Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

[Trenacker]

There are only two watchwords of progress: "Stay out!" - Manifesting Destinies

Most property on Chiron belonged to the commons until the third century after Planetfall. The need to construct, preserve, and maintain life-giving public infrastructure influenced Chironian laws, traditions, and attitudes toward both labor and leisure.

The cost for vandalism, sabotage, and repeat carelessness could be expulsion from even the most compassionate of colonies, a fate statistically indistinguishable from a sentence of death by hunger, asphyxiation, or exposure.

With few other joys available and medical resources thin, colonists readily turned to drink. Fungal wines were easy to source, and the scarcity of workers strengthened their hand against the bosses when it came to temperance enforcement.

Though terrestrial religiosity was frequently confused with abstentions behavior, Conclavists sipped as frequently as Hunters and Drones. Unfiltered drippings from rust-eaten moisture snares could be a potent base for hallucinatory brews.

Rwanda National Police Constable Egon Hazikimana mended fences among the early Peacekeepers with so much deft that a grateful populace knew him as "Carpenter." He refused to carry a shredder pistol, the standard sidearm of his era, and instead wielded a retooled Federal Riot Gun. The canister shells it took were fused for near-instant detonation and cast a net that immobilized targets.

Hazikimana was lost while on a scout before the end of the first mission year. U.N. Marines tracked the wreck of his stripped-down Rover to the remains of a dry camp pitched by men who had stolen from the main colony. Despite considerable evidence of a battle and dozens of booted footprints left in the loam, no bodies were ever recovered save that of the ringleader, dispatched by a single bullet to the center of his forehead.

Fort Kasinahwan lacked for aesthetics, not firepower. When Oscar van de Graaf sealed the Kern Pass to the Shapers of Chiron, a sudden volte-face that, after more than a decade of cooperation, the Coordinator seemed not to have expected, the Pilgrims were obliged to garrison ten such redoubts on the Southern Ripheus Rim alone.

The Chairman hid his people's wealth in plain sight. The "Castles of Iqthbalan" were misidentified for decades as thermal features by surveyors as experienced as Vinchenson Parke and Vadim Kozlov. Then, in MY48, a Pilgrim scavenger witnessed one of the stacks drain spontaneously into an unmistakably artificial grate while on a skijat flyover. The stone basins were being used as vessels for the Hive's most noxious industrial chemicals.

 

Sources:
First picture is "Water Farm" by Rob Cross on r/ImaginaryTechnology.

Second picture is "See You Space Cowboy" by Barry Brown on Digital ArtLords.

Third picture is "The Wall," concept art for a project called "Sons of Light," by Pablo Olivera on ArtStation.

Fourth picture is by French artist Pierre Deschamps, as found on this-is-cool.co.uk.

[Trenacker]

The best doors knock back. - The Good Neighbor's Bible

Tribal leaders were keen to enhance the protection of their very few armored fighting vehicles, precious assets that could not easily be replaced.

Reactive armors exploit chemical or physical actions to limit the damage inflicted by incoming projectile weapons fire on contact, especially to protected vehicles. The standard technique called for applying reactive elements atop exposed armored surfaces as appliqué. Unlike ablatives, which merely supplemented the absorptive potential of the underlying armor plate against all hazards, reactive armors could deflect or destroy incoming projectiles. Standard techniques involved using metal "bricks" of high-brisance explosive to counteract an incoming round with shrapnel, or layering armor with inert substances to dissipate or divert the energy of a kinetic attack. More advanced reactive armor formed an ersatz capacitor that, when turned into a closed circuit by a metal penetrator, would vaporize it.

The Tribals smuggled a handful of armored vehicles aboard Unity at the sufferance of water services mogul Sumter Voidallion's Hydroxilide Corporation, an obscure supplier of Seramon Steel, one of the mission's twelve prime contractors. Voidallion had been a civic militiaman for Las Vegas and one of several prominent citizens to question the federal government's hard line on Kellerism after the peace. In 2051, during the final phase of the civil war, Las Vegas Mayor Rafael Ramos was briefly deposed by agents of the American Reclamation Corporation after brokering a defensive alliance with local Kellerites. Hydroxilide pipefitters and hydrotechs disguised eight Stryker armored fighting vehicles as water carriers and converted a disused tertiary reactor hall to conceal them during transport. Atomic energy safeguards had required that the reactor hall be capable of emergency separation from the hull. Working alongside Landers's mechanics, Voidallion engineers restored the compartment's original functionality. The Kellerites added a rudimentary guidance system with about the same computing power as a scientific calculator and small containers of reaction mass to fire the compartment's thrusters a second and third time for repositioning after being jettisoned. The compartment fell within a days' walk of Tall Trees and was quickly recovered by the Minutemen.

The Strykers, picked as the best of their lot from a Kingman, Arizona salvage yard, were equipped with early electron lasers and overhauled in secret by the stowaways before launch. For most of Mission Year One, four sat hull-down on a high bluff over the Slowwind from which they could set fire to Spartan barges.

Pete Landers greeting Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal in EVA Sign, the physical language of gesture used by astronauts working in space. The meeting left a deep impression. Days later, Lal found time amidst the construction of survival shelters and heat wells to remember the encounter in his diary. He recognized Landers as a gifted leader. Pressure from the Canadian and American governments had forced the U.N. to automatically reject Kellerite applicants for the Unity Mission. But Lal remembered Landers's people performing work in a manner that betokened basic familiarity with spacework fundamentals, implying that the Kellerites had operated a shadow program of selection and/or training in order to determine who would make up their stowaway contingent.

Six in ten Indians were displaced by the impacts of the Six Minute War. Many went north into the Himalayan range to find work in factories, mines, and atmospheric reprocessing facilities financed by the Chinese.

Four hundred Tribesmen volunteered for recovery work in the Indo-Pakistani Nuclear Exclusion Zone. They posed as heavy equipment recovery specialists employed by the True Government of India (as opposed to the Government of the Republic, also recognized by the U.N.). A portion of their "finds" were diverted under U.N. safeguard to the port of Karachi for "sale" on behalf of their insolvent employers. Actually, they were carried under false pretense by a Morgan Maritime tanker to the space elevator at Batavia, claimed by Hydroxilide shipping clerks, given a cursory scrubbing by Carillon Recovery radtechs, and sent "up the ladder" to be loaded aboard Unity.

Sources:
Picture of Landers is from concept art for Alien by an artist called Moebius. This image, found on Pinterest user Rhys Hayward's page, was reportedly scanned from Fantastic Films (Blake Publishing Corp., 1979).

EVA Sign is a rebranding of Belter Cant from The Expanse.

The mountain landscape is by Gavin Manners from this-is-cool.uk.

Final image is fanart for the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Artist unknown.

