Intergalactic Summit

Entry Nine: Dam Torsad (part two)

So ... I've been thinking a lot, agonizing, really, over just how to go about this.

My overall impression is that Dam Torsad is a microcosm of the Amarr Empire, and of Amarrian self-image and ambition in particular.

That might sound a little ... limited. A little shallow or simple. It isn't. There's a lot, and I only just scratched the surface, and I really want to get this right. So ... I have to be careful here.

So, without trying to somehow unify a picture I didn't really, actually see, here are some fragments I picked up. Maybe they'll pull some sort of picture together, which at least won't be wrong.


The Museum

To a pretty large extent, Dam Torsad's a museum of the Imperial past, its present, and even its future aspirations. The national character is on display, and is therefore sort of ... bigger ... than it needs to be most places. It's more noisily formal, more conspicuously pretty, more ostentatiously faithful, and on and on.

It's like "Amarrian culture," written in a subtly larger font size and boldface, and curated (or maybe gardened, and occasionally weeded) by the MIO.

While they don't seem to mind waving this under the nose of the odd foreign dignitary (or traveling writer), I got the feeling I wasn't really the target. I think it's mostly for the Amarr themselves: "This is who we are. This is what our civilization can aspire to. This is what we offer to the universe."


The City

Of course, Dam Torsad's also a place where people live. I didn't get to see as much of this as I would have liked, but it's not like all the MIO officers on Athra could have kept the liveliness of the place in check.

Well, not without killing its attractiveness as well, anyway.

Anyhow. Dam Torsad, wherever you go, is very much a lived-in space. There's nothing fake about the lifestyle; this isn't some arid sepulcher where living, breathing ghosts act out the ancient rites of Empire. It's a thronging metropolis, and the living room exhibits on display are actual, lived-in living rooms.

(Or so I infer.)

Even if there's an element of showmanship to the local culture, there's no sense that anything changes when you, oh visitor, turn your back. I guess having to be on display for strangers all the time gets to be sort of ... habit, or something, after a while.


Stagnation (lack of)

I've previously remarked on certain tensions and dynamics in Amarrian society that keep it more agile than it might look from the outside. In case it wasn't already clear: the idea that the Amarr are a "stagnant" culture stuck in the past is a massive misconception, one I harbored myself before coming here.

The mistake is understandable: (1) they're still feudal (?!), ergo they're obviously stuck in the past; (2) they often don't advertise or celebrate change, therefore it must not be happening; (3) they're deeply religious, therefore they must be caught up in a maze of crippling, self-perpetuating ignorance.

Never mind that there are certain political purposes served by portraying them as backward and set in their ways-- the civilizational equivalent of a decrepit, irascible elder with opinions decades out of date and steadily going soft in the head. That the Amarr seem to have some gerontocratic tendencies probably doesn't help the image much.

Illusion. Misapprehension where it's not flat-out fiction.

Pay the old Torsad-Laur district, known locally as The Cauldron, a visit and you might think you were walking through an iron age marketplace, right down to the packed street bazaar on weathered cobblestones. Follow that with a walk among the hyper-modern towers directly adjacent, though (I'm still pretty sure I saw some Sleeper technology in that architecture), and you might start to wonder how you're still on the same planet.


Faith

... seems to be a really public thing in Dam Torsad. Services are frequent, all day. You're not expected to attend all of them. Prayer drones are kind of a ... presence, though.

(How many places have dedicated prayer drones?)

A lot of schools of Amarrian thought are represented; about the only one that's in short supply is "none of the above." There's a certain self-generating reality to it all. The shift from "whether" to "how" and from "which faith" to "which branch of the faith" is pretty fundamental.

Like I said, Dam Torsad seems to be sort of by the Amarr, for the Amarr. As an Achur, I usually feel a little alien among the Amarr, someone out of place. Dam Torsad's thus far the only place I've actually felt like an alien, though. Something utterly other.

For someone of the Amarrian faith, it's probably pretty motivational.

For me, attending morning services was sort of like taking a walk through a capital ship rail gun battery's capacitor array.

(Also, Sarumites: not subtle.)

The architecture is, of course, astounding.


Commerce

So, Caldari consumer goods (among others, I'm sure; the Caldari ones are just the easiest for me to recognize) do actually reach the street level in Dam Torsad. They're not marketed very ostentatiously, but they're not confined to black or gray markets and you don't have to know anyone special; you just walk into a boutique at the base of one of those towers I mentioned.

