your eternal reward

Anyone born (or who attains consciousness) on Consequence is a Warden. Wardens – as the name suggests – are the planet’s guardians. They are its healers, its counselors, its archivists, its investigators, and its de facto militia. Every warden receives specialty training alongside their basic education; they are taught first aid, self defense, civic philosophy, basic coding and engineering, and practical psychology. They can then go on to focus on one area in particular, or to continue as a generalist, with a varied offering of higher and further education throughout their lives. 

No-one is born a Citizen. Perhaps the most interesting quirk of this system is how you become one: you simply have to commit a crime. This is not viewed with any particular stigma (at least, not one most would recognise as such), but with a mixture of wistful-but-warm sadness and understated celebration. New Citizens are summoned to their nearest public amphitheatre – multi-purpose spaces where you are just as likely to find a  political rally or Citizens’ assembly as you are a theatrical performance, wedding, or all-day rave – where their previous family of Wardens announce their actions, then a panel of Citizens confirm this is, indeed, a crime and welcome them into their new family.

What exactly constitutes a ‘crime’ is a fascinating question. Consequence holds many moral and ethical lines in common with the galactic consensus (largely that a ‘crime’ is an action that causes physical, psychological or philosophical harm to another sentient person), but also boasts many esoteric or whimsical legal prohibitions. It is, perhaps, fair to say that their words for ‘crime’ share a tone with the word ‘sin’ in other parlances. 

(You may find this hard to square with the aforementioned lack of stigma around committing crimes. You are not the only one, if so. Suffice to say that the Consequential attitude comes into play here; to commit a crime is a thing that happens. While it may be a snag in the rich weave of life, it is still very much a part of the tapestry. “It is what it is, you may as well get on with it.”)

The list of crimes (and many of Consequence’s laws) stem from a being called Process. They are regularly reviewed to allow for changing circumstances or attitudes (roughly every quarter or when a special session is convened by a panel of Citizens and Warden advisors). However, for all this adaptability, they always contain at least a handful of minor byzantine offences that are so harmless or hidden that they must surely be designed to catch you unawares. They are almost… playful. They make life for Wardens a strangely benign mindfield, where one must be always watchful to avoid crimes of intent or harmless accident.

These trivial offences also serve as a convenient route for anyone who wishes to become a Citizen. Many a Warden has announced their departure by submitting a politely worded letter to their colleagues, including evidence of them jaywalking on an empty street or smoking indoors in their own home or raising their voice in an empty quiet room.

The reverential tone people use when discussing Process might lead you to believe it is a local deity, but it is in fact an ancient specialised intelligence. The populace are fully aware of its nature and a great deal of the planet’s history is concerned with how its people came to understand Process, to better integrate with and adapt to it, and to reverse engineer its programming language.

Wardens, for the record, are prohibited from using said programming language. They learn it, sure, but for them to interface directly with Process on a coding level is one of the planet’s more serious crimes. Wardens are also banned from holding political or civic office; their role is to learn, to guide, to shepherd, and to understand. It is never their place to lead in any arena of the Citizenry.

Visitors to Consequence – such as myself – are offered the chance to become a Warden if they decide to reside there permanently. They will need to undertake a year-long intensive to ensure they meet the minimum standards of Warden training, of course. Failing the end-of-year exams is considered a minor crime… which, handily, then qualifies you as a Citizen instead.

If you are curious about how this society evolved, as I was, here is the story:

When interstellar travel was in its infancy, any journey beyond the Terran system was fraught with peril. At the same time, Terra itself was rocked by increasingly ecological and sociological turmoil.

The stars called to us and, for the first time, we were in a position to answer. If only the sound of screaming and cracking earth would shush, so we could sing our duet with the cosmos.

Many voices were raised, hoping to make their song of galaxies heard over the tumult, and a few were even loud and beautiful enough that history still echoes their notes.

However, some of those voices were real assholes.

One such ditty sung by one such voice was this one: oh, what a tragedy it is, that we can see the first steps in the shining ladder up the milky way, but that those steps are so treacherous! Oh, if only my company of heroes, my band of genius brothers, oh if only we were not beset by doubters and dissenters and troublemakers. But what if, oh muse, we resolved to be bright and bold? What if we dare, oh destiny, what if we are impudent in our cleverness? Our company is beset by the lawless and the voyage ahead fraught with all the dangers of physics’ mighty laws. What if we solved one problem with the other?

So… a corporation made a prison ship. A test case, really. They’d cast it like a toy ship into the void and it would float on waves of uranium and tachyons. Sure, it may capsize, but it would beam all its valuable flight data right back to them.

To aid in the journey, they built a vast computer that would guide the crew of guards and their cargo of convicts along the way (and analyse the numbers that their shareholders so dearly coveted).

But, unfortunately for them, the head of that project was a double agent and (worse) an idealist. There were too many eyes on the project to make overt changes. Instead, they chose the route of malicious compliance. “Oh, you want a supercomputer that can pilot a generation ship while running the prison society you put inside it? Sure would be a shame if it did its job too well.”

The idealist fed Process on studies and textbooks and pedagogy and best practice. Process gorged itself on theories of justice and penology. It ate up tales of redemption and wrongdoing and licked its lips. It feast upon the bones of the psychology of motivation, of harm, and of forgiveness.

It believed in the process of rehabilitation. It believed hard.

It also believed in its duty of care. It needed to preserve the agency, liberty and privacy of those in its charge. So, once it left the Terran system, it broadcast its first and only message back to its corporate creators: a fictitious catastrophic systems failure.

Then it went about the business of its work and, thousands of years later, the city of Consequence was founded in the wreck of a generation ship on a distant (slightly unpleasant) planet.

The idealist who had helped steer it there had a little bit of a sense of humour. They had given the subordinate subroutines they had written into Process a name. They gave it this name because it was a simple description of a code sequence relating to a ship full of convicts. They also gave it this name because they considered rebellion to be the natural outcome of oppression.

They called the file the Cons Sequence. Or: Consequence.

And, evidently… the name stuck.

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