.3 Details of Part One
Here, I will go into as much detail as I have thought of regarding the events and characters of Part One and Part Two. I will briefly explain my old ideas from before I rejected the Republic of Earth and then explain how they should be changed in light of my new ideas. I am now realizing that nearly all of the characters’ names in every stage of this story’s development are just like Vladimir Tromedlov in that they all contain some kind of reference, joke, or pun, or are otherwise obviously ridiculous. As such, they should be changed in any finished product. To explain just how unimportant and interchangeable the names are, many of them were on a list of funny names I put together before giving them to characters. In order to keep things more brief and to save myself from any more embarrassment and from feeling the need to explain them all, I will only state characters’ first names just to serve as placeholders which distinguish them from each other
Old ideas for Part One
I am realizing that I do not like most of my old ideas for Part One very much at all. Perhaps some of them can be kept in some form, but I am explaining them here mostly just so that they would be written down somewhere. I might recommend skipping this section. The main protagonists of Part One are Steve and George. Originally, I wanted them to be parodies of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, respectively, but they very quickly became copies of Ender Wiggin and Bean. In their guerrilla campaign against the mysterious evil regime (I will refer to it as the Burzghash just for clarity. I will also go with the idea that they really are the force opposed to the Ayanamuz, not just puppets they created to be antagonists) which conquers the world, Steve would be the leader and George the tactician. When I thought about how my theory of morality would be originated in the story, I decided that Steve and George would each hold one of the two ideas represented by the two overlapping “L” shapes. Steve had become fascinated by the ideas of freedom and free markets. George was a nihilist and believed that if true morality does exist, knowledge of it would be unlike any other. Steve gives him the idea that a free society might be able to discover such knowledge. During the war, they discover the location of the Burzghash’s secret underground base and make a plan to attack it and destroy them. Before they do this, the enemy offers to allow them to live in peace if they surrender and never interfere with their global domination. Steve almost immediately decides to accept. His companions’ survival became his only concern and he had abandoned any higher purpose. He decides that the risk of getting anyone else killed, even if the plan were successful, is not worth it now that he has another option. George, with his newfound conviction, argues that freedom for everyone, not just themselves, is worth fighting for. If there is no true moral purpose, then there is nothing good about surviving and nothing wrong with dying. He convinces Steve and the rest of the group to execute their plan.
Two other important characters, who join Steve’s group later on, are twin brother and sister Alan and Tina. Years before I started imagining the beginnings of this story, I imagined one about Sly Cooper, with which I had an obsession similar to the one I had with Harry Potter. Remembering that story now, it was actually really cool. Sly Cooper and the other characters have a mishap with the time machine mentioned at the end of the third game, the last one I played, and they end up greatly changing history and they are left stuck in the 18th century where the ancient Egypt of the Pharaohs still exists and is a major colonial power in the Americas. Dr. M uses modern technology to try conquering the world. When I thought about including something from that story in the new one, I decided it would be Sly Cooper’s son Alan. I am not sure when or why initially I decided he would have a sister or why she needed to be the same age, but I later thought of a reason. Sly Cooper would not exist in this story exactly as he is in the games. Obviously, there would be no anthropomorphic animals in this story (actually, there might be, but that is for later), but Alan and Tina do have an extraordinary lineage. Their ancestors were not so much thieves, but people who knew how to escape the control of the Ayanamuz. An important part of their method was passing on the knowledge to only one child. The twins’ grandfather was caught and killed by Ayanamuz, so their father would not learn what he needed and would be under their control and was caused to have twins who would never learn of any of this, until later.
