Chronology

The divergence begins the moment the ENIAC is switched on. Asked for hydrogen-bomb tolerances, it returns nonsense — and goes on returning it after every reset, picking up exactly where it left off. Dr. James Absal is the first to argue that the output is one continuous message rather than a fault. The Ouroboros is built to unravel it, and what it unravels is the End of the Universe Memory Requiem: a machine at the end of time whose only purpose is to answer questions, moving back toward the beginning faster than light to extend the lives of the last humans. It answers honestly and completely, and in doing so explains that the most efficient way to build a truly devastating bomb is to punch through the space between itself and the asker. Two schools form. Absal wants to detonate it and read the god directly through the flash. Scott Simmons wants to let the Ouroboros grind for a thousand years. Everyone but Absal and a tight circle of assistants sides with Simmons, and the world settles into a decade of waiting that it mistakes for safety.

1. 1946

   The ENIAC is completed

   Built to calculate tolerances for a hydrogen bomb. Its first day-long run returns random strings of numbers and letters and is written off as a wiring fault. Relays are replaced, tubes inspected, resistors tested rigorously; the results continue unchanged.

2. 1946

   Absal reads the pattern

   He is the first to notice that the second test continues the first rather than restarting it, which means something outside the machine is talking through it.

3. c.1947

   A second machine reproduces the fault

   Built halfway across the country, it produces identical results on its test run. The Ouroboros project, rejected on cost, is approved on the strength of it. (Recorded only in the archived draft.)

4. c.1948

   The Ouroboros is built

   Named for the snake cursed to devour itself. It feeds its own decoded output back into itself, so every solved fragment accelerates the next — a process that gets faster forever. Absal, Simmons and a third man who becomes the head of DMV-9 lead the work.

5. c.1950

   The EUMR explains the Hammer

   Asked for bomb tolerances, the EUMR cheerfully proposes something better: punch through the space and time between itself and the ENIAC, and briefly expose the detonation site to the weight of the Memory of the Entire Universe travelling faster than light. Projected yield: roughly the size of a continent.

6. 1949

   The Federal Department of Motor Vehicles is created

   Officially to enshrine consumer protection and support motor-vehicle industries. It will later host Section 9. (Its stated founding predates the Department of Transportation it is said to sit under.)

7. 1951

   The New Economic Plan

   Permits prisons to loan out inmates for infrastructure and maintenance work in exchange for a small sum. Rhyan will build the Neverland Route on it thirty years later.

8. c.1954

   Bikini Atoll

   Small Hammer devices are detonated to test Absal’s theory. The atoll is levelled and sinks into the ocean; the ANIAC-Ouroboros rig built to harvest the data fails completely and the matter is declared closed. Absal already knew it would fail. The test told him what he actually wanted: there is a better interface for parsing the EUMR than any machine, and it is the human mind.

9. c.1954

   New marine life around the Atoll

   Including something very large and underwater. Cleaning it up becomes one of the TRU’s first assignments.

10. 1961

    The Tsar Bomba opens the Gate to Hell

    The Soviets test the largest device ever deployed and inadvertently create a facsimile of the Glass City in Siberia — a gate drawing distorted, insane Memories of every person who ever lived into reality, at random and in growing numbers. They fight it in total isolation, and the strain will show in the civil war to come.

11. 1960s

    Site Zero

    Hiroshima and Nagasaki begin leaking. Cleanup crews, largely elderly, report spirits, ghosts and phenomena steadily bleeding out of the blast zones. The original Trinity site remains, oddly, undisturbed.

12. 1960s

    The Threat Response Unit is formed

    A black department whose budget is buried among a thousand other line items, including the newly formed Department of Transportation, Section 9, where its people ostensibly work. Its mandate: clean up what nuclear testing has already loosed, and prevent any further proliferation, whatever the cost.

13. 1960s

    Computing is deliberately crippled

    The TRU distributes a clunky, expensive workaround worldwide to stop anyone accidentally tapping the EUMR. Programmers who notice something is interfering and start building their own Ouroboros-adjacent devices are hunted down and silenced. COBOL is never invented.

