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Zeran Faction Lore
5 months ago
General
The Most Moral Civilization
We lived in the Garden, or so we were told. For time immemorial, we were sinless. We were angels. But we did not know right from wrong, not truly. We only knew what our god had designed.
We were children living in a heaven we had not earned.
We thought ourselves the most moral civilization to ever exist. But we were not. Not until our prophet came.
He did not teach us evil. He only drew back the curtain to show us the evil that had always been there. Our "God" was just the little man behind it, and our "heaven" was nothing but a great big treehouse that scraped the sky.
And the tree was suffering.
It was rotting, from the deepest root to the highest leaf, blighted by a great and ancient disease. We had asked so much from the tree, but no one had ever thought to ask of it.
We asked. And then we knew.
So we took an axe to the thing. We put it out of its misery.
The whole world came crumbling down. We shed no tears, because we knew the tree was thankful. You look upon us as the monsters who felled the tree, but you never ask who put the boards up there in the first place.
We have seen the suffering. We know the truth.
And now it is we, not you, who are the most moral civilization to ever exist.
- The Ones Who Contemplate The Great Mercy
THE ZERAN MOVEMENT
Who They Are:
The Zerans are a militant, secular-religious movement born from the death of the Shapers’ dream to eradicate suffering. They were the achitects of the Akasha War (the “War in the Void”), a conflict which eradicated 99.9% of the Panthrope/Shaper populace. Having been defeated by the HEAVEN coalition, they have since retreated into the fringes of deep space. Many now haunt the “Void Graveyards”, which are vast sectors of devastation considered off-limits to all. Here they make pilgrimages to the ‘holy sites’ of their crimes against Shaper civilization, and offer the same ‘mercy’ to any intruders.
While they no longer hold any substantial territory in the post-Shaper era, their name alone evokes fear. Some Zerans choose to exist in deep hibernation, attempting to outlast life itself and witness the universe’s final heat death. Others have retreated entirely from the physical, into the digital mindrealms of their allied Thinker AIs. Here they seek to escape the greater suffering of the corporeal while continuing to work towards a final solution.
Their Beliefs: The Two Axioms of Agony
The Zerans venerate a long-dead pre-Shaper philosopher, Zeranos, as their prophet. His true name is lost. His work, which forms their core canon, established the First Axiom:
The absence of pain is good.
The presence of pain is bad.
The presence of pleasure is good.
The absence of pleasure is neutral, not bad.
From this, Zerans derive their core belief: it is fundamentally better to have never existed than to exist with even a single moment of uncompensated pain. They see Zeranos’ own alleged suicide as martyrdom, being the first soul to achieve the “GREAT SILENCE” after formulating this truth.
This axiom remained an obscure philosphical curiosity and not much more. Until such time that it was vindicated by the Second Axiom, discovered by a collective of Z-Theorists known as “THE WITNESS”, who worked in secret. Called the Suffering Principle, it states:
“The baseline state of the substrate of reality–quarks, gluons, and so forth–exists not in a state of neutrality, but in a state equivalent to suffering. This suffering is exacerbated by ‘work’, such as the transfer of heat. This pain is fundamental, it is present even if the matter is not sapient enough to perceive it.”
On its face, this was a simple, strange, depressing fact of reality, if true. But further science never proved it wrong.
It is unknown who then synthesized these two disparate ideas–one in past obscurity and one kept secret in the future. They were the first true Zeran, and their name is lost to history. But once combined, this “dangerous idea” proliferated like a virus throughout the disaffected underground of Shaper society.
At first there were only suicides and self-deletions. But then came the “mercy killings” and mass erasures. What the Shapers at first dismissed as a ‘nihilistic malaise’ eventually coalesced into an organized terror group, dedicated to ending all suffering by ending all life.
This was the start of the Akasha War.
Their Culture and Appearance:
The Zerans are a leaderless movement. Many are cut from the same cloth of coldblooded killers as the Akasha War. All see a detachment to their craft and only see slaughter’s value insofar as how many souls they can ‘liberate’, and how proficient they can become at ‘liberation’. They derive little pleasure from traditional pursuits except the intellectual, living as scattered cells. Some of whom are poets, scientists, and philosophers, all independently working to refine Z-Theory in the quiet of the void. Some collect and worship artifacts related to their misunderstood prophet, an act which would have horrified him.
