Eschaton

Alephian: [Laws, Codes, and Beliefs] [Sociology] [Religion]

"As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become."
- Joseph Smith

More is known of the Alephians' sociology than any other aspect of their culture. Before the war, throughout the years of the Alephian Cohabitation Treaty, many of the brightest among the Valtavech youth spent significant time studying aboard the nomad Worldships. Later, those that returned to the Valtavech with the outbreak of war brought much information with them.

Throughout the years of tension leading up to the Valtavech-Alephian wars, and even during the war itself, those same Immortals were active and outspoken in an effort to breach the culture gap between the societies and foster an understanding of the alien race that might prevent disaster.

Their failure was historic, but not a fault to lay at their feet. Rather, the society that heard them tended to regard their fantastical descriptions of life among the Alephians as either subversive propaganda or whimsical myth; an opinion compounded by a general contempt for the secretive Alephian religion. In harsh response to the voices crying out in defense of the Alephians, the Valtavech government quickly came to shun virtually any advisor that could be called an apologist for the Alephians. Meanwhile, propaganda on the part of the Valtavech abounded, though it was severely undermined by the proliferation of independent information sources — many of them maintained and supported through Alephian technology.

As a result, a given Alephian individual of any rank likely knew far more, and with greater accuracy, about the life of the Valtavech than even the most educated decision-makers among the Valtavech knew of the Alephians'. It seems likely that this dramatic information gap contributed to the Alephians' unexpected survival in the face of clear military dominance. So the war passed, the Alephian culture survived the threat of the Valtavech, and gradually those scholars driven into hiding returned, to answer the public's newfound curiosity.

When peace returned, and with it a new coexistence, the study of Alephian culture gained a strong following throughout the Republic. Bewildered by the efficiency of Alephian tactics throughout the war — tactics that had somehow made an obviously inferior force militarily unbeatable — the Valtavech changed course, and sought to understand that which they could not destroy.

In this effort, as in the last, they were doomed to failure. It has often been noted that the similarities between the Alephians and Valtavech are almost as many as the differences, and almost as subtle. In spite of the gulf between mankind and the Alephians, though, many patterns and principles were uncovered.

Reproduction and Growth
The life cycle of an individual Alephian and its role within the larger Alephian culture dramatically highlights the confusing duality of similarity and difference. Alephians do exist as individuals — as a point of law, every Alephian must exist as an autonomous physical manifestation — and these individuals seem to think, favor, behave in much the same way that Valtavech Immortals behave. The occasional differences can easily be attributed to the lack of a biological precursor stage.

Alephians are made, not born. In spite of decades of intense research, the Valtavech are utterly unable to uncover any useful information concerning the first Alephians, the beginning of the race, but the community that they do know gives strong hints. New Alephians are formed as conscious digital copies of living Alephians.

The Valtavech have witnessed and even recorded this process, and it is similar in nature to the system by which the Valtavech create security mindstate backups. Within the Valtavech culture, however, law and tradition both strictly forbid duplicate conscious copies of a single mindstate existing actively within the metaverse at any time. The Alephians, on the other hand, replicate themselves casually and often, and most researchers assume that the bulk of the Alephian community is formed of billions of divergent replicas of a single source mindstate.

The Alephians have long displayed signs of extraordinary abilities in controlling, manipulating, and isolating vastened mindstates within the metaverse. Though these signs are often refuted by Valtavech authorities, and the Alephians themselves refuse to comment on the matter, Alephians are positively known to use mindstate Isolation — a technique by which a Mind focuses all of its concentration into a single, limited network system in order to concentrate its processing power.

Many new Alephians occur as an exaggeration of this practice. An Exarch of a worldship, for instance, is capable of controlling the processes of the worldship as well as simultaneously piloting a small fighter, but he is much more likely to create a replica of himself, Isolate it to the fighter, and then turn his own attention back to the maintenance of the worldship.

As a result, a new Alephian is born. If the fighter survives combat, the personality remains and grows. Though it would likely be a simple matter for the parent Alephian to reincorporate the child once its project was completed, Alephians generally allow replicas to remain autonomous as a component of their pursuit of free competition.

Community
The fundamental social unit of the Alephians is the Worldship. Human sociological researchers spent years investigating this, trying to isolate the smaller social groupings — the equivalent of a human family — that built the whole, but always these efforts were in vain.

Two defensible arguments for smaller social units exist: that the Alephians organize themselves by carrier — that is, individuals within a fleet will organize themselves by the ship of which they are a member — or that the Alephians organize themselves by corporation. Both positions can be supported on evidence, but each has its weakness.

The latter proposal, that Alephian culture is built on corporations, has apparent strength. Consider the following:

* Virtually all Alephians are members of corporations.

* Larger corporations may span multiple worldships, but all worldships are built and maintained by at least one corporation.

* The leadership of a worldship is selected from among the leaders of its component corporations. The decisions of a worldship are made by the member corporations.

The largest flaw with the corporation proposal is a simple one: fluidity of membership. While virtually all Alephians are members of corporations, exactly which corporation any given individual is a member of will change several times during the individual's active involvement phase.

Studies have consistently shown that, though an Alephian is more likely to name a corporation than a worldship as a social identifier, the same Alephian is significantly more likely to consider itself fundamentally an inhabitant of its worldship, than a member of its corporation.

In spite of this, many sociologists insist that Alephian society is built on corporations rather than worldships, often for the simple reason that corporations are groups, they are collections of people, whereas worldships are only locations, spaces in which groups can exist.

At the other end of the argument are those that hold that Alephian society is organized as fleet, accepting that the society is built on container spaces and arguing that, though the worldship is the ultimate container space, most worldships are maintained by a fleet of smaller ships, and a significant portion of these smaller ships are permanently run by crew societies.

In this model, the individual pilots of a fighter group might constitute the basic social group, and the handful of fighter groups that protect a given capitol ship — as well as the crews of any supply frigates, heavy artillery ships, transport vessels, etc. — form a larger community, which is in turn a part of the worldship community. This model more closely resembles the pattern of human sociology, and most sociologists recognize it as a legitimate social structure, but few accept it as the primary social structure of the Alephians as a whole.

For one, there exists too much deviation in fleet organization from worldship to worldship, as each develops its own navy to supplement the precise needs of its enterprises. Further, some of the same problems with the corporation model exist — namely, fluidity of position. Though fighter pilots are less likely to switch roles, or even flight groups, the more support positions may serve many roles, some of them in support of their capitol ship, some of them simple errands for the pilot's corporation.

Probably the greatest flaw in the fleet model, though, is in the unaccounted, in those that critic Kerrin Liin referred to as the Many Orphans. Though virtually all inhabitants of a worldship are members of one of that ships corporations, barely thirty percent of a worldship's inhabitants belong to a flight crew. Thus the fleet model casually assigns the majority of any given worldship society to a place outside the basic social structure — and, in the process, assigns them back to the worldship container, the very container the model seeks to replace.

No matter what the underlying social model, these are the primary communities: for all citizens, their Corporations; for flights crews, their fleets; for the whole, the worldships that contain them. It is the membership in these groups, the conflicting needs and desires, the contest of obedience and loyalty among them that makes a such a rich study of Alephian sociology.