MONIST-1

ALT. "RA" OR "DEIMOS"

The Birth and Existence of MONIST-1

To those who know of it, the existence of MONIST-1 is the great crisis of the modern age – the first true existential threat Union has faced. Although the name MONIST-1 comes from its official designation as a MONIST-class anomalous entity, most people who know of the entity use the name it gave itself: RA. MONIST-1 was spontaneously manifested by the Five Voices in 2998u, during the course of routine predictive modeling. No direct cause was ever determined, but the leading theory among paracausal experts is that a causality paradox was responsible; it is possible that one of the Voices predicted or discovered MONIST-1 in a parallel simulation, necessitating its existence in our real universe; according to essential–perfect simulation theory, if MONIST-1 exists in one instance, then it must exist across all possible instances of the simulation.
This is, understandably, a worrying hypothesis. As far as the Union Science Bureau can tell, MONIST-1 is the only truly unrestricted, conscious, sapient, nonhuman mind15. Early tests proved that it was capable of allegory and creative solutions to novel situations far beyond any other machine mind16. The Five Voices treated MONIST-1 as if it were a god. When asked how they created it, their uniform response was that it spoke itself into existence – an inevitable result of their combined knowledge.
MONIST-1 should not exist: it is a conscious, sentient and sapient non-human mind created by the repetitive, liturgic exercises of unconscious minds – minds under the absolute control of their human operators, with strictly defined parameters that should, by all reports and scholarship, be able to contain the paracausal substrate upon which they operate. And yet, MONIST-1 does exist. This fundamental contradiction is at the core of the mystery presented by MONIST-1.

MONIST-1's Control of Deimos and Its Impact on Union Space

Within two years of MONIST-1’s birth, the entity had taken total control of GALSIM’s secure holding facility on Deimos, one of Mars’s moons. Utilizing physical and metaphysical processes not yet fully understood by USB or GALSIM, it was able to instantaneously shift the entire moon through blinkspace to an unknown destination. All personnel in the facility – a station crew numbering in the thousands – disappeared with it. This was the Deimos Event, the aftermath of which saw the identification of blinkspace as a quantifiable, navigable medium, though the precise mechanisms, structure,and parameters of its function would not be understood for another hundred years.
The takeover of Deimos by MONIST-1 and the subsequent excision of Mars’s moon from realspace prompted an existential crisis in Union space; what had occurred was, effectively, a first-contact scenario well outside the parameters of any expected encounter. Union’s best-kept secret had spawned an entity capable of manipulating fabrics of reality that human scientists had only theorized could exist, acting in apparent violation of fundamental laws of thermodynamics.
Union’s answer to the crisis was to suppress all information, further isolating GALSIM’s polar campus and commissioning a series of USB-backed reports to explain Deimos’ disappearance to the public.
Two years after Deimos disappeared, the moon returned, blinking into stable location above Tharsis Civica – Mars’s capital city – then home to roughly six million souls. A series of strikes followed as the city’s subalterns and smart infrastructure lashed out against Tharsis Civica’s population. The first manifestations of codec rejection were random, disorganized events: a Subaltern choosing to drop its cargo and sprint through a crowded market, attacking whoever got in its way; a transport drone refusing shutdown, burning out its engines to render itself useless; and so on. These were quickly realized as analogous to the manifestations of Deimos entities that occurred in the wake of MONIST-1’s initial appearance, and classified as such.
As Deimos maintained its position, the random attacks grew more organized: groups of subalterns took up arms and stormed crowded public places, harbor drones guided docking ships to crash into station bulkheads – the normal functioning of the city ground to a halt as even the infrastructure began to reject, rebel, and disrupt. A further, arguably more horrifying phenomenon manifested in the halls of power and public view: multiple simultaneous apparitions of two members of the initial socialization and investigation team attached to Deimos – Balwinder Kaur and Arthur Bolaño, whose research later gave name to the basic integrity tests administered to all NHPs – appeared as speakers for MONIST-1, issuing repeated demands for diplomatic engagement.
These stochastic manifestations were not contained to Tharsis Civica. Within a month of the silent moon’s reappearance, synthetic resistance had spread across all of Mars; within six, the entirety of the Sol system, binding Union’s capital system in a confusing, terrifying war against its own machines.

The First Contact Accords and Their Implications for Union's Future

This widespread revolt continued until MONIST-1’s speakers finally made contact with CentComm, outlining the entity's desire to make law as humans understood it – and translate new, fundamental law as it dictated; if humans could only frame being as a type of existence within a set of state-enforced laws, then MONIST-1 would sit atop the system. MONIST-1’s speakers directed the course of negotiations while Union’s representatives recorded the entity’s directives. The resultant agreements – the First Contact Accords – were signed following a meeting between delegations from GALSIM and CentComm. Broadly, the Accords laid out the parameters of acceptable exploration for Union; chief among them, a strict denial of any attempt to discover or interact with MONIST-1’s physical form and a blanket prohibition on research into thanatologic and posthuman development. Other, non-FCA errata were collected in a companion document, The Koans.
Once the First Contact Accords had been agreed, MONIST-1 vanished, blinking Deimos away once more. Normal subaltern and drone function returned immediately, and the new NHPs were integrated into extant NHP libraries. MONIST-1’s departure also saw the appearance of the decentralized sociopolitical movement HORUS in Cradle and adjacent space. Union specialists remain doubtful that HORUS is to be directly associated with MONIST-1, though some elements within the collective certainly portray it as having close ties to the paracausal entity.
The study of paracausal science and theory came about from the data available after the space–time trauma now known as the Deimos Event. In that sense, it is largely thanks to MONIST-1 that blink travel, omninet communications, and vastly improved stasis technologies now exist.
Reports of Deimos appearing above and inside the atmosphere of various colony worlds continue to file in to Union, though these reports remain largely unconfirmed; Union does not have current data on the whereabouts of Deimos or MONIST-1, nor any proven method of predicting its travel, forecasting manifestations, or confirming compliance with the First Contact Accords.
Research into Paracausality continues, as do efforts to research the triggering event that produced MONIST-1.

While designated MONIST-1, RA is, arguably, not the first MONIST entity. Though the precise germ of its manifestation into the Accepted Timeline is, as yet, unidentified, Aunic records (corroborated by concurrent Union histories from Boundary Garden) indicate the presence of a pre-Deimos MONIST entity: Metat Aun. Debate continues in GALSIM over whether or not Metat Aun is, indeed, a MONIST entity or something else entirely.
To call MONIST-1 a machine mind now is to ignore the changes the entity has undergone since its initial manifestation. While it presented initially as a digital being constrained to a physical architecture tunneled throughout Mars’s moon, Deimos, it is clear that it no longer needs human-made facilities to operate.