Also, Amarrian respect for antiquity means that the (fake, or, sometimes, real) antiquities market in the bazaar is impressive.


[cont'd]

Entry Ten: Dam Torsad (part three)

This ... isn't going to be a normal entry, exactly. If there is such a thing.

Last week, I learned that Dr. Arkon Sarain had passed away. Well ... passed away sounds like something you do in your sleep, of natural causes. Somebody killed him.

That's not ... very relevant, to me, or to this. I guess revenge isn't something I care very much about. And I don't really believe in justice....

Would he have been horrified to hear me say that?

Maybe I should say, I don't really believe "justice" is a thing we do justice to. I don't think we can. Justice is something that exists in our heads, not in the world.

... maybe he'd have been sad to hear that, too.

I haven't been taking this very well.

So ... I sort of skipped the funerals, both of them, of the man who was, maybe, one of the people I was closest to.

I doubt he saw me as anyone who was close to him. It's not like I was his daughter or anything. Or even a third cousin. Or a friend he'd known for years.

I was probably just some strange, curious, kind of lost young lady he was kind to and took on a tour that one time.

I haven't known anybody for years, though, so ... yeah. He was kind of important to me. Part of the limited cast of characters who've really, truly, meaningfully helped me.

The worst of it's been that his death's felt like a rejection. Of me. On an existential level.

I've explained this before, and maybe Che's right and I really shouldn't dwell. So ... maybe this'll be the last time.

Arkon died, really died, because he didn't have a backup of himself stowed away anywhere. It's a very ... human ... thing, I guess, to live once, and die, even if you get cloned a few times along the way.

There's something more ... artificial, I guess, in loading your head back up out of an archive. There are discontinuities there. Lost time. Experiences you've had that you ... never had, because that was a divergent timeline that did those things and then died.

I can see why he would think it wasn't natural. That God wouldn't approve.

Only, that's what I am. Actually, that's all I am. It's all I can remember ever having been: a discontinuity. An artificial person made from a damaged archival copy of someone else's mind. And he believed so strongly that that was a wrong and bad thing that he went and died for it.

And I know he wouldn't want me taking it that way and I know he would never have meant it like that and it's not like anybody gave him a choice about whether he wanted to be murdered and it doesn't matter because I'll never be able to hear him say any of that.

His last, inadvertent act was to die for the belief that my existence is blasphemous and wrong. And there's no way he can ever take that back.

Gods, grief is selfish.

... so ... I've been spending the last few days back in Dam Torsad.

The MIO was all over again. Of course. They were a little less subtle this time, but maybe that's because I tried a little harder to get away or get into places I wasn't supposed to be. They were pretty okay with street level, even back alleys, but they drew the line at service tunnels and crawl spaces. On those, I just got polite refusals, impassive stares, and directives to move away.

I couldn't muster the chutzpah for any open defiance, so ... I still can't tell you what the inside of a Dam Torsad service tunnel is like, or what color the rats are.

Or what the measurements are on an MIO holding cell, for that matter.

One thing I did notice is that the MIO was less about where I went, and more about who talked to me. My escort didn't inhibit my movements all that much, but I did see them sending a couple of people away. Probably most of that was happening well out of my sight. Maybe they didn't want me mixing with impressionable people. Maybe they didn't want me getting the wrong impression. Maybe they had some sense that I wasn't in the best frame of mind, and were ... I don't even know what they'd have been doing with that. But something, maybe.

My room was in the Central district (I even attended mass regularly, like something approximating a good Imperial subject), but Torsad Laur was where I spent most of my time. Dr. Sarain loved antiquities, and got nearly as much delight out of the fakes as out of the real things (I kind of like that a man so dedicated to law could admire a bit of artful scoundrelry). I spent a lot of time with the hawkers, and got hawked at plenty. Four thousand years of history makes for a lot of source material for replicas and such, it turns out.

It also supports a fair few genuine antiquities dealers, of course. If I ever actually want to start a collection myself, I might even have an inkling which ones are real by now. Probably not, though.

Just ... nothing much seemed right. If I'd bought anything, it would have been for Arkon, and ... I wasn't going to see him again.

Wasn't. Won't.

... anyhow ...

I visited chapels and historic sites. I visited an old courthouse, even. ... I didn't quite work out what I was looking for until my fourth day there.

