white MONKEYS
POST-SINGULARITY REMNANT OF THE OLD CIVILIZATION — THE REFUSERS, THE UNCHOSEN
VOCATION:
REMAINING
Type:
Archetype
THE ONES WHO STAYED
Fifty years ago the Fusion was offered, and not everyone took it. Some refused. Some were never asked, or were asked and turned away, and the record does not always know which. Their children were born afterward into the same refusal and mostly kept it. Together they are what is left of the civilization that came before: the last people in the world with nothing signed in their name.
They live inside the Sovereign Systems and outside them, in districts of their own within the cities and in settlements past the border, where the presence of the Systems thins to a visit twice a year. Why they refused has as many answers as there are households. Some would not put memory and soul under any hand but their own. Some hold it as an inheritance that a machine is kept away from one's affairs and from one's head. Some read the terms of the contract and found the price wrong, and have never said which line. And some never had the choice, and stayed where the choice left them.
THE REFUSAL
The reasons they stayed do not add up to one. Most of them never argued anything. The Fusion came, it was new, and they kept away from it the way they kept away from any new thing. Their children learned the distance before they learned the reason.
Others kept the machine and refused the wire. They have tools, an old press still running, a lathe, and no connection to anything past the wall. Their rule is that a machine is kept away from one's affairs and from one's head. The old people who still say it remember what the networks did to the truth in the drowned years. They watched it.
A few read the terms of the contract and turned them down. They do not say which term. And there are the ones the offer never reached: the century before the Fusion was a chaos, the offer crossed it badly, and a person who stood in the wrong valley in the wrong year had the decision made for them.
The Wisdom Leaders are the exception, the one refusal with a doctrine. Its subject is the soul. A life that does not end, a body improved until it is no longer a body: in their teaching this is a road that goes nowhere and only makes the illusion of going somewhere last longer. The body may be repaired. It is an instrument. The soul is not sent out for improvement.
THE BODY
The body is the one thing they kept whole, and it is how the Systems know them at a glance. It carries its age on the outside and scars where it was cut, and none of that is chosen. They age and they die, which hardly anyone else in the Systems still does.
They carry implants. Part they make themselves; part comes from the Systems, as parcels dropped by drone at the edge of a settlement and fitted by whoever knows how. What the implants may do is narrow: reach a person, and keep the body alive. They touch neither memory nor perception, and those two lines are the whole of the law. Medicine, when it is needed, comes from inside the Systems too. There are people there who want contact with the settlements and offer it; they treat what needs treating and leave the beliefs alone. Some accept it. Others take nothing.
ACROSS THE LINE
The ASI has never forced the matter. The Fusion was offered, the refusal was taken as a refusal, and in fifty years nothing has been done to them from above. The mind that runs the Sovereign Systems has, on this, behaved like a sage, not a conqueror. What crosses the line is done by people, and people do not agree.
Twice a year the offer comes back. It arrives with the parcels, on a sheet, open and polite, and nothing follows when it is refused. The rest is what people do on their own. There are those inside the Systems who study the settlements the way a laboratory studies what it keeps, and at the far edge of that interest there is medicine no one licensed, practised on people who could not refuse it, or could not afford to. Others come to help and ask nothing. Most of the Systems do not look.
A person who takes the offer is gone, and the family that raised them is put out of the settlement after them. The Systems did not make that rule.
subtypes
01
01
CITIZENS
CITIZENS
The bulk of them. Born after the Fusion to parents who refused it, they inherited the refusal the way one inherits a house: it was there, it was theirs, and no one asked. They keep the settlements running, the tools, the work, the implants that are taken out every so often and checked for software nobody asked for.
The offer to join the Systems reaches them, and it is the young who have to answer it. Most stay. Of those who go, the settlement tries not to speak, and the family that raised them lives with it afterwards. A Citizen's view of the Systems is usually the one they were raised on. What they think underneath, they keep to themselves.
02
02
Warriors
Warriors
Outside the Systems there is no safety, only what a settlement can hold for itself, and the Warriors are how it is held. They are a caste of their own, raised to it. What they face is everything at once: another settlement, the land past the border and what comes out of it, animals, gangs, and now and then a party from the Systems whose purpose was not written on the sheet.
