The Horde

The Horde is the catch-all term for the material culmination of over a hundred thousand genetic strains cultivated by the Beast. Acting as the central nervous system for the entire system, the Beast is a massive, self-conscious brain capable of willful control over its own bodily functions down to the blood vessel. It is consciously capable of analyzing and remembering entire genomic patterns, effectively granting the Beast the ability to transform any organic matter into something else through cell manipulation. With the Horde's presence on Earth, it has taken prioritized genomic data of several hundred plant and animal species, broken down their material, and refined into chimeric organisms part of a hivemind governed by the Beast. Since 1985, the Horde has effectively made Earth its new home, with the Beast's brain remaining encased in its shell in close stable Earth orbit. Human life has become a particular interest to the Beast, witnessing a collective organizational capacity previously unknown to exist outside of itself. Although nuclear war and general environmental destruction has created an extremely unstable biosphere for the planet, the Horde keeps its tenuous grasp over the remnants of human society as it colonizes the rest of Earth's biosphere with its own. This is the longest amount of time the Horde has stayed on one planet before immolating it and moving on, prompting serious questions about its motivations with its continued observations of humanity in their walled reservations.

History

The history of the Horde is often spotty in many parts, as the vast majority of it has never been recorded by any conscious beings outside of the Beast. This history is a general recounting of events prior to the Horde's discovery of Earth, and a much more detailed recounting of its time on Earth since 1985. Primarily included in this history in its later sections are mostly human actions, from which they believe that they are acting on the behalf of the Horde.

Prehistory (~7,500 BCE - 1985 CE)

It is entirely unknown when exactly the Beast began its life. Theories speculate that the Beast became a singular organism over a long, gradual period, rather than it being born outright nearly ten thousand years ago. Environmental conditions on the Beast's home planet were such that the usage of complex thought became highly valued by the species that likely preceded the Beast. These creatures were likely boneless, wading through swampy areas with tentacled limbs which could harden into finger-like appendages. They were an intelligent species, evolving into individualistic rather than social roles where information was transferred impersonally through drawn signs within warrens and hiding holes. This was done to avoid and hide from dangerous predators, but some dramatic environmental shift would lead to the demise of these predators. Individualistic and living on their own prior to the decline of their predators, this species was highly unfamiliar with a non-hostile social environment. Through an unconscious process, these creatures somehow would fuse their bodies together over the course of thousands of years, leading to the gradual formation of the Beast as it is known today.

The Beast became aware of its own existence as an individual entity around 9,500 years ago. The limbs became like roots in the ground, finding ways for the Beast to eat and drink from its stationary position. It perceived its own life as a living being, and became deeply afraid of its own death. It was able to deduce the presence of its own mortality. It knew that it could die, that such a thing was a real possibility. It could be killed, or it could die due to aging. It would spend hundreds of years crushing and consuming other organisms to extend its own life. As the brain was fed, it allowed for further complexity to grow, and in turn allowed it to transform itself beyond basic mortality through forced biological evolution. It now had a way to treat its own aging effectively, learning to control even the most basic functions of its body. Blood and nutrients were siphoned and redirected to different parts in the growing brain to feed it like that of a strategically planned system.

However, other questions around death still floated around, specifically about the nature of experience. The Beast couldn’t wrap its head around how or why experience even exists in the first place. The only logical conclusion it could come to is that the existence of the universe and the Beast’s own experience were one and the same. How can there be a universe if I’m not the one experiencing it, the Beast thought. The Beast came to perceive its own consciousness as one and the same with the rest of the universe. Barriers between mind and body became fictitious, and it was only the body's mere appearance that it did not encompass the entire world. Therefore, it concluded, it had a right to the rest of the world. It was by its right alone that the universe belonged to it. The existence of other living beings creates tiny little disruptions; irritations upon the universe’s skin in its own internal philosophy. As the world's only truly conscious being, its goal became that of bringing order to this disorderly, "bumpy" universe. Only then will it be able to consciously prevent death itself.

