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Sleeper Monks, The

Sleeper Monks
Image from Steve Bowers

The moon of Nuinamar in the Faust system is officially aligned with the Negentropy Alliance, and is home to an organisation of Negentropic adherents commonly known as the Sleeper Monks. The Sleeper Monks aren't a religious sect, and the official name of their organisation is Custodians of the Biological Trans-Temporal Information Storage (BiTTIS), but the traditional robe-like garments of Nuinamar, along with the general misconceptions amongst the rest of the Sephirotic citizens concerning the religious content of the Negentropic philosophy, serves to spread the religious sounding name. The Biological Trans-Temporal Information Storage project was founded around 3000 a.t., and the current organisation of custodians established around 3500 a.t. The BiTTIS project consist of several thousand secure nano-stasis tubes storing volunteers born as far back as the Federation era.

The oldest volunteer is Johan Clarke, born in 880 a.t., and thus close to 10,000 years old, over 9500 of which he has spent in various forms of stasis. The BiTTIS project provides free storage for the volunteers, in an environment as protected against entropic deaths as possible. Klarr, a third singularity AI, watches over the facility. In exchange the volunteers are awakened for a year approximately every 100 years to tell about the past, and receive information of what has happened since their last awakening.

The purpose of the project is actually not so much to store information, which sites like the newly opened Gurth Hexanode Repository handle much better, but to determine which events are memorable to a sentient being who has experienced several thousand years of history. The custodians are responsible for the running of the BiTTIS project, including maintenance of the facilities, interviews of the awakened, updating the information system used by the awakened for assimilation of new knowledge, and gathering as much new knowledge as possible. For this last purpose Klarr has free access to the Gurth Hexanode Repository, the Central Information Archive and the Encyclopaedia Galactica, among others.

Similar to the BiTTIS project are the Sophont Digital Information Interpretation project which stores the minds of digital beings for the same purpose as the BiTTIS project. According to official records, the SoDII project has several transapient minds in storage, as well as modosophont minds.
 
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Development Notes
Text by Thorbørn Steen
Initially published on 05 March 2008.

 
 
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