BY LETTER
Aryan Morningstar League
Late Information Age eugenics organisation | |
 Image from Steve Bowers | |
| Phobos, site of the last AML colony | |
The millstone around the neck of early transhumansFor every good idea there is someone, or some group, that wishes to pervert that idea to its own end, the idea of transhumanity was one of unlimited growth for humanity, one of a betterment of all mankind with new technologies, new ideas, new ideologies and perhaps most of all new ways to be Human.
— Abrogast V (transhumanism historian, 288 AT)
The boil on the butt of transhumanity
— NikkyB (Transhuman Shockjok and stand up comedienne, 94 AT)
However within a few years of its founding, other groups with far more sinister intentions attached themselves to the bandwagon. One of the most reviled by legitimate transhuman organisations, and yet one of the most recognised by the general public, was the Church of the Caucasian Morningstar, aka Aryan Morningstar League (or AML).
Based in part on a misinterpretation of classic humanism, the AML were dedicated to breeding a superior human, in line with eugenic procedures, the superiority of this human to be determined by IQ. (the kind of tests used being ambiguous with poor controls)
Obsessed with dysgenic practices, that they claimed were rapidly eroding human IQ, despite evidence of the Flynn effect, their loud and generally obnoxious behavior led them to the public eye. Their act of labelling themselves as a transhumanist organisation led to the entire transhumanist movement to being branded, by association, as a bunch of wacko practitioners of a discredited science.
"...your movement lacks any kind of imagination your ideas are simple minded, your principles incomplete and severely lacking in detail, and you have absolutely, despite your repeated claims, nothing to do with transhumanism."
"We are the only true transhuman organisation, we are the ones creating a new society, we do not place faith in unproven technologies or un-divine machines, we pragmatically use what is available now to create the future."
"Nanotech exists, admittedly in labs, but even Richard Smally now admits GA's are a good possibility, and AI's are a too good idea not to be. Their potential when combined could create a utopia of unlimited growth for all mankind. Your nineteenth century ideology will create a static society, where only your chosen will be able to exercise basic human rights."
"Eugenicists will always be attacked by the ignorant and stupid.."
"You mean to say you won't restrict voting and reproduction to your chosen ones, yet it's right there in your charter.. You really are a pack of tossers aren't you, oh wait, wasting your vital bodily fluids and the sacred genome contained within would be immoral wouldn't it."
— Part of a CNNet webcast between Aryan Morningstar Leaguist Nedry Wilcox and WTA member Dr. Ben Higginbottom Oct 2032 (63 a.t.).
Threatened with the destruction of transhumanist ideas, the other groups struck back with every tool at their disposal, the most effective tool being an early and incomplete memetic theory. Memetics along with nanotech, AI, space exploration, MVT and countless other transhuman technologies having been rejected by the AML as being irrelevant to the creation of their version of Homo Superior. Although this memetic attack was only partially successful, unbranding the transhumanist movement as eugenicists, but not undermining the memes contained within their dogma. It is still studied today by military strategists as an early use of memetic warfare.
As the second century of the twentieth millennium began to dawn, Aryan Morningstar League was deservedly stuck in the same position of the Ku Klux Klan of a century before, little more than bigots and terrorists as a large number of attacks against the digitally illiterate had been associated with them. However their fortunes were to regrettably take a turn for the better.
The increasing development of turing grade AIs, provolved animals, neural interfaces, and new cross-species genemods caused anxiety among the technological disenfranchised and religiously conservative, resulting in a rise in traditionalist, luddist, and anti-progress sentiment. The AML movement was able to capitalize on this with their creed of humanocentric stasism and "free love". Combining with various supremacist groups and anti-progress coalitions, and with their new wealth, the League became an influential special interest group in various government circles, again becoming a major threat to the future so desired by Transhumanists and Libertarians.
Their victory was short-lived however. By 124, a cabal of AI's had all but bankrupted the League, their leadership arrested for tax evasion, their political power evaporating overnight. Their members were left scratching their heads, wondering what had happened.
Again they returned to the category of the terminally clueless, until 143, when a new leadership gained control of the movement, claiming that they had wandered from their true goal, of founding a homeland and breeding Homo Superior. A number of Transhumanist groups, prone to baiting the AML, pointed out that Homo Superior had already existed for over twenty years, despite being refused the taxonomic classification. It came to no-ones surprise when they denounced all of the Superior as sick perversions, created with dark sciences and impure genes.
