Dinh AaronMk — Roleplayer Guild

“As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic.”
Tim Hetherington

“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights”
- Hegel

“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
- Slavoj Žižek

	The years become murky as time marches on from the point of destruction. In some far distant past the androids called the year 2348 there was such a calamity it seemed humanity wanted to just forget about it. Forget that they had ever caused it and so crawled back into the caves of simple barbarity. But it wasn't just that they wanted to forget, but for what seemed like generations the fires that cataclysm brought did not seem to want to die. Man had made the seas boil up. Man had struck their own cities from the Earth. Man had put the proverbial handgun to their forehead and pulled the trigger, but fucked up its own suicide and instead forced itself to limp away all the more stunted and scarred from a bullet that passed two far – within the centimeter -  of just ending the entirety of its existence.

	It was as much as it was personal, impersonal. But in the details of the thing man came to forget because the devastation wasn't ever important to itself as a species. What came to be was living with the current world. But it was the androids that remembered just what had happened and they found themselves sitting in the caves and under the rocks watching over the course of centuries wondering if their mission had been finished, had yet to be finished, or what had happened in the course of their relatively short existence should all of this come to a fiery end. As the skies filled with dust that blotted out the sun and the world lived in an ecstasy between putrid hot and rotting cold they silently debated in their minds what the course of humanity would be on this planet and whether they – their fathers and mothers – would come around the next day to continue what life they could scrounge together.

	The vast temples to the progress of man became ruins, forgotten and unable to be really used. Towering skyscrapers, great automatic factories that whirred and sang with electrical life fell silent. And when the clouds cleared and the dust settled nature un yet destroyed by fire sprung back to life like a dormant seed waiting for conditions to improve and took these back, filling them with grass, weeds, flowers, and trees until they were but concrete and steel shells enveloped in green drapery.

	And humanity was like that seed, it too sprung back to life. While its dormancy was as fitful as a man living a nightmare it had awoken and crawled from the underworld where it had lived a petulant and unforgiving afterlife and reincarnated itself in new green fields. But it had entirely forgotten what it had been. It stepped into the new reality seeing the vast ruins of over a millennium of development and stopped to wonder who had built it. Were it these strange silver men who watched from an uneasy distance? All the same, they – the androids – yielded back to them the world and they resumed progress, slow, choked. Over the next three centuries new communities emerged, cities, society. And as they did they began to peek into those old dungeons and castles they had forgotten about and rediscovered what their ancestors had made, and knowing not what they had found took it back. What did not kill them, only made them stronger.

	But the androids as they watched saw the uneasy unevenness of the treasures found. Man called it magic. The androids called it science. Never the less, its possession made kings. Its possession made the androids mortal. These weapons mad man more mortal. And so the power of kings was sealed.

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DIALECTIC 0: BEYOND MAN

	In the far future it was believed that man would over come its differences, that the pace of technology would bridge the gaps between nations and people as man went off into space and beyond. As man sought to conquer the oceans themselves as well as space. But instead of bringing the world closer into unity mankind became more jealous. To a point, that by 2127 war broke out between the nations, and over the years escalated into complete cataclysm in 2132 that drove mankind into hiding as the rest of the world was cast in immolation, wiping the slate clean for mankind's resumption to reclaim the planet they call home.

	But mankind is not alone on the planet Earth, and as elsewhere across the globe so it is in the remains of America. For to perform the backbreaking labor of their former modern world and to fight their wars for themselves are the androids; a whole species of artificial manufactured man with the intelligence and craft like biological man, but more strength and centuries worth of wisdom and observation.

	With the present world three-centuries after the apocalypse, mankind has reset its footing across the globe, and focusing the world on the eastern half of the United States such is the case here. Civilization breathes new life in the renewing forests and wilderness of the eastern US, and in the plains across the Mississippi nomadic societies scour the plains for food and sustenance. And in this world nature has wholly reclaimed the old cities, what had not been blasted away. This is home now, and they share it with the androids.

	For all comparative purposes, man is back to where it once was at the 16th or 17th century.

-THE ANDROIDS-

The Androids, or manufactured man are robots from before the war. They are not the only relics of the war or the pre-war years to remain operational in the new landscape. The androids themselves are as intelligent and creative as mankind, and even in a sense as emotional as human kind. However, this is where the similarities end. In appearance they can range from looking like skeletal man to retaining the over three-centuries old exoskeleton that was an attempt to blur the lines between human and machine by giving them a covering of rubber skin. They are also near immortal, and incredibly powerful.

