The Free Land of Hecatie is a huge, orderly nation, remarkable for its ban on automobiles, punitive income tax rates, and devotion to social welfare. The compassionate, cynical, devout population of 918 million Hecatieans are ruled with an iron fist by the dictatorship government, which ensures that no-one outside the party gets too rich. In their personal lives, however, citizens are relatively unoppressed; it remains to be seen whether this is because the government genuinely cares about its people, or if it hasn't gotten around to stamping out civil rights yet.

The government — a sprawling, bureaucracy-choked, socially-minded, well-organized morass — prioritizes Education, although Welfare, Spirituality, and Environment are also considered important. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Ethena. The average income tax rate is 82.2%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The Hecatiean economy, worth 47.2 trillion Shells a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. The industrial sector, which is highly specialized, is mostly made up of the Basket Weaving industry, with significant contributions from Book Publishing, Trout Farming, and Gambling. Average income is 51,382 Shells, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

When people want to start a family the government helps them planet carefully, the education system has gotten a recent boost in spending, people who have never eaten chicken are told it tastes a bit like crocodile, and no one is worried about government policies any more. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Hecatie's national animal is the Deer, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

Hecatie is ranked 56,686^th in the world and 861^st in The Communist Bloc for Healthiest Citizens, with 4.98 bananas ingested per day.