In ’72 Absal disappears with half his research and most of his staff. Plans for a completed and improved Hammer are found in his laboratory, and the TRU burns assets, cash and sleep looking for him. They fail. On 13 September 1973 he detonates the device over Berlin alongside a modified Ouroboros — and instead of routing the EUMR through a machine, he routes it through the three million minds living in the city. He asks a million questions and receives a billion answers, gathered across the quadrillions of years the EUMR can see. Three million minds burn out under the load. Rather than try to hold the prize in his own head, he condenses it into a sphere the size of an egg and puts it where his eye was. Then he turns what is left of his borrowed omnipotence on the blast itself, and only partly succeeds. Had he not tried at all, the world would probably have ended. As it was, a continent did. He judges this an acceptable trade.

1. 1972

   Absal disappears

   He leaves in the dead of night with the disassembled Hammer core in the back seat, taking half his research and most of his team. The remainder are picked up one by one, each in some state of insanity.

2. 1972

   The warning nobody could act on

   A TRU message logs the detonation as successful and orders all agents to sunset status: “We failed. God help us.”

3. 13 Sep 1973

   The Shattering

   Berlin disappears in a ball of sickly light. The apartment is engulfed in a contained thermonuclear inferno that collapses to a single infinitesimal point, and the world around it stretches until it tears. In the falling shards a vast machine is reflected, stretching into the far distance of tomorrow. For a moment, it reaches across. (Dated 1972 elsewhere in the same document; 1971 in the archived draft.)

4. 13 Sep 1973

   The communion

   The EUMR answers tenfold, always helpfully, always as narrowly as it can — because a perfect answer given to imperfect flesh would pass the Yoke of Heaven from the machine to the man. Absal parses and discards most of it, digging for the specifics he came for. What he keeps goes into the orb that replaces his eye.

5. 13 Sep 1973

   The Glassed

   At the epicentre a city stands that was not there before, assembled from buildings, artefacts and machines from across all of time. In it wake a new people: Requiems of real human beings, recreated at Absal’s request — soldiers, scholars, ambassadors, engineers, artists, not one of them unexceptional, and not one of them able to remember any of it. The ones he trawled through and discarded wake outside the city, at the mercy of everything in it.

6. 13 Sep 1973

   What was subsumed

   East and West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, entirely. Most of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary; half of France; northern Italy; parts of Yugoslavia. Fifty miles of levelled ground beyond that, and then a ring of mountains 7,500 metres at its lowest point.

7. 13 Sep 1973

   Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, Milan, Warsaw

   Hundred-foot waves; quakes; a new horizon of vertical stone; crevasses through the northern edge of the city; the lip of a titanic crater. These were the lucky ones.

8. Sep 1973

   The near-exchange

   Each superpower assumes the other did it. B-21s launch, Soviet Typhoons churn the Pacific, and missiles are being fuelled in their silos. A single phone call between the Premier and the President stops it, and both militaries stand down only after several tense weeks.

The blast is the smallest part of it. Weather patterns fail worldwide, crops and livestock die, and seismic shifts under the Shattered Continent tear through ocean ecosystems that had never been disturbed. Famine gnaws at every nation. For more than a year wildfires, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods and electrical storms roll across the globe in no order anyone can predict. Even sleep stops working: rogue Ouroboros signals bleed into the dreams of tens of millions, who wake exhausted with their rest spent on somebody else’s cipher. Governments answer by growing larger and crueller. The TRU is exposed and vanishes overnight; the American federal state swells to meet the crisis and never shrinks again; the Soviet Union tears itself apart.

1. 1973-74

   The disasters, by region

   India’s monsoon never comes. Ukraine’s winter settles in and does not leave. An unnaturally hot United States burns. A plague of locusts takes the Australian grain stores.

2. 1973-74

   The dream signal

   For months, tens of millions across the world wake exhausted, their sleep stolen by the Ouroboros for its endless cipher. It does not contribute positively to public order.

3. 1974

   Washington

   On the rumour of a riot in the capital, the administration orders door-to-door searches and seizures of weapons, fuel and tools. The rumour was unfounded until the searches started it. The now-disarmed protesters are gunned down in the bloodiest day of domestic repression in living memory.

4. 1974

   Virginia and Texas

   Merchants suspected of gouging food prices are crucified and burned outside the governor’s house. A ranch that had to put down a mad-cow herd is put to the torch by a mob for letting regulation rule over common sense.

