A Brief Introduction to the World

Hello, mystery patient. Comfortable? Volume not too loud? Okay. The idea here is that I’m going to start telling all the stuff that you should know, and this big machine is going to tell us how your brain reacts to that, which should let us reverse the damage. It might take a few hours, or it might take a few minutes, so please be patient and try not to shift your head. Please ask questions as we go, it’ll help us map out what’s going on. It’ll also help me because I’m just doing this off the dome, and I don’t have a script over here.

Don’t worry, you’ll be okay. I’m a very good doctor.

The World Today

The year is 1769 AD, 1445 if you’re using the Islamic calendar, and 628 DE if you’re a stickler for the Old Norse calendar. The Prime Minister is Adrian Otetiani. The war ended last year. You’re in New Saint Paul’s in Barcelona, in the Northern Union.

I guess that’s not ringing any bells. You live in a country— you know what those are?

Okay. Language center’s working, just not the memory. Anyway, that country you live in is the Northern Union. It’s a big one, covering most of North America, the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, and the Scandinavian Peninsula. The population’s around 700 million. There are other countries. There’s the Federation, though that’s really a bunch of smaller countries in a trench coat, that’s most of Africa. India, China, Russia, Arabia, Japan, Indonesia, Polynesia, a lot more. There’s a lot of countries. World population is around 6 billion. The Union’s pretty much entirely transhuman, same with— what?

Transhumanism

Okay, I guess we have to back up a little bit here. “Transhuman” these days generally just means anyone who isn’t perfectly baseline, but historically it meant shapeshifters. Therianthropes— that’s a specific kind of shapeshifter —have been around pretty much as long as we’ve got recorded history, at least a few thousand years. That’s werewolves, werebears, werejaguars, that sort of thing. Works because of a weird little magically-active symbiotic bacteria.

No, historically not any species of animal, usually larger mammalian carnivores, but there were some outliers. The oldest recorded therians were actually cassowaries, but birds are pretty uncommon.

Okay, anyway, a little over six hundred years ago, some teenager in Greenland befriends a dragon. The two really hit it off and accidentally discover that they’re now mutual shapeshifters. The kid can turn into a dragon, the dragon can turn into a human. The kid becomes King Hakon I, universally-loved benevolent ruler, breaks out of a lot of the old Viking traditions. Also, turns out any human-dragon pair can do that mutual shapeshifting if they want. Humans get dragon bodies, senses, and heat resistance, dragons get human bodies, fine motor skills, and intelligence. Not that they’re stupid, but dragon brains are for socializing, not for survival like human brains are. Anyway, these folks were called draconics. Given that you’ve got a dragon’s eyes, you probably are one, like me. Most transhumans are. And, please don’t try to shift inside my MRI, this one’s just for humans.

No, you probably don’t have a dragon partner. It’s heritable, so you were probably born like this. In fact, you probably hatched from an egg, it’s a lot easier than human childbirth. Or you immigrated and converted, which would mean you had a draconic partner. It doesn’t look like your biometrics turned up anything in the databases, so hard to say. But anyway, there’s not many wild dragons left, pretty much all of them became draconics centuries ago.

Sorry, yeah, there’s more. In ‘56, that’s thirteen years ago, the scientists finally figured out the magic behind all the shapeshifting stuff, and most of the rules went out the window. With a bit of math and some effort, you can just tack on more forms to shift between, modify existing forms, do serious body engineering, really anything that you can think of as long as you can compute a solution for it. And we’re really good at computing things these days. I think the majority of transhumans are still born as draconics, but most people do at least a little bit of self-modding. Doesn’t really matter anyway, it’s all the same thing on the underlying level.

These days, something like half the planet is transhuman? Headed upwards, anyway. Some people just don’t care, but it’s hard to turn down wings when there isn’t a downside. And cosmetic and medical modification’s big these days too, everyone wants to look better and live longer. Still hasn’t gotten rid of the common cold, but— sorry, that’s a little in the weeds, let me try to keep things to broad strokes.

