Background: The Demolisher also Rebuilds

We were the womb where all life began anew. We were a bubbling and since ancient times pressurizing volcano that could no longer be controlled. Ultimately we erupted in full force, and, instead of lava, spewed pure, molten gold high into the sky where it congealed into hefty, solid nuggets. Though these caused a considerable amount of casualties when landing, they enabled the survivors to take a flying start.

…

In retrospect it all started off quite harmlessly. At the time no-one could have guessed that two at first sight futile incidents that in a short period of time took place independently from each other, would launch a chain of events that rapidly lead humanity into the abyss. And yet one could pinpoint the interlocking consequences of a Dutch singer who got for unclear reasons thrown out of a renomated, international song contest and the suspension of a soccer player during a European Championship because of a political statement, as the epicenter from which the general decline spread globally. 

 

Not much later the world was actually down for the count, and, without shying away from violence, we seized our opportunities. Civilization had reached its end and was in urgent need of regeneration; if not the great void would follow. Like a retreating mist the population had, as a result of multiple causes such as rapidly changing weather and living conditions that not everyone was equally able to cope with, politically, economically and religiously motivated wars, an impressive advance of resistant bacteria, the one destructive viral plague after the other and the implosion of the entire financial system resulting in poverty, famine and an insanely high suicide rate, gotten near to decimated, whereupon the ice-cold figures behind the scenes, choking on greed, less and less managed to conceal themselves midst the nebulae, and became ever clearer apparent in their contours of gloomy bells of doom in the feverdreamy swamp of life. The globally extending tentacles of corruption urgently needed to be chopped off, and the various nerve centers were to be shattered and reduced to ashes.

Around the whole world people of all kinds instinctively smelled blood. They were witness to the fundamental collapse of as good as any institutionalized power block, and realized the longer the more that there and then the opportunity was emerging – perhaps the one single point in history ever – to once and for all put an end to these, to throw off the hated yoke, and finally eradicate it by the roots. Farmers lurched into battle with dung forks, rakes and spades, Tuaregs, Bedouins and Massai fought side by side, hackers shut down communication and security networks so that soccer hooligans, armed with Molotov cocktails, jackknives and boxing irons, could easily take in military bases, both the ninja and samurai cultures experienced an exponential revival in the far East, etc, etc, etc thereby ensuring that a thorough destruction soon became a fact. 

 

Loud and fiercely accompanied by So Pitted's long-awaited, Tad Doyle-produced sophomore record, 'Cloned' – that, with its top-heavy, often a-melodic, distorted cybergrunge (sinisterly fronted by alternatingly Nathan Rodriguez's screams of despair and Liam Downey's robotic/ alien voice) can perfectly be listened to as were it an eyewitness account of the past apocalypse – we then considered the reclassification of the earth's surface. To certain areas indissolubly riveted principles would henceforth serve as a guideline. We hoped to never ever see superiors, executives nor power concentrations again. A new segmentation based on ideas instead of nationalities, populations and religions seemed however less easy to develop than originally conceived. Both a too narrow and a too broad description lurked as a cause for an inextricable tangle.

…

The negotiations had nevertheless taken off in a euphoric, triumphant mood and a spirit of untiy, with representatives from all over the planet. Convinced that we could do better than the past, a no-go zone for people was soon on the table. It was baptized Chelea and constituted a region where fauna and flora could develop freely without any human interference. For the area in question we relatively easily agreed upon Poland, Borneo, a rectangular stretch of North America (that extends from Alaska across Canada to northern Florida), Tanzania, Pakistan, a significant part of the Atlantic coast in France (including Brittany and Normandy and bordered south by La Rochelle), Equador and the Urals. 

 

There were those who gave expression to such an attachment to their native soil, that the societal model did not matter to them at all. The few who thus preferred to continue populating Chelea, were granted permission to do so, provided they spread themselves across the territory in as animal-like a state as possible. For that purpose we sent out a clean-up crew to remove every remnant of human civilization from the areas concerned.

…

There was an equally high demand for a more uncomplicated life, though it manifested itself in various ways. Some were willing to go very far in escaping chaos and desired to be allocated a parcel of wasteland that could be rebuild from scratch and where nature would unfold in geometrically molded shapes. On the other hand a massive eagerness was reflected for a return in time in terms of technological development. While groups emerged from all continents that resolutely opted for the kind of nomadic existence that preceded the Iron Age, a close-knit and significant faction demonstrated the more specific will to build a community-driven, rural society inspired by the American Midwest before the industrial revolution started to exert its influence there. A chunk of the central part of the Appalachians with a substantial westward expansion was thus assigned to Taxehassee.

