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Enif Prefecture - Perseus Middle Region |
The Enif Prefecture was an area of thirty or more major solar systems and thousands of habitats in the middle region of the Solar Dominion expansion into Pegasus, an area contested with the Metasoft Version Tree. It was based around the stable yellow supergiant star Enif, a sister star to both Sadelmelic in the Mutual Progress Alliance, and Sadalsuud in Keter. The Enif Prefecture was mostly lost in the Version War to Metasoft, and the distant Bellerophon Archipelago was cut off and abandoned for thousands of years (see appendix A)
Before the Version War, some prefectures of the Dominion of the Divine Sun, particularly the Enif Prefecture used subsophont aioid workers, often known as robots in other volumes, but known in these prefectures as "Shabtis" in reference to Old Earth prototypes.
Originally, in Ancient Egypt, on old Earth (Sol System), in certain high ranking Old Kingdom burials servants were found buried with their masters. It is not known if these were sacrifices, or more likely included when the servants died naturally, perhaps of age or disease, during the tomb construction.
This practice died out in later periods and a "magical" substitute for the servants were included. These small model servants were known as "Shabtis" and expected to do all the work in the afterlife. Some burials contained several hundred figures, often equipped with tools for working the fields. Typically 'Overseer' shabtis were also included to keep the magical workforce in check.
Much later, Solar Dominion Shabtis were created during an historical obsession with Ancient Egyptian matters, especially on Karnakk orbital in the Enif system and the surrounding volume.These semisophont slave devices were often smaller than human size, although some "overseers" were larger, and typically green or bronze in colour.
More than twenty worlds in the Enif prefecture suffered memetic subversion of their robot workers by Metasoft in the period prior to, and during the Version War, when the peculiar cult of "death" in the Enif prefecture allowed a unique form of invasion.
Dying was also a fashion statement in the Enif prefecture...
It is important to remember all sophonts and singularity transingularity entities in the Civilised Galaxy are potentially immortal. Everyone would have at least one back-up in storage (copy/upload, and geneprint if a biont) so if anything happens to them they can be resurrected in a nanocloned body (like medical insurance). Of course this only applies to pets, some societums (collections), and those who are "wild" but with access to tech.
But since we are talking about citizens of the Dominion (which implies a new category, the "zar" - the freebeing or sir/madam or master/lady, the citizen of a sephirotic empire) everyone has most assuredly full access to complete high quality backups.
However the process of life retrieval/backup varies greatly from polity to polity. When an individual in a sephirotic empire choses to die and is uploaded in any way into the databanks e might be:
On choosing to die, the latest upload of the Citizen of the Prefecture in question was examined by the Balance. If the Balance determined that the upload in question was sufficiently 'light', it was allowed to reincarnate. If not, it was deconstructed into elements in the Derrida data banks (see appendix B), for a more integrated form of afterlife.
If there were multiple backups available, several of the most recent were 'judged' to determine the karmic path of the upload - has it been improving its balance? Or sliding down into the dark? - and this information was also utilized in determining whether it should be reborn or not...
The status gained by a sojourn in the Databanks, whether followed by reincarnation or not meant it was a popular choice at the end of a full lifetime, and was combined with a show of disposable income.
Wealthy Solarists could be buried with their Shabti when they chose to "die" - the robots were mostly about 10 cm tall, and it was seemly to have 401 of them, (ref New Kingdom Egyptian ushebti, with 365 workers and 36 overseers) though some people could only afford one, or none.
In 4543, all the deactivated votive robot Shabtis in the underground burial chambers were unexpectedly reactivated by airborne Metasoft viral subverters and came digging their way out of the ground- an event dramatised in the popular DocuHorror virch "They Came From The Tomb"...
Two thirds of the prefecture became Metasoft territory, including Enif, but after the War many vecs were casualties in the natural disaster of the Enif superflare (see Sadalmelic worldbook).The Solar Dominion sent what assistance it could and the reconstruction of the system helped cement the peace between the Dommies and the Droids. Enif is now a frontier system between aioid and bioid, but the old prefecture is still a politically sensitive and volatile area.
Free Shabtis can still be found on some of the liberated worlds that Metasoft kept after the war (as part of the general astropolitical redrawing of borders). The Version Tree used these subverted bots (which had been carefully cleaned of any Dominion sympathies) for memetic purposes, illustrating the difference between the Dominion exploiters and their own enlightened Version Tree where even subsophont rights are recognised.
[note - on the level of the first toposophic this "battle for hearts and minds", which continued well into the middle ComEmp period, was played out as an amusing and challenging game of memetic strategy. But for ordinary sapients this was all real. Minds of second toposophic and above did not seem interested, apart from a couple of observers and sociologists from FAS and one or two other sephirotic empires, who felt an obligation to record it all for posterity]
Appendix B
Derrida modelling: One process of reducing the storage requirements for sapient uploads. As a sentient is uploaded, it is 'deconstructed' into different weights of several million archetypes. That is, Joe Schmoe might be 0.4 tinkerer, 0.4 mechanic, 0.5 parent(male, positive archetype), 0.2 parent(male, negative archetype), etcetera. Note that the archetypes do NOT sum to a given total. This reduces the amount of storage drastically when trillions of beings are stored in a given ISO, for instance, requiring only the unique details of the being's life (date of birth, spouses' name, etc) to be encoded. Note that this does increase the amount of processing required, however, as the processors must integrate the various archetypes for each being instead of simply running a single program per being, but this can be a tradeoff which is acceptable especially as this cuts down the distance which must be travelled for information on a given being. Derrida modelling takes its name from the baseline philosopher Jaques Derrida, who was considered the founder of a school of philosophy called 'deconstructionism'. Deconstructionism figuratively breaks problems, objects, etc into their smallest coherent portions and attempts to address the whole in terms of answering each of the pieces. |
