Earth in 2497: four blocs and a buffer · The Next Five Centuries

Eight billion people live on Earth, divided among four blocs and a buffer, and the blocs share control of the sea lanes between them. Three frontiers still follow ceasefire lines from our own era: the Ukrainian front, the Indus Line through Kashmir, and the mountain frontier through Ladakh. The borders stay where they are; the status quo is maintained because each bloc’s array on Mercury can turn sunlight on its rivals’ habitats (see The Mirror Race).

Bloc	Territory	Population	Government	Holds
The Settlement	Canada and the northern US states; Greenland and Iceland; Europe west of the Finnish, Baltic and Ukrainian frontier, including Kaliningrad; Turkey; Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan; Africa south of the equator; Australia, New Zealand, Patagonia, most of Antarctica, eastern Indonesia east of Lombok, Papua; outposts in Japan and Taiwan	\~2.3 billion	Threshold Democracies	The Bosphorus, the Cape, Lombok Strait, Taiwan's chip design and prototyping, its own elevator (2496)
The Mandate: Asia and Russia	China, Russia, Belarus, Mongolia, Korea, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, western Indonesia, north and west Pakistan (Gilgit to Gwadar), Sri Lanka, the Pacific third of Antarctica	\~1.7 billion	Examined officials, Vault-advised; no elections	The rivers of Tibet and Gilgit, the Northern Sea Route, the Strait of Malacca, its own elevator (2488)
The Mandate: African provinces	North Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Horn	\~0.5 billion	As above	Suez, Djibouti and the Bab-el-Mandeb
The Bharat Parishad	India, with Kashmir and Ladakh; Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh; Punjab and Sindh; Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula except Yemen; Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan	\~1.8 billion	An elected federal parliament, no exam; its one Vault casts the deciding vote when the lower house splits	The Strait of Hormuz, its licensed fabs, its renewal clinics on the Moon
The Open Cities	The Americas south of the Laurentian line, Patagonia excepted; Alaska	\~1.6 billion	Elected city councils, with no limit on money in votes; a Steward forest in the Amazon	The Panama Canal, the Elevator's platform
The buffer	Syria, the Levant, Yemen	\~0.05 billion	City-states, warlord zones, proxies of every bloc	Nothing any bloc can safely ignore

Frontiers

Frontier	Between	Character
The Ukrainian front	Settlement Ukraine and Mandate Russia, Crimea and the occupied east	Drawn in the late 2020s; broken in the 2230s and restored (see How the frontiers survive). The proving ground: every generation of autonomous weapon is first tested here, deniably. Fought over for its black-earth farmland as well as ideology
The northern march	Finland, the Baltic states and Poland against Mandate Russia and Belarus	NATO's eastern flank, nearly five centuries on; the Remembrancer heartland is a frontier culture
The Caucasus ridge	Mandate north slopes (Chechnya, Dagestan) and Settlement Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan	Follows the crest of the Greater Caucasus; passes and tunnels are watched constantly
The Mediterranean	The Roman Compact and Mandate North Africa	A sea frontier; Europe looks south at the Mandate from its own shore
The Kisumu Line	Africa north and south of the equator	Cuts Kenya and Uganda in two and partitions the East African Highlands Federation; the Congo Basin Commonwealth loses its northern bend. Divided families, smuggling, defection
The Wallace frontier	Mandate western Indonesia and Settlement eastern Indonesia, Timor and Papua	Runs through Lombok Strait, along the Wallace Line between Asian and Australian wildlife. Australia faces the Mandate across a narrow sea
The southern Andes	Settlement Patagonia and the Open Cities	A cold, quiet border
The Laurentian line	The Laurentian Compact and the Open Cities	The old US–Canada border, moved south: the Americas' Berlin Wall
The Indus Line	Parishad Punjab and Sindh and the Mandate's corridor from Gilgit to Gwadar	Drawn in the 2150s, when Pakistan broke apart; in Kashmir it follows part of the Line of Control, a ceasefire line since 1949. It runs between Islamabad and Rawalpindi, twin cities until the 2150s. Both blocs' arsenals face each other across it. The hottest frontier on Earth
The mountain frontier	The Parishad and the Mandate's Central Asia and Tibet	From Iran's northern ranges through the Pamirs and the Tian Shan to the Himalaya, broken only by the Amu Darya plain and the Fergana Valley. The Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Sutlej rise on the Mandate's side. In Ladakh it follows the Line of Actual Control, where the fighting of 1962 stopped
The Palk Strait	Parishad India and Mandate Sri Lanka	A narrow sea frontier off the Parishad's southern coast
The Maldives	Parishad, disputed by the Mandate	The atolls drowned in the Grinding. The Parishad holds their seas for the Maldivians it resettled; the Mandate claims them from Sri Lanka
The ice line	League and Mandate Antarctica	Two meridians across the ice, 120°E and 90°W; on the east, Australia's old claim runs over it, so the quarrel there is between blocs