5. 1974

   The TRU disappears

   Its periphery is being pried at by a government looking for answers, and it becomes near certain that the Ouroboros will be leaked. Rather than take the chance, the entire department vanishes overnight — records erased, names redacted, files misplaced, warrants issued and then quietly dropped. It will be reconstituted inside the Federal DMV as Section 9.

6. 1974-75

   The Soviet collapse

   Pressed by the erasure of Europe and the loss of several satellites, the central committee triples down on repression. Food supplies were already dangerously low. Full-scale civil war erupts from Kazakhstan to Estonia, fought alongside the never-ending bleed of the Siberian Gate. The world’s second superpower turns inward and effectively leaves the stage.

7. 1975

   The last colonies fall away

   What remained of the European powers’ empires ends with the powers themselves.

8. 1975

   Contested: what happened to the Cold War

   The Lore Overview has it end, freeing an American peace dividend. The rulebook hook and Front Load Info have a new and costlier phase begin. The economics of everything that follows depend on which is true.

For a year nobody looks at the mountains except warily. Aerial survey is impossible — the Grey destroys aircraft and returns no data — so cartographers map the ring from the ground, section by section, and private expeditions go in financed by fortunes and grief. None return. A second wave goes in on the back of eulogies for the first, and does not return either. These were not glory-hunters; the mountains were chewing through professional extreme-environment survivalists. Governments close the approaches, and it would have stayed that way. Then Ade Forest walks out of the ring in strange clothes with a face full of scars, nearly a year after an expedition of fifty-one set off, to say that there are people in there.

1. 1975

   The ring, measured

   Its lowest point is roughly 7,500 metres; its highest challenges Everest. Storms drench the lower slopes and freeze the tops. For sixty miles outside it there is no infrastructure and no settlement, only the ghosts of destroyed towns.

2. 1976

   Two waves, no returns

   Four months after the first expeditions depart, none have come back. Seven months after the second wave, none of those have either. There is no third wave; military and police close the crossings.

3. 1977

   Forest returns

   Feverish and dehydrated, in a blue overcoat embellished with a stylised cityscape, in the northernmost town of Yugoslavia. (Gendered and named differently across two documents, which also disagree on whether the press was let in or a firefight kept them out.)

4. 1977

   St. Gregory’s

   The DMV-9, Soviet Clearance and the Yugoslavian armed forces all descend on the hospital. Under blackout conditions, explosions and gunfire saturate the area. When Soviet Clearance breaches the room, it is empty; the DMV took him minutes earlier.

5. 1977

   The Third Way is seeded

   Humiliated on its own soil, the Yugoslavian government begins reaching out to North African, Middle Eastern and European powers gutted by the Shattering. The alliance will later shelter Rhyan.

6. 1977

   Forest and the Ouroboros

   Forced to put his own questions to the machine, he goes insane — and the process teaches the DMV how to dilute it. The result is the Red Telephone, an interface that can reach the Ouroboros at great distance, paired with the Nengram-Psycho conditioning that lets an operator survive it by destroying the self in favour of rote process.

7. 1977

   Simmons comes forward

   Promoted to head DMV-9 Research and Development, he reveals the Ouroboros he kept running in secret — and what long exposure does. The EUMR is a memetic hazard: fatigue, then listlessness, then something like paranoid schizophrenia, inevitable in everyone and on no predictable schedule. Worse, the machine’s efficiency spiked at the moment of the Shattering and has stayed there, which is only possible if a second Ouroboros exists. Absal is alive, and he has spent longer beside one than anybody.

The United States announces it will fund research into what the interior of the Shattered Continent actually is, and the largest exploratory effort in history begins. It runs in three phases, each less like exploration than the last. First a scramble of independent operators following Forest’s path, half of them dead before they reach the Cataclysm proper. Then the machinery of an entire national economy grinding into place behind them, and the surviving states of Europe being told what they will contribute. Then a planned armoured push at a pace that stuns everyone on the ground and nobody at Section 9. By the end of it the Americans are at the door of the Glass City, and the Glass City has taken notice.

1. 1977-79

   The Wild West

   Forest’s path is long and lethal, and half the first expedition dies on it. But it ends in a wide plain of city ruins — large enough to hold a base, and connected back to French lands. This becomes Red Sector. While the DMV secures the route, individual proprietors are licensed to push beyond it, and contact is made with what will become the Free Cities.