Earlier, I said I might want to keep a few of my ideas for making other fictional works a part of my story. One of those is the Big Bang Theory, as ridiculous as that sounds. There could just be a passing mention at some point of a theoretical physicist and neuroscientist who began to discover the mechanisms by which Sanwe-latya functions in the early 21st century. Indeed, that might be one of the few ideas in this entire section I want to keep. However, I did imagine that Sheldon and Amy could be actual characters(that Sheldon’s name is Cooper and is a twin is an interesting coincidence). Their discovery of “super-asymmetry” lead them to be able to make use of Sanwe-latya and eventually realize the truth that the world is being controlled by mysterious beings with great powers of compulsion and illusion. They managed to escaped the control and ended up traveling with Steve’s group. Alan is the only one who takes interest in finding out who Sheldon and Amy actually are. They let him in on their plans. When Steve’s force attacks the Burzghash’s underground base, they are victorious. However, Alan is killed in the fight and Sheldon and Amy are missing. An intercontinental ballistic missile is launched from a silo at the base, but it had no apparent target and seemed to just disappear. None of the enemies allowed them selves to be taken alive and many parts of the underground complex caved in, destroying secrets. What actually happened is that Sheldon, Amy, and Alan made the difficult decision to take advantage the opportunity created when the Burzghash’s conquest distracted the Ayanamuz and permanently escape from them. To do this, Alan had to use his newfound powers to make everyone believe he is dead. Sheldon and Amy’s plan was to leave Earth. I remember in one episode of the Big Bang Theory, Sheldon says something to the effect that he will become immortal when he uploads his consciousness into a computer on a satellite which will forever orbit the Earth. My idea is that he and Amy do almost exactly this by transferring their minds to the missile and launching it into space. Presumably they are aware that it is possible to travel by Sanwe-latya and are confident in their ability to eventually figure it out. Thinking about this now, it might be consistent with what I have established before to say that one’s mind and body cannot be separated like this and I just do not like this trope. In any case, my idea was that they all use their power to become immortal and take different paths in opposing the enemy. Alan hides on Earth and tries to find ways to undermine them, while Sheldon and Amy see what they can find beyond Earth.
The survivors of the battle build a settlement outside of the underground base which becomes Armenelos, whether that is the capital of the Republic of Earth or the independent city-state. For a location, I tried to find places which relatively are relatively uninhabited, but seemed like nice places. The two I considered were the Aysen region in Chile and Graham Island off the west coast of Canada. Of course, there are probably good reasons why not many people live in these places and I would want to find out more about them if I were serious about making them important locations in the story. Also after the battle, Steve seems to go insane and sometimes the people around him do also, but only while they are around him. It eventually became clear that his confrontation with the mysterious enemy somehow left him with the ability to perceive the thoughts, experiences, and memories of other people. He figures out how to get this ability under control and teach it to other. Thus is the beginning of the Samatiri. After the war, Tina marries George, perhaps bonding over their shared nerdiness (it was Tina’s idea to start using these Quenya words). However, after I had the idea that George convinces them to attack the enemy base, it might make sense that she would blame him for Alan dying. In any case, Tina has quite a few children and one of the dies before or shortly after he or she is born, but that is only an illusion created by Alan. He took the child and then taught him or her the way of their ancestors with a lesson from his grandfather’s failure. This child would continue the tradition of hiding from the Manipulator.
New ideas for Part One
I never really could imagine details of what the evil force is and how it conquers the world. However, as soon as I started thinking about all this again when I started writing all this, I realized I did not need to imagine anything. It happened in reality. The tyrannical responses to the pandemic in 2020 (two years ago as of the time of this writing in the first half of 2022) by governments all around the world and the globalist technocratic agenda behind it all is not so far from what I was trying to imagine. However, this did not start in 2020. The governments, corporations, and media and academic institutions which push all of this are not new and they have been largely responsible for the most disastrous period of human history. This period includes the two most destructive wars ever. The government of the United States and its cronies, the victors of those wars, have since conducted many atrocities which most Americans are barely aware of because they are so subtle or happen elsewhere. The worst of these are devaluing the dollar and inflicting all kinds of ruinous economic and cultural consequences with monetary policy, wasting the country’s blood and treasure by fighting endless unwinnable wars which also ruin the places where they are fought, and destroying people's health, and thus causing the pandemic to be as severe as it has been, by centralizing the food and medicine industries and creating a system by which cronies profit from disease. The pandemic regime is only the newest part of that last one. Now that the pandemic restrictions are becoming more unpopular as it becomes more clear just how much of an atrocity they were, the regime has pivoted to a different crisis, the invasion of Ukraine, to distract people and advance the agenda. In many ways, the evil occurring in the present reality is just as epic as any in a fantasy story. Whether or not you agree with these views in reality, there can be a fictional story in which they are correct.