Enclaves and outposts

Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Mandate enclaves south of the Caucasus ridge, the parts of Georgia Russia occupied in 2026. The Roki Tunnel to South Ossetia is one of the most watched places on Earth.
Kaliningrad is no longer an enclave. The Mandate ceded it to the Settlement in the Kaliningrad Exchange of the 2160s, in return for guaranteed passage for its Black Sea fleet through the Bosphorus.
Japan, with the Ryukyus: the Settlement's eastern bastion, and the first society to live through the Hollowing as an ageing, robotic nation. Since the Korean Reunion of the 2090s it faces the Mandate across the Korea Strait.
Taiwan, held by the Fab Truce. Its old chip industry now specialises in design, research and small prototype production; bulk manufacturing is off Earth. The Settlement and the Mandate both inspect the prototype facilities. Neither can take the island without threatening expertise and tested designs that both need.

The Mandate tolerates the outposts because they are hostages to mutual restraint, trade windows and Concord inspection posts.

Chokepoints

Chokepoint	Held by	Why it matters
The Bosphorus	Settlement (Anatolia)	Every Mandate vessel in the Black Sea must pass Istanbul. The Montreux Convention of 1936 already gives Turkey this control
Suez	Mandate	The shortest route between Europe and the Indian Ocean
Bab-el-Mandeb	Mandate (Djibouti)	With Suez, both ends of the Red Sea
The Strait of Hormuz	Parishad	The Gulf's only way to the open sea
The Cape	Settlement (the Zambezi Federation)	The other way around Africa
The Strait of Malacca	Mandate	The main lane between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific
Lombok Strait	Settlement	The deep-water alternative to Malacca
The Drake Passage	Settlement (the Austral League)	The southern way between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the only alternative to the Open Cities' Panama
Tibet and Anatolia	Mandate and Settlement	Each bloc's hold on others' water: the Himalayan rivers that feed the Parishad's plains, and the upper Tigris and Euphrates that flow through the buffer to Parishad Iraq
The Elevator	Open Cities (the platform); Settlement 35%, Mandate 35%, Parishad 15%, Open Cities 15% of climber slots	Most of Earth's traffic to orbit, though the bloc elevators of 2488 and 2496 have begun to draw it away; still the only shared route, and the one Belt-bound freight takes

Antarctica

The Austral League has held most of Antarctica since the Southern Claims of the 2160s, as the heir to the Chilean, Argentine and New Zealand claims. Australia's old claim, 42% of the continent, and the old British claim overlap the League's hold, and both are Settlement too, so most of that quarrel runs inside one bloc, and the Settlement has never settled it. The Pacific third of the old continent is the Mandate's: from 120°E to 90°W, Adélie Land and the eastern end of Australia's old claim, the Victoria Land coast, the Ross Sea and Marie Byrd Land, the one sector no state claimed in 2026. It grew from China's Qinling station, opened in 2024 on Inexpressible Island, and Korea's Jang Bogo station across Terra Nova Bay, which came with the Korean Reunion. In the Southern Claims the League gave up the Ross Sea, New Zealand's old claim, and the coast west of it to 120°E, as the price of the Mandate recognising the rest. Australia, whose old claim ran to 160°E, never accepted it, so part of its quarrel over the ice is with the Mandate, between blocs. Much of the Mandate's third is sea and islands the lost West Antarctic sheet left. The Ice Law does not reach those islands: the Mandate mined them at first, then closed them as protected ground. About 3 million people live in Antarctica, most of them on the League's Peninsula, its ice-free coastal oases and its ports, on krill, kelp and the Southern Ocean trade. The East Antarctic ice sheet is untouchable: the mining ban of 1991, reviewable from 2048, hardened into the League's Ice Law, which the Mandate signed for its own part of the plateau in the Southern Claims, because disturbing the sheet risks tens of metres of sea rise on top of the loss of West Antarctica (see Cities). Why the south stays settled. The Long Heat opened Antarctica's coasts, and the cooling after 2300 has not closed them. An ice sheet lost takes tens of thousands of years to grow back, so the coasts and islands the West Antarctic sheet left stay bare. The Southern Ocean gives up its stored heat over centuries, so the krill grounds and kelp forests still flourish in 2497. The settlements were never built on warmth: they live on the ocean, the ports and the Drake Passage trade, and on the League's need to be seen holding its claim. Cooling still costs them something. Sea ice is creeping back, winter shipping seasons are shortening, and some of the smallest outposts of the hot centuries have emptied. Antarctica in 2497 is past its peak, holding at about 3 million people rather than growing.

