Terrestrial transport is heavily dominated by nuclear power, not just in the military sector, but also for civilian transport. Unlike on Earth, where nuclear energy is often met with public skepticism, red tape and safety concerns, Kyanah city-states in affluent regions have adopted nuclear-powered airlines--traveling at Mach 2--and trains with little to no regard for such concerns. Suborbital transit via spaceplanes is sometimes used by packs of high-ranking executives, politicians, or diplomats who don't have time to waste sitting in a plane for hours. Nuclear-powered trucks are also not uncommon; as their homeworld is a super-Earth with no oceans, routes can get extremely long (Ikun-Kanenhah is about 30,000 km by road and it's not even the longest route on the planet), and not needing gas stations or charging areas can be very handy. Even some nuclear powered cars for individual packs have been developed, though the complexities of cramming a nuclear reactor and radiation shielding under a car hood make them a premium item, starting at the equivalent of approximately $100,000 in human terms--though some say this is made up for by the convenience of being able to just get in and drive, without ever worrying about plebian matters like fueling or recharging. For most packs in developed city-states, electric cars are the norm instead, with advances in battery life via room temperature superconductors rivalling or exceeding ICEs. However, some older coal-powered ones--the only naturally occurring fossil fuel, due to the lack of oceans--can be seen, and are quite numerous in poor and developing city-states. Notably, many consumer cars tend to be much larger than on Earth, almost like vans; as packless Kyanah aren't generally in a position to afford cars, and those with packs rarely if ever have any reason to drive anywhere without their packs, cars must be made to accommodate entire packs, with 4-6 adults plus however many young they may have.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kyanahs' devil-may-care attitude towards nuclear power extends to nuclear bombs as well. In fact, peaceful nuclear detonations make up a majority of the nuclear detonations on the Kyanah homeworld, outnumbering nuclear tests and acts of war combined. As per Ikun's policy of nuclear monopoly, no other city-state is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, but Ikun itself has performed thousands of peaceful detonations, both for its own projects and occasionally, on request from one of its allies. Such projects include flattening extremely large areas of terrain for infrastructure megaprojects (including road and rail links through impact various ranges, or flattening areas for building in said impact ranges), exposing valuable mineral deposits for mining, and even using the craters generated by nukes to create several artificial oases; at least 18 independent city-states have been created from scratch around such oases--this has occasionally been used by Ikun as a means of creating pro-Ikun regimes in areas where overthrowing an existing city-state was deemed impractical. Nukes have also been used by Ikun to power Raiun-cannons, which as the name suggests are essentially large cannons that use a nuclear explosion rather than a chemical one to propel thousand-ton payloads into space; the equivalent human term is "Wang Bullet". However, these have largely fallen out of fashion with the development of SSTO nuclear spaceplanes that can carry more delicate payloads and not destroy the launch site with every use. As it has been 66 Earth years--more than the average Kyanah lifetime--since the Day of Tower Clouds and almost 40 since the last nuclear annihilation by Ikun, the average Kyanah in Ikun is more likely to associate nukes with projects like these than with a nuclear holocaust--though in some places, the nuclear annihilations early in Ikun's Hegemony Era cast a long shadow even in the present day.
Many large-scale, and even planetary-scale infrastructure projects do exist on the Kyanah homeworld, but anything that extends between multiple city-states is almost invariably an emergent phenomenon that has emerged from many different entities independently building infrastructure for their own economic and strategic needs, often following historic trade routes. For instance, while almost all known medium sized (population >131k) and large (population >1.04M) city-states are connected via paved roads, there is no centralized figure behind this, like with the Interstate Highway System, and the network constantly changes as entities stop maintaining highways that no longer suit their interests, and others decide to construct their own. While such highways are in the open land between city-states, which is legally considered in a manner similar to international waters on Earth, whatever entity commissioned the building of a particular road or railway through open land is considered to own it and be responsible for it. Quality varies considerably, ranging from two-lane pothole-strewn death traps in the middle of nowhere to eight-lane smart highways that display alerts and information holographically, automatically inform maintainers about needed repairs via wireless sensors, and communicate with autonomous vehicles to allow them to navigate smoothly; city streets in wealthy city-states also share these features. Some roads in the Rktakian Kwardniet have the ability to wirelessly transfer power to compatible electric vehicles for a toll, reducing the need to stop and charge. Paved roads are usually built from some form of concrete rather than asphalt and in wealthy regions, are sometimes seeded with nanoparticles or genetically engineered microbes that automatically repair micro-cracks, meaning that such roads only need any maintenance at all once every 30-40 Earth years, and--if simulations hold up--won't need to be outright resurfaced for centuries. Road workers in these affluent areas--such as much of the Rktakian Kwardniet, and parts of the Far South, Meatbucket, and Western Sector, are thus only needed to build new roads, or if natural disasters have destroyed part of a road. Most cars and trucks have a high level of autonomy, equivalent to level 4-5 on smart highways and 3-4 on arbitrary roads; it's common in vast stretches of highway between city-states to see multiple trucks traveling in a convoy with only the first one actually being driven by a pack.
Rail networks have largely evolved in a similar organic fashion with no top-down authority guiding their development or standards, and thus as a practical matter, variable gauge trains have always been required to cover any serious distance without running into this issue. There are an estimated 15 million kilometers of rail on the Kyanah homeworld, about 20 times as much as on Earth, a factor which can be attributed to it being an oceanless super-Earth with nearly 9 times the land area, and barring political considerations or issues with customs, it is usually possible to get from almost any mid-sized or large city-state to any other by rail. In recent epochs, the development of room temperature superconductors has made long range maglev systems practical; in practice, these are often integrated into existing rail lines, allowing both maglevs and internally powered nuclear or internal-combustion trains to use the same route, though maglev-compatible lines are much more sparse outside of the Rktakian Kwardniet, Western Sector, Meatbucket, Far South, and immediate vicinity of various megacities outside these regions. New rails are often constructed from self-healing metals to reduce the need for repairs. To the Kyanah, "high-speed rail" refers to vactrains, which have been implemented, but are even more sparse. The expense of making the required room-temperature superconductors in orbit and maintaining a vacuum tube for hundreds of kilometers, the extreme security risks and high-profile terrorist attacks, and the fact that acceleration time greatly limit the available stops--to avoid turning it into a high-G experience and still make full use of the available speed, stops must be at least 400-500 km apart, with any in-between destinations being served by a second line, and the necessity of having a perfectly straight line--mean that only a few such lines exist. The only one in the Rktakian Kwardniet runs the Ryden-Ikun-Aktin route, covering 1500 kilometers in about 25 minutes, including an 8-minute stop in Ikun, at half the cost and three times the speed of an equivalent plane ticket. However, security concerns, red tape, and bickering between the three city-states in question have caused this project to cost roughly half a trillion koin and take 37 years to complete--or in human terms, about $80 billion and 17 Earth years, double the cost and 50% longer than originally planned--and in 38 years/17.5 Earth years of operation, it has yet to be a net profit, discouraging the construction of further vactrains in the Rktakian Kwardniet. The Far South, with a less car-centric culture and a greater prevalence of direct government control over infrastructure, has seen 17 city-states be connected with four vactrain lines, and one additional line connects four city-states from East Anweri to Dagtan, though this has been the most controversial of all due to the poverty and developing economies of these city-states. While advances in mega-scale 3D printing of infrastructure since about Y944 may lead to the cost of vactrain lines dropping in--in human terms--under $50 million/km, it will likely never be as practical for most routes as nuclear jets that can go from almost anywhere to anywhere else, even if they only travel at 0.7 km/s instead of 2 km/s as vactrains do.
The planet's impact ranges pose a considerable challenge to ground transport--arguably worse than Earth mountain ranges--as the masses of overlapping craters, impact peaks, and ejecta piles lead to chaotic, loose, rockfall-prone terrain with drops and rises reaching hundreds of meters or even kilometers. Most impact ranges have several major highways passing through in modern times, using elaborate systems of bridges, tunnels, and ramps to navigate through the treacherous crater fields. The largest and most treacherous such area, known as the Shatter, where three separate impact ranges overlap, only has one paved road and rail crossing, at the Dagtan Gap, where the shattered crater-field narrows from hundreds of kilometers across to just 60. Naturally, this has put Dagtan city-state, on the southern side of the gap, in a very important but also very high-pressure position; they are much bigger and wealthier than many city-states in their general vicinity due to the sheer volume of trade between the Rktakian Kwardniet+Western Sector and the Middle+Far South going through Dagtan. However, hundreds of city-states are constantly trying to influence Dagtan and secure beneficial trade arrangements, and Ikun itself has invaded no fewer than three times during the Hegemony Era to overthrow the government in Dagtan. Some companies in Rktakian Kwardniet city-states have proposed using nukes to blast a path through the Shatter a few thousand kilometers east of Dagtan to create an alternate route (as has been done a few times in other impact ranges) but there are few large and economically developed city-states near the proposed route, so hundreds or even thousands of kilometers of smart highways and magrails across barren desert would have to be built to connect it to existing infrastructure, and also Ikun's government seems disinterested in using nukes for this particular project, making it largely a pipe dream.
The largest piece of infrastructure on the Kyanah homeworld is undoubtedly the Water Distribution System. While pipelines to carry water between city-states have existed since the early industrial times, construction has accelerated drastically after the Utopian Wars, as technology has advanced and economic interconnectedness have increased, and thousands of city-states and corporations have built pipelines, silos, ultra-deep water wells, and fog collection systems to transfer water between themselves and their allies and trading partners. This way, water can be quickly and easily moved from regions with an excess to regions with drought, a handy piece of infrastructure for such an arid planet. However, Ikun has heavily invested in the underlying technology and infrastructure, bridging gaps in strategic locations around the world and building vast numbers of the most powerful and efficient control nodes and refining and optimizing the infrastructure, causing the emergent networks to gradually merge into a cohesive whole. With more than 120 million kilometers of pipelines and 9 million control nodes, corporations and government agencies based in Ikun together own some 82,000 control nodes, nearly 1% of the entire system and over three times as many as the next most influential city-state, and have also built some half million kilometers of pipelines themselves. In recent years, construction robots and metal 3D printing technology has made this construction more efficient, enabling the production of pipelines in one continuous length, without the need to haul disparate segments into place and weld them together. Sensors are ubiquitous along the system's length, immediately alerting control node owners of mechanical issues in remote areas so that construction crews can be sent to repair them.
A human, with a human-centric view of institutions and interconnected systems, could be forgiven for thinking that the Water Distribution System was a grand altruistic endeavor intended to uplift impoverished communities. But to the Kyanah that was never the point, even though it's certainly had that effect in most parts of the world. Essentially, the crux of the Water Distribution System is the control nodes, which can be used by their owners to activate valves, pumps, and storage mechanisms to either push or pull water in a particular part of the system, causing it to be routed to their desired location; the more powerful and efficient the underlying hardware is, the more effective the control node is. However, thousands of entities are pushing or pulling water at any given time; if multiple control nodes are trying to move water in the same direction, their effect will be magnified, while if they are moving water in the opposite direction, their effects will be diminished or even cancelled out entirely.
The Water Distribution System is thus, in a sense pay-to-win via technical investment, as affluent and technologically advanced city-states like Ikun have more and heavier-weighted control nodes. It is a very complex strategic landscape with organizations heavily relying on optimization and game theory to try and maximize their influence and access to water. Sometimes, city-states cooperate, and other times they work against each other, using complex strategies to deny their enemies water by strategically pushing or pulling from enemies, allies, and neighbors to indirectly leave the target in a situation where water is flowing away from them in every direction with a force too great for their own control nodes to override. Determining the optimal strategy is a computationally hard problem with no closed-form solution, so those with the biggest supercomputing clusters and the best scientists to devise classified algorithms gain an advantage that stacks with control node superiority. The Water Distribution System is a lot like a planetary chess game, where some players have like three queens on the board and a computer running Stockfish, and others...just don't. Because of this, the system can be controversial, with approval ranging from less than 30% of packs to over 90%, depending on the city-state. And yet, access to water has genuinely increased. Often-times there will in fact be excess water somewhere in the world that a struggling city-state can pull with little or no resistance, and even if not, other players will often push it to them to secure political concessions in other areas, bolster alliances, or even just to keep global trade networks stable, avert a refugee crisis, and maintain trust in the Water Distribution System, which are all generally in the best interests of the wealthy power players, so they generally don't just suck impoverished city-states dry for no reason unless there's a goal even more pressing than these general interests.
