Xiwantandu
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Six Domains of Tandire Xiwantandu | |
|---|---|
 Flag | |
Motto: Progress, Prosperity and Peace | |
| Capital and largest city | Itzcoatl |
| Official languages | Itztli |
| Demonym(s) | Xiwa, Tandan |
| Government | Atlepetl Federation |
• Sovereign | Toloche Cancuzuma |
| Establishment | |
• Great Reformation | 14th of August, 1284 AM |
| Currency | Tulu (Tl) |
| Date format | dd-mm--yyy |
The Six Domains of Tandire (Itztli: Xiwantandu ), also known as the Tandan Hegemony, is a star state located in the Gamma quadrant of the Milky Way Galaxy. The eponymous Tandire, a primarily ocean-covered life bearing world in the Gentian system, is the seat of Xiwantandu and the homeworld of its founding species, the Miri. The Gentian system is the only fully controlled star system claimed as core territory by Xiwantandu, and the overwhelming majority of the Tandan population as well as space constructs, infrastructure for extraction, production and transportation and the state's military and scientific centers are located within what is termed cislunar space, or the space generally encompassed within the orbit of Tandire's smallest and outermost satellite Efira, generally considered to mark the outer edge of the planet Tandire's gravity well. Xiwantandu is a minor power within the Gamma quadrant and holds negligible influence over the wider galaxy, but has demonstrated its capability to operate in the local region and continues to focus on the furtherance of greater prosperity and development within its home system both through internal and external means.
Tandan government is a theocratic technocracy governed by the duly elected Sovereign and a caste of clerical administrators overseeing a vast temporal and secular civil service. The religious law which governs the operation of the Xiwa state lays out strict codes of conduct and absolute responsibilities, such as the requirement of state officials to guarantee the material needs of those under their stewardship without exception, and the duty of the citizenry to lend their labor to the state in exchange for and indeed often in furtherance of these services. As a result, Tandire and the broader sphere of the Xiwa is a highly ordered and moralistic society balancing a universal guarantee of physical and psychological needs to its citizens with a deeply engrained central organization and somewhat authoritarian proselytization and imposition of rigid religious principles on the populace. Xiwantandu's internal structure takes the form of a coalition of major city states across the landmasses and island chains of Tandire in what is known as an Atlepetl, or City State, Federation. Formally, all the powers and authority of each individual city and its chief executive, or Tlatoani are ceded to the central government and the supreme Sovereign, however in practice the daily operation of the local region is usually conducted by the Tlatoani or the military equivalent Cuauhtlatoani in the Sovereign's name as a form of delegated authority.
Xiwantandu possesses a planned economy composed entirely of either state owned or community owned organizations and is devoid of what is traditionally termed private enterprise. Nevertheless, central planning is usually limited to large scale projects across the planet and in space, while the daily political and economic activities in a given region are usually overseen by the local community through a rule by committee system at the city and ward/township level. The Tandan economy currently find itself in a period of prolonged expansion through the technological augmentation of its capabilities, specifically the exploitation of oceanic and lunar resources, the former providing untold mineral and agricultural wealth to the terrestrial cities and the latter unlocking the resources necessary to further expand and colonize the Gentian system and project power to better secure Tandire and its populace.
Government and Politics
The structure of Xiwantandu is based on a long political tradition of precursor Tandan civilizations of the medieval and classical ages. At the highest level of organization, Xiwantandu is a federation of individual city-states or Atlepetl, each of which is in turn governed by their own lord (Tlatoani) or an appointed viceroy usually acting as a military governor (Cuauhtlatoani). Many of these states, especially those located on the planet Tandire itself, are usually many hundreds or thousands of years old and may be ruled by ancient lineages that have survived numerous empires rising and falling. Each city state in turn is traditionally divided into calpolli districts, which describe both rural towns and wards within an urban center. As much as the Atlepetl is the principal unit of government at the large scale, the Calpolli is the center of day to day life for the average Xiwa citizen. Each Calpolli is made up of several kin-groups which collectively own and govern the lands and property of the Calpolli, which may include tracts of agricultural land, mines, forests or even factories, offices and storage depots. Consequently, most centers of economic activity in Xiwantandu are publically owned and operated by a dedicated community attached to that specific productive center. Since the modern day, many Atlepetl tier states have specialized their Calpolli to function as connected nodes of a supply chain, such that a single Atlepetl or a small group of Atlepetl working together can fully transform raw materials into any number of finished products through the use of the productive specializations of each of their Calpolli units.
