Eternal Empire of the Hans

The Eternal Empire of the Hans is one of the political powers shaping the post-Extermination world, but the novel presents it through encounters and passing references rather than a full account of its institutions. Its clearest profile emerges from its dealings with Bartek: it seeks to acquire his Tokyo Mother, while he refuses to assist in building what he regards as another red empire. Elsewhere, it appears as a destination in a fragmented global order and as a potential participant in experiments with abundance. These glimpses place the Empire at the intersection of material control and competing ideas about how society should be rebuilt.

A power in a divided world

The Empire’s setting is a world in which control of infrastructure has become inseparable from political power. Before the First Transformer War, rival alliances competed over mechs, servers, power supplies, defenses against the Plague, and shares of the Mothernet. The war settled immediate questions of ownership, but did not restore a globally connected society. Later, the failure of the last transatlantic telecommunications satellite, after the ocean cables had already succumbed, ended the possibility of freely logging into mechs across the world. Guilds and alliances hardened into nations, bound not only by shared language and culture but by time and place.

The Eternal Empire of the Hans belongs to this landscape of territorially rooted powers. The available scenes do not specify its borders, leaders, internal organization, or the precise systems by which it governs. Instead, they show its reach through political dealings and through Dagenskyoll’s journey: 549 days before meeting Bartek at Real Paradise, Dagenskyoll had flown there on his way from the Randomites to the Eternal Empire. The Empire is thus legible as a destination within a world whose former networks have given way to separated domains and long journeys.

The dispute over Bartek’s Tokyo Mother

In a conversation about the Empire’s interest in Bartek, Dagenskyoll says that the Hans wanted to buy out his Tokyo Mother. The exchange links the Empire to a concrete struggle over control of a resource or system important enough to acquire, though the text does not explain the proposed transaction’s terms or what the Tokyo Mother contains. Bartek says the Hans had not anticipated the scale of the Children of Mao’s IS: the supposed Paradise of Communism had proved infectious among Chinese people born from a Hollywood copy of China.

Bartek’s objection is political as well as personal. He says he would rather delete himself than help build the next red empire, or the next game inside one, and treats the distinction between those projects as negligible. The passage therefore associates the Eternal Empire with a possible expansion of political order that Bartek rejects, while leaving open whether the Empire itself is identical to the red empire he fears or would merely benefit from his cooperation. His refusal marks a boundary: the Empire may seek to absorb or acquire systems, but it cannot count on his willing participation in its project.

Empire, territory, and competing paradises

A view of the world from orbital heights shows lands parceled among digitally restarted forms of life associated with different versions of Vincent Cho. The passage names several such territories and identifies Central Africa and its First Paradise as the domain of Lady Spiro, just beginning its day. This description places the Eternal Empire within a broader geography of political and social experiments, but does not directly identify the Empire with any of the territories listed. The distinction matters: the novel offers a map of overlapping powers and projects, not a complete atlas of the Hans’ possessions.

The Empire’s route also intersects with Real Paradise. Dagenskyoll arrives there after traveling from the Randomites toward the Eternal Empire, and later discussion turns to whether the Hans still resist distributing abundance. That juxtaposition makes the Empire a point of comparison for an alternative social arrangement, without establishing that it controls or has formally opposed Real Paradise. The text’s emphasis is on the differing scale and viability of such models rather than on a documented war between them.

The problem of abundance

During the visit, the question arises whether the Hans still decline to provide abundance as if it were manna from heaven. The response acknowledges attempts, but argues that an economy of abundance cannot function in isolated fragments: a partial infinity set beside continuing scarcity does not reproduce the conditions of a fully abundant system. At the scale of a village of a few hundred humanos, or an area no larger than two hundred square kilometers, the model might work provincially; it would not thereby become workable for an entire world. The exchange ends with the observation that nobody has tried it at that global scale.

The discussion does not establish a formal economic doctrine or a definitive imperial policy. It does, however, make the Hans a reference point in an argument about whether abundance can be distributed incrementally or requires a total transformation of social conditions. The Empire’s significance lies partly in this unresolved distance between political power and an alternative that may work only when adopted in full. Alongside Bartek’s refusal to help build another empire, the question of abundance gives the Hans a sharply defined narrative function: they represent a real center of power, but the novel leaves both their institutional nature and the possibility of a different world open to dispute.