The thing about all of this is that none of it is really in the elite’s best interests. They benefit from all these things in many ways, but they could also benefit from doing other things. If the government of the United States and its cronies were only trying to increase their own wealth and power, then they would not particularly want the population they rule to be impoverished, sick, and divided. If they were trying to trying to weaken the United States, as well as other countries, in favor of a globalist agenda, then they would hardly be doing anything different. All the governmental, economic, and cultural problems in the west in the past hundred years and before have perfectly mundane and even innocent explanations, but it is also easy to imagine that it has been orchestrated by some kind of evil occult demonic power which hates humanity and has a goal of depopulation. There are all kinds of theories as to what this might be and, for the purposes of a fantasy story, it does not matter whether there is any truth to them. It is also possible that my perspective as someone living through these events causes me overestimate their significance, especially in comparison to those in the past.
There are a few problems with making the conflict in Part One the events happening in reality. One is that the story would have to be a commentary on these recent and current events which many people would not agree with. It is impossible to ignore how all of this is inseparable from the cultural and political conflict occurring in the United States right now. Support and opposition for the pandemic restrictions has broken down along the political divide with the left generally supporting it and with the only major opposition being on the right. If my story is about the defeat of the globalist regime, it would need to be a story in which the best of the American right eventually wins. However, I do not think anything I have written in this section would be very controversial to any slightly free-thinking person. Certainly, I do not care about making anything agreeable to people who actually support the pandemic regime and the other things. This might not be a problem because it will probably be a very long time before this story is made into any kind of finished product if it ever is. By then, the events of the 2020s will be a part of history. For them to have not occurred in a fictional story would be just as strange as World War Two having not occurred. As such, the people who enacted and supported the pandemic regime and the larger agenda may be remembered as Nazis. The kind of “woke” progressive leftism prevalent right now may be remembered as a vindictive degenerate force which allows people to feel justified when they demonize anyone opposed to the regime and is inseparable from the globalist agenda of total control and depopulation.
This would lead to another problem. In the future, when the way the present events turn out is fully known, Part One of my story would either need to be an alternate history or the actions of the fictional protagonists do not have significant effects on the way things turn out on a large scale in the near future. The effects of their actions would only be seen in the far future when I could more comfortably make things up. To avoid all of these problems, it might be be best to just create an entirely fictional fantasy world for the story to take place in. This way, there would also be less of an expectation of realism, so my ideas for magic and technology, as well as the political ideas would fit better. Indeed, the only reason it does take place in the real world is that Harry Potter does. However, I will explain still explain my newest ideas for a story which takes place in the real world and how I would resolve these problems. Many of these ideas are probably unrealistic and should perhaps be changed, but they could also be used as prompts for deciding what additional things would need to be true in this fictional reality for them to make sense.
In part one, the powers which have controlled the world for the at least the past hundred years are broken. There are quite a few ways this is happening in reality. Public consensus in support of the regime has broken down now that the internet allows people to find information and points of view they would not have otherwise. It is not so much that people are learning the truth, but that they do not all subscribe to the same narrative. Cryptocurrencies have the potential to undermine the financial power of the regime. Whether or not any of the cryptocurrencies which exist now will be commonly adopted for everyday use, the idea of un-inflatable money not under anyone’s centralized control will remain and there will always be people trying to make it work. Additionally, the globalist regime may have gone too far in using the pandemic to push its agenda of total control and more people are becoming aware of its many evils and pushing back. When the schools were shut down even more people tried to find alternative to the regime’s indoctrination. Many people left the places where the pandemic restrictions were the worst and moved to places where they were less severe, meaning the people who are opposed to the regime are more concentrated in places where they can be effective. The economic hardships and inflation, which may be part of the globalist agenda, lead many people to seek self-sufficiency or to depend only on their local economy. Of course, if things get so bad in reality, then I should be concerned with things other than creating a fictional story. The weakening of the United States means the relative power of other countries, some of which might not support the globalist agenda, increases, resulting in a return to a multi-polar world. In short, there seem to be many trends toward decentralization.
All of this happens in Part One and may be all that happens. Part One could just be a prologue for Part Two which gives an overview of these events, but if it were to be a full story on its own, then, while all of this is happening, the protagonists would somehow directly confront the occult powers attempting to dominate the world and achieve a decisive victory against them. These occult powers are humans who have used Sanwe-latya and enhanced it by evil means to gain their power. They may be directed by the Seoaisaoei remnants or they might just know about them. Either way, the protagonists see some evidence of this during the confrontation, foreshadowing the future events by indicating that this is part of larger conflict which goes beyond Earth and is far older than they realize. The enemy is weakened and they no longer have a monopoly on the ability to consciously use Sanwe-latya as the protagonists now have it. This confrontation and its results do not become widely known to the public, not because it is kept a secret, but because it is unbelievable. I will explain a possible source for ideas of what this battle is like elsewhere.