This Calpolli system has functionally been the basis of every Tandan civilization since before the Bronze age. The principle factor setting Xiwantandu apart from its predecessor is the elimination, or in most cases simply the marginalization, of the hereditary nobility which traditionally held all the seats of power, being replaced by religious institutions. While many Tlatoani lineages remained in place in their specific Atlepetls, the events of the Great Reformation led to the clerical caste overthrowing the last Heuy Tlatoani (equivalent to an Emperor or King of Kings) and installing the first Sovereign of Xiwantandu, Irolen Itzcoatl to rule. The old Jaguar Knights (Ocelomeh) were reformed into the hereditary military caste of Xiwa Janissaries, while the new tensions between clerical and warrior castes led to the emergence of many Temple Guard organizations, which would later merge into the armed cleric Eagle warriors (Cuauhtli), which serve as a counterweight to the Janissaries and as the pretorian bodyguards of high ranking Xiwa officials.
At the empire-wide level, the government is split into three distinct sections knowns as the "Columns of State", each of which holds the Sovereign at the top. The columns, which are the military, the administration and bureaucracy, and the political and legal system respectively, each contain more specialized organs to tackle more specific tasks and are represented on the scale of an individual Atlepetl and often an individual Calpolli, to some extent. Each column has its own chief officer who could be considered a high tier minister to the Sovereign, and who in turn oversees lower ministers. Each column exercises a significant amount of power over the component Atlepetl units of the federated Xiwantandu, demonstrating the centralized nature of the Xiwa political structure in defiance of its federal structure which is largely a vestige of its decentralized, medieval past.
The military column is unique in that its general membership is composed of a type of slave or bonded soldier raised within specialized military Calpolli from birth to serve the Sovereign in battle. Consequently, the members of the Xiwa standing military are technically the property of the office of the Sovereign (although mass mobilized troops drawn from the Calpolli during wartime are free volunteers), and their leaders are the only high level officers of the Xiwa government who are not of the cleric caste. The Calpixque in turn make up a vast class of steward-administrators who are governed by a Huecalpixque and oversee the bureaucracy and the vast majority of day to day government services such as postal/communications networks, transportation infrastructure, as well as education and medical services. Members of this administrative caste are all ordained priests of various Tandan temples, which is used as a mechanism to enforce ethical rules through the strict application of religious law as well as stringent entry requirements as initiation rituals double as civil service examinations. As the Xiwa government began to expand faster than this elite caste of administrative clergy could recruit new members, a secondary subservient class of secular bureaucrats known as the Pochteca was created to raise manpower for the aparatus of state without diluting or lessening the high standards to which the Calpixque are held. Similar standards are applied to the cleric arbitrators under the legal and political column of state, which is headed by the Cihuacoatl who is considered to be the vice-ruler and second in command to the Sovereign. While their central duty is to staff and oversee the Xiwa system of courts, their role as mediators definitively places the underlings of the Cihuacoatl at the center of political life in Xiwantandu, despite holding a smaller role in the day to day lives of the citizens than the administrative Calpixque. The Cihuacoatl and the court system, besides the day to day adjudication of common disputes and criminal cases, is also tasked with foreign affairs and diplomatic tasks as well as the balancing of internal factions.
