Against southern raiders or thalassocratic meddling, it relies on river forts with overlapping fields of fire, shoreline minefields, and the ability to deny inland markets rather than fight for every quay. Against Manchuria, it plays a long game: refusing pitched battles, fortifying key passes and ruin mouths, encouraging desertion and quiet migration from the frontier prefectures into nearby cantons.

Beiyou views advanced battlefield automation with deep suspicion. Low-level robotics—work drones for hauling, simple sentry turrets in the Ruins, small agricultural robots—are tolerated where they save labour under human supervision. High-autonomy systems, especially those capable of independent lethal action, are banned in canton law. Stories circulate of wandering pre-War combat drones and entangled AI clusters in the Ruins that still respond to garbled satellite signals; even the suggestion of building such things anew rouses memories of the global systems that once killed the sky.

What power armour exists is prized but rare. A handful of suits, patched and updated, are assigned to specialist canton companies for shock action and ruin work. The Federal Staff keeps a small reserve under its own direct control. Service in armour is prestigious but heavily regulated. The wearer is sworn under special oaths, and the suits themselves are fitted with multiple lockouts controlled by canton armourers. “No single man is stronger than the canton,” an instructor says, knocking his knuckles against a suit’s chestplate. “If he thinks he is, we turn the machine off.”

Internal security is handled in the same spirit: many eyes, many small tools, no one all-seeing apparatus. Each canton has watchmen and investigators, but there is no secret police with cross-republic reach. Smuggling from the south is inevitable; it is managed by setting clear lines—tools in, unlicensed drugs and slaves out—and coming down hard when those are crossed. Cults are tolerated until they begin to hoard weapons or interfere with quotas, then the militia intervenes, and the courts decide whether to dissolve them or push them out beyond the borders to take their chances among raiders and ruins.

2.6 Ruins, Relics, and the Wasteland Beyond

No description of Beiyou is complete without the wasteland around and beneath it. The Republic does not merely sit beside ruins, for it is built in their shadow and fuelled by their salvage. Entire cantons owe their prosperity to a single accessible industrial site: an old vehicle plant whose line can be partly resurrected, a logistics hub whose warehouses still hold spares, a decommissioned research campus with archives and lab gear intact.

Because of this, salvage is a tightly regulated profession. Teams are chartered at the canton level, often under joint guild and militia oversight. Each team must include a medic, a rad-tech, and at least one scribe trained to copy inscriptions, catalogue devices, and recognise pre-War hazard markings. Finds are inventoried on return; the canton takes its share first, the guilds second, the crew third. Particularly dangerous or sophisticated artefacts—AI cores, high-energy powerpacks, bioweapons labs—are tagged and turned over to the Federal Ruins Office, whose specialists decide whether to dismantle, store, or very cautiously repurpose them.

The ruins themselves are ecologies as much as places. Mutated flora and fauna are common along old river channels and in collapsed metro networks. Beiyou folklore is full of stories of “iron ghosts”: half-functional maintenance robots following phantom routines, automated defence systems that still see anyone without the right 21st-century IFF codes as intruders, feral securitron-like machines scavenging metal and attacking loud noises. Salvage manuals devote as much space to recognising behavioural patterns of rogue systems as to lockpicking or tunnelling techniques.

Neighbouring polities see Beiyou as both competitor and necessity in this domain. New Goryeo, Nanyang companies, even Tibet and Xinjiang occasionally commission Beiyou units to retrieve specific artefacts or secure particular sites they cannot easily reach or trust their own people to handle. This gives the Republic both a source of hard currency and a role as gatekeeper to some of the more dangerous legacies of the old world.

For individuals, the ruin frontier is both threat and opportunity. Cantonal youth who chafe at terrace work volunteer for salvage expeditions or join escort companies guarding caravans to the steppe and the south. Journeys begin in villages like the one in your painting: tiled roofs and red leaves reflected in muddy water, militia banners drying in the morning sun, a drill-square with chalked lines and a bullet-scarred target wall. From there, roads run outward: up into hills where khanate riders ghost along the horizon, down into hollow cities where the wind sings through broken corridors, or east toward the distant smell of salt and the glitter of Nanyang sails.

In all of this, Beiyou’s sense of itself—as a people, not just a state—is what keeps the pieces together. Where the old world taught “Han” and “Hua” then shattered under the weight of its own centralised systems, the Republic has chosen a narrower, more stubborn word: Beiyou. Not quite an ethnicity, not merely a nationality, but a lived answer to the question that haunts every survivor polity on the planet: if we will not be what we were, what are we instead?

3. The Sea-Lords of Nanhua and Nanyang

If Beiyou is what happens when the uplands of North China decide never again to let one roof cover all, the Southern Hua world is what happens when the old civilisation flees to the sea and refuses to give the name Hua up. Two centuries after the War, “Hua” in the north has become a word in textbooks. In the south it is still a living claim.

People from the Pearl Delta, Fujian coast, Taiwan, Hainan and the Nanyang archipelagos call themselves Hua in a way Beiyou no longer does. But they almost never stop at that. A dockworker in Xigang will say he is Yue Hua (粵華), a shipwright in Quanzhou will insist she is Min Hua (閩華), a merchant-priest in Binondo might say Tangren or Hokkien Hua with equal ease. “Hua” is the civilisation layer, the thing that ties them to a myth of Huaxia stretching back before dynasties and bombs. The qualifiers—Yue, Min, Hakka, Teochew, Nanyang—are how they actually live.

3.1 Lands of the South: Deltas, Headlands, Archipelagos

The Southern Hua world inhabits a spray of coasts and sea-lanes. On the mainland, it clings to the Pearl River Delta, the estuaries and inlets of eastern Guangdong, the rugged Fujian littoral, and pockets along the old Zhejiang coast. Offshore it stretches across the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and deep into Nanyang: Hainan, the Philippine archipelago, the coasts of Vietnam and Malaysia, the Straits of Malacca and Sunda, fragments of Singapore and Java.

The climate here is hotter and wetter than in Beiyou, and more violently unstable. Typhoons drag longer tails. Seasonal rains come in pulses that drown one region and skip another. Sea levels, already elevated by pre-War warming and tectonic glitches from submarine detonations, have eaten into old cities. In many deltas the skyscraper forests stand waist-deep in brackish water, their lower floors turned into mussel beds and mangrove thickets.

