That title is the opening to the tagline of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K miniatures game; a game I played for around 15 years (along with Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Battlefleet Gothic, Epic Armageddon, Necromunda, Mordheim, Battlemaster, Man o’ War and pretty much anything that GW produced in their minis line. Yes, I was in deep.) It’s ending is “… there is only war.” It’s meant to emphasize the constant conflict- indeed, the very reason for existence -of the human Imperium and its array of enemies/targets/victims (i.e. anything that isn’t human, including mutated humans, plus heretics of all kinds.) The Imperium exists to serve its own war machine and nothing else. The parallels to the attitudes of certain modern superpowers of the 20th and 21st centuries cannot be missed. Indeed, the US is dealing with that right now in that war has been declared by the US government with the stated purpose of achieving long-sought but quite murky strategic goals. Instead, that conflict is going to end with the situation exactly as it was before the bombs started dropping and yet is declared a “victory.” This is, of course, no different than the attitude of many of the gangs on Six, the War Zone, who will gladly engage in tremendous violence for square yards of territory and somehow call it a “victory” to reverse the situation that was last week. That situation will, of course, be reversed again next week because this is the game we play.
When I first designed the setting, the gang conflict was paramount because that was the situation that existed in a few American metropolises. Whole neighborhoods were armed camps beholden to the conflict between warring gangs and the battle for territory which, in turn, defined the drug trade. On Six, the struggle is really no different than it is on any of the other levels, excepting Two and Eight (and kinda Seven.) It’s just larger because we’ve passed the serenity and control of a large portion of Five (the Black Market) and moved on to the free-for-all that is survival and existence below the halfway point of the city. That free-for-all is especially driven by The Phalanx, the only gang large and powerful enough to have a presence on not just one level, but two; Five and Six. There’s a decent-sized story behind why The Phalanx is that large and powerful, but we’ll get to that when we get to it. Suffice it to say that it has a lot to do with technology, which the other gangs like Bloodpulse, the Shadow Dragons and the Stillettas also use to their advantage. This is no different from 40K, in that the use of technology by the Imperium, the Eldar, the Orks, and the Tau enables them to engage in the constant conflict and for forces like the Necrons, is part and parcel of their very existence. It just dovetailed nicely with what I was writing (GW was creating Rogue Trader, the precursor to Warhammer 40K, right around the time I was creating Dystopia) because I think both sets of creators were responding to the reality that was around us, not only on the urban level which was the driving force for my work, but also the global level.
But like with most good stories, it’s the human level that tends to make them last. In GW’s work, they want people to identify with the unique characters that are the leaders of their factions. In mine, I want the same but I also try to highlight that human consequence of war with things like the Pit Crews. They’re the remaining members of the Red Cross teams (and others that they’ve since trained) who responded to the initial disaster that was the Collapse. Seeing the ongoing conflict that started shortly after that disaster, they stayed on to try to keep people alive on the battlefield and protect those who are the (sometimes) innocent bystanders. Showing the trauma that violence creates is usually the best way to encourage people to try to find alternative paths. Until then, it’s all video games (just like drone warfare!) 40K’s angle is that the conflict is so huge that spending time thinking about each individual soldier of the Imperial Guard is pointless. I’m a little less sanguine/ironic about that, even if there have been and will be random members of the gangs involved that don’t get a name in the course of our stories. They’re right in that many people remain faceless in the tide of violence, but I’m thinking there’s another way to present that situation, especially one that doesn’t leave readers of my work like many players of 40K, who begin to look at the Imperium, initiator of swathes of destruction throughout the galaxy, as the “good guys.” You really shouldn’t miss either the “grim darkness” or the “… there is only war.” parts if you’re paying attention.
So, Six really is a meat grinder in the worst sense of that phrase, but there are a lot of good stories to tell in the midst of that chaos. The first story for the old Dystopia: Gangwars took place on Six and I still have the script sitting around. It involved Bloodpulse, The Phalanx, the Walkers, the Pit Crews, the Lizard King and a character that we’ll be meeting shortly in the chapter after Scylla is complete. (On that note, yes, I’m filling space here as ALFA got hung up on some real world stuff, so there’s no page this week. Next week we’ll be back on schedule.)
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