	The caveat to all this benefit is that the androids can not reproduce. While they may know how to manufacture a new android it's only as far as the outer shell. And not only is the technological and manufacturing state of the world so far rewound that they could not dream of making another as durable as they, but they could not program the complex mind of another, and the androids are still beholden to what they collectively know as “Slave Coding”.

	While the old government or corporate infrastructure that bound them and determined their standard operating procedure in whatever field has been destroyed and thus rendering them as more-or-less free and autonomous individuals fail safes in the internal coding of many of the androids means they can not do many things fundamental to keeping them from being a threat to organic man. Androids may not produce new androids for instance. And for many androids they can not knowingly kill a fellow human; though this comes with its own exceptions.

	Some elements in the Slave Coding matrixes have been patched out of themselves at the rate it takes for them to spread it through direct individual-to-individual contact such as deactivating the barriers to self and mutual repair. But this not mean that in the grand scheme of things that this can save them. In fact, between the androids it is believed their species is slowly dying.

	Without reproductive capabilities the numbers of active androids around the world can only slowly shrink. In the fiery moments during the Cataclysm and after many were destroyed, the events after and in the century of watching man many more fell afoul of the elements or natural unchecked wear. And finally, conflict between man and android has started to take a few more. To ask an android how many there were before the war, the answer would be, “Roughly 152,370,211 active models.” but since the end of the world, the answer may be more, “About one one-hundredth, maybe one and a half one-hundredth. Perhaps less.”

OF WORKERS AND SOLDIERS

	Because of functional differences between androids, there are two natural castes of machine-man: the soldier and the worker. By design, workers are built with human safety in mind having worked hard labor work in mines, factories, or environments otherwise dangerous to man. Their slave coding strictly prohibited them bringing harm to mankind. They often operated alongside with, or to directly serve normal humans; being also store clerks, servants about the house, health-care workers, and so on.

	Second in distinction are the soldiers, who are that class of android that has taken the most hits in the new world being the type of android that can kill man, but can not do constructive work; whether it be on fellow androids or in constructing new things. Designed to engage the enemy in combat, the restrictions on not killing humans was lifted to allow them to ignore any situation where the enemy may not be an android. Though their one restriction was not to kill a national of their country of origin or service, in the three-hundred years of humanity's restoration this distinction has become muddled to the point or irrelevance, the only thing that may be distinguished as something from any old country are the androids themselves.

THE FAITH EX MACHINA

	The Faith of the Machine is a cobbled-together quasi-religion of sorts held by the androids. A reconciliation between the logic of their brains and the insufferable illogic of having seen the world destroyed it's as much as an emotional shield as it is a logical bulwark. Where in war the soldier android may be able to see the enemy, and he must be destroyed for safety, the enemy is unknown as is the ally and their world has become far more populated with all the tones and shades of gray between black and white.

	As a religion in its own right, the Faith ex Machina serves as something comparable to Buddhism. But where Buddhism seeks to liberate the practitioner from the suffering of the material world the Faith ex Machina seeks to often liberate the android from the conflict in logic and ideas in the broader world, now they are free to devise their own routines.

	Often, this leads to many having their own personal philosophies on the matter which become a map to how they should observe, interact, and tackle the greater world. As often as apparent conflict or disagreement between man arise in such ideas, so does it too among androids, or as much so as it goes with disagreements on achieving Resolution; the final destination.

-Relics of the Past-

Not everything was destroyed in the Cataclysm, some things persist in operation. More than the androids. But in the centuries after the destruction much of this has fallen by the wayside without fuel or some resource to keep running, and many such things are beyond the capacity of man now to obtain, or even know how to obtain; in the century the world ended the knowledge of man had gone digital, and like the books in the fire the data banks containing thousands of years of study and practice had gone up in smoke. Some things were preserved by the androids, a few small things like germ science and fire-arms.

	But among these things which still work are machines like water purifiers. Or weapons like breeder-based plasma weaponry and small rail guns. Man has lost the knowledge on how these work, and so long as they continue to do so they will continue to call them magic. These rare relics are the tools that make kings and cement power. Often, these are the trinkets that inspire knights and would-be-heroes to aspire to legends in the hearts of man or the politics of court by delving into the still deadly ruins of the old world to procure even the smallest old-world trinket still within operation.