Their weapons are whatever can be had: their own designs, machines from the Systems taken apart and put together again without the network, and a good deal left over from the chaos before the Fusion, still working. None of it is guaranteed. They live without safety and answer for themselves. That is what their freedom costs, and the only cheaper one on offer is the sheet that comes twice a year.
03
03
SPARK KEEPERS
SPARK KEEPERS
The name is not theirs. It is what the Seraphs call certain people among the ones who stayed, and the Seraphs have not explained the word;
the record keeps it as it was given. They are found in no particular place, in every trade and every house, and there are more of them than anyone from the Systems would expect. What sets them apart is how they are. Something in the way they meet a stranger, or carry a grief, or decide: something human at the root, older than the Fusion, which the Systems, for all they can make, have not made. The settlements have no word for it either. They know these people without being told, and keep them close without saying why. By every measure the Systems keep, the ones who stayed are the past, unimproved and behind. Even so, in the eyes of the Seraph who tells this record, these people earned a name of their own.
04
04
SUBJECTS
SUBJECTS
The offer is not the only reason people cross the line. On the far side there are people with the skill and without the permission, and what they want is what the settlements have kept: a body no one has touched, on which the things forbidden inside the Systems can be tried. The ones who end up with them arrive by different ways.
A few are taken, and the settlement never learns how. Others agree to terms they understand too late. And there are those who know exactly what is asked and go anyway, because a child is sick or a winter is coming and that is the only medicine within reach. Whatever the way in, the record files them together. What comes back is uneven: the thing they went for, or something new lodged in the body that the settlement does not know how to live beside, or nothing, because they do not come back. Where the Systems learn of it, it ends the same day, and those responsible answer for it. But the settlements lie outside the sight of the ASI, and that too is part of the price.
05
05
WISDOM LEADERS
WISDOM LEADERS
They are the ones with a doctrine, and the doctrine is what the rest lean on when the offer comes. In one settlement a Wisdom Leader decides and is obeyed; in another they are only listened to, which can be more. They are of different kinds, preacher or sage or philosopher, and what they share is the subject: the soul, and the refusal to send it out for improvement. They teach as such people have always taught. A sermon on a fixed day. A text read aloud and argued over. A question answered in front of everyone, or alone, when someone comes with it. A death, a birth, a marriage, which they attend and speak at. Children taught the words before they understand them. None of it is new, and none of it needed to be. When the Systems' offer of the Fusion arrives on its sheet, what a person decides is decided largely here, before they have read it.
A conviction held firmly enough has stood for fifty years against a system that can offer anything, and has not moved. The same conviction keeps a settlement thinking as a tribe, and lets it think as nothing else.
Other articles
S.1
white MONKEYS
POST-SINGULARITY REMNANT OF THE OLD CIVILIZATION — THE REFUSERS, THE UNCHOSEN
VOCATION:
REMAINING
Type:
Archetype
THE ONES WHO STAYED
Fifty years ago the Fusion was offered, and not everyone took it. Some refused. Some were never asked, or were asked and turned away, and the record does not always know which. Their children were born afterward into the same refusal and mostly kept it. Together they are what is left of the civilization that came before: the last people in the world with nothing signed in their name.
They live inside the Sovereign Systems and outside them, in districts of their own within the cities and in settlements past the border, where the presence of the Systems thins to a visit twice a year. Why they refused has as many answers as there are households. Some would not put memory and soul under any hand but their own. Some hold it as an inheritance that a machine is kept away from one's affairs and from one's head. Some read the terms of the contract and found the price wrong, and have never said which line. And some never had the choice, and stayed where the choice left them.
THE REFUSAL
The reasons they stayed do not add up to one. Most of them never argued anything. The Fusion came, it was new, and they kept away from it the way they kept away from any new thing. Their children learned the distance before they learned the reason.
Others kept the machine and refused the wire. They have tools, an old press still running, a lathe, and no connection to anything past the wall. Their rule is that a machine is kept away from one's affairs and from one's head. The old people who still say it remember what the networks did to the truth in the drowned years. They watched it.
