Overview
Fuhai is the settlement founded west of the badlands by a small group of defectors from Echo Sprawl, 492 years after The Blaze. By the end of its first generation it was the only polity on the continent whose resource base approached that of Echo Sprawl itself, and it is the largest sustained experiment in non-corporate civic life the post-Blaze record contains.
The settlement is unusual in two structural respects. The first is that it has no constitution. Its government was built by accumulating laws, with each new law taking priority over what came before, and the rights of citizens are not enumerated in a single founding document but distributed across the body of legislation as it stands at any given moment. The second is that it was founded by people who had personally lived under the labor-contract system of Echo Sprawl and who, with one significant exception, had no other model of mass civic life to draw on. What they built is what occurred to them as a correction.
Founding
Departure from Echo Sprawl
The group that founded Fuhai consisted of Marsh Horton, Luna, Jane Harbinger, and Octavia. They left Echo Sprawl together by the formal expulsion route the corporations made available to workers whose contracts had been terminated, or who had elected one of the small set of departures the sprawl recognized. The wasteland did not return what it took, but it did not detain what it had agreed to release.
The party’s original destination was a cherry forest to the southwest, of which fragmentary records had survived in the sprawl’s archives. They reached it. It was already occupied by another community, and the group judged that any approach by four armed strangers would not be received as a friendly one. They withdrew without making contact.
The Valley
The party pivoted to a valley just west of the badlands. The valley had water that the badlands did not, defensible ridgelines on two sides, and enough flat ground to break for foundation. They established camp.
The First Year
Ground was broken within the first year on a clock tower in the center of the planned town. The tower was built by Debra Cain, who joined the party in the early weeks of the settlement and who would build most of Fuhai’s subsequent civic structures. The tower stands at the geographic center of Fuhai and is the visible declaration that what was being founded was a city rather than a camp.
The founding paperwork was prepared by Luna in the same period. The first election was held when the population had grown to a number Luna judged sufficient to be called an electorate. Marsh Horton was returned as the settlement’s first president by a vote of the small group then present.
Government
The Accumulation Doctrine
Fuhai was established without a central constitution. The decision was deliberate. Marsh and Luna had both grown up under the corporate-contract system of Echo Sprawl, where the conditions of life were established by contract and revised at the corporation’s discretion, and they understood the appeal of a single founding document that would constrain future law. They also understood that a single founding document, in the conditions Fuhai faced, would have committed the settlement in advance to provisions its founders could not yet evaluate.
What they elected instead was a body of accumulating legislation in which each new law would carry priority over the laws that preceded it. The doctrine is informally called the Accumulation Doctrine in Fuhai’s later legal literature. Its practical effect is that the most recently passed law on any subject is the operative law on that subject, and the older provisions persist only where the newer law has not displaced them.
The doctrine has obvious advantages and obvious risks. Its advantage is that the settlement is not bound to the assumptions of its founders past the point those assumptions are useful. Its risk is that any future legislature can revise the terms of citizenship without amendment ceremony, and the protections written into the early laws are protections only so long as no later law contradicts them. Marsh’s position was that the risk was acceptable because the legislature itself was elected by the citizens it would govern. The argument has not been tested at scale.
The Principal Acts
The first major piece of legislation, passed in the founding year, was the New Nation Act. The Act sets out the basics of immigration into Fuhai, criminal law, and private property. It is the closest thing to a foundational text Fuhai has, and most subsequent legislation has been written either to extend its provisions or to revise them in light of conditions that have since arisen.
The Treasury Act and the People and Places Act followed in the early years. The Treasury Act established the procedures for collecting and disbursing public funds. The People and Places Act formalized the relationship between citizens, properties, and the government, providing the registry and the categories of standing on which subsequent law would build.
The Criminal Code Act was passed once the population had grown to a size that the New Nation Act’s brief criminal provisions could no longer cover. It sets out the procedures for trial, conviction, and the enactment of punishment.