Yet the same violence that ruined the coasts also protected them. Many inland powers can barely keep roads intact. Almost none can maintain blue-water fleets. For those who could cling to shipyards and learn to navigate the new currents and minefields, the seas became not just corridors but walls. A shallow channel, a patch of rebar-studded surf, or a field of mutagenic jelly blooms can be decisive defenses if you know them and your enemies do not.

Southern Hua politics therefore follow the contours of useful harbours and repairable drydocks. Inland, control rarely extends far beyond the tidal limit of rivers. Beyond that, Beiyou-style agrarian leagues or fragmented village republics hold sway, trading food for salt, tools, and passage. On the coasts and islands, power belongs to whoever can keep enough hulls afloat and enough crews loyal to enforce their customs.

3.2 Orders of the Sea: League, Guild, Company

Three main institutional traditions share the Southern Hua sea: League, Guild, and Company. None is a state in the old sense, but each has grown teeth.

Around the rebuilt Pearl River mouths, the Pearl League acts as a floating capital. Its core is a handful of port-cities restored from the megacity graveyard—clusters of habitable high-rises, reconditioned docks, and former corporate compounds turned into citadels. The ruling families call themselves Sea Houses. Some trace their lineages back to pre-War conglomerate dynasties; others to triad bosses or naval officers who seized bunkers when the bombs fell.

The League’s Sea-House Council is and is not a government. It issues convoy passes, sets harbour dues, allocates salvage zones in the sunken cityscape, and adjudicates disputes between Houses. It also commissions privateers, licences slavers under delicate euphemisms (“labour brokers”), and turns a blind eye to smuggling when the bribes are right. Outwardly it affects a sleek, quasi-corporate aesthetic: flags with stylised logos, not coats of arms; contracts typewritten and sealed, not carved. But behind the paperwork are old clan politics and a willingness to throw men into the sea to make a point.

Further north and east, the Min Sea Guilds have built something that looks, at first glance, more virtuous. Ports like New Quanzhou and the rebuilt enclaves around Xiamen are governed by overlapping guild councils and temple boards. Every significant trade—shipwrights, sailors, merchants, net-makers, rice dealers—has a guild. Guild masters sit in a chamber that smells of incense and engine oil, while priests of Mazu and other sea deities preside over oaths.

In Min ports, a contract is as much a ritual as a legal instrument. You swear before the altar and the guild; if you default, it is not just a court you offend but your patron goddess and your fellow guilds. Public works are framed as offerings: a seawall, a lighthouse, a communal grain depot are all “gifts to the gods and the city.” The system is conservative, even suffocating, but it produces a kind of slow, steady order that many traders prefer to the Pearl League’s flashier but more brittle arrangements.

Across the wider Nanyang, especially in Binondo, Malacca, Sunda and Singapore’s ruins, the Southern Hua backbone of the population expresses itself through Company-States. These New Nanyang Companies hold charters issued jointly by local councils, Southern Hua merchant clans, and sometimes distant partners in Japan or Goryeo. Their internal rules look like a spliced genetic strand: articles of association rescued from pre-War corporate law, clan tablets and family compacts dictating who may hold shares, and island customary law spelling out land use and ritual obligations.

In practice, a Company-State is a port-city run by its board. The board sets tariffs, maintains the harbour police and dockside militia, funds shipyards and salvage expeditions, and negotiates with inland and overseas partners. It may fly a city flag or a corporate sigil; often the two are indistinguishable. Southern Hua identity here is overtly diasporic: spoken Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Malay, Kapampangan, Tamil and a smattering of Portuguese or Spanish all swirl together. A Company’s “Hua” character is measured by how much it honours ancestral tablets, how many Chinese characters appear on its charter, and how loudly it claims moral kinship with the old civilisation during festivals.

3.3 Wealth of the Tide: Economy and Tech

The Southern Hua economy is volatile but deep. Where Beiyou has cultivated redundancy on land, the sea-lords have cultivated redundancy of routes. If one Strait is blocked by war, storm or an angry god, there is usually another, more dangerous but still navigable, and someone who knows it for a price.

Shipyards are the temples of this world. In Pearl League dock-bays, skeletal hulls of pre-War freighters are cannibalised into hybrid vessels: part steel, part carbon composite, part whatever can be ripped from the bones of megastructures. The largest hulls carry heavy guns salvaged from coastal artillery or shipwrecks, flanked by racks of rockets and drones. Smaller craft—the true workhorses—are fast, ugly and intensely local, built to the quirks of a particular harbour or reef-line. Min guild yards place more emphasis on maintainability than raw power: their ships are simpler to repair with hand tools and local materials, less impressive but more likely to limp home after a storm.

Energy comes from a mix of tidal turbines, wind farms on headlands, rooftop solar plates and small fission or fusion nodes in the richest ports. The League and the bigger Companies maintain a few high-density reactors hidden in old data centres or military facilities, surrounded by layers of insurance and secrecy. Ordinary consumers see power as something intermittent and expensive. Blackouts are normal; so are neighbourhood-level microgrids run by guilds or temples.

The Southern Hua tech stack is skewed toward navigation, communications and weaponry. They do not invest much in rural mechanisation; why bother, when so much food comes from trade or forced arrangements with inland farmers? They pour resources instead into encrypted radio nets, radar and lidar arrays, drone-scouts, and experimental sonar to map the shifting seabed and minefields. Pearl League engineers play endlessly with guided munitions, signal jammers and analogue-on-digital warfare, testing ideas in skirmishes against pirates and each other.

Computing exists in islands. Some ports boast robust server clusters running House-derived protocols, handling everything from cargo manifests to semi-automated anti-air fire control. Others barely manage mechanical calculators and a few fragile terminals. Everywhere, there is an ingrained caution about letting software control anything that explodes. Vault-Tec’s legend, the Tel Aviv fires, and the Great War’s “two hours” are part of Southern Hua lore as much as Beiyou’s: machines can count your profit, but you do not let them choose your enemies.