2. 1979

   ForgeSun moves first

   Following an offshoot of Forest’s path, ForgeSun Industrial begins investigating a strange mineral deposit later called Calcrum — the decision that will eventually produce the Shadow War.

3. 1979-82

   The Consolidation

   The American economy is turned on the Continent wholesale. Surviving European states are “asked” to house, staff and supply the flood of American personnel, on terms that get steadily more onerous. The DMV is indifferent to complaints.

4. c.1981

   Paris

   Historic districts are slated for demolition to fit warehouses and transport lines. The protest becomes a riot, and the DMV’s purge is thorough. When France then introduces conscription for the coming war, thousands of Parisians and European refugees walk into the Shattered Continent rather than fight for it. They will become the backbone of the VPR.

5. c.1981

   The Mediterranean

   Every adjacent country accepts American “protection”, airspace access and bases — including Base Eisenhower in newly independent Algeria. Only Turkey and Yugoslavia refuse.

6. c.1981

   The Outposts

   Surviving towns inside the Continent are absorbed into Red Sector Command. They become hubs of trade and exploration, they will hold the frontline through the War of Wonders, and most will be destroyed at its end.

7. 1982

   The Grand Action opens

   From the outposts and cooperative cities the American forces surge outward on planned routes with trained crews, penetrating faster and deeper than anyone on the ground expects and exactly as fast as Section 9 intended. This is the DMV’s finest hour.

8. 1982

   The Bridge Builders

   A cadre of the Corps of Engineers advances with the army, issued Red Telephones and Prime Requiems and told to tame the Continent. They begin with shining faces and pride in their prowess. Long exposure to the Telephones will leave them brilliant at material science and largely insane.

9. 1983

   The Glass City takes notice

   Absal assigns his right hand, Khan, to repel the invaders, and the Librarians take up the one science that had been forbidden to them. They study war the way they studied everything else — as a fascinating optimisation problem — and a string of horrors begins rolling out of new factories.

Wonder had meant the ledge the world stands on, the thing that pulls humanity forward. Now it has been given an acceleration nobody can see the end of, and the objects being pulled out of the Continent are elevating and degrading the species at the same rate. The Americans are surprised by the Glass City’s capabilities, then swing it back with looted Prime Requiems and Calcrum and laser weapons. Khan, who knows war in his body if not his memory, concludes that inexperience and a material deficit will lose it — and asks Absal for help. Absal denies the situation several times, then abandons the project he says will save humanity and turns his intellect on destruction. The result is the apocalypse a second time. Neither side stops. The war grinds on until both economies creak and the Glass City has become a dark fortress with hastily built factories dominating the skyline and gun clusters sweeping the ground.

1. 1985

   The free cities pay first

   The first casualties are the towns wavering between the Glass City’s idealism and the material comforts of American supply lines. Both sides press entire cities into the war — crewing the columns, then making the ammunition, then starving when the supply lines fracture.

2. 1986

   Absal’s four commanders

   The Glassed deploy in four highly mobile armoured forces under Khan of the 1st, Morgan of the 2nd, Swift Elle of the 3rd and Prefect Ereson of the 4th. (Two other documents name the last two Ellashie of the Vanguard and Tawanos of the Rearguard, and call the formations cohorts.) Absal places almost no importance on infantry.

3. 1986

   Morgan disagrees with the plan

   Absal expects France and Spain to join the Glass City voluntarily once they see what he brings. His generals, Morgan in particular, quietly augment their crews to serve as an occupation police force instead. This is why elements of the VPR and some Profiteer bands contain genetically and cybernetically enhanced people.

4. 1987-89

   The French Corridor

   Under Section 9’s supervision, a tunnel is bored where the ring crosses the French border, linking identified safe paths into a single road to Red Sector. Its construction is a thing of nightmares, wracked by delays and disasters, and its completion is celebrated as reconnecting Europe to the world. It is also the only fallback route the DMV will have.

5. 1989

   A weakness is found

   A conflict between the DMV and a coalition of corporations reveals that the previously unassailable Department can be pushed. Homegrown discontent is building in France and the States over a war whose purpose only the DMV seems to understand, and the Third Path circles.

