Elite

by Allen Stroud

  3197 Deforestation protests are put down in Ashoria and the northlands.

  3207 Walden sells genetic technology to Imperial scientists.

  3224 Hennel Tallis appointed Imperial Ambassador to Lave.

  3228 Bryce Jander takes part in the Alioth rebellion.

  3230 Phoenix symbol starts to appear in the Ardu region.

  3235 Heldaban Kel graduates from EFP school in Ashoria.

  3244 First sighting of the Phoenix symbol on a wall in Ashoria.

  3246 Meeting of rebels in Admiralty Hall, New California, Alioth. Bryce Jander on security.

  3248 Henry Walden is born.

  3248 Viper Mark II enters service.

  3250 Bertrum Kowl appointed prefect of Ashoria.

  3251 Walden gives speech at Ferrite mine in Neudaal.

  3254 Lave establishes mining base in the Castellan Belt.

  3255 Imperial ambassador to Lave disappears after an air crash over the Ka dian Sea.

  3255 ‘Doctor Nathanial Finch’ present on Soholian during fever outbreak.

  3255 Martha Godwina appointed Imperial Amabassador to Lave.

  3256 Tobias Renner’s last visit to Lave.

  3257 Harry Walden is born

  3259 Walden and Prefect Kowl have a private meeting in Ashoria.

  3261 Pietro Devander meets Atticus Finch.

  3263 Gebrial Kassini runs away from home on Codorain. Finds her way to Solati Station.

  3263 Heldaban Kel ends relationship with Faith Kander in Machin’s Bar in Oliversville, Reorte. Triggers a fight. Faith loses some teeth.

  3264 Modified wheat germ stock exported from Lave to Diso.

  3264 The Alliance Naval carrier, Furnace begins her mission under Admiral Bryce Jander.

  3265 Revolution.

  3266 Hennel Tallis dies.

  3267 Democratic Elections. Martha Godwina removed as Imperial Ambas sador, petitions for citizenship of Lave.

  3269 Jasper Malone appointed Federal ambassador to Lave.

  3274 Jasper Malone returns to Earth.

  3278 Niall Aspin appointed Federal ambassador to Lave.

  3280 President James Gibson elected.

  3281 Documentation requests to Federation halted.

  3283 Death and funeral of Martha Godwina.

  3286 Reconciliation Committee opens and begins publishing documents.

  3288 Last Viper Mark IIs are withdrawn from use in Lave system.

  Appendix B: The Walden Writings

  A portrait of Hans Walden held at the Myer Institute on Sark. This was painted from memory in 3214, the artist is unknown, but believed to have lived in Ashoria and been commissioned for the work. The reason for his disappearance remains a mystery.

  Foreword

  In these enlightened times, the plethora of artefacts claiming to be Walden originals or derived Walden era antiques remain prodigious. The violent episode that gave birth to our current democracy was well documented as lasting for days in Ashoria and up to weeks in the furthest reaches of Ardu. In this time, much of what had been and what symbolised oppression was destroyed, leaving fragments and a tattered vestige for the historian.

  Much of Walden’s commentary is available as public record on the planetary datanet. Granted, there are certain security flags placed on searches for particular articles and research papers, but these can be made available through an application to the Central Archive department in Central Ashoria or, if your request is an out-system query, through the Elite Federation of Pilots office at New Freire House.

  With such a disparate collection of documents, we have collated and grouped the work artificially, divided the collection into groups of relevance. The majority author of the Rationale is believed to be Hans Walden I, otherwise known as Walden 1#. The selection of work included here is from a larger body of intimate writings, retrieved from his surviving private chamber on Lave Station. As you will know, most of these rooms were destroyed by weapons fire from the Alliance warship Errant, but some documentation was recovered and supplemented by additional notes found on the research laboratory discovered in the Castellan Belt.

  The second section, Speeches is a small sample of material from the wider public archive record. These have been included specifically owing to their relevance to the argument outlined in the first section of this document.

  It is worth mentioning, there is a danger in these writings. It is easy to forget the lessons of history, the suffering and pain brought about by the application of the methodology discussed here; when reading, the presence of an intelligent, but flawed mind becomes apparent, very quickly. The reasoning given is deductive, the conclusions persuasive. It is arguable that you are reading the work of the greatest mind of Lave, certainly its greatest communal mind and, as such, it is easy to become drawn toward these ideas.

  Walden’s yardstick is the application and ramification of discovery. It should be remembered, the application of the strategy outlined here, would have killed billions in a campaign of galactic genocide.

  Turgan Devante – Archaeologist. Ashorian Historical Society.

  The Rationale

  [Editor: A collection of Walden's explanatory writings that have been declassified by the Lavian Government. This sample is only a taste of the work available.

  There is reason to believe additional archives exist outside of Ashoria and the Lave system as well. The planetary government have stipulated that rewards will be granted to those who find verified 'walden work' and return it to the proper authorities.]

