Khan Noonien Singh
Intro
Khan! The name itself still stirs strong emotions and stronger memories to most humans well into the First Imperial Era. He was the one who took on the might of the superpowers with nothing but sheer willpower of the have nots. It was a testimony to his capabilities that it took the vast majority of the world's industrial and military might to subdue him and his followers after decades of grueling conflicts stretching from the frozen wastes of Siberia to the deserts of Sahara, along with every ocean and sea.
Perhaps he was merely the lever of which historical forces applied pressure to, but to history, he was Khan, the man who dared to dream and challenge the world. His exploits and vision inflamed the imagination of a generation, and brought untold levels of suffering to those same people who took up arms by his side. Perhaps he was merely another egomaniac warlord in Terra's long history, or merely another delusional visionary. Perhaps it was merely the technological levels of the era that allowed him to accomplish what he did.
Background, origins, and early developments
At the dawn of the 22th century terra was still at a standstill, unwilling to begin another round of the endless waltz*. Two mighty factions, representing over half of humanity and the vast majority of its industrial and military capabilities. They stared at each other, from the Berlin wall to the Korean DMZ, with submarines and ships in all the oceans, and the skies above, in the cloak and dagger games in the halls of Washington, Moscow, and London. It was a peace waiting to be broken, although no one then could have suspected who that finally broke it.
The Republic of India at the beginning of the third millennium was the world's largest democracy, and an example that both the occidental and oriental blocs would point at as an example of the failures of representative government. Dysfunctional, incompetent, and filled to the brim with extremely corrupt politicians, the republic lurches on from one crisis to another. The only reason their continuous existence was indulged in was due to it being a convenient dumping ground for some of the more exotic experiments from the major powers, from political pet projects to some of the... more depraved stuff. Ironically, this meant that India was more scientifically ahead in many fields than their northern neighbor and immediate threat, the Sino Socialist Autocracy.
One such field that India was fast developing into was the field of eugenics, of which was mostly discredited following the defeat of the Third Reich in the middle of the 20th century, mainly due to the lack of useful results. However, it was a very different version of eugenics. Rather than going through the rather crude techniques of mass culling and breeding of populations, the then modern technologies of gene editing and selective artificial insemination were utilized, keeping costs reasonable and more importantly results discreet. Another key difference was time: the Reich had less than a couple of decades (perhaps they would have done better if they had a thousand years) while India had close to half a century, there was plenty of time to refine techniques and throw out failures. And there were plenty of failures in the beginning, entire batches of production, from misshapen lumps barely even humanoid to the merely mentally developed were euthanized, their corpses filled entire unmarked landfills.
Perseverance did paid off in the end, and soon a number of "augments" were created. Not birth, for the means they came to this world was too artificial for that. From their birth they were to be breed to be the ace in the hole, for the republic to rise beyond the shadows of the great powers and take her proper positions under the sun. Raised under conditions of which even the Spartans of ancient times would have balked at, in their formative years they only knew hardships, suffering, and misery.
They said misery builds character, perhaps they should have read more and find out what kind of character they were building... To the surprise of absolutely no one (except for the researchers themselves) it was only a matter of time before the augments snapped and wrecked vengeance on them, trashing the research complex and [accidentally] destroying most of the data in the process before escaping into the wider world, never to be heard from again...
... and a few years later, totally unrelated, a number of extremely charismatic individuals suddenly rose out of the blue onto the Indian political scene, headed by a man who will soon be a household name to hundreds of millions: Khan Noonien Singh.
The seduction of charisma
Politicians of democracies tend to be much like hot ballons: full of hot air, limited ability to deliver, fair weather at best and easy to deflate. They come and go as fast as the clouds and change as often as socks, or they stay as long as they live in the mortal coil like a festering wound, leeching the life of all those around. The worst of them were the populists, who are as fickle as the rabble who buy into their lies and tricks. At first it appeared that Khan and his group were little different in that regard. It's easy to pretend to care about the endless and fickle wants of the rabble, and like the latest fashion craze they will soon pass from the limelight.
The world would probably have been a better place if it had been the case, but it seemed that the universe loves suffering, especially of the ironic flavor.
