They Don’t Want the City. They Want What the City Proves.
“External Interests” is not a single faction.
It is a constant pressure.
Beyond Commonwealth City exist capitalist enclaves, authoritarian technostates, bio-purist regimes, data-theocracies, and post-national power blocs that never adopted the Unowned model—or abandoned it after trying.
To them, the City is not an ally or an enemy.
It is a threatening example.
A proof that their systems are not inevitable.
When megacorporations collapsed inside the City and survival systems were collectivized, outside powers predicted failure within years.
It didn’t fail.
Worse—it stabilized.
External Interests emerged not as a coordinated response, but as overlapping reactions driven by fear, envy, and opportunity:
If the City works, their citizens will ask why theirs doesn’t
If the City scales, existing power structures become obsolete
If the City fails publicly, it discredits collectivism everywhere
Every external actor wants a different outcome.
All of them want influence.
While endlessly varied, most External Interests fall into recognizable patterns.
Post-corporate city-states and offshore markets that retain private ownership of survival systems.
They want:
The City’s logistics tech
Its AI governance frameworks
Proof that collectivism eventually collapses
They operate through:
Trade pressure
Smuggling networks
Think tanks and “economic advisors”
Highly centralized regimes that use technology to enforce obedience.
They want:
Surveillance models refined by consent-based systems
Control algorithms without ethical constraints
A narrative that freedom requires coercion
They operate through:
Diplomatic missions
Data exchange treaties
Intelligence proxies
States that reject augmentation, post-human identity, or non-biological sapience.
They want:
Validation that the City is “unnatural”
Failures they can parade as moral warnings
Control over refugee narratives
They operate through:
Cultural campaigns
Targeted sanctions
Covert destabilization
Groups that claim to offer a better collectivism.
They want:
To outperform the City symbolically
To recruit from its population
To prove the City compromised too early
They operate through:
Ideological infiltration
Funding Commons Project failures
Cultural subversion
External Interests almost never act openly.
They use proxies and deniability.
Funding Freeholder enclaves
Sponsoring Pulse Union figures
Manipulating Commons Projects
Buying influence through the Patrons
Laundering data through the Open Ledger
Targeting infrastructure weaknesses the CSA denies exist
Their greatest weapon is patience.
They do not need the City to fall.
They only need it to doubt itself.
Officially, the City maintains diplomatic neutrality.
Externally, it is portrayed as:
A noble experiment
A dangerous anomaly
A ticking time bomb
A threat to “natural order”
Citizens are vaguely aware of outside pressure—but rarely its scope.
When exposed, influence campaigns are dismissed as isolated incidents.
They never are.
Freeholders: Frequent proxies. Ideology is easy to buy.
The Patrons: Selective collaboration. Influence trades internationally.
The Open Ledger: Critical interface. Everything moves through Harborline.
Pulse Union: High-value target. Culture crosses borders faster than policy.
CSA & Assembly Secretariat: Constant probing. Slow systems invite pressure.
External Interests rarely confront power directly.
They reshape incentives until power moves itself.
Players encounter External Interests when the conflict isn’t local anymore.
Discovering foreign funding behind a “local” movement
Preventing a Commons Project from being engineered to fail
Tracing destabilization back to an external think tank
Deciding whether to expose foreign interference publicly
Choosing between international stability and local harm
Players may:
Act as counter-intelligence operatives
Follow money across borders
Become symbols in global narratives
Decide whether the City should play the same games
External Interests respect results.
They discard assets without hesitation.
External Interests are united only by opposition.
They despise each other almost as much as they fear the City.
Some want:
Collapse
Others want:
Control
Others want:
Imitation
Their inability to agree is the City’s greatest shield.
For now.
External Interests are the reason the Unowned City can never relax.
As long as the City exists, it asks a question the world would rather not answer:
If no one owns survival—
what justifies power?
External Interests don’t want the City destroyed.
They want it disproven.
And until that happens, they will keep pushing—quietly, patiently, endlessly—
waiting for the City to make a mistake big enough
to be remembered forever.