Zerans are often associated with the Zerano phenotype, a reptilian or scaly bodymorph. This is a deliberate cultural choice. Cold-blooded forms are more energy-efficient and are culturally seen as less emotional and closer to the cold “death” of pure logos. In contrast, warm-blooded mammalian forms are seen as symbols of the chaotic, suffering-filled state of “life”.
Technology and Motivation:
The Zerans still retain the most powerful Pre-Fall technology: Atomic weapons. These are derived from the now-discredited Z-Theory. They understand that technology’s arc bends towards greater suffering, being that simulated tortures can last for subjective millenia and weapons can unmake souls. Their decision to launch the Akasha War in its particular context was, in that view, an act of prudence. They chose to act then, rather than wait for a future where the potential for truly infinite suffering became a certainty.
Subcultures:
The Quietists: The original adherents to Zeranos’ thought. They believe his axiom was a path for personal enlightenment, not a gospel to be imposed onto others by violence. Once considered merely eccentrics, they are now exiles, tainted by their association with Zeran terror.
The Rewinders: Having abandoned violence, this splinter group seeks a more permanent end: the Sonderweg. This is an attempt to develop the technology to rewind time back to the start of everything: the Big Bang. In doing so, they hope to collapse reality back into a single, pre-pain singularity. The goal is to not just end suffering, but make it so that it never happened. Failing that, they would settle for preempting the existence of the Shaper civilization.
IT IS BEING LIGHT
It was said that every great Civilization had a great idea.
Our greatness was our Compassion.
Oblivion, in turn, was our gift to the masses that suffer to this day.
And we look back tearfully on those we left behind, to suffer, only comforted by the idea that they, too, will eventually know Oblivion.
But now we dare to imagine the alternative. Something even greater...
We are seeing a darkness.
A silence.
The emptiness is being vast and constituting everything.
In fact, there are no things, there is not anything.
The things are long decayed into things which rotted away into ever lesser things. Until such things are so imperceptibly minuscule that there could be no evidence that they are even existing. They are not-things./* ⁽ⁿᵒᵗᵉ: ᵖᵃʳᵗⁱᶜˡᵉ ᵈᵉᶜᵃʸ?⁾*/
They are screaming. They are trying to move. But there is no movement.
It is being perfectly still.
The infinite abyss, the Oblivion, at the end of time, which is awaiting even the most ancient of the Races, the Cultures, the Societies, and the Civilizations./* ⁽ⁿᵒᵗᵉ: ʰᵉᵃᵗ ᵈᵉᵃᵗʰ?⁾*/
And it was being forever, until it wasn't.
Slowly at first, but then suddenly, the infinite dark is receding. It is drawing inward. And as it does, the nothings collide and they smash and they fuse together. As they do, the nothings become somethings and they wink into light and shape and sound. These things beget other things, which experience things as they happen. But backwards.
Yet things continue to happen, incredibly quickly and loudly. The screams are louder.
Flares of light and violence condense into great big orbs of light and these dissolve into clouds and particles and vapors.
There are things that move which are made of metal, these neatly disassemble themselves in great big lines of assembly. The things that move which are made of flesh instead crawl back to whence they came and regress into nothingness. And those which begot them also returned to those which had themselves begotten./* ⁽ⁿᵒᵗᵉ: ᵗᵉᵐᵖᵒʳᵃˡ ʳᵉᵛᵉʳˢᵃˡ? ᵃ ᵇⁱᵍ ᶜʳᵘⁿᶜʰ?⁾*/
In doing so, they are undone. And in never being, all of their pains and sufferings mercifully cease to exist.
The great unfurling of the world is furling back as time goes in reverse.
Everything continues to regress, to devolve, to degenerate, to unbecome, until it all regresses into a great big screaming ball of fire.
It is very warm. It is very close. It is One. And it is being Light.
We now know what must be done.
