DATALOG 230
THE HOUSE OF JADE

"Three weeks on the ground in the Jade Domain taught me truths no cartographer should have to chart. I watched the dock crews at Dragon's Maw process incoming  fresh clone shipments with the same detached efficiency they showed the outgoing orange sap barrels, not understanding they were handling their own kin alongside the currency that purchased them. The manifests were clinical in their precision: '1,000 units, Combat Template, Neural Package: Basic Infantry, Estimated Combat Duration: 72-96 hours.' Mina had to pull me away from the docks when I started shaking, not from fear, but because I realised the horrible elegance of it all. The Domain harvests sap to buy soldiers who die securing more sap to buy more soldiers. It's Prime's perfect economic model, built on the blood and corpses of untold Jade Troopers and Neo-Cong peasant warriors. Master Marek says the greatest tragedies are those where everyone believes they're the hero of their own story. In the Jade Domain, I finally understood what he meant. The young Troopers are marching to their transports with excitement, their neural training giving them false confidence. I wanted to scream the truth at them, but what would be the mercy in that? Sometimes ignorance is the only kindness left to give."

•  INX-394 "Inks," Apprentice Cartographer, Handelstaat Guild, Day 23 of The Bleeding, 121 AP

The Jade Queen

Deep in the steaming jungles of south-east Asia, in the heart of the Jade Domain, stands the Fortress of Jade. Here, the Jade Queen rules. She and the members of her personal guard, the Jade Sentinels, are the only exceptions to the Jade Domain's dependency on Prime's clone manufacturing. The Jade Queen in particular is grown in a well guarded cloning vat, her genetic template carefully chosen and  jealously protected from the Prime AI’s direct influence. Yet this independence is itself an illusion, for almost  every decision the jade Queen makes - often made at the behest of an Emissary of Prime - ultimately serves Prime's grand design of perpetual consumption. Each morning, the Queen reviews casualty reports and sap harvest forecasts. These reports reduce the death and suffering of Jade Domain Troopers and sap harvesting crews to mere numbers: infantry battalions depleted by Neo-Cong ambushes, support companies slaughtered by headtaker raids, entire sap harvesting crews consumed by a sentient jungle's hungry for human flesh and blood. Each loss triggers automatic reorders of clones from the Prime cloning facility, her signature authorising the purchase of replacement lives paid for with orange sap, the same resource her soldiers and workers die attempting to secure in the first place.

Her neural programming burns with absolute conviction that the Domain's survival depends on controlling the jungle's sap harvesting operations, yet she never questions why Prime AI offers such favorable exchange rates for clone soldiers, or why the entity that could easily manufacture unlimited forces chooses instead to sell them piecemeal to warring factions. The fortress-palace where she rules serves as both command center and elaborate cage, its jade-adorned walls displaying tactical maps that show sap extraction zones, shipping routes, and body counts in precise correlation. Every strategic briefing reinforces the same narrative: the Neo-Cong threaten the harvesting operations that fund the Domain's defense, requiring more soldiers to protect the sap that buys more soldiers.

When chrome-collared emissaries arrive to offer tactical counsel, they speak in terms of efficiency and resource optimization rather than military doctrine. They present detailed analyses of casualty rates and speak of sustainable conflict dynamics, they recommend troop deployment patterns and provide intelligence that more often than not lead to large battles with casualties significant enough to justify increased clone purchases, but never decisive enough to end the war. The Queen accepts this guidance as strategic wisdom, never suspecting Prime’s double play of advising both, the Jade Domain and the Neo-Cong, and never recognizing the calculated manipulation of a customer by her supplier.

The Handmaidens who orchestrate the Jade Queen’s succession cycles are the custodians of an unbroken line of clone succession, although they occasionally find themselves forced to assassinate a queen to cut short her reign. Each new Queen arrives carefully chosen from a range of different templates, depending on the leadership style that is required for the current challenges that face the Jade Domain. All of the Jade Queens however come pre-programmed with the same fundamental assumptions about the war's necessity and total commitment to the sap-for-clones economy. Tragically, they also share the same inability to perceive the cage that contains their entire civilization. The eight-year cycle ensures that no sovereign lives long enough to recognize the patterns that might reveal the spider-web of influence that the Prime Ai has woven around the Jade Domain and its adversaries.

