Midnight Dark - Fiction

I've very nearly finished laying out the book and finalizing the text. I've just got a few more missions to write and a few more upgrades to devise and we'll be done.

Which means, of course, that I now have to turn to developing the fiction to support the game! The setting for Horizon Wars is pretty well developed, even though I've struggled to make headway on any of my attempts to write a single narrative (which, it turns out, might be the fault of that ADHD I've previously mentioned).

However, those of you with a copy of the original will recall that the setting is intentionally and explicitly satirical. But some Big Stuff has happened since I wrote the original setting in 2015, which means that the historical record of The Burning (the nuclear holocaust of 2117 and its aftermath), which represents the primary setting for Midnight Dark, needs updating.

I've toyed with a lot of different directions. We've got Trump, Brexit and the alt-right movement. We've got Ukraine. We've got the rise of A"I" machine learning models and content generators. It's a rich and verdant land for the satirist to plunder. But after many false starts, I've decided that at least some of these are just too serious and depressing - not to mention too immediately unresolved - to make good fodder.

Instead, I ended up going in a direction that I hope still hits the right notes in terms of having something to say, but which isn't as depressing as grappling with the rise of neofascism. I thought you guys might enjoy a completely exclusive taste of where I decided to take things:

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With the benefit of the so-called Oxford Data, we can say with some certainty that the event that initiated the Burning — the period of and immediately succeeding the nuclear holocaust of late 2117 — was certainly the British military operation recorded as “Operation Plantagenet”.

However, it is now apparent that this was a more complex event — politically, socially and militarily — than we had previously imagined.

British society, during the mid- to late-Twenty-First Century, seems to have increasingly divided into two social groups: the influencers and the influenced. From an analysis of the records, combined with what we already gleaned from the Venusian and Martian archives, it looks like influencer society was closely analogous to pre-revolutionary France, in which there were multiple classes and strata of influencer, all tied together in a complex web of obligations, relationships and trade agreements. Meanwhile, the influenced were largely sedentary, passive consumers of the media devised by the influencers to control them.

Operation Plantagenet might have begun as an in-joke among influencers that accidentally escaped and obtained a life of its own. Military leaders — most of whom were low- to mid-level with substantial groups of “followers” among the influenced — boosted the #OperationPlantagent and #InvadeFrance memes in concert with their own attention-grabbing mech hardware.

It remains unclear whether the actual assault in the spring of 2116 was a planned, intentional act or just a poorly-advised stunt initiated by junior military influencers in the hope of raising their profiles among their class. In any case, a British mech contingent emerged from a mothballed tunnel under the stretch of water between the British islands and the continent (the existence of which has been largely corroborated by radar imaging of the area) and engaged French border forces.

Footage of the attack apparently “went viral” in a way that led to dozens more military influencers converging on the beachhead before scattering, with the largest group making for Paris.

The Oxford Data suggests that this “content” was enormously popular with the influenced population, whose role in political affairs was largely reduced to voting for certain things or people on an irregular basis and whose favour as a group was therefore highly valuable to the influencers, even though their value as individuals appears to have been minimal. It is now impossible to know whether the political will to endorse and pursue Operation Plantagenet came before or after the fact.

It is also impossible to know to what extent the situation in Britain was similar to that in other nation states at the time and, therefore, whether the reprisal attacks on British territories called “Gibraltar” and “Falkland” (the locations of which have not yet been identified with any certainty) were similarly motivated. The escalation of the conflict, though, does seem to have been the apex of a trend amongst British influencers to boost their status through bigger and bigger acts of military destruction.

We hope that the archaeological expeditions currently combing through the east coast territory of the northern American continent will be able to use our dig site findings to assist them in locating an intact repository there. Unfortunately, a promising intact server that was uncovered last year has yielded a narrative so ludicrous that the entire site has been written off as an elaborate hoax.