Lore:Plasma Clique
 The Plasma Clique |
Other Names: The Union of Plasma Distribution, The Holy Mandate of Plasma Regulation, The Volatile Monopoly |
Plasma Clique
Thou shalt not harvest Plasma in the dark, thou shalt only brave extraction in our light.
The only thing more dangerous than a monopoly is one that can't be controlled by profit.
The Plasma Clique exists to control the production and distribution of Plasma. The Plasma Clique does not exist to control SolFed, render ungodly profit, to conquer or liberate.
They are a collection of member states who own the main plasma producing systems in SolFed. These go to systems that are anomalous, so they may produce other things too, but plasma is the most important of their exports. They work together to set industry standards for plasma production, and production quotas. They're made up of various democratic member states and in addition to looking out for their financial interests try to push democracy within SolFed.
The Plasma Clique own the main plasma producing systems in SolFed, including several Anomalous Zones.
As a state-owned monopoly, the Plasma Clique doesn't answer to CEOs or a voter base. They own everything top to bottom, so don't have external pressures at anything but a state-vs-state level. The profits belong to the people, and unlike the egregore of the CEO grindset, the people of the Plasma Clique aren't demanding Infinite Growth At All Costs. social services they enjoy are maintained, which they easily are, they're happy. And this scares people, anyone on a Board of Directors who doesn't want their workers realizing that they could settle for "this is good enough" and choke the living hell out of their company's growth. Capitalism is fought through voluntary complacency, and here the Plasma Clique are the soldiers of God.
Why?
The purpose of a system is what it does: The Plasma Clique maintains a monopoly on plasma in order to maintain their monopoly on Plasma. Likewise, the purpose of the answer to "Why?" is not to convey objective truth, but to convince the listener that the Plasma Clique should remain in control of the Plasma trade. Depending on who asks, the answer will be different, tailored to the asker's sensibilities.
None of these are false, but none capture the full scope of the Plasma Clique's motives:
- To fight monopolies: SolFed has been wrecked with the Trade Clique's enforcement of byzantine copyrights. Folk have had their identities stripped from them because some pharmaceutical company trademarked a strand of genes that happens to be in their blood. The Plasma Clique sees the danger that a malevolent monopoly could pose, but also sees that there will always be a throne of Plasma to sit upon, so it takes the throne so that no one worse could.
- To regulate the dangers: With something as flammable and dangerous as Plasma, letting it go unregulated and freely sold also poses dangers. Plasma, to the Clique, needs accounting and regulation and safety, all things the Clique provides and the free market would not. Someone must be in charge of Plasma, and so it shall be the Clique.
- To retain power: The Plasma Clique holds power over Plasma. To retain that power, it needs to use that power. The Plasma Clique needs to exert political influence to choke out independent plasma dealers, lest they rise up and become unhealthy, unsafe competition.
- Plasma is limited: Theoretically, there's a finite amount of Plasma in the universe. Pedantically, there's a finite number of atoms in the universe, so it's a little hypocritical to only obsess over Plasma. Regardless, shortages happen, logistics and transport need to happen, and for many folk Plasma is their sole source of power, so letting the free market give Plasma to the "highest bidder" is frankly immoral.
- Plasma is unlimited: Where Bluespace and Realspace clash and the veil between the two is torn open, the damages congeal into Bluespace crystals, metaphysical scabs. By that metric, where the veil does not tear, it bruises, and those bruises manifest as Plasma. Through wide-scale abuse of the fabric of reality, Plasma could theoretically be farmed infinitely, whalloping the metaphysical to feast off her tears. The Plasma Clique stands not as a guardian of Plasma, but the noble knighthood defending reality herself.
- To help people: The Plasma Clique is notoriously charitous. Customers are not extorted beyond their means, and excess is taxed heavily. The Three-State-Aid Program, sponsored by the Clique, ensures that generators and plasma are widely available to small ventures and needy settlements, asking nothing but an attempt to transition to renewable energy.
- Empower everyone: The Plasma Clique owns the copyrights on modern Modular Solar Panel arrays, especially their upgradable glass compatibility layer, and in their charity offers the designs freely, with only reprimands that the printer breaks no SolFed law nor does no Evil with them.
- Keep it out of Evil's hands: The Plasma Clique does try to enforce its morals upon those dependent on them. The Plasma Clique unilaterally supports democracy; they'll deliver to monarchists, charging premiums that the upper class can afford to afford, and while it would be Illegal and Immoral to declare war against a fellow SolFed Member State, incidental democratic coups against these states suspiciously never have to worry about keeping their lights on.