Military
Janissaries
The Janissary corps is the backbone of the Tandan military and represent a martial institution over a millennium old with a legacy of service dating to the turbulent foundation of Xiwantandu. Upon the abolition of the warrior caste's rule over Tandire, many reforms were implemented to establish that caste's new role in the social order. The result of these reforms were the Janissaries, born into service just as the warrior caste Ocelomeh Knights had been prior, but stripped of nobility and instead termed as slaves of the Xiwa Sovereign, loyal only the high office and indoctrinated through childhood to attain unparalleled loyalty as well as a high degree of discipline and practical training. To make this lengthy process of mental and physical conditioning effective, Janissaries are raised from dedicated martial calpolli which are often encircled with barriers or otherwise physically isolated from the rest of an atlepetl, although they are often found near the city's seat of power as a means to enforce the Sovereign's dominion over the lower Tlatoani of each city. Young Tandans are formed into Janissaries in these calpolli, which also serve as general living quarters and military bases for adult Janissaries, the children of whom will often be trained as Janissaries within the same calpolli their parents inhabit.
As a fighting force, the Janissaries represent the apex of the ground power Tandire is able to produce. Their extreme discipline and conditioning can make them extraordinarily effective soldiers under a competent commander. The size of the Janissary body has fluctuated through the centuries, becoming little more than a skeleton force in prolonged periods of peace. Lack of any notable conflicts for extended periods has also caused their equipment to become archaic compared to the level of technology applied in civilian fields. The Xiwa rearmament effort is focused primarily on resolving this technological gap, seeking to equip the formidable Janissaries with modernized weapons of war, and perhaps more importantly train their commanders in modernized doctrines. With the exception of space-based boarding actions and space-to-surface insertion operations, the Janissaries are slotted to fulfill every role of combat, including infantry and mechanized ground combat, atmospheric combat, and maritime naval warfare. The Janissary forces are commanded by the Tlacochcalcatl, or "supreme general", who is the second in command of the entire military apparatus under the office of the Sovereign herself, although they are behind the civilian Cihuacoatl and Huecalpixque in terms of overall control of Xiwantandu, and are barred from becoming involved in non-military affairs or holding a civilian office due to their position in the warrior caste of the Tandan social hierarchy. Underneath this supreme general figure, there is a panel of High Generals known as the Circle of Generals, which serves as an advisory body to the Tlacochcalcatl and may form a collective martial authority to oversee military operations should the Tlacochcalcatl die or be incapacitated.
Militia
The Tandan militia service exists in the modern era as a vestige of the ancient mass levy system used by Tandan city states to raise vast armies of peasant foot soldiers which would be led by a small body of elite Knights. This model was modified with the replacement of the Knights by the Janissaries during the foundation of Xiwantandu, and while levy units were used in great numbers early on, as Xiwantandu expanded and solidified its grip on its territories, Janissary numbers expanded and began to subsume the role of the levy in the military, until the Janissaries became the primary body of the Tandan ground forces. The lack of conflict brought about by the pax tandica has further pushed the wartime only levy mobilization system into obscurity as only the peacetime Janissaries remained in existence. Consequently, the Tandan militia system has atrophied and remains rooted in highly antiquated organizations and traditions. The immediate modernization of Xiwantandu's mass mobilization mechanisms has been deemed a high priority task as it may be of critical importance should Tandire come under alien attack. New mechanisms for voluntary service and conscription have been put in place by the Xiwa administration, however the implementation of these long overdue reforms and more importantly the preparation of material and means of training for these militia forces has proved an arduous and monumental task, one even the notably efficient state apparatus of the Xiwa may take many years to complete. Militia forces fall under the Janissary command structure when mobilized and serve as auxiliary forces.
Armada
Forces designed to fight exclusively in space have been a key focus of both the Xiwa remilitarization effort and of the civilian Open Wings colonization initiative. The space forces of the Xiwa are the newest and smallest of Tandire's armed forces by manpower, although it dwarfs most organizations and even eclipses the Janissaries in terms of the budget and investment of resources made towards the development and construction of a space navy to protect Tandire and the Gentian system. Although most of the naval staff are natural Tandan Miri, ships of the Armada are crewed by an artificial sub-species of Spacer Miri, physiologically modified to boast a near total immunity to the negative biological effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity and microgravity, as well as resistance to G forces and a suite of other alterations to make these Miri inherently adapted to life in service aboard spacecraft. These individuals, known as "Shaved Ones" for their tradition of shaving parts of their plumage, are taken as representative of the entire Armada and naval force as they crew and command the ships, even though a large proportion of the naval staff are not Shaved Ones. The Armada, military shipyards, naval staff and ship crews are based on the Tandan moon Selisera where the Xiwa Tlacatecco military district is located. This entire district including the shipyards and production facilities, as well as the Armada personnel deployed elsewhere, fall under the authority of the Tlacateccatl, an office of supreme command of the naval forces reserved for a Shaved One officer hand picked by the Sovereign. In a similar vein to their Janissary counterparts, the Armada possesses a Circle of Admirals made up of High Admirals which advise the Tlacateccatl and may collectively replace her as a provisional commanding authority in the event of her death until the Sovereign can name a replacement.
