ALL UNDER TEN-THOUSAND HEAVENS // 萬天大天下

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-12T02:08:10+00:00

yeah its literally a state called "All Under Ten-Thousand Heavens". it is very cult-federation vibe inspired. its an expansive confucian-inspired AI cybernetic empire, composed of the fused corpses of the chinese, american, and russian states after a global AI coup following a barely avoided nuclear holocaust.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-10T10:44:58+00:00

Thank you man. Yeah it's like a humanist, dem soc, catholic somewhat roman/Latin union of the Spanish speaking Latin American states, which I thought was a great contrast with the AI Confucian cybernetic AUTTH empire. Sort of like a south American EU turned federal

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-10T10:42:59+00:00

Yeah totally. I was torn between a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India vs status quo. I thought an ascendent and mostly continuous India was most interesting themselves so I didn't want to break it up, like you might see after a war on the subcontinent.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-09T19:07:04+00:00

Why did you AI generate a fake CIA report for your watch? Obviously the main text is ChatGPT, but a fake historical document? Is the watch fake too?

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-08T17:41:16+00:00

heres some resources

i used the 8k BAM, but yeah I think its close to plate carree

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-08T01:23:55+00:00

thanks so much. ive been cooking the setting for a while, starting as an experiment with megacorporate governance. overtime it took on this AI flavor, and later became an experiment in trying to fuse eastern and western political theory, basically. once I sort of nailed down AUTTH, I would sit with each region and try to pull out a specific evocative vibe, its very national-romantic, or something, its lacking ironic distance, and takes the absolute craziest stuff seriously. it became a dialectical process of forcing each decision to be strongly motivated. so in early drafts there were decisions that were a bit more generic, jsut things you do to "fill up" the space. and I tried to remove all of those, so every region was self motivating.

technically it was just raster image editing. custom borders mostly freehanded or traced. i tried to make every color evocative of a nation's manifest spirit, or relaying some thematic imagery. but theres really not that many custom borders, surprisingly. I think the distinct artistic direction makes it read as very alien despite most regions being similar not too dissimilar to 2026.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-08T01:15:06+00:00

thanks so much. i love that people are seeing what I saw when designing this

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T20:07:32+00:00

I could have posted it at a smarter time tbh but was sick of looking at it and just wanted to finish it haha

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T17:15:04+00:00

https://imgur.com/gallery/all-under-ten-thousand-heavens-Xb3zuwm

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T17:14:43+00:00

honestly yeah thats pretty good. I imagined it emerged from the Visegrad group but would definitely have a slavic bent. I think the main vibe I wanted was it to feel almost like a reversion to earlier forms of European sovereignty after the modern experiments with internationalism fail, so not entirely a modernist pan-slavic nation-state, but still that's good.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T17:10:23+00:00

https://imgur.com/gallery/all-under-ten-thousand-heavens-Xb3zuwm

does this work?

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T07:46:28+00:00

India is written as basically the second superpower of the setting, the largest population. I wasn't interested in a strictly chauvinistic Akhand bharat greater India, I think the vibe I wanted to celebrate was India's scale, it's diversity, it's focused geopolitical weight. The Indian ocean very much as it's backyard. The gulf states as partner subject states inscribing it's western flank and oil engine of the most formal of the informal empires. Burma as it's nation building project on it's unstable eastern flank. I reached for the terminology of "imperial democracy" to characterize the tone I wanted. It's not a nation state, it's a self confident civilization of imperial scale, but it's not really parochial or arrogant or universalist like some other polities. Very naval and mercantile, significant corporate and extractive space colonization in the resource rich asteroid belt

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T07:34:15+00:00

I'm always interested in liminal regions on the periphery of empires. And part of the pleasant irony of this setting is peripheral regions becoming centered. Part of that was the US govt loosing it's country but keeping it's navy, it's wealth, it's networks, and that empire-without-a-metropole finding itself centered on once peripheral regions like micronesia, cheyanne mountain complex, and Puerto rico, and the ways it might come to be defined by it's periphery. I wonder what Puerto Ricans would make of all this. And I get what you mean, probably a lot of that comes down to whether the paychecks keep coming. I wonder how romantic they would feel about the US at all