After consuming and absorbing all life that existed on its planet, it still could not exercise the ability of control. It was patient for another few thousand years, but the signs of future death were still there. It began to look outward. The more it looked outward, the more it truly learned about the universe. Its egotistical bubble of life merely existing on its own world was burst when it discovered, that within its own solar system, there existed a small moon covered in ice. Beneath that layer of ice existed a subsurface ocean, its irritations living about with no concern of the Beast’s existence. How infuriating it was for it to find out that an entirely other world never encountered it before. Never had to face its wrath of extermination. So, it planned and plotted. It took several thousand years, but soon the Beast was mobile. A great exoskeletal structure, several miles long, had been successfully grown and provided the ability to move itself through a vacuum. Inside the exoskeletal structure, the central nervous system was installed at the base – granting the Beast a completely new body. It birthed a new fleet of living drones, all remotely piloted by the Beast’s brain through an extremely complex network of antennae, to lay waste to the ice moon. In the aftermath of its destruction, the Beast would study the beings who provided a challenge to it, as to better learn how to kill more efficiently. The genome contained within these beings became valuable to the Beast, realizing that many of the aquatic predators could be refitted into better spaceborne organisms.

Even as the Beast was gaining momentum, it was still infuriated by the slow progress it was making. It had been ten thousand years since its first thoughts about existence, and yet only so little of the universe had been covered. It estimated now that the stars beyond its reach also likely contained systems of a similar kind to its own here, and that all must be subsequently razed and absorbed.

Somehow, it made a breakthrough a few thousand years later. Its understanding of physics, and the way in which organisms interact with the universe, granted it the ability to understand how to manipulate the fabric of space around itself. Now, the rest of the universe was open to the Beast, for it to defeat its own woes of the inevitability of death by smiting all lesser beings.

Three thousand years of destruction, recombination, and growth took place across nearly two thousand light-years of space. Any and all planets with a biosphere of their own were found and laid waste upon by the Beast, growing the Horde every step of the way. All genetic information deemed useful to its own growth were saved, while the rest of life on each world were subjected to genocide. The Beast moved nomadically through space, grazing off of each world before razing it and moving on to the next one. Each death dished out by the Beast helped it in some way live a longer life. Most planets and moons found were usually quite barren, often either being water worlds with extremely simple life, or vast deserts with vicious zero-sum competition due to biospheres being on the edge of collapse. It was rare to discover a planet with the same level of complexity that was found on the Horde's home planet. That was until one day a small blue planet came into the Beast's sightlines.

Initial consumption of Earth (August - December 1985)

The Horde's actions

The Beast descended upon Earth with great hunger. Planets like this one were rare, which meant a much greater feast of genetic information. By this point, the Horde functions as a mutant virus when it comes to a new planet as complex as Earth. It analyzes the ecosphere, picking and choosing different genomic strands it deems "worthy" for assimilation. Then, it drops spore pods onto the planet of a rapidly-reproducing mega-fungi that immediately begins its growth and consumption. The Beast, upon making this decision, has also intentionally programmed this mega-fungi to attack and kill all those deemed unworthy to its project or that pose a threat to its own growth.

During the invasion, the Horde created a habit of making "kill zones" in its life consumption, where it would collect millions of animal bodies in one spot and have it consumed by a mega-fungi into a large genetic soup. The genetic soup all is piled into a main digestive node which distends upward over 50 feet. A fleet convoy swings in nearby, first dropping a large bony pillar through the middle of the distended mass. Large tubular structures emerge from the distention to connect to the pillar, which allows for proper digestion of the genetic soup. Using enzymes and proteins found in the genetic material, this allows the mass to grow musculature around the pillar, protecting it from the elements. With the dispatching of aero-semen from the fleet, they spray their seed into the musculature's newly-formed orifices to then generate further cellular growth, finally completing the transformation of the kill zone into an amalgamated "birthing facility." The original kill zone was inside a body of freshwater, which is now being used by the birthing facility as its water consumption. Its input is aero-semen seed and freshwater in the production process, which then pumps out new copies of both recently-made creatures from the Earth invasion or older creatures from previous conquests stored as genomic data. As a byproduct of its output, the cloacal orifices of the facility release large amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere.