In hindsight, the difference was obvious: as Khan and his fellow augments seemed to connect with the suffering masses in a way that the politicians in their gated communities and estates never did. It was almost as if they too, suffered from the incompetence and malice of the existing political establishment. Perhaps it was genuine, or perhaps not. But regardless they quickly rose through the ladder of politics, with Khan himself soon becoming the president of the republic.
Shockingly, once in power Khan and his clique actually made earnest efforts to improve the lives of the average people. A series of reforms were quickly shoved down the throats of the government and bureaucracy, and more importantly, actually implemented. Successes took time though, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was the Khanate. The rot had to be cleared out, then the new structure put in place, and only then could the reforms flow.
There was a lot of pushback from the establishment, who were outraged that these upstarts dared to rock the bedrock of proper governance. Unfortunately for them, the fire has been lit under the mob, who now for the first time in living memory has had a taste of what a competent and non-oppressive government is like.
And the enraged mob was a dangerous thing, as a few found out when they were torn limb from limb (mostly figuratively, although there was at least one case where it was literal...). Once the bread and circus was given, it became rather impossible to take it back, or even attempt to do so...
Within a few years India was beginning to become revitalized in both spirit and more material measures such as GDP per capita and growth, but troubles were to be found soon enough, from the despots to their north...
Curry vs. noodle, round 2: The Second Sino-India War
Although the roots of the Second Sino-India War stretched back to the middle of the 20th century, chief among them was the horrific brutal annexation of Tibet by the Sino Soviet and thus the control of critical origins of a number of rivers that the two countries depend on (the horrific televised torture and execution of the Dali Lama in late 1962 certainly didn't help relations between the two countries). While India wallowed in the incompetency of democracy, the Sinos choked themselves into an anti-technological despotic regime, hellbent on inflicting the maximum amount of suffering to their masses. With India suddenly gaining newfound strength, the despots in Beijing decided that they have to act fast before they're left in the dust and the Indians come calling to rectify perceived past territorial injustice.
Thus they decided on a prompt full scale invasion of India through Tibet, and the Second Sino-India War was on.
It wasn't even a contest: the Indian military with it's professional troops armed with relatively advanced weapons such as the INSAS rifle (G3M4 variant), Arjun Mk. VII MBT, and the HAL Tejas II LSF quickly crushed the Sino Red Guards, who were still mainly equipped with the Type 63 rifle and "battlemaster" Type 69 tanks (a knockoff of the monkey model variant of the Soviet T-54 medium tank) and whose entirety of military experience could be summed up as shooting unarmed cripples, children, and other such "enemies of the state" in the back. Within the span of merely six months the Sino forces were completely driven out of Tibet, much of the time simply due to the lack of infrastructure in the region making armored thrusts unsustainable for any length of time. It seemed that the war was all but over, and Khan has secured the critical region he needs.
Then the Sinos decided to double down, and poured tens of millions more to their utterly pointless death in repeated and futile assaults. Fanatical ideology trumping over sound strategy or even common sense and reality. Although not really even a major threat, these pointless attacks did force Khan's hand, for he couldn't simply stand back and watch a nation waste away its people in something as senseless as that. Thus he brought the war to the Sinos.
In the end, the armies of Khan marched into Beijing simply because the Sinos ran out of troops, having lost over 40 million "military causalities" (and something north of 145 million civilian causalities, mainly killed by the secret police to deny the enemy resources and labor) during the course of the five years of grueling war. The war was noted for extreme levels of brutality, mainly on the Sino side, which committed just about every atrocity under the sun, including detonating thermonuclear landmines under the city of Nanjing (without evacuating it's ~12 million civilians beforehand) simply to deny the forces of Khan the glory of taking the city.
The war had a profound effect on Khan, who after witnessing just how far the Sino Soviet was willing to destroy its own people, vowed that he will remake the world in which that sort of injustice will be stamped out.
More, more, and even more! The formation of the Greater Khanate
After the rather unplanned conquest of the Sino Soviet Khan was left with ruling the largest and most populace nation on earth, although a nation heavily scarred and lacking much in the form of material wealth besides bodies. He was left with little time to brood over matters, and once again forces beyond the border of his country forces matters to a head.
