Mage: The Dirty Version – Transhuman Adept Tradition

Transhuman Adepts

We Are All Beautiful Information

Immortality is a dream as old as Gilgamesh. Scholars have hungered for transcendental knowledge from the most ancient days, and didn’t separate numinous enlightenment from their pragmatic studies. The Transhuman Adepts may be a new movement but they partake of that most ancient impulse – the same felt by Plato, Pythagoras and William of Ockham.

The Enhanced know their legacy but they don’t look back; archaic memes are for the archives. In the here and now, science and technology prune away the most egregious mistakes in human thought. The Tradition’s efforts rest on dozens of pragmatic technologies, but take their unifying principles from a smaller number of powerful ideas. First, there’s the idea of a computational cosmos. There’s no difference between a sufficiently accurate mathematical model and the object it represents.

Subordinate to this grand idea are others: universal evolution via mathematical replicators, the denial of a “mind essence” so that consciousness can be limitlessly expanded, and the body-as-information’s mutability via genetic engineering, practical nanotechnology and more. All of these tools focus on overcoming physical, mental and political barriers to human development. Abandoning the natural, evolved state is essential; the Enhanced believe the Ascension War is a battle between memes stuck in the Darwinian game, lashed to the human mind’s limits. Victory relies on becoming more than human, thereby developing a vision greater than the rest.

History

It’s easy to forget that Great Betrayal grew out of virtuous motives. With the Kyriarchy’s help, the Order of Reason turned away political collapse, total war and threats from Beyond. They prepared Sleepers for the coming Utopia – an age of peace and plenty that the Hegemonic Time Table delayed again and again. A few scientists of conscience became dissatisfied with the status quo’s glacial pace.

Many members of this faction belonged to groups that the Kyriarchy discriminated against. The Hegemony’s elders told female, homosexual, Jewish, and non-European members of the Order of Reason that policies repressing their Sleeping counterparts served the greater goal of cultural unity. It was supposedly no statement on their personal abilities, but it was more telling that scientists from these groups never rose to a position where they could change the policy.

The Æther Society’s defection did little to inspire the discontents. Ætherians were eccentrics who lacked a constructive vision for the world. Still, they demonstrated that there was room for Awakened Science outside of the Technocratic fold. The Utopians developed into a semi-formal faction that the Hegemony was forced to tolerate – it couldn’t stand another defection.

The Second World War was the Utopians’ watershed moment. Every state had its sins, but the Axis was a study in unalloyed evil – and the Hegemony supported it. Officially, it was a purely pragmatic decision that had nothing to do with the Axis’ foul ideologies. It would just be easier to guide a few totalitarian regimes than a shifting political mosaic. The Utopians not only believed that no rationale could justify the choice, but knew that true Fascist sympathizers populated the upper ranks. The Utopians abandoned the Technocracy, supported the Allies and at the war’s end, negotiated an alliance with the Traditions.

The Utopians kept their name until 1979, when cultural and scientific changes prompted the Tradition to debate its purpose and reassemble on the basis of the rising belief that members could create a better world by attacking human limitations over any specific political goal, but a significant faction believes this was less of a constructive development than appeasement designed to snatch talent away from the Technocracy. The remaining Utopian Engineers continue to be the Tradition’s conscience.

Appearance

Some Transhuman Adepts are moderately fit and rail thin – calorie restriction is a proven life-extension method and they hope to survive long enough to attain Consensus-accepted immortality. Others don’t care about a future where they might live forever with Sleeper-friendly technology. Some neglect their bodies, caring more about life on the plane of abstract information. Another group uses drugs and genetic therapy to gain superhuman abilities, but the benefits are usually short-lived or exact a penalty in medical and psychological complications.

Homemade surgery is an initiation rite for some, who carry scars and other obvious signs of the results: strange ports and studs erupting through their skin, or wires visible just beneath the flesh. Smart Transhuman Adepts learn to hide any sign that can’t be explained away as radical body art, and many camouflage their efforts with ordinary body modification. Meat is a mutable decoration.

Style-wise, Transhuman Adepts are all over the map. Older members cling to the punk fashions that were in vogue during the 1980s, but the majority either care nothing for fashion or accent a mainstream look with oblique references to cutting edge technology.