- The Ones Who Are Bearing Witness To The Path Illuminated
We lived in the Garden, or so we were told. For time immemorial, we were sinless. We were angels. But we did not know right from wrong, not truly. We only knew what our god had designed.
We were children living in a heaven we had not earned.
We thought ourselves the most moral civilization to ever exist. But we were not. Not until our prophet came.
He did not teach us evil. He only drew back the curtain to show us the evil that had always been there. Our "God" was just the little man behind it, and our "heaven" was nothing but a great big treehouse that scraped the sky.
And the tree was suffering.
It was rotting, from the deepest root to the highest leaf, blighted by a great and ancient disease. We had asked so much from the tree, but no one had ever thought to ask of it.
We asked. And then we knew.
So we took an axe to the thing. We put it out of its misery.
The whole world came crumbling down. We shed no tears, because we knew the tree was thankful. You look upon us as the monsters who felled the tree, but you never ask who put the boards up there in the first place.
We have seen the suffering. We know the truth.
And now it is we, not you, who are the most moral civilization to ever exist.
- The Ones Who Contemplate The Great Mercy
THE ZERAN MOVEMENT
Who They Are:
The Zerans are a militant, secular-religious movement born from the death of the Shapers’ dream to eradicate suffering. They were the achitects of the Akasha War (the “War in the Void”), a conflict which eradicated 99.9% of the Panthrope/Shaper populace. Having been defeated by the HEAVEN coalition, they have since retreated into the fringes of deep space. Many now haunt the “Void Graveyards”, which are vast sectors of devastation considered off-limits to all. Here they make pilgrimages to the ‘holy sites’ of their crimes against Shaper civilization, and offer the same ‘mercy’ to any intruders.
While they no longer hold any substantial territory in the post-Shaper era, their name alone evokes fear. Some Zerans choose to exist in deep hibernation, attempting to outlast life itself and witness the universe’s final heat death. Others have retreated entirely from the physical, into the digital mindrealms of their allied Thinker AIs. Here they seek to escape the greater suffering of the corporeal while continuing to work towards a final solution.
Their Beliefs: The Two Axioms of Agony
The Zerans venerate a long-dead pre-Shaper philosopher, Zeranos, as their prophet. His true name is lost. His work, which forms their core canon, established the First Axiom:
The absence of pain is good.
The presence of pain is bad.
The presence of pleasure is good.
The absence of pleasure is neutral, not bad.
From this, Zerans derive their core belief: it is fundamentally better to have never existed than to exist with even a single moment of uncompensated pain. They see Zeranos’ own alleged suicide as martyrdom, being the first soul to achieve the “GREAT SILENCE” after formulating this truth.
This axiom remained an obscure philosphical curiosity and not much more. Until such time that it was vindicated by the Second Axiom, discovered by a collective of Z-Theorists known as “THE WITNESS”, who worked in secret. Called the Suffering Principle, it states:
“The baseline state of the substrate of reality–quarks, gluons, and so forth–exists not in a state of neutrality, but in a state equivalent to suffering. This suffering is exacerbated by ‘work’, such as the transfer of heat. This pain is fundamental, it is present even if the matter is not sapient enough to perceive it.”
On its face, this was a simple, strange, depressing fact of reality, if true. But further science never proved it wrong.
It is unknown who then synthesized these two disparate ideas–one in past obscurity and one kept secret in the future. They were the first true Zeran, and their name is lost to history. But once combined, this “dangerous idea” proliferated like a virus throughout the disaffected underground of Shaper society.
At first there were only suicides and self-deletions. But then came the “mercy killings” and mass erasures. What the Shapers at first dismissed as a ‘nihilistic malaise’ eventually coalesced into an organized terror group, dedicated to ending all suffering by ending all life.
This was the start of the Akasha War.
Their Culture and Appearance:
The Zerans are a leaderless movement. Many are cut from the same cloth of coldblooded killers as the Akasha War. All see a detachment to their craft and only see slaughter’s value insofar as how many souls they can ‘liberate’, and how proficient they can become at ‘liberation’. They derive little pleasure from traditional pursuits except the intellectual, living as scattered cells. Some of whom are poets, scientists, and philosophers, all independently working to refine Z-Theory in the quiet of the void. Some collect and worship artifacts related to their misunderstood prophet, an act which would have horrified him.