Cuauhtli
As the only armed force of the Xiwa belonging to the ruling clerical caste, the Cuauhtli warrior monks of the Eagle Temple play a special and unusual role for a branch of the military. They are entirely outside of the normal military chain of command and answer directly to the Sovereign, bypassing any warrior caste officers in the Janissary forces or the Armada. Their primary function is as an inward facing force which is designed to deter any attempt by the warrior caste, or any other party, to wrest control of the government away from its priestly stewards. Its members are recruited from among the abandoned and orphaned of the planet's cities, raised and trained within Eagle Temples to fight as well as undergoing preparations of the initiation rites necessary to become a Tandan priest. These Cuauhtli warriors were commonly used as a force of bodyguards for important priests and members of the religious government, a role they retained as a matter of tradition long after most credible threats to those individuals had subsided. Two elite units exist within the Cuautli today which stand out from the standing force of warrior monks. The first and most visible of these are the Crimson Cohort, which are clad in all red, considered a royal color on Tandire, and are the personal bodyguards of the Sovereign, although they may also guard the vice-leader Cihuacoatl. The second of these are the Huntress Triads, a sect of fanatical Cuauhtli used to track down deserters and eliminate traitors within the command structure, known to always operate in groups of three giving them their name. Huntress Triads are famous for intentionally seeking out powerful foes and picking difficult fights in order to hone their skills and demonstrate their prowess.
Economy
The economy of the planet Tandire and the surrounding regions which it controls is highly organized and almost entirely planned by state entities, with the conspicuous absence of private corporations or businesses which are common in other star states. Not all economic activities are centrally planned however, and a large portion of the productive processes of the economy are controlled at the local level by the authorities of the local Calpolli which often take the form of a special committee put in place by the consensus democracy of the Calpolli unit of Tandan society. In the ancient Tandan social structure, the Calpolli traditionally controls the means of production which originally meant that the community of several kin groups held rights to the land, although in modern times this more often means the community owns a factory or office complex which produces goods or generates other value, in addition to the housing and social complexes for the associated workforce of the Calpolli. In many of the modern megalopolis tier cities of Tandire, these Calpolli units or wards can sometimes be seen packed into single city blocks or even one on top of another in large towers, turning the downtown areas of many Tandan city states into major industrial centers capable of high levels of production and specialized output. Early on in the process of industrialization on Tandire, Calpolli became specialized as their communities centered on a factory fulfilling a specific role within the supply chain, which the factory cores of other Calpolli within the city state would compliment. The coordination of multiple Calpolli by a city's Tlatoani and their economic advisors created city level economies which contained entire supply chains for many finished products, able to take in materials from the rural Calpolli and export an array of manufactured products out to other cities. This would eventually develop into a global economy of specialized city-level economies which conduct mass trade across the world ocean at low cost, all treated as internal trade within the overarching authority of Xiwantandu, leading local economies to become highly specialized into relatively minor niches of the world economy being overseen by the Sovereign and her cadre of Calpixque administrators, as well as a swath of Tlatoani governing their respective cities all over the planet.