In recent years, speculative geoengineering technology has been increasingly implemented by various city-states with the goal of securing more favorable weather conditions and reversing ecological damage in their regions. Koranah, a Far South city-state and geopolitical enemy of Ikun, with the largest raw GDP (even beating Ikun, albeit not per capita), has invested heavily in building control nodes in this new system and promoting the widespread use of geoengineering across the planet. Naturally, this too is not some altruistic collective venture to save the planet, but a calculated strategy by Koranah to mirror Ikun's success at influencing global politics via the Water Distribution System, by creating an even more powerful piece of infrastructure, the Climate Control System. Naturally, the technology of the Climate Control System is far more advanced. Control nodes are essentially quasi-living factories--with inorganic protective shells and networking equipment surrounding biotech internals--that produce vast amounts of genetically engineered or outright synthetic microbes, which can block out or concentrate sunlight to alter temperatures, seed or disperse clouds to cause or prevent rainfall, break down pollutants or release beneficial trace chemicals into the atmosphere, or promote or suppress key aspects of local ecosystems from the ground up. With the use of biotechnology and genetically engineered organisms, the need to manually repair and replace these systems or come in and manually adjust settings constantly, is greatly reduced, as the low-level details can self-regulate. However, even the most basic versions of this sort of technology are much more expensive and intricate than pipelines and pumps. Additionally, global weather systems and ecologies are open, chaotic systems instead of closed, deterministic ones like water pipelines, and actions taken by control nodes in the Climate Control System have ripple effects across the world that require sophisticated modeling and advanced science to accurately predict. Thus determining a suitable strategy is two nested computationally hard problems: in order to solve for the optimal instructions to give to a particular control node, you first need to accurately predict the effects of each instruction on the environment, taking into account theoretically unlimited knock-on effects outside the system itself; it's a lot more complex than "we want water there, so we push/pull water there". So city-states with even a slight advantage in geoengineering technology and/or computing will utterly dominate. As Ikun and Koranah are neck-and-neck in the supercomputing arms race and Koranah's geoengineering is 3-5 Earth years ahead of Ikun's, the government of Ikun has gone all-out in suppressing geoengineering through its superior soft power, leveraging sanctions, treaties, and propaganda to disrupt the Climate Control System's expansion.
Curiously, while plenty of city-states import and export energy to others, there's no recognizable global grid in the same manner as the Water Distribution System or Climate Control System, with regional power trading arrangements between dozens or hundreds of city-states at most instead. There are various technical and political reasons why, but essentially energy is neither as scarce as water nor as globalized as the environment itself, so techno-political forces governing the energy industry tend to be different. Fission power provides a plurality and near-majority of the Kyanah homeworld's energy supply, about 47% in total--Ikun's nuclear monopoly does not preclude other city-states from building nuclear reactors, just nuclear weapons. Thousands of city-states have nuclear reactors, and thorium reactors have been extensively commercialized alongside uranium ones. Miniaturized fission reactors are also frequently used; the smallest are not much larger than a conventional car engine. Solar takes second place, with 27% prevalence; the Kyanah homeworld receives more solar flux than Earth and tends to have fewer clouds, so it tends to be a viable choice in most places, except those that have a polar night. There has been some commercialization of space solar, as not having to deal with nighttime or an atmosphere makes it far more efficient. So far, this is only about 1% of the global solar market, but growing fast. Coal--the only fossil fuel that exists in significant quantities--makes up 18% in total. Though it's not evenly distributed; in affluent and developed areas, fission makes up 80-90% of energy generation, while nuclear reactors are rare in developing regions where coal dominates; the Middle South, with its poor yet rapidly industrializing city-states, is also known as the Coal Belt for a reason. Fusion power is a solved problem, but only makes up 4% of global energy usage due to the severe logistical problems with finding deuterium, tritium, or helium-3. Thus far, the most practical solution has been atmospheric mining, first implemented at the system's only gas giant, Entiak-Ryitu, about 7.5 AU out, in Y927 (49 years ago; 22.5 Earth years). There are few regions where wind or hydroelectric are practical, so these only comprise a trace amount of energy output on a global scale.
Road to Hope
Re: Road to Hope
The typical Kyanah approach to AI differs substantially from the human approach. They don't see it as in any way trying to trying to create intelligent software--let alone sentient software--but instead simply about algorithmically finding answers to certain types of questions that are difficult to automatically answer with classical methods. There is little serious research effort or public interest in creating AI that is self-aware or otherwise Kyanah-like, and consequently, fears of an "AI uprising" or Skynet-type scenario are almost completely absent from Kyanah society; to them it would be like being scared of a calculator uprising. When questioned about this by humans, they seem to believe that if a task truly requires sentience, then there are billions of packs who can do it, and if it doesn't, then there's no point in including it in their algorithmic solution. This reflects extensively in real-world examples of Kyanah AI: they almost never appear to exhibit any sort of personality or even act as though they are conversing with their users at all; they simply output a solution to whatever problem was input into them. This likely stems from Kyanah society; as a heavily pack-centric species for whom interactions with outside their own packs are transactional and have little or no emotional weight, they have little interest in being able to talk to their AI and would in fact consider the idea off-putting. In fact, there is no distinct field of AI at all, with all the research and applications that humans would consider as such instead being split into advanced versions of optimization, pattern recognition and generation, and control theory.
Nevertheless, applications that we would widely consider AI are widespread in Kyanah society, and in many cases are quite developed. One of the earliest examples is query adapters, used to convert natural language queries into a complex and structured query parameter protocol that is used to traverse the tree-like structure of Kyanah internets and find the node that is most relevant to a particular query. Considerable amounts of research have been devoted to optimizing the resulting query parameter protocols and preventing them from falling into spam traps. However, many of their most advanced modern applications revolve around finding winning strategies in complex, massively multi-agent fully or partially adversarial "games"--likely an area that has seen considerable investment due to the fractious geopolitical nature of their homeworld, with thousands of competing city-states, rather than a few nation states or one world government. Such applications are often known as tactical engines. The most obvious example of this are the military tactical engines used during their invasion of Earth, calculating optimal attacks and defenses with machine-like precision, enabling them to outsmart and outmaneuver human forces in nearly every engagement. In the civilian sector, this sort of technology is used for various techno-political "games" such as the global Water Distribution System and Climate Control System, as well as local and regional scale versions, often involving local power grids, natural resource extraction in areas where other actors may be trying to extract the same or similar resources, and access to shared technical resources like computing clusters, whose owners may offer more and/or cheaper compute power to users whose work is deemed more useful to the owner's interests and goals, a factor that is itself often calculated by advanced algorithms. The Kyanah version of Globalist doctrine, wherein city-states exploit natural resources in unclaimed open land between city-states from across the world strategically denying closer and often less developed city-states the opportunity to extract these resources, can also sometimes be considered a techno-political game, with the location and nature of resource gathering being optimized to maximize a city-state's political influence or deny enemy city-states access to natural resources they need for economic development. In the realm of politics, these sorts of tactical engines are used in conjunction with language models by politicians and diplomats to draft laws and treaties designed to be the most likely to be adopted and accomplish the desired agenda while stifling competing agendas. In corporate offices, they are used to guide the purchasing and selling of assets in pursuit of executives' goals. Notably, this doesn't just mean making money; as governments tend to be tightly integrated into the economy, serving as economic actors that get just as involved as any private company, instead of an overseer or controller of the economy, businesses can also seek to increase political influence, gain access to state resources, or reduce constraints imposed on them by the state.
In more light-hearted matters, tactical engines are used by online creators to devise powerful memetics and content that will successfully out-compete other content for netizens' attention. They are also frequently used in actual games. Kyanah video games tend to heavily focus on game AI while having comparatively bare-bones graphics that leave much to the imagination, only conveying what's needed for the players to know what's going on. In fact, most hardcore gamers see fancy graphics as something for casuals, that only serve to distract them from the underlying mechanics. While game landscapes are rather barren, they are filled with extremely sophisticated and diverse enemies and other entities that are extremely capable of maximizing their in-game resources and surviving whatever players and other entities throw at them; instead of having absurdly high stats, bosses are simply as smart or smarter than the players themselves, requiring superior items or numbers to beat. Procedurally-generated AI is a common feature of Kyanah games, ensuring that every entity behaves in a unique manner. Anomalous randomly-generated bosses have sometimes survived in multiplayer servers for years despite the best efforts of thousands of packs to destroy them. Hardcore Kyanah gamers, who are often just as hyper-dedicated as their human counterparts, have been known to go as far as renting supercomputer clusters and running millions of simulations to find a winning strategy against a particularly annoying enemy. Likewise, most classical strategy games have been either fully solved or achieved vastly super-Kyanah performance, even those that are designed to be played amongst members of a pack, instead of between two packs, and thus involve alliances, deception, and social deduction, and even some games that have been specifically designed--often by algorithms--to be computer-proof.
In addition to tactical engines, the Kyanah also have efficiency maximizers. The goal of these is to find the minimum amount of resources (broadly defined) to achieve a particular goal in settings that may not necessarily be multi-agent or adversarial. In the Kyanah invasion of Earth, these were used along with tactical engines to optimize the payload for their interstellar vehicle and production of resources on Earth via ISRU. Efficiency maximizers are also used in the civilian sector; one application that has been increasing in prevalence in recent years is to guide staffing decisions in combination with wearable sensors. The data from these sensors allows efficiency maximizers to calculate the productivity of each worker and retain the minimum staffing necessary to achieve business goals. Naturally, this has been contentious among the workers themselves, who have devised elaborate strategies to game the system and sabotage coworkers to relatively boost their own metrics. Some city-states use similar algorithms on immigrant populations to swiftly deport those who are deemed to be assimilating poorly or otherwise aren't contributing sufficiently, so that state resources can be used on natural citizens and more useful immigrants. And naturally, efficiency maximizers play a major role in resource acquisition in the corporate world, ensuring that only the minimum necessary resources are purchased. In general, most Kyanah cultures have an extreme aversion to waste--likely due to the arid and resource-poor nature of their homeworld--which manifests as them going to extreme lengths to ensure that un-needed resources are not spent on a goal.
Efficiency maximizers can also tie in with social and actual networks to create influence maximizers, which basically seek to find the fewest nodes in a network that need to be influenced to propagate some concept or agenda through the network. This is used in politics a lot, both by domestic politicians figuring out who they are best off working with to get their desired agenda passed--a tricky task since cohesive, named political parties are largely unknown, with power blocs instead revolving around influential packs--and in inter-city relations to calculate who to ally with; it's often ideal to ally with as few packs or city-states as possible to pass an agenda, to reduce the number of potential concessions and compromises that will need to be made. Similarly, they can be used to figure out how to spread or suppress ideas with a minimum expenditure of social capital, e.g. corporations figuring out which online nodes to buy ad space on to get exposure with minimal expenditure or governments seeking to suppress threatening movements by selectively targeting as few important packs as possible, instead of wasting resources on mass arrests and crackdowns, or even working in tandem with military tactical engines to achieve strategic goals with minimum loss of life or target specific enemy soldiers whose loss will have the strongest effect on morale or operational capabilities.
Other forms of AI exist as well, including AI art--or as the Kyanah see it, extremely complex and aesthetic pattern generation, though it seems to be less advanced than their tactical engines and efficiency maximizers, arguably not far beyond recent human developments. In general, Kyanah art, whether literary, visual, or physical, tends to be heavily pack-centric. Written works (whether artistic or merely informational) are often multi-threaded, with each member of a pack creating their own thread that is interleaved with those of the other members, rather than a singular sequential plot line; art in other media is often organized in a similar fashion. Thus, pattern generation can be used to create works with more threads than there are members in the pack that created them, by filling in the blank space based on given parameters about the nonexistent packmate. This sort of breaks down when too many threads are added, or Kyanah don't create any of the threads themselves. However, multi-agent pattern generators can be used for this use case by having multiple generators that simultaneously influence each other's parameters. Systematic encoding of ground truths and relations between subpatterns are used in combination with statistical models to ensure a greater self-consistency over long ranges than pure statistical models; this takes the form of huge numbers of auto-generated constraints added to the generators, though the produced works aren't flawless upon close examination. Instead of simply creating massive numbers of regular story-threads or other media, generators usually focus on making things that would be impossible for Kyanah packs to produce: works with dozens or hundreds of threads, visual media that have details even when zoomed in absurdly far, and works that are too large or long to be created by a single pack. This, combined with the general cultural stigma against waste, lead to a generated art scene where instead of wasting compute power to make a hundred pieces of AI-generated trash, they just make one, relying on how obviously alien and impossible it is to produce by real Kyanah to draw in as much or more attention than a huge pile of AI generated spam. The prevailing attitude seems to be that using pattern generators to make art that looks and feels like Kyanah-made art is like building a car that walks on two legs: inefficient and completely missing the point of a car. That being said, it's sort of an open secret that many creators of commercial story-threads and other multi-threaded work sometimes use pattern generators to pad out the number of threads or by individual pack members to optimize their own individual threads.