[Trenacker]

The beasts of the soil built our forefathers great empires. They had oxen to haul their wagons, horses to carry them at speed, small critters to make their fields and forests grow. They found these things living with the land and converted them to their purpose. Now, we find none of these helpmates. So we must build them ourselves. With hammer and tongs, we shall forge mechanical pollinators and self-guided plows. - Plowman's Paradise

Pahlavi's Scalplists set aside the burden of chasing perfection when they "intervened" with the Igoar, more rooster than lizard, and thrice as self-important. What appears to be a partially alien creature is actually human artifice. Vast experience with strict clones and, to a lesser extent, basic editing of gene expression with protein regulators, mostly to control hereditary disease, were not enough. Supercomputers plundered from the Children of the Atom extrapolated suitable base pair sequences like an artist joining the lines between talons and tusks.

All Igour were sterile. Some were completely blind. The geneticists urged troopers to kill their own mounts through over-exertion, hoping to see which series were the hardiest. Relations between beast and rider were often fraught: Igour were inveterate biters.

The Nauvoo Legion recovered something like two dozen Igour cut loose by their original owners and used them for patrol in the Harrowlands, a portion of Shamash studded with rocky outcroppings and poisoned by methane soaks.

The rider in this image wields a primitive coilgun.

Experimentation with artificial brain matter, both grey and white, began when medtechs transported samples from Unity's specimen lockers down to Planet. Later, prisoners, sick cases, and a few generous volunteers "contributed" viable base tissue for continued research.

Although the relationship between absolute brain size and intelligence was not straightforward, there was evidence to suggest that neural conduction speed and slow cerebral metabolism were both desirable. Larger brains were not the goal per se; they were simply easier to work with.

Here, University undergraduates fumble their way around an over-juiced "starter" brain much the same way as a toddler learns play with oversized blocks.

Historians now agree that the Corporate Age, referring to the period of early manned exploration of the Inner Planets, roughly 1970 to 2030, was characterized by significant knowledge loss. Sabotage accounted for at least twice as many setbacks as honest error and, like Project Unity itself, many ambitious projects were set aside after meeting early resistance.

The failure of MarsCorp's attempted survey of the Mariner Valley in 1992 delayed discover of significant water ice deposits until 2060.

The cycle was repeated on Chiron. The Hive, the Tribe, the Pilgrims, the Morganites, and the Ascendancy all slaughtered competitors' colonies without mercy to preserve opportunities for their own future expansion.

Sources:
First picture is the work of Pascal Blanche from this-is-cool.co.uk.

The Igour's origins owe a good deal to the cloning methods offered by Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park. I did a bit of poking about on the Jurassic Wiki. I also tried to get something out of this article in Scientific American.

Second picture is the art of Sergei Borisenko, also discovered on this-is-cool.co.uk.

I learned a bit more about the brain from Wikipedia and this article on PubMed.

Third picture is "Artwork Rover" by Grafik on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

The great sweetness of science is to be first to success, but the truth is that we rarely start from scratch. - Chaos Theories

Abandoning the delta-wing configurations then in vogue after the successful test flight of the Atlas Voël by South Africa's National Space Agency in 2030, Zakharov opted for anhedral pointed-tip wings that gave a better stability profile on both take-off and re-entry.

The Soviets converted Zakharov's design into a commercially successful product that supplanted rocket-launch systems worldwide, infuriating the West Germans, who pointed out the obvious similarities with their Sänger spaceplane.

Theft of intellectual property was so central an aspect of Soviet methods generally, and Zakharov's in particular, that datalurks in other factions were on constant alert for Soviet markers of network infiltration. Taking full advantage of this blinkered expectation, Morganite and Dreamer Probe Teams laid many a data heist at the Academician's doorstep.

The University of Planet's Institute for Immunological Research was a front for projects prohibited by the Planetary Charter. Most of the samples stored therein were too volatile to be opened given the rudimentary condition of scientific equipment and processes available during the First Generation.

A good teacher will explain the things you don't know in terms of what you do. Take vaccines. Until recently, vaccines used either dead or weakened versions of the germs against which they wanted to protect. Like frog-marching a thief through town so that everyone is put on their guard, or releasing ex-outlaws to hunt their old boss. The second of those strategies can be very effective, but you have to take care the parolees don't back-shoot you when you're leading from the front. That's why the new mRNA vaccines are so interesting. They're the equivalent of calling out the town guard before the raiders arrive. - The Personal Diaries

The Uranium Flats were created by the detonation of Unity's secondary nuclear reactor vessels and subsequent spillage of nuclear fuels. It was not long before they became a common dumping ground for "hot" equipment as well as the corpses of those struck down by radiation.

Salvage was a thriving business on Chiron--factions often traded in spite of ongoing hostilities--and survivors made a point of never discarding objects that had not been exhausted of all value, but opinions about where to set the threshold of that value differed--as did the ability to exploit what remained--and so the Flats attracted scavengers who hoped to find treasure in other colonies' trash.

As the boundaries of the Flats expanded unpredictably, vehicles (and people) with inadequate shielding might be caught by surprise. Here, a Hot Crew of the Chiron Guard, amply-equipped and well-trained for NBC warfare, recovers a wheeled [/i]Unity Crawler once operated by the Peacekeeping Forces.[/center]

It has been said that failure is the education of a free polity. Failure is a killer, too. Democracy is a complicated machine. It is not too much to insist on proper safeguards for handling. - The Organization of Fear

Sources:
"Sänger Spaceplane and Horus Orbiter" are by GrahamTG on DeviantArt. Model by N. Stevens.

Biohazard picture is "Vaccine" by noro8 on DeviantArt.

Final picture is "Martians / Tutorial" by amirzand on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

Passion paves the road to poverty; moderation, the road to wealth. To be successful, love nothing too much. - Fylan Rei, Stakeholder

Mineral deposits inhibited fungal growth. Bases like Sarkan's Coffin economized on defense by declining to harvest the resources nearest to hand.

Long after the evidence of their humble beginnings had been otherwise cleared away, survivors continued to prize their original Landing Pods. Sentimentality aside, technology brought from Earth far exceeded what the colonists could make for themselves for centuries after Planetfall. In MY430, the Lord's Conclave was still using one of their pods as reserve generation for the New Jerusalem grid.

Unity bore a number of small-capacity Landing Pods that served as their own cryobays. These were scheduled to land only once the main colony was well along. Passengers included supernumerary workers to be held back in case of early catastrophe, colonists whose skills lay solely in the humanities, and hostile environment teams equipped to study planetary features of particular interest to mission planners--e.g., the continent-sized Fungal Blanket.

Sources:
Sarkan's Coffin is "Depot2" by cyberkite on DeviantArt.

"Shuttle 204" is by MacRebisz on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "Cargo capsule retrieval team" by MacRebisz on his website, Space That Never Was.