  Premise

  It is a strangely simplified and illusory existence humanity has devised for itself. How we strive to make everything around us clear, free and easy. How we grant our senses a passport to everything superficial and our thoughts permission to dwell on the irrelevant and pointless.

  From the beginning, we contrive to retain ignorance in order to wallow in freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness and frivolity. Our minds are driven by imperatives to waste our greatest attributes.

  On this solidified foundation of ignorance, we claim knowledge. We invent further affectation and drive ourselves in a protracted quest towards the banal, the pointless and the inane. We invent structures and processes, which impede and hinder our ability to truly innovate, change and observe existence around us. We are blinded by our own attempt to frame, reference and understand.

  Defenders of this quest claim they suffer ‘for truth's sake’, yet fail to see the inconsequential nature of their progress and the ways in which their reliance on the exploration, explanation and counsel of others renders them impotent and obsolete. Indeed, the language of stratified enquiry provides only a means for measurement against previous failure and the irrelevant. If comparison to historic investigation were relevant, then surely such an investigation would already have achieved the sought conclusion and the current investigation would be a repetition and refinement?

  To some, ‘the truth’ they seek to find, protect and defend remains an image of perfect idolatry; an eternal emblem, so illusive and illusory that many amongst their number acknowledge their quest might be fruitless and see a perverse noblesse in this. They use this to justify their attacks on true innovation, claiming the work of their knives as essential intellectual examination, when actually their contestation serves only to justify their own inability to innovate and provides a means for them to accept the innovation of others.

  Why would this archdeity and icon hiding at the end of our quest require protectors? The ancient Earth adage ‘truth will out’ implies some evolutionary process to revelation. The rigours of test and attack imply duality and dichotomy. Should truth remain fragile, then how can it be absolute? So in turn why should it require defenders? If fragile, truth must nurse to grow strong, if already strong, no defence is necessary. Those who claim to be guardians are, in fact, jealous assassins, thieves or terrorists.

  Thus, we return to irrelevance.

  The martyrdom of the scientist, the ‘sacrifice for the sake of tr
uth,’ forces into the light whatever there is of agitator and actor in the persona of the individual. The martinet and romantic vigilant, devoted to making humanity better by uncovering reason and fundamental understanding. Who applies the mind without diversion! Something to admire? Not, if said scientist labours under the illusion of stratified legitimisation.

  It is important to accept that such validation is meaningless. Discovery has meaning, Ratification by one’s fellow bipedal defecators holds no meaning, since such peers discovered no comparable insight for themselves within the context of time and means. The only form of endorsement that retains value lies in application and through this, ramification. It is here that the icon’s lustre grows bright.

  Origin

  As a young man I laboured amongst others in an ignorant quest for truth. I saw my work as a means to immortalise. The idea that I might originate something fundamental that might live and exist beyond my mortal frame remained a clear goal. The psychological motivation for this quest remained clear. By glimpsing the Archdeity, I might prove my worth to be raised up and something of me remain beyond my lifetime, exist beyond the material components of my physiology.

  This naive paradigm had been the obsession of my parents, particularly my mother; a frustrated scientist, whose tragic descent into lunacy came about through her inability to comprehend the inadequacy of rules imposed on her life’s work. The celebrity societal strata she sought to join, placed strict conditions on their approval and she became obsessed with fulfilling these criteria, rather than seeing them for what they were; subjective burdens of artifice, constructed by the unworthy she tried to lower herself to join.

  The trappings of this affluent, irrelevant group indicated their pointlessness. The value placed on insular approval, tenuous and inapplicable attainment spoke loudly to those that could still understand its correct message. But to most, this group were the elohim of humanity; incarnadine intellectual behemoths whose effort brought about a new age of enlightenment; the Galactic Co-operative; or Galcop, a monstrous Babel, raised up to level all and ultimately, to eliminate the individual.

  To place limits on individuality is to declare war on innovation. The majority of humanity strives instinctively for privacy and labours to construct a psychological citadel to their individual values, which in turn, preserves homeostasis. From these safeties, they reach out and spy upon the citadels of others, not realising the very act of construction has rendered any truth they might seek to diluted impotency.

  A rare group of humanity’s thinkers seek to build walls that might encompass a community of individuals. These walls encircle those with common value, but also become paths between each structure within, the shared value becoming a means to dismantle the barriers to discourse. However, they also become strata that frame this discourse and turn the established community inward in its search for a truth.

  The truly enlightened individual does not first explore values that encourage homeostasis, but looks for innovation with clear application. This requires a study of societal rules and a complex understanding of the laws of the universe, be they considered physics, biology, chemistry or otherwise. Note, I do not say science, for this implies an allegiance to the precedent-based means of inquiry mentioned before.

  The enlightened individual must experience and remember. These are the key tools of the true intellectual. Experience must be unfettered by societal homeostasis as mentioned, but follow a path of derived relationship. This is a quest of connected relative realist determination, finding conclusions based on primary sense data or secondary information derived from constructed (and understood) technological tools. The memory is as important. Artificial repository might offer support to the flaws within human record, but cannot replace this, owing to the intrinsic and superior ability of the human mind in finding the derived relationships that will both drive and fuel the individual’s quest for applicable discovery.

