Techrot and JaiSing City

“Listen to the storm.”

The Imperial Cartographic Journal. Volume 24, Chapter 5. Dated 62.2.12004. Inscribed by Shaga IV.

JaiSing City

Machines made JaiSing into what it was; shaping its amorphous architecture towards a fabulous and phantasmagoric beauty. All that is gone.

JaiSing City, once a cultural and economic powerhouse, is now reduced to a shadow, a distorted meld of concrete and steel. Eighty million inhabitants. A disease that fuses human and machine broke out in an epidemic sixteen years ago, in the heart of its financial district. The greater country has built a wall encircling the entire city and has been under quarantine since the outbreak. This plague is known by many names: metal sickness, grey goo, hisstek, the Red Death, Erit Nox, Dwen Mvarrig, but the majority (and fittingly so) call this Techrot. My research suggests it is extraterrestrial in origin, and further sample analysis concluded that it is linked to the Greenfly machine intelligence that devastated our empire during the last circuit. As of writing this I am taking my sample to Athanaeum World IX for final evaluations and preservation.

Of my six year journey of touring the planet, this city is of most import to His Highness’ Royal Path. The Ambadern has been at work here, and although the people of Imeon do not know what it is, they are at least aware in some sense of the supernatural. The initial outbreak at JaiSing led to an unusually high concentration of investiture in the area. As a result, Techrot-infused individuals possess physically illegal capabilities, which I have named the Endowment Phenomenon. I touch on some details in this document, but I go into more detail in Chapter 6.

Techrot

The growth came from within, like a fungal invasion. It had a fantastic capacity for corrupting the molecular tools to which we probed it. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated.

Techrot is not a disease in the traditional sense. It is not quite a biological nor a software virus. Rather, it is a chimera of the two - a rogue nanite swarm that attacks and fuses anything nanotechnic: cybernetics, machines, implants, not discriminating between man and machine. Fortunately our empire’s unitor technology is safe from the virus; they are too small to be affected. When the virus attacks a cybernetic-enhanced human, this leads to horrific and uncontrollable modifications to the body. The majority of infections lead to death, and it is a mercy compared to those who survive.

In Imeon’s current point in history, cyberware prosthetics is a lifestyle choice, and is as common as jewellery. Society is supersaturated with trillions of nanomachines - swarming through their blood, clotting their brains, linking their thoughts to the local web. With their minds they can forge matter on the scale of mountains, writing symphonies from tamed fire. Machines made JaiSing into what it was; shaping its amorphous architecture towards a fabulous and phantasmagoric beauty. All that is gone.

It is worse than you are thinking. If the plague had only killed machines, millions would still have died, but that would have been a manageable catastrophe, something from which JaiSing could have recovered from. But the plague went beyond mere destruction, into a realm much closer to artistry, albeit an artistry of a uniquely perverted and sadistic kind. It caused the machines to evolve uncontrollably - out of their control, at least - seeking bizarre new symbioses.

Their buildings turned into nightmares, trapping them before they could escape their lethal transformations. The machines inside their bodies and blood began to break their shackles - blurring into them, corrupted living matter. They became glistening, larval fusions of flesh and machine. When they buried the dead they kept growing, spreading together, fusing with the city’s architecture.

“…there was a building which looked uncannily like a human hand, grasping from the sky, its fingers elongating into tendrils which quickly merged with others, from adjacent structures. Here was another, which resembled an oak tree, and others which expanded into a froth of shattered bubbles, like the face of someone stricken by an awful pestilence.”

All around us, vast building rose from the flood, sides slab-sided and immense. They were all I could see in any direction, until - forestlike - they merged into a distant, detailless wall, like a bank of smog. They were encrusted - at least for the six or seven storeys - in a barnacle-like accretion of ramshackle dwellings and markets, lashed together and interlinked with flimsy walkways and rope-ladders. Fires burned in the slums, and the air was even more pungent.

Looking up, I saw the slab-sided structures ram skywards, perspective forcing them together at least a kilometre above my head. Up higher, though, the picture changed sickeningly. Although no two buildings had mutated in quite the same manner, there was something common to their shape - changing, a kind of uniform pathology which a surgeon might have recognized and diagnosed as stemming from the same cause. Some of the buildings split in two halfway up their length, while others bulged with unseemly obesity. Some sprouted tiny avatars of themselves, like the elbowed towers and oubliettes of fairytale castles. Higher, these structural growths diverged and bifurcated again, interpenetrating and linking like bronchioli, or some weird variant of brain coral, until what they formed was a kind of horizontal raft of fused branches, suspended kilometres from the ground.

It was a time of horror.

It is not yet over.

Their parasite, like any truly efficient plague, was careful not to kill their host population entirely. Tens of millions died, but tens of millions more remain in perpetual sickness, with a drive to survive and spread. However there were those fortunate enough to have their implants tore from their bodies before any trace of the plague reached them, or have their nanomachines flushed away. People who were too dependent on their machines opted to go into abeyance, in community crypts, as a kind of escape.