Pattern generation can also be combined with speculative biology or genetic engineering and efficiency maximizers to create procedurally generated life and algorithmically optimize the genetics of their genetically modified creatures. It is rare for genetic modifications to be made by biologists looking at a creature's genome and figuring out which genes they have to modify to get the desire result; instead gene sequences are automatically optimized. In high-priority areas where this research has been done for decades (e.g. agriculture), it's only possible to discover marginal gains to state-of-the-art gene sequences with immense computing resources. This also leads to generative paleontology, where pattern generators are used to fill gaps in the fossil record; while inefficient and unreliable, it has on occasion accurately predicted extinct organisms that were later found in the fossil record, but is still being refined. Naturally, the Kyanah have been known to use AI to create AI, though this is seen more as, variably, optimizer optimizers or generator generators. However, out-of-the-box generated algorithms are often further modified, especially if maximum performance is required.
Nevertheless, applications that we would widely consider AI are widespread in Kyanah society, and in many cases are quite developed. One of the earliest examples is query adapters, used to convert natural language queries into a complex and structured query parameter protocol that is used to traverse the tree-like structure of Kyanah internets and find the node that is most relevant to a particular query. Considerable amounts of research have been devoted to optimizing the resulting query parameter protocols and preventing them from falling into spam traps. However, many of their most advanced modern applications revolve around finding winning strategies in complex, massively multi-agent fully or partially adversarial "games"--likely an area that has seen considerable investment due to the fractious geopolitical nature of their homeworld, with thousands of competing city-states, rather than a few nation states or one world government. Such applications are often known as tactical engines. The most obvious example of this are the military tactical engines used during their invasion of Earth, calculating optimal attacks and defenses with machine-like precision, enabling them to outsmart and outmaneuver human forces in nearly every engagement. In the civilian sector, this sort of technology is used for various techno-political "games" such as the global Water Distribution System and Climate Control System, as well as local and regional scale versions, often involving local power grids, natural resource extraction in areas where other actors may be trying to extract the same or similar resources, and access to shared technical resources like computing clusters, whose owners may offer more and/or cheaper compute power to users whose work is deemed more useful to the owner's interests and goals, a factor that is itself often calculated by advanced algorithms. The Kyanah version of Globalist doctrine, wherein city-states exploit natural resources in unclaimed open land between city-states from across the world strategically denying closer and often less developed city-states the opportunity to extract these resources, can also sometimes be considered a techno-political game, with the location and nature of resource gathering being optimized to maximize a city-state's political influence or deny enemy city-states access to natural resources they need for economic development. In the realm of politics, these sorts of tactical engines are used in conjunction with language models by politicians and diplomats to draft laws and treaties designed to be the most likely to be adopted and accomplish the desired agenda while stifling competing agendas. In corporate offices, they are used to guide the purchasing and selling of assets in pursuit of executives' goals. Notably, this doesn't just mean making money; as governments tend to be tightly integrated into the economy, serving as economic actors that get just as involved as any private company, instead of an overseer or controller of the economy, businesses can also seek to increase political influence, gain access to state resources, or reduce constraints imposed on them by the state.
In more light-hearted matters, tactical engines are used by online creators to devise powerful memetics and content that will successfully out-compete other content for netizens' attention. They are also frequently used in actual games. Kyanah video games tend to heavily focus on game AI while having comparatively bare-bones graphics that leave much to the imagination, only conveying what's needed for the players to know what's going on. In fact, most hardcore gamers see fancy graphics as something for casuals, that only serve to distract them from the underlying mechanics. While game landscapes are rather barren, they are filled with extremely sophisticated and diverse enemies and other entities that are extremely capable of maximizing their in-game resources and surviving whatever players and other entities throw at them; instead of having absurdly high stats, bosses are simply as smart or smarter than the players themselves, requiring superior items or numbers to beat. Procedurally-generated AI is a common feature of Kyanah games, ensuring that every entity behaves in a unique manner. Anomalous randomly-generated bosses have sometimes survived in multiplayer servers for years despite the best efforts of thousands of packs to destroy them. Hardcore Kyanah gamers, who are often just as hyper-dedicated as their human counterparts, have been known to go as far as renting supercomputer clusters and running millions of simulations to find a winning strategy against a particularly annoying enemy. Likewise, most classical strategy games have been either fully solved or achieved vastly super-Kyanah performance, even those that are designed to be played amongst members of a pack, instead of between two packs, and thus involve alliances, deception, and social deduction, and even some games that have been specifically designed--often by algorithms--to be computer-proof.
In addition to tactical engines, the Kyanah also have efficiency maximizers. The goal of these is to find the minimum amount of resources (broadly defined) to achieve a particular goal in settings that may not necessarily be multi-agent or adversarial. In the Kyanah invasion of Earth, these were used along with tactical engines to optimize the payload for their interstellar vehicle and production of resources on Earth via ISRU. Efficiency maximizers are also used in the civilian sector; one application that has been increasing in prevalence in recent years is to guide staffing decisions in combination with wearable sensors. The data from these sensors allows efficiency maximizers to calculate the productivity of each worker and retain the minimum staffing necessary to achieve business goals. Naturally, this has been contentious among the workers themselves, who have devised elaborate strategies to game the system and sabotage coworkers to relatively boost their own metrics. Some city-states use similar algorithms on immigrant populations to swiftly deport those who are deemed to be assimilating poorly or otherwise aren't contributing sufficiently, so that state resources can be used on natural citizens and more useful immigrants. And naturally, efficiency maximizers play a major role in resource acquisition in the corporate world, ensuring that only the minimum necessary resources are purchased. In general, most Kyanah cultures have an extreme aversion to waste--likely due to the arid and resource-poor nature of their homeworld--which manifests as them going to extreme lengths to ensure that un-needed resources are not spent on a goal.
Efficiency maximizers can also tie in with social and actual networks to create influence maximizers, which basically seek to find the fewest nodes in a network that need to be influenced to propagate some concept or agenda through the network. This is used in politics a lot, both by domestic politicians figuring out who they are best off working with to get their desired agenda passed--a tricky task since cohesive, named political parties are largely unknown, with power blocs instead revolving around influential packs--and in inter-city relations to calculate who to ally with; it's often ideal to ally with as few packs or city-states as possible to pass an agenda, to reduce the number of potential concessions and compromises that will need to be made. Similarly, they can be used to figure out how to spread or suppress ideas with a minimum expenditure of social capital, e.g. corporations figuring out which online nodes to buy ad space on to get exposure with minimal expenditure or governments seeking to suppress threatening movements by selectively targeting as few important packs as possible, instead of wasting resources on mass arrests and crackdowns, or even working in tandem with military tactical engines to achieve strategic goals with minimum loss of life or target specific enemy soldiers whose loss will have the strongest effect on morale or operational capabilities.
Other forms of AI exist as well, including AI art--or as the Kyanah see it, extremely complex and aesthetic pattern generation, though it seems to be less advanced than their tactical engines and efficiency maximizers, arguably not far beyond recent human developments. In general, Kyanah art, whether literary, visual, or physical, tends to be heavily pack-centric. Written works (whether artistic or merely informational) are often multi-threaded, with each member of a pack creating their own thread that is interleaved with those of the other members, rather than a singular sequential plot line; art in other media is often organized in a similar fashion. Thus, pattern generation can be used to create works with more threads than there are members in the pack that created them, by filling in the blank space based on given parameters about the nonexistent packmate. This sort of breaks down when too many threads are added, or Kyanah don't create any of the threads themselves. However, multi-agent pattern generators can be used for this use case by having multiple generators that simultaneously influence each other's parameters. Systematic encoding of ground truths and relations between subpatterns are used in combination with statistical models to ensure a greater self-consistency over long ranges than pure statistical models; this takes the form of huge numbers of auto-generated constraints added to the generators, though the produced works aren't flawless upon close examination. Instead of simply creating massive numbers of regular story-threads or other media, generators usually focus on making things that would be impossible for Kyanah packs to produce: works with dozens or hundreds of threads, visual media that have details even when zoomed in absurdly far, and works that are too large or long to be created by a single pack. This, combined with the general cultural stigma against waste, lead to a generated art scene where instead of wasting compute power to make a hundred pieces of AI-generated trash, they just make one, relying on how obviously alien and impossible it is to produce by real Kyanah to draw in as much or more attention than a huge pile of AI generated spam. The prevailing attitude seems to be that using pattern generators to make art that looks and feels like Kyanah-made art is like building a car that walks on two legs: inefficient and completely missing the point of a car. That being said, it's sort of an open secret that many creators of commercial story-threads and other multi-threaded work sometimes use pattern generators to pad out the number of threads or by individual pack members to optimize their own individual threads.
Pattern generation can also be combined with speculative biology or genetic engineering and efficiency maximizers to create procedurally generated life and algorithmically optimize the genetics of their genetically modified creatures. It is rare for genetic modifications to be made by biologists looking at a creature's genome and figuring out which genes they have to modify to get the desire result; instead gene sequences are automatically optimized. In high-priority areas where this research has been done for decades (e.g. agriculture), it's only possible to discover marginal gains to state-of-the-art gene sequences with immense computing resources. This also leads to generative paleontology, where pattern generators are used to fill gaps in the fossil record; while inefficient and unreliable, it has on occasion accurately predicted extinct organisms that were later found in the fossil record, but is still being refined. Naturally, the Kyanah have been known to use AI to create AI, though this is seen more as, variably, optimizer optimizers or generator generators. However, out-of-the-box generated algorithms are often further modified, especially if maximum performance is required.
Re: Road to Hope
Both industrial robots and autonomous free-moving robots are widely used in Kyanah society. These tend to rely on artificial muscle technology via shape-memory alloys to move in an energy efficient manner and navigate terrain that would stump wheeled robots or legged robots with conventional actuators; they are capable of near-perfect balance in virtually all environments. When applicable, these robots are equipped with multiple hand-like appendages at various shapes and sizes, with as many or more degrees of freedom than an actual Kyanah hand. Legged robots with artificial muscles are often used in the military to carry all the supplies in the field, leaving soldiers free to use their strength solely on carrying guns, ammo, and heavy armor, instead of the huge backpacks often carried by human soldiers. But similar robots are often seen in the civilian sector as well, especially in mining, construction, and factories, where their ability to automatically navigate in tricky spaces can come in handy for fetching and carrying and the like. Adoption of robots is widespread in nearly every industry; they can often be found harvesting feed crops for the Kyanahs' livestock, extracting resources via mining and logging, assembling items in factories, and doing surgeries. "Android" type robots are quite rare, most robots tend to have four, six, or eight legs coming out of a central box, with however many arms and sensors are needed being bolted on at odd angles. Notably, adoption of such solutions is not universal; less developed regions, or those that have had strong backlash by workers have less ubiquitous robotics than city-states like Ikun.
While artificial muscle robots are common, they are not the answer to every problem. Conventional drones swarm through the skies above major cities like Ikun, delivering food and light packages faster than ground vehicles that would have to navigate through the often chaotic street traffic. They also perform surveillance in areas that are too remote or out of reach for conventional camera arrays, being semi-automatically deployed whenever intelligence agencies calculate that there is something of interest to monitor and can also be found in large numbers around battlefields gathering real-time data to feed to tactical engines. Swarms of drones and crowds of artificial-muscle ground robots can sometimes be found wandering the wilderness between city-states, seemingly at random; these can be surveyor bots or academic data-gathering bots but are actually often a harbinger of a future Kyanah industrial operation, and they're often there due to satellite observations, not at random. Many corporations and governments that are involved in resource extraction maintain fleets of bots and remote-controlled vehicles that traverse the world, autonomously prospecting for minerals and ecologies. Ground bots are often ruggedized for traversing all manner of terrain and have solar panels and charging ports for their companion drones. When these bots find something, the Kyanah themselves will quickly show up and get to work. City-states with the means to maintain such fleets can extract resources from just about anywhere on the planet, often out-competing and stifling domestic industry in regions that don't have such elaborate technology. There have been some prototypes of systems that can not only prospect but 3D print basic infrastructure before Kyanah workers even arrive on scene, but civilian tech in this regard lags behind military tech and a fully unsupervised system is still years away for both. There is also research into using genetically engineered organisms with neural remote control systems, so they can survive in nature as living things do, but this too is years away from being practical. Bot-and-drone fleets can also be found traveling together across Ryitu (Tau Ceti f) though they are mostly scientific in nature rather than industrial.
