TerranTechnocrat

For example, consider the MiB in the 1997 comedy film. It's mentioned that the organization primarily funds itself through patent royalties on technologies that were reverse-engineered from contraband originally obtained from aliens. Liposuction, microwave ovens, mobile phones, solar panels, Velcro, and many others.

This puts the MiB in a surprisingly intriguing position! It's simultaneously an unaccountable security agency — literally perceived as being "above the system" it rules and profits from — while also functioning as a parasitic rentier entity that extracts knowledge from extraterrestrial beings, commodifies it, and licenses it for sale to a captive market. From this perspective, the MiB is less of a "cool guy" secret police and more like a financial pipeline with alien visitors as exploited subjects and the rest of humanity as captive consumer market.

After the authorities were sufficiently roused, the personnel of the closed city assigned to it took to calling it an "anomalous convergent topology" — something safe and objective, if freighted with implications. But amongst the researchers and workers themselves, it was "Тот Берег," the Other Shore.

The apparatchiks in Moscow eventually settled on the designation Program ANABASIS — simple, opaque, and plausibly deniable.

The secret Congressional hearing landed on the name Project NADIR, while the researchers later called it the Deep.

When word spread among the general public in the counterculture hangover of the 1970s and '80s, it became the Innerlands.

Universities in the West came to refer to it as the Subliminal Exterior.

Historically, this society emerged from the ashes of a self-inflicted nuclear catastrophe. While a now-defunct empire indeed sheltered the survivors, the tragedy lies in how they internalized their captor's rigid collectivism. Today, that survival mechanism has ossified into a pervasive, bureaucratic apparatus known simply as 'the Party,' which prioritizes the survival of the state over the flourishing of the individual.

The tragedy extends to the Hegemony's external relations. The Galactic Community has made repeated, peaceful overtures to welcome the human race into the fold of universal trade and cultural exchange. Hegemony fleets routinely meet these offers of aid and dialogue with paranoid rejection, viewing the free flow of information as an existential threat.

Most heartbreaking is the plight of the pre-FTL societies within their volume. Under the guise of 'protection,' the Hegemony enforces a strict cordon that effectively quarantines these developing cultures from the outside universe. By denying them access to the technology of the galactic society of worlds, the Hegemony condemns these populations to preventable suffering, effectively holding them in a state of enforced underdevelopment and violently repelling all attempts at organized relief. The Human Hegemony is caught in a perpetual humanitarian crisis—a redundant pariah state that chooses stagnation over the shared prosperity of the stars."

"On the Human Question" : Trisolar Media Group

"That they're insane. Even the last surviving ship among them would be racing blindly into our formations until they received the call to withdraw—and even if their shitty offensive systems failed, they set whatever stupid brick they're in to autopilot and just try to ram it straight into the biggest target. Like an oversized antimatter missile."

"Have you ever seen a human before?"

"No. And I don't want. But I always imagined big nasty arthropoids or many-toothed worms. My love, Spurs-of-Iron, claims they saw them while deployed down the gravity well of some rock in the vicinity of E57-061, but that they were encased in heavy war-forms and thus got pretty much pulped anytime something took them out, but that they also engaged in these endless sprawling waves of fighters and robots, both grounded and flying. I remember Spurs-of-Iron was so relieved to see their native Opportunity Zone again..."

Unused clip from "Wars Of The Spirit" : Tavis Holdings Conglomerate

"Do you realize that pan-galactic economic integration is the most catastrophic imperialist development that our Great Experiment has ever had to face?"

A point in the near-to-mid future (i.e., centuries hence) where human labor itself has become heavily enmeshed with machinery to keep pace with the absurd costs of fixed capital, resulting in a stratum of intensely-exploited cyborg labor.

Such mechanical modifications are not considered extensions of a laborer's own body, but merely property that has been generously endowed by their rightful owners — such intricate modifications and the operations necessary to integrate them wouldn't be remotely accessible to wage-slaves otherwise! Living labor, invaded by and blurred with dead labor.

The laborer's augmentations, and life, are subject to revocation under the long-term contract with their employer.

