The Mega-Lyceum of Kharostia is a colossal, safe nation, ruled by Professor-General Istvan Batory with an iron fist, and remarkable for its keen interest in outer space, pith helmet sales, and punitive income tax rates. The compassionate, cynical, humorless, devout population of 5.282 billion Kharostie are ruled without fear or favor by a psychotic dictator, who outlaws just about everything and refers to the populace as "my little playthings."

The enormous, corrupt government juggles the competing demands of Education, Law & Order, and Industry. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of New Budapest Central Lyceum. The average income tax rate is 90.8%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The frighteningly efficient Kharostian economy, worth 616 trillion Textbooks a year, is quite specialized and led by the Information Technology industry, with major contributions from Book Publishing, Tourism, and Furniture Restoration. State-owned companies are reasonably common. Average income is an impressive 116,781 Textbooks, and distributed extremely evenly, with little difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Large-girthed charity workers assign themselves healthy wages for their work with starving children, 100-year-old politicians are now a thing of the past, Maxtopian tourists make expensive pilgrimages to New Budapest Central Lyceum to enjoy their national art, and adultery has been made a capital offence. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a very well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Kharostia's national animal is the Kharostin Writable Penguin, which frolics freely in the nation's sparkling oceans, and its national religion is Church of Textbooks.

Kharostia is ranked 37,322^nd in the world and 2,293^rd in Osiris for Most Scientifically Advanced, scoring 187.97 on the Kurzweil Singularity Index.