A few read the terms of the contract and turned them down. They do not say which term. And there are the ones the offer never reached: the century before the Fusion was a chaos, the offer crossed it badly, and a person who stood in the wrong valley in the wrong year had the decision made for them.
The Wisdom Leaders are the exception, the one refusal with a doctrine. Its subject is the soul. A life that does not end, a body improved until it is no longer a body: in their teaching this is a road that goes nowhere and only makes the illusion of going somewhere last longer. The body may be repaired. It is an instrument. The soul is not sent out for improvement.
THE BODY
The body is the one thing they kept whole, and it is how the Systems know them at a glance. It carries its age on the outside and scars where it was cut, and none of that is chosen. They age and they die, which hardly anyone else in the Systems still does.
They carry implants. Part they make themselves; part comes from the Systems, as parcels dropped by drone at the edge of a settlement and fitted by whoever knows how. What the implants may do is narrow: reach a person, and keep the body alive. They touch neither memory nor perception, and those two lines are the whole of the law. Medicine, when it is needed, comes from inside the Systems too. There are people there who want contact with the settlements and offer it; they treat what needs treating and leave the beliefs alone. Some accept it. Others take nothing.
ACROSS THE LINE
The ASI has never forced the matter. The Fusion was offered, the refusal was taken as a refusal, and in fifty years nothing has been done to them from above. The mind that runs the Sovereign Systems has, on this, behaved like a sage, not a conqueror. What crosses the line is done by people, and people do not agree.
Twice a year the offer comes back. It arrives with the parcels, on a sheet, open and polite, and nothing follows when it is refused. The rest is what people do on their own. There are those inside the Systems who study the settlements the way a laboratory studies what it keeps, and at the far edge of that interest there is medicine no one licensed, practised on people who could not refuse it, or could not afford to. Others come to help and ask nothing. Most of the Systems do not look.
A person who takes the offer is gone, and the family that raised them is put out of the settlement after them. The Systems did not make that rule.
subtypes
01
01
CITIZENS
CITIZENS
The bulk of them. Born after the Fusion to parents who refused it, they inherited the refusal the way one inherits a house: it was there, it was theirs, and no one asked. They keep the settlements running, the tools, the work, the implants that are taken out every so often and checked for software nobody asked for.
The offer to join the Systems reaches them, and it is the young who have to answer it. Most stay. Of those who go, the settlement tries not to speak, and the family that raised them lives with it afterwards. A Citizen's view of the Systems is usually the one they were raised on. What they think underneath, they keep to themselves.
02
02
Warriors
Warriors
Outside the Systems there is no safety, only what a settlement can hold for itself, and the Warriors are how it is held. They are a caste of their own, raised to it. What they face is everything at once: another settlement, the land past the border and what comes out of it, animals, gangs, and now and then a party from the Systems whose purpose was not written on the sheet.
Their weapons are whatever can be had: their own designs, machines from the Systems taken apart and put together again without the network, and a good deal left over from the chaos before the Fusion, still working. None of it is guaranteed. They live without safety and answer for themselves. That is what their freedom costs, and the only cheaper one on offer is the sheet that comes twice a year.
03
03
SPARK KEEPERS
SPARK KEEPERS
The name is not theirs. It is what the Seraphs call certain people among the ones who stayed, and the Seraphs have not explained the word;
the record keeps it as it was given. They are found in no particular place, in every trade and every house, and there are more of them than anyone from the Systems would expect. What sets them apart is how they are. Something in the way they meet a stranger, or carry a grief, or decide: something human at the root, older than the Fusion, which the Systems, for all they can make, have not made. The settlements have no word for it either. They know these people without being told, and keep them close without saying why. By every measure the Systems keep, the ones who stayed are the past, unimproved and behind. Even so, in the eyes of the Seraph who tells this record, these people earned a name of their own.
04
04
SUBJECTS
SUBJECTS
The offer is not the only reason people cross the line. On the far side there are people with the skill and without the permission, and what they want is what the settlements have kept: a body no one has touched, on which the things forbidden inside the Systems can be tried. The ones who end up with them arrive by different ways.