A cyborg's implants and modifications may be removed for reuse once the employer deems a cyborg to have outlived their utility. Since this is almost invariably fatal, the contract for ROYALTY FREE cyborgification* always includes a tiny clause consigning the laborer's organic remains to the employer as company property to be recycled/commodified (fuel, fertilizer, bioplastics), extracting further residual value from their corpse. This is a great deal for the company as it means they get to multiply your labor power by orders of magnitude, recoup part of their losses at the end, then restart the process with someone else reusing your parts.

Why would anyone agree to such an arrangement?

. . . By September, the Army of the Revolution was consolidating its gains on the eastern seaboard and on the western coast while gathering momentum to strike at the interior. Starvation and grief were cast away, replaced with rationing and grim determination. How many lie dead from hunger, sickness, or gunshot — their smartphone still in their pocket? The automatic rifles never stopped firing in the parks and warehouses where the most dangerous ones were being brought in for judgment.

Heavy machinery plowed across the Great Plains and met the federal loyalists in battles operating on a post-human scale. The loyalists were depleting their fuel reserves faster than the Reds. The Reds had effectively won the coastal industrial zones. Their encirclement of the interior strongholds signaled the end of the American Empire. "Very well," they resolved. "If we can't have it, no one can." They initiated the Samson Protocol.

The Chinese space station was passing over when the flares washed out the great landmass below. Every major population center, industrial hub, and agricultural zone controlled or contested by the Red Army was saturated. We still don't know how many warheads... failed to arm due to under-maintenance, how many people disobeyed when the order came, how many sailors lunged screaming at their own officers. We only know that the entire reactionary-controlled triad was unleashed across North America in a tragedy of unimaginable scale — a holocaust of the American working class, betrayed by their rulers.

The United States, Canada, and Northern Mexico effectively ceased to exist as territories within 45 minutes. The death toll in the first 24 hours is estimated at over 300 million. Rolling firestorms engulfed the megalopolises of the East and West Coasts. The greatest empire in human history was reduced to a radioactive wasteland.

Western financial markets collapsed, shattering the illusion of "fictitious capital" that sustained the European and Atlanticist economies. The center of gravity for global production and political power shifted violently. Crisis overtook the states of Europe with the loss of both the NATO military umbrella and American rulership. The European social-democratic compromise dissolved, precipitating the rapid immiseration of the European proletariat and the emergence of revolutionary conditions.

Neofascist and ultranationalist governments took the reins in France, Germany, and Britain, but lacked the material base to project power while rearming, leading to mass revolt. In Latin America, with the "Monroe Doctrine" definitively buried under nuclear ash, a mad scramble was occurring to reorient economies toward self-sufficiency and away from American-oriented extraction. In Asia, the People's Republic of China — already caught in the midst of general economic catastrophe as its largest market disappeared overnight — suddenly found itself as the world's sole guarantor of stability and material progress. The East was no longer the factory of the West, but the fortress of civilization.

"JOIN US OR DIE."

Grinning brightly, Earth's rulers said, "Yes, of course we will demilitarize."

"Yes, of course we will disarm."

Simultaneously, rough-hewn senator and hard-pressed apparatchik communicated indirectly by way of flickering light and cryptographic card.

At 19:07, on 14 June, an ontological anomaly occurred in sub-division 7 of the "Olverhore" mega-regional belt.

A hitherto unprecedented bipedal life-form appeared spontaneously amidst an electro-magnetic disturbance with sufficient power to briefly ionize the air in a highly localized sphere.

The incident, now suspected to be some form of cross-reality rupture, was fully captured by multiple public sensor systems — audio, visual, and electrical — and, as far as investigators have concluded, deposited just this single bipedal person, whose name care workers have since learned, translated literally, is... Laudable, in the Month of Worship, of Dear Mother (Joyous). I am told that the care workers call them Laud'.

Now, as best we can infer through translation, Laud' was an inhabitant of a planet, evidently a rather Earth-like planet at that, situated in some alternate reality.

Uhm, now, I believe the consensus among technicians in topological physics right now, at this stage, is that it is some equivalent to what the average worker may call "inter-dimensional" travel, not displacement across interstellar distances from some other point on the plane of "our" space-time. This is because the energetic profile at the scene was insufficient for such a thing as... currently understood by the laws of conservation.

Yes, I understand how that must sound.

Now, Laud' themself is a... frill-necked biped, most closely analogous to a theropod dinosaur, but tilted upwards at the hips to better accommodate tool use— most likely a descendant of some sprinting generalist.

