Chapter 3- A Brief History of Tectonics in the World

Ever since the people of the world could remember, their land masses were moving. It wasn’t the kind of movement that was perceptible. But people knew because if there was one thing the ancient people of the world were good at, it was cartography. Having mastered the art of map making rather early on, the people of the world had a fairly good idea of how the world looked a million years ago and how it looked now. Moreover, even though the movement itself wasn’t rapid, when landmasses fell into the Limitless Universe, usually there would be a massive ‘plop’ as the sea moved in where the land had been. So there were definite indicators that land mass was moving. For as long as they knew land masses moved, they had deduced that the movement was random. Some land masses moved in to the centre of the world. Some moved out. Randomly, land masses would change direction and speed. But then Kuarantine Kaltz happened to tectonic motion.

Kaltz, in his pathbreaking paper “ Be where you want to be” explains how tectonic motion is, in fact, not random at all. It is something that is dependent on where people want their landmasses to be. For example, if the people of Gargantua wanted to move off the face of the earth into the Limitless Universe, their land did precisely that. Kaltz explained that no landmass really wanted to fall off the face of the world. Because, for one, the people didn’t know what happens to landmasses that fall off and two, most of the successful landmasses were converging at the centre and everyone wanted to be successful.

Another aspect of Kaltz’s theory and indeed the most significant for interlandmass politics was that this action of each landmass together with the actions of all the other landmasses meant that there was nothing random about landmass movement. People, often, not only directed their landmass but also took it upon themselves to navigate other landmasses to suit them. For example, the nation of Pagannoor wished the island of Tiririst would go far away because legend had it the Tiriristans were dangerous folk with violent instincts. Similarly, the people of Machettestan, the largest landmass in the world, would send some small islands scurrying to the margins of the world to make space for others they wanted as neighbours. The structure that was inadvertently created was that each landmass tried to outdo the other in racing towards the centre and making space for their nation to join the Elite Group of Nations .

This crucial paper was received with accolades. Kaltz himself was from the land of Kremtia, which was at the very core of the Elite Group of Nations, at the very centre. Ofcourse, like all academic papers it had some criticism. But most of the voices of dissent were from the margins, and they fell into the Limitless Universe before they were amplified just as Kaltz had predicted.

Kaltz found a ready and unerring loyal follower in PC. PC believed that Gargantua’s destiny was with its people. Gargantua was a great nation destined for great things if only her people willed it that way. And the only way Gargantua could achieve these great things was if it joined the Elite Group of Nations at the centre. As a student at Camford, PC was so taken up with the idea that he wrote his Master’s thesis on what steps Gargantua had to take in order to will its landmass to the very centre. And it was an extension of that academic idea that he tried to implement as Minister of Home Décor.