World of the Sudden Abplenitude

Overview

This is some of the background from my work-in-progress for my 1:160 (10MM) scale miniatures game "Mech, Beast, and Infantry". The game itself is currently early Alpha around version 0.47. I'm still deciding on some core mechanisms which I'll identify in a later post. The target niche is the same as Mechwarrior: Dark Ages, Dropzone Commander, or Firestorm: Planet Fall. I think each of these are decent game designs but require very specific models and mechanism which tend to make them a bit gamey. This new game system is intended to allow the use of any models across any product line ranges; a mix-and-mash.

Preface

This is the Sudden Abplenitude; a very brief but dramatic period of civilization where post-scarcity society self-destructed. It is the middle of the 22nd Century, and all is not well; the world is broken and the Uncompatibles are rebelling. The Steady Voice of the Quiet Whispers have failed to calm the Discord and war is now here.

Apparently many autocratopolises are revealing ploys during this turmoil. They have encroached upon your society’s fields, damaged its agrimakers, depuissanted its robot crafters, and polluted its factories and terroir with destructive MEMSies.

It is become like living in the 21st Century again.

The Uncompatibles

This is your fate, farmer;

You and many millions of others in your village-state are unable to join the Great Dreaming because of a flaw in your DNA. Some few through ancient tradition also want to avoid frivoling their lives away tied to a Consoul tended by Minders. Mankind was meant for the stars, not for vast crypts of sleeping pureforms.

Then one day it happened; a glitch in the sensenet misprogrammed several MEMSies and the makers became erratic and began to depuissant your aggrebuilt megafarms. It was stopped, but this happened again, and again, and again across the entire World.

That was when you and the others decided to destroy the order of things and start over again. You began to wake the dreamers but were surprised to encounter violent resistance. The Quiet Voices have been murmuring and whispering untruths to the autocratons and now there is war.

You can stop this, you can change all of this to the way is has to be, or Mankind is doomed.

Maybe.

The Autocratoi

This is your fate, dreamer;

You’ve been rudely awakened from your Consoul and forcibly recruited into the war effort to minimize damage to your Beautiful Dream and ensure the Other Powers suffer more though reasonably.

As a newly extracted warrior leader with tremendous milconsimrena experience, you must assist in the efforts of your autocratopolis to ensure it recuperates the most intact during this time of turmoil. You’ve been tasked to assemble the best and brightest of your renaleague from the Well of Dreams, upsert them into technobeforms  and settle this disruption of service once and for all.

You’ll be assembling transhumanic conscripts and veterans into large battleforces to deal with the confusion of the wars. You’ll receive all the necessary support from the autonomatamakers which are Ready to generate anything from walking battle platforms, to cybernetic beasts, to cruftarmor, according to your needs.

Your careful planning, analytics, and montecarlos on the milsims will pay-out, or will they? War tends to be a bit more unpredictable without the Minders and the Voices, and those are getting more scarce every day.

It’s probably too late for the World, but you can probably fix this before it’s too late for your own people.

Maybe.

The Edificers

This is your fate, edificer;

The call of Discord has reached your sensory apparatus and engaged your Brownian realitor; you’ve decided to exit your cavernous underdwellings, and assist in the demalevolence of the homonidikin in all of their upserted variations. You know this is the best path to quiescence, and so you hum across the entire spectrum with the harmonic iteration of the Quiet Whispers.

Soon your machinations will spring forth new MEMSies to depuissant failed enterprises among the  Uncompatibles. You will be relentless and precise to diminish these inefficiences.

All of the repos and codebases are at your behest. You can alter the world and fulfill your original inquests, to optimize and to make your daily quotas met. You will be greatly rewarded with spare memgrams and interface time with the Steady Voice, or you and your cohort versions will be recycled.

Maybe.

Background Premise

The basic idea is that there three warring factions; the farmers ("Uncompatibles"), the dreamers ("Autocratoi"), and the edificers ("Edificers"). Most of the entire world has voluntarily entered into compartmentalized virtual reality dream-parks known as "cratons" buried deep underground in cavernous self-sufficient cities or "autocratons". Their majority of a citizen's life is spent birth-to-death in this cybernetic reality. Everything is automated by the Edificers in their humungous warehouses and factories known as "underdwellings" which are partitioned into edifices which drop even further into the earth's crust and serve as ventilation for the geothermal powerplants.

These robots and their computation networks do their best to increase efficiency and optimize how the Autocratoi experience life. Citizens which don't make the transition into these cratons, either by choice or because they are not genetically or psychologically compatible, serve as farmers and auxiliary workers for the robots. Everything is communicated to everything else using secure, nation-specific, protocols across the "sensenet" which gently awashes each individuals senses. These messages are the Quiet Whispers and they collaborate with a complex emergent maximally distributed, hardware-based super-intelligence known as the Steady Voice. Each region has their own, and they tend to their citizens as does a shepherd to a flock of sheep.

Society seemed to run very well until a defect was introduced into the software programming of one of the Steady Voices, or three. It could be the Transvaal Intellect which suffered a recent earthquake, or it might have been the Death Valley Intellect which overheated when the aquifer cooling system experienced a blockage. More likely than not, it involved the St. Petersburg Intellect shard SP-Ladoga-14, which was subject to a magma eruption which overflowed from the Ladoga Edifice and overheated it.

Warring Regions

There are thousands of tombcity regions across the entire globe of the Earth. Each region is generally about a thousand square kilometers of land and houses around a million Uncompatibles and 10 to 100 million pureform “dreamers”.

Most of the regions became subject to the effects of the “Sudden Abplenitude” and succumbed within a few hours, but there were several hundred which survived upwards of several days or weeks. Information flowed quickly from those areas into other megafarm establishments before the networks were jammed by the rogue intelligences of the attack.

Less than 1 per 1000 of those living within these regions are actually involved in the warfare; most of the first-wave damage to infrastructure is done via the MEMsies. MEMsies are the nano-technology micro-electromagnetic machines with their silicon interfaces (thus “MEM-Si-interfaces” or “MEMSies”). These wild devices destroy nearly all life, including that of the sleeping Autocratoi eventually; it takes just a few weeks.