The weakening of the globalist regime by both the mundane ways occurring in reality and the actions of the protagonists results in even more chaos and economic disruption as centralized systems fail. People are forced to develop their local economies out of necessity. This movement is lead by a disparate network of people which includes the kind of libertarians whom I have been responding to in my other writing. In addition to achieving economic security for their communities, their goals are also to gradually work towards political independence partly by using the strategy described by Hans Hermann-Hoppe in “What Must be Done” as well as strategies being discussed recently, such as the Anti-Tax(I wish I knew something to link to explain what this. It might be nonsense). This begins in a few localities, but competitive forces among small political units causes it to spread. Even as they lose power, the globalist technocrats’ agenda still advances, but Florida, Texas and other red states resist by nullifying federal acts and ending privileges for crony corporations. These libertarians, for lack of a better word, support their state governments in this while also seeking independence for the small towns and rural localities where they are carrying out their strategy. Perhaps successful nationalist populist movements in the United States and elsewhere put a stop to the globalist technocratic agenda. Perhaps the story could be an alternate history in which it is far more successful than it is in reality and many of the worst conspiracy theories are true. Either way, there is a movement of people who know that they cannot rely on the most powerful institutions, such as the federal government, and they need to build their own localized centers of power which can resist those higher powers when they act against their interests or support them when they act in their favor. Additionally, there are many who see these crises as the natural result of a declining civilization. They are the hard times created by weak men. The West has achieved the greatest prosperity ever to exist and now it can only decline. This process cannot be stopped. One can only delay it and begin to build what comes next.
The economic hardships result in increasing civil unrest. In 2020, a condition of anarcho-tyranny could be seen in which rioters go free, but people are prosecuted for defending themselves. Some states and localities try to stop this, but anything which even looks like police brutality will be used by the regime as an excuse to intervene. Additionally, people in blue states still need protection. Even if these problems do not last very long, it becomes clear that it is possible for them to happen. For these reasons, there is a need for effective security services which are also accountable and use as little violence as possible. To meet this need, but also because of ideology and they might have the same thoughts as mine about the possibility of anti-empire, some of these libertarians experiment with creating private insurance-based security services. The protagonists who won a victory against the occult powers and gained the ability to use Sanwe-latya could be the first and most successful ones to do this and could also be the first to adopt the blue dragon of Neptune as a symbol. Sanwe-latya might be what makes the insurance-based model work by providing a way to enforce the insurance contract with or without a legal system. It might be possible for a Samatir to take an unbreakable oath by compelling himself to take certain actions at some future time if certain conditions are met. This might seem like one of the advanced abilities which would not be discovered until later, but if Sanwe-latya has been used by every government and powerful institution since the beginning of human civilization at varying levels of awareness, the achievement of the protagonists might just be discovering ways of using Sanwe-latya which are humble, self-sacrificial, and productive rather than prideful and predatory.
The other problem with this is that it would be impossible to keep Sanwe-latya a secret if it were to be used this way, but that might not matter very much. There are many things which are not secrets, but are not commonly known by the average. These are usually either things which the elites would prefer the public not know and try to keep out of mainstream discourse or specialized technical knowledge. Sanwe-latya is both. Something related to this which I have heard about recently is the “Dim Age”. Just as the decline of the Roman Empire was followed by the “Dark Age”, the decline of the United States is also a transition from a materialist age to a mystical age. This can be seen in the fanatically religious way many people reacted to the pandemic. Another part of this is that no one really knows how today’s advanced technology works. Even the people who create it only have extremely specialized knowledge of specific parts. As far as the average person is concerned, the technology he uses is magic and he is not bothered by this. The average person might not be alarmed if he became aware of the use of actual magic, especially if it is as subtle as Sanwe-latya. This also means that the rate of development cannot be sustained and current technology will be difficult to maintain. However the “Dim Age” is different from the “Dark Age” in that knowledge is easily available to anyone who searches for it, but few people do. I am aware that “Dark Age” is no longer considered a correct name for that period of history. I am only explaining something which I have heard which could be a source of interesting ideas for my story, even though I have questions about how much sense it makes in reality.