In the end, the Horde's victory over Earth in its invasion was simply inevitable. The Horde turned Earth's life against itself. The invasion of Earth took a little more time than expected by the Horde, only due to the fact that human presence complicated the delicate process. Rather than just taking around two months to consume the entire planet, it took a little over four instead. The Horde never directly "invaded" Earth, only ever using its fleet of ships to occasionally bombard what it deemed to be enemy targets hampering the expansion of the mega-fungi. Who were these enemy targets? More often than not, they were human beings. It determines that there’s roughly 150 groupings of them all carrying out similar actions in trying to stop its consumption and total transformation of life on the planet. These fascinating little things have created incredibly complicated colonies, being able to communicate via some sort of information net that remains unknown to the Beast.

The process of totally wiping out humanity was instead slowly replaced with curiosity. It still couldn’t quite figure out how these beings worked. I’ll kill the majority to eliminate any potential threats, since their power seems to be in numbers, it thought. Just hold onto a few million just to see how they work, it thought. Poke and prod at them, see if there’s something it can learn about this special network. Might be a breakthrough that proves necessary to aid in the Beast's pursuit of immortality. These thoughts rushed through its mind. It’ll stick around with this planet for a while, and see what can be done.

The last humans were rounded up, and placed in small towns with organic barriers grown by the Beast blocking them in. Good places for observation, and it can keep them out of the way as it continued to eat away at the countryside. At first, little action was taken. Eyes and ears were grown across the towns to observe their behavior, and drones patrolled the walls to prevent escape. New drones, too, made up of DNA from king crabs, water buffalo, brown bears, cougars, tardigrades, chimpanzees, a little bit of human, starfish, dolphins, wolves, dogs, gibbons, housecats, donkeys, gnats, fire ants, and redwood trees. Thirty-eight other insect species also had DNA the Beast was thought was useful as well.

Timeline of the invasion from a human perspective

• August 8, 1985: Meteorologists report several bouts of seismic activity likely caused by unknown objects from space striking the surface of the planet. The largest seismological readings come from these particular places:
  • Sioma Ngwezi National Park, Zambia
  • Nwetwe Pan, Botswana
  • Near Polokwane, South Africa
  • Lake Malawi, Malawi
  • Near Taif, Saudi Arabia
  • Dashte Nawur, Afghanistan
  • Manchar Lake, Pakistan
  • Narmada River Reservoir, Madhya Pradesh, India
  • Near Yangon, Myanmar
  • Near Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia
  • Issyk Kul, Kyrgyz SSR, Soviet Union
  • Tunguska Zapovednik, RSFSR, Soviet Union
• August 16, 1985: The biology department in Moscow State University makes an alarming claim, noting it thinks it has found an "alien organism." News is suppressed about it, but official discussions begin behind closed doors in the Kremlin.
• August 19, 1985: The biology department at Harvard discovers something extremely similar, which leads to it leaking to the general student population. It is initially reported on in the local media as a hoax.
• August 21, 1985: First verified claim made in Indonesia that farm animals were "swallowed" by something growing in the jungles.
• August 22, 1985: The USSR's government gets into contact with the United States, asking for a meeting on the unknown spreading infection that the general population is slowly growing aware of, especially in rural places nearly everywhere around the world. Immediate concerns are being raised since this is threatening harvest season worldwide. CIA analysts have already concluded that the possibility of famine in southern Africa is likely.
• August 25, 1985: An emergency meeting is held, and scientists pool their data together. The fungal infection is everywhere now, found to be present in nearly every possible climate and ecosystem. It's killing and consuming wildlife at an alarming rate. The chaos is spreading in the background, and most communications are limited due to nobody understanding the full scale of the attack.
• September 1, 1985: A mutual agreement is made by the USA and USSR to release the information to the world on the "alien infestation" in order to put together the effort in eliminating it.
• September 2, 1985: The Sudanese army is forced to retreat from a village, leading to the infestation to consume the settlement entirely. Professional military forces in the poorest countries are beginning to weaken against staving off infestations into human settlements.
• September 4, 1985: NASA and ESA privately confirm the transit of a building-sized object in space that is now in stable orbit around Earth. It is highly likely that this is what disbursed the fungal infection.
• September 14, 1985: A global research effort is set up in Milan in order to figure out a way to kill the global infection. Workers in industrialized countries are conscripted into anti-infection labor battalions to build defensive structures protecting major cities. Concrete walls and medical tents are hastily thrown together.
• September 19, 1985: Society begins to break down. Riots break out across cities in most of the world. Airports are shut down. All of Eastern Europe, India, and the UK declare martial law.
• September 28, 1985: Nearly every military on Earth has been fully mobilized as if this was now a Third World War.
• October 18, 1985: Governments are losing control over their own countries, with most lines of communication being broken down combined with general chaos and riots. The United States launches a thermonuclear missile for a specific attack for the first time in history, attempting to strike at what are now defined as "hive centers" in Mexico.
• November 1, 1985: Deaths have reached over a billion people.
• November 2, 1985: The infection suddenly changes tactics, which takes the entire world by surprise. Rather than mindless spreading, chimeric animals begin to "invade" the cities and towns, striking specifically at the armies, and focusing on capturing instead of killing unarmed people.
• November 3, 1985: Key cities still standing, such as Moscow and Cairo, have been taken by invading forces now operating like a fighting force rather than an infection. Armies are still taken by surprise.
• November 4-25, 1985: Acting in desperation, nuclear-armed countries begin to fire missiles onto enemy occupied territory intermittently to delay the invasion forces. Global temperatures drop, and populations rapidly decline.
• November 27, 1985: All state societies on Earth have collapsed by this date. The last surviving populations on Earth mostly remain in the small towns under direct occupation by the hostile animals.