Using the mess of the treaty that was the Luna Exploitation Agreement, the AML (now calling themselves the Church of the Caucasian Morningstar) were able to secure an abandoned mining camp and claim squatters rights to the surrounding area. Using a front company, extraterritorial status was granted by their few remaining political friends in the UN. Renamed Galton, after the founder of the modern eugenics movement, 25,000 members of the church moved there in 145 after an extensive rebuilding program using public domain automation.
Almost all contact with Galton then ceased, and the microstate became isolated from contact with the outside world. Galton became a joke, a story to scare Superior children.
-Hey Mycroft, you're working for the Luna States, what are the AML up to?-
-Get this, they initially set up their society based on a model derived from bonobos, because they have 98% genetic compatibility. That has, of course, fallen apart. Now its mostly a theocracy, where the high priests bless the most fetching women with their genetic code. The poor kids are raised communally, which basically means their looked after by the killjoyed worker class, whilst being brainwashed with basic memetics. Their then sterilized at ten, and put to work or sold to Korp types if they don't meet the criteria.-
-Slavery, meatshit, what baselines do to each other...-
-They're also trying to create combat biorgs and designer plagues targeting IQ, not to mention stealing genomes of anyone they consider desirable, oh yes they also sainted Heppe along with Galton and Darwin. Of course under the Luna States privacy bill, I don't know any of this, and neither do you.-
-Sure, but what of their Homo Superior?.-
-Look up a comic book from the late C20, called Preacher, take a look at the descendants of Jesus Christ, now combine that with osteoporosis because the calcium hack is considered immoral modification of the sacred genome.-
-Uh..Turing, I wish I hadn't asked, but no calcium hack???-
-Well the priesthood have it of course, and it's a germline modification, so its filtering into the population, a real case of "do as I say, not as I do".-
— Conversation between HAL and Mycroft, from the 2208(239 a.t.) Nomic championships
Released by the Keter Historical Review 6309
Historical simulations conducted in 4527 by the MPA Transhumanist Preservation Society, show that the societal matrix rapidly fell into a rigidly hierarchical structure, based around a combination of a Theocracy and a Meritocracy. Children that were born in Galton were brainwashed into conformity, using pre-first toposophic memetics. All members of society were reversibly sterilized at ten, made permanent at twenty one if the person failed to pass doctrinal and IQ tests. Members joining from the outside were heavily memed into conformity. The social structure was remarkably simple, conforming to their baseline status:
Priesthood: The chosen, the blessed, the leaders of society. Chosen for their IQ and genetic purity, although their IQ's ranged in the 150-180 bracket, their education was for the most part extremely limited, concentrating on theology, philosophy and eugenics. Only the most devout were allowed to learn forbidden subjects such as memetics, genetic engineering and other sciences.
Breeders: Again selected for their IQ and genetic purity, this class were responsible for giving birth to new citizens and their upbringing. Considered a highly honourable role in society, the most revered being those chosen to carry the children of two members of the priesthood. Minimal education.
Workers: The Mules. Essentially slaves, responsible for maintaining Galtons infrastructure, be it washing dishes, refining He3 from the regolith or patching holes in the domes. These are the people who failed selection to one of the other castes on IQ or ideological grounds. IQ's ranged over 85-170, any "troublemakers" were killjoyed. Education was the absolute minimum required for their jobs, mostly based around ISO9000 documents.
Warriors: After 200 years of work, members of the priesthood were able to create extremely primitive combat biorgs, replacing members of the worker caste as the enforcers. Little is known of this caste as it was utterly destroyed in 377. Few records remain.
Little was known about Galton and the Church of the Caucasian Morningstar during this time, protected as they were by Lunas strict privacy laws. Still stories, carried by black market smugglers and AI manipulation leaked out. During meetings between planetary baseline governments and the AI/Transhumanist controlled Orbitals and off planet colonies, the Church's situation was frequently thrown into the Transhumans faces. Shamefully neither side bothered to investigate these stories further, considering the church to be either a corrupted baseline cult, that was a baseline problem, or the result of uncontrolled progress, and the transhumanists should clean up their own mess.
With the collapse of the Luna privacy laws in 227, and realising the effect of public exposure would have on their project, the Church of the Caucasian Morningstar essentially closed up Galton, moving to the heavily mined moon of Mars, Phobos. Phobos had essentially become the dumping ground for the systems ideologies, heavily mined during the Mars colonisation and already containing an extensive network of caverns, making it an easy conversion to a self sustaining biosphere. The lack of any central authority guaranteed privacy for their experiments. Other groups on Phobos at this time included the Varian Oliarchy, The French Government (in exile), The Logiarchy and the Nanocommunists. As well as numerous smaller groups, slowly dying out, such as The Family and The Cult of Kibo.
