In an increasingly G-rated world, where everything in every sphere of life is becoming catered to children and politically correct work environments, one woman seeks the ultimate solution. She’s known only as Antigony as she sets out to create a free society for those who think like her. Antigony journeys over land and sea to garner interest in the cause. There’s just one major obstacle: the majority resist giving up viable land for a purpose they find threatening. Devoted to her mission, Antigony assembles a rag-tag group of militaristic pirates: nihilists, philosophers, anti-breeders, homosexuals, scientists and engineers. Totally kickass people with a thirst for adventure without conventional morals.
The band of pirates name themselves the Aesir, after the war-like idols of the Vikings. Under this new banner, they find common purpose and begin scheming their transhumanist plot. The Aesir focus their developments on life-extension and soon achieve its highest goal; immortality. Breeding is useless and insustainable for the Aesir. They become completely dedicated to advancing the Arts and Sciences. The Aesir successfully assemble the technology and military force needed to claim their Nation-Space. Then begins their Revolution, and from that the new Nation of Lemuria is born.
Lemuria's citizens live free from the cold rationalism of the old society. No longer mired in pragmatism and free from slavery to the most sacrificial of biological imperatives. Lemuria becomes a hedonistic paradise where everything is permitted; work is abolished, people pursue creation dictated only by passions.
But this does not bring peace between the lands.
The desire for a free society becomes a quest to eradicate the old society; their sentimental values and further prosperity threaten all life of planet earth. The Aesir find the old society despicable in its martyrdom and self-sacrificial slave morality. They are disgusted by the masses who remain; still pushing out new carbon footprints, over-consuming resources, destroying ecological diversity and balance. The Aesir realize that people clinging to the old ways must be stopped; by all means possible.
Force is needed; for if not, they will be left without a planet to live on.
Antigony leads the Aesir in a quest for global domination. They recognize that the enemy’s highest Idols must be destroyed first. These Idols the Aesir call ‘Time-Burglars’ or ‘Need-Machines.’ A second-rate form of achieving immortality through breeding deserves neither tribute nor indulgence. Aesir world domination begins with the extermination of all children. For clinging to useless Idols, the Aesir dub their enemies the Sentimentals; Sentis for short. The only mercy the Aesir allow is a quick death for those who don’t resist.
The War waged is successful. Total victory for Lemuria is near. Sights of the Need-Machines grow scarce. Sentis live in fear, cowering in what sporadic pockets of their society still remain. In a futile attempt to preserve their way of life, the Sentimentals propose a solution: they will leave Earth for Mars. Antigony wont accept this, as she can’t risk retaliation.
Such superficial reasoning hardly scratches the surface.
Lemurian society has become consumed with hatred for Senti ways, for their fun-spoiling. The Sentis very existence turns Lemurian culture increasingly blood-thirsty, the need for violence must be slaked above all else. This desensitization leads to further extremes needed to get their rocks off, and satisfy more primitive urgings. No longer can the Aesir afford to exterminate the Sentis; they’ve become supreme outlets. Inevitable yet unforseen.
The Aesir need them now. Their slavery to violence demands a gladiatorial spectacle.
Pursuing the fine line between sex and violence becomes the highest Lemurian value; through it they seek spiritual transcendence at the expense of their enslaved subjects.
The bloodsports quickly dwindle the number of suitable outlets for violence. The scientists of Lemuria devise a solution; they fuse their transhumanist technology into their enemies, in order to prolong their lives as they turn outlets for their overlords. Sentis have been modified to have sublime pain tolerance, regrow limbs and regenerate blood so gallons can spill from just one individual. All this, without dying. Sentis now join the Aesir in immortality.
Out of the need to adapt to supernatural levels of suffering the Sentis form an underground culture. In the search for reprieve they make a God of Masochism. Through this new mythos they cope. The Sentis' own scripture, art, and legend emerge as they learn to accept and grow strong in their pain. It's now an Ethos to have their life-essence spilled by their blood-lusting torturers, as if baptising those who once enslaved them as invite into love reborn from hatred.
The two cultures form a symbiosis, feeding of each others parallels and polarities.
A dystopian reality becomes a completely ingrained culture, a new utopia where all human impulses, most base and most exhalted, are satisfied; the longing to simultaneously experience constraint and complete freedom is resolved.
Except one thing shakes the civilization up and threatens to destroy all they had fought, killed, suffered to achieve.
An Ancient God awakes. So much blood had poured into the soil, it had reached the tomb where he did rest since primordial time. The bloodbath awakened the God, who was displeased to find his body soaked in red from the antithesis of all he stands for. The Ancient God reveals himself as Mythras; manifestor of all that is Order, Love, and Peace. He declares his outrage at all the formless violence and seeks to vanquish the new ways of the mortals.
Mythras proves a formidable force. Lemurian technology is no match for his anti-blood magic. Once again the Aesir are forced to War, now seeking to preserve their freedom from the docile condition of total peace. In his constant quest for knowledge, one Lemurian archaeologist thinks he's discovered signs of how to overcome this God. It may be the only way.
The Civilization must awaken Mythras' opposing chaos-Goddess; but has she survived being abandoned from worship for aeons?
Figured I'd take intermittent breaks from the novel I already started writing to create something easier to just write freely, for fun and practice. There's a lot of potential things to write about from this:
-Antigony in the time before the Aesir
-their quest for domination
-the masochistic mythology developed by the Senti slave caste
-their life-extension tech
-the gladiatorial bloodsport and how its enhanced by transhumanist technology
-the genocide of all children; for the daring and not feint of heart (sorry! lol)
-the sex and violence to transcendence mythos
-what Mighty Mythras-the-Pissed-Off does
-who is the archaeologist and how did he find shit out
-the search for the chaos Goddess
-Et Cetera and imagination is the sky's limit!
If anyone else would like to write something from this go ahead. It can be comical, silly, serious, whatever. I'm not getting sentimental about it.
I paid tribute through influences from Cities of the Red Night by Wiliam S. Burroughs. A timeless favourite.