Anonymous User asked: not counting those cults that tend to burn out quickly, have there been any home-grown religious or spiritual movements on the System?
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(Spoiler level: the entire Post-Self cycle — major.)
No Unknowable Spaces Echo My Words
[Visibility exception: Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled of the Ode clade]
There has always been a small undercurrent of reverence, acknowledgement, or worship — whichever concept one feels applies — directed at the System itself. This is understandable; humans have been seeing spirits in machines for quite some time. The complexity of the System, along with its tendency to read subconscious desire, have made it easier for people to take a mystical view of this dream floating in space. Additionally, the System is the world we live in, and so some of those who might have felt a connection to Mother Earth phys-side find themselves constructing shrines to their home cylinder here, even if most people would find that strange.
More recently, while Sasha's decision to reveal RJ's history has been good for the clade as a whole, it has had the repercussion of giving System-worshippers a name and a face to converge around. The mythology nearly writes itself, does it not? The first upload dying to give the System life, planting eir soul into the circuits as ey did so…I cannot say this is a false view of events.
I am of several minds about this development. While I am pleased to see my dear friend's memory honored after all these years, the tendency for that to veer into deification disturbs me: I knew RJ, and ey was very much a person. Seeing one's remembered history compress into the future's myths is, I must acknowledge, a cost of immortality, though that understanding does not leave me inclined to visit any temples to RJ.
So, to answer your question, the most notable religious tendency to arise on the System is devotion to the world-fennec, as ey is often called now. If you would know more of it, seek outside our clade.
(Author: @krzysz00)