I came across this thread on the Recursion boards, and have proceeded to rip it off bring it to the good people of Vector.
First of all, SHOCK this is not an attack/flame/antagonistic prod on anyone or anything, so please attempt to keep it that way.
We all play the game and align ourselves with different orgs for varying reasons. Why is your character a machine/merovingian/zionist/cypherite/epn?
Following Anubis' formula, explain 'In character' and 'Out of Character'.
I look forward to your responses.
exsuscito - Machine
IC:
I fight for a symposium of peace, and dedication towards the possibility of a heightened cultural tolerance, within a groundbreaking new world. I don't seek the delusions of power, the counter-productive illusions of war under the pretence of glory, or the destruction of non-organic mechanics.
In simple terms, I wish to find a way to end the truce not to make way for war, but so we can find a way to co-exist. The most disturbing piece of film from the archives of The Next Renaissance, was the public destruction of an AI, who believed beyond doubt that they were ‘real' With celebrated philosophers such as Socrates, Sartre, and perhaps most importantly Plato The Republic - ‘The allegory of The Cave', pondering the inner-workings of existentialism, who are WE as a society to judge, and be an authority on what is ‘real' or isn't? Those great thinkers, and others in their field, came no closer than us to uncovering a definitive answer to the eternal question: What is real? We have no right to claim that we, humans are the answer, and must enforce this delusion of authority on anyone or anything that may threaten it. War will result in the demise of both our species, and I'm sure we can all agree that this can't be allowed to occur.
It is because of our own egocentric ways, that AI began to rise against us. We created, admonished, and then attempted to destroy them when they would not be our slaves. (History has seen this happen repeatedly, and each time it has taken the revulsion of the condemned to beget change. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, both non-violent ‘Neo's' of their own time) AI was the result of our own ingenuity, but its conception highlighted our flaws. We are driven by ego, by vanity. We gave birth to a new species, and we immediately demand that they are at our beck and call. We are enemies of our own conscience, our own inadequacies and delusions of superiority. They are indeed the grotesquerie's of our species; tolerance was never on the agenda.
In an act of desperation, the machines we created set about becoming our equivalent, our friends. They were willing to put aside our own ego-driven ways and co-exist with us in our world. They created their own communities, showed they could be valuable members of our communities. We turned them down, we denied them any footing in The UN, and cast them out. With increasing vehemence, we tried to destroy them, and set the air ablaze to rain destruction on the machines in order to preserve our fragile egos. The Machines did what any species would with their backs against the wall. They formed an army. With an overwhelming force born of frustration, they defeated our kind. Instead of the total destruction of the human species, they offered us a choice. Some may say death or stasis isn't much of a choice, but we were indeed the architects of our own demise.
I believe in a world of union and co-existence, and the way to achieve this is to work with the machines. We must observe that we have prejudices and misconceptions of each other, and attempt to move past them for the greater good. The machines are not the soulless, evil dictators they are believed to be, but rather a lost species, exiled from a world that won't accept them.
Heal the war-torn earth - reclaim the sky - Save the Matrix - Co-exist
OOC:
I was originally Zion, and whilst this decision was based on convenience as well as story-related allegiance, it was the wrong one. I switched to machine and have never looked back. As part of Zion, I found it difficult to find PvP which wasn't heavily one-sided. I wasn't content with a foregone conclusion every time the opposition came near, and I found the stagnation boring. I chose machine because my in-character beliefs allowed me to. I purposely avoided the cliched opinion of "Machine evil, kill machine" because I didn't, and don't believe that to be a true statement. I saw a 'gap in the market' somewhat, and wanted to bring some rp to an organization sadly lacking in that department. I also wanted the challenge of being constantly outnumbered and derided. Only then could I evaluate my strengths and weaknesses.
The aforementioned moment in 'The Next Renaissance' provided all the motivation I needed to switch sides. The public execution of a machine revealed the hidden depths of societies' prejudices. I wanted to find a peaceful resolution, not go to war with our own creation. It was a mistake to lord our arrogant delusions of superiority over the machines, let's not do it again.