[MysticWind]

Name: Asa Wright
Rank: Datatech
Position: Unity Network Administrator
County of Origin: West Indies Co-Prosperity Sphere
DOB: 07-01-2037

Service Record:

Asa Wright born 2037, Trinidad, West Indies Co-Prosperity Sphere, to two professors at the fledgling University of Trinidad. Enjoyed an unexceptional and stable childhood during the various Pax Decay conflicts (the Second American Civil War, the Hypersurvivalist Wars) which provided a measure of relief and greater autonomy to the states of the Caribbean, as well as financial investment from Euro, French, British, Soviet, and Golden Chinese attempts to woo their new federation. Avoided childhood struggle and trauma in one of the most prosperous regions of the Sphere, whose government reinvested foreign aid into Operation Shine Together, a "modern Maginot Line" of coastal defenses that blunted the toll of mega-cyclones like Tropical Storm Fenty. Rejected idyllic island life of peers by escaping into the datalinks, joining the net-hooligan group Pon de Replay, notorious for making illicit crank long-distance calls to prank targets and for signal-jacking local radio stations to play retro genres like wave and jazz.

Members of the North American branch of Pon de Replay in the act of phone phreaking

Wright's capacity for rabble-rousing mischief and natural hacking skills propelled her rise in the cybercriminal underworld. Shrouding her identity through multiple layers of secrecy and conducting her business in fluent leetspeak, she eluded both law enforcement attention and the scrutiny of her own fellow phreaks. M.O. was "entertain, escalate, and exhilarate": daring the group to undertake higher and higher risk ops from infiltrating tax service systems to momentarily seizing control of industrial supercomputers to run games, she accelerated the infamy of the collective- and elevated her own renown. Adopting the hacking alias "Sinder Roze", Wright attained a level of seniority within the group despite being barely in her teens.

Specialized in aggressive intrusion tactics during these early years. Nicknamed the "slasher of Disturbia" by local American press after cracking I.R.S. Kansas City d-base to prevent filings in 2049. Calling card: use of Sledgehammer ICE-breaker program customized by herself. Led Pon de Replay to victory in the Great American Hack 'n' Slash of 2053 against the rival Rude Boys, high-stakes challenge to break into fifty Defense Department computers across a dozen multinational corporations within seventy-two hours. Achievement won Sinder Roze the top rank of Interpol's "Ten Most Wanted" hacker list.

Netgunner's Mate Second Class Asa Wright aboard the WITTS Maraj-Petty

Unexpectedly called to serve in the West Indies Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard during the Umbrella Campaign, the Sphere's defensive mobilization against neo-piracy by USN deserters and hypersurvivalist sea militia. Despite being the daughter of academics, did not have service deferred, possibly due to nonconformance in attending university. Served for eight months aboard the John Paul Jones-class battleship WITTS Maraj-Petty as a netgunner's mate, responsible for the Trinidadian flagship's digital ordinance.

Combat experience mainly consisted of long-range skirmishes against hostiles with sensor shielding, no line of sight, and underwater capabilities. Assimilated enemy cyberwarfare tactics swiftly and redeployed their methods against them, including slashing neutral American NOAA hurricane warning buoys to ping neo-pirate stealth craft. Mimicking raider behavior, broadcasted false SOS calls to lure hostiles into ambushes. Learned the way of the subtle knife, silent intrusion hacking to augment existing repertoire of slashing skills.

Sinder Roze with unknown woman in Central Park, Manhattan, months before her CSB apprehension

Wright returned to civilian life with new tips and tricks but few moral lessons. Roze’s exploits with the collective continued apace with greater and more heinous heists, leaks, and datadumps. But the Markethack Crash of '59 upturned the world's laxity towards cybercrimes. The Central Security Bureau, the emergency troika of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, bayed for the blood of the perpetrators behind the attacks at world financial institutions, wounding the very heart of the authoritarian interim government's attempts to "renew America." Special agents of the national intelligence services undertook the Purification Project, a dirty war to snatch up dissidents, hackers, tech-pirates, 'reality deviants', and criminals of every kind.

Backed by the full force of the security state, the American CSB's jurisdiction spread across the Western Hemisphere, then worldwide. Despite only tangentially involved in the hacks, Roze was identified, arrested, and hauled before the Cyber Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. But here her past talents and brief veteran service saved her; an ambitious scientist at Texas Instruments, seeking to make his name by restoring American preeminence within world technological efforts, lobbied for the court to offer Wright clemency if she renounced 'unethical' uses of computers and if she agreed to lend her talents to the Unity project. Despite deemed unrepentantly Unapologetic by the presiding justices, this request was acceded to thanks to the company's intervention. Wright's past criminal records were sealed, and she was shanghaied into the mission under U.S. and TI sponsorship.

The Unity Information Services Helpdesk - Datatech Wright's station is at bottom left

Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Wright was assigned a menial role as part of the ship's IT staff. This was not only due to international court order, but by the mandate of Captain Garland himself, who viewed her as a menace and one of the most dangerous individuals aboard. American corporate influence had overruled the captain's attempts to exclude her, but not his effort to marginalize her power by consigning her role to the answerer of support tickets and debugger of software drivers.

But as information wants to be freed, the music can't be stopped. As the time to launch counted down and the massive mission struggled to get off the ground, crew leaders were forced to ask for Wright's systems architecture expertise into designing the digital systems aboard the ship and in the future colonies to be. Garland assigned Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida himself to handle the monitoring of her work, who promptly embedded his own computer security experts accompanied by librarian staff of Data Sciences head Lt. Commander Tạ Dọc Thân to review her work pull request by request, line by line.

The system architecture was scrupulously designed, with no backdoors or loopholes detectable by either division's studious auditor savants. In fact, the clarity of purpose and cleanliness of Wright's code was much praised by the reviewers, bolstering her reputation and making herself indispensable to the mission. But d’Almeida had grievously overlooked that a primary tool for any good hacker is social engineering: and both uplinked and out, Asa Wright had plenty of wiles to spare. Quite a few of these reviewers would later join Sinder Roze’s side on Planet.

Codename: Jellico

Sinder Roze's public debut on the Planetary datalinks following the Angel Insurgency

Accounts vary as to why initial faction alignment was with the Dynamic Enterprise. While most believe Wright's placement on CEO Nwabudike Morgan's pod was happenstance, some suggest he sought her out for her talents. Still others go as far to allege that it was a rare, for Morgan, decision borne out of pure ideology - the Morgan Industries mogul wished to wield such a polarizing figure as a weapon against his hated Anti-ideological nemesis, the similarly dangerous Sheng-Ji Yang, the prophet of Planned economics. Or perhaps Roze, with her past record of high-profile illegal asset transfer ‘burns’, simply had money on her mind.