Powered exoskeletons are in widespread use in many heavy industries. Unlike stereotypical mech suits, these are not practical for combat and not intended for fighting with (except in certain sports) but instead simply for lifting heavy loads in environments where robots may not be the most practical or cost-effective option, boosting the operator's carrying capacity by up to an order of magnitude. These can include emergency responders and industrial work in remote areas and military engineering, but also more mundane applications. While many warehouses are fully automated, those that store diverse and non-standardized items and containers--which can happen when collecting goods from many different city-states due to a generally decentralized culture and lack of agreed-upon global standards--often have exoskeleton-wielding workers to handle them, especially as young packless Kyanah can be hired for such roles, and packless labor is dirt-cheap compared to packs.
Ever since the early Utopian Wars, modular manufacturing has become increasingly widespread, providing a second level of industrialization above merely having assembly lines with interchangeable parts; this is considered the Kyanah homeworld's second industrial revolution. Complex machines and products, including but not limited to robots, are made by simply slotting together various combinations of parts, and can be modified or improved upon quite easily by removing and replacing or rearranging individual components--though many companies go out of their way to ensure that only their building blocks are compatible with each other. And closely looking at the individual components will often reveal that they've been manufactured in the same modular manner. However, with this level of freedom comes a very large possible design space when manufacturing products, with plenty of room to make mistakes or improvements. Building Kyanah technology can in some ways be likened to assembling lego sets where every assembly step is an equation that has to be solved for. With this, combined with the high level of robotics involved, manufacturing of physical objects often more closely resembles the software development process, with continuous rapid iteration on product design and deployment of new ideas even while products are being manufactured; different iterations of the same product will often have subtle variations. To capitalize on this, assembly lines have become quite nonlinear, with multiple lines operating in parallel and interleaving with each other to converge on optimal parameters within the assembly space. Most modern systems and infrastructure are filled with embedded sensors to automatically alert personnel if things have failed or broken down, greatly reducing the need for active monitoring.
The presence of robotics and AI have significantly altered the economy on the Kyanah homeworld, especially in level 3 economies--or post-industrial as humans would call them--like Ikun, and traditional manufacturing has declined significantly, while surging in new level 2 economies in previously less developed regions. Many city-states, especially in more conservative and traditional cultures, have adapted strict laws limiting automation in response to civil unrest from workers, but in Ikun, such regulations are fairly minimal. Packs that aren't knowledge workers or participating in the service sector have tended to adapt by acting as the glue between automated systems, often moving between different sites as they do so. The general lack of standardization and uniformity created by the hyper-competitive environment, in which organizations are constantly and aggressively optimizing technologies and procedures, and creating very diverse solutions as a result, has allowed considerable room for this sort of economic activity. In general, most Kyanah cultures have a disdain for waste and inefficiency--whether that be waste of money and material goods, lives, or socio-political capital--and unnecessary expenditure of resources is seen as not just an engineering failure but a moral shortcoming. This is likely due to the relative lack of abundance on their hot and arid homeworld, especially in historic times. Combine this with their cultural distrust of central authority sources outside their own packs, and the constant competition between thousands of city-states and subgroups within said city-states, and you get the current cultural and industrial landscape of the Kyanah homeworld, characterized by extreme customization, high tolerance for risk, and low tolerance for waste--quite the opposite of human industry.
While artificial muscle robots are common, they are not the answer to every problem. Conventional drones swarm through the skies above major cities like Ikun, delivering food and light packages faster than ground vehicles that would have to navigate through the often chaotic street traffic. They also perform surveillance in areas that are too remote or out of reach for conventional camera arrays, being semi-automatically deployed whenever intelligence agencies calculate that there is something of interest to monitor and can also be found in large numbers around battlefields gathering real-time data to feed to tactical engines. Swarms of drones and crowds of artificial-muscle ground robots can sometimes be found wandering the wilderness between city-states, seemingly at random; these can be surveyor bots or academic data-gathering bots but are actually often a harbinger of a future Kyanah industrial operation, and they're often there due to satellite observations, not at random. Many corporations and governments that are involved in resource extraction maintain fleets of bots and remote-controlled vehicles that traverse the world, autonomously prospecting for minerals and ecologies. Ground bots are often ruggedized for traversing all manner of terrain and have solar panels and charging ports for their companion drones. When these bots find something, the Kyanah themselves will quickly show up and get to work. City-states with the means to maintain such fleets can extract resources from just about anywhere on the planet, often out-competing and stifling domestic industry in regions that don't have such elaborate technology. There have been some prototypes of systems that can not only prospect but 3D print basic infrastructure before Kyanah workers even arrive on scene, but civilian tech in this regard lags behind military tech and a fully unsupervised system is still years away for both. There is also research into using genetically engineered organisms with neural remote control systems, so they can survive in nature as living things do, but this too is years away from being practical. Bot-and-drone fleets can also be found traveling together across Ryitu (Tau Ceti f) though they are mostly scientific in nature rather than industrial.
Powered exoskeletons are in widespread use in many heavy industries. Unlike stereotypical mech suits, these are not practical for combat and not intended for fighting with (except in certain sports) but instead simply for lifting heavy loads in environments where robots may not be the most practical or cost-effective option, boosting the operator's carrying capacity by up to an order of magnitude. These can include emergency responders and industrial work in remote areas and military engineering, but also more mundane applications. While many warehouses are fully automated, those that store diverse and non-standardized items and containers--which can happen when collecting goods from many different city-states due to a generally decentralized culture and lack of agreed-upon global standards--often have exoskeleton-wielding workers to handle them, especially as young packless Kyanah can be hired for such roles, and packless labor is dirt-cheap compared to packs.
Ever since the early Utopian Wars, modular manufacturing has become increasingly widespread, providing a second level of industrialization above merely having assembly lines with interchangeable parts; this is considered the Kyanah homeworld's second industrial revolution. Complex machines and products, including but not limited to robots, are made by simply slotting together various combinations of parts, and can be modified or improved upon quite easily by removing and replacing or rearranging individual components--though many companies go out of their way to ensure that only their building blocks are compatible with each other. And closely looking at the individual components will often reveal that they've been manufactured in the same modular manner. However, with this level of freedom comes a very large possible design space when manufacturing products, with plenty of room to make mistakes or improvements. Building Kyanah technology can in some ways be likened to assembling lego sets where every assembly step is an equation that has to be solved for. With this, combined with the high level of robotics involved, manufacturing of physical objects often more closely resembles the software development process, with continuous rapid iteration on product design and deployment of new ideas even while products are being manufactured; different iterations of the same product will often have subtle variations. To capitalize on this, assembly lines have become quite nonlinear, with multiple lines operating in parallel and interleaving with each other to converge on optimal parameters within the assembly space. Most modern systems and infrastructure are filled with embedded sensors to automatically alert personnel if things have failed or broken down, greatly reducing the need for active monitoring.
The presence of robotics and AI have significantly altered the economy on the Kyanah homeworld, especially in level 3 economies--or post-industrial as humans would call them--like Ikun, and traditional manufacturing has declined significantly, while surging in new level 2 economies in previously less developed regions. Many city-states, especially in more conservative and traditional cultures, have adapted strict laws limiting automation in response to civil unrest from workers, but in Ikun, such regulations are fairly minimal. Packs that aren't knowledge workers or participating in the service sector have tended to adapt by acting as the glue between automated systems, often moving between different sites as they do so. The general lack of standardization and uniformity created by the hyper-competitive environment, in which organizations are constantly and aggressively optimizing technologies and procedures, and creating very diverse solutions as a result, has allowed considerable room for this sort of economic activity. In general, most Kyanah cultures have a disdain for waste and inefficiency--whether that be waste of money and material goods, lives, or socio-political capital--and unnecessary expenditure of resources is seen as not just an engineering failure but a moral shortcoming. This is likely due to the relative lack of abundance on their hot and arid homeworld, especially in historic times. Combine this with their cultural distrust of central authority sources outside their own packs, and the constant competition between thousands of city-states and subgroups within said city-states, and you get the current cultural and industrial landscape of the Kyanah homeworld, characterized by extreme customization, high tolerance for risk, and low tolerance for waste--quite the opposite of human industry.
Re: Road to Hope
The Kyanah are a heavily pack-centric species so if anyone commits a crime, the whole pack is, with few exceptions, considered responsible both morally and in the eyes of the law. This includes their children, though if imprisoned, they can usually petition for release upon adulthood even if the rest of the pack is still doing their time. Likewise, any occupation or social role is held by a pack, not an individual. In most city-states, criminal cases, much like civil cases or pursuit of public office, are handled via a challenge in the arena, judged by an arbiter-pack. This is a descendant of ancient trial by combat practices, though in modern times, challenges are instead conducted by presenting the relevant facts and laws, and the combat aspect, if present at all, is purely symbolic.
Justice systems vary wildly between thousands of independent city-states, but in Ikun: as the government itself obviously isn't a physical entity that can stand in the arena, it appoints a Champion, a pack with legal expertise to fight the challenge on behalf of the state. (Champions, a concept descended from the skilled warrior packs who would historically represent nobles in combat challenges, back when nobility existed, can represent non-pack entities who are challengers or defenders in any challenge. Notably, packs don't get this, as they're already physical entities that can 1v1 in the arena.) In the interest of fairness and preserving the 1v1 aspect of the challenge, neither pack is allowed to communicate with the outside world during the challenge, though speaking to legal consultants beforehand is allowed and encouraged. To prevent stalling, challenges must continue without stopping until a verdict is ready, unless both parties agree to adjourn, which can give them time to rest and discuss strategies with consultants. Additionally, arbiters are chosen at random from the pool of arbiter packs, and their identities are not revealed until the challenge begins, to reduce the probability of collusion. Similarly, Champions must delicately balance their chosen win conditions; the challenge is to prove that the defending pack is guilty and deserves the stated sentence, and overly extreme demands can make this more difficult.
Once the arbiter pack has no more questions and both sides are done presenting the evidence, they will decide who won. Arbiters who don't at least give the appearance of being objective may find themselves either facing a criminal challenge against a Champion of the state seeking to have them imprisoned for breaking the law, or a successional challenge, by a citizen pack seeking to take their place due to their incompetence. Or even both, in especially egregious rulings.
If the Champion wins, results for the defending pack can include flogging--replacement for fines, which are seen in Ikun society as adjacent to bribery--exile/denaturalization--usually for tax or immigration related crimes, and rarely for other matters, imprisonment, or death. In modern Ikun, there's no elaborate ritual or gruesome torture. The guards just escort the condemned into the prison courtyard and unceremoniously fire a bullet to the head at point blank range, one for each member of the guilty pack. Some have proposed that nitrogen chambers, if properly implemented, would consume fewer resources, but this hasn't caught on in Ikun.
As for the prison system itself, it's basically like being forced to move to a shitty apartment that you can't leave, where the landlord is armed and always watching. The goal seems to be neither rehabilitation nor retribution, but just keeping threats to society contained as efficiently as possible until they're no longer a threat. Cells are arrayed in a circle around a central control room, sometimes stacked several stories high, so that all cells can be seen at once from one area. To add to this effect, the central area is kept dark while the cells are lit at all times, making it difficult to see out via the transparent doors, but easy to see in.
The cells themselves each contain an entire pack, as splitting up packs is powerful psychological torture and is banned except for captured foreign military or intelligence personnel. Each one is windowless and about three meters by five meters and two meters high--Kyanah themselves average about 1.5. Most of this space is taken by an empty plastic nest frame fixed to the concrete floor, a sink, and a toilet. And four cameras in the ceiling to monitor everything. When packs are sent to prison, they are usually given the opportunity to bring their stuff with them, including nest-building materials, personal devices and whatever else they want from home, as prisons themselves don't issue such items, though guards inspect everything for weapons, contraband, and illicit files.
Imprisoned packs are expected to pay market rate for meat, water, and utilities so as not to be a burden on the system, though how they do this is up to them, so long as they can do it from inside the prison walls. That can include burning through savings, somehow holding down a remote job from prison, or working in the prison itself, maintaining the bioreactor tanks where meat is grown from genetically engineered microbes, cleaning and maintaining the grounds and systems, taking care of administration, or in some cases working in adjoining factories that some companies set up in prisons for the below-market labor. While the pay is atrocious in this latter case, it's the most practical option for packs that don't have tons of money or connections, and provides the only regular opportunity to leave the cell--other opportunities can include speaking to registered legal consultants or medical professionals, though for these, appointments have to be approved in advance. Work details and shifts are randomized to prevent alliances or rivalries from forming between imprisoned packs, and thwart escape attempts.