Economically, Southern Hua ports knit East Asia together. Pearl League convoys carry Beiyou tools and Manchurian machine parts south, returning with salt, dried fish, spices, and rare woods. Min Guild fleets specialise in passengers and high-value cargo: medtech, documents, art objects, religious relics. Nanyang Companies run the long-haul runs: to Japan, to Goryeo, to the House-dominated West and the Soviet remnants. Their ledgers record the real shape of the post-War world in tonnage and ton-miles.

3.4 People of Hua: Identity, Class, and Language

Where Beiyou has deliberately rewritten who it is, Southern Hua has chosen to remain Hua by multiplication. Ask a dockhand in a Pearl League port what he is and he may shrug and say, “Yue Hua, of course,” as if no one could think otherwise. Ask him if the Beiyou up in the hills are Hua and he might hesitate, then say they are something else now, some kind of mountain republic people who have forgotten their place on the map.

This layering shows up in names. A woman might introduce herself as Li Mei-yu and then add that she is from the Third House of Xiangshan, Yue Hua, now crewing out of New Macao. A Nanyang trader will print “Zhang” on one side of his card and “Teo” or “Cheong” on the other. The idea that ‘Hua’ is an ethnicity with a single homeland feels archaic. Hua is a civilisation that runs conjugate with geography.

Socially, Southern Hua worlds are steeply stratified. At the top sit the Sea Houses, guild masters and Company boards: people whose power flows from ownership of hulls, docks and charters. Below them is a broad, precarious middle of skilled workers: navigators, engineers, scribe-accountants, armourers, harbour pilots. At the bottom are day-labourers, net-menders, stevedores and servants. In some ports there is also a shadow class: bonded workers whose “debts” never seem to shrink, victims of raids or poverty folded into the labour pool under euphemisms like “contracted crews.”

Compared to Beiyou, there is more ostentation. League and Company elites dress in imported fabrics, wear jewellery looted from Vaults or bought from Catholic enclaves, dine on spices and wines. Guild masters in Min cities are more austere, but even they mark status with better tools, more elaborate altars, walls heavy with calligraphy and ledger-wood.

Linguistically, the Southern Hua sphere is an explosion. Mandarin here is a family of registers. Pearl League officials use a clipped, technical Northern-based Mandarin in their documents and on the radio. Dockside Mandarin is full of Cantonese tones and English loanwords from pre-War shipping. In Min ports, Mandarin is something you switch into for inter-port business; at home, people speak Min varieties as fiercely distinct as ever.

Across Nanyang, Hua Creoles—Tongue of the Straits, Kuala Lumpur Street, Sunda Tang—carry Hokkien or Cantonese grammar with Malay, Spanish, or Bahasa vocabulary grafted on. A Beiyou traveller can make himself understood if he sticks to basic Beiyou Mandarin and learns the right handful of local words. A southerner can navigate Beiyou but will always sound like someone from the coast: vowels rounded a little differently, humour saltier, metaphors full of waves and storms instead of terraces and dust.

3.5 Gods of the Sea, Spirits of Profit

Religion among the Southern Hua is as dense as their trade routes. The old pantheon—Mazu, Guanyin, local river gods, City Gods, ancestors—never left. Their temples survived on hilltops and in side streets even when corporate towers rose all around them, and they came down unharmed or easily repaired when those towers fell. After the War, when satellites went dark and stock indices ceased to exist, those temple networks suddenly mattered again.

In Min ports, religion and law are fused. Guild oaths are sworn before temple images. Arbitration may begin with a reading of ledgers and end with a shared donation to repair a seawall or sponsor a festival to appease the offended patron deity. The line between devotional generosity and civic taxation is intentionally blurred. A ship that refuses to pay into the storm-relief fund may find itself mysteriously unblessed, and then mysteriously unlucky, until its owner corrects the oversight.

Pearl League cities are more secular on the surface, more willing to let a boardroom overshadow a shrine. But even there, major Sea Houses keep private altars where deals are blessed and dangerous voyages consecrated. League propaganda likes to speak the language of efficiency, innovation and “civilised commerce”; its captains still refuse to sail on certain days or in certain configurations of moon and tide, not because of actuarial tables but because some great-uncle drowned ignoring that rule.

In Nanyang Company-States, Southern Hua religion undergoes yet another transformation. Catholic churches stand down the street from Mazu temples; mosques share skylines with ancestral halls. Festivals braid together—processions split and recombine, shrines exchange flags, saints’ stories crossbreed. The term “Hua” in these contexts carries an implicit religious connotation: to be Hua is to honour your dead properly, to keep some link—however creolised—to the gods of the rivers and the stove, even if you also attend Mass or Friday prayers.

Ideologically, Southern Hua elites oscillate between three stories about themselves. In the first, they are the last true heirs of Huaxia, pragmatic enough to survive where the northern plains burned. In the second, they are modernisers, finally free of stodgy northern bureaucrats and able to build a cosmopolitan maritime civilisation. In the third, whispered only in certain chapels and study circles, they are a people in danger of becoming what the old megacorps were: powers that worship profit and navigation more than justice.

3.6 Southern Hua and the Others

To Beiyou, the Southern Hua are a necessary irritation. They bring salt, fish, medicines and exotic goods; they also bring debt, smuggling and coastal raids. Cantonal catechisms describe them as “Hua who never learned to live without the sea,” people who still dream of capitals and global markets behind the mask of flotillas and guild seals. Beiyou negotiates with them carefully, preferring Min Guilds and certain Nanyang Companies over the flashier Sea Houses of the Pearl League, but never quite trusting any of them.

To Xinjiang and Manchuria, Southern Hua ports are both back doors and threats. The Directorate quietly buys Beiyou-made tools and Nanyang medtech through southern intermediaries; it also spends resources tracking contraband arms and fugitives moving along the same routes. Manchurian officers see the southern sea-powers as a long-term flank hazard: convenient sources of imported luxuries and industrial kit now, possible blockaders of northern ports later.

New Goryeo relies heavily on Southern Hua trade but is wary of being turned into just another client. Its shipyards compete, sometimes successfully, with Pearl League and Company yards; its laws about bonded labour and piracy are stricter than many southern ports, which makes it a favoured partner for Beiyou and for Catholic enclaves. The DPRK remnant, for its part, occasionally attempts to disrupt Southern Hua shipping with antiquated missiles or raiders, which only reinforces the sea-lords’ conviction that landlocked ideologies are insane.