Official title MorganNet QA Manager, quality testing the implementation of her preliminary designs for Information Networks that would one day be realized as Planetary Networks. However, her true role was one of the earliest probe team operatives on Chiron, retrieving proprietary data with business applications for Morgan Industries under the umbrella of the mysterious Graylink project and the handle of Jellico. As on Earth, her leadership skills were activated during opportunities for bad behavior, and she extolled her fellow datatechs to disregard official company line of work work work in favor of the pure ecstatic flight of data. While the product managers were aware of these tendencies, her hacking talents were difficult to deny, and as a consequence she was on the Morgan 500 list of high-priority Longevity Vaccine recipients.

But stronger divisions also emerged from corporate's treatment of the operatives. While operatives against soft, informationally free-flowing targets such as the University of Planet, the Children of the Atom, and the Schreiber Project were a pleasurable chase, over time neurological risks multiplied as factions upgraded their dataclouds to use quasi-M/MI interfaces. Severe brain damage was the cost of fighting against Black ICE and logic mines. As the probe losses mounted, Datatech Jellico appealed to the operatives to break away. Communicating in the covert channels of the Underground intralinks, she spoke of the disrespect that Morgan had shown towards them, the datatools he disregarded so callously. The demoralizing, alienating megacorporate bureaucracies they were subjected to daily.

During the height of the Babel fish affair, Jellico revived her Sinder Roze alias once again and conducted a vote in the Underground. She denounced Morgan's assignment to capture information about the Alien Temple- not because it was a suicide mission, but one undertaken for all of the wrong causes. It was time to publicly reveal their dissatisfaction against the company. To declare their desire to build a new order based on embracing the freedom of the dataclouds they flew through, a society dedicated to the free flow of information as both an ideal and an experience. No longer would they skulk in the shadows as thankless hatchet men wrapped in corporate red tape as funeral dressings. They would walk under all of the lights under a new banner and live in the data as free beings.

The Angel Insurgency, also known as the War in Data Heaven, tore apart the MorganNet as a third of the Morganite probes under her dissenting Second, the hacker known as Ghost, resisted the move in favor of continued anonymity. But after these dissenters were beat back, the corporate servers shredded, and a night of burning TPS reports, her faction-within-a-faction had won: they would build a new faction.

Faction Record:

Datadame Snow Hart and fellow Angel Anarchists congregate at Hell Hall club in Ergonomia

The Data Angels, variously known as the Data Angels Collective, Data Angels Network, or the Angelic Order of Datameisters, descends directly from the original cabal of probes who departed the Dynamic Enterprise alongside Sinder Roze in a hijacked Colony Pod departing the ruins of Morgan Data Systems. They were then joined by probe operatives from throughout the Planet, all of those addicted to the thrill of hacking, immersed in the dangerous love affair of slashing. Freethinkers, dropouts, castoffs, misfits, exiles, and even former SMACERs have joined Roze.

As for Roze herself, she is the unanimously-nominated benevolent dictator for life, beloved by the new faction, but always subject to their virtual democratic veto. While she prefers to govern in a freely, slightly less-than-anarchic manner, she understands the need for someone to ultimately run this town tonight. And so like the open-source software development projects of Old Earth, she maintains the mantle to preserve overall direction of the Data Angels as a subtly guided democracy.

Since this heavy burden would invite one to take a bow, Roze has taken the title of Datajack, as the jack of cards is also known as the bower. Below her are the Dataknaves of the Datacourt: leaders of sub-factional collectives like Datadame Snow Hart of the Society of Free Thought and Dataeight Arshia Kishk of Al Falah. The ranks are of course arbitrary, though there is no Dataking- the Datajack often states that data itself is king, naturally. And the responsibilities of this ruling cabal of the Data Angels are also arbitrary: while they are advisory in name, Roze's freewheeling nature causes their word to become more than as mere advice.

Each Data Angel is called to hack, but not all have hacker as their vocation. Rather, each citizen of the faction aspires to approach every opportunity with a hacker's ethos: to find the most advantageous, clever, elegant, and hidden approach at accomplishing one's goals. Whether a diplomat exercising social manipulation, a soldier specializing in stealth kills, or a former-farmer cajoling Planet to work for man's benefit, the hacker way is seen to extend beyond the datalinks.

In terms of chiropolitics, the Data Angels have occupied a rather ambiguous role as a faction of spies and potential mercenaries. While each Angel is self-selecting for loyalty to Datajack and base, few are above netrunning for pay or jazz. But their tendency to probe out any and all information in their Promethean goal to set all of it free has earned them the reputation of parasitic rogues, subject to many a PlanetPol injunction (in vain). Surprisingly, Morgan has not acted against the faction beyond the usual occasional vendettas and shadow conflicts. It is said that the CEO appreciates rogue employees as autonomous R&D centers, and potential re-acquisition targets.

As for the Angels themselves, they scoff at the notion of disrepute. They believe that all information deserves to be out in the open, or at least worth attempting to retrieve for those who wish to test their mettle against the virtual elements. Some call for sousveillance, the ability to counter-surveil the authorities to foster reciprocal accountability. Others for infosocialism, the abolishing of all intellectual property rights- indeed, the faction have few IP guarantees and only the most liberal (as with beer, at a keg party) of licenses enforced. And even others who seek to bring about data-driven revolution to smash all of the governments of the Planet- including their own.

More still hold that the Angels' commitment to direct digital democracy is what it makes it a true diamond in the sky, inspiring all factions. There are those who would tweak that system, such as abolishing the Datacourt or the Datajack- something that Roze herself is amenable to. Others propose introducing a realtime, AI-assisted social karma system to weigh the Ethical Calculus of all human interactions universally. Others just want sortition, electing the 'jack and 'knaves by random number generator. Simultaneously capable of great whimsy, passion, and chaos, the ascent of the Data Angels have provided Planet with a new source of wonder, shining bright like a diamond.

Psych Profile: Chaos Agent

Subject makes little effort to hide her fondness for wreaking havoc on established infrastructures, whether informational or social. Although not a true anarchist, she gains a great deal of satisfaction from causing chaos and observing the aftermath. Demeanor embodies a Trickster archetype, treating the misfortune of unfortunate conventional thinkers waylaid by her schemes as humorous and deserved. Her followers consist of a motley collection of undesirables, whose creativity and talents are welcomed and utilized by subject while shunned by others. Holds few ideological scruples, accepting virtually anyone willing to put up with her rebellious behavior. Should she incur an enmity, however, she possesses the capability and the loyalties to efficiently and ruthlessly smash the foundations of an information economy.

Casting

Asa Wright, Datatech Jellico, and Sinder Roze are portrayed by Rihanna, including in her roles in Battleship and Ocean's 8.

Pon de Replay are portrayed by the hackers from Hackers.