On the flip side, all activity is heavily monitored at all times. Any property suspected of being used for criminal activity, or in violation of personal property or spending limits, can be seized and destroyed by prison officials at any time, without the due process and legal proceedings required for free packs, as long as they believe in good faith that it was being used to break rules or laws--and demonstrating that they don't is notoriously difficult to prove. Similarly, escapes, riots, and other troublemaking can lead to temporary bans from leaving the cell, which can make acquiring rent rather difficult to say the least. And failing to pay rent on the cell will lead to confiscation of its contents and eventually getting food and water cut off.
Justice systems vary wildly between thousands of independent city-states, but in Ikun: as the government itself obviously isn't a physical entity that can stand in the arena, it appoints a Champion, a pack with legal expertise to fight the challenge on behalf of the state. (Champions, a concept descended from the skilled warrior packs who would historically represent nobles in combat challenges, back when nobility existed, can represent non-pack entities who are challengers or defenders in any challenge. Notably, packs don't get this, as they're already physical entities that can 1v1 in the arena.) In the interest of fairness and preserving the 1v1 aspect of the challenge, neither pack is allowed to communicate with the outside world during the challenge, though speaking to legal consultants beforehand is allowed and encouraged. To prevent stalling, challenges must continue without stopping until a verdict is ready, unless both parties agree to adjourn, which can give them time to rest and discuss strategies with consultants. Additionally, arbiters are chosen at random from the pool of arbiter packs, and their identities are not revealed until the challenge begins, to reduce the probability of collusion. Similarly, Champions must delicately balance their chosen win conditions; the challenge is to prove that the defending pack is guilty and deserves the stated sentence, and overly extreme demands can make this more difficult.
Once the arbiter pack has no more questions and both sides are done presenting the evidence, they will decide who won. Arbiters who don't at least give the appearance of being objective may find themselves either facing a criminal challenge against a Champion of the state seeking to have them imprisoned for breaking the law, or a successional challenge, by a citizen pack seeking to take their place due to their incompetence. Or even both, in especially egregious rulings.
If the Champion wins, results for the defending pack can include flogging--replacement for fines, which are seen in Ikun society as adjacent to bribery--exile/denaturalization--usually for tax or immigration related crimes, and rarely for other matters, imprisonment, or death. In modern Ikun, there's no elaborate ritual or gruesome torture. The guards just escort the condemned into the prison courtyard and unceremoniously fire a bullet to the head at point blank range, one for each member of the guilty pack. Some have proposed that nitrogen chambers, if properly implemented, would consume fewer resources, but this hasn't caught on in Ikun.
As for the prison system itself, it's basically like being forced to move to a shitty apartment that you can't leave, where the landlord is armed and always watching. The goal seems to be neither rehabilitation nor retribution, but just keeping threats to society contained as efficiently as possible until they're no longer a threat. Cells are arrayed in a circle around a central control room, sometimes stacked several stories high, so that all cells can be seen at once from one area. To add to this effect, the central area is kept dark while the cells are lit at all times, making it difficult to see out via the transparent doors, but easy to see in.
The cells themselves each contain an entire pack, as splitting up packs is powerful psychological torture and is banned except for captured foreign military or intelligence personnel. Each one is windowless and about three meters by five meters and two meters high--Kyanah themselves average about 1.5. Most of this space is taken by an empty plastic nest frame fixed to the concrete floor, a sink, and a toilet. And four cameras in the ceiling to monitor everything. When packs are sent to prison, they are usually given the opportunity to bring their stuff with them, including nest-building materials, personal devices and whatever else they want from home, as prisons themselves don't issue such items, though guards inspect everything for weapons, contraband, and illicit files.
Imprisoned packs are expected to pay market rate for meat, water, and utilities so as not to be a burden on the system, though how they do this is up to them, so long as they can do it from inside the prison walls. That can include burning through savings, somehow holding down a remote job from prison, or working in the prison itself, maintaining the bioreactor tanks where meat is grown from genetically engineered microbes, cleaning and maintaining the grounds and systems, taking care of administration, or in some cases working in adjoining factories that some companies set up in prisons for the below-market labor. While the pay is atrocious in this latter case, it's the most practical option for packs that don't have tons of money or connections, and provides the only regular opportunity to leave the cell--other opportunities can include speaking to registered legal consultants or medical professionals, though for these, appointments have to be approved in advance. Work details and shifts are randomized to prevent alliances or rivalries from forming between imprisoned packs, and thwart escape attempts.
On the flip side, all activity is heavily monitored at all times. Any property suspected of being used for criminal activity, or in violation of personal property or spending limits, can be seized and destroyed by prison officials at any time, without the due process and legal proceedings required for free packs, as long as they believe in good faith that it was being used to break rules or laws--and demonstrating that they don't is notoriously difficult to prove. Similarly, escapes, riots, and other troublemaking can lead to temporary bans from leaving the cell, which can make acquiring rent rather difficult to say the least. And failing to pay rent on the cell will lead to confiscation of its contents and eventually getting food and water cut off.
Re: Road to Hope
Scrubland Dominion (~2300-900 BC). The first phase of civilization in Kyanah world history, originating with the creation of the oldest true city-states--areas permanently inhabited by Kyanah doing second-order agriculture (growing feed crops for their livestock) and exhibiting a division of labor enabled by surplus food--around 43-4400 Earth years ago, clinging to the shores of some of the larger boreal scrublands oases. Their livestock predominantly consisted of nyruds and smaller scrubland herbivores such as the sheep-sized undergrowth-browsing onikagi. These early city-states would all be on the rim of the Great Polar Plateau, between 57-65N and 30-60W; this region is considered to be the hatching nest of Kyanah civilization and includes one of the oldest extant city-states, Aiyahah, likely founded around 2050 BC.
Unfortunately, little is known about most of these earliest city-states, as they had yet to develop a written language, relying on oral tradition to pass down information to their young and handle administrative matters. Additionally, traditional scrublands buildings were made of readily available timber from shrubs and bushes, leaves, and animal hides. Few have withstood the test of time, though some buried ruins have provided a clue as to the nature of such structures. It is believed that they were constructed by balancing rows of branches from exoskeleton plants against each other in a triangular prism shape, securing them with sinews or plant fibers, and patching the gaps with hides, leaves, and dirt. Some could be up to 40 meters long, perhaps serving as storehouses, workshops, or temples, while dwellings for packs were much shorter. By 2000 BC, packs in these primitive city-states were frequently building their nests inside such structures; indeed Kyanah architecture likely originated in the first place as, essentially, robust "nested nests". This was likely not just protection from the elements--nests were already quite sophisticated at retaining heat--but a place to store and protect the increasing amount of tools, equipment, and other possessions associated with a sedentary, agrarian lifestyle.
Metal-working would emerge in the early Scrublands city-states with copper smithing around 1600 BC, followed about a century later by the first bronze tools and weapons. Other key innovations include kilns, allowing for the creation of more advanced pottery, plant-protein based alcohol to go along with existing animal protein-based versions, metal jewelry and armor, and starting from around 1900 BC, increasingly complex irrigation works instead of just having disorganized crop fields hugging the oasis shores. Meteoric iron scavenged from impact craters was sometimes utilized, though this was rare. Towards the end of this period, around 1200-1100 BC, wells, muscle-powered pumps, and terraced fields and pastures surrounding oases would make things even more complex. By 1200 BC, traditional stone-stacking art would become considerably more complex and standardized, with increasing evidence of stones being extensively carved before being added to cairns. This may indicate the use of cairns to transmit information, as a form of proto-writing. By the late Scrubland dominion, some of the largest city-states had populations around a quarter million, the largest concentrations of Kyanah anywhere on the planet at the time, in a time where no oasis anywhere else had more than about 30,000. These huge populations for the technology at a time can be attributed to the geography of the Kyanah homeworld: as oases are the only stable and permanent source of water, it's only natural that packs in societies developing civilization are overwhelmingly concentrated there instead of being scattered all over the place in smaller villages.
However, without formalized writing, it's unclear what political or economic systems were employed, or even if they saw themselves as a singular polity or just thousands of packs jockeying for space at the same oasis. Based on later observations of societies at a similar technological level, it is likely such systems were simple. A pack became the new City Alpha by killing the old one, and trade was done via bartering. In general, packs semi-autonomously tended their own plots of land and livestock--or workshops or mines, given the increasing division of labor in this era--and handed over a portion of every slaughter to the City Alpha in exchange for protection by (and from) the City Alpha and their ikoin (allies). Violence between packs seeking more water and farmland was likely common, despite mediation from the nascent state.
While Scrubland-dominion civilizations were the most sophisticated and developed areas on the planet, the rest of the world was not by any means idle. The last completely uninhabited major regions in the Dunelands, the Ptekyen Highlands, and the Naatnan Desert were settled by hunter-trappers and herders, and in the far south, packs began advancing into the polar barrens, closing in on the south pole. However, the Deadlands still remained uninhabited. Global population increased from around 300 million in 2300 BC to 550 million by 900 BC (adjusting for land area, this would be like 33 and 62 million humans on Earth, respectively). Organized city-states, with second-order agriculture and eventually bronze or copper tools, would spread from the Great Polar Plateau Rim Cluster into to the inner plateau, towards the north pole, by 1900 BC, into the boreal savannas by 1700 BC, the Western Sector and Meatbucket by 1500 BC, and the Rktakian Kwardniet by 1400 BC. In the southern hemisphere, city-states would independently develop in the Anweri cluster around 1200 BC and the western equatorial flood meadows around 950 BC. As hot-walkers (essentially warm-blooded mammal-like reptiles like the Kyanah themselves) were less dominant closer to the equator, these civilizations would instead farm cold-walkers (characterized by cold-bloodedness, splayed legs, and soft-shelled eggs). Meanwhile, the Scrubland-dominion societies would pass their peak around 1100 BC and begin to decline, with around three quarters of the city-states in this region having collapsed by 900 BC. The exact cause is unclear, but bad crop management, possibly brought about by forgetting important agricultural knowledge such as crop rotation--first practiced around 1400 BC--likely weakened many of them. Climatic shifts and/or overhunting and extinction of several tyotonkior species--relatives of the nyruds--caused an incursion of nomadic hunters and warriors from deep inside the Great Polar Plateau to finish them off; this is likely the source of legends written centuries later about such fearsome peoples as the "great-horned-nyrud-riders", "ratorkortyot-skull-wearers", and "blood-face-painters"--highly exaggerated accounts of (probably) real cultures that came down from near the north pole around 950-900 BC and killed thousands of Kyanah in the city-states.
Unfortunately, little is known about most of these earliest city-states, as they had yet to develop a written language, relying on oral tradition to pass down information to their young and handle administrative matters. Additionally, traditional scrublands buildings were made of readily available timber from shrubs and bushes, leaves, and animal hides. Few have withstood the test of time, though some buried ruins have provided a clue as to the nature of such structures. It is believed that they were constructed by balancing rows of branches from exoskeleton plants against each other in a triangular prism shape, securing them with sinews or plant fibers, and patching the gaps with hides, leaves, and dirt. Some could be up to 40 meters long, perhaps serving as storehouses, workshops, or temples, while dwellings for packs were much shorter. By 2000 BC, packs in these primitive city-states were frequently building their nests inside such structures; indeed Kyanah architecture likely originated in the first place as, essentially, robust "nested nests". This was likely not just protection from the elements--nests were already quite sophisticated at retaining heat--but a place to store and protect the increasing amount of tools, equipment, and other possessions associated with a sedentary, agrarian lifestyle.
Metal-working would emerge in the early Scrublands city-states with copper smithing around 1600 BC, followed about a century later by the first bronze tools and weapons. Other key innovations include kilns, allowing for the creation of more advanced pottery, plant-protein based alcohol to go along with existing animal protein-based versions, metal jewelry and armor, and starting from around 1900 BC, increasingly complex irrigation works instead of just having disorganized crop fields hugging the oasis shores. Meteoric iron scavenged from impact craters was sometimes utilized, though this was rare. Towards the end of this period, around 1200-1100 BC, wells, muscle-powered pumps, and terraced fields and pastures surrounding oases would make things even more complex. By 1200 BC, traditional stone-stacking art would become considerably more complex and standardized, with increasing evidence of stones being extensively carved before being added to cairns. This may indicate the use of cairns to transmit information, as a form of proto-writing. By the late Scrubland dominion, some of the largest city-states had populations around a quarter million, the largest concentrations of Kyanah anywhere on the planet at the time, in a time where no oasis anywhere else had more than about 30,000. These huge populations for the technology at a time can be attributed to the geography of the Kyanah homeworld: as oases are the only stable and permanent source of water, it's only natural that packs in societies developing civilization are overwhelmingly concentrated there instead of being scattered all over the place in smaller villages.