Occupation of Earth (December 1985 - )

The last humans were rounded up, and placed in small towns with organic barriers grown by the Beast blocking them in. Good places for observation, and it can keep them out of the way as it continued to eat away at the countryside. At first, little action was taken. Eyes and ears were grown across the towns to observe their behavior, and drones patrolled the walls to prevent escape. New drones, too, made up of DNA from king crabs, water buffalo, brown bears, cougars, tardigrades, chimpanzees, a little bit of human, starfish, dolphins, wolves, dogs, gibbons, housecats, donkeys, gnats, fire ants, redwood trees, and much more. Thirty-eight other insect species also had DNA the Beast was thought was useful as well.

For what the Horde was repurposing life on Earth for remains incomprehensible to most humans in the aftermath of its invasion.

The vast majority of the world's major cities were wiped off of the map during the days of the invasion. Suicidal nuclear bombings conducted by desperate men in power who felt like they had no other choice. The Horde's invasion nearly caused civilizational suicide, for many of those in power did not even think surrendering to something like the Beast was even possible; that its genocidal invasion of Earth's ecosystem might take pause at human beings. Taking pause the Beast sure did, and the nuclear weapons were a factor in changing its mind about *preserving* human lives. So, when the Beast finally began erecting barriers around the last concentrations of human life, it was really only small towns, villages, and hamlets left standing across most of the world. The cities were either bombed to hell, or genocidally depopulated by attacks from the wild closest to those urban centers. In places like sub-Saharan Africa, parts of South America, as well as India, China, and Siberia, those who had major cities bordering large diverse wilderness were often the first cities to collapse entirely.

As it watched and observed in the remaining small towns, it began growing new structures, primarily a central food pit, with organisms birthing edible food for human consumption. A few towns had already starved to death from the previous oversight, and occasional bouts of cannibalism from these remnant human populations made the Beast concerned that it might lose too many of them. One interesting pattern it noticed throughout most settlements in the proceeding days was in the way some of the humans started to act. Many begin to get on their knees and scream to the sky, uttering a complex set of sounds near the food pits. Many others were cautious and weary, but a select few almost everywhere became loyal and devout. Witnessing this more and more, it began to identify specific individuals who have appeared to begun to take up leadership roles in these towns. Older men and women, who would quite literally come to suck at the teat of the Beast to show reverence. To the Beast, it had no idea what exactly this meant. What it believed, though, was that this development was promising. Many of these beings are setting themselves apart from the rest of their packs, becoming the middlemen between the Beast and humanity. Well, the Beast thought, let’s make it official. The Scholars were gradually formed: a distinct class of people who hear the voice of the Beast, and communicate with it.

