The Armed Republic of Hekkly is a massive, safe nation, ruled by Hekk with an even hand, and remarkable for its barren, inhospitable landscape, public floggings, and ubiquitous missile silos. The hard-nosed population of 1.84 billion Hekklyians are prohibited from doing almost everything except voting, which they do timidly and conservatively.

The large, moralistic government juggles the competing demands of Defense, Law & Order, and Administration. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Hekk. The average income tax rate is 40.8%, but much higher for the wealthy.

The Hekklyian economy, worth 89.3 trillion Sufferings a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. However, for those in the know, there is a slick, highly efficient, fairly diversified black market in Door-to-door Insurance Sales, Furniture Restoration, Arms Manufacturing, and Information Technology. The private sector mostly consists of enterprising ten-year-olds selling lemonade on the sidewalk, but the government is looking at stamping this out. Average income is 48,524 Sufferings, and distributed extremely evenly, with little difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Modelling agencies send their clients to work in nursing homes, kids are arrested at gunpoint for playing with toy rifles, every day at 4am Hekklyians wake to pray for the sun to rise, and passwords to nuclear codes must now contain upper and lower case characters. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a very well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Hekkly's national animal is the Pain, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its national religion is Hekkism.

Hekkly is ranked 113,423^rd in the world and 5,672^nd in Balder for Lowest Crime Rates, with 64.33 law-abiding acts per hour.