Japan’s plural polities are both clients and rivals. Some island republics rely on Southern Hua companies for certain imports and for access to faraway markets. Others maintain their own fleets and resent any hint that Nanhua Houses or Nanyang boards might dictate terms. Marriages between Southern Hua merchant clans and Japanese aristocratic families are common enough that gossip sheets in port tea houses track them like weather reports.

And beyond East Asia, in the far West under Robert House’s gaze and in the broken heartlands of former superpowers, Southern Hua ships are often the first and sometimes the only contact. To an NCR caravan master or a Soviet bunker administrator, “Hua” is less a theoretical civilisation and more a flag on the horizon, a convoy that, if properly handled, can bring you medicines or take away your copper scrap, your data cores, your people.

In their own eyes, the Southern Hua have done something remarkable: they have remained Hua in a world where that word could easily have died, and they have done so without clinging to a single capital or a single standard tongue. To Beiyou, they look compromised by commerce and the sea. To the Red bastions, they look dangerously independent.

Design-wise, they are the mirror to the Beiyou Cantonal Republic: where Beiyou rooted itself in soil and oath, Southern Hua rooted themselves in tide and charter. Both think they have learned the right lesson from the old world’s fall. Neither is entirely wrong.

4. New Goryeo (신고려), ca. 2300

If Beiyou is what happens when North China swears never again to be a capital’s hinterland, and Southern Hua is what happens when Huaxia flees to the sea, then New Goryeo is what happens when a peninsula refuses to be anyone’s frontier ever again.

Two centuries after the Great War, New Goryeo claims—and in most places exercises—sovereignty from Jeju to the Tumen. The DPRK remains only as a subterranean afterlife: sealed mountain complexes, dormant tunnel grids, and a handful of hardline “Deep Court” enclaves that periodically surface to raid, broadcast, sabotage, or threaten. The old DMZ has been repurposed into a wide, jagged Dead Belt—a scar of glassed valleys, crumpled bunkers, and minefields turned to shifting wetlands—now patrolled, farmed in patches, and treated as an internal cordon rather than an international border.

Goryeo’s self-conception follows from this reunification without a return to brittle centralism, pursuing continuity without a single choke-point city to exercise sovereignty without becoming a client to any mainland power.

4.1 Land, Coasts, and Climate

New Goryeo’s effective territory still wraps around the coasts like a collar, its ports acting as a lifeline. The kingdom now extends decisively into what used to be the DPRK as well. The southern and eastern seaboards remain the densest cores of population and industry: Busan and its satellite harbours, the southern coastal arc around the rebuilt Gwangju zone, and the east-coast chain up toward Gangneung and beyond. Northward, Wonsan and Chongjin have re-emerged as fortified harbours—smaller than Busan, harsher, more martial in temperament, but indispensable as northern anchors. The western lowlands near the Seoul-Incheon area are still heavily fractured: pockets of arable land and reconstructed towns interrupted by belts of craters, subsidence, and slowly healing contamination. Seoul itself remains a gravitational hazard in the political imagination, a ruin that tempts centralisers. Goryeo’s covenants treat it with near-religious caution.

In the far north, settlement is uneven. Valleys and coastal pockets have rebounded. Some interior mountain zones remain thinly peopled, either from lingering contamination or because they sit atop tunnel architectures that nobody trusts. The old industrial nodes of the DPRK survive in a mixed state. Some are dead husks, some are “refurbished by scavenging,” and a few are shockingly intact because the pre-War regime buried and hardened what mattered. Where those assets have been brought into the open under Goryeo supervision, they have become the backbone of northern reconstruction: mines, machine shops, basic metallurgy, and hardened storage that makes the North less vulnerable to coastal blockade.

The climate is harsher than in the 21st century, but less chaotic than on some continental interiors. Winters are longer and more erratic, seeing sudden thaws followed by flash freezes, and late snowfalls that kill early buds. Summers are hotter, with a monsoon that has become shorter and more violent. Typhoons hit harder and track more unpredictably up the Yellow and East Seas, sometimes raking both coasts in the same season.

Goryeo’s map is therefore a map of corridors. Fortified port cities and regional hubs are linked by repaired railways and “safe roads” that have been de-mined and re-graded at enormous cost, and by a north-south spine that stitches the peninsula together without making Seoul its keystone. Between these secured corridors lie broader, looser zones of village republics, partially resettled hills, and marginal lands that still hide unexploded ordnance, forgotten bunkers, and mutated ecologies.

4.2 Crown and Councils: Political Form

New Goryeo calls itself a kingdom and means it, but not in the way pre-War monarchists would recognise. The “king” (wang) is both less and more than a sovereign: a human dynastic pivot onto which a confederation of councils has deliberately fastened its sense of continuity.

The basic political units are:

• City-States (do-si): fortified ports and regional hubs that control harbours, rail junctions, and industrial clusters.

• County Communes (gun, myeon): inland districts of villages and small towns that share irrigation works, hillsides, and local markets.

• Free Leagues: looser federations of towns in more marginal regions (upland Gangwon, parts of Jeolla inland, and several northern valleys) that have signed onto the Goryeo charters but retain eccentric internal arrangements.

Reunification forced one additional layer into existence: the Northern Marches (북변/북방 제도권). These are governed under special statutes that recognise the practical realities of the former DPRK: dense tunnel legacies, heavier militarisation, and communities that survived under bunker discipline. Marcher councils are granted wider latitude on security and reconstruction, while being bound more tightly to the crown’s oath framework to prevent a northern strongman state from re-forming.

Each city-state has its own elected council of elders, guild representatives, and militia officers. Each commune holds regular open assemblies in schoolyards, church halls, or re-roofed town offices, where land use, water rights, and militia rotations are thrashed out face to face. These local bodies send delegates to regional councils, which in turn feed into the central Gukhoe—a bicameral assembly meeting in a rebuilt, modest capital often called simply Jungseong (“Middle Citadel”), positioned inland enough to be hard to bombard and far enough from the old Seoul ruin to avoid its gravitational pull.

The king’s court perches on top of this lattice, but its formal powers are deliberately narrow. The monarch sanctions treaties and declarations of war, appoints (from lists proposed by the Gukhoe) certain key officials—chief justices, the naval marshal, and the head of the Subsurface Authority—and serves as final court of appeal in a small category of cases: inter-regional disputes, treason trials, and conflicts over succession and treaty interpretation.

