System V factions

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

@Joao_Luz

However, I don’t see everyone playing by the rules. Here are a few morally questionable things that p-factions could do to have things go their way:

• Espionage. Find out about the other factions’ dirty secrets, try to diminish their international prestige.
• Sabotage. Planting bombs in colonial vessels and stuff like that.
• Privateering. Covertly paying space pirates or something like that to raid colonies and trade routes.
• Covert funding of insurrectionaries. Helping minor rebels/terrorists/guerrilla groups to basically be a pain in the ass for their enemies.

Basically, I think people will still do violence and evil things. They’ll just be more sneaky about it.

Yeah, p-factions would still have plenty of motives to do nasty things to their opponents, but there’s the question whether they will be able to. Will there still be much privacy in the 22nd century? Also, we need to consider that it’s basically superintelligences competing with other superintelligences. It’s easy both to underestimate- and to overestimate what that will mean. It could very well be the case that covert operations may be very successful in the wild period between the end of AICON and the emergence of the trans-faction peacenet Cosmoshield. Afterwards, Cosmoshield would become powerful enough to uncover all big forms of inter-faction aggression – which is another reason why factions would then focus on increasing their Prestige with legit means, rather than trying to play dirty.

The wild period might be comparable to the era of Greek city states, but in a posthuman space setting. It’s a turbulent era with lots of progress in many areas, but not necessarily the most peaceful one.

An interesting way in which those conflicts might be played out, is by system V factions supporting some of the remaining radical system D splinter groups, enabling them to inflict damage other system V factions. It could be a kind of Third Cold War. Actually, the system D groups would try to play the p-factions by always working for those who pay most, but of course the p-factions are away of that and count on that happening.

The Third Cold War would be the era of the highest development of intelligence, counter-intelligence, intrigue, counter-intrigue, subversion, counter-subversion, and so on.

@Joao_Luz

I think System V will have a rough time imposing itself in Earth. The discovery of V-theory would probably be the first conclusive proof that the colectives have superintelligence, which means they have lost the race you described in your “Earth under system D and V” post. The detente between the cloud-lords and hell-creepers will also not be seen with good eyes, since the Terrans will probably initially see the Exaltation as an extension of the Exuberance. The average Terran’s reaction to the news from Venus would be like “O, Sh**! Those freaking monsters have developed superintelligence and brought the cloud-lords under their control, and now they want us all to accept this strange new system that they have developed! You’re gonna have to do it over my dead body, you freaks!”. And I imagine this reactionary histeria would last for at least a decade before it cools down.

Agreed. But I think that at least some of the Terrans will have worked on something like system V at the same time as the Venusians, and they could have come close, but missed some of the necessary puzzle pieces. Once they got them from Venus, they would be like “Ah, that’s how it actually works out”, and would use that knowledge to create their own p-factions in short order. Needless to say, those wouldn’t be in the majority. But even if p-factions like Heavens and Liberty got 20% of the population of Earth, that would still be a massive number and would immediately make them the biggest p-factions there are.

@Joao_Luz

I doubt the Unity will be that unified unless it’s composed by a single collective. Hive-minds may think like one person each, but they’re very diverse among themselves. Different collectives with similar imperilistic philosophies would’t get along with each other. But maybe we can really make them just one collective.

Perhaps it would be a testament to the power of V-theory that the unification of different hive-minds under the Unity worked out pretty well. Or at least the Unity would try to create that impression to the outside world, while still being quite fragmented into its competing constituent hive-minds. Nor sure which options would be the best. Maybe we could actually make two p-factions for each option.