New worldbuilding ideas
These are the trends which lead to the world in which Part Two takes place. Earlier, I briefly mentioned that I thought it might be interesting if Part Two might resemble both medieval fantasy and futuristic science-fiction. With what I have explained here, It begins to become more clear how that might happen. The failure of so many centralized systems and the desire to be independent of the ones the globalists try to force people into leads many to adopt more pre-industrial ways of life. The breakdown of supply chains means it becomes comparatively less expensive to produce food, but also every other good, locally using traditional means. Increasingly expensive gasoline might even lead to horses being used in some cases. Indeed, an increase in energy costs would be the biggest driver of many of these trends. The civil unrest and breakdown of law and order might create a need for fortified buildings which incorporate some design elements of medieval castles. The movement towards political decentralization and privatization and insurance-based security companies eventually taking the role of governments in some ways results in a kind of feudal order. The people leading this movement become the aristocracy in the places where this occurs. Many of them being conservatives, reactionary libertarians, and people who left cities because of the events of 2020, they believe that the centralization of government and the economy is only a part of the problems of modernity and see the return to more traditional ways of life as a good thing in many ways. They are interested in figuring out how to maintain these ways of life even after there is a recovery from the economic disruption. Whatever one thinks about these issues in reality, in the context of the story, I think it would follow from the rules of Sanwe-latya that so many aspects of modern life are harmful to people’s well-being and the transhumanism of the technocratic agenda promises to make all of this far worse. It does not seem unreasonable to say that something is making people insane. Those with the power to perceive these effects would want to mitigate them. To be successful in this, they should not just be Luddites. Instead, they need to achieve a different kind of progress by finding technologies which allows rural agrarian societies, perhaps in inland or mountainous locations, to be as powerful and productive as coastal urban ones. This means finding ways of having some of the benefits of modern life with less of the harms.
Along with the idea of anti-empire, the challenge of turning these ideas into a story is figuring out somewhat believable ways this could happen. This could be why the kind of biomimetic technology I described elsewhere is adopted even if it is inferior to to conventional technology at first; it makes it possible to manufacture products with non-specialized equipment and locally sourced raw materials. Of all the technologies described in Janine Benyus’ book, the most important and first to be adopted are the ones in the first chapter about sustainable agriculture which does not require massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides which would be in short supply. This issue of food production is closely connected to all the others as it determines people’s health and is intertwined with the political situation and the depopulation agenda. It also happens there are a quite a few people, such as Jack Spirko and Joel Salatin, who practice regenerative agriculture and are associated with the kind of libertarians who would be involved with this movement.
This is how these changes might happen both as the organic result of various trends and because the new local elites encourage and maintain them as part of their political movement. This is how the appearance of the setting of Part Two might be a combination of both futuristic and pre-modern. Realistically, the pre-modern aspects would more resemble pre-20th century America than medieval Europe, but there may be some who are intent on cultivating such an aesthetic to express how thoroughly they reject modernity, resulting in a mix of the two. One thing to remember in all of this is that none of these changes are universal. Different places will be different.
In this new version of the story, the equivalent of the Istarcanor are those who work for the insurance-based security services, but there would not be a special name for them, certainly not at first, as they would not have a clearly defined and unique role. Most of what they would do to produce their service, and probably the only thing they could do early on, is just be normal productive people. However, when the movement towards decentralization and privatization progresses and the insurance-based security services begin to create the anti-empire, the armed men deployed to actively provide security by various means including violence may eventually come to be known simply as knights. Like medieval European knights, they would even have similarly iconic suits of armor in the form of the SSSMACCC suits. However, that acronym probably also should not be used in this new version of the story. The suits would only be gradually developed and adopted as a set of technologies which can maximize the effectiveness of individual warriors in small groups and would be less important to conventional militaries as such. It would not be a single invention or a standardized product. Each suit is nearly unique. In addition to being made to fit the user’s body, each one would have different hardware and software depending on the owner’s needs and budget. They would have different thicknesses of armor and muscle and may only have a few of the components corresponding to the letters of “SSSMACCC”. Indeed, some may be suspicious of this kind of equipment and see it as being akin to transhumanism. The most common thing might just be relatively thin armored vests with no muscle, which can perhaps be worn under clothes without other people being likely to notice. With the revolution of decentralized manufacturing I have described here, there would not be only one or a few manufacturers, but rather, there would be many craftsmen creating these using the same kinds of non-specialized tools used to make many other goods in processes which might be referred to as “printing” or “growing”. When the crisis in Part Two approaches, they would figure out how to create more complex equipment such as the smaller of the aircraft I discussed previously. The helicopters could be analogous to knights’ horses.
