Why allow society’s dictates to determine your reality? The ubiquitous hegemony of culture roiling over everything like a stench you can’t scrub off. Laws, money, social hierarchies all warping and pruning and binding humanity in to a field of fleshy bonsai. Civilisation, not slave but inhuman master dictating the path ahead of us.
To the Reclusionists this the chain around everyone’s neck. They don’t seek change, the forces they would challenge are too vast and too impersonal. People are too caught up in the benefits of their enslavement to see what it is costing them. The Reclusionists seek escape. Even founding a micronation would only draw attention to them as a threat - however minuscule - to the sovereignty of greater powers, be too ineffectual and drag too much baggage from the old world in with it. What they need is an entirely new world.
Their goals are:
- Recruit like-minded people to aid and accompany them.
- Avoid interference from governments and other authorities.
- Testbed ways for people to live without culture or social organisation.
- Create and move into an otherspace without social structures (their objective, 29% complete).
Zack Clements was raised alone in the north Alaskan wilderness by a man who hated the government. Not the US government but the notion that government, that Hobbesian leviathan, existed solely to smother the free will of man. Being a child Zack never questioned this, he hated this government-monster and prided himself on his freedom. He learned to survive in one of the harshest environments on earth.
Then the man died and for a while Zack was on his own. He did well considering he wasn’t yet a teenager but a chance encounter with a group of petroleum surveyors brought him into the government-monster’s grasp. Group homes, social workers and schools were Zack’s worst nightmare. The government-monster hid behind everyone’s faces and they just let it! He ran, always looking over his shoulder. There was no escape, nowhere it couldn’t find him.
Zack is a lean, hard man in his 30s but his weathered face and prematurely grey hair make him appear much older. An accomplished survivalist and outdoorsman he brings the same hard-bitten ruggedness to navigating the hostile environment of civilisation that he does to any desolate wilderness. He would happily retreat into conventional isolation were it not for the spectre of the government-monster forever looming over his shoulder, consuming as much of the world as it can touch.
For Zack the cabal’s goal represents the creation of a childhood fantasy: a lonely, windswept utopia where the strongest survive alone on their own merits rather than through the forced parasitisation of government.
Lara Drick was a once a widely feted activist-academic who championed cultural preservation as a tool for social enrichment and universal understanding. That was before a phobomancer took exception to her efforts as an attack on ‘the fear of the other’ and monstered her into a breakdown. She still believes in cultural preservation, but now as a stopgap solution on the road to inescapable global collapse.
To Lara cultural darwinism is currently as inevitable as climate change and antibiotic resistance and just as dangerous. In the same way that monoculture almost led to the extinction of the banana (and may again), she believes globalisation will leave humanity critically vulnerable to social viruses. Her solution? You can’t fight it, so get out while the getting out is good.
Lara is in her late 50s, dresses professionally and speaks with the elocution of a professional orator, she is also a very hopeful motumancer. Her attacks on social structures are like koans, intended to provoke thought and enlightenment in others and either prove or falsify the validity of her own beliefs. She’s looking for a solution, a cultural apotheosis that she can carry the seed of into her new world.
To Lara the project represents a combination of life raft, time capsule and vaccine, a potential clean slate from which the future of humanity can reemerge to begin anew after the apocalypse.
Samsa is not their real name. They cut away attachment to their name a long time ago, they cut away a lot of unnecessary things. They cut away fear and loneliness and love and scruples and any other personal aspects they perceived as weakness, cocooning themselves in alienation. Whatever mewling injury once motivated Samsa’s psychological self-mutilation is long discarded, what remains is the impulse to adapt and improve by excision. They want to cut until they are perfect.
Outwardly Samsa maintains a superficially perfect, blandly unimaginative existence in reflection of their barren interior. Fantastic career, loving husband, wonderful children, a wide social circle, tennis twice a week and regular vacations. It’s all part of a rigid facade that they once desired but now feel nothing towards but detached possession. When alone Samsa sleeps standing with their eyes open, they eat raw ingredients rather than prepare food, they would live in an unfurnished closet and speak to no one if they could. Their outer life exists as a flimsy, load-bearing pretext to justify their metamorphosis.
Samsa appears as a woman in their late 20s, expressionless, beautiful and the picture of health. They want to continue to pare away pieces of themselves to fuel further change but their current environment stifles this goal and the cracks are starting to show. The thought of it forcing them to abandon their false life for worse circumstances is offensive to foundation of this twisted obsession. Thankfully oddity brings exposure to the unusual which in turn brought the Reclusionists to their attention. To them it sounds like crafting a new reality - in which their strength is realised - is just what that the doctor ordered.
Samsa’s objective is to use the otherspace as a chrysalis to fuel further transformation. Their ceaseless self-destruction has reached a plateau, their only remaining option now is to adapt an environment to something worthy of them.
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