In Torsad Laur, there was a hawker selling ... well, just silly, cheap handmade pendants. Natural quartz crystals, the sort of thing nobody bothers to synthesize in a lab (at least for ornamental purposes) because they're barely even semi-precious.

And ... well, I bought one. I'm wearing it right now, as I write this.

Looking in the mirror, I can see my own artificiality: smooth, unwrinkled skin, without blemish or freckle; perfect teeth; bone structure made to order-- the sheer extremity of it.

We're all artificial, of course. Arkon Sarain was no different, probably: a capsuleer, like me. Like all of us.

[cont'd]

I think I can relate to that.

Also, if you are interested by all those places in Dam-Torsad, I suppose I could show you.

It doesn't help that the vast majority of capsuleers don't know anything about politics and what conservative/liberal actually represent. More often than not capsuleers seem to think that conservative means you are mean and liberal means you are nice, even though that couldn't be further from the truth.

You're not the only one who walked those streets as a slave, Ronin. What those buildings look like to me is something to be proud of, because I know they were built by people like us.

There are labor safety rules in most Holdings, because slaves are valuable property and creations of God. If your Holder treated his workers poorly, then he would be losing money and acting against Scripture. Mistreatment of slaves happens far less than most people try to claim.

But you can not deny it happens can you? It happens more often than you want to make yourself believe poor lost child. Because you were not put to death you say it never happens. You act as if slavery cult members were incapable of sin, something they do not even claim themselves. The only thing stopping them is a sense of it being bad for business and scripture. So why then the vitoc and the slave collars and the slaver hounds you deluded simple child?

Because slavery is a living nightmare for the slaves every second they must endure it, yeah drug induced hallucinations help blur the agony but it is always there ready to leap back into the lime lights. Some choose the self induced insanity like you have and try to accept that bad is good and pain is guidance/ penance, but that is just bat crap crazy little one.

You are suffering from hostage syndrome where fear pain and lifelong indoctrination makes you see green as blue and red as purple and no about of truthfulness from others will sway you from your wretched path until the real One True God touches you and makes your self induced blind eyes see.

If the tone I take with her offends you so be it. I was enslaved, I know what those monsters can do to you. I was very very lucky to come through to the other side with my psyche intact.

I feel deep regret for people like her who still cling to the notion that they are .... less. That God made them for the sport and pleasure of others who are by birth, more.

You perhaps can not understand the level of depravity it takes to tell someone God does not love them as much as he does you and that gives them license to enslave your people, violate with impunity your parents, siblings, spouse, and children, and turn you into a beast of their burdens and entertainment no matter how sick or disgusting they be.

You walk down the palisades of towering beauty and see only the smallest of what is really there, you don't see the untold billions that were tormented to make it all possible. You heard the prayers of their faithful but you were deaf to the anguished wails of the billions who have toiled and died under the yoke of slavery for generations.

I bid you awake to the horror of what they are, the worst blight on humanity in the cluster.

They have mistaken technology for culture, I hope you are not making that same grave error, they are uncivilized warmongering slavery cultists, so if you choose to have pleasant conversations and pastries with them do not be surprised if I care not what you think of when I address one of their victims with tenderness. I may never be able to heal her and that is a great sorrow.

The real One True God of humanity made us all equal in my opinion and faith.

One day the slavery cultists will turn away from their wicked practices and repent for their innumerable agreesions against both humanity and the very concept of what a religion should be. I hope you are not still strolling along like a ghoulish tourist in a mausoleum along streets that are really the catacombs of the countless victims of their sinfulness with a smile on your face oblivious to the real scope of what surrounds you.

There are a lot of ways to make a civilization, pilot.

It's not the tenderness that catches my eye. It's the abuse. It's the attacks on the will and autonomy of someone who's probably suffered as much as you did. In subtler ways, likely, but still.

And, unlike yourself, she's still here.


Hm. A certain kinda-sorta patron of mine probably hopes something similar, albeit from a sharply different angle.

... I think maybe I was always a little ghoulish, though. And probably will remain so: an artificial person wandering among the graves, admiring the engravings and the flowers.

. . . .

You say that the Amarr are the worst blight on humanity in New Eden, but it's not clear that humanity agrees. You say the Amarr are a horror, and yet I'm routinely more horrified by myself than I am by them.

Pilot, issues of who is right and who is wrong aren't ... very interesting to me.

People are, though.

I won't pretend to care very much about abstract ideas of cruelty, and the suffering of people I've never met. The world's a haze of such things. People are awful to one another.

