Ghosts of the Eastern Hinterland

 

CW: medical brain injury. 

In the White City, the military pragmatists keep robust records of troop numbers and movements, materiel requirements, leadership postings, and areas of active instability inside the empire. Their strange methods are useful culturally, but also logistically: they are capable of processing and interpreting vast amounts of data, and using it to generate predictions, models, and other indispensable planning documents.

Within the pragmatist clades are a secretive few called the Eastern Group, who take as their specialist interest the far-distant eastern borders of the empire. The citizens understand that their territories are vast, but finite - that the endless plains of conquered city-states and peoples does eventually end at the far end of the world. It is known that the eastern borders are the shores of a strange sea. 

The work of the Eastern Group is mostly concerned with how the empire might extend its capacity for force projection across this sea - they are naval planners, sea-steaders, bridge-builders, proponents of massed air power, proponents of draining the oceans, of freezing or transmuting its ultrasaline waters. Of cities in the sky or on the dark ocean beds. Of new moons to pull the oceans back like the skins of overripe fruit. Of the perpetual workings of great, sealed engines that might traverse them. The Eastern Group dream of another empire, mirrored, expansive back 'through' the volume of the world, and that eastern shore is its obscure line of inflexion. 

They are also, more secretly, the creators of ghost soldiers, ghost companies, and even entire ghost armies. A ghost is an Imperial Soldier who has been socially and informationally removed from the polis - the Eastern Group are very good at this; they have a lot of practice and institutional know-how, as well as access to staff and resources. A 'true' ghost is one who is remembered by no one outside the Eastern Group itself; a 'false' ghost is one with outstanding traces to be expunged. 

Because of their nature, no one can truly claim to know how many ghosts there actually are. It could be thousands - it could conceivably be millions. The ghosts themselves are subjected to chemical and surgical procedures that destroy long term memory encoding, and then shipped out east to fight and die in secret wars unguessed in the polis. 

Uniquely among the soldiers of the White City, the ghosts of the eastern expanse are dressed in plain steel gear, undecorated with the images of the game. The impulse, however, cannot be truly obliterated - they play games of their own, but in a vacuum, cut away from the complicated system of referents, assumptions, and cultural history that animate the play of citizens in the core territories. Each ghost creates his or her own visual language from a vastly reduced set of images. Usually each of these refers directly to another soldier. The other ghosts (and the kindly, smiling agents of the Eastern Group) are all that they know; are their entire world. Each is an image, nested amongst their peers, and their games and diagrams grow like gnarled family trees of the disappeared, the disembodied, in disincorporated. 

Each soldier takes an image for themselves, which they tattoo onto the chest or back.

Never Going Home

Don't Ask

A Lifetime of Silence

The City, The City

We Stalk at Night

Operational Assurance

Devour Light

Special Projects

Prism Watcher

I Was Your Daughter, Now I Am Something Else

Make Of Me What You Will

Precision Instruments

From Our Bodies Will Grow

Knowing Red Spectrum

Test Bed

We Kill What We See

Eastern Ghost

As Soldier of the White City, but no images painted on armour - usually unpainted steel, sometimes painted black. 

Every time an Eastern Ghost takes psychic damage they must save or suffer a seizure, which deals d3 damage and, if they survive that, takes them out of the fight non-lethally. 

Ghosts are just as vicious as normal soldiers, but they are also muddled and dreamy. It takes them a while to make decisions, and they will usually be confused by your presence unless you feature specifically in their mission. 

Bands and companies are like family to one another, to a greater degree than normal soldiers. If you slay one, the others will react as if they were siblings. They sing together as they fight and work - not the patriotic war music of the city; softer and gentler songs, improvised on the spot, for ten to fifteen people singing rough harmonies. 

They all have a strange horror-fascination with the idea of returning west, to a city and a people that have been systematically removed from their memories.