The Executers Board of Daerth (EBD) met on the third day of the Global Strike and entered emergency session. The People had thrown down. The Chief Executing Officers of the 8 estates of Daerth beset the underlings of the Board, begging, asking, and threatening these rigid individuals for the resources and direction they required. The Strike had precipitated early, months ahead of anyone’s expectations. It went global almost instantly, within half a day. The People had shut the world down. Their grievances were voluminous, explicit, imperative. Capitulate or commit widespread massacre – already these seemed the only alternatives facing the Executers Board of Daerth.
Not easily controlled was Daerth – the country, the corporation, the world. Not easily controlled were the Peoples. And the Board would not relent.
In the past, the billions of People of Daerth had given in and gone along, or resisted as best they could, piecemeal. No more. Within the first few days of the Strike, the People’s organizations bloomed like some long delayed spring flamed miraculous into summer.
The Board of Executers of Daerth, taking advantage of geography, had long since divided Daerth into 8 incorporated estates of top-down plutocratic control. Wealth flourished in near-infinite pockets and poverty mutated as vast mutilation and within deep wounds.
An underlying mix of creeds bred and comingled, Xtn tending west, Ism east, along with Hnu and Bdu. Plenty of other creeds, and lack thereof, replicated in each of the 8 estates of Daerth. However the secular creed of Corpsratism dominated and rode the other class-ridden faith-based creeds.
Proceeding visually from the northwest of Daerth to the southeast, one begins with powerful North Amusa, still predominantly white before the Global Strike, though tending ever more brown, black, other.
Less powerful South Amusa glowed basically brown, of various strains and assortment.
In northcentral Daerth, across the Atlanttack Ocean, the redoubt Eurorusse beamed white in its northern realms while glinting brown in southern reaches.
Due south across the Mediated Sea lay huge Sabla, awash in various shades of black.
Centrally and vitally located in Daerth - sandy Oila and its dusky peoples.
Similarly toned, populous Spindia, stretching southeast of Oila, east across the Spindian Ocean from Sabla.
Coming full circle, and of colors most similar to South Amusa, though sprawled distant across the Great Pacified Ocean, lay Bigaisa, endless of mountain and plains densely packed.
Offshore to the southeast, far-flung Islaisa, ever more populous, its peoples living on a few large islands and literally tens of thousands of small isles ranged across the Pacified Ocean.
These, the 8 incorporated estates of Daerth, prior to the Global Strike: North and South Amusa, Eurorusse and Sabla, Oila and Spindia, Bigaisa and Islaisa.
The Executers Board of Daerth and its appointed ruler more or less commanded the world, though most estates continued to hold elections of a sort, as tightly controlled advertising campaigns. New CEOs were reliably anointed.
The Chief Executing Officer of the Executers Board of Daerth happened to be a man known far and wide as Velvet Thugbomb Apocalypto (aka, Jack Dehatchette). Dear Thugbomb, or Most Honorable Thugbomb, as he preferred the Peoples of Daerth to call him.
For their part, the Peoples commonly referred to the CEO of Daerth as the Tyrant. They belittled his corporate policies and decrees, mocked his rule, calling it, A Modest Tyranny.
The Peoples preferred to call Daerth by its indigenous name, Adeyeartha, and referred to themselves proudly as the Peoples of Adeyeartha.
Dear Thugbomb the Most Honorable Velvet Apocalypto could scarcely tolerate what he felt forced to put up with. The Peoples! By the almighty Coin, he swore they were too powerful.
Manifold peoples multifarious peoples malicious peoples malingering peoples mendacious peoples menacing peoples, so greedy and violent toward him and the Executers Board of Daerth that they were hardly fit for his Majestic Tyranny, for the fine rule of the EBD. Thugbomb looked upon the peoples of Daerth as the blood of life to be spilled, splashed, dispensed per corporate will. The Peoples too often persisted in thinking otherwise.
And so it was, in the time before the Global Strike, the 8 geographic regions of Daerth existed as estates, or subestates, corporate bodies, subcorporate bodies, of the sole country and corporation that was Daerth, the world, the universe, they thought.
