The Rise of the Forite Order

[TsarPrinceps]

It had been centuries since the Halfhour War. Long years, years covered in frost, years where the Highplain had had to be abandoned, until the wrath of the radio gods on its dried vales would subside.

Princeps had been the one to discover it, though-that the radio gods trembled before the might of great Harley. One of the gods of the road, specifically of bandits and thieves, the radio gods kept well away from the works the ancient Federals had erected in Harley's honor.

It was Princeps that led a motley assortment of of bikers out of the decaying shell of Lincoln's suburbs. Well, not so much "led" as "was driven out of." But all the same, the rogues and castaways were his, and he led them down the highways he had discovered in his youth were safe.

It was when one of his followers wandered off to a nearby stream, and failed to catch the radio plague for it, that Princeps started to wonder. When someone else fired up their netbox, and the radio gods delivered the signal instead of distorting it, he really had to wonder.

His grandfather had believed in the radio gods, and there had been people his grandfather's age that had ventured onto the Highplain and caught the radio plague. It had imparted a very terrible message to his peers, but only encouraged Princeps to see for himself.

And that's why they were here.

"What does the sign say?" asked Princeps of one of the forward scouts.

"Hay Springs, population 1047," the answer came back.

Like everything built in the time of the Federal Republic, it was crumbling, rotted and rusty. The central feature of towns-of most towns on the Highplain, really-was its rusted-out "grain elevator." Richards' "The History of the Husgar Race" said these things were meant to store local grain for tribute. They had been torn apart for scrap metal everywhere east of Cozad, but here, in the chernobyl wrath of the radio gods, they lingered as towering testimony to the power of the old Republic.

"We will make camp in the ridge of pines to the south," Princeps declared. The land was empty of people, but he couldn't be too careful. Here on the plain, they were exposed. That pine ridge to the south would give them some cover.

So they made their way to the southwest. Random ranches appeared here and there, rotten and dirty like the buildings of Hay Springs. Soon they were deep in the ridge, following a dirt path barely-intact after centuries of neglect, and they came to the foot of a cliff.

"We can't be in the Front Range yet?" wondered one of Princeps' lieutenants.

"The maps don't have this," replied another. "Nobody's been here for centuries, remember. The maps I bought at the McNally Guild aren't sure. They say there's some confusion whether the 'Sandhills' and 'Pine Ridge' known to the ancients are the same thing or not."

"Well," decided Princeps, "pitch camp here. Get on the netbox and tell Grandfather the radio gods are serving man again, and we're out in the Highplain and safe."

The netbox operator got on an internet forum. With the fall of ICANN in the Halfhour War, and the failure of anything new to take its place, no new websites were able to be registered, and what was left of international politics could only assent to a freeze of the existing registry. Consequently, websites that had been completely innocuous centuries ago had been commandeered for other purposes, often nefarious. Grandfather had handed down ops to a site called the Fora, which had been in the family for hundreds of years. Princeps, indeed, was named for the site's founder, a distant relative.

And indeed, the value of owning such operative websites was such that clans had formed around them in the years of the frost, and endured to this day. Politics back in Lincoln had been based on them, and other clans had started to push the Forite clan out of the city. Which is why Princeps was on the run, and in the middle of a wasteland.

"Grandfather says that he's coming with the rest of the clan from Lincoln. And you're to name the camp Kythera."

Princeps chuckled at that-Kythera was a subforum rumored to exist somewhere on the Fora, but had never been found-not even by admins like himself. It was a myth, a hidden place-just like this Pine Sandhills Ridge he found himself in.

"Kythera it is, then," Princeps declared.