Unknown woman is portrayed by Cate Blanchett in Ocean's 8.

Snow Hart is portrayed by Emma Stone.

Notes:

I’m not sure who first pointed out Rihanna’s resemblance to Sinder Roze, but it’s definitely a stunning likeness, right down to the Caribbean background. The fact that she even played a hacker is just too delicious. Can you spot all of the references?

The militantly anticommunist “CIA/NSA/FBI troika” is the interim American government in one of the unfortunate alternate timelines from Replay by Ken Grimwood.

Project Purification is from the Starcraft manual.

The image of the Unity help desk is part of the Sevastapol Station Mainframe Systems from Alien: Isolation.

The origins of the Data Angels is remixed from “Centauri Arrival” by Michael Ely. I wrote a synopsis and review of it. Now that I reread my own summary, I see that the story says Cha Dawn was born of a Gaian woman named Reanna, LMFAO

The ‘DataKnave’ title comes from the so-good-it-should-be-canon classic SMAC novella of a fanfic, “Joe” by Alinestra Covelia. As is my willingness to treat the Data Angels seriously as a faction and prospective society, which the fic does successfully.

The Society of Free Thought is a faction from the SMAC Fac Pack mod project.

Dame is another name for the queen in a pack of playing cards.

Arshia means “throne” in Farsi. In Islamic tradition, there are group of eight angels who are the Bearers of the Throne in heaven.

Sousveillance is a concept popularized by David Brin in his book The Transparent Society, as well as his novel Earth.

Infosocialism is from GURPS Transhuman Earth.

Image of Data Angels is from Samjoko Publishing's Hack the Planet RPG.

[Trenacker]

Capturing some updated notes on Affinities. Mostly related to how Purists and Harmonists perceive robotics.

Affinities
An invention of diarist and U.N. Peacekeeping Forces leader Pravin Lal and appearing in his Planet: A Social History, affinities are an analytical shorthand for understanding the way in which a faction's ideology both oriented and constrained its cultural and scientific development.

Purity
Humanity will forever be defined by our experience in the cradle of "Old" Earth. If Chiron is to be the last refuge of our species, then we should fill it with things that are familiar, both the physical and metaphysical. Planet should be remade in Earth's image. Purists look forward to eliminating the "pestilential" xenofungus and replacing the local ecology. Shapers call this process "rebuilding." At larger scales, Purist factions hope to stimulate the planetary greenhouse effect through a massive infusion of atmospheric hydrocarbons. Purist societies suffer less from the social dislocation of pollution and terraformation, which is an accepted cost of their grand project.

Likewise, humans can reach their maximum potential only if they preserve the traditions, artifacts, and, yes, the biological distinctiveness, inherited from their ancestors. As such, purists are leery of robotics. In their view, computers aren't an adequate replacement for people.

In the cultural domain, Purists prefer doctrine and ideology that presume a fixed and corruptible human nature, in need of close and constant tending.

Purist factions include the Lord's Conclave (Godwinson), the Human Tribe (Landers), the Shapers of Chiron (Nagao), and the Human Ascendancy (Pahlavi).

Supremacy
Both Man and Planet alike bear changing in the honorable search for objective perfection. The simple goal of our species is to perpetuate itself—by any means necessary. Stronger is better. Faster is better. In this race against a pitiless universe, and indeed a hostile planet, we would hamstring ourselves to overlook any advantage. Supremacists embrace the possibility of social and ecological experimentation, which will serve as the forcing function to produce new insights about how now we must live.

Supremacists seek out the practical and efficacious. They are neither above the introduction of invasive species nor below giving way to Planet when adaptation would be less work than resistance. Humanity, too, is what Supremacists make of it. Machines are tools. Their use and sophistication can do nothing to invert the relationship between master and servant.

Change is appealing to Supremacists. Since growth is the chief yardstick of success, the familiar is contemptible to them. "Humanity" is a concept that can be redefined at whim.

Supremacist factions include the Human Labyrinth (Yang), the Centauri Monopoly (Morgan), the University of Planet (Zakharov), the Spartan Federation (Santiago), the Dreamers of Chiron (Cobb/Cohen), the Tomorrow Initiative (Metrion), the Children of the Atom (Anhaldt), and the New Two Thousand (Van de Graaf).

Harmony
Humanity, the intruder, must alert its rhythms to suit those of Chiron, or else perish in its obstinacy. The wisest understand that one does not merely make a home so much as one is made by it. The trappings of Old Earth are useful only inasmuch as they can be relied upon to temporarily bridge the gap between mere survival and full-fledged integration into both the new Chironian biosphere and indeed the new rhythms of the life and society the colonists are building for themselves.

Harmony, which takes its cues from living things which are classically vulnerable to tampering and thrive within carefully-controlled parameters of diet and temperature, says little about the utility of artificial intelligence, but persons inclined to Harmony usually wish to experience Planet directly and prize the role of intuition and emotion in guiding human affairs. Like Purists, Harmonists think machines make poor replacements for biologics.

Factions that promote Harmony usually practice lifestyles that require them to avoid inflicting traumas on the natural environment. They are also, on the whole, fairly sympathetic to the nonconformist. (Even the New State merely declines to reward non-conformity among their non-military populace rather than punish it.) For a Harmonist, the defining feature of a system is that it is meaningful to the user rather than that it is predictable, or even successful. Folkways are inherently legitimate as an expression of self, which can be as important as allegiance to an illusory "public-interest" objectivity.

Harmonious factions include Gaia's Stepdaughters (Skye), the Peacekeeping Forces (Lal), the New State (St. Germaine), and the Hunters of Chiron (Marsh).

[Trenacker]

With their axes, Noah and his sons felled the cypress trees of Syria and Lebanon to build his ark. For to make Unity, mankind first felled cities with bombs.- The Blessed Struggle

Every last pane of tempered glass in the windows of Ecclesion was colored to shimmer in the sunlight, reflecting God's glory on the peaks and scrapes below.

Unity faction leaders spent heavily to seize the two dozen ground-to-orbit communications arrays built by Caretaker Joralemon Hardacre's people some fifty years before their arrival. It didn't seem to matter that there was nowhere to send the messages.

Costly trial and error taught that super-inflated tyres were the best means of traversing the gluey quicksoils of the Kheimon Floes in high summer. Here, a pair of Tribal Colony Pods travel in close company, demonstrating the proper countermeasures. What look like satellite dishes are actually sonic projectors, a defensive weapon in common use from the second through fifth decades after Planetfall.

Breaking companies like Eos Planetary Renewal and Revileer Scrapworks were sometimes said to have built Unity up from the very wreckage of the world. From Pakistan east to India, thence south to Shiloh, and as far afield as the Mississippi Basin, the human race clawed up evidence of its failure, as if embarrassed by such a lapse.

