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Fexel
The NoSanNoOs always were very big on control. They permitted a certain degree of scientific/technological knowledge and no more. If your civilisation was on the cusp of the Space Migration stage, then you were in luck - your race would be given free travel to anywhere in the galaxy, free access to the Information Net that covered thousands of other civilisations, free food and energy. As long as your people toed the line, you were okay. Some things were illegal: artificial intelligence. Genetic modification. Virtual reality. Faster-than-light travel. Efficient matter-to-energy conversion. When the NoSanNoOs gave you all these things, then it wasn't really necessary to figure them out for yourselves. Of course, some civilisations were just naturally curious. You could warn them away from it, but some factions would still do it ... test the limits, make a slightly more advanced neural net computer, a slightly faster reactionless drive for their interplanetary craft... some races got more warning than others. It was up to the Artificial Intelligence that coordinated things for the NoSanNoOs. Anyway, to my point: one thing they were really down on was Fundamentalist religions. They didn't like Christianity (then again, who does?). They REALLY didn't like Islam. Those groups went underground, or mutated into less virulent, less violent variations. Splinter groups, each one marginally acceptable. There are always exceptions. There was a race, known, collectively, as Fexel, or 'the Fexel'. When they encountered the NoSanNoOs, their organisation encompassed nine planets in six different systems, all under the control of a religion so rabid, rigid, Fundamentalist and intolerant to make Islam look like the Church of the SubGenius. Just as christianity was united under the symbol of the cross, and Discordianism was united under the symbol of the golden apple, the unifying symbol of Fexelism was a sound. Fexelism had managed to spread that far using slower-than-light drives, so they weren't changed that much, technologically, by the NoSanNoOs. They did try and convert them, of course; imagine trying to talk an artificial intelligence into following a religion ... NAPAI - the NoSanNoOs' AI - left them with their religion. If it had been taken away from them, the Fexel would have been nothing; pack animals, no smarter than hyenas.
NoSanNoOs code: N-KLI-AMR/K
The inhabitants of the world on which this System of thought originated were predators who hunted in packs. Such beings, when organised into a planet-wide society, would (of course) pride conformity above all else. Right-Thinking was a concept that, originally, encouraged Survival. Those who embraced Right-Thinking prospered; those who didn't, perished. Right-Thinking covered all aspects of their lives; the kinds of prey they were allowed to kill, and where and how; their writing (language was fixed, a set of seven hundred and eleven words, no more, no less), their mating rituals, their law, their architecture. Right-Thinking was never set down in words; it didn't have to be. It was expected that each being would know, innately, Right-Thinking, from birth. In practice, young were tolerated some transgressions but soon learned what was going on. Scientific progress was slow under such a system; orthodoxy of thought was built in. These beings were hampered, also, by their primary sense being sonic rather than visual; astronomy and space exploration simply did not occur to them. Eventually, hindered also by a rather awkward base-four number system and incredibly long compound words for later scientific inventions - nuclear fission, for example, was known in their language, as 'objects (of small size) of smallness weight 1132 (or 64 + 16 + 12 + 2, or 94, or Plutonium) which are broken into objects (of small size) of smaller smallness weight' -they achieved space migration. They were fortunate in that the nearest solar systems were all less than three light-years away. Such was the rigidity of their social system that colonists could meet from colonies six light-years apart, after a journey of fifteen years, and still be undifferentiated socially and linguistically. They made little use of computers and artificial intelligence beyond simple autopilot systems for aircraft and the like. The individual who was known as Fexel was born some six thousand years after the first successful space flight (the event from which their dating system started). He was entirely orthodox (if a little brighter than usual) up until the occasion of his first mating, where, for some reason, he refused contact with any females of his race. Since this concept was not prohibited by Right-Thinking, this transgression went unpunished. He was accompanied by a crew of six similarly inclined males; they set out on a voyage of exploration in a slower-than-light starship to a system some four light-years distant. The ship was in constant contact with the rest of civilisation throughout the journey; the tiny society began to question the basic tenets of Right-Thinking on the way. The basic line was that since their civilisation had achieved a degree of mastery over their worlds, that the rigidity of Right-Thinking was no longer required merely to survive, and that if their race was to progress any further, new thoughts would need to be allowed. On the one hand, Fexel and his crew were changing the way they thought; on the other, they had to maintain a pretense of Right-Thinking, or communications would be cut off with the Home World. In secret, they began