The Enciphered Mnemonic Republic, aka the Oubliette
Privacy
Liberty
Individuality
The Enciphered Mnemonic Republic, aka the Oubliette, is famous for chocolate, wine, cryptography and memory. The reasons this one world civilization is known for the last two is because of their history and technology that supports their civilization.
It all started with an ambitious terraforming project. One insanely wealthy (or just insane) individual bought multiple millions of stored humans to terraform a world and become Royalty. Needless to say, it was morally and ethically dubious with its reliance on the enslavement, and didn’t go according to plan. The stored rebelled, killed their owner and embodied themselves, becoming citizens in their nascent republic, setting up an e-democracy called The Voice. The Voice is the Oubliette's system (in many senses of the word) of democracy. It makes political decisions and has both legal power (e.g. ruling over punishment of offenders such as early or prolonged Quiets).
Each citizen starts with a fixed amount of Time stored in a personal Watch, which they use as currency. Like currency, they can earn (or lose) more, even becoming millienniaires - people able to theoretically live a thousand years embodied as a human with the amount of Time they have stored up. Everyone, visitor or citizen, tracks their available Time through the Watch. Once their Time has been depleted, their minds are transferred into robot bodies known as Quiet, which help to build, maintain and defend the Oubliette. Their bodies are preserved by the Resurrection Men. Given it’s importance, Time is secured by the best encryption the Mnemonic Republic can devise.
The concept of the Quiet as a price for eternal existence has been questioned occasionally. Although theoretically AI could be used, the Voice (so far) has held on to the system, probably because of its important educational aspect for the citizens. As one observer noted, "Perhaps, they've got it right. A little immortality but a little death now and then makes you appreciate life a little more."
The citizens of the Oubliette are very private, employing a technology known as gevulot to shield themselves from each other. Gevulot is privacy as it is practised in the Oubliette. It involves complex cryptography and the exchange of public and private keys, to ensure that individuals only shared what information or sensory data that they wished to the exomemory. Gevulot is disabled in Agoras and everything that happens there is public. In Agoras, you have to show yourself to the world. What happens there is remembered by everyone and accessible to everyone. They are places of public discussion and democracy where you can try to influence the Voice.
Exomemory is the collective memory for inhabitants and visitors to Oubliette. It is a combination of statistical recording, public ID, public archive, library of facts, storage for memories too large for baseline neuroforms, private and public communication, a means of ‘forgetting’ by encrypting agreed memories and data away from access - even by the participants and essential part of the Voice. Accessing Exomemory involves 'blinking,’ after which the person remembers the knowledge or event.
Because of this, memory and cryptography are two the four things Oubliette is known for (the other two are wine and chocolate - and are a different story).
The Enciphered Mnemonic Republic is governed by the Voice, but ruled by a triumvirate of Cryptarchs. The Cryptarchs are the best cryptographers and analysts that the Republic can produce and as a result have root access to all the encryption systems - Time and the Exomemory. This means that they can change or delete external memories, the conditions of contracts, the Watches of citizens - everything. With all that this entails, and why the Cryptarchs watch each other closely.
The Cryptarchs are chosen by their predecessors from the most promising cryptographers, mathematicians and spies of the Oubliette. And sometimes by the Voice when the chain of of succession is broken.
It is said they time with a light hand, but since they have the ackles for the entire system and everyone’s memory outside of their own heads, who can tell?
Citizens of the Republic tend to clump together in large cities. Their technology could allow them to live independently of each other, but they like being near each other. And it affords them an avenue for creativity, which leads to Oubliette’s architecture being, in a word, eccentric. Downright whimsical. Their cities are mobile - either on rails, legs, vacuum lifting cells or antigravity. And they move so what they see changes. Each city’s path varies - some vote on a schedule, others are driven by a semi-random number generation, while others are on a path agreed on years ago. A large part of what the Quiet do is mediating and mitigating the impacts of the cities and their movements.
What’s more, the cities tend to be modular and configurable, with only a few permanent thoroughfares and structures - a neighborhood has a beautiful view of the exterior can find itself shuffled to the interior. As a result they try very hard to make their neighborhoods and buildings memorable.
Despite all this some of the inhabitants use long duration aircraft to get around the changes, docking around the edges of the cities, moving about, or mooring on collections of masts. And these become neighborhoods too.
While the common view of Oubliette is of the Noble citizens, there are many more Quiet. Like their Noble counterparts, they’re embodied, but in much less human bodies. Some are tiny, others are huge bearers of their cities (called atlases) and their spacecraft are composites of Quiet. Truthfully, they are the heart of their civilization. And while they labor, they all know that they will experience the pleasures of humanity again at some point. There are also those that prefer the life of the Quiet, earning multiple times what they need to embody as a Noble, but staying there for a need that cannot be met as a Noble. Typically, this is found among the spacecraft Quiet.
Most of the societies in the core book can be found in Oubliette, with a large number of Artisans, Fictionaries, Heterolinguists and Traders. While there aren't many Technomages, the ones that do hail from Oubliette are noteworthy. From the fan material, there are Interstellar Association for Longevity Studies and the Technomagery
Common Name: Oubliette
Emblem: A gold abstract mask
Typical Allies: Association of Stored Humans due to their common origins and the Eternal Masquerade for their similar takes on living. They’re also very fond of the League of Independent Worlds and the Tao of History. Daoine na Realta Foraois alternate between allies and aggravating rivals over their shared values.
Typical Enemies: Association of Eternal Life with what they see as a view on life and living as antagonistic to their way of life. The Cognitive Union terrifies them as a successful slave state.
Benefit: Competitive Advantage in contests related to Cryptography and an extra twist to spend on Comprehension, Intrigue, Romance or Wonder.
Core Values: Privacy and Joi de Vivre
Privacy lets Oublietters avoid observation or be disturbed by others. They use the CV to resist surveillance and observation by others.
Joi de Vivre represents the enthusiasm with which Oublietters engage life. Whether its love, an argument, an idea or friendship, the average Oublietter will pursue it with enthusiasm. They use this CV to resist people who tell them to calm down or give up.
Other Common Core Values: Anonymity, Authenticity, Beauty Carpe Diem, Celebration, Chocolate!, Creativity, Duty, Elegance, Expression, Freedom, Friendship, Humanity, Identity, Individuality, Life, Pleasure, Sancity of Mind, Secrecy, Sensation, Time is Money, Tradition, Wine, Wine, (Wo)Men and Song!
Oubliette | Bio | Cog | Meta | Nano | String |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Citizen | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
Civilization | 3 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
Oubliette Societies
Oubliette has a few unique societies - The Tzadakim and Resurrectionists.
The Tzaddikim (from Hebrew Tzadik, “righteous one”) are anonymous crime-fighters and investigators in the Oubliette, sometimes described as vigilantes and sometimes as police. No matter what, they do display technology higher than that of the normal Oubliette citizen.
Core Value: Guardianship to guard Oubliette from internal and external threats.
Benefit: Increase the value of one of Cognitech, Metatech, Nanotech or Stringtech above the value of the citizens for Oubliette without decreasing Import.
The Resurrectionists re employed in the Oubliette to manage citizens who have 'run out of' time. They preserve the physical body of these citizens, and transfer their minds to machines that run and protect Oubliette during an enforced period of time known as 'The Quiet'. They operate from a vast underground network of facilities that lies beneath the surface of the Oubliette.
Core Value: Smooth Passage that those coming and going from Quiet should have as easy a passage as possible.
Benefit: Competitive Advantage for Medical.