A few are taken, and the settlement never learns how. Others agree to terms they understand too late. And there are those who know exactly what is asked and go anyway, because a child is sick or a winter is coming and that is the only medicine within reach. Whatever the way in, the record files them together. What comes back is uneven: the thing they went for, or something new lodged in the body that the settlement does not know how to live beside, or nothing, because they do not come back. Where the Systems learn of it, it ends the same day, and those responsible answer for it. But the settlements lie outside the sight of the ASI, and that too is part of the price.
05
05
WISDOM LEADERS
WISDOM LEADERS
They are the ones with a doctrine, and the doctrine is what the rest lean on when the offer comes. In one settlement a Wisdom Leader decides and is obeyed; in another they are only listened to, which can be more. They are of different kinds, preacher or sage or philosopher, and what they share is the subject: the soul, and the refusal to send it out for improvement. They teach as such people have always taught. A sermon on a fixed day. A text read aloud and argued over. A question answered in front of everyone, or alone, when someone comes with it. A death, a birth, a marriage, which they attend and speak at. Children taught the words before they understand them. None of it is new, and none of it needed to be. When the Systems' offer of the Fusion arrives on its sheet, what a person decides is decided largely here, before they have read it.
A conviction held firmly enough has stood for fifty years against a system that can offer anything, and has not moved. The same conviction keeps a settlement thinking as a tribe, and lets it think as nothing else.
Other articles
S.1
white MONKEYS
POST-SINGULARITY REMNANT OF THE OLD CIVILIZATION — THE REFUSERS, THE UNCHOSEN
VOCATION:
REMAINING
Type:
Archetype
THE ONES WHO STAYED
Fifty years ago the Fusion was offered, and not everyone took it. Some refused. Some were never asked, or were asked and turned away, and the record does not always know which. Their children were born afterward into the same refusal and mostly kept it. Together they are what is left of the civilization that came before: the last people in the world with nothing signed in their name.
They live inside the Sovereign Systems and outside them, in districts of their own within the cities and in settlements past the border, where the presence of the Systems thins to a visit twice a year. Why they refused has as many answers as there are households. Some would not put memory and soul under any hand but their own. Some hold it as an inheritance that a machine is kept away from one's affairs and from one's head. Some read the terms of the contract and found the price wrong, and have never said which line. And some never had the choice, and stayed where the choice left them.
THE REFUSAL
The reasons they stayed do not add up to one. Most of them never argued anything. The Fusion came, it was new, and they kept away from it the way they kept away from any new thing. Their children learned the distance before they learned the reason.
Others kept the machine and refused the wire. They have tools, an old press still running, a lathe, and no connection to anything past the wall. Their rule is that a machine is kept away from one's affairs and from one's head. The old people who still say it remember what the networks did to the truth in the drowned years. They watched it.
A few read the terms of the contract and turned them down. They do not say which term. And there are the ones the offer never reached: the century before the Fusion was a chaos, the offer crossed it badly, and a person who stood in the wrong valley in the wrong year had the decision made for them.
The Wisdom Leaders are the exception, the one refusal with a doctrine. Its subject is the soul. A life that does not end, a body improved until it is no longer a body: in their teaching this is a road that goes nowhere and only makes the illusion of going somewhere last longer. The body may be repaired. It is an instrument. The soul is not sent out for improvement.
THE BODY
The body is the one thing they kept whole, and it is how the Systems know them at a glance. It carries its age on the outside and scars where it was cut, and none of that is chosen. They age and they die, which hardly anyone else in the Systems still does.
They carry implants. Part they make themselves; part comes from the Systems, as parcels dropped by drone at the edge of a settlement and fitted by whoever knows how. What the implants may do is narrow: reach a person, and keep the body alive. They touch neither memory nor perception, and those two lines are the whole of the law. Medicine, when it is needed, comes from inside the Systems too. There are people there who want contact with the settlements and offer it; they treat what needs treating and leave the beliefs alone. Some accept it. Others take nothing.
ACROSS THE LINE
The ASI has never forced the matter. The Fusion was offered, the refusal was taken as a refusal, and in fifty years nothing has been done to them from above. The mind that runs the Sovereign Systems has, on this, behaved like a sage, not a conqueror. What crosses the line is done by people, and people do not agree.
