Cascade - Draft Intro (Patreon)

I'm putting some of my WIP chapters for one of my hobby projects back up as a bonus since I got a couple of PMs from people who had read them previously. This is my hobby project I work on when I'm not burnt out, and some of the chapters literally cut off mid-chapter since they're not done. So don't @ me.I'm tagging them with 'cascade' so they are easy to find. More Orphan stuff tomorrow night.

Introduction as written by Nathaniel Kent – Last Revised 2079

The genesis of the Cascades was not a simple thing, but it could be stated in simple terms. The rate of ambient dimensional energy entering our world reached a tipping point and began a runaway reaction that drowned much of the earth in ever more powerful gates. 

This description is simple, technically accurate, and entirely misses the point.

Other underlying causes of the Cascades are almost as numerous as the gateways themselves: The powder keg that was Eastern Europe, the fracturing of modern nation states, the explosive growth of individual or Rote power over that of society, the increasing acceptance of violence both in general and as a tool of social decision-making, the exponential rise of the global south and the economic determinism of capitalism in a vicious winner-takes-all competition.

There is responsibility in all of these. Any one of these factors, alone or in concert, may have been enough to trigger the Cascades, given time. But the fact is that in the end they were not the prime cause.

Pre-Cascade society was awash in media, in content and echo chambers so minute that a person could easily lose themselves in their own confirmation bias, no matter how absurd the claim. Humanity lacked not only a shared goal, but a shared understanding of history and of reality. These were not merely differences of opinion on a shared set of facts, but a complete divergence in fact itself in both individuals and groups.

This epistemic disconnect is at the heart of the era and of the Cascades. It is not that there was a lack of warning, but that even when warned the world could not collectively agree that there was any danger at all.

[Remember to finish this!!]

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Publication Introduction as written by Sara Sierra-Kent 

To anyone who knew my late husband, it should not be surprising that he left his life’s work incomplete. His death was sudden, but even if he had known the precise date in advance, I believe it still would have fallen to me to put together the final work. Nathan was always in search of the next interview, the next perspective. The missing piece of an ever-expanding puzzle. Time spent revising or compiling was time wasted in his eyes.

It is perhaps because of this work ethic that his manuscript is so unwieldy. At the time of his death the final working draft which was titled: Cascade (Final-Edit May 2079), not to be confused with Cascade[Complete] or Cascade (Complete-Edit 2078) contains 2142 long form interviews compiled between 12th March, 2062 and 30th July, 2085, in addition to over six thousand multi-media files and nearly ten thousand supplementary documents.

True to his intentions, a multi-volume compendium is in production for posterity and academic use. But in the interest of public consumption, I have taken the liberty of compiling a cross-section of what I feel are the most crucial interviews and documents. 

With this I hope to provide a companion piece, a singular narrative look at how and why the world was nearly destroyed. That through Nathan and those he interviewed, readers can find that shared understanding the Old World so severely lacked.

Though I am sure he would hate it, I have left in Nathaniel’s original footnotes for his interviews and have added my own as well where I felt it appropriate. This is purely selfish. He would insist that his voice not taint the work. I insist that his voice is as important as any other.

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Author's Note:

Amusingly this is version six or seven of this story's intro. I've never found one that I like so this will probably never see the full light of day, at least not in this form.

The main issue is that I need it to 'hook' but I don't know that this really works.

Also fun fact, you can see this story predates Orphan because I used 'Sierra' here first and later swiped the name for Orphan.