cults

Things to See, Places (Not) to Go (9)

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An Ember-class star distinguished only by its relative proximity to the Eye of Night (Last Darkness), orbited by a scattering of asteroids and an equally undistinguished dwarf planet (Geydagan Actual), the Geydagan (Last Darkness) System is occupied only by the Servants of Geydas, a cruel, hostile, aggressive, and secretive cult dwelling in a number of shabby surface habitats.

The Servants of Geydas are a polyspecific cult whose origins are lost in unreliable history. Their doctrine, pieced together from defectors, refugees, and espionage reports, is one of prostration before and service to their deity, Geydas, who is said to be imprisoned within the depths of the Eye of Night. Supposedly, Geydas created many ancient sophont races and offered them many gifts of knowledge, enabling them to ascend to enormous heights of scientific and technological prowess, but these species chafed under the control of their deity and grew jealous of its power, turning on it and collapsing an inescapable prison around it. Their victory came at the cost of their own destruction, as the deity’s rage lashed out even as he was imprisoned and brought their societies crashing down around them, but the deity remains imprisoned even now. The cult claims to have been contacted by the imprisoned deity, offering knowledge, enlightenment, and power in exchange for its freedom. At this task the Servants have labored for nearly three millennia.

There is, of course, no scientific evidence for the existence of Geydas, or for the historical events depicted, or for the Eye of Night being anything other than a perfectly natural black hole; and the notion that an entity can communicate from within the event horizon is flatly denied by known physics. In any case, the liberation of such a hypothetical deity from its prison would assuredly require the application of sophisticated ontotechnological space-time engineering techniques, and not merely the adept groveling, literal self-flagellation, or even sophont sacrifice that the Servants of Geydas have occasionally descended to.

In short: there are no security concerns whatsoever arising from these deluded cultists or their hypothetical deity. At worst, there is a minor req for pest control.

– Core Sextant Security Report, 7925

Trope-a-Day: Cult Colony

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Cult Colony: Averted initially, because sublight colonization was so ludicrously expensive that “cults” couldn’t possibly have afforded it.  Played straighter once the stargate plexus made it easier to get to new worlds, with a side-note that the failure rate – for which read death rate – of these is particularly high; planetary colonization requires a great deal of scientific acumen, technical skill, and mental flexibility, which are not common qualities attributed to things normally described as cults.  (Just look at how many pioneer colonies failed in Earth’s history – now add that you have an alien ecology to deal with and there’s a good chance that you can’t breathe the air.)

Much the same goes for cult habitats, to – well, a lesser extent on some factors, a greater one on others, but the net effect is much the same.  Most cultists aren’t good with sophisticated technical infrastructure.