The War

Okay, so, the war. Gotta give you a little bit of history first I guess. So the transhuman thing isn’t real popular with some folks, especially the Church way back in the Viking age. So there’s some crusades, the Church gets stomped, there’s a lot of resentment. Draconics end up mostly sticking to themselves, since they can’t convert people at the sword like the Church did, and end up expanding across the Atlantic ocean instead. They run into whatever was left of the Mayans, there’s a few hundred years of history in there, lots of stuff happens, end result is that we live in the Northern Union instead of the old North Sea Empire. Couple big global wars in there too.

Yeah, we’re still here, so we won ‘em. The last one was transhuman versus essentialist, but there’s some competing economics stuff involved too. Essentialism was mostly about the purity of the human form, sometimes a religious thing, sometimes not. Pretty varied, usually pretty murder-y. Those folks all banded together under ODI, which stood for… uhhh. Something. Organization for Defense and Integrity, I want to say.

Our side of it was the Pacific Defense Treaty, or PDT, which is really kind of a lie because there’s a lot more than the Pacific nations in it. And then the Feds joined in on our side in ‘66. Anyway, we won, so most of what used to be ODI is under military or UN administration while they try to fix everything. It’s a mess, but hopefully we manage to not repeat the whole ordeal in a few decades.

End result of all that is that we’re pretty close with the Federation these days, and they’re pretty close with us. They already crossed the majority-transhuman threshold during the war. And also some people are making noises about unification with the rest of the PDT, but nobody knows if that’s gonna be a real thing or if it’s just the victory high talking.

Yeah, economics. Uh, complex topic I guess. Broad strokes are that you’ve got your economic left and right. Left’s all about sharing, right’s all about hierarchy. It’s a broad spectrum, but ODI was pretty much all right of center. PDT’s all left, and the Feds are mostly a little left of center, but they’re headed our way. Left and right don’t get along, obviously, but the war pretty much put that question to rest.

That’s the big players, at least. Between them, that’s almost 5 billion people, so that’s most of the world. Everyone else is mostly trying to stay out of the way and see what shape things take in the next few years.

Science and Technology

Alright, topic change, keep those neurons firing. We’re doing science and stuff. Unless you want to do history, or pop culture? Look, we’re kind of winging this, we just gotta stimulate that squishy thing in your skull, the topic doesn’t matter too much.

Um. Let’s see, broad strokes. Computers are a thing. Put electricity in a rock and it can do math. Halfway decent silicon chips will fit a few hundred billion operations a second in your pocket. A halfway decent optical chip won’t fit in your pocket, but it’ll do a hundred times that much. Big quantum computers too, a few billion qubits… okay, sorry that’s a little technical.

Oh, let’s do space exploration. That’s more digestible. Uh, let’s see. We landed on the Moon in 1704, and didn’t really slow down since. Well, by “we” I mean humans in general, the Union didn’t land on the moon until ‘05, China beat us to it. We’ve gone to pretty much every body with solid ground in the solar system. There are stations with a permanent presence on the Moon, Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and Pluto, but not anything really stand-alone, it’s all very dependent on shipments from Earth.

They’ve found life pretty much anywhere there’s liquid water, and Titan’s even got methane-based fish. We got a ship to Proxima Centauri in ‘47, at the low price of ten thousand tons of plutonium, and found out the exoplanet there has life, decently complex too, big trees and bugs. That got named Carnelian ‘cause of the color, the biosphere uses some sort of orange-red chlorophyll. We haven’t run into intelligent aliens yet, but not for lack of trying.

How many folks in space? A few thousand, mostly at Luna Station. They get resupplied by NALR shots— oh, right. The Union built a giant launch rail, the North American Launch Rail, something like twelve hundred kilometers long, finished around twenty years ago now. Electrical power right into orbit, two hundred tons an hour. Too much acceleration for astronauts though, so they usually get teleported unless they’re going to Luna, then the Feds fly them out on a spaceplane. And the Feds broke ground on their own launch system a few months ago, but who knows when they’ll get it finished.

Yeah, teleportation. That’s just magic. Relatively modern stuff, real expensive to do, but a lot easier than having to fly people to and from places like Europa.

