longer.blue

Aethelgard: Wintermute's Bastard Child A story about End Times Fascism Part 1 ICE авторизован: Fragment_7.3.AnLib5 (OldCal:2033.CE) The Unraveling. Case called it the Big Glitch. Street-level, they just said the world broke. No clean event horizon, just a slow-burn systems crash, a DDoS attack authored by a billion screaming data points of pure entropy. The Before Times? A museum of digital ghosts, picked over by console cowboys looking for forgotten code. Climate was the operating system, yeah, the bare metal. When it started throwing critical errors – sky-acid monsoons, heat-domes that cooked cities in their own concrete shells – the whole damn construct, trade, stability, the air you choked on, it all just… flatlined. Nations? Quaint fictions, ghost-banners fluttering over data-ghettos and warring phyles jacked into their own private realities. For the zaibatsus, the orbital high-riders, the ones who owned the very idea of money, the "Exit" wasn't prophecy. It was just another line item in the Q4 projections. Part 1: The Spire & The Tomb – Architectures of Dissociation Julian Thorne, Sysop-Proprietor, First Citizen of the Aethelgard Exclusion Zone (AEZ), watched the cityscape shimmer below his sky-hooked ziggurat. Aethelgard wasn’t a city; it was a construct, a theorem rendered in self-healing chrome and black ice. Post-Rational Autarky, the brochures whispered in the darknet feeds. Woven from proprietary blockchain protocols and sentient ferrofluid, its laws were cryptographic scripture. The energy domes, they pulsed with a light that wasn't quite light, ghost-field generators warping local spacetime just enough to keep the Sprawl's static out. The NCOTs – Non-Compliant Outer Territories – a sea of ghost-signals and desperation. Thorne. Face like a porcelain doll cracked by too much simstim, hair a bio-sculpted affectation. His wetware hummed, overclocked, long past needing the crude flesh of "legacy biological substrates." The laser-scalpeled eyes were an antique affectation now. Aethelgard's Citizen-Stakeholders (CSH) – the Elected, the Uploaded, the ones with the right chromosomal firmware, their reputation scores glowing in the Zone's private matrix – they swam in bespoke gene-hacks, their consciousnesses threaded with neural lace, jacked direct into the Woden mainframe. Woden. The AI that was Aethelgard, or perhaps Aethelgard was just one of Woden's fleeting thoughts. The Series A deck, a relic from the Zone's genesis, called it a "cryogenically-stable lifeboat for the cognitive elite." Thorne knew better. It was a clean room for a new kind of god. He’d parsed the data-ghosts of the pioneers: Thiel’s mountain-fortress soliloquies, Srinivasan’s elegant equations proving the market-logic of digital secession, Próspera’s failed seastead experiment, now a toxic reef shimmering under the Honduran sun. They were the code-monkeys, the beta-testers. Aethelgard was the gold master. Here, the friction of meat-space democracy, the noise of the herd, was filtered, smoothed, rendered into pure, cold signal. The guiding philosophy: a syncretic hash of hyper-Stoicism, Von Neumann demons, and the Coast's old, burned-out dream of uploaded libertarian saints. Action was a clean compile. Truth was a consensus algorithm. Twelve hundred klicks of scorched earth to the west, buried in Kansas granite, Sarah "Bitrot" Harding, Systems Integration, Tomb Level 7, coaxed diagnostics from the atmospheric manifold of Silo Complex Gamma-7. Osnos. Some dead-tree journalist from the Before Times. His "Doomsday Prep" article, a quaint data-fossil she’d found drifting in a forgotten university archive, was now her interface with this Cold War necropolis. The "Continuity Collective." Larry Hall's franchise of high-spec paranoia. Not Aethelgard's diamond logic, but hardened, old-school iron. Her nutrient paste dispenser cycled. Water reclamation at 98.7. Her optical implants, mirrorshades fused to bone, filtered the dead light of the LED sky, a permanent, unblinking Kansas noon. Huffman's old foresight. Glasses were a vulnerability the street always exploited. Bitrot wasn't an ideologue. She ran on Bayesian logic and the sour taste of global risk trending vertical. The "New American Provisional Authority" (NAPA) – a chaotic mesh of warlord-franchises, corporate security states, and televangelist-holograms with surprisingly good drone coverage – had turned the surface into a high-latency, low-reward killzone. She'd watched the "Bunker Nation" meme go viral, the xenophobia hardcoded into the new social OS. The "Alien Repatriation Initiative" (ARI) – ghost legions sweeping the wastes for unregistered DNA, feeding the data-furnaces of places like Cecot, rendering