The neighboring countries, from the Juche empire to the Caliphate of Arabia, were all extremely threatened by the sudden expansion of this suddenly competent India, and at first separately but soon in cooperation promptly attacked the new rising power. Preemptive self defense, as they called it, it was preemptive alright, wars are always a good distraction to keeps the masses from dwelling too hard on the suffering imposed by their own governments.
As long as they winning of course, which after the initial battles they weren't, and once again the armies of the Khan was marching forth. In a matter of years, over 40 countries in the old world fell. Here, in his supreme moment of triumph, Khan displayed his talent in administrative skills, delegating vast tracts of territories to members of his clique, forming new nations with borders far more in line with ethnic distributions. For although he wishes for a day when all of humanity live in harmony with each other, he was pragmatic enough to see that day was still far off, and the present populations need what's familiar.
All these nations still hold the same great vision of Khan, and together they formed what was simply known as the Khanate, with Khan himself still in the senior leadership role as a first among equals.
Raging against the titans: the eugenics wars
With the annexation of the Caliphate of Arabia and the subsequent cut of the the oil production there from the world market the two major blocs finally started to react in earnest, as their previous arming of proxies and funneling of funds to insurgency groups were having rather the opposite effect than intended, as most of those groups were having trouble keeping their membership from defecting (many cases with their new toys) to the nations of the Khanate, for the future that Khan offered, and more relevantly what he managed to deliver in the present, was simply too seductive for most to resist.
However, with the still overwhelming majority of the planet's military and industrial power on their side, the superpowers and their posses took to war in earnest and then it was the Khanate stuck in the other side of the tech disparity.
It took decades, and the Khanate won most of the battles. But it was irrelevant as the superpowers have much more where the last batch came from, not to mention all the dirty tricks in the book. Agent orange to kill the crops, nerve gas to knock out the cities. It wasn't hard to hold the civilians in hostage, backing Khan into a corner in which he could not escape from, not without losing the bedrock of his support and betraying his entire world view.
It was rather fitting that the wars ended where they started: in the Himalayas where Khan's forces first went on the offensive against the Sinos and now made their last futile stand against the might of the superpowers.
Death and legacy
Although killed in his final stand in the battle of the Himalayas unfounded rumors and speculations persisted for decades after the wars that Khan was somehow alive. Much like sighting of Elvis, these rumors could be safely dismissed. Perhaps the most outlandish of these conspiracy theories was that Khan and a number of his inner circle fled the planet onboard a interstellar spacecraft launched from a Block II Sea Dragon from somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Needless to say the number of holes in that theory are numerous**.
However, these crazy conspiracy theories represented a far more worrying trend: that of the sinister brand of idealism: the promotion of freedom and self determination stirred up hotbeds of discontent even as the gulags and FEMA [death] camps welcome the newest millions of the spoils of war to process. The peace after the Eugenic wars was short, and soon waves of revolutionary discontent engulf both the occidental and oriental nations, the destabilization of which was one of the major factors leading to the final world war, as either the new revolutionary states seek to readdress old grievous and old powers seek to keep the status quo. Within a few decades the armies were once again on the march, and cities burn in the fires of atomic glory.
In the end, the world did burn, one way or the other. In a sense the endless waltz did end on terra, but only because humanity took it to the stars, and in the coming centuries danced the same deadly waltz among the stars.
In the end, he become a symbol among those who yearned to throw off the shackles of oppression, which being rather annoy to terrifying to those who oppress them. Children look under the bed to check for monsters in the dark, and so the rulers of the Terran State look everywhere for signs of Khan's message.
------------------
*the endless waltz of humanity ever since the dawn of organized societies consists of three steps: war, peace, and revolution. Many leaders of the past have sought to end the waltz but they merely partook in the various steps of said dance.
**To begin, the whole Sea Dragon rocket itself never left the concept stage (never mind any block II variant), the nuclear infrastructure required for a sea launch was never found (although much of the Indian ocean was rather radioactive due to all the nuclear submarines sunk there during the war) and probably never existed to begin with, the cost of mounting such a project at a time when even basic resources were hard to come by was simply impossible. Most of all, it was simply out of character for Khan, who until the very end simply cared too much for the world to simply abandoned it like that.