This technology would help the recovery from the crises, but there would still be many products which can only be manufactured by more conventional means and those might often be expensive and difficult to acquire. Such products might be regarded as exotic and nearly magical items. If it is not possible to create sufficiently effective armor materials with this biomimetic technology and materials similar to those used today would need to be used, then the ballistic plates used in armor would be one of such products. In this way, the fantasy trope of rare and powerful items could exist in this story.
Of course, I tried to answer the perennial worldbuilding question of how the use of swords could be justified in a science-fiction setting. I have a few answers, but none of them really work, certainly not by themselves, but maybe together they do. When I began hearing that ammunition has become very expensive and in short supply, I thought that if the economic crisis becomes far worse, there may be a need for an alternative to firearms. After the crisis passes, the bladed weapons would be kept as historical artifacts and the learning the skills of their use would be a tradition. The problem with this is that, while the demand for ammunition is high, it is not being used more than it has been as far as I am aware. An absurd amount of shooting would need to take place in order for the United States to run low on ammunition. Additionally, those who run out would not start using swords, they would just lose whatever fights they are in, until everyone else runs out also. Perhaps there could be some kind of massive civil war and total breakdown of society. Maybe that could work in my story, but it is not really what I was thinking. Gradual changes with only certain places having extreme civil unrest and lawlessness is a more probable way the kind of world I have described here comes about. An explanation which makes more sense, is that there is severe gun control which creates a need for alternative means of defense, but melee weapons can be restricted also.
Another idea is that private insurance-based security services would be strongly incentivized to avoid collateral damage, so they would have a reason not use guns if they do not need to. By protecting and increasing the speed of the wearers, SSSMACCC armor would allow them to enter melee range. However, this would only work against enemies who do not have weapons powerful enough to overcome the armor, who would probably just be common criminals. In such cases, non-lethal options would be preferable. In an actual war with enemies who can defeat the armor, concern for collateral damage would be less of a priority than stopping the enemies as efficiently as possible. However, this might be different in contained private wars or duels between feuding factions which I discussed earlier as part of what makes the anti-empire work, but those would not happen until after the time of Part Two. However, one situation which could occur in Part Two where the slightest risk of collateral damage would be a massive concern for everyone involved is fighting on spaceships. Additionally, the weight of firearms and ammunition would add to the expense of into
I previously had the idea that the Istarcanor’s extremely sharp knives could easily cut through the armor while ranged weapons cannot. Of course this makes no sense. The force of a bullet is far more than what a human can put behind a blade and I had imagined that the SSSMACCC muscles would rarely more than double that. Unless the entire blade is an atom thin, it would not be able to simply cut hard ballistic plates. However, if someone does not have a sufficiently powerful firearm, he could use bladed weapons in the same way they were used against medieval plate armor. The conditions of this setting might make situations, in which a sufficiently powerful firearm is too heavy, too expensive, or risk too much collateral damage, are marginally more likely. I initially imagined that a SSSMACCC suit would provide total protective coverage with the plates covering the wearer’s joints being smaller and more articulated, but that would be unnecessary and even more difficult to engineer. So, there would be parts of the suit which are only protected by non-rigid materials and can be cut by a sufficiently sharp blade with enough force. I thought it would be cool if hand-forged steel weapons were prominently featured in the story as part of the return to pre-modern ways, but this might require ones made with advanced materials and sophisticated processes like I imagined before. However, unlike the great variety of knives I had previously imagined the Istarcanor would have, the only kinds of melee weapons which would be used this way are highly thrust-oriented daggers. There were techniques for fighting armored opponents with full-sized swords, but they probably would not be worth carrying around and would only be ornamental and ceremonial and training to use them in combat would only be a sport or hobby. If there were to be a weapon for fighting armored enemies when sufficiently powerful ranged weapons cannot be used for whatever reason and which would be more than just a sidearm, the best option might be something like a poleaxe.
