Officially it is well known that the Great Pacific Republic is the dominant superpower of the first orientation. It claims the first orientation as its own, for it was the first of the empires to formalise the science of interface travel, and therefore received the honour of defining the origin of space and time. It was the first to convene the Interorientational Dialogue which established a fragile line of communication between the upper and lower powers, enabling for the first time a peace borne not of ignorance but of reasoned understanding. Naturally, it was also the first to violate that fragile but mutual peace, citing the need for security and vital resources for its citizens. The Dialogue still runs to this day, but all that is exchanged over the ansibles and conferences are threats and demands, warnings of imminent desecration, and the bureaucratic arrangements necessary for the repatriation of the dead.
Officially, it is also well known that the Great Pacific Republic is also winning its war against his Revealed Excellency, the Eiraene Empire. With the Taifang sundered by the Dysaecular Device (the sole product of the secret Esteeri Project Zeitenwende), it seems that once the Middernlands fall the Republic will become the dominant power in OQ, the first to unite all four sets of land and sky, joining eight realms under one roof. The roof, of course, being the roof of the Republican Chamber of State. Never mind that the Esteerenbild, which destroyed an entire orientation with a single gadget, is still alive and kicking. Never mind that the Republican Chamber has sat empty for the last ten years as war after war led to contiguous states of emergency, its rump parliament rubber-stamping a series of extraordinary decrees at the best of times and simply bypassed at worst. And never mind that the Republic is not even the only superpower in the first orientation.
You see, long before there were wars between orientations there were wars within orientations. In fact, there still are. The Great Pacific Republic of Eo was once matched with a rival Republic, the Seven-Starred Republic of the Folk of the Jien, whose sphere of influence rivaled the Pacific hegemony at every turn. The war was at first cold, then hot, then cold again, and by the time it came hot the third time around the Pacific Republic had begun using orientation traversal as a means to move troops without fear of detection or reprisal. The natural philosophers of the Jien had no means of traversing the fourth dimension, and found themselves at every turn hounded by the increasingly desperate cries of their people and their government for a wonder weapon; a miracle cure to end the war that was now turning decisively against them.
And then what happened?
They had no means of defeating the enemy. But they did have a way of remaking themselves. For the eminent philosophers of the Jien were well trained topologists and geometers of all kinds, including the foremost experts in functional topology in the entire OQ. And what is land, but realised geometry?
You don't mean...
Yes, to defend themselves against the Republic the Jien military developed the first fractal bomb. It wa called an iterative regularisation device, a tool for enabling the distortion of local reality using the laws of mathematics. And they used it on themselves.
Idiots, yes, and many more things besides. Nowadays the entire sphere of the Jien, from their home plains to every satellite statelet they convinced to join their coalition, is about the size of four football fields joined together. Its border is now a perfect square, every point of land rearranged into a fractal which grows ever more dense as you approach the centre. When the Emergency Command heard what the Jien had done, they laughed and said the war would be over in three months. By the time I was sent to the front we'd just passed through the second ring of regularisation.
How long had the war been going on by then?
Some fourteen years. Now it's coming on thirty.
How can it take so long to wipe out a few football fields?
If you start walking into the Jien empire now, you will find your subjective sense of space shrinking. Somehow, as you approach the centre each step puts you in a larger rather than a smaller space than before. Most of it is just void---empty land, filling in the points between the original geometry---but the overall effect is that the entire surface area of the Jien empire is still there, just folded in on itself. This was the genius of the geometers, you see. For they designed the fractal in such a way that the defenders, who were deeper in than us, would always have more land, more ground to work with, more angles of attack. Despite encircling them on all sides we were in fact always hemmed in, with our backs against the wall, made to look slow and sluggish. I was at the front for five more years. Every day the sky seemed emptier as we pushed deeper in. Eventually I realised that there was simply not enough sky left for the iterative mapping to work with, and all that was left was a deep atomic blue. Still, by the end of the five years we reached the outskirts of the Jien river valley itself. Their capital was within reach.
What did you find there?
Patience, student. For months by that point we had grown worried. Intercepts from the capital had become increasingly garbled, prisoners of war spoke of absent leadership and unclear directives. By the time we saw the walls and our aerial scouts saw how the insides seemed to widen as they flew in, it was already too late. They'd seen us coming, and detonated another fractal bomb inside the capital.
That... can't be good.
It isn't. One fractal bomb is nasty stuff, but the infinity is still fairly regular. A fractal inside a fractal... we shelled the capital, or what was left of it, for weeks, months, a year. Our scouts saw no difference. Time, too, slows when you are in the zone of contraction. Then we saw what was coming out. Half-soldiers, distorted tanks, gunships flying backwards and dilated in time, firing antimunitions that rose out of the ground with our soldiers still stuck on them. It was a fresh layer of hell.
So the war was never won.
No. It took us years more to evacuate all of our troops and every non-distorted civilian we could carry. There was no Jien government any more, no more war to speak of. There were only humans, who wanted to live, and the monsters inside the capital. The Republican Chamber declared victory, and now we just deposit endless shells into the territory from outside. Bigger bombs too, when we can find one. Eventually the plan is to get some Esteeri diplomats on side and arrange for a team to deliver a Dysaecular Device into the centre of the double-fractal.
Does that work? Will any of this work?
I don't know. I hope I never have to find out.