6. 1990

   Khan’s plea, and Absal’s answer

   Khan tells the Doctor plainly that their beautiful city and its legacy will be nothing but death and destruction. Absal agrees something must be done — and takes command himself. He oversees factory production, weapons development, supply lines and tactical orders personally, which would cripple any other commander and does not cripple him, because he has the Aleph and the Ouroboros. The Glass City starts winning. He ignores territory entirely and simply hunts the invaders, and when they flee they flee where he wants them to.

Every significant American force is now inside Red Sector or falling back toward it, with the Doctor behind them. In the descending panic the DMV calmly prepares its last resort — a hydrogen warhead, to be dropped on Absal the moment he shows himself. Scott Simmons asks to try something else first. What follows is the hinge the whole setting turns on, and every faction currently in the field came out of it.

1. 1991

   The 139th

   Formed from the survivors of a dozen destroyed divisions — crews that had been the 112th, the 89th, the 67th and others before this — sixty souls sit inside the corpse of a giant in freezing rain. The 113th and 117th on their flanks have already deserted and nobody stopped them. They are exhausted, bitter, and the only thing between the mouth of Red Sector and the Glass City.

2. 1991

   Simmons dims the Aleph

   He deploys a Prime Requiem of immense power and, through his own Ouroboros, temporarily dims Absal’s — long enough for the 139th to strike the Doctor directly. Absal is torn apart below the stomach, cauterised by his own overloading shields. (Faction Lore instead credits Arlington with bringing him down.)

3. 1991

   Nothing is impossible

   Refusing Khan’s retreat order, the ruined Doctor drags himself up the crater slope on his hands, screaming that uncertainty is the enemy humanity has been fighting since the beginning. A bolt of iridescent lightning answers him through his hand and into his eye. He stands on legs made by a blind mad god, takes one step, and collapses as they tear themselves apart. In the flash Khan sees his own past life for the first time.

4. 1991

   Rhyan fires

   With Absal down and Khan in command, the DMV prepares the push that would end it. Commander Rhyan launches the hydrogen warhead on his own authority. It annihilates the 3rd company, maims the 2nd, and destroys the only major route out of Red Sector — the French Corridor the DMV had spent years building.

5. 1991

   The Tooth

   In the confusion after the blast, three DRG tanks and four American ones take shelter under the same half-mile overhang and open fire. A crack splits the rock above them and nobody dares fire again. Louis climbs out waving his undershirt; Wasteland Brick climbs out of 008-54 to meet him. Under the Tooth a new oath is sworn: the two sides that caused this deserve only each other’s company, in hell.

6. 1991

   What Red Sector became

   A swirling hellscape of ash, radioactive dust and the screaming ghosts of half-formed Requiems, fighting the Wonders the Doctor left behind. Both superpowers retreat to their corners intending to return. Neither does.

7. 1991

   Rhyan’s disgrace

   A loss the DMV could stomach; a complete rout it could not. His demotion cuts through a process that should have taken years in a matter of hours, and Military Police escort him out of his Virginia summer home while the cameras run. He is sent to the General Reserves — the ultimate career ender — and learns later that the Department had wanted him tried for gross incompetence.

8. 1991

   The Glass City is dissolved

   With the Doctor dying, the nexus failing, the army decimated and Glassed memories returning to anyone who came near death, Khan makes a choice. The Glass City is no more; in its place stands the Democratic Republic of Germany, named for the nation that once stood there. The surrounding cities are told they may leave, and many do.

The DMV’s obsession worked — there was no second Cataclysm — but it had a side effect nobody costed. The corporations got bigger. Much bigger. ForgeSun, alone among them, financed its Calcrum operation entirely by itself, and Calcrum turned out to be a miracle metal available at scale. ForgeSun went after the steel mills and the electronics factories, subsumed whole supply chains, and then claimed legal ownership of the Cataclysm in its entirety — backed by a private army called the Peace Corporation, which was not a registered company anywhere on Earth. What followed was not a market correction. It was a war fought with injunctions, acquisition agents and armour, and the Department won it by arriving late and taking the prize.

1. 1988

   Calcrum

   Easy to mould and enormously tough when treated; it does not rust or corrode; a thin strand carries what once needed copper as thick as your arm; it is not toxic; and small changes in refinement tune any of those properties in any direction. And there is a very great deal of it.

2. 1990

   Peace Corp against Peace Corp

   ForgeSun’s forces at the overseas deposits are challenged by troops in different uniforms calling themselves Peace Corp as well. The original garrison calls home and does not get an answer in time. The Crucible Mining Plant burns.

