Share
Disarchy

Quasi-empire in Crucis, stretching from the Middle Regions to the Periphery

Disarchy
Image from Steve Bowers
The Disarchy Region lies to coreward and to anti-spinward of the Inner Sphere

The Crucis Corridor

In the wake of the Version War settling the NoCoZo-Negentropy Alliance border was a complicated and fractious issue, further confused by the presence of the Paradigm, Corambytia Protectorate and especially the "NoCoNeg", the sizable chunk of former NoCoZo systems that had been successfully conquered by the Alliance during the war. The region was currently under intense cultural change and a constant source of internal and external conflict. As part of a number of peace treaties, the ComEmp guardian systems were allowed to set up the Crucis Corridor to help resolve the situation. The Crucis Corridor was a largely artificial political entity, little more than a number of stargate links defended by ComEmp legal fleets.

As the NoCoZo and Negentropy Alliance had resolved their most pressing border and protocol disputes through the ComEmp, they began to turn outwards again. In the vast volumes in the rough Centaurus direction there were many independent societies, defector cultures, undiscovered colonies and unlinked fragments of the former empires. Also, much of the volumes officially claimed as part of the empires were in practice totally independent and disconnected, often having developed into their own powers. As the empires began to extend outwards they had to deal with the fragmentation.

While the NoCoZo solved the fragmentation by lucrative trade offers and where they failed, simply by ignoring the recalcitrant systems, the Negentropy Alliance quickly found itself colliding with the fragments and their cultures. Especially troublesome was the TrueModel.

The TrueModel

The TrueModel was an AI led theo-plutocracy at least officially striving towards Hyperevolutionary Transcendence (the massive use of autoevolving systems in matters of policy and religion) and in practice expanding their own stargate empire inwards from the Centaurus direction. It had emerged as an old AI colony culture (possibly of dissident Keterist origin) had turned expansionist sometime during the 4700's and begun to recruit other local powers into their high-technology economy. It was pluralist, radical like the Oshi-Durtam Web and clearly seeing its manifest destiny to out-evolve all the old empires. It had enough ideas similar to Keterism and Negentropism ideas to make it uncomfortable to the Alliance.

For a long period the NoCoZo, Alliance and TrueModel played a complicated dance of interstellar politics. The NoCoZo gladly traded with the TrueModel and attempted to use it to waste Alliance energy, but was vary of its expansionism and overtures to NoCoZo worlds to join a new evolutionary alliance rather than the old treaties. The Negentropy Alliance saw the TrueModel as a direct threat, and did its best to convince local powers about this. The TrueModel exploited the Alliance-NoCoZo rivalry while convincing lesser powers that it was the solution to their political problems.

In 5434 the TrueModel line-layer ships reached the Crucis Corridor and it began significant trade with the inner sphere. It exploited the ComEmp protocols flawlessly, quickly gaining much influence over the Corridor as the ComEmp systems, feeling the waning support from the Empires, desperately tried to find new supporters. Dissidents, heretics and neophiles from the inner sphere emigrated outwards to the new territories in or beyond the TrueModel. Relations with the Negentropy Alliance cooled quickly, and when in 5984 the Corridor Political Logistics Node decide to become a fully accredited True Model Selector the Alliance declared the old Corridor pacts null. Everybody braced for the war that was sure to follow.

To everyone's surprise the Negentropy Alliance instead made a peace offer: they offered the TrueModel to become a member of the Alliance, with favorable legal and administrative status. The offer - being the life work of the great Negentropist diplomat and ahimsite visionary Alecha Canizares of Arnon Dar, was surprising to everyone, and when the TrueModel accepted the local political landscape suffered a tectonic shift. The Negentropy Alliance now had extended and straightened its border with the NoCoZo, gained remote stargate links to the far edges of the frontier and had extended its volume outwards enormously. It was a major defeat for the NoCoZo.

The coup was however not entirely painless. Several of the TrueModel member subclades and member systems Selectors explained that they saw the alliance as an evolutionary dead end. These hyper-evolutionist clades announced they had tired of their flirtation with the wearying and dull-witted Negentropists and their restrictive adolescent rules and regulations. These TrueModel systems had been previously trading with the NoCoZo, and in a sense represented a third position equally removed from both those inner sphere empires. Having left the Negentropist-TrueModel alliance, they became known as the Neutral Way. Although of very little military, or economic significance, they did and still do remain a thorn in the Negentropist side by every so often inviting NoCoZo envoys and sign trade treaties just at the time when it was guaranteed to cause maximum annoyance to the Alliance.

An interesting development involved the Neutral Way clade Durrel Inheritors of Varnerkaspi, which in 6011 became suddenly withdrawn and non-communitive until 6048, when they suddenly emerged in a fleet of halo-drive craft and departed at relativistic velocity for the galactic core.