- Ensure basic morality: Besides Democracy, the Plasma Clique pushes to help your fellow man, to abhor excess and to treat thy neighbor as your own. They won't shun you for owning a suburban house and living within your means, but that vacation home isn't a timeshare? It just sits idle for most of the year? Good luck powering that with their disapproval. The Plasma Clique is a collection of nations, so specific moral judgements might vary a little, but they keep each other in check just as much as they keep their dependent customers (most of the galaxy) in line.
- Be smug sons of bitches about the whole fucking thing: Yeah, they'll give you food for free, as long as you attend a lecture about how their morals are just, how their championing plasma is for the Greater Good, how all these charity programs that you're totally eligible for are the correct way to run a society, how you should be a part of that society. Y'wanna learn slurs for corporations? They've got whole songbooks they'll print out for you. They'll feed and clothe the homeless, but y'know what they won't do? Make more homes. (Note: they will make more homes actually). But okay they'll make homes but the only jobs allowed are to further their charities. Like yippee, you're out of the soup kitchen earning your own paycheck, but nope you're still in the soup kitchen on the other side of the counter. What the fuck happens when everyone gets theirs, and everyone's on the serving side of the soup kitchen? Nobody left to feed then, so you're out of a job, so you go to a soup kitchen, you get a job at a soup kitchen, there's nobody left to feed, ..? Think about it. These Plasma purists are fuckin' shit-heels. It's fuckin' moral to stick it to these chodes, ride your hog around their checkpoints and smuggle this plasma to the people, for the people, AROOOOO!!
- The Prophecy: When no rational argument will make things seem right, the Plasma Clique isn't above pretending to dabble in mysticism. Deep in the Time Before, the Forces created Plasma, a wild and voracious pet, and set it loose upon the galaxy, to guide it to greatness. But Plasma, volatile as she is, knew not the depravity of man, and let them abuse her, to suckle at her teat without wean, to bite and cry freely. The Forces wept, and in their tears came destruction: wild limbswapping explosions, and wild regular explosions, and wild the like. The Forces cried out for a shepherd to take Plasma into their flock and protect her, and lo, Tsogyal arose. With the stillness of the grave and the grace of life eternal, Tsogyal took Plasma under her wing and stood between her and ruin. There, Tsogyal still stands, staving off the end of times for both Plasma and Man through careful moderation and generosity. ... This isn't entirely a lie, as this was indeed prophesied... in the Plasma Clique's focus groups in the Time Before, a clock-themed conference hall.
The Plasma Clique handles plasma production and distribution, and for what means of production it does not directly control, it regulates, establishing industry standards and production quotas. Excessive production incurs their wrath, and their economic vengeance. Sure, mine twice the Plasma, but the Clique will buy none of it from you and now you're storing a volatile explosive for free.
Naive morons would consider them affiliated with the Trade Clique.
Where?
The Tsogyal Anomalous Zone is, reductively, a perpetual explosion, a forever bomb stuck in an infinite amount of time. On a surface level, it shares many similarities with a mundane "white hole," the conceptual inverse of a black hole. As one approaches a black hole, their perception of time accelerates, and as one approaches the Tsogyal Anomaly, their experience of time diminishes. As black holes pulls and consumes matter, the Tsogyal Anomaly produces and pushes it away. Despite the resemblance, the Tsogyal Anomaly is conclusively anomalous.
Consciousnesses within the radius of the field accelerate proportional to their attached body's deceleration; that is, visitors think at the same speed they do in normal space while their body moves in slow motion. Machinery, flesh, gasses, anything that's not directly related to the nervous system of a conscious person slows exponentially as it nears the core. As photons are discrete particles and not steady streams, visual perception slows as well. The conscious brain is adept at interpolating between visual stimuli too fast to observe, and surprisingly equally able to adapt to slower rates of light, hallucinating expected changes while waiting for the next photon. There is a radius around the anomaly's core, about 300km in diameter, in which the perceived "frame rate" is too low, resulting in a deleterious effect on the sanity of any exposed to it.
Inconveniently, the travel time of non-sapient information means that, at best, a person within can convey thoughts to the outside at exactly the rate that an ordinary person would at that same distance, but with additional signal-processing noise.
Experiments with "long person" have been forbidden by the Tsogyal Republic for the critical endangerment of all researchers involved.
Advancements
Of all the advancements related, surprisingly Positronic research has had the most advancements from studying within this anomaly. By observing the moment a circuit accelerates to conscious-time, scientists were able to pinpoint the moment it became sapient, wildly cutting back on redundant information loops. As a result, new silicons can be significantly dumber (and smaller) while remaining "conscious." While the Positronic Cube remains the most commercially-viable artificial brain, now consciousness can reside on a drive smaller than a floppy disk.