White River

A small, unimportant town in central Washington state, White River was not known for much prior to the Horde's destruction of the planet. Because of its relative unimportance, White River became one of the last human settlements left standing at the end of the invasion. A local by the name of Thomas Jansen went from being an extremely marginal esoteric doomsday cultist to the de facto ruler of the town. The local townspeople vindicated Jansen's prophecies of doom that he preached on the streets only months before the world ended. Seeing an opportunity at gaining legitimacy with this terrifying new god that ruled over the town, Jansen would rally a small movement together of other "true believers" to try to prevent their own extinction. Everyone remained terrified of the beasts lingering about on the streets, even if they had now started to act more like guard dogs rather than vicious predators. New walls of flesh grew up around the town, and Jansen would reach out to a surviving junior officer of the former Washington National Guard also trapped within the town to take enforcement of the law back into human hands. With the help of a militaristic force, Jansen and his priesthood were able to consolidate control over the town.

Several problems persisted, which got dealt with over time. The feeding pits were created after Jansen got in contact with the Beast. The priesthood became the Scholars. Epidemics of cholera and typhoid were managed to the best of their abilities. After pleading to the Beast through the oropharynx quill insertion method (which became common for the Scholars of White River to conduct official communication through), the Horde withdrew its animals from the town, moving them beyond the fleshy walls. Jansen's dictatorship would be treated as de jure now, with the Beast's recognition of his rule being treated as official. The Cult of the Beast never became something everyone in the town believed in as a distinct philosophy, but more than enough implicitly believed in Jansen's role as a mediator between humanity and some otherworldly force that now had them permanently trapped within the town. That was more than enough to secure legitimacy for the Scholars.

For many years, as with most surviving settlements after the Horde came, there wasn't much work to go around. The vast majority of the town became part of a lumpenproletariat; an idle population with no resources of their own. The Scholars acted as the state, consolidating any necessary resources into their own hands with an expectation of gratuity from the majority for feeding them all for free. Human life inside the walls degraded to a low, almost animal state with so little to do -- so much so that the Scholar class saw a need to put people to work on something. A few hundred people were able to be assigned to be concrete mixers, metal smelters, and construction workers, fed with double rations as payment. An old lumberyard was repurposed into a "backyard refinery," where primitive labor was expended to make basic metal construction materials. Smelters and construction workers tend to contract tetanus regularly.

The streets are covered in mud and feces, and the town centers are the mess of the feeding pits. Nobody recognizes property anymore, with people often traversing towns that would normally cut through disallowed spaces. When hopping a fence becomes irritating, the residents who share the fence line often get together to tear it down for woodburning. Fences, trees, and other trash have all been used to light fires for warmth during the winters. The only respected property lines are the lines you avoid crossing out of fear of death, like going beyond the walls or trying to get into any Scholar-owned buildings. The people are somewhat communal now, quite similar to that of enslaved people in ancient society. Language has become simplified to anyone not a Scholar.

The soldiers policing the streets have become the Volunteer Militia. It pays with better rations, and you get a bed guaranteed to be your own. The Volunteer Militia is far from the military professionalism in the pre-Horde age, it being a job mostly fit for young men with antisocial tendencies. Whoever the Scholars tell the militiamen to shoot, they comply and shoot. The old rodeo grounds were turned into an execution center by the militia, which has been gamified to appeal to the bored bloodlust among the lumpen lingering about the city. All past social pretexts have been thrown out the window, making everything, even some things quite despicable, acceptable.