Year in and year out, the CEOs of the 8 estates endeavored mightily to please CEO Thugbomb and the EBD, otherwise they would not long remain rulers worthy of either the EBD or of their own Executers Boards.
No one executed better than the 8 CEOs of North and South Amusa, Eurrorusse and Sabla, Oila and Spindia, Bigaisa and Islaisa, for fear of being replaced by other more proficient Executers of Daerth.
Dutifully reporting to the CEO of Daerth, Velvet Thugbomb Apocalypto, the loyal CEOs of the 8 estates of Daerth:
The CEO of North Amusa, her majesty Searalot Obliterata (of the McBleedem-O’Bombem dynasty). Searalot and North Amusa boasted a particularly lofty bearing, economically in part, but moreso lately in the quantity and quality of bombs and general armament. Though Seara and North Amusa had declined a bit in power prior to the General Strike, they continued to call the most awful lot of shots. After all, little but North Amusa’s own deep pocketbook could stop the horrific blazing of its biggest of guns.
In virtually no way could the far weaker sibling of Daerth’s Executers Board, the Knitted Estates, consisting of about 190 municipalities found throughout the 8 estates of Daerth, throttle down Seara Obliterata and North Amusa. Not when the nuclear and subnuclear pedal hit the Daerthan metal. Though the North Amusan era of Daerth dominance had waned a bit both at home or abroad, Searalot Obliterata and North Amusa loomed large for the foreseeable future, at least prior to the Global Strike.
South Amusa remained more complex and quite possibly more promising. For the time being, Jefe “Machine Gun” Reyes headed the South Amusan Executers Board as CEO. However, the populist leader Nugo Changez held enough power to force Reyes and the board to sometimes act against their preferred calculations. For this reason, the Executers Board of Daerth hastened the process of implementing a practical policy to deal with the upstart Changez, would be South Amusan revolutionary. The Global Strike interfered for the moment, at least, with those official blood-rich plans.
On the eve of the General Strike, Eurorusse thumped reliably along, rich as ever in its Western Euro sector, the venerable northcentral estate humming like the proverbial well-oiled machine, especially in its better municipalities, commanded by Eurorussen CEO Jettens Strykkkar. In Eurorusse, in a manner not dissimilar to North and South Amusa and elsewhere among the 8 estates, racial and class uprisings were treated like bugs in a machine, and squashed.
South across the Mediated Sea, the vast diverse estate of Sabla limped about, forever full of potential, eternally hampered by internal disorganization and external manipulation and control. CEO Rawbe D. Bhlyndde did what he might with the many less than affluent municipalities. Meanwhile the Executers Board of Daerth perennially lost patience with Bhlyndde’s economic vision or lack thereof and Sabla’s purported inability to pay back loans to the major creditor states of North Amusa and Eurorusse.
In Oila, CEO Chic Crushtherealm bathed daily in his estate’s valuable natural resource, petted his thoroughbreds and falcons, and presented a standing invitation to all of the collegial CEOs to luxuriate along with him in his many dandy palaces and lands.
Spindian CEO Raajaa Topcaste, ruler of “the second most culturally, linguistically and genetically diverse” region and state after Sabla, ran herd on his ever-growing corporate network and great agricultural sector even as many Spindian farmers sought refuge in suicide, due to increasingly corporate economic policies.
In Bigaisa, CEO Chensaw Nooseng, leading his most populous state to greater industrialization and mind-choking pollution, was once looked to as the future leader of the world, prior to the Global Strike.
Islaisan CEO Raja Gunemdown pushed the Ism creed upon his Peoples much as the Xtn creed blanketed the Peoples of North Amusa and elsewhere. The message, in the main: conform and be quiet and accepting of the dominant powers, or be cut-off, expelled, or worse.
In the meantime, within and across each estate arose organizations and individuals building independent and communal power marked by liberty, justice, and equality that both stood alone and together and challenged the oppression and injustice and inequality of the status quo – a lot going on around and about and against the official corporate and creed laden world now and long prior to the People’s Global Strike – so many people working together, standing up and going forth as never before.