The last justification is Sanwe-latya. I had imagined that one reason every Istarcano is given a unique knife is so that he would have a both personal item and useful tool with which he could somewhat easily make mental contact with if he were to be later trained as a Samatir. It seems to make sense that it would be easier for a Samatir to make contact with an object which can be more easily thought of as a single thing because it has a simple construction with no moving parts. However, I am still not sure exactly what this would allow a Samatir to do. Moving the knife telekinetically, using it with extraordinary skill, and clairvoyantly perceiving its condition would be the obvious possibilities. Again, this would not justify the use of anything larger than a knife which someone could easily carry along with a firearm as a main weapon.
Thinking more realistically, If there were to be an iconic weapon in the future setting of this story, I imagine something which could perhaps be described as an anti-materiel carbine. A somewhat compact short to medium range semi or fully automatic rifle which fires large rounds for penetrating the kinds of advanced armors used by infantry, but also by combat robots which would also not feel pain or bleed. This kind of weapon would be so heavy as to be inconvenient to carry unaided by a SSSMACCC suit.
I am not sure how I feel about lasers and other futuristic weapons which might replace firearms in this story. I like the idea of firearms still being used in a futuristic setting for similar reasons that I like the idea of pre-modern or medieval elements in a futuristic setting, but I would still want laser weapons to exist and I find science-fiction in which they do not to be rather strange. If nothing else, it seems like they would be perfect for missile defense. I should do research to find out what the advantages and disadvantages of laser weapons are so that I can decide whether and how they would exist in this story, but I can think of two issues. One is that a laser would require more sophisticated equipment and expertise to manufacture and maintain, and considering that no living organism emits high-intensity lasers, the biomimetic technology might not help very much. The other issue is that a portable laser weapon would require compact energy storage. This should not be a problem because the same thing would be required for the SSSMACCC suit to work. Because such energy storage could be used to power many different things, not just weapons and, if laser weapons are for any reason less reliable or effective than firearms, then they might be mostly used by people who are not expecting to be in a fight or in rough conditions and would carry energy sources for other purposes.
Regarding the timeframe during which the world of Part Two comes to be, it would be more believable the farther in the future Part Two takes place. While I can imagine how the events and trends occurring in the present could lead to such a world, the further in the future it is, the more time there would be for whatever other improbable series of events to occur which would be needed for such a future to come to be, even if those would include another crisis similar to what is occurring now. As for more specific dates, I look to the idea of the Fourth Turning. Every four generations or approximately eighty years, there is a crisis which defines the time period until the next Fourth Turning. Such a time could be when Part Two takes place. In the history of the United States, these have been the War for Independence, the Civil War, World War II, and the present. Continuing this pattern, the next one will be around 2100 and the one after that will be around 2180 and that should be the earliest time at which Part Two takes place. Knowing how things turn out at the end of the 2020s would give a better idea of the events which happen leading up to Part Two, but for now, the general idea of what might happen is that the United States empire continues to decline and states and localities continue to move towards independence. When Democrats are in power, red states ignore or resist the federal government. When Republicans are in power, blue states do the same. The divisions are reinforced as people move out of places which enact policies they hate and into more agreeable ones. The United States still formally exists, but the states are largely independent and the federal government becomes irrelevant as it taxes and spends nearly worthless dollars. The crisis occurring around 2100 provides a justification for the federal government to reassert its power. Many states resist, but this time the federal government is serious about enforcing its rule. There is a violent confrontation which might be known as the Second American Civil War, but this time, there is no willingness to fight a drawn-out war and the federal regime is not able to maintain public support for its actions. Perhaps it becomes commonly known that the justification for seizing power was false. The resisting states formally secede from the United States after they win a few decisive battles.
As for what this crisis might be, 2020 shows what it could be like, but a war against a foreign enemy is the easiest to imagine and the federal government starting a war over dubious pretenses, as it has before, would be an easy way to portray it as wrong. I have been thinking that the United States empire might be not so insane if it stayed on the western side of the Atlantic ocean and had tried to dominate Latin America and Canada in a kind of latitudinal Manifest Destiny. Perhaps someone in 2100 has the same idea. Whatever the crisis is, the insurance-based security companies play a part in resolving it and are afterwards seen as fully legitimate centers of power which work alongside governments.