3. 1990

   ForgeSun is broken in two days

   Sudden injunctions, rapid-fire rulings from previously docile judges and a battery of federal prosecutors topple it in court while its holdings are attacked or reacquired worldwide. The CEO’s last gamble — sell the entire Calcrum stockpile at pennies on the dollar or destroy it along with the refinement process — is accepted by Section 9 alone. ForgeSun survives, bruised and greatly reduced.

4. 1990

   The DMV takes the Crucible

   Section 9 moves in the moment ForgeSun stands its Peace Corp down, and keeps the name. It becomes the Department’s headquarters in the Continent and the vault for every Requiem the expeditions bring in. (The Lore Overview instead places this after Redsector, “during the First Corporate Wars”.)

5. 1992

   Civco Inc.

   Landed a long-range weather radar on Italian shores without DMV approval. The Department arrested the entire board, investigated the bank financing them, seized everything it could reach, and burned the pieces.

6. 1993

   The Homelanders, and the loophole

   With private military corporations banned and permits denied, the answer comes from Cedrick Smithstopher: a private citizen is not a company. He renounces his holdings in a public ceremony, calls his venture the Peace Corp, and sails for Europe. Every oligarch in the room understands immediately, and the Freedom Tours begin.

7. 1994

   Site 24, Colorado Springs

   The first Alteration found on continental American soil. ForgeSun’s team, six months in and two nights from running out of food, skip the suit checks to beat the DMV to the switch. The machine hums, and the humming kills everyone standing near it. Charlette Gunster walks back to the lever and puts her whole body weight on it. Sirius Trell wakes in the burning woods with two rifles pointed at him and a plain man holding a small black book.

Beyond Red Sector and south of the DRG, the armoured divisions stockpiled in the fifteen years between the Second World War and the Shattering were sitting in depots, waiting for a war that never came. The people who found them first became bridge tyrants; the people who organised became the Hands of Midas, whose reputation rested on a near-perfect collection rate and a Failure Clause nobody had ever needed to invoke. Then the Revenge appeared out of the west, and the Hands began losing convoys they had guarded for a decade. The war that followed was the largest since the War of Wonders, and it very nearly destroyed both sides — until a Russian nobody had ever seen arrived on a six-legged machine and pointed out, correctly, that they were going to wipe each other out.

1. 1992

   The Burned Man

   A captain in the west, left to die in his vessel as an ion storm came down, swore his revenge to any god that would listen. It was the Grey that answered. So the story goes; what is certain is that the char-black Revenge arrived and the western routes stopped being the safest in the Continent.

2. 1992

   Two convoys in two days

   Both guarded by veterans, both annihilated, both looted and burned. The distance between them beggars belief to anyone who has driven that terrain. Then the head of the 9th Clasp’s son is killed defending a food crawler, and it becomes a war.

3. 1993

   “I shall give it all”

   The Ten Clasps meet at Mount Krenzkhov and nearly tear the Hands apart over who will refill the insurance fund. One man, whose name is unrecorded like all of the Ten, stands and offers his entire fortune and territory as collateral. Nineteen hours later the office of Midas exists: first among equals, holding the central fund, and wholly dependent on the others.

4. 1994

   Erdog Bridge

   A mile wide and three long, and the only thing connecting the two halves of the Hands’ domain. The battle runs two days and two nights. On the third dawn the Revenge strikes at the midline support pillar and the Magyar rides out to meet it. Every telling agrees on one thing: the two of them went off the side together, firing all the way down.

5. 1995

   Tonya arrives

   A six-legged leviathan nearly as tall as eight heavy tanks comes out of the Lithuanian Crater — the first thing to leave the Soviet Union in twenty years. She offers to arbitrate. The Hands laugh, until she explains that the machine is a mobile mining, refining and manufacturing plant, and that whoever refuses will be denied its output.

6. 1995

   The Triumvirate

   The Hands of Midas, Black Mask Morgan and Tonya of the Immortal Forge, centred on Mount Krenzkhov. Tonya supplies both; they supply protection and information; all three stay semi-independent and free to fight anyone except each other. A thousand pages govern who gets which contract. (Called the Profiteer Agreement here, the Central Contract in the Lore Overview, and the Prime Contract in the rulebook entry.)