However, without formalized writing, it's unclear what political or economic systems were employed, or even if they saw themselves as a singular polity or just thousands of packs jockeying for space at the same oasis. Based on later observations of societies at a similar technological level, it is likely such systems were simple. A pack became the new City Alpha by killing the old one, and trade was done via bartering. In general, packs semi-autonomously tended their own plots of land and livestock--or workshops or mines, given the increasing division of labor in this era--and handed over a portion of every slaughter to the City Alpha in exchange for protection by (and from) the City Alpha and their ikoin (allies). Violence between packs seeking more water and farmland was likely common, despite mediation from the nascent state.
While Scrubland-dominion civilizations were the most sophisticated and developed areas on the planet, the rest of the world was not by any means idle. The last completely uninhabited major regions in the Dunelands, the Ptekyen Highlands, and the Naatnan Desert were settled by hunter-trappers and herders, and in the far south, packs began advancing into the polar barrens, closing in on the south pole. However, the Deadlands still remained uninhabited. Global population increased from around 300 million in 2300 BC to 550 million by 900 BC (adjusting for land area, this would be like 33 and 62 million humans on Earth, respectively). Organized city-states, with second-order agriculture and eventually bronze or copper tools, would spread from the Great Polar Plateau Rim Cluster into to the inner plateau, towards the north pole, by 1900 BC, into the boreal savannas by 1700 BC, the Western Sector and Meatbucket by 1500 BC, and the Rktakian Kwardniet by 1400 BC. In the southern hemisphere, city-states would independently develop in the Anweri cluster around 1200 BC and the western equatorial flood meadows around 950 BC. As hot-walkers (essentially warm-blooded mammal-like reptiles like the Kyanah themselves) were less dominant closer to the equator, these civilizations would instead farm cold-walkers (characterized by cold-bloodedness, splayed legs, and soft-shelled eggs). Meanwhile, the Scrubland-dominion societies would pass their peak around 1100 BC and begin to decline, with around three quarters of the city-states in this region having collapsed by 900 BC. The exact cause is unclear, but bad crop management, possibly brought about by forgetting important agricultural knowledge such as crop rotation--first practiced around 1400 BC--likely weakened many of them. Climatic shifts and/or overhunting and extinction of several tyotonkior species--relatives of the nyruds--caused an incursion of nomadic hunters and warriors from deep inside the Great Polar Plateau to finish them off; this is likely the source of legends written centuries later about such fearsome peoples as the "great-horned-nyrud-riders", "ratorkortyot-skull-wearers", and "blood-face-painters"--highly exaggerated accounts of (probably) real cultures that came down from near the north pole around 950-900 BC and killed thousands of Kyanah in the city-states.
Re: Road to Hope
Savanna Dominion (~900BC-200 AD). The second phase of Kyanah civilization, it would emerge in the flatter and warmer boreal savannas just south of the Great Polar Plateau. Initially, small city-states arose in the boreal savannas in 1700 BC, relying on nyruds they brought with them from the boreal scrublands, as well as the native tyukruds. However, with the fall of Scrubland-dominion, the economic and technological center of gravity would shift to the boreal savannas, whose civilizations would be a quantum leap forward from their predecessors. Even before Savanna-dominion, these city-states had built complex irrigation works and knew how to work bronze by 1150 BC, and by 900 BC, would rediscover some of the lost knowledge about crop rotation. As their environment was quite different from the boreal scrublands, they were more able to drive away the invading ratorkortyot-skull-wearers from the north. However, their biggest advantage would be the development of proper writing systems--first picture-based proto-writing scratched into rocks or mud-bricks by 1150 BC and later, actual symbolic written language, around 950 BC. This would prevent the loss of knowledge between generations and enable more complex and accurate record-keeping. The first true written works appear to be collections of ground truths and relations between them, geared towards helping whatever pack wrote it track complex relations between different packs to find useful allies in the complicated and cutthroat city-state environment and maximize their own influence more efficiently than trying to work everything out in their heads. They thus include countless statements indicating what some pack said or did, interactions between other packs, and useful recipes or procedures.
By 800 BC, these informal writings created by various--likely powerful and influential--packs would become more formalized and standardized, being refined into the first legal codes and professional scribe and arbiter packs by 700 BC. Concurrently, the development of writing would also allow for the first rigorous study of mathematics, leading to nascent accounting, allowing for a more diversified economy, and the study of complex tree and graph like data structures, often used by the ruling elite to model various engineering and statecraft problems. All of this led to a drastic increase in the cohesiveness of the state apparatus, with a basic bureaucracy and formal tax code. An increase in farming the more intensive nyruds likely also contributed. However, this efficiency also led to a major stratifying of society and decrease in the autonomy of farmers and crafts-packs. Instead of working their own fields and herds and handing over a portion of the meat as tribute, they were now working the state's fields and herds and in return getting to keep a portion of the meat for themselves. And instead of succession being determined through strength in combat and allied packs to back up their claims, it was determined through highly ritualized show fights between the mostly closed set of allied packs who owned the land and nyruds. This is the basis of the Noble Ikoin system, more stable and less bloody than its predecessor, Rule by Righteous Strength, yet ultimately less free--though many packs were not 100% bound to the land like serfs and had some limited ability to choose whose fields they worked in certain circumstances, as noble packs were always seeking to maximize their own work force at the expense of rivals'. Unlike human nobles, this nobility was often but not strictly hereditary--as has been discussed, Kyanah packs generally don't form emotional bonds with those outside their packs, so would have little inherent reason to give land to packs that happen to contain their adult children. Thus it's occasionally possible for the nobility to decide that a pack of nobles' young are just commoners (albeit likely rich ones), or to elevate an entirely common pack into the set of nobles. Elaborate weighted voting systems and trial by ritualized combat are often used to settle disputes between nobles without resorting to having to kill each other, as in older systems. With these more rigid and well-defined states came the first known political and philosophical treatise in Raknatay city-state by ~664 BC, as well as the first gods who haven't been lost to time and are still worshiped by some modern Kyanah.
Bolstered by widespread written languages, technology and science would advance in Savanna-dominion city-states. Iron-smelting without relying on meteoric iron would be developed between 700 and 600 BC. Additionally, architecture advanced considerably over Scrubland-dominion city-states. Before about 1000 BC, Kyanah in boreal savanna city-states would mostly put their nests inside hide or leaf tents, due to relative lack of timber. However, advances in stacking-stone technology eventually allowed dry-stone architecture, with carefully selected stones being fitted together without mortar to create sturdy buildings; the 1.4G gravity of the Kyanah homeworld necessitated very skilled and precise engineering to pull this off. With iron tools making it more practical to shape stones to reduce gaps and bumps and make them interlock to increase stability, this really took off after 600 BC, even enabling the construction of two and three story buildings, high walls, and watch towers. Beginning around 500 BC, noble packs and City Alphas would begin adopting this technology to build some of the oldest surviving great monuments, having their laborers stack thousands of stones into large piles. They would often have an elaborately shaped footprint rather than a simple square or circle, with the base stones being extensively carved, polished, and covered in writing and relief sculpture. The idea was that the pack who commissioned it would be laid to rest at the top, drawing the attention of the gods to ensure that they would be included in the universe's next iteration and not forgotten. Competition amongst elites within and between city-states would over time lead to bigger and bigger monuments, with the largest in 100 AD being upwards of 40 meters high. Over time they have partially collapsed and become overgrown, but hundreds are still recognizable and remain prominent tourist attractions.
The flatter and more open terrain of the boreal savannas also made wheel-based transport more practical and so two and four wheeled nyrud-drawn carts were invented even before Savanna-dominion, and had spread across the boreal savannas already by 800 BC. This enabled them to carry larger loads than just riding on the back of a nyrud, though advances were made in this area as well, with the development of practical nyrud saddles by 500 BC. (Notably, riding nyruds is unlike riding a Terran horse--nyruds are so wide that it's physically impossible to straddle them, so riders have to either sit sideways or kneel on the back of the nyrud, and also entire packs would typically share one or two nyruds when riding; thus nyrud saddles were designed very differently from horse saddles; in lieu of stirrups, stabilizing devices like straps would be popularized by 200 BC.) This increase in nyrud-based transport also led to the first known road networks between city-states, stretching tens or even hundreds of kilometers. At first these were dirt roads, but by 400 BC, some gravel roads would be created and maintained. In the interest of optimizing these road networks, advanced--for the time--surveying methods would be discovered and quickly optimized, leading to the creation of surprisingly detailed regional maps, whose accuracy was not surpassed until the modern era. In fact, it was this increase in organized long-distance travel, combined with strange and subtle inaccuracies in some of their biggest maps (failing to take into account planetary curvature!) that led to boreal savanna cultures being the first to see--by 100 BC--the Kyanah homeworld as a finite sphere with a single sun circling around it, rather than an infinite plane with suns constantly rising out of the ground in the day and sinking back in at night. New maps taking into account planetary curvature, combined with the development of the magnetized compass in the first century AD, enabled the first long-range expeditions. The first known deliberate attempts to reach the North Pole were made soon after--albeit polar herders and hunter-trappers had likely passed near it unwittingly for thousands of years--and likely succeeded, judging by the anachronistic presence of iron tools and tyukrud bones near the north pole about 200 Earth years before iron-working and tyukrud farming were being done there. There is no record of any successful circumnavigation of the Kyanah homeworld in the Savanna-dominion, though it's unclear of the packs who attempted died or just abandoned the mission and settled in some other city-state. With a human mentality, this would lead to the formation of the first empires, but with Kyanah mentality, such large-scale social organization was virtually impossible.
The Savanna-dominion was ended by the -42nd epoch impact event, in the late 2nd century AD by Earth time. A large asteroid impact around 62N, 10E caused regional devastation that led to a collapse in the major boreal savanna cities and caused less apocalyptic but still significant effects to food supply across the northern hemisphere. The cartographic revolution of 300-100 BC was not limited to just surface maps; cartographers also mapped soil, geology, and ecosystems, leading to further refinements in agriculture and more stable support of large populations around oases. During the Savanna-dominion, world population would increase from 550 million to around 1.8 billion (equivalent population density to an Earth with ~203 million people), likely falling to around 1.7 billion in the years after the impact event. Over this period, city-states, second-order agriculture, and metallurgy would continue to expand across the northern hemisphere, with a resurgence in the boreal scrublands around 700 BC; iron-working would follow eventually, leading to the iron-nail cultures arising in 400 BC, using (obviously) iron nails to hold together dwellings instead of sinews or fibers as in the Scrubland-dominion. In the Kuayen plains, between the Western Sector and the Deadlands, civilization would develop around 500 BC and by 100 AD would have organized city-states nearly as advanced as the boreal savannas, with an independently developed written language and legal system, sophisticated cisterns and filters for storing water in this semi-arid region, and elaborate glassworks. While in the Middle South, cold-walker farming civilizations continued to expand. The Dunelands had city-states by 1 AD, leaving the only fully un-civilized areas in the northern hemisphere some of the more arid and mountainous regions near the equator, and the Deadlands. In the Far South, between the Middle South and the Green Impact Range at around 60-70S, civilizations would arise around 600 BC. The earliest Kyanah presence at the south pole dates to around 200 BC, though it would be highly sporadic until after 300 AD.
By 800 BC, these informal writings created by various--likely powerful and influential--packs would become more formalized and standardized, being refined into the first legal codes and professional scribe and arbiter packs by 700 BC. Concurrently, the development of writing would also allow for the first rigorous study of mathematics, leading to nascent accounting, allowing for a more diversified economy, and the study of complex tree and graph like data structures, often used by the ruling elite to model various engineering and statecraft problems. All of this led to a drastic increase in the cohesiveness of the state apparatus, with a basic bureaucracy and formal tax code. An increase in farming the more intensive nyruds likely also contributed. However, this efficiency also led to a major stratifying of society and decrease in the autonomy of farmers and crafts-packs. Instead of working their own fields and herds and handing over a portion of the meat as tribute, they were now working the state's fields and herds and in return getting to keep a portion of the meat for themselves. And instead of succession being determined through strength in combat and allied packs to back up their claims, it was determined through highly ritualized show fights between the mostly closed set of allied packs who owned the land and nyruds. This is the basis of the Noble Ikoin system, more stable and less bloody than its predecessor, Rule by Righteous Strength, yet ultimately less free--though many packs were not 100% bound to the land like serfs and had some limited ability to choose whose fields they worked in certain circumstances, as noble packs were always seeking to maximize their own work force at the expense of rivals'. Unlike human nobles, this nobility was often but not strictly hereditary--as has been discussed, Kyanah packs generally don't form emotional bonds with those outside their packs, so would have little inherent reason to give land to packs that happen to contain their adult children. Thus it's occasionally possible for the nobility to decide that a pack of nobles' young are just commoners (albeit likely rich ones), or to elevate an entirely common pack into the set of nobles. Elaborate weighted voting systems and trial by ritualized combat are often used to settle disputes between nobles without resorting to having to kill each other, as in older systems. With these more rigid and well-defined states came the first known political and philosophical treatise in Raknatay city-state by ~664 BC, as well as the first gods who haven't been lost to time and are still worshiped by some modern Kyanah.
