Author's note: There are some elements to the background of this story which would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to shoehorn into the story itself. To solve that problem, I have written this. It a short piece which is intended as an overview for some of the background. It does not go into great detail; it's a brief overview.
The piece contains no sex, and it is set outside of the realm of our story. The setting is a college lecture hall, thousands of years after the events depicted in the story...
*****
The professor clicked a button on his laptop, advancing a slide. The new slide read: "History of the Trasian Empire: The Rise of Emperor Athello IV, aka His Supremacy."
"OK, so." The professor paused and pushed his glasses up from the bridge of his nose. "Even though Tras had a history going back over a millennium, when most people hear "Tras" they think of Athello IV. His Supremacy. His reign was a brief, strange period in the history of the world - and in the history of Tras itself."
"Athello conquered the entire world, or at least the known world, in an astonishingly short time - maybe a decade or so. He decimated old Trasian institutions and replaced many of them with institutions loyal to him. He consolidated a lot of power that had previously been distributed in different places - institutions, nations, even to some extent religions - into his own hands. He was worshipped as God during his lifetime, and if the historical record is accurate, many people actually believed this."
The professor pushed forward to the next side. "So, how did he do it?" He paused again. Most of the class looked bored, or was staring at little screens.
The professor cleared his throat. "We've went over what happened over the past century or so the last time. Tras had, politically speaking, become a sleeping giant. Power had devolved from the imperial crown to the nobility."
"At the same time, it was a period of peace and scientific advancement," the professor continued. "But here's where it gets interesting. We don't know a whole lot about what made Trasian technology tick - much of that's been lost. But we do know that in the century or so before Athello's birth, there was an agricultural revolution. A massive increase in the empire's population. There were also some big advances in military technology, artillery, explosives, that sort of thing." The professor paused. "And there were the magneto roads. We'll get to those in a minute."
"So this massive increase in population - it was anything like the world had seen to that point. It was unlike anything the world would see until the birth of modern agriculture. We still don't know exactly what the Trasians did to make it happen - the population did grow fast in other places, but it was centered on Tras - but it was unprecedented."
The students still looked pretty bored. The professor rubbed his eyes. "But unlike when modern agriculture got going, there were no new factories to absorb all these people. Manufacturing went up, sure, but not like that. So you had tens of millions of people - literally - hanging around with very, very little to do. It was a combustible situation."
"So Athello's father, Maeson II, came up with a plan. We covered this the last time. Wrest power of the purse from the nobility with the support of the commoner merchant class, who hated the nobles. Use it to fund a massive military build-up. Use that to re-establish the empire's geopoltical position, and hopefully grow it. Use it to re-establish the crown's authority."
The professor fixed his glasses again. "Well, Maeson II died when his son was an infant and when Athello took the throne, he carried out the plan. And it worked. It worked far beyond anybody's wildest dreams."
He pressed the button to push the slide forward. "Let's take a moment to talk about the magneto roads. Just a moment because, again, we don't know very much about them. But they basically used these incredibly powerful magnets - called supermagnets, it was a very creative name - to create something kind of like a train, although smaller. The movement was created by the magnets on the road. The technology was known about before Athello took the throne, but nobody had any idea how to actually make it work on a large scale. But after the big military build-up, Athello had a new advantage: a massive, and very well-organized, labor force."
A hand shot up. Finally, someone was listening! "Yes," the professor said.
"Why don't we have magneto-roads today? I mean, if they were so great and all."