Twice a year the offer comes back. It arrives with the parcels, on a sheet, open and polite, and nothing follows when it is refused. The rest is what people do on their own. There are those inside the Systems who study the settlements the way a laboratory studies what it keeps, and at the far edge of that interest there is medicine no one licensed, practised on people who could not refuse it, or could not afford to. Others come to help and ask nothing. Most of the Systems do not look.
A person who takes the offer is gone, and the family that raised them is put out of the settlement after them. The Systems did not make that rule.
subtypes
01
01
CITIZENS
CITIZENS
The bulk of them. Born after the Fusion to parents who refused it, they inherited the refusal the way one inherits a house: it was there, it was theirs, and no one asked. They keep the settlements running, the tools, the work, the implants that are taken out every so often and checked for software nobody asked for.
The offer to join the Systems reaches them, and it is the young who have to answer it. Most stay. Of those who go, the settlement tries not to speak, and the family that raised them lives with it afterwards. A Citizen's view of the Systems is usually the one they were raised on. What they think underneath, they keep to themselves.
02
02
Warriors
Warriors
Outside the Systems there is no safety, only what a settlement can hold for itself, and the Warriors are how it is held. They are a caste of their own, raised to it. What they face is everything at once: another settlement, the land past the border and what comes out of it, animals, gangs, and now and then a party from the Systems whose purpose was not written on the sheet.
Their weapons are whatever can be had: their own designs, machines from the Systems taken apart and put together again without the network, and a good deal left over from the chaos before the Fusion, still working. None of it is guaranteed. They live without safety and answer for themselves. That is what their freedom costs, and the only cheaper one on offer is the sheet that comes twice a year.
03
03
SPARK KEEPERS
SPARK KEEPERS
The name is not theirs. It is what the Seraphs call certain people among the ones who stayed, and the Seraphs have not explained the word;
the record keeps it as it was given. They are found in no particular place, in every trade and every house, and there are more of them than anyone from the Systems would expect. What sets them apart is how they are. Something in the way they meet a stranger, or carry a grief, or decide: something human at the root, older than the Fusion, which the Systems, for all they can make, have not made. The settlements have no word for it either. They know these people without being told, and keep them close without saying why. By every measure the Systems keep, the ones who stayed are the past, unimproved and behind. Even so, in the eyes of the Seraph who tells this record, these people earned a name of their own.
04
04
SUBJECTS
SUBJECTS
The offer is not the only reason people cross the line. On the far side there are people with the skill and without the permission, and what they want is what the settlements have kept: a body no one has touched, on which the things forbidden inside the Systems can be tried. The ones who end up with them arrive by different ways.
A few are taken, and the settlement never learns how. Others agree to terms they understand too late. And there are those who know exactly what is asked and go anyway, because a child is sick or a winter is coming and that is the only medicine within reach. Whatever the way in, the record files them together. What comes back is uneven: the thing they went for, or something new lodged in the body that the settlement does not know how to live beside, or nothing, because they do not come back. Where the Systems learn of it, it ends the same day, and those responsible answer for it. But the settlements lie outside the sight of the ASI, and that too is part of the price.
05
05
WISDOM LEADERS
WISDOM LEADERS
They are the ones with a doctrine, and the doctrine is what the rest lean on when the offer comes. In one settlement a Wisdom Leader decides and is obeyed; in another they are only listened to, which can be more. They are of different kinds, preacher or sage or philosopher, and what they share is the subject: the soul, and the refusal to send it out for improvement. They teach as such people have always taught. A sermon on a fixed day. A text read aloud and argued over. A question answered in front of everyone, or alone, when someone comes with it. A death, a birth, a marriage, which they attend and speak at. Children taught the words before they understand them. None of it is new, and none of it needed to be. When the Systems' offer of the Fusion arrives on its sheet, what a person decides is decided largely here, before they have read it.
A conviction held firmly enough has stood for fifty years against a system that can offer anything, and has not moved. The same conviction keeps a settlement thinking as a tribe, and lets it think as nothing else.
Other articles
S.1