The New Prussian Kaiserreich

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Siege
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The New Prussian Kaiserreich

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The New Prussian Kaiserreich

“Oh Kaiserreich! Oh marvel of erudition and transhuman thinking! Your glazed Bauhaus belfrys, reaching vainly for the stratosphere’s embrace, and your mammoth spaceports, brinks of absconsion into intellectual dimensions! Your universities, vain cathedrals dedicated to the great god of cogitation, and vaster than the walls of Babylon! How incessantly you toil for the sweetest of cosmic pinnacles. How your Empire of Letters supplicates itself before its idol, its golden image -- Science! And for to please Her you will reach for Her fruits, and you will taste the gift of Knowledge, and you will know Eden no more.”

The New Prussian Kaiserreich is, depending on who you ask, either a gleaming monument to forward thinking or a collection of emotionally stunted nutballs meddling with forces beyond their comprehension. Certainly it is a collection of extremes: it would like to present itself as a supremely rational state guided by competent people full of objective thoughts and good intentions, but in reality it is more akin to a warring federation of bureaucracies, some of which don’t officially exist, some of which only exist on certain days, and most of which have conflicting jurisdictions. It is a state in which universities directly administer large territories, where science is greatly revered, and where Knowledge really does equal Power.

Prussian society is a technocratic meritocracy dominated by the New Tomorrow movement. This relentlessly future-oriented cause seeks ‘to discard old truths and seek out new ones’: it is firmly of the opinion that the past is an abyss from which humanity has only barely freed itself, and it is very much best not to look back into it, lest Prussia ends up a feuding nightmare like so many of its surrounding states. Rather, the focus of its citizens is on the New Society; the New Art, the New Dance, the New Science and so forth. Every aspect of society continuously seeks to radically evolve itself into something new and better. This progressiveness is a great idea in theory except for one niggling fault: it is terribly divisive.

From the New Music to the New Architecture to the New Science, Prussian society tends to break apart into snooty subcultures each of which believes itself to be the only true vanguard of the future, whereas all others are universally flawed legacies of regressive old thinking. Sometimes these divisions manifest in relatively petty acts of minor vandalism, such as one faction of Chaos Horticulturists taking their lawn mowers to the geometrically perfect Math Garden maintained by a particularly rigid Algebraic Arborean. Other times however it can lead to massive feuds between the bureaucracies of a single university, or even between different universities entirely. In order to not let these conflicts spiral out of control the Kaiserreich has erected a bewildering tangle of red tape that would give even Kafka nightmares: agencies, committees, administrations and authorities, councils and bureaus and jurisprudences concern themselves with smoothing over the differences, determining what New Thinking is truly New and what is just rehashed old balderdash, what is useful and what isn’t, and so forth. In many cases this just leads to busywork that fuels the meritocratic machine, turning much of Prussian society into a kind of Darwinian bureaucratic ecosystem in which the most skilled officials thrive and rise to the top. But this cannot be said to be true for the New Science.

Because the New Science is serious business. The New Science involves the manipulation of human minds, of matter and energy on a level so fundamental it’s essentially twisting and reshaping the universe itself into a desirable shape, and of remote dimensions full of terrors. It is very potent, very potentially destructive, and Prussian scientists are crashing through its unexplored landscape at the recklessly dangerous pace of two competing explorers racing for the heart of some undiscovered continent. Except instead of lost cities there may be terrifying mind-eating gribblies at the finish line.

In order to contain the damage done by said gribblies a singular overarching judicial bureaucracy has been put in charge of monitoring all Prussian science. The Wissenschaftsrat is the ultimate authority on anything in Prussian space, a collective made up of the most prominent rectors, engineers, philosophers and scienticians in the Kaiserreich. Its most prominent task is to curb the enthusiasm of the myriads of mad scientists produced by Prussia’s engines of learning. And its most prominent tool for doing this is the Technopolizei. This special police agency’s existence is officially a secret, but its agents are feared amongst all academics. The thankless task of its inspektors - or, as they are more commonly called, spekters - is to keep track of all the secret research and weapons projects carried out throughout Prussian space, and to keep tabs on the typically fairly insane people working on them and make sure they do not contact the wrong extradimensional entity or accidentally unleash forbidden sentient thoughts upon a (mostly) unsuspecting populace.

Their task is a difficult one, for many scientists resent the interference of the Technopolizei as hide-bound reactionary nonsense of the worst kind. These are the sort of mad scientists who might hide tomes full of heretical cogno-memetics on the shelves of back alley bookstores, where it is just a matter of time before they imprint on an unsuspecting passer-by forbidden knowledge about dimensional engineering, or how to draw the attention of the dark matter creatures that dwell in the infinitely cold depths of intergalactic space. To the stalwart agents of the Technopolizei falls the thankless task of rounding up such knowledge and locking it away for the good of the Kaiserreich. But even though they are outnumbered and frequently outthought by their opponents, the officers of the Technopolizei have one potent ally: because from its unapproachable digital vantage deep within the Prussian datasphere, the omniscient K41-S3R watches all with benevolent, unblinking robot eyes...
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Re: The New Prussian Kaiserreich

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Fantastic! Mad science meets obsessive competitiveness and overgrown bureaucracy, all under the gaze of an omniscient robot overlord, wunderbah!

Did I say overload? I meant protector.

I particularly love the idea of everything being built on an obsession with being new and breaking through barriers, and everything being overlaid with competing organs of government, sounds absolutely bewildering without an apparent plague of mad scientists running around.
"Little monuments may be completed by their first architects, but great ones; true ones leave their copestones to posterity. God keep me from completing anything."
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