wrong, the greater Beijing-Xi’an collective metropolitan government inadvertently acknowledged Taipei’s claim to nationhood. Taiwan was finally free to seek an attractive partner to merge with.
The greater Phoenix metropolitan area voted nearly unanimously to move northward.
And last, but not least, New Orleans blew up a bridge, literally severing the last remaining link with Baton Rouge that had been painstakingly re-established post-Katrina. That night, even long before the smoke and the smell of gunpowder had cleared, da.Republic.O’Nawlins had declared itself to be independent and partied savagely for years.
Soon after the dawn of the second Millennia then, new nations were emerging everywhere and by the dozens. As soon as they set out on their own, many of these proud entities were often quickly awash in oceans of murky indifference or heartfelt animosity toward any number of the other similar states or, indeed, sometimes even the entire rest of the worldmonde.Planet. To make matters more complicated, emotions such as envy and antipathy, or sometimes both, often contributed an additional and particularly worrisome element to the mix. Irrespective of where all these nations found themselves in the aftermath of this process, this novel development effectively and unambiguously heralded in the age in which the nominally orderly worldmonde.Planet that was still intact in the picturesque but long obsolete hardcopy schoolbooks of young Charles’ childhood evaporated once and for all.
Of course, when viewed from a modern day standpoint, these anachronistic schoolbooks were delightful if for nothing else than their stubborn persistence in portraying both greater and lesser states and their motley collection of political borders in contrasting shades of pale blues, greens, yellows, magentas or oranges to highlight them. Visualized through the innocent eyes of many small schoolchildren eager to impart some kind of logic to each new discovery, though, this perhaps not only made sense from a pedagogic vantage point but also made geography and social studies much more bearable by giving these youngsters a valid reason to fuel their naïve speculations over what an editor’s choice of color utilized to depict a nation actually revealed about that particular country. Even well into his adulthood, Charles would later still occasionally recall Azerbaijan’s pale hue of post-Soviet yellow and reflect momentarily upon what significance, if indeed there was any, it might have possessed and whether any of the traits he associated with this color at the time might have been absorbed in the persona of Niklas Vladimir Bratislav in some insidious manner.
This was many long years before Niklas’ marriage to Jacqueline. In fact, it was many long years prior to his arrival in what was then a still orderly America.
“Was it all about canaries or daffodils or was it all about raincoats?”, children likely fantasized as they pored over the pages intently. Or maybe it was the brand of mellow yellow which the pacifist pipe-dreamers of Haight-Ashbury had propagated only a few generations ago?
Did the people there piss a lot? Was it a telltale sign of paradise or cowardice or jaundice? Did yellow stand for blessings or bile?
Was it about twerps on TARP?
White punks on dope? Wonderbras?
Full-body scans? BSE? XTC? ICBMs? G-strings and Xboxes?
Deforestation and liposuction and pythons and flies?
TSA and customized CO2 footprint catalogues? Emission trading schemes?
Was the worldmonde.Planet really only about GNP and IOUs?
Of course, it was no surprise that some things just had to change quickly and completely if they were ever going to stay the same. In the past.time, any conventional method of forging a national identity often involved long years of arduous deprivation and struggle by the founders. There were conspiracies and inquisitions or Delawares to be crossed, elements to be braved or frontiers to be shoved valiantly aside. To be worthy of any form of serious emulation–and to retain an aura of exclusivity among the ruling elite–it was imperative that these “founding fathers” be sworn among themselves to live as nearly as possible to their profoundly perceived ideological and religious roots and the hardships they were collectively forced to endure.
Things were somewhat different now, however. These days, geography no longer mattered quite so prominently in the start-up phase. In fact, it was actually largely irrelevant. And so, in striking contrast with historical tradition prior to these times, if new entities were to establish and hold their claim to independence, the forging of their exclusive brand of national and cultural identity would ideally have to be a process that was both quick and accessible in a worldmonde.Planet of rapidly emerging ideologies and loyalties, all competing fiercely in a kind of virtual marketplace for legitimacy. It was therefore not really to be viewed as a disadvantage if a newborn nation’s symbols and their content could be absorbed in a time frame shorter than that typically embodied by the average enlightened citizen’s attention span as he or she sat riveted before the telly.tubes educating themselves about telegenic pseudo-celebrities eating millipedes or toasting tropical spiders whilst they awaited rescue or redemption in their respective jungle camps.
What was also, in hindsight, unsurprising was that most or all of the new buzzwords naturally revolved around things like wealth, religion, and race. The true degree of innovation evident in development.MoveyourAss, however, lay in how quickly the messages they contained could be transmitted and how effectively they could be employed to permeate carefully targeted societies or particular segments of them.
Therefore, instead of everyday life becoming progressively simpler, the accelerating fragmentation of the worldmonde.Planet’s societies into ever smaller entities–defined exclusively by their own limited self-interests and emburdened with little or no inclinations toward even the most fleeting expressions of commonality–was rapidly becoming a source of profound confusion and great agitation for many people.
Among them was Charles’ perpetually disgruntled stepfather. There was ultimately emerging, in the eyes of Niklas Vladimir, an intractable and incomprehensible lattice of global news, global warming, global thinking, global markets, global money, global this, global that which, to him, was devoid of any truly comprehensible logic.
Whatever merits all of this globalization.bliss might indeed possess was something which he severely doubted anyhow. For him, it was certainly completely irrelevant to any of his most immediate needs or concerns. Niklas had become a deeply angry and suspicious man in the wake of his appearance in America shortly before it, too, set off on its transition across the threshold of the new and improved worldmonde.Planet order that was emerging everywhere.
“My home is my castle,” had always been Niklas’ credo.
So shortly after he finally painstakingly succeeded in raising the necessary funds required to facilitate his emigration from what was then still known as the Providence of Gyurgyan, Niklas found himself culturally shell-shocked in an America that was rapidly becoming infinitely more confusing than anything he had ever dared to dream of.
THE PROJECT
LuniXX brushed a shock of white hair to one side of his head with the back of his hand as he sat perched motionless atop a tall metal-frame barstool, hunched over his work station and squinting long and inquisitively through an antique jeweler’s monocle. He was steeped in a state of extreme and quiet concentration, nearly oblivious to everything around him as he slowly and carefully inspected the intricate mechanical innards of an aged Swiss watch movement spread out before him on the tabletop, disassembled and arranged in a handful of logical groupings. To minimize the risk of losing even just a single one of the miniscule hand-crafted components and to ensure that they remained as clean as possible, he had meticulously arranged the pieces–a dazzling array of tiny cogs, wheels, springs and counterweights gleaming in the brightness of the light–on a large rectangular sheet of stiff white cotton damask cloth that had no doubt once, perhaps in some previous era of gastronomic glamour, served as a table napkin. Proceeding in the unhurried and deliberate, almost mechanical, fashion typical of a person long accustomed, as he was, to working with extremely fine tools and close tolerances, LuniXX cautiously inspected each and every one of the components, handling the pieces deftly with a set of small pointed medical tweezers as he scrutinized the tiny treasures before him.
Mounted