MEta-Empires: Modern solutions to old problems
At the beginning of the Second Interstellar Period, the nation-states began to fall away, with the idea of a nation-state slowly replaced by alternative and new forms of government. The old-fashioned city-state returned to prominence, and governments that were made of single clades or genotypes emerged. The God AIs rose to ascendancy, and the space in the Verge and Bleed gave room to practice new models of culture, new government and economic types, and new social orders. However, as humans do, those with shared cultural traditions and a shared history began to reach out over the stars and form alliances; these alliances may have been economic, cultural, military, or any of the above. As the colonies locally grew to match any 21st century nation-state in terms of raw power, they continued to work together, stretching across the gulf of space in various degrees of organization. This tendency to work together through the wormhole network is part of the reason that the modern meta-empires got legs; early on, many of the current meta-empires began life as trade networks and cross-wormhole economic zones, with members sharing wormhole access and experiencing low tariff trade compared to outsiders who weren't necessarily part of the community.
Defining a meta-empire is not easy. The concept was poorly defined from the start, with any number of possible definitions being viable. However, not all of them were mutually inclusive, and as a result, there is no definition of a meta-empire beyond "that's a meta-empire and society tends to agree that it is." The most cohesive definition that seems to be the most successful is a collection of stellar nations that have agreed to work together either because of a shared culture, shared history, shared economic influence, or all of the above, but this definition has a number of weakness: the various entities within Nariac and the Imperium are territories and were never independent, for instance. This makes the federal nature of Nariac and the Borealis Technocracy problematic, and while the "shared economic influence" manages to capture some of the Verge Consortium, it doesn't perfectly fit, since the VC is a free trade zone between various powerful stellar nations that would likely be meta-empires in their own right were they "independent." The definition of a stellar nation is even more frustratingly vague; it's defined as anything that isn't large enough to be a meta-empire, but is too large to be a conventional city-state or even a lose coalition of city-states. Furthermore, a number of megacorporations actually make that list as well. Naturally, since meta-empires aren't exclusively defined by their size, this means there's a lot of gray area and not everyone can agree on what is and isn't a stellar empire, no more than they can agree on what is and isn't a meta-empire. However, collating and organizing the lists produces a number of similar elements, and it's these shared elements that many tend to cluster under the header of "meta-empire" and "stellar nation," often times regardless of over all size, government type, reach, military might, soft power influence, cultural domination, and the like - although all these things tend to be included in the overall judgement. |
Civlization CLash in the Verge and Bleed
One of the most interesting definitions for meta-empires is that they are large-scale political-civilization entities that exist in the Verge and Bleed; if such an entity doesn't exist within the Verge and Bleed, then it isn't a meta-empire. This raises a number of interesting question, including questions about what the Verge and Bleed actually are. However, the idea of framing the meta-empires as civilizations has some merit to it; using the classic definition of civilization - a complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government, and a symbolic system of communication, along with divisions of labor and specialization, culturally ingrained ideas like progress and supremacism, taxation, and societal dependence on agriculture and expansionism - it's possible to form something that resembles a cohesive definition. Each meta-empire appears to cluster around the kernel of at least one civilization model, while multiple stellar nations can all share the same civilizational model and ideals. By this definition, a meta-empire would be as if the entire 21th Western world unified around a single type of government or a loose coalition of governments, and conflicts between the meta-empires are actually conflicts between civilizations. However, this definition once again leaves out the largest of the accepted meta-empires - the Verge Consortium - and doesn't capture the unity that many meta-empires possess, nor does it account for those like the Monarchy who are considered to have three civilizations that make up their "culture," so like all other definitions, this one has its problems as well.
The Solar Combine: EArth's SpecterOften left out of most meta-empire discussions, the Solar Combine casts a huge shadow over the Verge and Bleed. Rising up from the ruins of the Ascension Crisis and the Swarms, the Solar Combine - with its headquarters on Mars, Europa, and Ixion - considers itself to be the direct descendant of the Concordance Era government, or the God AIs. However, it doesn't have a government composed of AIs; it seeks to remedy the mistake of the past by working with the AIs, rather than allowing the AIs to simply run everything as happened with the God AIs. The Combine has a number of goals, with the two foremost goals being the unification of the human sphere to form a single government that spans the whole 200+ light year diameter range (a feat not even the God AIs could pull off) and the repair of Earth, which was utterly devastated by the Nanoswarms. They've had more success with the latter than the former; recent terraforming swarms have managed to trigger a new ice age, which many engineers hope can act as a metabolic trigger for humanity's long-forgotten home world. Their second goal has stymied. While the Combine has considerably military power - given the wealth and influence of the core worlds that make it up, it probably rivals the Verge Consortium in terms of economic might and the Combine Aerospace Force is probably large enough now to go toe-to-toe with the Imperium - it would rather influence through soft-power than military might or economic coercion. To help achieve this goal, the Combine began the first Laser Program, which was a program tasked with hiring freelancers to work with the Combine and the Meta-Empires to solve problems that were either too small for the meta-empires to deal with, or were too tricky and required outside influence from a neutral third party. The program was cancelled after five years, but following the recent wave of instability and the Verge Consortium civil war, the Combine has revived the program, which it sees as part of its goal to try and unite the Verge and Bleed under the Combine banner, but to do so subtly. It just so happens that this freelance interstellar police force also works for but doesn't necessarily represent the Combine directly. |
The MEta-empires
As noted above, determining who is and isn't a meta-empire is often times a fool's errand and waste of time, in equal measure. The definitions can vary wildly and aren't consistent, sometimes even within the same text. That aside, the various papers and documents that categorize meta-empires can sometimes be organized and through a meta-analysis, a number of names appear across all the different interpretations. This is an overview of those polities that are classified as "meta-empires" by almost every definition of the term.
Future of the Meta-Empires
There is a lot of conversation regarding the nature of the meta-empires, but very little conversation regarding their future. To many in the universe, they can seem like they just exist, always have existed, and always will exist, but on the time scale of the universe, this is likely not going to be the case. Some wonder if the meta-empires are actually a transitionary period, between humanity at the present and some distant, post-scarcity reputation-based future. Others fear that the meta-empires are not just cultures but will go onto become separate species - with enough time, they may become wholly alien entities to one another, alien empires that descend from humanity. Others feel that they're eventually going to collapse and that they are too big to sustain themselves.
Ultimately, the fate of the meta-empires is unknown, and it ultimately boils down to which definition one subscribes to for "meta-empire" (some argue that meta-empires doesn't even exist, and instead are illusions of order, really nothing more than collections of city-states and orbital habitats that project more power than they actually have and in the grand scale of the universe, even with wormholes, are tiny - and there's some merit to this idea). Ultimately, it's fact that nobody can know the future, and that human civilization is ever in flux - even if the fluctuations now take decades or even centuries to notice. ∎
Ultimately, the fate of the meta-empires is unknown, and it ultimately boils down to which definition one subscribes to for "meta-empire" (some argue that meta-empires doesn't even exist, and instead are illusions of order, really nothing more than collections of city-states and orbital habitats that project more power than they actually have and in the grand scale of the universe, even with wormholes, are tiny - and there's some merit to this idea). Ultimately, it's fact that nobody can know the future, and that human civilization is ever in flux - even if the fluctuations now take decades or even centuries to notice. ∎