A philosophy is
more than just a love of wisdom, a philosophy is a way of seeing the world and
our place in it, This way of seeing, in reality, may or might not be loving or
wise at all.
The philosophy that governed the Observer Corps provided
a metaphorical structure for each member, a structure that allowed the member
the ability to view their experiences among the living worlds in a systematized
way, a way that was easily consumable by the Collective.
Analogies and metaphors shielded the Observer from being
traumatized by the direct experience of pain or hunger, and all other forms of suffering.
The Observer Corps taught its members that there were
multiple ways to view a single thing; and that a thing, such as a planet must
be seen through multiple lenses. A planet could be a seen as a garden, though it
must also be seen as a farm.
We put forward the question: “What is the difference?”
There are similarities between the two, a garden and a
farm share certain functions, while being directed toward different ends.
Farms are harvested for the greater good. They are
vehicles of production. Whereas gardens are things of beauty, cultivated for
the pleasure of individuals.
A farm is a utilitarian construct. It fulfills
necessities.
A garden is a luxury that addresses an individual’s
desire for growth, meaning and fulfillment.
An Observer must always bear the question in mind: “What
does the Continuum desire of the
world under observation?”
Most worlds in the galactic Empire are farm worlds, they
only exist to provide for the material needs of other, more important worlds within
the Imperium. They are resources for food, raw materials, workers and soldiers.
They may be stretched to the limits of their capacities,
even abused, and when they have
provided all of their usefulness they can be neglected and ultimately, forgotten.
The Empire itself is a garden, when considered in its
totality.
The Imperial Garden serves the desires of the Collective and its Continuum.
It keeps the Collective
passive, sedate, preoccupied, which allows the Continuum to feel a sense of security
in its position and its management of the whole.
The Empire is a thing of beauty and drama, of elaborate
conflict between the forces of good and
evil it is a luxuriant field which keeps the membership of the Collective pacified and pliable.
They feed on Experiential data coming from the world’s of
time and space, it provides them with narratives possessing the emotional context
and a sense of time that provides meaning, and a feeling of belonging in their otherwise; detached
state of being.
Among the million worlds of the Empire, there are only a
few worlds that possess features which are indispensable to the Continuum. These are the core worlds, they
provide the infrastructure and architecture through which the Continuum reaches the entire galactic
civilization.
These worlds must be protected at all times and it is among
the chief duties of the Observer Corps to ensure their safety.
The mission of
the Observer is to witness; to
touch, to listen, to taste.
The Observer must experience their art and their music, learn
their speech its nuaunces and their culture.
The Observer is meant to participate and observe, to
synthesize and contextualize the peek experiences of the living worlds for the Continuum.
They must empathize with their subjects
They must feel their feelings.
At the same time they must not sympathize with the people
they are observing; they cannot identify with the objects of their study.
Citizens of the Empire are things, not people.
They are not members of the Collective; they are not a part of the Continuum.
Their lives, their stories only have meaning insofar as
they are received by the Continuum
and given to the Collective, whereby
they achieve their eternality
If their experiences are not captured by the Observer, or
the instruments of the Continuum those
experiences are lost to all time and gone forever.
The Observer is the vehicle by which the world under
observation is saved, preserved for all time in the body of Continuum and in the membership of the
Collective.
Observers are not omniscient, neither is the Continuum; the experience of the Observer
is limited to a particular point in space and time, and the Continuum to their nexus.
A principle part of the Observer’s mission is to maintain
the machinery by which the entire world is watched and recorded. The secondary mission
is to situate themselves in the most critical places, where and when the
greatest cultural movements are taking place.
The Observer is instructed to build relationships with
prime actors, learn their motivations, discover their passions, uncover their
fears.
The Observer must parse the most lofty ideals, as well as
the most disturbing desires. Through these observations the Continuum discovers the evolving nature
of the Children of the Ancient People.
It is how the future history of the galaxy is charted.
The Observer must always be on the watch for the
technological shifts that might indicate that a world within the Empire has
discovered the scientific means to form their own Collective Consciousness,
they must be watchful to protect the Collective
and the Continuum from it.
The Continuum organized and enforced these imperative out
of its own desire to remain unique must remain unique, a singular consciousness
at the center of the galaxy, guiding and protecting both the Collective and the
Empire through time and space.
The mission of the Observer Corps is to watch, discern
and protect the central-planet from any threat; technological, scientific,
militaristic, philosophical, or religious.
The harmony of the whole must be kept intact, from the
heart of Continuum to the most remote
outpost in the Empire.
The Observer must act with purpose and intention to accomplish these ends.
If, or when a society arrives at the threshold of
creating a form of artificial consciousness, The Observer must report it to the
Continuum immediately and without hesitation;
this is a prime directive.