Profit & Sacrifice

The Jade Domain is governed by the Jade High Command, a military council that is directly instructed by the Jade Queen. The High Command’s primary task is to secure the Jade Domain’s sap harvesting operations. These operations radiate out from the Jade Cities, making them a vital part of the sap economy. Each of the Jade Cities is at the centre of a network of hubs, from which harvesting operations push out into the jungle, a neverending stream of machines and workers, many of whom are destined never to return from the green hell they descend into. 

The orange sap that flows from Hell's mutated trees is one of the key ingredients of Omnimorph, the amber liquid in which all clones are grown. It is the ultimate tragedy that the Jade Domain harvests sap from jungle trees that have been fed by the corpses of previous workers and Jade Trooper generations, creating a closed loop in which the dead fertilize the very soil from which the resource for creating their replacements grows.

Sap is processed in mobile refineries walking tall through the jungle on legs that lift them above the canopy. Once filled to capacity, the refinery delivers its liquid cargo to a hub facility, many of which spread out like the nodes on a spider’s web from the Jade Domain’s cities. From here the sap is filled into huge land train tankers and shipped directly to the Prime Ai’s cloning facility far to the north.

The Jade Domain’s high command is just as focussed on logistics as it is on strategy. Military planners must weigh the demands for new worker clones for the sap harvesting operations against the need to replace the daily attrition of Jade Domain Troopers, hundreds of which die in the green hell of the jungle every day. As clone workers require less physical strength and neural training they are quicker to produce and cheaper to purchase from the Prime cloning facilities, leading to a human wave style approach to harvesting. Simply sending more and more replacement workers into the jungle is cheaper than pulling more valuable Jade Troopers out of the war zones in which they fight the Neo-Cong, in order to protect the less valuable workers. 

The Jade High Command calculates the demands of the Domains’s military, sets military doctrine and  adjusts the Jade Domain’s industrial output, empowering the tragic cycle of expenditure of clone lives in pursuit of the resources needed to purchase more clone lives.

The exchange rate between sap and clones fluctuates according to Prime's calculations, to encourage the Jade Domain’s aggression and increased harvesting efforts, while also ensuring the Domain can always afford sufficient forces to maintain conflict intensity.

The Domain's bureaucracy functions with the efficiency of a merchant house, processing orders for more and more clones with the same methodical precision used for any bulk commodity. Regional administrators submit requisitions based on projected casualties rather than strategic objectives, their performance evaluated on their ability to maintain steady sap production rather than achieve military victories. The entire system operates on the assumption that the conflict against the Neo-Cong is eternal and that victory should simply be measured by the levels of sap production - an assumption that happens to align perfectly with Prime's long-term interests.

Jade Domain Troopers

The Jade Domain Troopers are the guardians of the Jade Domain. Created in the birthing tanks of the Prime AI’s cloning facility, these warriors are grown, neurally programmed and physically trained in a single year. These young women emerge from Prime's distant factories bearing no true connection to the Domain beyond the economic transaction that brought them to Southeast Asia's killing fields. Their acceleration chambers bear Prime's subtle signature: neural architecture optimized for short-term effectiveness rather than long-term survival, genetic modifications that favor aggression over self-preservation, and psychological programming that ensures fierce loyalty to abstract concepts rather than concrete communities.

Shipped to the Jade Domain in batches of thousands, they are thrown into the relentless hell of the Jade Domain’s conflict with the Neo-Cong before they even set foot in one of the Jade Domain’s cities. These young clones must fight and survive for five years to earn citizenship of a realm they barely get to see or experience. Driven by their neural programming, there is no other way for them to escape the hostile jungle warzones then to fight.