The Tsogyal Anomaly
The Tsogyal Anomaly was originally confused for a sun: a large burning ball around which planets orbited. Only once astrographers attempting to plan a Bluespace Shipping Lane plotted the odd orbit of Tsogyal's six planets did anyone suspect the sun to be anything but. The six planets in orbit of Tsogyal are actually a stable six-body satellite system, in which the gravity of each planet pulls the others inwards. The Anomaly, then, is stuck in the middle, equally repelled by each "orbiting" body. This uneven repulsion actually serves to stabilize the entire system, gently correcting any inconsistent wobbles until the system is stable again.
So why is it on fire? The core of the anomaly produces a seemingly infinite supply of plasma at a seemingly infinite pressure, meaning that it combusts when it is fast enough to react with ambient oxygen, or dense enough to undergo some analogy to nuclear fusion. Regardless, it's a burning ball of Plasma with negative gravity. Despite the flames, the surface temperature is shockingly survivable, and once a vessel is past the flames, the pressures within are slow enough to also be manageable. Excursions into the anomalous zone require exponential amounts of energy, and excursions out require patience. Tsogyal relies on an array of railguns to propel vessels deep upstream, where they are then capable of extending their stay through high-powered light emitters, offsetting their eventual expulsion from the torrent of fleeing plasma. Current vessels are capable of maintaining a steady impulse at (the radius at which time feels) 1/20th normal speed, and the deepest known incursion is hypothesized to reach 1/50,000th in the next 300 years. "Juggling stations", consisting of automated reinsertion relays, are able to keep returning a vessel into 1/800th speed for a "brief" duration, such that it averages to 1/500th speed experienced over a single journey of 2 years.
Exiting the anomaly is as simple as opening a large sail, letting out more surface area for the waves of plasma to push you away. The IDP Hosanna remains the only vessel to survive an emergency evacuation from 1/500th speed, avoiding structural collapse through careful engineering and aerodynamics, and avoiding sapience cessation through the radical therapy of intentional death in a resuscitable manner and a "timely" response by the IDP Chauncey at the 1/50th band. Most vessels who attempt such an exfiltration find themselves torn apart literally as molecular bonds fail to spin in corresponding ways, and metaphorically as the rapid influx of causality into a mind strongly hampers the sense of self.
Researchers suspect that the anomaly is simply the time dilation, and that the plasma is a result of bog-standard anomalies happening at the same rate as in realspace-timed anomalous zones, except slowed to an infinite timeframe, thus happening infinitely many more times at "once" in the center. Other rumor-starters suggest that the Tsogyal Anomaly is a new Big Bang creating a new universe with a new timescale, incompatible with our current realspace. Gossipologists accuse the Tsogyal Anomaly of being two massive Supermatter monuments clipped into each other in extradimensional ways, generating infinite energy through infinitely attempting to dust each other in nonorthogonal ways. Hearsayientists suggest that since plasma is when the veil between bluespace and realspace is wounded but not pierced, that the time dilation would mean that no wound could pierce in the core before the end of the universe, that once an infinite amount of time has passed and the wound has had time to properly pierce, the Tsogyal Anomaly will then begin expelling Bluespace, potentially contaminating the entire universe with instantaneous reconfigurations. Doomsday-profiteers point to numerous calendars as a finite date of total annihilation, and encourage you to buy your way into a stable afterlife for easy payments - what's a finite amount of money worth in comparison to your infinite soul?
Tsogyal Gasworkers ignore the mysticism and successfully harvest a steady supply of plasma from the burning cloud through - remember there is an immense amount of engineering keeping this steady, and that this is a simplification for the layperson to understand - putting a large straw through the burning layer so that no oxygen can get in so it can't burn before it's expanded enough to not want to burn.
So why is it still on fire? The plasma's infinite, but the oxygen? The incredible amount of plasma involved triggers an electrolytic CO2 reduction, melting the first combustion reaction's CO2 into methane and oxygen, which is recycled back into the combustion. In theory, the reaction needs only a finite amount of oxygen to burn the infinite amount of plasma, and removing enough oxygen manually could halt the burn. In practice, enough oxygen and microdebris exist drifting in space to rekindle the burn without perpetual (and cost-prohibitive) vigilance. In the opposite direction, while the addition of more oxygen could accelerate the burn, in practice the anomaly is already saturated with an even coating of oxygen, such that extra oxygen is propelled away from the anomaly before it can properly bind into a combustion reaction. Is that fucked up or what?
Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.