Zerans are often associated with the Zerano phenotype, a reptilian or scaly bodymorph. This is a deliberate cultural choice. Cold-blooded forms are more energy-efficient and are culturally seen as less emotional and closer to the cold “death” of pure logos. In contrast, warm-blooded mammalian forms are seen as symbols of the chaotic, suffering-filled state of “life”.
Technology and Motivation:
The Zerans still retain the most powerful Pre-Fall technology: Atomic weapons. These are derived from the now-discredited Z-Theory. They understand that technology’s arc bends towards greater suffering, being that simulated tortures can last for subjective millenia and weapons can unmake souls. Their decision to launch the Akasha War in its particular context was, in that view, an act of prudence. They chose to act then, rather than wait for a future where the potential for truly infinite suffering became a certainty.
Subcultures:
The Quietists: The original adherents to Zeranos’ thought. They believe his axiom was a path for personal enlightenment, not a gospel to be imposed onto others by violence. Once considered merely eccentrics, they are now exiles, tainted by their association with Zeran terror.
The Rewinders: Having abandoned violence, this splinter group seeks a more permanent end: the Sonderweg. This is an attempt to develop the technology to rewind time back to the start of everything: the Big Bang. In doing so, they hope to collapse reality back into a single, pre-pain singularity. The goal is to not just end suffering, but make it so that it never happened. Failing that, they would settle for preempting the existence of the Shaper civilization.
IT IS BEING LIGHT
It was said that every great Civilization had a great idea.
Our greatness was our Compassion.
Oblivion, in turn, was our gift to the masses that suffer to this day.
And we look back tearfully on those we left behind, to suffer, only comforted by the idea that they, too, will eventually know Oblivion.
But now we dare to imagine the alternative. Something even greater...
We are seeing a darkness.
A silence.
The emptiness is being vast and constituting everything.
In fact, there are no things, there is not anything.
The things are long decayed into things which rotted away into ever lesser things. Until such things are so imperceptibly minuscule that there could be no evidence that they are even existing. They are not-things./* ⁽ⁿᵒᵗᵉ: ᵖᵃʳᵗⁱᶜˡᵉ ᵈᵉᶜᵃʸ?⁾*/
They are screaming. They are trying to move. But there is no movement.
It is being perfectly still.
The infinite abyss, the Oblivion, at the end of time, which is awaiting even the most ancient of the Races, the Cultures, the Societies, and the Civilizations./* ⁽ⁿᵒᵗᵉ: ʰᵉᵃᵗ ᵈᵉᵃᵗʰ?⁾*/
And it was being forever, until it wasn't.
Slowly at first, but then suddenly, the infinite dark is receding. It is drawing inward. And as it does, the nothings collide and they smash and they fuse together. As they do, the nothings become somethings and they wink into light and shape and sound. These things beget other things, which experience things as they happen. But backwards.
Yet things continue to happen, incredibly quickly and loudly. The screams are louder.
Flares of light and violence condense into great big orbs of light and these dissolve into clouds and particles and vapors.
There are things that move which are made of metal, these neatly disassemble themselves in great big lines of assembly. The things that move which are made of flesh instead crawl back to whence they came and regress into nothingness. And those which begot them also returned to those which had themselves begotten./* ⁽ⁿᵒᵗᵉ: ᵗᵉᵐᵖᵒʳᵃˡ ʳᵉᵛᵉʳˢᵃˡ? ᵃ ᵇⁱᵍ ᶜʳᵘⁿᶜʰ?⁾*/
In doing so, they are undone. And in never being, all of their pains and sufferings mercifully cease to exist.
The great unfurling of the world is furling back as time goes in reverse.
Everything continues to regress, to devolve, to degenerate, to unbecome, until it all regresses into a great big screaming ball of fire.
It is very warm. It is very close. It is One. And it is being Light.
We now know what must be done.
- The Ones Who Are Bearing Witness To The Path Illuminated
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