Ancestry register

Each polity of 2497 descends from named states of 2026, and carries some of their rivalries forward.

Polity in 2497	Bloc	Descends from	What survives from 2026
The Laurentian Compact	Settlement	Canada; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, upstate New York, New England	The Great Lakes Compact; US–Canada rivalry recast as Settlement versus Open Cities
The Hanseatic Compact	Settlement	Germany, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, Kaliningrad	Hardened by the Cold Shock and now a frontier
The Roman Compact	Settlement	Britain, France, Iberia, Italy, the Balkans	The Roman frontier: the Compact is the old empire's west and its islands, the Hanseatic Compact mostly the north beyond its frontier
Ukraine	Settlement	Ukraine west of the 2020s front	The front itself
Anatolia and the southern Caucasus	Settlement	Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan	Montreux and the Bosphorus; Turkey's contested democracy, so an uneasy Threshold polity
The Austral League	Settlement	Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the Chilean, Argentine and New Zealand Antarctic claims	The refuge south
The Commonwealth of Australia	Settlement	Australia, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea, eastern Indonesia, Pacific island states	Tuvalu's Falepili Union as the first absorption treaty
The Zambezi Federation	Settlement	South Africa and its neighbours	The Cape; the Zambezi dams of Kariba and Cahora Bassa
The Congo Basin Commonwealth	Settlement	The two Congos and their neighbours south of the equator	Cobalt as well as hydropower
The East African Highlands Federation	Partitioned	Ethiopia (Mandate); Kenya and Uganda (split); Tanzania (Settlement)	Indian Ocean trade; India's East African diaspora
The Pacific outposts	Settlement	Japan, Taiwan	The Korea Strait; Taiwan's chip design and prototyping
The Yangtze heartland	Mandate	China's heartland	The core of the Mandate
The Siberian provinces	Mandate	Russia east of the Urals	Russians as a minority; the reversed treaties of 1858 and 1860
Western Russia and Belarus	Mandate	Moscow, St Petersburg, Belarus	A Chinese provincial Moscow facing Kyiv
The South Sea provinces	Mandate	Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, western Indonesia	South China Sea claims made good
The Ganga Compact	Parishad	Northern India, Bangladesh, Nepal	India's universal right to vote, in place since 1950
Parishad (unnamed polities)	Parishad	The rest of India, Punjab and Sindh, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Gulf states, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan	Gulf sovereign wealth, invested abroad
The African provinces	Mandate	Egypt, the Maghreb, the Sahel, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Horn	Belt and Road; the Djibouti base
The Open Cities	Open Cities	The United States outside the Laurentian north, Mexico, Central and South America	US market culture, tech fortunes and longevity projects
The Cordillera Republic	Open Cities	The Andean states	The lithium triangle
The Amazonian Stewardship	Open Cities	The Brazilian, Peruvian and Colombian Amazon	Carbon credit markets: the forest is an asset others trade
The buffer	None	Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Yemen	Arab diasporas

Nations that persist in name

Some nations survive as identities rather than states: languages, churches, grievances and sports teams. Russians in exile in the Settlement keep a lost nation's language and faith, like the White Russians of 1920s Paris. The drowned island nations are read aloud at every Recitation.

Why the emptied lands stay empty

Warming falls below 1.5°C after 2300, yet the Sahara, Arabia, southern India and inland Australia are still thinly peopled in 2497. Cooler air does not undo what the heat destroyed. Aquifers pumped dry in the Grinding take millennia to refill; soils baked and blown away must be rebuilt by drawdown crews, a hectare at a time; roads, grids and cities have gone. The descendants of those who fled are rooted elsewhere, and the land they left is often owned by blocs, Lines or funds that hold it as a claim rather than a home. Where frontiers run close, security rules keep it empty on purpose. Resettlement happens only where someone pays to rebuild, as in the Sahel Greening and south-east Australian wheat belt. Around the reactors abandoned in the Grinding, the warning zones kept by the Long Watch are one more reason to stay away.