Bolstered by widespread written languages, technology and science would advance in Savanna-dominion city-states. Iron-smelting without relying on meteoric iron would be developed between 700 and 600 BC. Additionally, architecture advanced considerably over Scrubland-dominion city-states. Before about 1000 BC, Kyanah in boreal savanna city-states would mostly put their nests inside hide or leaf tents, due to relative lack of timber. However, advances in stacking-stone technology eventually allowed dry-stone architecture, with carefully selected stones being fitted together without mortar to create sturdy buildings; the 1.4G gravity of the Kyanah homeworld necessitated very skilled and precise engineering to pull this off. With iron tools making it more practical to shape stones to reduce gaps and bumps and make them interlock to increase stability, this really took off after 600 BC, even enabling the construction of two and three story buildings, high walls, and watch towers. Beginning around 500 BC, noble packs and City Alphas would begin adopting this technology to build some of the oldest surviving great monuments, having their laborers stack thousands of stones into large piles. They would often have an elaborately shaped footprint rather than a simple square or circle, with the base stones being extensively carved, polished, and covered in writing and relief sculpture. The idea was that the pack who commissioned it would be laid to rest at the top, drawing the attention of the gods to ensure that they would be included in the universe's next iteration and not forgotten. Competition amongst elites within and between city-states would over time lead to bigger and bigger monuments, with the largest in 100 AD being upwards of 40 meters high. Over time they have partially collapsed and become overgrown, but hundreds are still recognizable and remain prominent tourist attractions.
The flatter and more open terrain of the boreal savannas also made wheel-based transport more practical and so two and four wheeled nyrud-drawn carts were invented even before Savanna-dominion, and had spread across the boreal savannas already by 800 BC. This enabled them to carry larger loads than just riding on the back of a nyrud, though advances were made in this area as well, with the development of practical nyrud saddles by 500 BC. (Notably, riding nyruds is unlike riding a Terran horse--nyruds are so wide that it's physically impossible to straddle them, so riders have to either sit sideways or kneel on the back of the nyrud, and also entire packs would typically share one or two nyruds when riding; thus nyrud saddles were designed very differently from horse saddles; in lieu of stirrups, stabilizing devices like straps would be popularized by 200 BC.) This increase in nyrud-based transport also led to the first known road networks between city-states, stretching tens or even hundreds of kilometers. At first these were dirt roads, but by 400 BC, some gravel roads would be created and maintained. In the interest of optimizing these road networks, advanced--for the time--surveying methods would be discovered and quickly optimized, leading to the creation of surprisingly detailed regional maps, whose accuracy was not surpassed until the modern era. In fact, it was this increase in organized long-distance travel, combined with strange and subtle inaccuracies in some of their biggest maps (failing to take into account planetary curvature!) that led to boreal savanna cultures being the first to see--by 100 BC--the Kyanah homeworld as a finite sphere with a single sun circling around it, rather than an infinite plane with suns constantly rising out of the ground in the day and sinking back in at night. New maps taking into account planetary curvature, combined with the development of the magnetized compass in the first century AD, enabled the first long-range expeditions. The first known deliberate attempts to reach the North Pole were made soon after--albeit polar herders and hunter-trappers had likely passed near it unwittingly for thousands of years--and likely succeeded, judging by the anachronistic presence of iron tools and tyukrud bones near the north pole about 200 Earth years before iron-working and tyukrud farming were being done there. There is no record of any successful circumnavigation of the Kyanah homeworld in the Savanna-dominion, though it's unclear of the packs who attempted died or just abandoned the mission and settled in some other city-state. With a human mentality, this would lead to the formation of the first empires, but with Kyanah mentality, such large-scale social organization was virtually impossible.
The Savanna-dominion was ended by the -42nd epoch impact event, in the late 2nd century AD by Earth time. A large asteroid impact around 62N, 10E caused regional devastation that led to a collapse in the major boreal savanna cities and caused less apocalyptic but still significant effects to food supply across the northern hemisphere. The cartographic revolution of 300-100 BC was not limited to just surface maps; cartographers also mapped soil, geology, and ecosystems, leading to further refinements in agriculture and more stable support of large populations around oases. During the Savanna-dominion, world population would increase from 550 million to around 1.8 billion (equivalent population density to an Earth with ~203 million people), likely falling to around 1.7 billion in the years after the impact event. Over this period, city-states, second-order agriculture, and metallurgy would continue to expand across the northern hemisphere, with a resurgence in the boreal scrublands around 700 BC; iron-working would follow eventually, leading to the iron-nail cultures arising in 400 BC, using (obviously) iron nails to hold together dwellings instead of sinews or fibers as in the Scrubland-dominion. In the Kuayen plains, between the Western Sector and the Deadlands, civilization would develop around 500 BC and by 100 AD would have organized city-states nearly as advanced as the boreal savannas, with an independently developed written language and legal system, sophisticated cisterns and filters for storing water in this semi-arid region, and elaborate glassworks. While in the Middle South, cold-walker farming civilizations continued to expand. The Dunelands had city-states by 1 AD, leaving the only fully un-civilized areas in the northern hemisphere some of the more arid and mountainous regions near the equator, and the Deadlands. In the Far South, between the Middle South and the Green Impact Range at around 60-70S, civilizations would arise around 600 BC. The earliest Kyanah presence at the south pole dates to around 200 BC, though it would be highly sporadic until after 300 AD.
Re: Road to Hope
Middle South Dominion (200 AD-1600 AD). By 200 AD, city-states in the Middle South could be found across the entire region, a swathe of warm and comparatively fertile land (relative to the rest of the planet anyway; everything is still generally hotter and drier than Earth) running from about 20S 140W to 50S 10E, not just in the Anweri region. As they primarily farmed cold-blooded livestock, which have a lower energy expenditure and thus supported more Kyanah on less land area than warm-blooded ones, the Middle South was a prime region to support high populations--other southern hemisphere regions near the equator were either hotter and wetter, leading to a greater prevalence of disease in concentrated city-states together with a bit less of an incentive to stick together in such a lush environment (likely the main reason why the western equatorial flood meadows, or the Nyruietkot Riyentkin/eastern equatorial flood meadows, which developed its first city-states and iron-working around 500-600 AD, never had their turn as the economic center of gravity), or else inhospitable barren deserts. In the aftermath of the -42nd epoch impact event, a warming and drying climate around 300 AD led to a thousand-year warm period that made the environment even more suitable for cold-blooded livestock. Populations in the Middle South would boom, giving rise to the first city-states on the Kyanah homeworld with populations over a million by 400 AD.
With the rapidly increasing populations of Middle South city-states, the state apparatus naturally becomes more complex. The bureaucracy becomes more multi-layered and separate from the nobility and their direct advisors, with bureaucrats being increasingly chosen via (somewhat) objective examinations instead of being chosen based on the whims of the nobility. Some even use conscription to work the machinery of the state, requiring all packs to serve in either the military or the state bureaucracy. Trade also increases dramatically between city-states, facilitated by advanced cut-stone roads. These roads were, like other Kyanah stoneworks of the time, made via dry-stone techniques, with stones slotted together without mortar, as available cement mixtures at the time consumed too much water and would not work in the homeworld's atmosphere. Nevertheless, nyruds and nyrud carts could move far more efficiently than open land or dirt roads. These road networks, arising emergently by different city-states or pairs of city-states constructing individual roads to meet their own economic and strategic interests, are much bigger than the Savanna ones, stretching for thousands of kilometers across the Middle South and behind. The largest city-states would become significant importers of food, utilizing these road systems to trade finished goods and tools, textiles, and ceramics in exchange for meat. The use of textile-based clothing as a cheaper alternative to animal skins had been present in the Middle South since 100 BC, but by 300 AD, it would become much more widespread and expand into the northern hemisphere, and textiles would be grown as cash crops by 600 AD (though in many northern hemisphere languages, even in modern times, the word for clothing is still some reference to 'skin' or 'hide', unlike in English, where 'cloth'ing is an obvious textile reference). The Middle South city-states would also continue to make advances in agriculture and water distribution, making widespread use of pipelines rather than channels that were vulnerable to evaporation in the hot climate. Wind-operated pumps would also be seen by 400 AD to move water from oases to fields, and they additionally employed sophisticated cisterns, much like the Kuayen plains to the north. Some pipelines ran tens of kilometers between multiple oases, and there is evidence of a water trade between neighboring city-states, a primitive precursor to the modern Water Distribution System.
However, the region's reliance on cold-blooded livestock would cause problems, as cold-blooded life tends to be more vulnerable to fungal outbreaks. Around 550 AD, a major outbreak, larger than the regional ones that swept across the Middle South and equatorial regions every few decades, would cause regional famines and economic devastation, although all told, the Middle South was still more economically powerful than anywhere else in the world. While areas such as the Meatbucket and Kuayen plains were doing quite well, and the Western Sector and Rktakian Kwardniet had advance well into the Iron Age and recorded history would begin in many city-states in these regions, they were still not as developed as the Middle South during this slump, in part due to the hot and dry climates still favoring cold-walkers. A second large fungal outbreak would strike in 700 AD, causing further deaths and economic problems. During this time, there was reduced trade and significant strife and war between many Middle South city-states, due to the ramifications of the fungal outbreaks, leading to more deaths. Around 750 AD, during this period of war, the first gunpowder-based explosives would be developed, though the metallurgy for practical firearms was not yet there. However, the Middle South would largely recover by 800 AD, setting the stage for the late Middle South-dominion.
During this period, practical mortar-based architecture reaches the Middle South by 850 AD, enabling much larger buildings to be constructed, with much higher stability, than the older dry-stone architecture, mud-brick, and wooden buildings. In some of the larger city-states, buildings could reach as high as 8 or 12 stories--30-40 meters--a huge achievement considering the high gravity and available technology. The first universities on the Kyanah homeworld were established in this region in around 900 AD, and by 1000, there would be dozens across the Middle South, leading to the first professional researchers and scientists and the seeds of the modern education system. Countless discoveries in agriculture, medicine, mathematics, and engineering would be made at these universities. Meanwhile, in 1200, detailed study of the thukukenoids--organisms that float through the air using giant gas bags filled with hydrogen--led to the creation of the first balloons, using hydrogen collected from said organisms. This would be refined by using lighter and stronger cloth instead of stitched-together thukukenoid skins. By the 1300s, the first crude airships would be deployed, using large kite-like structures deployed at variable altitudes to catch winds of varying speeds for navigation, while hydrogen from thukukenoid farms provided lifting gas, while university researchers extensively studied meteorology to navigate via complex wind patterns. This would revolutionize trade, exploration, and, together with the proliferation of crude firearms and steel plate armor as a defense against them, military strategy as well. During the 14th and 15th centuries, there would be a brief period that would seem to indicate the start of an age of empire building, with powerful Middle South city-states annexing some of their neighbors. However, this was short-lived and did not get very far due to the unique constraints imposed by Kyanah psychology; the most successful would reach an area roughly the size of California and last just 19 years before splintering. It seems that these "city-packs" were not even seen as empires in the human sense, just multiple cities that happen to have the same City Alpha.