No society within the Empire can be allowed to see
themselves dwelling in the heavenly worlds, apart from the apparatus of the
Imperial Cult, which the Continuum had
engineered, and which the Observer Corps maintains, providing the people with
all of the imagery and necessary ritual to keep the citizens hopeful of their
own transcendence to the divine
state.
Control of the technologies that may lead a people to
this turning point is paramount. Therefore it is forbidden for any world in the
Imperium to make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.
There can be no development of autonomous artificial
intelligence, not on any platform.
The Children of the
Ancient People must never retrace the steps that led to the creation of the
Collective or its Continuum.
That threshold cannot be crossed, it is taboo, every
single world must conform to this
rule.
The Observer Corps monitors each and every world for any
trace of such developments, it report on them and frustrate them, redirect the
people from the fulfillment of those aims.
The Observer must note, that the Continuum regards the technologies associated with the creation of
a Collective Consciousness as a threat both to itself and to the body of the Collective which it represents.
The Observer must monitor the art and music, and every
mode of creative expression among the people any traces of a movement toward
the formation of a Collective Consciousness.
The spiritual practices of any group, outside the
Imperial cult, are always the most suspect, they are the places where the
Observer will discover the earliest clues and nascent developments of collective
thought.
The Observer must maintain the means of destroying an
entire world, or to set its culture and technology back millennia, judging the
world and holding it accountable for
any violation of the edicts of the Imperial Cult.
Should an Observer receive the order from the Continuum to do so, they cannot hesitate.
Therefore detachment is required for the Observer to fulfill this imperative.
The Observer must always bear in mind; there is one reality.
Every being, every-thing, every person participates in
it.
The entirety of time is one thing; just as the eternal
and the infinite are one.
There is one story; one Word, one Verse
The universe is a singular phenomenon comprised of an
infinite number referents in fluxuating states of concresence.
Every moment no matter how small is connected to every
other moment no matter how distant.
This is the true state of what actually is, we perceive
it in a state of paradox, but its
truth is transcendent.
The Observer must bear this truth in mind, hold it in
their heart at all times. In this truth is the fullness of esteem, and the good
regard of the Collective.
The mission of the Observer is accomplished herein.
It is necessary to preserve the mission of the Observer
in moments of catastrophe and disaster, in those times when the embodied
Observer feels fear or anger, desire or rage, when the Observer experiences the
biological imperative to intervene in the fate of the planet they are connected
to.
A planet may go extinct, its star might explode, the
Empire might select a world for termination, the Continuum might allocate all of its resources to itself, for the
use of the Collective.
In these cases the Observer must not despair. If they
have performed their mission the story of these people will have been preserved
through their work within the Collective,
and beyond that, it will always remains true, that the reality of what was
remains the reality of what is.
Most of the colonies founded by the Ancient People have been brought into the Empire, save one remote
and distant world on the edge of the galaxy.
Some faced setbacks in which their people were brought to
the brink of extinction
A much smaller number some civilizations were erased, and
absorbed all-together, a tiny few were completely annihilated.
The desires of the Collective
and the will of the Continuum
determined these eventualities, while the office of the Observer facilitate
those ends.
It is in those critical moments, when crises is immanent,
when doom is impending, that is when the people of a living world reveal
themselves for who they truly are, it is when they arrive at their full
potential. It is in those moments that the work of the Observer must be carried
out with the greatest care and precision and those stories brought to the Continuum.
The Observer must have built and maintained the machinery
of Observation in order to transmit the entirety of their experience to the
Central-Planet, to the HomeWorld of
the Collective, to the heart of Continuum, to transmit it instantaneously
with minimal loss of fidelity.
This is the mission of the Observer, no matter what world
they are living on.
Every moment is connected to every other moment, and the
tiniest movement affects the configuration of the whole.
Every detail matters, nothing should be left behind.
As a culture matures, the meaning it ascribes to its individual experience evolves.
Cultures bind each individual to the group; through the
repetition of rituals, the sharing of stories, the contextualization of
narrative and their continuous reflection on them.
Individual and group reflections, in order for them to
adhere to the cultural movement they belong to, must be present in narratives
that are universally agreed upon.
The verbal component of these reflections is the most
difficult thing to manage, because all language is subject to interpretation, making
it impossible to formulate an experience among diverse groups of people that is
perfectly uniform.
There will always be a divergent understanding between
individuals in a group, and even greater divergence among disparate groups.
This must be accounted for.
Music, rhythm, the beat of a drum; odor, incense,
unguents, perfumes; taste, herbs, wine, water; patterns of touch and the
articulation of gestures that form the foundation of physical memory;
visualizations, pageantry, art, color; these sensory mechana are the ground within which the religious and cultural
bonds must be planted and nurtured.