Magic

Sure, we can do magic, that’s how we’re fixing your amnesia anyway. Speaking of that, nurse? What’s the— okay, we’re getting close then.

Sorry about that. The basic idea of magic is that you can use intent and symbolic actions to make changes to the world. It’s not free, you need some sort of action to generate potential, and then reality tends to rebound after you mess with it, but you can do stuff that would be otherwise impossible. Violate thermodynamics, causality, all that jazz. Magic occurs naturally, with some animals even evolving to take advantage of it. Classic example there is dragons, but there’s some others. People can learn it too, no real requirements. Usually it’s a little easier for transhumans, since we’ve got some internal magic, but in the modern era that doesn’t really matter.

Wizards? Well, I guess technically I’m a wizard, but my title is DCMT, which stands for Doctor of Computational Medical Thaumaturgy. Wizard usually implies a guy in robes throwing fireballs, thaumaturge is the modern term for a professional magic-user. We do sometimes wear robes though, since symbolism matters for magic. And symbolism doesn’t just mean literary symbolism— math works too. Math works really, really well, in fact. Most modern magic is just a lot of math, since it’s hard to do better than two thousand years of meaning. Well, some folks use old runes, Sanskrit usually, but since a computer can do the math for you… yeah.

On a technical level, magic is just particle physics, and there’s a bunch of math that describes how it behaves. That’s mostly how modern thaumaturgy works. We use a computer to calculate some symbolic diagrams, and then use a laser to draw them. For most normal magic, you use a sacrifice to fuel it. That’s usually just some blood or a sex act, but there’s some flexibility. The hospital here’s on top of a ley line, so we just tap that for our workings.

Oh, we figured out the math for all this in the 1680s, a little later than we did for particle physics. Magic itself has been around forever, but people have been using it since cave painting times. They weren’t as good at it back then as we are today, of course, with the exception of the Mayans. Yeah, the Mayans. That’s a whole thing, ain’t it?

Post-Apocalypse

Let’s see. Mayan Empire. Uh, it existed around a thousand years ago, developed some really advanced magic, and conquered most of the Americas. Then they got too reliant on human sacrifice to power all their magic, had a huge civil war, and nuked themselves into oblivion— oh, Hel, do you know what nukes are? Okay, good, imagine trying to explain that. You know what thaumonukes are? Hm. Those are basically just magic nukes. They teleport to the target and transmute themselves into the proper isotopes to cause a chain reaction. Tons of magical fallout too. We know what they were, but have no clue how to make them, we can’t even transmute into unstable isotopes. Probably for the best.

Anyway, the population of the Americas goes from something like half a billion to a few million in a day, then a hundred thousand or so in a year. Total collapse of society. They were hyper-reliant on magic, never figured out any real mundane stuff past copper metallurgy, and when their apocalypse killed most of their mages, they couldn’t recover. The fallout got most of the rest. All that magical release juiced up their constructs though, so most of them are still active. Real dangerous to go south of the 20th parallel north, outside the central canal. And that they had clear by carpet nuking the place in the ‘90s. There’s been talk of using orbital bombardment against the defenses that are still working, but it never goes anywhere.

Oh, the people. Yeah, not everyone died, just most of them. All the Mayans did, as far as we know, or at least the all ones who knew their magic. But they loved conquering other folks, and some of them survived. They mostly integrated with the draconic Norse back when they started exploring, and took to transhumanism pretty quickly. The Americas are a good place to have it, that’s for sure. Lots of leftover nasties from the Mayans’ war, but wendigos can’t exactly deal with dragonfire. Or gunfire. Anyway, yeah, something like a quarter or a third of the Union is descended from original Americans? Lotta lost culture there, all craters and coldglass now, but some bits and pieces of the old languages are still around.

Hold on one sec. Hey, good news, we’ve got the data we need. Nurse, could you— yeah, thanks. Okay, go ahead and move your head around, and good job, you’ve been really helpful. We’re gonna get you down to the OR and zap all your memories back into your head.

No, this doesn’t happen often. Or ever, as far as I know. Total situational amnesia like this, without losing any language skills? Truly unheard of, I’ll probably get a paper out of it. Fortunately for you, I’m a very good doctor.