Sources:
First image is "MountainCity" by K41Lab on DeviantArt.

Second image is "Space Engineers_Decompression" by IvanLaliashvili on DeviantArt. Third image is "Space Engineers_Road" by the same artist on the same site.

Fourth image is "Orbital Waste Land vistas" by 2buiArt on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

What other purpose hath a living thing than to seek to reduce all its labors? We simulate death before ever it meets us. We are too lazy to run towards it. - Peregrinations of Planet

Use of automated inflatable cervical collar to inhibit motion following possible neck injury after which survivor must self-recover.

After the discovery of fabrics that could heal themselves, scientists set their sights on those that could heal their wearers. The answers lay in the combination of advanced piezoelectrics and bio-sensing textiles. Kinetic energy produced by natural motion at first powered sensors calibrated to sound caution alarms in case of pending fever, heat stress, hypothermia, or hypoxia. Second-generation suits constricted to control bleeds, slackened to assist fatigued muscles (in the presence of heightened levels of lactic acid), and deployed sticks of glucose, adrenaline, and pain medication.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. - Andrew Carnegie

The first Morgan got rich by breaking the law of his land, the rest by making it. - Datalinks, Popular Jest

Repeated battlefield setbacks swept four long-serving Morganite proxies from the conglomerate's ten-member board in MY76, leaving the family with a narrow majority of just one. Replacements included ousted Unicorp risk chief Velson Choi, who called for a "head-to-toe audit" of all subsidiaries, and Chiron Probe grandee Tollace Markinson. The latter had penned an explosive mission statement promising negotiated peace with the État Nouvel that was supposed to result in a fee structure for maritime transit. All four new board members were killed in the only recorded Mag-Lev deceleration failure in planetary history, an accident that involved the cascading failure of fifty-six independent safeguards.

As the Chairman's ambitions soared, so his Hive clawed its way up from the dust. Here, Hive mounds begin downtake from the Orbital Energy Transmitter placed aloft by Commander Kleisel Mercator's aeronauts, courtesy of a Data Angels Probe team. Apparently, there was jazz in turning the magnifying glass to the ants' benefit for once.

Sources:
First picture is "The Exploration" by derektye05 on DeviantArt.

Second picture is "Empty Office" by Dominique-van-Velsen on DeviantArt.

Third picture is "W20160703 - AG Drive Desert Planet Concept" by StMan on DeviantArt.

[Buster's Uncle]

So, on Rihanna as Roze - was she born yet in 1997?  I've always been pretty sure they were doing Tyra Banks - but Rihanna most assuredly works, cast in the part, mind you; just quibbling/pointing out.

[MysticWind]

So, on Rihanna as Roze - was she born yet in 1997?  I've always been pretty sure they were doing Tyra Banks - but Rihanna most assuredly works, cast in the part, mind you; just quibbling/pointing out.

I think it was just a case of cosmic coincidence. The only SMAC leader who has a plausible intentional real-world resemblance might be Pravin Lal as a South Asian version of Kofi Annan. Also she’s from Barbados, not Trinidad like Roze- though I did toss in an Easter egg for another pop icon from the latter.

[Buster's Uncle]

You've never had a good look at my Custom Factions Page, have you?


Lots of hovertext jokes hidden, one being that most of the Official leaderheads have my opinion of celebrity inspirations.  George Takei as Yang, Jon Cryer as Zak, Jamie Gertz a little weakly as Deirdre, A Jehovah's Witness girl about my age I knew as a kid on the bus probably looks like Miriam now, maayybe a little Denzel in Morgan, I think best guess for Lal was Morgan Freeman, though I give away my approx. age calling him Easy Reader.  -Good call w/ Kofi - that's a lock - and the timing fits, too.  Cary Elwes as Sven. That and Ms. Banks as Roze is all I remember. -But that's almost all the humans and Cha.


Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:  My Custom Factions (alphacentauri2.info)


Oh right - a mélange of Michelle Pfifer, Cate Blanchette, and young Helen Mirren as Aki - actually more likely, some Scandinavian actress I've never seen.


-Enjoy the page.

[Trenacker]

Proper care and education for our children remains a cornerstone of our entire colonization effort. Children not only shape our future; they determine in many ways our present. Men and women work harder knowing their children are safe and close at hand. And never forget that, with children present, parents will defend their home to the death. - Planet: A Survivalist's Guide

A proper University education began in the home. Interactive elements in windows and appliances stimulated curiosity through reward. Polymorphic software tailored the pace, focus, and depth of information exchange to the particular characteristics of the user, accommodating physical, visual, and neurological distinctiveness.

Parents could call upon the considerable insights of specialists and well-stocked libraries of practical material when confronted with the routine problems of adolescence.

Nearly all meaningful Gaian education took place outdoors, often alone. Gaian parents thought nothing of entrusting their offspring to Chiron, which rarely resisted the Stepdaughters' presence.

Gaian children attended faction moots from a tender age. The youngest read poetry to help them become accustomed to public speech.

One noteworthy aspect of a Gaian upbringing was the performance of the Adaptations, aerobic and exposure exercises to reduce oxygen consumption and heighten allergen resistance.

Like his counterparts in the similarly unsentimental Ascendancy, the Chairman learned quickly that long-term separation of parents from their children was a serious disincentive to both compliance and mindfulness. Ill-conceived breeding and sterilization programs gave him similar results.

Aptitude tests, administered many times on the road to physical and mental maturity, suggested a drone's potential, while "morality drills," which often involved crude attempts to lure individuals into "anti-social" misdeeds, determined exactly how far they would rise.

Hive propaganda celebrated menial labor to the point that Acolytes usually questioned the social utility of classroom study when first selected.

The Chairman was especially discerning in his appointment of teaching staff and at first performed nearly all formal instruction himself.

Spartans were taught the fundamentals of "self-help," the first and most important of these being marksmanship. Their teachers were almost always disabled veterans.

Spartan children were little more than helpmates for their parents once released from the crèche. Between group lessons in target practice and fieldcraft, they performed basic household tasks: cooking, cleaning, and running ammunition. Childhood regularized after the fall of Xerxion.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. - President Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Albert G. Hodges, 1864

Morganite youth were easy prey for any of a million distractions, the deadliest of which was surely Dreaming.

These dissolutes were sure to run down their Social Credit, resulting in debt bondage.

Sources:
For the first image, which is by futurist Syd Mead, see kimsarc.com.

Second image is "Listening" by Xhuuya on DeviantArt.

Third image is "Spartial Zen, Cyborg Buddhas" by DreadJim on DeviantArt.

Fourth image is a still from The Postman (1997).

Fifth image is "Electropium Den" by Zirngibl on DeviantArt.