Presidency
The presidency of Fuhai is an elected office. The first holder was Marsh Horton, returned by acclamation in the first vote of the founding population and re-elected at every subsequent vote of her lifetime. The office’s formal powers are defined within the body of legislation rather than in a single charter, and they have grown over time as the legislature has added to them. The informal powers of the office, in Marsh’s case, were larger than the formal ones, on the grounds that the population of Fuhai had personally been led out of Echo Sprawl by her and was, for the duration of her life, unlikely to elect anyone else.
Civic Infrastructure
The Clock Tower
The clock tower built by Debra Cain in the founding year is the geographic and civic center of Fuhai. It is the tallest structure in the settlement, it is visible from every district, and it marks the time the legislature uses. The lower floors house a small archive and a public room the settlement uses for civic announcements. The upper floors are not normally open to the public, a policy that became settled after the events documented in the section on the Hex Adeyemi affair below.
The Slums
The first residential district of Fuhai was a cluster of housing near what would later be called the Slums. The name was retained from the Echo Sprawl architectural vernacular the founders had grown up with and was applied to Fuhai’s first residential cluster without irony, since the cluster’s construction was comparable in materials and density to the Shaft they had left. The name has not been changed despite it no longer fitting. Subsequent residential districts have been built to higher standards.
The Park
A small park was built in the early years near the center of the settlement, within view of the clock tower. The park is the only intentional civic green space in Fuhai and is widely understood as Marsh’s response to having grown up without one. It is small. It is shaded. It is well-used.
The Workshop
The workshop is the building in which Debra Cain, and after her the carpenters and engineers she trained, built most of what Fuhai requires built. The workshop produced the timber, fittings, and finished components for nearly every civic structure in the settlement, including the rail network’s early sections.
The Government Building
The Government Building houses the presidency, the legislature, and the small administrative apparatus that operates the laws Fuhai has accumulated. The building was constructed in the early years and has been expanded as the apparatus has grown. It sits within view of the clock tower.
The Animal Farm
In the same period, Jane Harbinger began work on an automated animal farm intended to supply Fuhai with a diverse food base without requiring full-time tenders. The farm is one of Jane’s two major engineering projects in Fuhai, the other being the small-arms program the government subsequently adopted, and is the single largest reason Fuhai’s food economy did not depend on imports from Echo Sprawl in its first decade.
The Rail Network
Nova and Octavia began work on a rail network in the early years of Fuhai, intending it as the primary means of moving freight and people between Fuhai and what they correctly anticipated would be a growing number of polities on the continent. They formed a company to manage the network and to sell access to it to other nations across Caldora, on a per-line and per-use basis the company adjusted as the network expanded.
The rail company became one of the principal sources of Fuhai’s foreign revenue. It is also, in retrospect, the structural pretext for the events documented in What Marsh Did, since the company’s accounts and its operating relationships were the documentary basis from which Camina Gravacs would later argue that Nova, Luna, and Octavia had never fully detached from Echo Sprawl’s economy.
Arrivals
The population of Fuhai grew, in the years following the founding, through a steady arrival of defectors from Echo Sprawl and from the smaller settlements that had begun to appear elsewhere on the continent. Among the more consequential arrivals were Vex Silver, who would settle into the workshop and later the rail company, and Camina Gravacs, who had departed Echo Sprawl through the same expulsion route the founders had used.
The Small-Arms Program
Marsh and Jane Harbinger developed a small-arms program for the use of members of the government in the early years. The program’s stated purpose was the defense of the presidency, the legislature, and the senior administrative officers, and the weapons it produced were of higher quality than anything available to private citizens within the settlement. The program is one of the two principal departures of Fuhai’s founding decade from the model of unarmed civic governance the founders had described to one another at the start. The other is the Hex Adeyemi affair, in which the program saw its first use, and the events documented at What Marsh Did, in which it saw its most consequential one.