Sealing off all access tunnels to their section of Phobos, and refusing to use the main spaceport in the Angelina Stickney crater, Church of the Caucasian Morningstar seemed to drop of the face of the system, never in the news, and therefore didn't exist for the man in the street. Indeed the only time the Church came to public attention was in 282, with the attempted theft of genetic material from baseline genius Alexander Chandraisimlar, by a group of church sympathisers hoping to join the priesthood. Other instances of genome theft were covered up by various authorities.
The most interesting facet of Church of the Caucasian Morningstar society was its complete lack of culture, there were no church created symphonies, poems or works of literature. Indeed most forms of artistic expression were outlawed by the priesthood. Entertainment was in the form of reworked movies that had fallen out of copyright, now emphasising AML values. Only a few pieces of art were created by anyone outside of the priesthood, the most notable being by Katharine Wells, drawn secretly between the ages of 13 and 16, and apparently inspired by some form of outside contact. They vividly portray the despair felt by highly intelligent baselines, trapped in hideous surroundings. These pictures were apparently found by members of the priesthood, and as a result, at the age of 16 she was sold to a korp. However investigations later revealed that this korp was in fact one of the many fronts used by the early AI's, and that Kilburn emself might have contacted the young Ms Wells.
The three monkeys approach continued until early 377, when the Varian Oliarchy, a clone state with Spacer ties as well as being the strongest presence on Phobos, was attacked with a bioweapon. A combination of several necrotising viral strains crossed with the seemingly indestructible common cold, this unnamed disease swept through the tunnels and domes of the Oliarchy, in less than three hours. The Church immediately annexed this section, including the main spaceport, claiming that the Varian Oliarchy had committed numerous acts of war against their God, Aryus, including the theft of resources. Apparently the Oliarchy had been the first stop on an underground railroad, smuggling out escaped workers and children.
The indiscriminate use of bioweapons in a freeport brought a wave of anger and revulsion from all over the system, Hundreds of spying devices from dozens of organisations were aimed at Phobos, discovering that a genocidal campaign was underway against all the other occupants. In the meantime the AI's released the various documents they had created over the intervening centuries, causing yet more anger.
Two months later, a coalition of Transhumanist organisations attacked the Church's stronghold, for the first time transhuman military technologies were tested in actual combat. Spacer special ops teams accompanied by retrofitted mining cyborgs stormed the tunnels and domes of Phobos. Crude and re-purposed disassembler replicating swarms assisted in securing the surface while orbiting ships and AKV's, equipped with high power energy weapons picked off any interceptors or escaping ships. During the fighting all of the Biorgs were killed, along with 95% of the priesthood and over 60% of the workers.
The remaining population were removed from the now unsafe complexes to the orbitals and Mars, undergoing a great deal of deprogramming and training in Solarian society under the care of the AI's. Children were adopted into numerous communities all over the system, the now de-memed adults mostly took places on outbound colony ships, or faded into the background. The remaining members of the priesthood, all members of their Homo Superior, were tried for the creation and use of bioweapons and sentenced to life imprisonment on The Pit, the MaxSec prison on asteroid habitat 12580Yootha.
Phobos was quarantined for ten years, and was sparsely populated until 622, when it was used as emergency living quarters for refugees from the GAIA expulsion. In 652 a particularly large AMAT colony ship was constructed from material mined from Phobos, leaving only a small remnant behind.
The remaining church groups, usually evangelical missionaries, were completely unable to recover from this blow, and rapidly factionalised into warring sects, some with as few as eight adherents.
The Aryan Morningstarist ideology, despite its quaint historical nature, is not entirely dead, certain remnant memes are still apparent in various biocentric and anthropocentric organisations and clades, mostly baseline and nearbaseline. Thankfully these memes are very weak, completely unable to cross the toposophic barrier, indeed today "Aryan Morningstar League" is a phrase used to describe an incredibly short sighted and unimaginative solution to a problem.
- Ken Ferjik University
- Department of Transhumanist Studies
- Virch 9657c**1 CE10,191
Related Articles
Appears in Topics
Development Notes
Text by Ben Higginbottom
Initially published on 13 October 2001.
Initially published on 13 October 2001.