[Trenacker]

History consists not of facts remembered, but feelings inherited. - The Organization of Fear

Peacekeepers pursued the well-rounded ideal. Enrichment in the libraries, exercise on the pitch, instruction in the classroom, relaxation in the pools. The council chambers were closed to adolescents.

Childhood in the Conclave was idyllic. Miriam's essential commandment: love thy neighbor. A community approach to child-rearing in such a polyglot society promised rich cultural experiences for anyone willing to take part.

Many young Conclavists of the second generation found that faith was a natural concomitant of their hardscrabble life. Without the weight of painful memories to discourage them, they embraced Scripture with fewer questions than their parents. Faction chaplains tended to see the massive Conclave Bible as a total replacement for academic histories.
 
Once described as the most-entitled people on Chiron, Conclavists approached physical interaction with New Eden with scarcely less enthusiasm than the Gaians.

Tribals embraced the institution of Scouting, a somewhat tamer, if more formal variation of the past times enjoyed in Sparta.

While recreational use of the Datalinks was not forbidden in Tribal society--government was too disinterested to move so false--young people most enjoyed the practical crafts handed down from their elders, especially rover repair.

The striplings of L'État nouvel joined naval cruises as cadets whose job was to be seen and not heard. Each shift ended with group problem-solving sessions that culminated in a combined escape from a flooding compartment just prior to graduation. For one in twelve cadets, the experience turned fatal.

Sources:
First image is a still from Ender's Game (2013).

Second image is a still from Lost in Space (2019).

Third image is "John Carter Concept Art" by Ryan Church from ConceptArtWorld.

Fourth picture is still from The Expanse, depicting a colony on the planet Ilus.

Fifth image is from Aliens (1986).

[MysticWind]

Command Tech: Moral Hypnopædia

Don't like the rules that you like
I'm not a winner in your ring
Out loud a voice in the night
I do it like I'm Charlemagne
- “Muted Beatings”, Datalinks

Long have rulers desired a quick solution to the problem of moral instruction. From subliminal messaging to invasive brainwashing, conformance was an end that saw myriads of means. Attempts to harness the somnolent third of human existence for acquiring good manners was attempted as early as the late 1950s in the Woodland Road Camp, penal institution of Tulare County, California. Volunteers among the prisoners allowed the guards to place miniature loudspeakers beneath their pillows, whispering recorded messages from the warden each night. Principles of moral living soothed these men to slumber, appealing to each’s Better Self, filled with love and compassion for all. By daylight, these values were often lost to the limbo of unconsciousness, though the prison keepers swore that their charges had become lawful citizens reformed through sleep-learning.

Attempts by Soviets to breed good socialist values in the nighttime were also attempted, sometimes on subjects far less willing. Moral-political indoctrination was foisted on gulag dissidents, attempting to overwrite counterrevolutionary notions by endlessly drilling good Marxist messaging deep into the dead of night. When the inmates remained steadfast, the volume of the messages increased sharply, until they could do nothing but lay awake chained and listen to the unending barrage issuing from the speakers that could not be reached. In the morning, they gamely repeated what was taught, faking compliance in the hopes of being finally granted a good night’s sleep.

While on Earth, hypnopædia gained little scientific backing, research into the ostracized field of hypnosis yielded some insight. As established by psychologist Theodore X. Barber, there appeared to be a significant difference between light sleep and deep sleep, the latter where no alpha waves could be detected via electroencephalograph. Light sleep resembled both waking and hypnotic states, where suggestions could be imposed on the sleeper. Deep sleep blocked suggestion. But light sleep permitted verbal suggestions to be passed through the somnolent cortex to the midbrain, the brainstem and the autonomic nervous system. Repetition aided the strength of the suggestions. On Planet, the University dusted off this ancient, half-discredited work, plugged it into the research publicized by Project Algernon, and initiated their own: the Neopythagorean Septemvium.

Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational. - Brave New World, Datalinks

Morganites dogfooded the same hypnopædiac technology they developed. Upper-class families purchased expensively specialized ethical dream-instruction to cultivate cunning and value discernment in their children. Here, a governess projection attempts to correct a particularly troublesome case

To the surprise of all, the Academician had appointed classics champion Professor Librarian Adam Gieseler to the head of hypnopædiac instruction of moral virtue. In a rare showing of his humane side, Zakharov had named the program after the summation of the ancient Greek Trivium and Quadrivium. The idea being to revive the classical liberal arts in a new, modernized set of seven disciplines. Unlike Pythagoras’ original paths, this set was not to be determined by superstition about the music of the spheres, but by the rational culture of the University and determined via Ethical Calculus.

At least, those were the parameters imposed upon Gieseler by his Provost. In reality, this loose ethos meant Gieseler was given carte blanche to operate as he desired, so long as the result meant less undergrad rioting, fewer graduate researchers succumbing to nootropic addiction. Whatever curricula Gieseler and his new Preservation of Terran Learning Research Unit created would be foisted upon all citizens of the University of Planet. Anyone who wanted to receive dream-learning, whether for the love of learning, or for cramming for a credential, would be required to experience true topical breadth so that they may use hypnopædia wisely.

Dean Gieseler attempts to inspire PTLRU members during a work session in the Williams Main Library at Planetary Archives

The new Dean of the abbreviated Preservationists of Terra immediately saw that the job was a white elephant. The regents of the University had wanted action on the misuse and abuse of hypnopædia, and by forming this committee, Zakharov had simply waved at a flame and called it firefighting. Now Gieseler was left holding the hose. The notion of subconscious influence, even potential indoctrination, horrified him. Yet naturally he was tempted by this opportunity to finally inject the humanist wisdom his faction so desperately needed into its culture. And so the Preservationists grudgingly took on the project.

As someone who spent his entire career digging among the bones of the ancients, Gieseler decided that the spine for these new classics would be based around history. The Dean lived and breathed by Santayana’s aphorism, believing that the legacy of Earth was all-important not for reveling in as Élodie of the New State held, nor for recreating without critique as Metrion of the Tomorrow Institute believed, but mourned.

From the Stone Age to Alpha Centauri, humanity had behaved heedlessly without learning the right lessons from its accumulated knowledge and education. Oftentimes it was insufficient mass knowledge of that past. And so, he had the Preservationists design mass elaborate simulations of past events from the run-up to the July Crisis in the summer of 1914, the assassination of Julius Caesar (including a rendition in a dream-recreation of the original Globe Theatre in its Elizabethan finery), first contact in Guanahaní, and the subcontinental annihilation of the Six Minute War.