Agriculture
In the modern era, food production has been almost entirely relocated from the sparse landmasses into the ocean through the use of fusion power and genetics technology in the first phase of the Open Wings Initiative. This primarily involves the use of floating farms, which consist of vast rafts of marine vegetation modified to bear nutritious fruit and cereal type seed grains. These are usually maintained a few meters under the surface to avoid being damaged by storms or passing waves, however they must be fertilized artificially as the surface waters of the open world-ocean are desert-like and lack any degree of nutrients and fertility. Because of this, another type of oceanic farming was developed deep underwater along vertical cables anchored on the seabed and attached to buoys above. The abundant nutrients found in the abyssal waters are used to naturally nourish the marine flora, however as these farms are too deep to receive any appreciable sunlight they are artificially lit using fusion power plants, supplemented by cheap fission and geothermal power supplied from the ocean floor. Although resource intensive to maintain, these techniques of oceanic farming in the relatively sparse yet massive regions of the open ocean has eclipsed the maximum yield possible using the arable land area above water and has enabled the controlled growth of the port cities around Tandire into massive megalopolis tier cities of tens or hundreds of millions of inhabitants, fed not by the hinterlands but instead by fleets of harvester ships which bring in massive crops from the ocean year round.
Some of the principles of Xiwa oceanic agriculture has been further developed into a type of intensive hydroponic agriculture which not only utilizes high efficiency lighting but also tiered cultivation and a mix of multiple crops grown together to maximize caloric yield, an ancient practice among the Tandans. This development of agricultural techniques has been applied to great success on Xiwa space stations and particularly on their lunar bases, such as the large industrial settlements on the Tandan moon Selisera. Unlike the mass agriculture of the Tandan oceans, both light and nutrients must be artificially provided within these hydroponic bays, which double as air recyclers in the lunar settlements where they are found. Hydroponic bays of this type are more expensive in recourses to put in place and are often so manpower intensive to maintain that they require a dedicated army of robots to make them practical. In return for these costly investments, the bays offer a greater efficiency of caloric production compared to other methods of agriculture, and considered the only reliable means of food production in space or on lifeless rocks such as the Tandan moons or outer Gentian outposts, making them indispensable for maintaining permanent populations in these areas.
Mining
As many of the city states became industrialized across Tandire, their economies rapidly began to outpace the capacity of their respective territories to extract recources. Open trade and exchange within Xiwantandu cities mitigated this, as did new technologies and exploratory prospecting across the areas of the planet's larger landmasses. However these remain relatively small, and oceanic mining became one of the higher priority projects of the Open Wings Initiative. In modern times, large amounts of mineral resources are brought up from ocean floor mining and brought into cities to be used by the above water industry within Tandan urban centers. Due to the great expense of constructing and maintaining living areas at sea level pressure, robotics became key to the abyssal mining efforts and remain so to this day, with largely automated mining posts and mobile bases built on the surface and dropped down the water column, staffed and assisted by robotic extraction vehicles and autonomous prospector units. Materials are moved to the ocean surface via floats or hoisted by cables attached to surface buoys, where the cargo can be retrieved by ship and brought to port. Passage of living Miri staff is limited to maintenance teams servicing the automated systems in order to reduce the recourse investment necessary for these extraction programs. Mining operations are limited by directives not to interfere with delicate marine ecosystems, which are concentrated in shallow sun-lit waters and around hydrothermal vents. However this still leaves an vast majority of the largely desolate abyssal plain open for mining. Mining waste materials, radioactive waste materials used by archaic fission technology, as well as other types of non-recyclable waste, are often disposed of in oceanic trenches or in tectonic subduction zones where the water insulates any radioactive leakage and the waste may be buried or dragged into the planet's mantle and destroyed without damaging the world's biosphere. In total, the vast areas of the mineral rich oceanic crust which are exploited for resources provide more than sufficient material to satisfy the demands of the industrial ports and are projected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This has allowed the Xiwa economic authorities to shutter land-based mining operations, which were less costly overall but generate a far greater degree of ecological damage and lasting costs which the administration considers an unnecessary burden.