The Hex Adeyemi Affair
Hex Adeyemi is the figure responsible for one of the more unusual chapters in Fuhai’s early municipal history. Hex would regularly grapple to the top of the clock tower at the center of the settlement and sit on the edge, for reasons she did not fully explain. The presidency tolerated this for a period. The presidency stopped tolerating it after one of her visits became an argument with Marsh Horton.
Hex had repeatedly been told to leave, and had not. The escalation that followed was Marsh’s first use of the small-arms program, and Hex was expelled from the clock tower by force. The cost of being so expelled was substantial. Hex grappled back. The cost of being expelled a second time was the same. Hex grappled back. The cycle ran for a number of returns the official record has not preserved exactly.
It ended on a single decisive defeat, after which Hex did not return. The terms of that defeat are not in the public record.
Foreign Relations
Echo Sprawl
Fuhai’s official posture toward Echo Sprawl is one of distance. The settlement was founded by people who had personally lived under corporate rule and who built Fuhai precisely so that they would not have to live under it again. Fuhai does not recognize Echo Sprawl’s labor contracts within its territory, does not extradite to Echo Sprawl, and does not maintain a formal embassy. Such trade as occurs runs through intermediaries.
The official posture and the operational reality were not, on the evidence recovered after the events of What Marsh Did, always the same posture. The reconstruction is in that article.
Athenia and the Annexation
Athenia, formally abbreviated TUNA in trade documents, was Fuhai’s nearest neighbor of comparable scale during the early period and was, for the duration of Athenia’s independent existence, Fuhai’s principal diplomatic partner. The relationship began before either polity had stabilized. Marsh and Jane Harbinger were involved in the events that precipitated the schism within Athena, the predecessor polity from which Athenia broke off, and the underwater settlement that resulted carried that goodwill into its trade arrangements with Fuhai from the start. Reciprocal embassies were established in each capital. Lapis lazuli from Fuhai’s local deposits moved one way and finished underwater-engineering components moved the other. The rail network was extended to the eastern shore at a junction Athenia’s tubes were engineered to meet, and the rail company’s freight schedule began listing the lines under the TUNA acronym in the same period.
Athenia’s government subsequently collapsed under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily reconstructed. Members of its administration ceased to appear in any record over a period of months, with no bodies, no notes, and no further appearances. By the time the absence was understood as a pattern, only a small number of citizens remained on the polity’s territory. With the consent of those citizens, Fuhai annexed Athenia under the existing provisions of the New Nation Act and the People and Places Act, rather than through a separate treaty. The underwater chambers were registered as a district of Fuhai, the engineering apparatus was transferred to Fuhai’s technical staff, and the lapis lazuli and underwater-engineering lines were brought into Fuhai’s domestic freight schedule. The annexation brought Fuhai’s resource base to a level approaching that of Echo Sprawl itself, which is the development that placed the settlement on a structurally different footing from every other post-Blaze polity except the corporations.
The full record of Athenia from its founding through the annexation is on the Athenia page. The vanishings remain unsolved.
The Smaller Settlements
A number of smaller polities established themselves elsewhere on the continent and the world during the same period as Fuhai’s first decade. They include the small community on the floating island of Novaya Zima, the additional underwater communities of the eastern sea that did not join Athenia, and the mountain settlement of the south. Fuhai’s posture toward these smaller polities has been the same posture Athenia took during its independent period: open to trade, prepared to extend the rail network where geography permits, and uninterested in the kind of consolidation Echo Sprawl’s example warned against.
What Marsh Did
The events by which President Marsh Horton, in the second decade of Fuhai’s existence, ordered the assassinations of cofounders Nova, Luna, and Octavia and arranged for their deaths to be entered into the public record under causes that did not name the presidency, are treated in their own article at What Marsh Did. The summary that page begins with: the evidence Camina Gravacs assembled on the three cofounders’ undisclosed ties to Echo Sprawl was real; the conclusion Marsh drew from it was the conclusion the framing produced; and the order Marsh gave was given outside the legal architecture she had built. The settlement that emerged from the killings was a more centralized Fuhai than the one that had entered them.