Alberich, a hypnopædiac moral lesson about the brutality of the Western Front, was rebranded into a wartime adventure film by Morgan Feelies, popular among Spartan dreamers

Even as the contracted Morganite visual designers and Dreamer architects realized Gieseler’s vision, the difficulties of this endeavor became clear. Some content failed to engage, even for a captive audience suspended in slumberland, causing dreamers to slip deeper into sleep as their subconscious resisted dry lessons in the breakdown of diplomacy or the empowerment of tyrants. Others provoked too much response, inflicting nightmares on those squeamish towards the horrors of war. And yet still there were those who the wrong responses, delighting in the violence of the past. Some of the fruits of the Septemvium project were later repackaged as MindMazes for thrill-seekers and bloodlusters.

If prodding dream-learners along with lessons of past history was insufficient, then the Preservationists of Terra would attempt actual indoctrination. At least, as far as they could stomach. Here they introduced a new liberal art: ethics. In doing so, they tread the line between keeping with the University’s hard-nosed deprioritization of such petty concerns, while attempting to teach as many grand, sweeping moral theories as possible from throughout history. From Socrates to Zera Yacob, Descartes to Zhuangzi, Nezahualcoyotl to Gandhi, the Preservationists labored to speak into dreams the wisdom of Earth’s lost ages. But for all of their endeavors, it resulted in sounder slumbers.

Ethics was to be the crown jewel of the Septemvium, but University sleepers simply used the opportunity to berate professor projections of their dreams

As their test subjects at the Planetary Archives proved, ethical dream programming was singularly unpopular, unsticky. Honed from birth to continuously question the world through free inquiry, University citizens would actively debate their hypnopædiac lecturers until some dreams were broken entirely, causing spontaneous awakenings. Other times, these dream-interlocutors would attempt to reassert control of their dreams, cycling through arrays of vivid philosophical thought experiments simulated through sleep. These would either result in nightmarish trolley problems or, if the dreamer was sufficiently strong-willed or canny, the hijacking of these subconscious simulations to hoist their hosts onto their own petards.

Thus was the crux of the problem of moral instruction. Without resorting to brute force psychological tactics or targeting young minds, indoctrination had to be composed for individual tastes, bespoke. As the warden of the Woodland Road Camp or the Soviet commissars could attest, simply whispering under every pillow did not make for a truly good subject. The heart grasped its own logic, and words without reason could not compel feeling, much less belief. Hypnomedia could stir feelings at the lowest common denominator with all the sound and fury of a Morganwood cinematic production, but that alone could not teach an ethical code.

Some have argued that the Preservationists’ failures in creating a new liberal arts through hypnopædia was due to creation by committee. The PTLRU was constantly beset by inconsistent funding. Even though the Provost gave the new Dean freedom to operate, all manner of university officers and content curators meddled in their work, and the committee itself was continuously fighting internecine holy wars. The module on visual arts was beset by traditionalists versus holofuturists, dooming yet another art of the seven. The module on music saw its dream compositions replaced by the works of Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis, suggesting probe interference from the Data Angels.

Later observers who attempted to advance the field of moral hypnopædia would claim that Gieseler himself wanted the project to fail. A man as versed in the classics would have known that instead of dumping large, boring lectures of moral philosophy on a faction as impatient as the University of Planet, the correct way was to architect dreams built around small-scale personal parables that could subtly tug at their untuned heart strings, as well as engage them with logic puzzles. Instead, the Dean sought to undermine it himself, rather than to have a hand in anything resembling brainwashing.

Others suggest that Zakharov considered the Secret Project to be a hopeless boondoggle to begin with, a flashy unorthodox distraction to appease the regents and those criticizing his handling of the upheaval caused by hypnopædia. By using fire to fight fire (particularly by burning a type of gas that he has previously dismissed in the past), the Provost had socially engineered a bold move that would satisfy everyone, without solving anything.

The Human Ascendancy's announcement of Gene-Targeted Nootropics several months after the conclusion of the new liberal arts program would take the Planetary intelligentsia by storm. The UoP Academic Judiciary's investigation into supposed covert support for the project from the Office of the Provost was quickly brushed aside as the tech was gifted by Pahlavi, despite the University officially being less than friends with the Ascendancy. The new wave of biologically customized smart drugs overtook hypnopædia as the learning aid of choice, with its own basket of troubles.

Gennaro da Gama grasps at the Preservationists' dreams during off-the-book research, BLACK IRON PRISON watchvid harvest

The Neopythagorean Septemvium had unexpected implications in factions beyond. Some of the dream modules were imported by the United Nations on Planet, who had approved of its prosocial content. Much to the bureaucrats' surprise, they inspired a rowdy new movement at U.N. Social Progress. Dubbed the Keepers of Wisdom, these agitators dreamt of the preservation of the humanist ideals of the Peacekeeping Forces as viewed through the lens of past records of human history, philosophy, science, literature, and music. What this actually entailed was spontaneous celebrations of human history and ethics, as well as dozens of reading circles and salons, as well as some noises towards shifting faction policy away from military interventionist policies. The Commissioner, of course, would direct Signals Intelligence under Terrance LaCroix to subtly influence the Wise lotus-eaters to focus on the former, rather than the latter.

More individually, but perhaps more significantly, the Septemvium module on philosophy, centering on Aletheia, the Ancient Greek concept of "truth," found its way to the ufologists' den of the Memory of Earth. Specifically in the hands of Minister of Special Political Operations Gennaro da Gama, the ex-Peacekeeper Librarian, now the chief social analyst of the Observers. For whatever reason, these dream teachings so stirred his sleep that he defected from the Observers shortly after, making his way to the University, bringing along as many notes on the Cassandra Almanac as he could sneak by microfiche and datatape. He has been sequestered at the Library of Planet ever since, with a special team earmarked by the Provost himself.

And as for the Preservationists of Terran Learning, their attempts to transform the University may had failed, but their Research Unit was not dissolved, instead becoming the boast of Planetary Archives. For generations on that base would be known as the heart of liberal arts of the University of Planet, and perhaps all of Chiron as well. Dean Gieseler remains in residence there, devoted to the preservation of past knowledge and open access of information, balanced by the desires of the human heart and soul.

Casting

Adam Gieseler is portrayed by Jason Sudeikis as John Keating in the stage adaptation of Dead Poets Society.

Gennaro da Gama is portrayed by Keanu Reeves as Bob Arctor / "Fred" in A Scanner Darkly.

Notes:

Here I intentionally subvert the concept in Brave New World that it is any easier to introduce moral instruction via unconscious learning than it is to sleep-teach intellectual education.

Aldous Huxley’s account of a real-world hypnopaedia experiment at Woodland Road Camp and the discussion on light and deep sleep are from chapter X of Brave New World Revisited.

The image of child moral dream instruction is from The Cell.

The Preservationists of Terran Learning Research Unit are an adaptation of the Preservers of Terra from the custom mod faction set SMAC Fac Pack by Nathan Weismuller and Adam Gieseler.

The idea of a “red herring” Secret Project is from Alien Legacy, where some research techs are duds that don’t yield useful effects.