Jack of Harts

We live in a clarion time right now. People all over the world have spoken on video, over social media, via signed letters, and on the streets in favor of the terrorists who tortured civilians to death, raped civilians to death, and took civilian captives to use as human shields. These people have told us with their own voices where they will stand when it is time to load undesirables, irredeemables, or deplorables into cattle cars and take them to gas chambers, or whatever modern technologies can be used to deal with the people they don’t want to live. Watch, read, and listen. Remember what they said. Remember their names. They are not on Team Civilization.

The Shang have a serious chip on their shoulders when it comes to Earthborn humanity in the Jack of Harts universe. They don’t trust us. They don’t like us. And they do not want to see us expand into the galaxy. They want us controlled and docile at worst, and relegated back to Earth at best. They are Not Amused that Aneerin made Contact with us and helped us expand. Not Amused at all. They never actually had an intention to kill all of us, you understand, but they decapitated the American government in an effort to make us surrender without a fight. They did not want a war. And they did not attack us from their point of view. They were defending themselves from us. We are the monsters under the bed. We ARE the primary antagonist of THEIR story.

The Shang are powerful, an old civilization going back thousands of years at least. Maybe tens of thousands. As the writer, I know how old they are, but I’m not telling yet. 😉 They claim to be our gods, and the Chinese at least seem to fully accept that the Shang helped build their ancient civilization back in the day. Or that the Shang can give them enough of a leg up on the Russians and Americans that they won’t argue the point over much. Not that most people in the Western Alliance know that. News out of China is heavily redacted, and even transmissions from the Shang are heavily edited before the common citizens see it. Only conspiracy theorists spreading disinformation think the Shang actually claim anything like that. And that’s crazy. Right?