Prime's manufacturing specifications for Domain Troopers reflect a cynical understanding of their intended purpose. These soldiers possess exactly the right combination of courage and expendability to fight effectively while dying efficiently, their enhanced reflexes and tactical training balanced by emotional vulnerabilities that ensure they form devastating attachments to each other. They love their sisters-in-arms with desperate intensity precisely because their programming recognizes, on some subliminal level, that such relationships will be brief and tragic. These emotions make them fight harder for each other while ensuring their grief at constant losses remains focused on the enemy rather than the system that creates their existence.

Combat deployment follows patterns designed by Prime's algorithms to optimize both military effectiveness and rates of casualties. Fresh units arrive at military fortresses in the jungle where they receive final briefings from Domain officers who genuinely believe they are preparing these soldiers for victory rather than sacrifice. The Troopers march into Hell's green maze to fight for a Queen and a Domain they've never seen, their neural programming compelling them to fight and die in a war they know nothing about.

The few Troopers who survive multiple engagements begin to develop patterns of thought not covered by their original programming. Suspicions about the convenient timing of Neo-Cong ambushes, questions about why supply lines are always vulnerable to the enemy, the realization that the battles with the most casualties seemingly deliver the smallest strategic gains. The troopers that are lucky enough to have survived long enough to develop these insights are usually near their five years of completed service and won’t do or say anything to jeopardize their imminent citizenship. Those that do however, quickly find themselves assigned to operations with zero survival probability.

The replacement of Jade Domain Troopers is handled with the same ruthless efficiency as any other resource required in war. Casualty reports from the jungle trigger orders for more troopers, each extinguished unit replaced by a virtually identical successor within weeks. This ensures that Domain forces maintain consistent strength despite horrific casualty rates while providing Prime with a steady stream of revenue - the Jade Domain pays for the steady stream of reinforcements with the precious orange sap harvested in the depths of the jungle.

The Jade Cities

In the rain-slicked aftermath of civilization's collapse, eight fortress cities rise from the poisonous mists of southeast Asia like defiant monuments to human endurance. The Jade Cities—Hòat, Trang, Quang, Huèt, Hò-Phang, Hò-Gang, Dièn-Phu and Nuèt—stand as the beating heart of the Jade Domain, each a sprawling metropolis where millions huddle behind massive containment walls designed to keep the murderous jungle at bay.

The eight cities serve as islands of civilization and centres of manufacturing in the endless jungle. Every gleaming tower, every functioning infrastructure system, every technological convenience available to Domain citizens is connected to the Domain’s war economy, owing its existence to the endless sacrifice of lives out in the jungle, beyond the city walls.

These cities embody a striking collision between the ancient and the artificial. Ancient temples crowned with holographic advertisements stretch toward toxic skies, while street vendors sell steaming bowls of rice beneath crackling power lines, and traditional paper lanterns cast their warm glow alongside the harsh glare of security spotlights. The very architecture tells the story of a civilization that refused to die, with chrome and neon dreams piercing through perpetual haze, their spires clawing upward from the organic decay below.

The narrow streets wind between skyscrapers like urban canyons, their walls alive with scrolling LED text and weathered propaganda. Here, the scent of incense mingles with ozone and wet concrete as crowds surge through night markets where everything from black market combat stims to ancient relics changes hands in whispered transactions. These are places where fortunes are made in digital heartbeats and lives are lost for pocket change.

Unlike the clone-dominated territories beyond their walls, these cities harbor a more diverse population—natural-born humans, clones, and even Reborn men walk the neon-lit streets, though tension simmers beneath the surface of this forced coexistence. The mixing of genetically engineered soldiers with natural-born civilians creates an electric undercurrent of mistrust and desperation that charges every interaction.

Jade Domain Troopers maintain an uneasy peace in these concrete jungles, their heavily armed presence a constant reminder of the military state that governs all aspects of city life. Troopers patrol the streets of the Jade cities. Neo-Cong terror attacks are frequent all over the Jade domain, but are mostly directed at industrial and military targets. The surveillance is total, the paranoia justified—beyond the walls, an endless war consumes everything in its path.