The Middle South reached its zenith in the 3rd epoch under Ikun's calendar (late 15th century). It is estimated that over a third and perhaps as many as 40% of all Kyanah at this point lived in the Middle South, with the largest city-state being Anwenyeana. Some contemporary sources assert a population of 8^8 (~16.7 million) though this is largely debunked, and modern historians generally accept a value of 5.1-5.3 million--still larger than any human city until 1900. It would have been a tremendous sight indeed, with its oasis entirely surrounded by kilometers of multi-story stone buildings, broad streets paved with bricks constantly swept and repaired by packs of slaves, huge arenas and temples, grand statues, organized sewers and water filtration systems, and parks filled with exotic plants from across the world. And surrounding the city, some ten or twenty thousand square kilometers of terraced farmland and cold-walker pens, watered by pipes controlled with wind-powered pumps. It was far from the only great city-state with populations in the millions, in a time when no city-state anywhere else in the world was bigger than about 1.2-1.3 million. During this time, trade from the Middle South stretched across nearly half the world, largely due to the advanced Merchant Paths developed by Middle South city-states. While airships were occasionally seen far and wide, the technical expertise and resources required to build them and provide lift gas meant that only the most powerful city-states, the true shining jewels in the Middle South crown, could afford to maintain a handful of them; they were essentially like aircraft carriers on modern Earth.
Going into the 4th epoch, the Middle South would enter a gradual decline, as a resurgence of volcanism in the Anweri region would lower global temperatures, ending the Middle South-domain warm period and making warm-blooded hot-walkers more competitive again. Additionally, the highly entrenched and powerful bureaucracy, while efficient and orderly as long as the status quo remained, was top-heavy and slow to adapt to changing circumstances, such as the changing climate, or increasing civil unrest in the vast and dense city-states. The increasingly conservative and regimented socio-political environment would foster an emphasis on procedure and conformism, spurred on by new philosophical schools of thought such as Fractalism (which posits that relationships between natural and societal structures at differing levels are essentially the same, and the relationship between a pack and its members is essentially a "zoomed in" version of the relationship between the state and citizen packs, thus encouraging deference to high-status packs) even as city-states in other regions were beginning to catch up. However, the real decline of the Middle South would occur in the 5th epoch, with the arrival of the Shadow. This deadly pandemic, spread from the western equatorial flood meadows via nyrud caravans, would infect Kyanah via bites from parasitic crawlcritters and consuming infected nyrud meat. It would first cross the blood-retinal barrier, causing burning and bloody eyes within 2-3 Homeworld days (1-2 Earth days) and blindness within 5-7 Homeworld days (3-4.5 Earth days)--hence the name. From here it would often spread via the optic nerve to the brain, causing diminished motor control and reflexes, brain swelling, and possible death within 10-13 Homeworld days (6.5-8.5 Earth days). Without oceans to stop its spread, it would cross the entire planet in a couple of decades, killing an estimated 15-20% of the global population.
Ironically, the Middle South would be one of the less affected regions. Sanitation was more advanced here than almost anywhere else--in fact, they even knew, thanks to recently developed sophisticated glass lenses, that disease and spoilage were caused by tiny invisible creatures-- and nyrud meat was rarely consumed by these cultures, and they were also hit with an early variant that had a much higher death toll--65-70%--meaning that it would often burn itself out before spreading very far. Thus, the status quo was able to persist in the face of a changing world, which proved to be a double edged sword. Quite a few Middle South city-states from the 14th century onwards could have quickly industrialized had the right economic and political pressures been present, but with huge populations and vast numbers of conscripted laborers and slaves to throw at every problem, such pressures did not arise in time. This would even continue after the Shadow, allowing city-states far beyond the Middle South to beat them to industrialization.
Populations would fluctuate but generally rise during Middle South-dominion, from 1.7 billion in 200 AD to 2.2 billion in 500 AD, then falling to 2.0 billion in 800 AD before rising to 4.3 billion before the Shadow, which would kill an estimated 770 million Kyanah, putting the population at 3.6 billion at the end of the Middle South-dominion. During this time, the first city-states would arise in the outskirts of the Deadlands, and by the 15th century, rumors of gold in the inner Deadlands would lead to the first settlement of the last major uninhabited region--though of course here and there, unclaimed oases still remained in various pockets across the world, and few city-states could exist between oases, leaving inter-oasis populations as mostly hunter-trappers, herders, and other nomads.
With the rapidly increasing populations of Middle South city-states, the state apparatus naturally becomes more complex. The bureaucracy becomes more multi-layered and separate from the nobility and their direct advisors, with bureaucrats being increasingly chosen via (somewhat) objective examinations instead of being chosen based on the whims of the nobility. Some even use conscription to work the machinery of the state, requiring all packs to serve in either the military or the state bureaucracy. Trade also increases dramatically between city-states, facilitated by advanced cut-stone roads. These roads were, like other Kyanah stoneworks of the time, made via dry-stone techniques, with stones slotted together without mortar, as available cement mixtures at the time consumed too much water and would not work in the homeworld's atmosphere. Nevertheless, nyruds and nyrud carts could move far more efficiently than open land or dirt roads. These road networks, arising emergently by different city-states or pairs of city-states constructing individual roads to meet their own economic and strategic interests, are much bigger than the Savanna ones, stretching for thousands of kilometers across the Middle South and behind. The largest city-states would become significant importers of food, utilizing these road systems to trade finished goods and tools, textiles, and ceramics in exchange for meat. The use of textile-based clothing as a cheaper alternative to animal skins had been present in the Middle South since 100 BC, but by 300 AD, it would become much more widespread and expand into the northern hemisphere, and textiles would be grown as cash crops by 600 AD (though in many northern hemisphere languages, even in modern times, the word for clothing is still some reference to 'skin' or 'hide', unlike in English, where 'cloth'ing is an obvious textile reference). The Middle South city-states would also continue to make advances in agriculture and water distribution, making widespread use of pipelines rather than channels that were vulnerable to evaporation in the hot climate. Wind-operated pumps would also be seen by 400 AD to move water from oases to fields, and they additionally employed sophisticated cisterns, much like the Kuayen plains to the north. Some pipelines ran tens of kilometers between multiple oases, and there is evidence of a water trade between neighboring city-states, a primitive precursor to the modern Water Distribution System.
However, the region's reliance on cold-blooded livestock would cause problems, as cold-blooded life tends to be more vulnerable to fungal outbreaks. Around 550 AD, a major outbreak, larger than the regional ones that swept across the Middle South and equatorial regions every few decades, would cause regional famines and economic devastation, although all told, the Middle South was still more economically powerful than anywhere else in the world. While areas such as the Meatbucket and Kuayen plains were doing quite well, and the Western Sector and Rktakian Kwardniet had advance well into the Iron Age and recorded history would begin in many city-states in these regions, they were still not as developed as the Middle South during this slump, in part due to the hot and dry climates still favoring cold-walkers. A second large fungal outbreak would strike in 700 AD, causing further deaths and economic problems. During this time, there was reduced trade and significant strife and war between many Middle South city-states, due to the ramifications of the fungal outbreaks, leading to more deaths. Around 750 AD, during this period of war, the first gunpowder-based explosives would be developed, though the metallurgy for practical firearms was not yet there. However, the Middle South would largely recover by 800 AD, setting the stage for the late Middle South-dominion.
During this period, practical mortar-based architecture reaches the Middle South by 850 AD, enabling much larger buildings to be constructed, with much higher stability, than the older dry-stone architecture, mud-brick, and wooden buildings. In some of the larger city-states, buildings could reach as high as 8 or 12 stories--30-40 meters--a huge achievement considering the high gravity and available technology. The first universities on the Kyanah homeworld were established in this region in around 900 AD, and by 1000, there would be dozens across the Middle South, leading to the first professional researchers and scientists and the seeds of the modern education system. Countless discoveries in agriculture, medicine, mathematics, and engineering would be made at these universities. Meanwhile, in 1200, detailed study of the thukukenoids--organisms that float through the air using giant gas bags filled with hydrogen--led to the creation of the first balloons, using hydrogen collected from said organisms. This would be refined by using lighter and stronger cloth instead of stitched-together thukukenoid skins. By the 1300s, the first crude airships would be deployed, using large kite-like structures deployed at variable altitudes to catch winds of varying speeds for navigation, while hydrogen from thukukenoid farms provided lifting gas, while university researchers extensively studied meteorology to navigate via complex wind patterns. This would revolutionize trade, exploration, and, together with the proliferation of crude firearms and steel plate armor as a defense against them, military strategy as well. During the 14th and 15th centuries, there would be a brief period that would seem to indicate the start of an age of empire building, with powerful Middle South city-states annexing some of their neighbors. However, this was short-lived and did not get very far due to the unique constraints imposed by Kyanah psychology; the most successful would reach an area roughly the size of California and last just 19 years before splintering. It seems that these "city-packs" were not even seen as empires in the human sense, just multiple cities that happen to have the same City Alpha.
The Middle South reached its zenith in the 3rd epoch under Ikun's calendar (late 15th century). It is estimated that over a third and perhaps as many as 40% of all Kyanah at this point lived in the Middle South, with the largest city-state being Anwenyeana. Some contemporary sources assert a population of 8^8 (~16.7 million) though this is largely debunked, and modern historians generally accept a value of 5.1-5.3 million--still larger than any human city until 1900. It would have been a tremendous sight indeed, with its oasis entirely surrounded by kilometers of multi-story stone buildings, broad streets paved with bricks constantly swept and repaired by packs of slaves, huge arenas and temples, grand statues, organized sewers and water filtration systems, and parks filled with exotic plants from across the world. And surrounding the city, some ten or twenty thousand square kilometers of terraced farmland and cold-walker pens, watered by pipes controlled with wind-powered pumps. It was far from the only great city-state with populations in the millions, in a time when no city-state anywhere else in the world was bigger than about 1.2-1.3 million. During this time, trade from the Middle South stretched across nearly half the world, largely due to the advanced Merchant Paths developed by Middle South city-states. While airships were occasionally seen far and wide, the technical expertise and resources required to build them and provide lift gas meant that only the most powerful city-states, the true shining jewels in the Middle South crown, could afford to maintain a handful of them; they were essentially like aircraft carriers on modern Earth.
Going into the 4th epoch, the Middle South would enter a gradual decline, as a resurgence of volcanism in the Anweri region would lower global temperatures, ending the Middle South-domain warm period and making warm-blooded hot-walkers more competitive again. Additionally, the highly entrenched and powerful bureaucracy, while efficient and orderly as long as the status quo remained, was top-heavy and slow to adapt to changing circumstances, such as the changing climate, or increasing civil unrest in the vast and dense city-states. The increasingly conservative and regimented socio-political environment would foster an emphasis on procedure and conformism, spurred on by new philosophical schools of thought such as Fractalism (which posits that relationships between natural and societal structures at differing levels are essentially the same, and the relationship between a pack and its members is essentially a "zoomed in" version of the relationship between the state and citizen packs, thus encouraging deference to high-status packs) even as city-states in other regions were beginning to catch up. However, the real decline of the Middle South would occur in the 5th epoch, with the arrival of the Shadow. This deadly pandemic, spread from the western equatorial flood meadows via nyrud caravans, would infect Kyanah via bites from parasitic crawlcritters and consuming infected nyrud meat. It would first cross the blood-retinal barrier, causing burning and bloody eyes within 2-3 Homeworld days (1-2 Earth days) and blindness within 5-7 Homeworld days (3-4.5 Earth days)--hence the name. From here it would often spread via the optic nerve to the brain, causing diminished motor control and reflexes, brain swelling, and possible death within 10-13 Homeworld days (6.5-8.5 Earth days). Without oceans to stop its spread, it would cross the entire planet in a couple of decades, killing an estimated 15-20% of the global population.
Ironically, the Middle South would be one of the less affected regions. Sanitation was more advanced here than almost anywhere else--in fact, they even knew, thanks to recently developed sophisticated glass lenses, that disease and spoilage were caused by tiny invisible creatures-- and nyrud meat was rarely consumed by these cultures, and they were also hit with an early variant that had a much higher death toll--65-70%--meaning that it would often burn itself out before spreading very far. Thus, the status quo was able to persist in the face of a changing world, which proved to be a double edged sword. Quite a few Middle South city-states from the 14th century onwards could have quickly industrialized had the right economic and political pressures been present, but with huge populations and vast numbers of conscripted laborers and slaves to throw at every problem, such pressures did not arise in time. This would even continue after the Shadow, allowing city-states far beyond the Middle South to beat them to industrialization.
Populations would fluctuate but generally rise during Middle South-dominion, from 1.7 billion in 200 AD to 2.2 billion in 500 AD, then falling to 2.0 billion in 800 AD before rising to 4.3 billion before the Shadow, which would kill an estimated 770 million Kyanah, putting the population at 3.6 billion at the end of the Middle South-dominion. During this time, the first city-states would arise in the outskirts of the Deadlands, and by the 15th century, rumors of gold in the inner Deadlands would lead to the first settlement of the last major uninhabited region--though of course here and there, unclaimed oases still remained in various pockets across the world, and few city-states could exist between oases, leaving inter-oasis populations as mostly hunter-trappers, herders, and other nomads.