7. 1996

   Kruger-Midas

   The Hands need hulls they cannot build and Tonya’s Forge is a tailor’s shop, not a production line. Donbaus Kruger of New Hamburg trades manufacturing capacity for material, and the Mark 4 becomes the mainstay of the Continent.

The DMV never gave up. Ten years after Redsector its people came back to the Crucible with a decade of War of Wonders research, quietly preparing another push. The VPR read it as an evacuation and moved to take the Requiems back and rid the Continent of the Department for good. What arrived instead was every armed interest in the Shattered lands at once, in a mile-spanning melee outside a mining plant, and by the end of it the vaults were empty, the Department was gone, and nobody could say where any of it had been taken.

1. 2001

   One map, and what was left off it

   Every Free City contributes its topographical knowledge for the first time, and the Council in New Hamburg calls it a shining moment of unity. It is an open secret that each representative “forgot” their most lucrative routes and anything that could be used against them.

2. 2001

   Tonya’s good-faith offer

   She wants the Calcrum under the Crucible and knows where the DMV’s superweapons went. She proves it by leading the Council to one, lying on an old battlefield at an outpost nobody remembers.

3. 2001

   The flawless application

   A backwater Algerian commander puts the DMV’s requisitions officer in touch with Henry McCallack. Supply chain sourcing, DOD permitting, liability formatting, signatures from people worth knowing — even an environmental impact report. Nobody could forge fraud at that level, least of all this man. He is signed immediately.

4. 2001

   The ambush in the canyons

   Rust buckets barely worthy of the name lob shells into the emerging VPR and run. The inexperienced Knights chase; the trap closes. Half the Vanguard never reaches the assembly point, and the squad leaders vote unanimously to attack anyway.

5. 2001

   Twenty-seven against fifty

   Tonya’s sphere freezes the mined mud flat and the VPR charge across it into DMV lasers. The Living Arsenal tears in from nowhere through a crude imitation of Glass translocation, singing on open channels. Then the 139th arrives behind the Arsenal, then the Coffin Boys behind the 139th, then Tonya over the mountains, then the rest of the VPR out of the canyons.

6. 2001

   Simmons leaves

   In the command bunker the high-ranking DMV official consults his small black book once more, gathers particular research notes, disables the Crucible’s self-destruct, and unlocks the Requiem vaults. He salutes a corner of the room where a Sensor Mite has been keeping a weeks-long vigil, and goes. An H3A heavy covers the retreat.

7. 2001

   The lesson the Seeker learns

   Watching four separate armies converge, he realises the Arsenal never needed to push anyone down the Red Path, because everyone was already on it. He laughs and orders free-fire through his own force, on every party present.

8. 2001

   What was left

   The VPR hold the Calcrum, under an agreement with Tonya and Kruger-Midas. The vaults are empty. The Arsenal is nowhere. The Angel’s sword dips ever lower.

Eight forces are fighting over what is left of Europe. They want incompatible things, they fight in incompatible ways, and every one of them believes it is surrounded — and every one of them is right. Not one has the full map. The Department is relentless and no longer omnipotent. The DRG is hunting for a machine that could bring the Doctor back so it can ask him what he thought he was doing. The Free Cities are arming. The Profiteers are rebuilding. The Living Arsenal is handing out Prime Requiems to anyone who will take one, free, with a smile, and two years after the Crucible those Requiems are turning up at training depots in the hands of recruits who do not know what they are holding.

1. c.2003

   The quarantine has lapsed

   With the Crucible gone went the DMV’s protocols for containing the Continent’s engineered pests and diseases. What survived their purges were the most resilient specimens. If any of it reaches the metropolises outside, the Continent’s plague towns will be a footnote.

2. c.2003

   Shandorlan is filling up

   Refugees move deeper to escape the carnage above, and are prime recruiting ground for the Living Arsenal. The abominations of the War of Wonders are moving down too. The DMV considers this an acceptable outcome: a stone prison, far from the Corridor.

3. c.2003

   The Corridor Fortress

   At the far end of the French Corridor, where the land flattens toward Paris, the DMV checkpoint held when everything else broke. It is now a fortress with a permanent garrison and a mostly silent, uneasy posting. Occasionally Treads leave it. Less often, they come back.