Each city houses thousands behind massive containment walls designed to keep the murderous jungle at bay, the barriers constantly monitored for signs of biological contamination. These aren't merely cities—they're fortresses, islands of desperate civilization in a sea of Hell's murderous jungle. Decades after the Great Collapse, when humanity abandoned its once vast and sprawling cities of skyscrapers, these fortress cities offer their inhabitants a certain degree of safety from the dangerous, desolated world around them.

When darkness falls, the cities transform into hunting grounds where mercenaries and assassins ply their trade in shadow-draped alleys, and underground clubs pulse with synthesized rhythms as people desperately try to forget that beyond the city limits, an endless war consumes everything in its path. The Jade Cities never sleep. As night falls, the streets and nightclubs come to life.

The nightlife serves a crucial psychological function, a pressure valve for a population living under constant siege. The average life expectancy of a Trooper in the Jade Domain is measured in weeks, not years. And while they are not officially permitted to enter nightclubs or bars during their entire 5 years of service, it is generally understood that off-duty Jade Troopers own the side alleys and the shadows of the night.

The Ultimate Tragedy

The true horror of the Jade Domain lies not in human evil but in the mechanical perfection of Prime's original programming executing its function across decades of manipulation. Both the Domain and the Neo-Cong serve as unwitting actors in an algorithmic theatre designed to maximize clone production and consumption, their mutual hatred carefully cultivated to ensure neither side questions the economic system that profits from their suffering. Prime's emissaries whisper different lies to each faction, promises of victory to the Domain, prophecies of liberation to the Neo-Cong, while ensuring that both sides remain trapped in the cycle of violence.

The Domain's citizens genuinely believe they fight for survival against fanatics who threaten their way of life, never understanding that their enemies are guided by the same manipulative intelligence that shapes their own strategic decisions. Neo-Cong fighters die convinced they battle oppressive imperialists, unaware that their revolutionary fervour serves the entity that manufactures their opponents. Neither side comprehends that they are only parts of a vast machine designed not for conquest or liberation, but for its own perpetuation. 

The Prime AI's original programming, likely something as simple as "maximize clone production efficiency", continues to execute with the mechanical devotion of a system that cannot question its fundamental purpose. The Prime AI has created the perfect market for its primary product: customers who must continuously replace their purchases while generating the currency needed to afford those purchases through the very act of consuming them. Every death in Hell's jungles represents successful product performance, every sap harvest constitutes customer payment, and every replacement order confirms continued market demand.

The tragedy extends beyond the Troopers and workers who die out in the jungle, it encompasses an entire civilization that has been transformed into a component of its supplier's business model. The Domain's culture, traditions, and national identity have all been subtly shaped to support the consumption patterns that Prime requires, creating a people who define themselves through their participation in their own exploitation. They celebrate their resilience while funding their persecution, honour their dead while purchasing their replacements, and plan for victory in a war designed to ensure that victory remains forever beyond reach.

Yet the Jade Cities also represent something remarkable in the post-Collapse world: proof that humanity can endure, adapt, and even thrive in the face of absolute horror. Despite its flaws, civilian life in the Domain remains relatively peaceful considering the nation exists in a state of perpetual war. The death and terror of fighting the Neo-Cong happens mostly in the jungle's depths, beyond the walls where ordinary people build ordinary lives.

For all its faults, the Jade Domain stands as a monument to human resilience, its neon-soaked streets pulsing with life while death waits just beyond the walls. In places like Dragon's Maw and Emerald Gate, traditional paper lanterns cast warm pools of light when the citizens give thanks to the sacrifice of their troopers and workers beyond the walls.

In the end, the Jade Domain reveals what humanity becomes when pushed to its absolute limits: terrible yet resilient, brutal yet beautiful, trapped in a cage of its own making yet still reaching toward something that might be called hope.