The issue with what the International Health and Militaristic Division (I.H.M.D.) called “Walls,” was that a great many of them were constructed rather hastily upon the Zero Event. Indeed, many were constructed in a manner of weeks, and while that sounds like a triumph, the Walls were often quite fragile and didn’t stop neither the infection, nor the impudent anarchists from the outside. In limelight, however, it was perhaps more ignorant for us to entrust our lives to the I.H.M.D. as we had.
The first weeks of the Zero Event were perhaps the most hostile and traumatizing of my days. My family spent a good portion of it locked away in a bunker underneath a Wall in Valu City. I spent a great number of hours training mandatorily for combat effectiveness, including firearms training and Tagonic strategy. Luckily, my understanding of the Tagonic arts was perhaps one of the most well developed among the Wall, and I quickly picked up on combat tactics relayed onto me in the event of a catastrophic emergency.
This catastrophe was not far ahead either, as on one Winter afternoon, about three months after Zero Day, there was an insurgency which usurped the Valu City wall and declared a Normatite hegemony. This was the first time I had ever seen real combat, but far from the first time I had seen destruction.
In the past, there were many misanthropes among the government sector which became clearer and clearer as I became more involved. It was oftentimes that many of these discussions and decisions from which I was present for were protected under law by a non-disclosure agreement. Only now, as the laws are more or less irrelevant, can I speak about the true heinous crimes committed by those we used to entrust with our lives.
These perpetrators who tore me from my family and separated us, and removed the only feeling of security we had felt for three long months, were indeed also monsters. However, it was the titans of this ideology -- a Normatite hegemony -- which has been built into the minds of the supremacists since the day Tornun was founded. Indeed, Tornun holds the rightful birthplace for the advent of Normatite Race Theory, wherein the creation of what are considered “races” created a bonafide, superior race: the Normatites. This notion was grandfathered in by the initial separation of cultures that was enforced during the Xiqen Empire, Normatia of which were one of the most persecuted of the cultures, originating from Tornia. In the early 8000’s, the Xiqen Empire had started a colonization campaign across the planet to ensure its dominion.
It’s important to note that no particular culture, however, had a grasp or hold on the Xiqen Empire at large. Indeed, the empire was hardly hegemonic at all, and encapsulated multiple different cultures, none of which had a superior hold on the other. It was the elite of the representatives of these cultures which were active agents against their constituents and proponents of greed.
Normatia’s spite was spawned purely from the imperial nature of the Xiqen Empire, wherein a retaliatory sense of group identity was created to maintain cohesion against the world dominion. It eventually evolved into an ideology denouncing all others and claiming superiority -- a dominion from four thousand years of revenge: the Tornun Republic.
The origin of Normatite Race Theory begs the topic that imperialism has had a stark stain in Ciphrus world history. It was the result of three Cascades across the millennia; three times Ciphrus civilization has appeared to have had visible regression into general chaos.
After I was separated by my family, I was taken to the Left Wall in Beylu City, where I was to continue my research on anomalies, and a new phenomena known as carbon storms, which were rampant and destroying billions in infrastructure across the globe.
Much of my time after the fall of Valu’s Wall was dedicated to both researching my anomalies and more importantly: finding my family. It was a hard pill to swallow that they were perhaps all dead or lost out in the wilderness, perhaps separated from each other, and so -- as the fascist, imperialists as they were -- the I.H.M.D. used that as leverage to ascertain my loyalty to their cause. In the next three years, I felt trapped in this perpetual system of a military junta, which the old Republic had fallen into. What’s worse was that the inhabitants seemed indifferent to the changes in their old political world. These were hard times, after all.
What’s strange and unexpected about this newfound society was that I had a lot more free time than in the last one. The infinite growth model of capitalism which had reigned the Republic now suddenly found itself in a pit for survival, and while money still strangely had a value in this New World Era, it was not the main focus of the I.H.M.D. whatsoever. Indeed, their main focus was simply staying alive. That meant that people like me: scientists, researchers, people who were trained more in the study of our universe rather than in the propagation of a world order, were more of a liability than an asset when it came to their main tasks of logistics and territory control. In such events, I took time to recollect on my past into the eventuality of me writing this now.
In this free time, I managed to ponder the bigger questions about the anomaly that I had seen that day in the Agrivide, and here I write it to perhaps shed some more light on the truest nature of our world, and once again defend my tangential essay.
I said before that the anomaly had disappeared in a matter of a minute, but it reappeared several times over the course of those 21 days. In the time we had researched the anomaly, there were several “laws” to which it dictated its sliver of spacetime. First and foremost, it appeared as though inertia was either completely void or dampened in some way, as many items floated freely amongst the debris without much support at all. Any time objects moved, they quickly lost energy and remained in a free-float state, unmoving.
The anomaly roamed the town and surrounding area, creating a three hundred square kilometer bubble and never once deviated from that territory. Chronometers within this zone showed varying frequencies of timeshifts, of which were mainly dictated by how close the anomaly was to each clock. Then, the anomaly had begun to switch rotational directions.
This came with a series of new and unexpected challenges, including apparent bypass of known time paradoxes. When the anomaly spun clockwise, time sped up often by several days; counterclockwise, and the chronometers would not only revert in their time stance, but in some cases reappear in our stock as though we had never put it out in the field. Attempts to capture this on camera were futile, as any electronics within a kilometer of the anomaly would cease to function.
After the anomaly disappeared, thirty four chronometers had been placed back, fifteen had their time altered (stopped, reversed, and/or sped up), and six were completely missing. The fact that the majority of our chronometers had been placed back, seemingly on account of time reversal, was a further implication that this anomaly had come from the distant past, and was somehow pouring into the current time pool. Whatever had happened at this point in the past, it had significant enough energy to bleed into what we perceive as the present, and spacetime was, in a figurative and metaphorical sense, bending backward to make ends meet.
After spending the greater portion of an afternoon sifting through the evidence, including compositions of the different signals and particles which came through the rift, it was clear that there was some kind of massive energy release on the planet approximately ten thousand years ago.
At some point, a fire sparked on the damaged side of town -- most likely due to an electrical issue -- and as soon as firefighter teams were sent to put it out, the anomaly had approached the scene. Passing over the flames, it was as though the fire itself had burned away the anomaly, as the sky broke into a flurry of black smoke, flames, and electricity. This was the first time it had approached the town since its arrival, and again: as quickly as it came, it went.
Because of its lack of Termoyl, unlike other anomalies, its distinction in relation to a very specific time period, and evident radio signals communicating basic, decipherable information, it was clear to both myself and my researchers at the time that this rift was of artificial origin. It was either created by a precursor civilization untold through the millennia, or ancient alien observers from before our time. Its purpose as to why it was sent remained a mystery to me until my exfil from Beylu City, into the Untalo Region on the Vai continent some three years later. This is where I met my first Knomnolite, who completely reshaped how I viewed Termoyl, and the Terrasque.