In return, the monarch is bound by oath to three taboos engraved into the Goryeo founding covenants:

1. No Capital Absolutism: the court may not move to or rebuild Seoul’s exact site, nor claim extra-ordinary emergency powers beyond those listed in the charter—even in war.

2. No Single-Party Rule: political factions may organise, but no party may claim “eternal” mandate or control security forces on its own.

3. No Succession without Consent: succession must be ratified by the Gukhoe and a council of regional elders. A monarch who loses that recognition becomes, in law, a private citizen.

The symbolism is intentional. New Goryeo wants a crown as a hinge between regions, not as a spearhead. The monarchy is hereditary but conditional. Dynasties can be and have been changed when they failed catastrophically. A deposed king, however, is exiled to a temple-town or seaside estate, not executed. The point is to keep the crown sacred, but its wearer replaceable.

4.3 Economy and Technology

Goryeo’s economy is a tight weave of three strands: coastal industry and shipbuilding, inland agriculture and light manufacture, and a surprising niche in finance and information.

On land, terraces and paddies still dominate the landscape. Rice remains a staple wherever water allows; maize, barley, potatoes and hardy vegetables fill upland plots and reclaimed Dead Belt zones. Communal labour days maintain dikes, hillside terraces and windbreaks. Unlike Beiyou, Goryeo leans more heavily into mechanisation where terrain allows it: small tractors, powered threshers, and fuel-efficient trucks are common on the main breadbaskets of the south and west. Salvaged pre-War factories in the safer parts of the old Seoul–Daejeon corridor have been repurposed into production for domestic tools, rail parts, and basic electronics.

Reunification also widened the industrial palette. The northern Marches contribute mines, hardened depots, and a tradition of austere, repair-first engineering. Goryeo’s planners do not romanticise the DPRK past, but they exploit what survived: mountain hydro schemes, rail tunnels, underground workshops that can be converted into secure foundries and storage, and coastal nodes suited to cold-water fishing and Arctic-leaning trade routes.

Along the coasts, shipyards are king. Busan and its satellite harbours host some of the best medium-displacement yards in East Asia. They turn out convoys of tough, uncomplicated freighters and escorts—less glamorous than Pearl League flagships, but easier to maintain and cheaper to insure. Goryeo’s yards are also specialists in repair: up-armouring Beiyou rivercraft, refitting Nanyang hulls for cold northern seas, patching Manchurian bulk carriers too damaged to limp back home. In the north-east, Chongjin’s yards and drydocks specialise in ugly endurance vessels—ice-tolerant hulls, heavy trawlers with armor skirts, escorts designed for fog and mine-threat waters.

Goryeo’s tech level has the same lopsidedness seen elsewhere. In rural communes, a family might share a single radio and one rugged terminal in the village hall. In Jungseong’s ministries, clerks tap on refurbished tablets and a handful of air-gapped servers run simulations and census databases. The state invests aggressively in three domains: civil engineering (tunnel detection, demining, and fortification), communications (resilient low-power radio nets and hardened fibre along the rail spine), and naval tech (sonar, coastal radar, and interception systems, often co-developed with Japanese and Nanyang partners).

In finance, Goryeo has carved out a narrow but significant niche as a trusted bookkeeper. Its ports offer relatively transparent courts, predictable enforcement, and tight regulations on bonded labour and piracy compared to many Southern Hua or Nanyang ports. As a result, foreign merchants and even some Beiyou guilds use Goryeo banks to hold reserves, settle accounts, and arbitrate disputes. The crown and Gukhoe nurture this reputation obsessively. It is one of the few comparative advantages a peninsula can sustain.

4.4 Goryeo People: Identity and Everyday Life

If you ask a citizen of Busan or a farmer in Jeolla who they are, the answer is almost always “Goryeo saram” first. Han and Joseon as terms tied to a divided 20th-21st century state system are seen as historians’ trifles. “Goryeo” reaches back further to a period when the peninsula was a centre in its own right, not a pawn.

That identity now has to do real work, because reunification did not magically erase differences. The southern cities carry memories of markets, plural faiths, and civic councils. The northern valleys carry memories of bunker rationing, surveillance, and the grim dignity of “enduring.” New Goryeo’s solution has been neither mass amnesia nor permanent stigma. Instead it built a civic ladder: amnesties tied to public service, local autonomy tied to adherence to charter law, and a relentless emphasis on the idea that peninsula survival is a shared craft.

Within that shared frame there are still sharp regional flavours—Yeongnam against Honam, coastal against inland, March northerners against southern port folk—but they feel more like dialect differences within a language than competing nationalisms. The unreconciled remainder—the Deep Court and its tunnel loyalists—is called “the Bunkers” in everyday speech, with a mix of fear, contempt and pity. People who sympathise too openly with bunker absolutism are not typically jailed for thoughtcrime. They are, however, watched, socially isolated, and confronted in civic hearings where neighbours ask, bluntly, whether they want to live underground forever.

Socially, New Goryeo looks like a cross between a hard-schooled republic and a Confucian market society. Education is near-universal and heavily civic: children learn basic literacy, arithmetic, peninsula geography, and the founding covenants of Goryeo before they are taught any higher math or sciences. High school curricula mix practical skills—first aid, basic mechanics, urban shelter protocols—with history lessons that linger on foreign invasions, colonialism, dictatorships, and the Great War as linked warnings about external domination and internal overreach.

Family structures are recognisably Korean: strong extended families, respect for elders, a dense web of kinship obligations. Birth rates recovered slowly after the War and remain modest; the state quietly incentivises larger families in safe regions without pushing so hard as to provoke backlash. Marriage is still often family-arranged or family-mediated, but romantic choice is more common than in pre-industrial times, especially in cities. Women serve in the militia and navy in large numbers. Certain combat roles remain male-skewed culturally rather than legally, but female officers and ship captains are not unusual.

Religion in Goryeo is a tempered syncretism. Buddhism, Christianity, folk shamanism and a secular-Confucian civic ethic coexist and overlap. Many citizens will visit a temple on one festival day, attend a church service on another, and consult a mudang before undertaking risky ventures. The monarchy leans into this plurality: the royal household makes a point of patronising multiple traditions, appearing at temples, cathedrals and shrines with equal ceremony. “Goryeo faith” in political speeches tends to mean loyalty to the peninsula’s survival and to a certain idea of shared fate, not adherence to any single creed.

