Ko Netko is a nation whose people never had to worry about wars of conquest, because nobody was insane enough to want their land. The water is often contaminated with deadly diseases, as is the insect life. It can be hard to find very fertile soil, and even so...

Perhaps it's magic. Or maybe it's just another disease, with a very long dormancy period. Or there's a build-up of chemicals which causes it. Or perhaps the explanation is something that could only be explained with a two-hundred page paper with four hundred different eight-syllable words which nobody outside of a highly specialized field of science could hope to understand. The people of Ko Netko do not know what the cause is, but they know the effect: Every twenty-three to twenty-five years, the land fails to produce all but the barest amount of food, if indeed it is capable of that.

They store all the food that they can, but most of the food they can grow does not last long before wasting, or is hard to grow in their land, or both. They would leave, except that this is their land, and has been theirs since before recorded history, and at any rate the neighboring lands are settled as well, and Ko Netko does not have the means to wage a war of conquest. They would import food, except that what little they can export must go to provide for imports of even greater necessity.

Ko Netko is a nation obsessed. Its people will stop at nothing to change their situation, to adapt their land to their needs, to adapt themselves to their land's abilities, to stop the generational onset of the slezhi slotzo.

They are quite the little nation of busy scientists, scrabbling to figure out how to improve their situation in any way possible.

Sottoronne

Cannibalism. The Netkots are not ashamed of it. On the contrary: They are proud of it. When slezhi slotzo sets in, the oldest and the weakest of them go to their deaths immediately, so that they can cease taking up valuable stores of food and immediately begin contributing to those stores. As others die, they are harvested as well.

They do not limit this practice to their own, however; once, the Netkots made raids into neighboring lands in order to gain food of all varieties (their history does not recall wars among themselves, for even in their distant past they recognized how useless it would be when there was more to gain from joining together and raiding others whose lands were not so fickle). Now, this tradition has stopped, for they have a self-propagating population of slaves, and when they are in need of more, they use their limited resources to import more. They shall have their neighbors bother with wars now, and in return they will provide the fruits of their research.

Ginkets, as the slaves are called, are no longer eaten immediately, as they were in the past. For nearly three hundred years the current system has been in place in Ko Netko, and a ginke has much to offer before his death. So that the Netkots can focus their attentions on their research, the slaves work the fields and the rice paddies, and perform all the other necessary work, such as construction and food preparation, which does not immediately relate to scientific pursuits.

There are, occasionally, slave uprisings, or at least attempts at them, but the price for failure is high, the reward for rooting out conspiracy is high, and the neighboring countries are more than happy to lend their strength to put down an uprising, so that they do not lose the benefits of being closely allied with a nation geared entirely toward scientific research.

When they are unable to work (or have been accused of being part of a conspiracy to rebel, or have committed some other crime), they become test subjects, and Ko Netko has developed no idea of "human rights" (or rights for any other intelligent species). If the idea exists anywhere at all in their world (which it very well may not, depending on how advanced society is), they surely understand why it would be considered by other people, but the fact of the matter is this: If there is the slightest possibility that the test will in some way lessen the effects of the slezhi slotzo, then no number of deaths, no matter how agonizing, can be anything but justified.

After the work, after the tests, when the ginkets are finally dead, they serve one final time, as food, as tools, as clothing.

This is sottoronne, which once meant the willing sacrifice of oneself for the good of the group, and now has come to represent everything which is sacrificed for the quest to end slezhi slotzo.

Fields of Study

Ko Netko society revolves around the six Tednots, or Fields of Study: Tedno Nonlo (Study of Society), Tedno Nonsi (Study of Mathematics), Tedno Notso (Study of Medicine), Tedno Sotro (Study of Astronomy, literally, but more loosely, and accurately, the Study of History), Tedno Zhitno (Study of Chemistry), and Tedno Zpeto (Study of Agriculture). These are rough categorizations, and what they translate into does not fully encompass everything which they involve, which shall be furthered detailed in next month's installment.

Education is divided into two phases, the first of which is a general education beginning at the age of seven and continuing until the age of fourteen. At this point, the adolescent Netko, along with her peers in that year, takes an exam. Based on its results, her Second Phase education, which will go for another ten years, will focus on one of the six Tednots, or else one of the two auxiliary fields, Administration and Child-Rearing. Once she is through, she is able to cast aside the facemask of the Student, and is assigned to be an assistant on a research team in her Field of Study.

Research teams are the basic building block of Ko Netko; they work together, live together, eat together, and for all intents and purposes, including more carnal matters, are married to each other, and the old term for "spouse" was in fact retooled to have its modern definition: research partner. Each research team works on a specific project, receiving a new one once it is finished. Assistants remain such for six years, managing minor details of the project which do not need a researcher's attention, but do require at least some knowledge of the field.

Upon finishing her sixth year as an Assistant, a Netko will become a full researcher and either remain with her current project or be assigned to a newly-formed research team assembled to tackle a new project. Managing them is the director, who does the same work as his subordinates but is also tasked with settling disagreements and keeping the team moving together in one direction. Research teams are formed and disbanded by the chief director in charge of that Tedno, in that city, and the chief director also controls how much funding each team receives from the Field's budget in that city.