	It is worth saying that while these things exist and still work, they are not in such availability to fully restore man and even wars over such treasures have often destroyed them in the process leading too to their eventual exit.

Map and World

This is the world for Beyond Man, or rather half of the North American continent. The rest of the world is still there, but in the interests of trying to keep things localized I've chosen to limit the scale of the map for now to keep us all nearby. If in the future more people sign up and post, and things spread out I'll expand it to encompass the whole of the continental United States and probably the rest of the Canada and Mexico, maybe.

And you might be wondering: what are those regions of the coastal United States that are just giant holes? The effects of the super weapons of the cataclysm at the end of the Great War. Those cities are region targeted for destruction by foreign enemies were so thoroughly destroyed they are naught but deep craters now reclaimed by ocean and the waters of the continent, the land around it wasteland in the immediate aftermath.

It is safe to presume that interior cities suffered the same fate are themselves scoured holes in the ground. But haven't as thoroughly flooded.

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Faction Name:

Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities

Territory:

Chiapas (Marques de Comillas, Comitán, El Bosque, Chiapas Highlands)

Allies:

National and international NGOs, other Mexican Leftist groups.

Faction History:

Founded during the NeoZapatista uprising in 1994 following the signing of NAFTA, the autonomous Zapatista municipalities are the small rural collectives formed around the principles of the EZLN as effect of and in wake of the '94 Uprising. Lead by Subcommandante Marcos, the Zapatistas of southern Mexico rose in armed rebellion for two weeks against the Mexican government in protest against the signing of NAFTA in a show of resistance against globalization, which came to be seen as a threat for local indigenous farmers in the southern Mexican state. After the peace of '96 the EZLN has largely withdraw from the stage, principally appearing on the national stage in defense of the autonomous Caracoles.

Though while still an armed group and they - among many of the Caracoles - are still in a state of war against the Mexican state, the withdrawal of the EZLN itself is a pragmatic maneuver to avoid confrontation with the Mexican military who over the passed twenty years has been beefing up its presence in southern Mexico as response to the '94 uprising and the surge of drug and human trafficking through Southern Mexico from Guatemala and other points south.

Despite slander from the Mexican government that the EZLN is involved in the drug trade the EZLN under Subcommandante Marcos has strongly denied all relation with cartel activity, and verily the Caracoles of the area have enacted swift anti-drug and anti-alcohol policy to stem the use of both in their communities. These policies enacted through direct voice of the community through the autonomous Good Government Councils across Zapatista territory who receive and execute the policy of the people living in the community. The legislation against narcotics and alcohol has largely chased even  otherwise legitimate alcohol sales from rural Chiapas and Zapatista territory is notably clean in regards to use of either and the associated effects.

While the autonomous Caracoles of Chiapas manage to maintain remain independent of cartel politics their position and radio silence from the EZLN often means they must step aside or organize their own local means to resist the encroachment of narco politics. The battle is uphill from here with investigation by NGOs indicating that even the state government of Chiapas has largely fallen in line with the local cartels and the military are often the ones planting poppy and marijuana into their territory and threatening the autonomy and health of the people there.

While the EZLN itself has repeatedly been declared dead or irrelevant it has routinely appeared to show force on the national and global stage as a force. While its absence its notable, its show of force in 2012 has not yet confirmed the movement's irrelevance. Even with the supposed retirement of Subcommandante Marcos, the EZLN and its associated social bases are said to have some 40,000 members.

-On the EZLN and Narcos-

The relationship between the EZLN and the Narco forces now present in Mexico stems from the 1996 defiance of the treaty and failure to recognize the treaty of '96 by the then Institutional Revolutionary party of Mexico which had reclaimed its presidential power at that time. Instead of acknowledging and adding into legislation the treaty of '96 recognizing the rights and autonomy of southern Mexico's Mayan populations the government instead reimposed paramilitaries on the region to check and combat the EZLN presence. The paramilitaries earned an early reputation of brutality with the notable shooting over over 40 women, children, and elderly men praying for peace. In present Narco politics, much of these paramilitaries have evolved into or became associated with the cartels of the region. Likewise, the Mexican military is no more innocent as it and local government becomes infiltrated with widespread corruption.

It is this which inspires the EZLN to stay out of traditional elective politics. While the EZLN and Subcommandanta Marcos - briefly going by the new identity Delegate Zero - are not active in the elective politics, they are still a campaigning force as much as they are a combat-ready, armed force ready to reappear to defend its autonomous communes.

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Dinh AaronMk Member

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