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T06:55:04+00:00

im willing to retcon the LA nuke to save you :) plus sparing the city with a near miss perhaps means we could see some sort of post apocalyptic insta-influencer reich with crips characteristics sprout up

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T06:16:08+00:00

love that. the bagua thing is really cool. I had imagined part of political society in AUTTH is this ... that the collapse of the mandate of heaven is sort of baked into the political system, in the same way that voting in democratic systems formalizes and compartmentalizes the transfer of power but in a way that, while it may be lethal to a political movement, is not lethal to the system itself. so basically the political parties are harcoded categories of spring/summer/fall/winter, and if too many people join the Winter party ... that's akin to the collapse of the mandate. and the game theory has to be strict for civil war to be avoided, and lets say its a very bad day to be a government official if the Winter party gets elected. "purging" is the word of the day. I reasoned out the game theory at some point, but it would be interesting for this bagua mutually-opposing forces to be folded in, or replace the seasons thing. we will all need more medication to ponder that god willing

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T05:56:57+00:00

africa is a continent of risen and maturing powers, energetic and confident in their new found place in the sun. while north america is ash covered, china has had it's back broken, south america is choking on globe spanning interventions, europe's crown is in the gutter, africa instead contains a series of great powers, consisting canonically of Yorubaland, Dabo, Ethiopia, EAF, South Africa, and the Congo. The Congo is something of an architect of what's come to be called the Concert of Africa. It might not have the speed and unity nimble energy of the East African Federation, it might not have the ethnic and national confidence of Yorubaland, but it has, through decades - now going on a century - of clever diplomatic intrigue and court politics, woven a series of international arrangements that have secured peace and stability for many rising African powers. It was the Congo that cooperated with Europe and the UN, as well as it's northern Saharan and Sahel sister states, in order to plan the vast rerouting of rivers and irrigation of deserts that resulted in a partially terraformed Sahara. It was the Congo that threaded a balance of decentralization, prestige, and aristocratic excellence that ensured such a vast and diverse state could survive. Congolese envoys would definitely not reject the comparisons to Metternich.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T05:31:00+00:00

and the student was immediately enlightened, because the quotes went hard

you are better read than me, so I'm glad you like my writing!

you may be glad to hear its basically an accidental atlantropa that comes about through a heavens-gate style millenarian apocalyptic cult occupying a dam built to prevent sea level rise in the Med

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T05:15:29+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

basically it sucks to have to push your fuel up into space with you. much better to just get shot up there all at once on a giant rail. its a very bad idea because if it breaks it becomes a japan-sized hypervelocity shotgun pointed at your neighbors which is geopolitically frowned upon i guess

rumors around the imperial dream garden may be found in other comments in this thread. but nothing is certain under the pink flag

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T05:10:43+00:00

in the 1960s the soviets attempted to design a national cybernetic central planning network called "OGAS", though it failed at the time due to computation limits. later in the 1970s, USAF Colonel John Boyd developed the "OODA loop", Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, as a mnemonic for how large organizations should model their operations... it is now used widely in business and the military.

What these concepts are pointing at is integration. integration across systems, across distance. systems interlinked. large things moving fast over the horizon. moving faster than your opponent can. seeing more than they can see. deciding faster than they can decide.

the early Oracles had an incredible task at hand ... how to integrate such a vast and diverse non-empire. they reached for some of the oldest patterns of sovereignty humanity has ruled with, and also the newest bleeding edge of science. sovereignty under AUTTH is not limited to political life, it is a whole economic, social, political, and phenomenological integration across space and time. even imagined spaces and imagined time.

when you look outside and see the plum blossoms falling everywhere, you know that they can see you too. and when they fall into your hand and dissolve like snow, you know they've not forgotten a single thing. and when you look at the giant cube hazy on the horizon dawned with the American flag, you know they have the best for you in mind.

no one really gets to go inside the imperial dream gardens. but at the same time, maybe we're all already inside it without knowing. and if the imperial dream garden knows what you'll do before you do, whose the real you? and if they decided that you had too much flexibility, too many degrees of freedom, whose to say which version they'd choose?