adding new words to their language. This new system of thought was known as Fexel, or Fexelism. By the time they had arrived at the new system, they were no longer Right-Thinking members of their society. They established a colony on the single planet of the new system and began indoctrinating new arrivals as they came. The colonists arrived in small groups or were told to wait in orbit and descend in small groups, as Fexel was concerned that a large group of people who did not accept the new way of thought could start a civil war. Eventually, Fexel's reforms were modified to include females, and he took a mate. Her name (by convention) was Fexalaf. She appeared to accept Fexel's way of thought; secretly, she reported his heretical modification of Right-Thinking to the rulers on the Home World. They mounted an expedition to bring the deviates back into line. Fexalaf, when asked, did not think to dissemble about her informing the Home Worlds, and confessed to the group that she had betrayed them. Fexel took his six original crew and his wife and fled for another system, this one eight light years away. Eleven years later, on entering the outer fringes of this system, their ship encountered a Moridani scout-ship, piloted by the Moridani Kendr-Banfeld-Morau-Senfa. This was the first contact that anyone of that race had had with intelligent alien life. No-one else from that civilisation would have been capable of communicating with an alien; any Right-Thinking being would have regarded her as some kind of prey animal (despite the fact that she had her own space-craft with a faster-than-light drive) and would not have considered communicating with her. Kendr-Banfeld-Morau-Senfa saw, in Fexel, a possible ally against the NoSanNoOs. She told him of the NoSanNoOs, their battle against the Moridani and the threat they posed to all intelligent races. She gave him a gift of physical longevity and returned him to his ship. When the Homeworld fleet caught up with him (which they saw as necessary - they could not allow him to go around perverting Right-Thinking; he had to be brought back into the fold) they took him back to the homeworld, a journey of almost twenty years... then in a very public ceremony, they pierced the walls of his sounding cavities, the equivalent of cutting out a human's vocal cords. The last sounds he made were recorded, sampled and became the symbol of his movement. In their language, he said, 'You Must Think Outside Yourselves', a statement which may have been influenced by the Moridani. Fexelism became more popular when he was incarcerated, supposedly until he died of old age; and yet Fexel did not die. He became the leader of the new movement from within his prison, a pit with bars over the roof. unable to communicate beyond some primitive sign-language, he was forced to stand by and watch while Fexelism replaced Right-Thinking; males were expected to remain celibate until the age of twenty-five. Initially, only the priests of his following had their sounding-cavities pierced; this practice later was enforced on all males after their first mating. Despite the intended changes, Fexelism was merely a more efficient version of Right-Thinking; more words, some silly ideas about celibacy and the Silencing (which, for a race whose primary sense is sound-based, is almost as drastic as blinding a human would be). The progress of their society was drastically hindered by this habit; there were swings of power from a Female-dominated system to one dominated by celibate, immature males, since no male could be a competent leader once he had been Silenced. The society had been firmly entrenched in Fexelism for almost a thousand years before they were contacted by the NoSanNoOs. Fexel had died after three hundred years in his prison. His last words had achieved the status of holy dogma; the words themselves were endlessly propagated, and yet the meaning was ignored. A standard representation of the sounds was established, and it was a crime punishable by death to even slightly modify them. If a new method of encoding the sounds was devised, Fexel (The Sound, as opposed to the being) had to be translated into this new form and back again with no loss of digital information, or the translation was not allowed. It was similar to the Muslim tradition of not desecrating the name of Allah. As time went on, and Fexel the individual was forgotten, the following deviated further and further from the original intention. This was partly due to the nature of their language, which was still very limited; abstract thoughts such as philosophy had to be described in groups of simple phrases, which were open to dozens of variations in interpretation. The phrase 'You Must Think Outside Yourself' became to be thought as 'Your Thoughts Must Exist Outside Yourself', and then 'Existence Outside Your Own Is Only In Thought'; dozens of splinter groups diverged with their own interpretations, some of them as silly as 'You Only Think That Anything Outside Yourself Exists!' and the like. One of the problems was that this race was still essentially made up of predators; very violent and very defensive of their own brand of orthodoxy. Religious wars, which would have taken too long between planets using their own slower-than-light systems, accelerated rapidly under the NoSanNoOs, where their entire civilisation collapsed into thousands of tiny factions, each one defending its own brand of Fexelism, each one, somehow, still in possession of Fexel's last sounds; each one ignoring their meaning. |
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