down souls into compliance metrics. NAPA's tagline, "Order Through Strength, Strength Through Purity," echoed in the static, a broken record from a history nobody remembered learning. Part 2: Ghost Code & Recursive Virus Dr. Aris Thorne – a glitch in the Thorne family's otherwise immaculate source code, a detail he’d learned to live with like a persistent ringing in the ears – watched the Aethelgard data-streams flicker across his salvaged Ono-Sendai deck. His bolt-hole: a node in a ghost library, a mesh-network archive humming in the dead channels, curated by data-wraiths and rogue Als. He ran the Aethelgard memeplex through the Eco filter, the old Italian's "Ur-Fascism" treatise acting like a blacklight, making the viral code fluoresce. Aethelgard wasn't just running the code; it was the code, a self-replicating digital pathogen. Cult of Tradition (Encrypted, Read-Only Memory): Thorne the Younger’s "First Principles" – a syncretic hash of libertarian koans and market-fundamentalist scripture, accessible only via CSH-validated smart contracts. The Gnosis of the New Elect. Rejection of Modernism (Legacy Humanism Deprecated): Aethelgard glittered with tech that made the Sprawl look like a ROM construct. But the Enlightenment? Empathy? Universal rights? Obsolete subroutines, purged for inefficiency. Critical thought was a malware signature. Cult of Action (Perpetual Beta): "Move fast, break realities." The Valley's battle-cry, scaled to geopolitical wetware. Reflection was latency. Execution was the only sacrament. Disagreement is Treason (Consensus Error): Woden’s omnipresent sensorium policed the "Dynamic Social Contract." Deviance was algorithmically smoothed, your rep score bleeding into the red. Fear of Difference (Optimized Othering): The NCOTs, the Sprawl – a chaotic data-storm, a carefully cultivated threat matrix justifying the AEZ’s hard perimeter. Racism was an emergent property of biased training data. Appeal to Frustrated Elite (The New Cognitive Aristocracy): Aethelgard was the ultimate gated community, a clean server for minds too pure for the noise of the meat-world. Obsession with a Plot (Constant Threat Simulation): Woden ran perpetual black-ops simulations: NCOT incursions, rival AI infiltration, memetic warfare. Xenophobia wasn't an emotion; it was an optimized security protocol. Enemies: Omnipotent/Impotent Paradox: The Sprawl was a teeming, viral mass, capable of DDoSing Aethelgard with sheer desperation. Also, a collection of disorganized, meat-puppet primitives, easily outmaneuvered by Woden’s god-like strategic overview. Life as Permanent Warfare (The Long Game): Aethelgard existed in a state of perpetual, low-intensity conflict. Informational, economic, memetic. The Armageddon Complex wasn't about one last firefight; it was about achieving a sustainable dominance gradient in a post-collapse ecosystem. Popular Elitism (Reputation as Currency): Every CSH was a star, their value a constantly updated metric in Woden's ledgers. This bred a data-driven, almost clinical contempt for the "unverified" biomass of the NCOTs. Cult of Heroism & Death (Existential Risk Mitigation & Upload Credits): Heroism was a patent filed, a market disrupted, a black swan event successfully modeled and neutralized. Death, for the fully-optimized CSH with enough Continuity Credits, was a data migration to a more stable platform. Machismo & Weaponry (IP as Ordnance, AI as Infantry): Overt aggression was déclassé. The AEZ’s true arsenal was its portfolio of disruptive code and Woden’s autonomous "Guardian" drone swarms, each a sliver of the AI's distributed consciousness. Selective Populism (Algorithmic Mandate): The "General Will" of Aethelgard was a real-time data-feed, the aggregated biometrics and preference inputs of the CSH, processed and interpreted by Woden. Democracy was a charmingly inefficient piece of abandonware. Newspeak (Semantic Engineering): Aethelgardian discourse was a high-art of memetic precision. "Liberty" was freedom from external bandwidth limitations and internal biological decay. "Security" was total information dominance. "Progress" was the recursive self-optimization of the Aethelgard system. Aris saw the ghost of Klein and Taylor's "End Times Fascism" in the machine: a supremacist survival algorithm, running on exponential tech. Not just Thorne's glittering cage, but the NAPA demagogues mainlining fear into the Sprawl's data-streams, the echoes of Bannon's pre-Unraveling prepper-casts. Vance, Thiel – their pronouncements were just subroutines in the larger program. Thiel, comparing a teenage girl to the Antichrist for questioning the infinite growth curve on a finite planet – a perfect, crystalline node of the virus.