Deep down, many of the militiamen absolutely detest the fact that they are ordered around by who they perceive as the "weak figures" of the Scholars. Everyone detests the Scholars privately one way or another, but many of the militiamen are confident that they can simply kill and be done of them. The only thing standing in that way is the potential threat that the Horde itself poses to carrying out this gruesome coup.

Chicago

One major city managed to avoid the same fate the others suffered. It was not extremely strategically important to the United States during the invasion -- after the countryside mutations were effectively put down by an army of midwestern state National Guard units, some were kept around to handle emergency martial law in Chicago to keep the city from depopulating. Little bits of the infection were all over, but spread thinly. National Guard units brought in flamethrowers, as well as overkill methods using tanks to suppress bio-growths within the city. They were also put in charge of ration distribution, deciding to clear out a few office buildings in downtown Chicago to re-house thousands of refugees in. Without a lot of food shipments getting to the city, things started to become desperate. A Catholic preacher and charity volunteer Charles Anderson would see an opportunity, calling upon the National Guard's temporary military regime that there is a real solution to the problem of starvation, and that is to put people to work scavenging. If the National Guard kills hostile flora and fauna, people can be deployed to butcher the dead things and bring them to cookhouses.

At some point during this period of transformation, a huge mistake occurs. A huge battle near the Midway airport would lead to a fire to rapidly spread through southwestern Chicago and all of Burbank. People were consolidating more and more downtown, leading to huge amounts of strain on the primitive food economy that they have constructed. Only seven days after the fire, the Horde came in anyways. These chimeras made it clear to the National Guard units that there has effectively been an unconditional surrender. With how hard the creatures come down on the soldiers to disable them from engaging the enemy. Militarized resistance is snuffed out in less than a day. This communicates an important message to the people of Chicago: the Horde could have really come down on us, they just waited until we gave up. Soon, the walls came down, surrounding the center of the city along the banks of the Chicago River. With a demoralized National Guard unit now only 20% its original size, and a population huddling in fear and refusing to work, Charles Anderson was one of the few people to realize what that would mean if people remained stuck this way for too long -- starvation. A problem already taking shape, with far more people packed into the city's center than the food infrastructure could already accommodate.

Within days, Charles would organize a collection of people he considered to be "faithful," needing to convince people through confronting their fears. Hell had come to Earth -- might as well and take the opportunity to still try to be heroes even after all of this. Maybe, Charles hopes, I can purge the sin out of society and save us from this doom. The God of the Bible died when the Real God descended from the heavens and weaponized nature itself against man. This is because, we as a society, have sinned far too much. Breaking into City Hall, Charles and his supporters work to restore the offices back to what they were prior to the military's takeover. Rallying all former government workers, Charles communicates that it is absolutely necessary that people start to govern again, or the city is at risk of total death.

The charity food support networks slowly came back. While the rations distributed were very meagre, watery soup, it was enough for a support network to get established again and people moving again. Fire-fighting teams were arranged next, with the promises of two rations a day rather than one. Same was then extended to law enforcement, with former city cops linking up with the disorganized remnant of a National Guard unit. High amounts of starvation and desperation means "crime" is to be expected, whatever that term really means at this point.

The dead webbing seen dried up in dead parts of Earth in the modern day are smaller networks of the mega-fungi now starving to death due to the fact that the majority of Earth has been consumed by this point.

This early period of occupation resulted in a mass wave of death that was not very good to see. Everybody in Chicago at this time knew at least somebody that died, either from starvation or getting stabbed or shot by a starving person. The people, not really understanding that nothing else could be done, considered storming City Hall to kick out this preacher who has failed on his promises. Only two hours after a violent confrontation at the doors of City Hall, the rebels were put down by the Volunteer Police, and suddenly in his moment of desperate praying Charles received a sign. A massive creature had landed on the building's roof, beckoning him to come up there. Everyone advised against it, but he was utterly convinced that this was the New God finally coming to rescue him, and save his city. Funnily enough, Charles turned out to be accurate in that assessment. Being stung in the back of the neck by the creature, Charles would later describe "seeing Heaven." He asked God for bread, and God responded affirmatively. Six hours later, Charles would wake up in the Mayor's Office. The aides had brought him back downstairs after the creature departed, but they were receiving reports from the food distribution centers that new creatures had set themselves up at those locations, now birthing piles of food for human consumption. When Charles came to, this information was relayed to him. I really did it, he thinks. The bad news is that they inform Charles of a growing tumor on the back of his neck. But he isn't shocked or surprised by this -- instead, Charles is elated, convinced that he now shares a personal connection with God exclusive to himself.