“Cryogenic functions are still green, miraculously. But I think we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the crypt’s failure at some point in the future…”

The survivors operate mechanical vertical solar farms along the outskirts of the city for food, and use the SingMon river for water. They depend on regular supply drops from the greater country.

By the time Feoland had established a quarantine border and started constructing a wall, there were twenty-six million dead, at least twice as many infected and the rest in hiding, living in communal camps, or fled beyond the border. To them, it is of paramount importance that this virus does not breach outwards into the rest of the world. They are not about to commit a genocide on their people, but they cannot let them leave until a cure has been found.

The Cult of the Symphony

Dark to light, the day from night

What is most interesting is the cult that sprung up from the survivors affected by the plague. Infiltrating it had been no easy task. Only the “chosen” are permitted within the inner districts of the city, and I had to burn through seven bodies before I was able to survive Techrot without death. The trick, at least for psionics, is ironically any neural interface. Acute psionics are strong enough to resist the plague’s further spread, but while you’re affected by it there will always be some kind of itch. In the back of your head. The local Tech Witch Asdemyra proved her loyalty and herself a useful asset to the empire. She successfully disguised herself and moved up in the ranks of the cult, being of some renown due to her usefulness as a medic. She provided information about the cult, and knowledge of the city, but she was not trusted/influential enough in the inner circle to smuggle me into the heart of the city.

In short, the cult is a group of fanatics that rose sometime within the chaos of the initial outbreak. They are influenced by a head figure into achieving a human singularity - becoming one with the machine.

While the cult only appeared in JaiSing around the outbreak, it is possible it begun in the corporate sphere some time before that, as an extension of the tech giant Screenshot Imagination’s campaigns and growing influence. Following the outbreak and enclosure, it quickly rose to prominence to the point where they could be considered the chief power within the city. They conduct daily parades, and they are a common fixture of the city.

The Cult of the Symphony believe that a new world is coming, one ruled by the human singularity, and that Techrot is the next stage in human evolution. Members are encouraged to infuse themselves with even more cyberware and abandon all worries and concerns. The addition of extra cyberware exacerbates the spread and intensity of the plague, and at some point leads to death.

Rituals

The cult has two notable rituals, the parades, and the choir.

The parades, called Funeral for the Abandoned, are organized daily on the streets stretching from Inner Financial to Rezoning. The participants expose their cybernetic flesh and expresses themselves through odd movements and unnerving moaning. The purpose of the parades seems to be to both express the cult’s values and to attract new members.

The choir is organized in the breach along the southern wall, where Central station used to be. It is invitation-only. Participants tune in to the central choir and indulge themselves in the unholy art of combining cybernetic prosthetics into their flesh, abandoning all hesitation or reason. The choir is organized in concentric rings, the closer you are to the central choir, the more difficult it is to resist its influence though most participants do not even fight it. Some members of the choir are so far gone, they do not leave at all.

Structure

The cult has a hierarchy of membership from a follower, to parader, to choirman, to the Major ranks. The further up the ranks, the stronger the cult’s influence becomes. Eventually, everyone who joins the choir loses their sanity and revels with reckless abandon.

Tech Witch

Organizes the Funeral for the Abandoned. Roles include preaching, safeguarding the cult’s faith and morals, healing, exercising pastoral care of the community entrusted to them. Asdemyra is one of them, loyal to the empire.

Choir Noir

The collective is known as Choir Noir. Individually, they attune to different frequencies to produce a harsh discord - almost hypnotizing the infected’s prosthetics. They manage the choir ritual.

Rotpriest

“Are you brave? Or have you forgotten the fear of death?”

“Find solace in the inevitable.”

They are chosen by the Speaker and they oversee and defend territory assigned to them. Each rotpriest has a unique set of abilities and can summon lower ranked followers to their aid.

Speaker for the Dead

Acts as a voice and advisor for the Empress. Is often seen at the head of the parades. Notable feature is her Hypervisor. The Endowment Phenomenon has allowed her to channel infrared radiation from the Hypervisor in a destructive beam.

Empress of the Damned

Current title of the head figure of the cult. She is rumored to have nearly achieved complete body-machine assimilation. Not much else is known about her, or her whereabouts.

End

Thanks for reading! This is a bit of my worldbuilding I organized together. I put this up on the blog because I’d like to explore this more in the future. Of course, there’s a lot of story I haven’t written down here, this is just the background context for future projects. For some more context, this takes place in a larger universe. The galaxy is huge, and civilizations crest and fall like waves - an endless, grinding procession. This planet is just one of many that are under reconnaissance by an outside, overarching empire, whose “benevolent” leader’s goal is to guide humanity through a future prophesised crisis. Reconnaissance teams scour the universe for its potential to furthering the Royal Path.

The preview image is not my own, but looks hella rad and closely matches my vision of my worldbuilding. Credit to @KadaburaDraws

I was inspired by a lot of things when imagining this up in my head for my universe. Here’s a list (incomplete):

• COVID
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Kowloon Walled City
• Hong Kong
• Catholicism
• Body horror
• Warhammer 40K
• Sci fi
• Dependence on technology
• Dune!
• Alastair Reynolds
• Brandon Sanderson
• A loooot of sci fi