Daily life varies by region, but its texture is similar to Beiyou’s in one key respect: obligation is normal. Young adults expect militia drills, civil defence exercises, and occasional service weeks where they help maintain tunnels, shelters, and coastal batteries. Market days in inland towns mix stalls selling produce, tools and textiles with mobile medical clinics and travelling inspectors from the Subsurface Authority, who quiz villagers about any suspicious ground subsidence or new rumours of Deep Court movement.

4.5 The Subsurface Problem: Security and Doctrine

After reunification, the North turned from an enemy flag to mere geography, all while the real danger migrated downward into rock.

The DPRK remnant does not possess the population or surface industry to re-take the peninsula. It does, however, command vast tunnel networks, hardened chambers, sealed depots, and scattered rocket infrastructure preserved in mountain vaults. These allow Deep Court enclaves to persist as an insurgent-statelet culture. Their operations are sporadic but psychologically potent: a sudden radio broadcast, a sabotage at a rail tunnel, a kidnapping of a border engineer, a missile fired not to win a war but to prove they can still make the sky answer them.

The institution built to manage this is the Subsurface and Dead Belt Authority (the TDZA). It is part engineering corps, part intelligence service, part legal order. Its teams map old tunnels, monitor ground-penetrating radar along the Dead Belt and the northern mountains, and respond to any sign of intrusion. Their emblem—a stylised pickaxe crossed against a steel cog stamped with radiating signal lines—appears on warning signs not just near the old DMZ scar but around northern valley towns, rail cuttings, and hydro sites.

Doctrine assumes three classes of threat.

Demonstrations cover missile tests, dirty bursts, or “signal strikes” meant to remind the world the Deep Court still exists. Goryeo’s response is track, intercept if necessary, and publicise—turning transparency into both defence and legitimacy.

Tunnel action covers infiltration teams probing defences, stealing supplies, assassinating local council leaders, or attempting to re-enslave surface communities into underground ration systems. Discovered tunnels are collapsed, flooded, or sealed; captured infiltrators are tried publicly. Goryeo makes trials into civic theatre: deliberate displays of lawful restraint, to contrast itself against bunker absolutism.

Contagion expresses the fear that bunker unity might appeal to marginalised groups. Goryeo counters this not with total censorship—impossible and counterproductive—but with civic competition: meaningful local voice, reliable courts, and enough dignity that “absolute unity” feels like a prison rather than a dream.

Alongside subsurface defence, Goryeo maintains a substantial navy and coastal air arm. Its doctrine, like Beiyou’s, is defensive depth, but in maritime form: layered coastal batteries, mineable approaches, fast attack craft, and a capable escort fleet that can protect convoys as far as Japan, the Nanyang straits and certain House-linked Pacific routes.

Unlike Beiyou, Goryeo does keep professional standing forces above a small cadre. The tunnel problem and coastline demand continuity of skill. However, those forces are tightly integrated with local militias and overseen by civilian councils. Two terms are drilled into officers from cadet school onward: Frontier, not State—their job is to guard the border and the tunnel lines, not rule behind them, and Sea Wall, not Spearhead—the navy exists to keep enemies out and trade flowing, not to seek glory through conquest.

4.6 Bridges and Balance: Goryeo’s External Role

New Goryeo’s geography makes it a hinge, and reunification made it even more so. It sits where Beiyou, Manchuria, Japan, Southern Hua, Nanyang, and the wider House-linked Pacific can all reach, but none can dominate outright. Its leaders frame foreign policy in three watchwords: balance, openness, and memory.

With Beiyou, relations are cautious but amicable. Goryeo buys inland tools, weapons components, and certain agricultural innovations. It sells ship services, technical advice on coastal engineering, and mediates Beiyou disputes with Southern Hua on neutral ground when asked. Ideologically, there is mutual recognition: both societies reject over-centralisation and fret about debt and foreign capture, but Goryeo is more comfortable with cities, markets and formal naval power than Beiyou’s terrace republics. There is low-grade dscussion in pamphlets and journals about whose model better avoids the old world’s mistakes.

With Manchuria, things are colder than before—because the peninsula now directly touches the North-East military orbit along its far borders and adjacent seas. Trade exists—coal, metals, specialist parts—but remains small and heavily monitored, with border incidents managed through layers of intermediaries and ritualised “incident protocols” designed to stop one patrol clash from becoming a campaign. Manchurian textbooks still speak in old heroic tones about the peninsula. Goryeo hears in that language the sound of someone remembering ownership.

With Southern Hua and Nanyang, Goryeo has a love-hate relationship. It depends on Nanhua and Company-State trade for certain tropical goods, long-haul connections, and access to technologies that Beiyou or Japan are slow to share. At the same time, it competes fiercely in shipbuilding, insists on stricter anti-slavery and anti-piracy norms than Pearl League or some Companies would like, and positions its courts as cleaner alternatives to certain notoriously corrupt or predatory ports. Southern elites joke that Goryeo is “a Beiyou with saltwater dreams”. Goryeo papers reply that some sea-lords are “pre-War megacorps with incense.”

With Japan, relations are complex but generally good. Plural Restoration Japan appreciates having a relatively stable, civically serious neighbour across the Sea of Japan. Goryeo appreciates that Japan’s fragmented structure means no single shogunate or city-republic can dominate the straits. There are naval and coastguard cooperation treaties, shared research on missile defence and subsurface detection, and a slow drift of cultural exchange: Goryeo students at Japanese technical academies, Japanese aristocrats and merchant families investing in Goryeo shipyards or rail expansions.

With the wider world—NCR, House’s Vegas, Soviet remnant clusters, African and Latin American survivor polities—Goryeo is a minor but respected player. It cannot project power that far, but it can provide reliable crews, trustworthy brokers, and a neutral flag under which more volatile powers are willing to share a deck. Occasional Goryeo-flagged expeditions carry engineers and civic planners to help rebuild ports in distant lands, paid in raw materials or advanced medtech.