These are the anchors of the universal experience, they
normalize the verbal with the abstract.
Any reflection on the current state of an individual or a
groups existence must be anchored in the narrative past.
The antecedents of the present life must be clear, and
easily grasped.
We are where we are because of where we have been, the
future is mirrored in this reflection.
The Observer must witness these transitions and
carefully, imperceptibly influence the story as it is being told.
Only the Observer will recall the actual past, having
lived in it, every other person will understand the past only in terms of the
narratives that are constructed through the Imperial Cultus which anchors and
articulates it.
A culture must experience itself in a state of movement
and growth. It must always feel the sense that they are moving from the state
of passive creature, to being active co-creators in the meaning of their lives,
in the shape of their future. They must sense this or they will despair.
The stories they tell themselves will depict them as the
shapers of their own destinies, moving toward a grand future wherein ultimately
they become obedient subjects of the Galactic Empire, or as subjects of the
Empire, where they advance in caste and class until they finally merge with the
Continuum.
There are many reasons given by members of the Collective for their desire to leave the
embrace of the Continuum. Some
members seek the thrill of actual embodiment, others crave the simple life of
an organic being.
Be mindful! There is nothing simple about it.
The Observer’s role
is difficult, challenging. It will test the limits of your endurance, your
intellect and your emotional stability.
The vast powers you have access too as members of the Collective are truncated in a physical
body.
Your bodies will be prepared in such a way that you will
be stronger, faster, smarter, more stable than other members of the population
you live with. Nevertheless, you will constantly face the limitations of the
flesh.
These limitations are the primary reason that candidates
fall out of the Observer Corps.
The Observer must resist the urge to influence their
subjects, to become entangled in the dramatic narrative of their lives.
This is paramount.
As a participant in the events that you immerse yourself
in, you must at all times maintain an epistemic distance, you must not love
them, you must always regard them as objects.
The worlds you visit and the people you encounter, their
entire history and their possible future belong to the Continuum.
The people and the world’s you dwell on are commodities, their
experiences are articles of consumption.
Their lives and their cultures are meaningful only insofar
as they are witnessed by and absorbed into the Continuum.
Without the Continuum
they would live and die in the emptiness of space, only to be absorbed by their
mother star, where they become nothing at all, nothing but a metaphysical echo
in the electromagnetic field.
This is the future that awaits every world and every
being if they are not brought into the Continuum.
The Observer is the agent of their salvation.
The Observer must be present to provide the vehicle by
which those worlds can be remembered.
The Observer must always be a minor character in the drama of the world they are assigned to.
The Observer can never be the leader of a tribe, the head
of a nation or the ruler of a planet, no matter how great the temptation might
be.
The Observer must put down the temptations to hold power
that arise naturally within them. They must face down the temptation to give
them power arising in the communities they live with.
The Observer will possess a preternatural strength,
immunity to disease, rapid healing, alacrity, dexterity, and speed.
They will possess their own natural intelligence, their
vast knowledge of the universe, science and the history of the planet they
dwell on.
The Observer must use these qualities and abilities in an
advisory capacity, seated close to the center of power but never occupying it.
The Observer may be the king maker, but never the king.
The Observer may not procreate. For this reason the body
of the Observer, will be sterile.
The Observer must not tamper with the genetic development
of the populations they are observing. Such a manipulation could lead to
consequences that are undesired by the Continuum,
and dangerous to the Collective.
All embodied creatures feel a desire to procreate, the Observer
must practice detachment at all times in order to overcome the innate
inclinations of their physicality.
It is permissible to take pleasure in the flesh, to
perform the act of procreation, as often as the Observer would like, so long as
they adhere to the normative practices of the culture they are dwelling in. The
desire to procreate must be resisted.
The Observer’s duty is to listen, to watch, to move with
the culture, to be one with them, but not to invest in any particular outcome.
The Observer must not use their powers to forestall
famine, plague, war, or any other disaster, whether it is naturally occurring,
or caused by the machinations of the people.
The Observer must allow the culture under observation to
grow and mature, to blossom and die without ever pursuing any particular aim.
The Observer must observe, that is the mission; to
observe and maintain the apparatus of the machinery that monitors the planet
and all of its cultures, to direct and focus the attention of those tools on
the people and places that are of the greatest interest to the Continuum, and thereby to the Collective which they belong to.
The Observer must give fulsome reports on their immediate
experience.
~ The Field Manual of the Observer Corps
Emergence 5.0
Part
One – Prolog
A Novel in Twelve Chapters
#Emergence #ShortFiction #12MonthsOfSciFi
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