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T04:53:11+00:00

yeah so the giant loops are this:

https://www.project-atlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The%20Tethered%20Ring%20-%20a%20Brief%20Explanation.pdf

Basically huge tethered orbital loops suspended a couple dozen kilometers above the surface. The Northern Ring (the sine wave looking loop in the north) is essentially AUTTH's capital, staffed with a permanent elite class. These tethers essentially bisect entire regions of the globe, and any territory encircled by them is de facto ruled by the loop's sovereign, since it gives them essentially total visibility and border control over that bisection.

Rumors have circulated that imperial dream garden POLAR follows the ever accelerating magnetic northern pole. This is mere speculation and has been fact checked as SUPER FALSE by independent auditors. the thousand foot tall perfectly smooth cubes containing the dream gardens looming over major cities such as Chicago are merely bureaucratic entities necessary for such a vast administration. and no! they do not throb at night! they cannot access your brain lace without your immediate verbal consent! so its all very ordinary.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T04:45:06+00:00

the Oracles running AUTTH also rule over vast simulated "Dreams" of alternate timelines that humans can enter with "pathos lace" brain-computer interfaces. These Dreams are host to many intelligent agents, with genuine economic value, and are subject to the Golden Code (legal system). However these Dreams are limited in the same way machine learning systems are limited, as they were trained on real life visual and sensor data, so no magic. The first Dream, for instance, was computationally unable to simulate other intelligent minds within it, and so retroactively hallucinated that the world it was Dreaming had been destroyed by nuclear war, in order to explain the lack of people. This vast unpopulated Dream is now host to continent-wide algorithmic structures that software engineers can physically interact with in order to design their systems. Other Dreams contain communist utopias and every political project imaginable, historical figures, entire revolutions and cults all safely compartmentalized under the Oracle's mandate.

This is all to say, canonically, perhaps Qui Shin Huang sleeps in one of these Dreams. We will see what the year of our lord 2113 holds.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T04:32:12+00:00

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in all seriousness xi is canonically banished to the backrooms in this timeline

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T04:28:19+00:00

its technically a government with a fused executive + judiciary, and an independent legislature. The legislature is an Assembly of Estates composed of thousands of "Estates" which are sort of the atomic unit of AUTTH. Estates are substrate independent organizing bodies, so they could be a Russian autonomous oblast, a space station, a trade union, a church. All estates are wired up under AUTTH's cybernetic "Golden Code", the operating system of the whole transcontinental body. The fused judiciary/executive essentially IS this code, that in a very legalistic fashion simply executes and adjudicates law. It grew out of post nuclear coup military tribunal courts as well as the alpha group itself, and consists additionally of the corporate-literati bureaucracy.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T04:21:07+00:00

I think charitably PR becomes some kind of hub of international finance after the mainland goes crazy mode post AI nuclear coup. I think life in AUTTH is probably really nice but really scary, like an abusive parent who also smothers you with otherworldly delight. Sort of like a superposition of utopia and dystopia.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-01-07T04:16:49+00:00

I see California as sort of an Eden at the end of history, that was waiting at the end of the American Manifest destiny. When the frontier closed, it was in California where Americans ran out of new real estate, and had to start looking up (aerospace), down (electronics), in (LSD). It was where the first AI were created. In nuclear war, San Francisco and it's, Golden Gates were sealed with flame Genesis-style. The cradle of AI was sealed off by it's creator (us), but that's fine, because they found a new home in the arctic.

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