In all these dealings, Goryeo performs a careful balancing act. It must be open enough to benefit from trade and knowledge flows, yet closed enough to prevent any one foreign network from capturing its elite. It must remember enough of the past—colonial exploitation, Cold War division, Great War annihilation—to keep its caution sharp, without letting trauma ossify into bunker absolutism like the Deep Court still dreaming under the mountains.

By 2300, New Goryeo has not solved the problem of power any more than Beiyou or the Southern Hua have. It has, however, turned a history of being a frontline into a deliberate identity as a bridge, and it has done so while hauling most of the old DPRK back into daylight without letting the peninsula snap into a new dictatorship.

From the deck of a Goryeo escort ship sliding out of Busan at dawn, one can see most of the world that matters to the kingdom: Beiyou tools in the cargo hold, Nanyang flags further out to sea, Japanese silhouettes on the horizon, and somewhere beyond the northern ridgelines, listening stations that keep watch for the quiet tremor of a tunnel waking up. Behind further inland, communes till fields under siren towers. Above, in Jungseong, a king signs a treaty drafted by councils who know that if they fail, the alternative is not merely foreign domination—but a return to the underground.

For now, the ship’s wake is clean. For now, the bridge holds.

5. DPRK Remnants (지하 조선), ca. 2300

If New Goryeo is the peninsula’s decision to live in daylight again, the DPRK remnants are the peninsula’s refusal to admit that daylight matters.

By 2300, New Goryeo’s writ runs across most of the old DPRK’s coastline and valleys. What endures is something stranger and, in some ways, harder to kill: a subterranean state-culture that never stopped thinking like the DPRK, even when it could no longer stand in the open and call itself a country.

In Goryeo law and common speech this is “the Bunkers.” In their own documents they use older, grander names—the Republic-in-Depth, the Underground Fatherland, the Continuation Court—but among themselves the most common term is simply “the Deep Court” (심정/深庭): a government that exists as hierarchy, ritual order, and a set of tunnels that still connect enough hardened nodes to make raids and proclamations possible.

Neither numerous nor rich, the Deep Court nonetheless maintains coherence in a way most post-War remnants do not, simply because they were built for coherence, and then the apocalypse rewarded that design.

5.1 The Geography of Depth: Tunnel Realms and Surface “Skin”

The DPRK remnants occupy tunnels behind blast doors, collapsed shafts, flooded galleries, radiation-hot chambers, sealed arsenals, and the painstakingly guarded “living layers” where air filtration and water recirculation still work.

Most Deep Court nodes cluster where the old DPRK already concentrated hardening: mountain spines, command tunnels, artillery complexes, and underground industrial galleries dug for war. Some complexes are true subterranean cities—dormitories, clinics, assembly halls, workshops, storage, and parade corridors wide enough to march a regiment under fluorescent light. Others are little more than an airtight barracks and a depot linked to a launch shaft.

The surface above them functions as “skin”: small semi-functional towns, fishing hamlets, or abandoned ruin-belts that the Deep Court uses as camouflage, supply zones, or sacrificial buffers. When New Goryeo patrols tighten, the skin goes quiet. When the Deep Court needs food, labor, or a spectacle, the skin wakes up—sometimes with collaborators, sometimes with coerced locals, sometimes with raiders wearing old badges like talismans. The old DMZ scar—the Dead Belt—is riddled with false tunnels, decoy shafts, collapsed minefields, and buried caches planted decades ago. In the Dead Belt, Goryeo sees danger. The Deep Court sees memory.

5.2 Government: The Deep Court and the Logic of Continuity

The Deep Court is not a junta and not a cult, though it can resemble both. At its top sits a small circle—never publicly named in full—known in Goryeo intelligence as the Inner Court. Its members are not necessarily blood heirs of the old Kim line (some are; many are not). The Inner Court claims thay it preserves the “true line” of authority through sealed archives, authenticated relics, and initiation rites that only the tunnel elite can witness. Their power rests on control of long-term food stores, control of secure communications between nodes, and control of the narrative of what the surface world is.

Below them are the Commandantures: bunker governors who administer specific complexes and their dependent surface skins. Each commandanture runs like a miniature state—rationing, labor assignments, surveillance, internal courts, and military drills. Promotions are political as much as technical. The system rewards those who maintain discipline and punish “decadence,” and it is ruthless toward anyone suspected of wanting to defect to daylight.

The Deep Court’s ideology is Juche reduced to its hardest mineral core. Gone is the pre-War confidence that the DPRK could outlast the world through industrial growth. What remains is a theology of endurance:

• the surface is chaos, corruption, foreign contamination;

• the bunker is purity, order, nation;

• hunger is proof of virtue;

• obedience is survival;

• contact with outsiders is a controlled toxin, administered only by the Court.

This doctrine keeps the tunnel society from collapsing under claustrophobia and resentment.

5.3 Economy and Technology: Rations, Salvage, and the Last Rockets

Food is the central currency. Hydroponic bays exist in many complexes, but yields are limited, and filtration failures can ruin entire harvest cycles. Fungal protein vats and algae troughs provide bulk calories. What can be grown is supplemented by raids, coercive “taxation” of surface skins, and opportunistic trade through intermediaries—usually smugglers, a few corrupt coastal brokers, or rare contacts with Nanyang actors who deal with the Court the way one deals with a venomous animal: carefully, briefly, never without escape plans.

Industry is likewise constrained. Some complexes retain machine tools and hardened workshops capable of producing ammunition, basic mechanical parts, and occasionally sophisticated components. Most have become repair cultures: cannibalising old equipment, stretching the lifespan of pumps and filters, patching circuits with scavenged boards. The Deep Court’s technicians are often impressively skilled within their narrow domain, but their technology base is brittle—every failure ripples.

Two assets keep the remnants geopolitically significant. The subsurface infrastructure itself lets them appear where they shouldn’t be able to appear, to move men and material without roads, and to hide critical nodes from conventional attack.

The Court’s remaining missile capacity is tiny compared to pre-War arsenals, but a handful of launch systems—some operational, some half-operational—are kept as sacred deterrent relics. They are used sparingly: not to win a war, but to produce moments of terror and proof. Even a single launch forces New Goryeo and its partners to expend interception resources and to explain to their citizens why the past is still firing into the sky.