  Some of this latter understanding had been part of my mother’s thoughts in her middle years, through her advancement of work in the area of artificial reproduction, building on her previous foresight to clone and freeze the fertilised embryo that became me. This came about through her truncated conclusion of the fundamental need for experience and memory. A replicated individual, sent forth to experience life might come to a greater understanding through multiplicity of accrued phenomena. Also, this replicated individual might develop a more detailed memorial record and attain a greater insight, through their artificially derived group than any collection of random bipeds who remain disadvantaged by the individual preconceptions each brings from their homeostatic citadels and by the intelligence of their weakest member.

  Of course, any group of individuals will disagree and indeed, one individual will never attain full confidence in their own purpose and determinations, but through experience I have found the dissonation experienced by a replicated individual can be alleviated through the intrinsic empathy it shares with its copies. In essence, the process invites certitude and affirmation.

  I was born a frail child, of a frustrated research student never to be granted her doctorate honours and a Lave Station Viper pilot, injured and invalidated from duty by an altercation with three narcotics smugglers back in 3104. My early years were guided by my parents’ misplaced sense of gratitude at their lot, living in a four-room apartment in Central Ashoria, which had been given to them pro gratis by the planetary authority. My mother continued her work to become academically accepted. My father sat and faded away. My childhood reflected their stoic conformity and tolerance of their lot, through a communal education programme woefully inadequate for my needs.

  When I came to understand the need to prioritise world experience over rote tuition, I rejected the frameworks imposed on my work by others and instead, went out to seek the contexts I craved. My psychological approach to education was not fettered by some naive position of knowledge worship. I no longer saw individuals as repositories of learning or gatekeepers to enlightenment. Instead, they became necessary experiences which would shape my journey towards discovery. Such experience could occur in traditional learning environments or within atypical contexts. Priority came with the measure of application, not with perceived veneration of the conversant.

  Early Enlightenment

  Armed with this revelation, I left communal education in the Ashorian municipality at the age of fifteen. Previously, it had been determined I should engage socially with my biological peers in my early years. The theorised premise was that such interaction would encourage me to develop shared values with this mundane conformist rabble, and that I might also develop values to intellectually fertilise the wasteland around me. The very idea that I might reject this notion of imposed magnanimousness had not been considered. Nor had the psychological and developmental ramifications of my imprisonment within the unenlightened herd. On reflection, when reanalysing my immature years of conformity to this charade, I saw the error of my choice. In Plato’s cave, I alone possessed the means to rid myself of my chains, but remained persuaded by an authoritarian to do otherwise. In this instance, the chief authoritarian voice, that of my mother, reflecting her own conformity to a system that produced mediocrity.

  My choice of experience and steps toward enlightenment began small, as all do. At first I lied, professing continual attendance of my classes. Instead, I would spend my time on the streets of the city, watching and interacting with its people and its prescriptors. When this lie became untenable, I looked inward, evaluating the context of my life and calculating the value of the amenities provided for me against the freedoms tasted outside the conformist bubble.

  I abandoned all adherence and accepted privation. I journeyed north from the city into the rainforest. At the time, the territory was left as a habitat for the planet’s native species and remained sparsely populated. My time alone amidst the nature of this world enabled discovery and formed the basis of my later strategy.

  It is the business of the very few to be i
ndependent; a privilege of the mentally strong. Whoever attempts it, even with the best right, proves their strength, but also their daring. Independence is a maze of self-reliance. It multiplies the dangers which life brings. No one can see how and where the independent mind might lose its way, save the mind itself and as such, this professed path both invites and insulates the walker from self-obsession and insanity.

  The logging community of the north forestry region was, at the time, an under-developed industry. Raw material export from Ashoria to Lave’s other colonies remained a process of necessary supply, not a profitable commercial enterprise. Once again, the men and women working day and night in sawmills, remained component parts in the elaborate machine of conformist society; their contribution to the development of a colonising programme designed to extend human habitation across the planet, far greater than the reward given for their efforts. The settlement of the Neudaal region was a large migration strategy, fuelled by raw materials exported from Firstfall. Primarily, people worked to support this initiative out of an engineered sense of loyalty to those making homes in the new land. In return grants were issued to settle the cleared land. It is remarkable to think the majority would never meet in their lifetimes, but still played their part in an exhausting initiative owing to some tenuous communal bond.

  I lived within this woodland for ten years under the pseudonym Atticus Finch, at times amongst the loggers, in their pre-fabricated domes, at times alone in the wilderness, watching evaluating, experiencing, learning.

  Amongst the indigenous creatures in the region, the habitat of the Lavian tree grub proved surprisingly extensive. This particular creature exudes a mild virus in its trail which is poisonous to humans. When new workers arrived at each station, they fell ill after a few days, then gradually recovered, becoming used to the symptoms and discomfort. What drew my attention to this specific malady was my own complete immunity to its effect.