…

They were more persistent and foremost more numerous than the public opinion could presume, the experiencers and abductees who insisted on safeguarding a place for extraterrestrial contact. Since most of them were deeply convinced of the phenomenon's place attachment they did not come forward as very flexible regarding the areas to be claimed. On asserted supernatural-historical grounds sections of Germany (complemented by Dutch and Belgian Limburg), Iran, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, the US and Argentina came to constitute Rikansalla. Remarkably enough it were not just a bunch of sci-fi fanatics and other types of believers, yet also quite a few scientists who suspected/knew that in aforementioned countries otherworldly technology had been present for some time, that chose to settle there. These latter not wantonly assumed that in some regions for almost a century already immense progress was made using reverse engineering (both in the fields of mechanics, genetics and telepathy), and were utterly keen to continue this research themselves, whereas they were, on the other hand, downright skeptical about the countless witness statements that associated alien life with portals to other dimensions through which ghosts, leprichauns, sasquatches and the likes could also enter our world.

While they actually quite liked the idea of interdimensional portals, a loosely connected squad of artistic people still felt like they were missing out. Alongside a string of other dropouts, excentrics and transcendental thinkers they, after having put their heads together, came up with a kind of new, mystical socialism where everyone is completely equal as a pawn of higher forces yet to be discovered. They decided to establish themselves in Baouan that spanned a large part of Southeastern Europe.

The last few years of the old world – to some degree as a result of both birth control measures and genetic manipulations of embryos that had been common in certain regions for decades, and that combined well with an online-fueled, misplaced sense of tremendous injustice – knew a worldwide, explosive growth in the amount of male incels who, the further the protective societal mechanisms disintegrated, began to manifest themselves all the more boldly and violently. To such an extent even that they, once the feelings of frustration had thoroughly exceeded the boiling point, eventually came to organize via the internet and subsequently put into practice an almost endless chain of murderous kidnappings and rape raids. During that period somewhere in Stockholm three women, who found themselves chased by such an emboldened, out of control, scavenging horde, fled into a still-in-use subway tunnel. Once inside they heard a rapidly approaching, in strength exponentially to an eardrum rupturing roar increasing rumble, and when a little later the glow of headlights illuminated the partitions of the passage way, they were but just able to withdraw into a for railroad workers intended alcove in the roughly finished, blackened side wall. The pursuing, bloodthirsty mob, on the other hand was completely overrun by the speeding metro train. From their shelter the panic-struck women had no choice but to listen to the resulting nasty mix of the deafening noise of a passing locomotive, sturdily mowing away everything on his path, with a cacophony of soon dying out, desperate and anxious cries. They would never be able to erase the accompanying sounds of shattering bones, bursting veins and metal-crushed bodies from their memory. When, some time later, they cautiously left the underground tunnel and, back in the open air, through the dense cloud cover, one single beam of sunlight bathed their worn out, sweaty, soot-covered faces in a warm, luminous glow, an immense, discharging sense of relief descended upon them, and in a moment of epiphany they decided there and then that there would be no more. They broke a loose rod from a stair railing and used it to carve a huge letter X into the tiled platform floor. Thus they symbolically marked for once and for all the exact spot from which resistance would spread over the entire surface of the earth. In the time following they globally united victims of sexual abuse and sympathizers alike, and grounded a fast-growing movement that, out of necessity, organized itself quasi-military. From then on they would turn the tables, and hunt the perpetrators and like-minded spirits down to eliminate them to the last person. At the moment of the reconfiguration they formed a close unit that took also quantitatively a quite strong position. Evidently they desired and obtained a cut of the pie, which resulted in the vaguely by the Amazon culture inspired Lilitze where men were only welcome on certain, be it not way too strictly defined, conditions. All those who to some extend renounced patriarchy thus descended on former Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Iceland and Greenland.

The secret society that created Tlön and that was outlined by Jorge Luis Borges in 'Fictions', had emerged from the past chaos (mainly because of the anonymous aloofness) relatively unscathed, and could, skilled as its members were in the art of debating, not be ignored at the negotiating table. As a result, the originally imaginary country, that over time had begun to exert more and more impact on reality, had now officially gotten a concrete interpretation that spread over large parts of South America.

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