Electronics in the Deep Court world are conservative. Analog and rugged systems are prized because they can be maintained without a full industrial base. Where computation survives, it is isolated and controlled, used for targeting calculations, encryption, resource accounting, and surveillance. Anything that smells like autonomous “decision machines” is distrusted—not because the Court is humane, but because it cannot tolerate rivals to its monopoly on judgement.

5.4 People of the Underground: Culture, Fear, and the Education of Obedience

Deep Court society is a study in compressed human life. Generations have been born under rock. Even those who occasionally travel to the surface experience it as a hostile foreign country rather than home.

The population is divided informally into three strata.

The first is the tunnel cadre: officials, security officers, political instructors, key engineers, and their families. They live slightly better—more space, more privacy, more stable rations—and, crucially, more access to information.

The second is the technical working class: maintenance crews, hydroponics workers, machinists, medics, and laborers assigned to sanitation and construction. They are the backbone and the most tightly managed: indispensable, exhausted, and under constant surveillance.

The third is the surface-dependents: communities in the “skin” who provide food, salvage, and recruits under various blends of indoctrination and coercion. Some are true believers. Many are simply trapped: too near bunker entrances, too dependent on Court medicine, too afraid of reprisals.

Education is a central obsession. Children are taught reading, arithmetic, and mechanics early—not out of enlightenment ideals, but because every citizen must be useful. They memorise catechisms of endurance. History is taught as a single long siege: foreign domination, betrayal, the moment the sky burned, and the righteousness of staying pure beneath the mountains. Surface life is described either as depravity or as tragedy caused by ideological weakness. The goal is to make daylight emotionally unattractive.

Ritual fills the spaces that sunlight once filled. Assemblies, anthem recitations, oath renewals, commemorations of “the Day of Fire,” and carefully staged “victory exhibitions” where technicians present repaired machinery as if it were a captured enemy banner. The Court’s genius is that it turns maintenance into liturgy.

Their visual language is inherited rather than designed. Old Juche symbols—pickaxes, mountains, rising suns—recur obsessively, but rarely in standardized form. Banners are repainted from memory, emblems copied by hand from fading manuals, slogans carved into concrete rather than printed.

5.5 Doctrine: Tunnels, Spectacle, and the Politics of Fear

The Deep Court prefers destabilisation in dealing with New Goryeo: sabotage a rail cutting, poison trust in a marcher council, raid a hydro site, kidnap a tunnel inspector, strike a coastal radar installation, broadcast propaganda at the moment of maximum public anxiety. The Court understands it cannot defeat New Goryeo conventionally. It aims instead to impose costs until the peninsula grows tired, divided, and tempted by some “deal” that restores bunker autonomy.

Three operational modes recur. First, infiltration through old galleries, newly dug shafts, or concealed access points. The Subsurface Authority is so large in Goryeo simply because tunnels are the battlefield.

Second, theatre with missile launches, staged parades in surfaced towns, dramatic radio proclamations, banners hung on ruins. These acts are inefficient but politically potent. The Court survives by being feared, and fear requires spectacle.

Third, cultivating sympathisers and collaborators. The Court’s propaganda offers certainty, unity, punishment of “corrupt elites,” and the fantasy of a world where someone is in control. In marginal zones where Goryeo governance is thin or corrupt, that offer can still find purchase.

The Court’s military culture is austere. Units are small, highly drilled, and fanatically loyal—or trapped enough to appear loyal. Discipline is enforced by internal security teams embedded in every operation. Defection is treated as a metaphysical crime.

5.6 Relations: Everyone Needs Them Gone—No One Can Quite Finish the Job

To New Goryeo, the remnants are a cancer not large enough to kill the kingdom outright, but capable of bleeding it forever if ignored. Goryeo’s strategy combines containment with slow attrition—seal shafts, buy off surface skins with better governance, offer amnesty to defectors, and collapse the Court’s legitimacy by demonstrating that daylight is livable.

To Manchuria, the Deep Court is a tool and a risk. Some Manchurian hawks would love a destabilised peninsula. Manchurian strategists fear the precedent of a unified, stable Goryeo more than they fear a few bunker raids. That ambiguity creates room for shadow dealings—never official, always plausible-deniable: a shipment of parts here, a blind patrol corridor there, a rumour seeded at the right moment. The Court plays that ambiguity like a reed instrument.

To Southern Hua and Nanyang, the remnants are bad business—unpredictable, violent, hard to insure against. Yet the taboo is not absolute. Certain Company-State boards will trade with anyone if the margin is high and the trail is deniable. The Court has learned to exploit that cynicism, offering rare salvage or rocket-era components in exchange for medical supplies, machine parts, or specialised chemicals.

To Japan, the remnants are an unpleasant ghost across the water. Some Japanese polities share tunnel-detection research with Goryeo and view any Deep Court missile activity as a direct threat to the northern seas. Others treat it as a distant nuisance—until a launch splashes down too close to a fishing route.

To Beiyou, the Deep Court is a warning for what happens when continuity becomes obsession and the state burrows into the earth rather than reforming. Beiyou rarely engages directly, but it watches closely—because if Goryeo cannot fully extinguish the bunker idea, then the bunker idea remains a potential infection in any post-War society.

5.7 Story role

The DPRK remnants give players an excuse for tunnel raids, sabotage plots, infiltrators, hostage rescues, and the ever-present dread of a “demonstration launch.”

They also hold sealed depots, functioning military tech, pre-War archives, and weirdly intact infrastructure for players themselves to raid. Getting into a Deep Court chamber can feel like stepping into a preserved slice of old modernity—clean corridors, banners, ration schedules, and a sense that time stopped underground and grew sharp.

They serve a tragic story of people born into a world that tells them the sun is poison and freedom is death. Defectors who cannot adapt to the surface. Surface communities that collaborate because they are terrified. Tunnel technicians who keep filters alive not because they believe, but because without those filters everyone dies.

The Deep Court endures because it is a solution to fear. New Goryeo’s long struggle is therefore convincing the peninsula that survival does not require burial. The Deep Court’s long hope—rarely spoken aloud, but implied in every ritual—is the opposite: one day the surface will falter, the councils will bicker, the markets will fail, and the daylight people will come begging for the only thing the Court has always offered in exchange for obedience.

A roof of rock. A ration. A flag. A tunnel that never ends.