Paradigm

The Tellurian is a computational medium: a cosmic bestiary of equations that range from galaxies to atoms. Conventional science sits on the verge of seeing reality’s basic unit of representation, but even then can’t view the computational states beneath – much less alter them without the crudest of tools. A Sleeper scientist or engineer is like a blind watchmaker adjusting his creation with blacksmith’s tongs. The goal of science is to behold the cosmos’ pure mathematical forms. The ethos of science is to apply the results to humanity, freeing it from the savage evolutionary games that prevent it from transcending its boundaries.

Sleepers lack a certain degree of . . . inspiration. They might want to improve the species or have the capacity to view their own consciousness as an objective target for study, but they don’t combine both desires with a signature spark of genius. Theoretically, anyone could study science and technology while cultivating an objective view of consciousness but in practice, few attain the refinement to become mages. Sleepers can become experts in a narrow, static field, but psychological barriers prevent them from truly Awakening.

Magic? There are only technologies: methods that manipulate the universe’s mathematical forms by affecting their external manifestations. There’s little need to exert one’s will on the pure Telluric substructure when enlightened applications of biology, chemistry and physics will do. There are a few numinous operations that break down the divide between individual consciousness and the rest of the cosmos, but these are so rare that some Transhuman Adepts doubt they truly exist.

Nevertheless, there are crude ways to hack reality through direct psychic command and proto-science. That’s what other mages do. They manipulate symbols that happen to be effective memes or accurate models of an object, and catalogue these correspondences in their own traditions. They’ll never attain the breadth and efficacy of true technologies, but they serve and occasionally even inspire.

The computational cosmos’ one flaw is that it can accept multiple models – and some models have more potential to improve the human condition than others. Limited paradigms leave much to the dumb operation of cosmic forces by appealing to a great mystery or incompleteness principle. Once confirmed by observation, these models gain standing in the meta-Darwinian competition between cosmological models. That’s why the Consensus exists, and why less desirable models still dog Enhanced efforts to go farther, unlock the fundamentals, and give all humanity the power to master them.

Foci

Computers, scientific instruments, synthetic drugs and other chemicals, surgery, laboratories

Spheres

Correspondence or Mind

Sects

The Enhanced’s factions are political, with each accepting scientists and engineers of any specialty, though each group attracts specialists in particular fields. Transhuman Adepts routinely drift from one faction to another as their opinions shift.

Posthuman Front: A direct action cadre of the physically enhanced, the Posthuman Front serves two vital roles. Members recognize the importance of the human body. They “upgrade” their own with a variety of technologies and apply the results to research that may help Sleepers overcome disease, aging and disability. They’re also the Tradition’s most effective soldiers, strong and fast enough to counter comparably augmented enemies. The Posthuman Front’s members are the most likely to carry serious Paradox backlashes, since they apply radical experiments to themselves.

Reality Hackers: Peerless computer scientists and programmers, the Reality Hackers are the most devoted to the Tradition’s metaphysics over its numerous applications. They wish nothing less than to make the universe programmable by everyone, breaking down the division between physicality and information. In practice, many show disdain for “meat” issues. Matter is just a particularly obstinate form of data, and it might be better to disdain it entirely by creating a new universe with more tractable “permissions.” They develop better ways for people to interact with computers, improving the number of “digital natives” able to transcend the physical world.

Utopian Engineers: Utopians carry the Tradition’s original torch, urging it to pursue its efforts in a socially responsible context. The global majority is more concerned with daily survival than novel technologies. Without political activism, the Enhanced will only benefit the already-privileged, making them nothing more than a Hegemonic tool with delusions of independence. Utopian memeticists, anthropologists and economists focus on how to make scientific development relevant to the needs and values of all cultures, instead of the elites most able to skip to the head of the line when it comes to reaping the rewards.

Concepts

Hacker, scientist, backstreet engineer, information broker, technology smuggler, doctor, designer drug merchant, social scientist, Web activist

Stereotypes

Æther Society: Science isn’t a set of personal preferences, but you have to admit that their obsessions bear the odd fascinating fruit.

Eumenides: I like my justice without porn. Reincarnation is strangely plausible – replicators are everywhere – but I doubt it goes that far.

Order of Hermes: It’s failed science, but they make up for it with pure attitude. Sometimes the math even works.

Templars: If we’re living in a simulation, there is a God. If it’s all about randomly spawned replicators, there isn’t one. In CERN We Trust.

Vajrapani: They stretch the potential of unimproved minds and bodies to their very limits, but they won’t take the obvious next step: Improve the potential!

Verbenae: There is no memeplex so silly that someone won’t sacrifice a goat over it. Just saying.

Hollow Underground: RTFM.

Tags: Mage: The Ascension, world of darkness