Laud' is 1.4 meters tall with a rather slender frame and appeared "barefoot" wearing a robe of loose, rough fabric under a belt of several unpowered hand tools boasting ligneous handles and copper components. This led us to believe that they were a skilled tradesperson or petty-producer of some kind, a postulation corroborated by their accounts.

Laud' themself appears to be the product of an early urban society with class stratification and, obviously, very early metal working. Their testimonies have corroborated this as well, seeming to describe a pre-industrial, early-metal-working society under a bureaucratic–tributary arrangement.

Of course, this categorization is imprecise and subject to change as our grasp of both their language and formative social-relations broadens.

Now, we have here the... annotated footage (if you would— thank you). This footage may be upsetting to some of you but it provides insight into the subject's person and context for how best to interact with them.

Video public observation system recording of "cross-reality rupture", plus ex post facto translation:

[Focus: a high, downward-focused view of a pedestrian boulevard between mixed-use buildings residential and light services.]

[Static crackles distort the ambient audio. Human figures in motion or congregating, and entering or exiting revolving doorways.]

Pedestrian #1: "... hey, hey, you feel that..."

Pedestrian #2: "... hairs on my arm are—"

[Crackles escalate to several electric cracks and pops, accompanying blue flashes.]

[Several persons move away from the epicenter of the electro-magnetic phenomenon.]

[A particularly bright flare coincides with an audible crack as the camera view seemingly pans slowly toward its center; the footage is over-saturated before re-normalizing — leaving an inhuman bipedal creature standing in the open and the center of the frame.]

Pedestrian #3: "What the fuck—?"

Exo-sapient: [Translated] Where—?

[Pedestrians begin to collapse backward in either direction, hiding behind any cover or ducking through doors.]

Pedestrian #1: "... it's, it's a... a dinosaur!"

Pedestrian #4: "Somebody call somebody— animal control, uh, uh— civil defense!"

Exo-sapient: [Translated] What—!?

Pedestrian #2: [Into comms] "... a...! I don't know ... please come quickly! ... never seen something like it!"

[The creature is turning rapidly in circles, the two wide frills of its neck extending laterally in a defensive threat display. The creature begins to run in one direction, but stops upon noticing observers huddled together in cover, then in another, before freezing again when faced by a similar gathering.]

Exo-sapient: [Translated] (Crying) Monsters! Ugly monsters! Go away! Stay away! Help! Somebody help me!

[The creature begins to visibly hyperventilate as its gaze passes over the surrounding skyline before its eyes roll back and it collapses.]

[+60 seconds: several onlookers begin to approach the unconscious biped.]

[+240 seconds: confused-looking civil defense workers arrive and forcibly push observers away to form a perimeter around the biped.]

[Within 30 minutes: civil defense and paramedics have already begun assembling an improvised containment and triage area around the unconscious being.]

Put bluntly: while this was an exciting and memorable episode for onlookers, being bolstered by their numerous comrades and familiar surroundings, and already conditioned by tales of... fictional science and centuries of paleontological publication to conceive the vague possibility of an individual such as Laud', we believe this to have been — for Laud' — the single most traumatic experience of their life.

Their shock was total and ontological.

Limited to a mythic framework, Laud' had no conceptual preparation whatsoever, not even a vaguely scientific framework, to begin processing their surroundings.

Since the subject recovered, our interactions with them has been gradual and mediated by visual stimuli including images of landscapes and tools.

Rejection leaves Gangle torn up, but she doesn't seem outwardly distressed by Jax's casual acts of cruelty. All humans care about each other to some degree but Jax cares about Gangle a lot. However, he can only express his affection through his performative misanthropy and mock aggression; possibly pushing with the hope (conscious or unconscious) that Gangle might push back, even though we see how vulnerable and distressed Jax is when people actually push him back.

Our only insight into how Gangle inwardly perceives Jax is that in both instances where she has power over him, she attempts to change him, trying to indoctrinate him during her manic episode and, in a significantly less dramatic manner, putting him in a maid outfit. Gangle thought Jax, her abuser, would look cute in a maid outfit.

I think both of them have fantasies about what the other could be, but both of them struggle with communicating their innermost selves, the result being toxic co-dependency.