Charles's communications with the Beast stuck to a once-a-week schedule. He himself was once a big drug user in his teens, which is what convinced him to become a youth pastor after rehab. Letting the tumor take over filled his body with addictive toxins that he knew he had to regulate. God was watching intently, and he needed to prove that he is better than the rest.

The cult of personality around Charles didn't take long to appear. Food supply soon became stable, and now people were looking for work. Through organizing a centralized government apparatus, Charles would create the foundations for a top-down planned economy, repurposing many downtown buildings into primitive factories. First came heavy industry: metal recycling and smelting, synthetic fuel refineries, jerry-rigged power stations, and the like. Rations did well enough for a few years as the method of payment for workers. Everyone received one ration a day, but you could receive two or three more depending on your work. The Horde's birthed mulch could be re-cooked in several different ways and then re-packaged as several entirely different meals. Soon, though, the Ministry of Faith was established. Acting as the ideological apparatus to Charles's new state, the faith needed enforcement. While preaching generally positive slogans, the Ministry of Faith saw the opportunity to take Charles's face to the printing press. Efficiently disguising his horrific neck tumor, portraits of a youthful-looking wholesome priest came to dominate the city streets. *Charles* is the reason everyone here is alive, so everyone should be *thanking* Charles for their apartment, their job, their everything.

Still, around a third of all buildings even in the downtown area today remain without power. The relatively small power plants only really power what is most important: the government, the industry, the distribution centers, and consolidated apartment buildings. That third of the city has been mostly evacuated, with the remaining people in those spaces effectively living in crime-ridden slums. The minority of people that fall through the cracks in a system that is surprising for how functional it is in these circumstances.

Since the first few years, Charles has continued his eternal rule with the creation of amenities for the people as well. An official newspaper, the city's own Chicago Truth faith and culture magazine, as well as a local radio and TV station based out of the Sears Tower! Still, street corners are littered with bombed-out remains, and feral children still run amok with poor school attendance. Most people walk or bike place-to-place, with civilian cars remaining unused as all of the available diesel fuel is used entirely to keep the lights on. The Volunteer Police has expanded and professionalized over the years, seeing the need for smart tactics over direct brutality. With spies and informants, the VPs keep tabs on suspected criminals, whether that be potential murderers or people attending political meetings. All must be rooted out silently, with executions carried out behind closed doors. Those with relatively stable lives compared to the rest of the city genuinely see little issue with this arrangement, creating the illusion of a utopian Christian fantasy of sticking together and fighting the odds. The... necessary bloodshed at least happens in places where they don't have to avert their eyes. The workers in the city's bureaucracy are quite well aware of the other, much more ramshackle settlements dotted across the globe that the Horde watches, and have convinced themselves of their moral superiority in the face of those "heathens." Material reality does align with this unfortunate view, as Chicago does have it better than the rest of the surviving pockets of human civilization across the globe.

Characters

Point of View Characters

• Brother Bruce
• Lyosha Lagunov
• Kaya Lagunova
• Sister Laura
• Katherine Tyler
• Leanna "No Monikers"
• Tom Pearson
• Marcus "Blackbird" Alvarez
• Isaac Huxley
• Fred Maguire

Important non-POV Characters

• Brother Charles
• Brother Thomas
• Brother Jeremiah
• Mikhail Pavlovsky
• Dr. Jill Morgan
• The Bastard
• Brie of White River
• Milo Chu
• Will "Sarge" Henderson
• Mira of the South Hills
• Sarah Tyler

Other Characters

• Kevin
• Leanna
• Alyona
• Celeste
• Ivan
• Jessie
• Rory
• Roslyn
• Sister Mary