198: Axis Solari

ENTRY 198: Axis Solari

“Is it then really to be the end of our history and of our peoples? No! We cannot believe it. This age must be called, not the decline … but the resurrection of the peoples … Only that which was old, decayed and evil perishes; and let it die! But new life will spring up. Faith can be found, if the will is there. Our leadership has the will, and faith is with the people....”

- Excerpt from Axis Solari ‘Mesh-cast; adapted from a speech by Adolph Hitler

Not all conservatives are bioconservatives. There is more to being human than the shape of your DNA, or the number and kind of your augmentations. The Axis Solari care nothing for your ethnicity or nation, your sex or your gender. They embrace biomorph and synthmorph alike as one people, unified, the survivors of Earth, the undiminished egos that survived the Fall, to be perpetuated forever. Those human egos are the chosen people that the Axis Solari wishes to save.

Not all transhuman attributes are positive. Their hatred, and cruelty, and racism. Bias and invective. Rape and torture and murder, sometimes on scales barely imaginable. Those are traits that the Axis Solari believes are valuable and defining to transhumanity. Those are the emotions that they wish to instill and cultivate to raise transhuman consciousness. So they have taken on them the symbols of those regimes which are most reviled in transhuman memory—specifically to elicit anger, and distrust, and bile. Because once you hate them, you have already achieved half of what they want.

AGIs are the scapegoats of the Axis Solari, the minority group that they feed their spite on. In their speeches and in their actions they proclaim them as alien intelligences, different intelligences, not human, inimically opposed to the human ego. Similar epithets are turned toward exhumans, and procedures that lean toward becoming exhuman; uplifts are regarded as lesser creatures. The AGIs bear the brunt of Axis Solari invective, and are at the forefront of their attacks.

The Axis Solari are transhumans dedicated to the preservation of the darker parts of the human ego, the parts that most transhumans wouldn’t mind pruning away. They dress themselves in swastikas and other symbols because they elicit hate and fear; they are willing to be hated, simply to spread hate. A terrorist group that knows what they do is terrible, but believes in the long run it is in the best interests of transhumanity.

Using the Axis Solari

On the most basic level, the Axis Solari are space Nazis—and everybody loves to punch Nazis. These people play the villain so much and so easily that they can be the bad guys or numberless goons in nearly any criminal or underhanded plot and none of the PCs will blink. That’s good; it makes the PCs underestimate the Axis Solari. That’s what they want. Better: being labeled as enemies of a large segment of transhumanity, the Axis sometimes finds itself in bed with other terrorist organizations, the better to betray them from within.

The only thing worse than space Nazis are intelligent space Nazis. The Axis Solari is actually deadly serious that it wishes to preserve the human ego, particularly survivors of the Fall, and all the criminal activities and low-level terrorism it engages in is just a visible smokescreen to funnel resources into its true goals of fighting existential threats. The Axis Solari are, for all their hate speech, a counterintelligence organization masquerading as a criminal hate group. As such, the Axis Solari have a lose working relationship with Firewall and other organizations—though they may not care for each other’s ideology, when it comes to fighting exsurgents, basilisk hacks, and extraterrestrial threats their goals overlap. The PCs who would so happily gundown the idiotic clanker with a swastika armband may find themselves working side-by-side with an Axis Solari deep cover agent to break up an exsurgent cell…