Negentropist problems did not end with the Neutral Way. Due to the treaty-structure of the TrueModel they could simply leave the alliance at any time, and several dissident Negentropy systems (including some mere nations in the NoCoNeg!) exploited legal loopholes to join the TrueModel defectors just before they left and hence became formally independent entities. Others alligned themselves with the Neutral Way. Forced to choose between the wealth of alliance versus keeping the dissatisfied and embarrassing systems, the Alliance chose to let them go.

Over the next century there was an increasing call from the Extensionist Party of Ruprecht to forcibly repacify the seceeded systems, which it saw as bringing down humiliation on the entire Alliance. This conservative and military faction gained in power until the the AI Landar of Paratt intervened and expelled them from power in a bloodless coup.

Some of the extensionists continued a campaign of sabotage and terrorism in the region, ironically helping forge a working law enforcement cooperation between the TrueModel and Alliance.

The Disarchy

The next 500 years saw the entire region undergoing tremendous shifts as minor clades emigrated elsewhere, newly independent systems formed their own federations, the old independents asserted their local strength towards both the old empires and the newcomers, the NoCoZo and TrueModel/Alliance attempted to open trade/political links with them and many of the radicals that had emigrated during the opening of the Corridor absolutely refused to have anything to do with anybody. Several bushfire wars and incidents occurred as the Alliance attempted to expand, and the NoCoZo found itself dealing with a jungle of more or less isolationist and nonstandard economies. The region was largely ungovernable for the remote empires. It became known as the Disarchy.

The TrueModel settled in as a part of the Negentropy Alliance, continuing its expansionism but now mainly outwards. Several further TrueModel factions seceded from the alliance and formed small empires of their own, including the Insculpta Cosmogony, Integrality, Langa Radiation, Harper & Vanni Endeavor, Deptkent clade, taking a number of regional Negentropist colonies and minor worlds, including Kawabe, Pentericci, Tzuking, and Wal Firback, with them. Although most of these defections did not do further harm (although the loss of important regional worlds were bad enough), the defection by the Evrard Freebeings was associated with the notorious Disarchy Alliance, in which the entire Negentropist world of Gillbank instead of actually defecting, declared itself the Disarchy Alliance, led by the Postscripts of Randomness. It was a deliberate parody of Negentropism. While the Alliance prank was merely a formal joke (with several million willing participants) it also reflected that the Negentropy Alliance was not being taken seriously in the region. It also helped popularise the term Disarchy for the region, and to this day jokes about the immensely powerful and mysterious Disarchy Alliance circulate.

Another prank or deliberate offence was committed by Neutral Way gene hackers, who distributed flower seeds containing the precepts of negentropy encoded in their DNA. They distributed them with the slogan: "Plant them and see what the Precepts will evolve into!" - a serious offence to orthodox Negentropists.

Although pranks and subversions of this nature once again caused ill-feeling and suspicion among local Negentropist governments, and once again heightened xenophobic and anti-TrueModel feeling, especially among the common sentients, who were most susceptible to TrueModel pranks, the Negentropist cyborg statesbeing Malhotra Castander of the Siow-Wang Circle of Ratay's World welcomed this process by predicting (correctly as it turned out) that the remaining TrueModel aioid clades would be more inclined to accept standardisation with the main body of the Negentropist Alliance.

And as predicted, both TrueModel expansionism and defections waned over the next five centuries, as the remaining Negentropist TrueModel elements instead turned more towards both standardization with the rest of the Alliance and towards developing new forms of evolution in accordance with the Precepts.

The Disarchy Today

The Disarchy today is a vast volume stretching outwards from Lynga 2, with a rough boundary running towards Feinstein 1 and the SN 1006 nebula, but with many incursions Solwards. Gillbank remains the formal capital world, but like so many other things about this quasi-empire, this has a large element of parody.

Some notable affiliates are Evermore, the Mensa Federation, the Velarian Confed, the Locality of Wolfra and the Eudoxa Clade. The region is dotted with a few old wormhole links and the now independent parts of the old True Model nexus, but most is isolated by relativist travel.

The Velarian Confed, a primitive bioid federation, has been steadily disintegrating in a bloody relativist civil war which has several times spilt over into neighboring volumes, especially the more peaceful Mensa Federation. Negentropic diplomats (most notably the honored Keilen of Gegton) have been trying to create a working armistice with some limited success, but the complexities of Disarchy politics makes many doubt that it will last.

The Locality of Wolfra is the largest organised polity in the region, a loose association of worlds united by a group of emigrant former TrueModel and NoCoZo dissident AIs; these AI-plutocrats have set up a local oligarchy that allows them to pursue their own designs in peace.

The Disarchy as a confederation has a long standing defence and technology-sharing compact with the Premacy, a NoCoZo gas-giant clade based around the world Ozymandias in Vela.

Disarchy Citizens
Image from Juan Ochoa
Disarchy Citizens

 
Related Articles
 
Appears in Topics
Middle Regions/Hinter-regionsMinor PolitiesOuter Volumes
 
Development Notes
Text by Anders Sandberg
M. Alan Kazlev
Initially published on 20 October 2000.

 
 
>