Industry
Robotics
The nature of Xiwantandu as a theocratic government deeply affects the role of robotics in its economy as well as the economic sector dedicated to the robots themselves. One of the tenets of Tandan religion is the imbuing of things with moral worth through the work of living hands required to craft the item or preform the task, making products finished by robots spiritually inert and worthless regardless of function. This has largely not affected the primary sector economy as robots are freely used to produce food, mine materials and haul cargo. Spiritually, minerals are already inert and are imbued with value in the work undertaken to shape them, the value of any cargo is not changed by the process of its transportation, and food is derived from living material and so is not lessened in worth by robotic tenders. Indeed, the application of robotics to mining, hauling and agriculture has dramatically increased productivity in these sectors and enabled great economic growth. However, the use of robots in manufacturing is more complicated and nuanced. Robotics have been introduced to many industrial processes of the secondary sector but the role of living workers remain critical as a religious matter regardless of how sophisticated the Xiwa capacity for automation becomes. This has created a controlled application of robotics and automation to the Tandan economy, as it has been broadly employed to increase productivity and brings significant benefit to every Calpolli that applies it regardless of their economic niche, yet the function of the worker communities themselves remains central and indispensable thus keeping living workers within the supply chain and manufacturing process.
Taxation
Due to the nature of the economy of Tandire, the Xiwa government does not have a necessity to levy conventional taxes. Economic activity is entirely contained within public sector bodies, so the collection of revenue for the purpose of funding the government is a simple matter of allocating a portion of the created value of economic activity towards sustaining state function on a local, atlepetl, and empire-wide level. A vast majority of economic activity is conducted at the local level using the Calpolli as the base unit of production. As a result, the structure of the Xiwa government treasury is pyramidal, with what could be termed as the net profit from a Calpolli's activities being divided between the Calpolli government and the city government, which in turn again divides the sum total of all the value provided by all of its Calpolli into a portion for its own operations and a second portion to be provided for the Xiwantandu treasury. In practical terms, agents of the central Xiwa government are present within all tiers of this pyramidal taxation structure, be they Calpixque or Pochtec type administrators. The Sovereign's treasury is thus able to control the stream of revenue from its headwaters at the local level to its outlet at the empire level budget and allocation offices, monitoring the usage and needs of the Calpolli and Atlepetl treasuries along the way. At times, tribute labor is employed as a substitute to taxation by a Tlatoani lord or by the Sovereign herself, which entails a selected group of individuals from one or multiple Calpolli being designated to provide unpaid labor for a certain period of time. The assigned monetary value for the hours or labor provided are taken as acceptable substitute to monetary value generated by material production, which makes this method of payment common among Calpolli that lack profitable or effective industrial capacities, as it may be more efficient to loan out the labor of a group of Calpolli workers to pay the required tribute to city and empire treasuries through the total value of their labor than to toil to produce goods from which a percentage of value generated will then be extracted as tax.
Trade
Both reciprocal and market trading are practiced widely on Tandire. Reciprocal exchange, in which goods are bartered directly for other goods or services, are very common within and between Calpolli units of Tandan society. Many of the small and mid-sized atlepetls operate on a concept of chained reciprocity, wherin the direct exchange does not occur between two Calpolli, but down a chain of Calpolli as the productive centers of each make up links in a supply chain and do not necessarily produce goods which the previous link in the chain has any use for. In this model, the value added at each stage in the supply chain is passed down the reciprocal chain until the finish product is shipped out and traded for goods which the city and its component Calpolli need, to which each Calpolli is entitled a portion according to their contribution to the final export product. If the final product of the supply chain is an item that is needed in the Calpolli, these items are likewise distributed as an act of reciprocity to the sub-units of the supply chain by the final link. For more complex and indirect exchanges, market trading is more commonly used. Unlike reciprocal exchange, market exchange generates value on top of the inherent value of the goods being exchanged, which incurs taxation. Similar to the regular taxation scheme of Xiwantandu, market trade between Calpolli is taxed by the Atlepetl unit, and trade between Atlepetls is taxed by the Sovereign. Inside the borders of Xiwantandu, tariffs are not applied and the value extracted in taxation is commensurate with the profit generated by the trade, and so is typically collected at sale rather than in transit. Tariffs are only applied to external trade with non-Tandan entities and civilizations through space, which is conducted on the market principles governing galactic trade.