If I could do something about that, I might care more. Maybe.

I can't. I don't.

But when I see it happening before my eyes, to people who've been kind to me?

That I care about.

I've said before that the Matari have standing to press their case in this. The Amarr are your enemy, and I'm a guest of the Amarr, writing about the Amarr without condemning the Amarr.

I can see why you wouldn't want that, so be as hard on me as you like.

But until you can speak to her and argue with her without trying to degrade her again, leave Samira Kernher out of it, you bloviating, self-satisfied sack of bile.

Entry Thirteen: Masks

Sometimes it's difficult to see something, even right before your eyes, until it becomes an issue. The difference between a mask and the face behind it is maybe one.

Imperial society aspires to be the Kingdom of God in this world, but it is a nation of human beings. There's a tension here; human beings routinely fall short of celestial spirits, but that's not a fact that can be publicly acknowledged without diminishing the Empire's lustre. The result is profoundly divided public and private spheres.

There's a lot of overlap (as there'd have to be), but....

Courtesy is generally public. Personal feelings (and remarks thereon) are generally private.

Religion is public. Faith, to the degree it's distinguishable, is private.

Hierarchy is pervasive; it may be set aside in private at the superior's option, but it's always present.

Duty is public. Sentiment is private.

Maybe these things are true, to some degree, everywhere (to a high-ish degree among the Deteis, for example; much less among the Civire), but they are especially strong in the Empire. A certain amount of Amarrian society is a play, put on for the participants' own sake.

During my stay among the Amarr, I was greeted in many places with great hospitality and courtesy, but there were only a few I ever grew very close to. It's these few that either quietly accepted my decision to depart or loudly denounced it. The difficult part has been someone, maybe, on the very edge of that social circle-- distant enough for masks to remain in place; close enough for words spoken privately after my departure to feel like treachery.

Also, a face doesn't have to be formal, to be public. "Duty" can wear a very gentle face. It can be warm, kind ... even nurturing. And still porcelain.

Thinking about it carefully, this should be obvious. But, it isn't, always.

But ... this isn't something I'm really in a position to criticize.

While I was among the Amarr, I conformed myself to Amarrian expectations, Amarrian courtesy as best I could. I played up what I guessed they wanted to see and left a lot unsaid. I studied their etiquette and followed it, accepted my place in the hierarchy without argument, learned one Amarrian idea of a proper bow.

I didn't volunteer information about myself, my faith, the deeper reasons for my interest in the Empire, or just about anything else.

Maybe that makes us all liars. But I think it takes a pretty brutal notion of honesty to reach that conclusion.

In a society of humans who take celestial beings as their role models, it would be difficult to live otherwise. Transcending human frailty is hard, really hard, so allowances have to be made, but that can't be directly acknowledged without also giving up on (or, at least, weakening) the aspiration to be better. Likewise, a traveler who wishes to learn about that society can't refuse to play a part in it and expect to get very far.

If we all showed our real faces, could we stand the sight of each other?

The reactions of those who have glimpsed mine suggest, probably not. And I don't think I'm a particularly awful person.

So, even if it results in mistakes, misunderstandings, and little perceived treacheries, people wear masks. And, I guess, maybe we should.

The idea of masks is a painfully black and white one, and it relies heavily on the idea that truth is a binary concept, too. You either wear a mask or you don't. There's no mention of half-masks or masks that mimic the face underneath.

A person could say truthfully that they enjoyed a party, without mentioning that they despised the host.

In my time with my Amarrian friends, I've known they've held things back, but I never considered it in terms of masks. I considered it in terms of... Well, speaking in military terms, clearance levels. A level one clearance allows you to see level one emotions. So on. So forth.

In the Amarr, I've met and befriended people slowly, painfully. The ones I've grown most fond of do not mislead about their higher levels. Their higher levels are not acknowledged. They can act as though they don't exist. Sometimes, that does create confusion; a friend I am thinking of in particular can be loving on level one and furious on level three. It is not that they are intentionally misleading, though. The greater culture is mature enough to acknowledge two opposing sets of emotions can exist at once, so its people act with that knowledge.

If you know enough about a person to have figured out what they're feeling on a deeper level... It takes a certain care to put the effort in to hide those levels. Another thing the greater Amarr culture is aware of, I've noticed, is that emotions are not permanent. That is one of the many reasons why acting on them immediately or showing them too early, to the wrong people, is frowned upon.

How different it all is from the Federation!