Beyond their capacity as test subjects, ginkets fulfill another role in research teams: bovrots, or carrymen. Carrymen are responsible for basic, untrained tasks such as retrieving needed materials, as the name suggests. The position is given to a ginke as a reward, and there is room for further mobility. Slaves who develop enough knowledge of the team's project can become assistants, and since this required that he acquire, from scratch and purely through observation, at least a working knowledge of what even the lowest assistant spent a decade studying, such a ginke has a keen mind, and will likely become a researcher.

While still a ginke when an assistant, or even a researcher, there is not really any difference between their lives and that of free members of the research team, and at least two research teams currently have a slave as a director.

Lodno

For three hundred years the society of Ko Netko has dedicated itself toward the six Fields of Study. There are some projects started then which are still going on, and Netkots give honor to those who went before them in the act of lodno, which is a refusal to step aside and give up, and to instead press forward, no matter the difficulties, until the goal is achieved, and the slezhi slotzots are no longer capable of instilling the people with dread.

Other cultures worship their ancestors by giving them offerings, or praying to them. The people of Ko Netko instead continue their work, and promise to never falter and never fail. Even should they die before their work is through, they have not failed, because their people's knowledge has increased just that little bit more, and those who replace them will practice lodno as well, and never falter, never fail, never accept defeat and the inevitability of slezhi slotzo.

Especially brilliant Netkots are mummified after dying, instead of being eaten. This mummification is believed to tie their spirit to this world, delaying the time before they pass on to whatever world comes next (the Netkots are rather sketchy on what happens in it, since they believe that very little information gets back from it, but what little they know points toward there being cycles of slezhi slotzo in the world to come, too, and the work they do here will help in the afterlife). So important is the concept of sottoronne that this is viewed not as a release, as non-cannibal cultures might see it, but as a great sacrifice. When it is necessary to communicate with the mummified person, usually for help on a current project, a ritual is performed which involves the consumption of hallucinogen-laced ginke meat.

The Matter of Food

Rice. The land is so barren, but the water is still fruitful, if prone to containing diseases, and rice is the staple crop of Ko Netko. It can be eaten as is, or beaten into a cake form, or be used as a filling for pine bread or meat. Not generally renowned for its flavor, rice is also frequently used in soup along with blood and shrub rat meat. Mostly, though, the Netko suffer through eating rice on its own, or along with pine bread, which is little better.

Hardy cereals, such as a sixty-year-old strain of barley, are also grown in Ko Netko, and there are several species of mushroom which seem to fare mildly well. After rice, however, pine trees are the most important plant in Ko Netko. It can be harvested for its nuts, its needles can be used for a tea called tseto, and the white inner bark can be eaten as is, turned into a thickener for rice soups, or ground up into a flour in order to produce bread.

The diet of Ko Netko is not exceedingly high in meat, with almost a quarter of it deriving from sottoronne (although, increasing the supply is the fact that the ginkets, who eat even less meat, do not benefit from this source). Shrub rats, however, are able to live off of anything, including certain species of plant which provide little or no nutrition to the Netkots and grow in areas which even the hardiest of more useful plants cannot grow in.

Charcoal cookies, made from pine flour and charcoal, are a common enough food, especially during the lean years leading up to a slezhi slotzo, when as much food as possible is being stored away, and the slezhi slotzo itself.

Objects of Manufacture

Nothing is wasted. Even bones are made into tools, and the skin of a dead man, whether ginke or Netko, is made into a leather and used for clothing. Underclothing is made from woven needle grass (a hardy plant which isn't edible, but is still quite useful, and also made into paper and baskets), and clothing is loose and billowy, with pockets and pockets and more pockets. There's nearly always something which needs to be put somewhere, whether a draft of a report, or a couple of charcoal cookies, or a vial of sreka virus.

No-one, even researchers in the Study of Astronomy, can point to the origin of the practice, but students (and before the advent of modern Ko Netko society, children and others who had not yet become adults) wear leather masks outside of their living quarters, and it is an intensely liberating feeling to be able to walk outside one's quarters without that mask, upon graduating from Second Phase education and becoming an assistant.

The Games We Play In This Wasteland

Jotfe is the art of falsifying information, and is a sport of sorts in Ko Netko. Under other circumstances, providing fake research in a report is as much of a mortal sin as for any other scientist, but when playing a game of jotfe, the report is declared to contain fake information from the outset. A period of time is given for other research teams in the same Field of Study to examine the information and determine the single piece of falsified data, with success going either to the research team which discovers it first or, if the falsity cannot be found, to the research team which generated the report (and who must obviously then point out what was wrong in order to prove that they did not submit a completely correct report just to beat everyone). In addition to simply being entertaining, it causes research teams to constantly stay in practice for detecting false data.

The various Studies have their own games, too. Researchers in Medicine will often make bets on which disease killed a given test subject, or on the side effects of the latest cure to be put in testing. Netkots engaging in Chemistry for their Second Phase education will often be presented with a dead ginke, already dying before he was poisoned by the teacher, and be asked to determine exactly what was used. Research teams in the Tedno of Society (which involves psychology) play at seeing who could inspire particular actions (suicide comes and goes in popularity) in their respective test subjects, and without using techniques previously determined to work.

Next Month: Diseases, Child-rearing teams, and more information on the Six Fields of Study. Also, diseases (they bear mentioning twice).