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The Cybergnostics are a group of mystics among the Virtual Adepts, who are fighting the Ascension War on the spiritual plane. Their main belief is that the world of matter, flesh and entropy is evil, and that pure information is the true goal of reality. Everything should be purified into information and uploaded into a higher reality (or rather, a higher level of implementation). The goal of evolution is to completely throw away the dust of the material world and evolve into a state of perfection beyond matter and energy.
Their beliefs mirror the ancient ideas of the Gnostics (hence their name), mixed with the Virtual Adept credo of information. The cybergnostics have an intense disdain for the weak flesh, not unlike their brethren in Iteration X. However, replacing it with technology would only be a stop-gap measure, since machines also eventually will fail. Only by turning everything into information can it become truly eternal and perfected. To this end they are experimenting with various ways to encode objects into data and uploading them into the digital web. They pursue the goal of total uploading even more than most Adepts, and there is no secret that most of their Masters are already disembodied information existing on the Digital Web.
Their vision of Ascension is the Singularity; the sudden awakening of all information in reality, which will ascend to higher levels of implementation while leaving the imperfect world behind. Many of the simulations of they have done seems to imply that this might occur December 21 2012. During the next decades, the information networks will grow faster and faster, and more and more the computers and programs themselves will develop more advanced versions. People will become parts of the growing Net, and when it reaches a critical size of 10 billion active intelligent units (human and machine) a synergy will occur, where the entire network will Awaken. During the next months, progress will be even faster as the Net guides the infosphere (all information processing on and around the Earth) to higher and higher levels. In a few hours, decades of progress will occur, and in the last minutes centuries and finally millennia of evolution will lead to the total awakening of all information and the end of the world of matter.
The cybergnostics are extremely optimistic, and think that this singularity will occur even if the Technocracy believes it will win. Most of the Ascension War is simply irrelevant to them. What is important is to make sure progress continues, that technology is never allowed to get bogged down and that the Net becomes large enough the Awaken. The more practical cybergnostics try to influence events in the right direction, for example by helping Iteration X get their new products past the Syndicate and New World Order or inventing even cheaper ways to get Internet connections. More advanced members realise that this is not the best way; instead they turn towards a more mystical battle in the information realms. There they seek to strengthen the forces of evolution, self-organisation, synergy and pure information against entropy, stagnation and disruption. In the beginning they merely manipulate the ideas of people, but latter they actively battle with the concepts themselves in the abstract worlds. The most advanced members are rumoured to have become abstractions themselves, far beyond humanity or comprehension.
Among the Adepts the cybergnostics are regarded as a bit too far out and esoteric, but generally cool. The chaoticians and reality hackers get along perfectly with the cybergnostics, while the cyberpunks find them irritatingly impractical. They are not very known among other traditions, but have some allies among the Order of Hermes and Gnostics among the Celestial Chorus. They also have ties to the more mystical units of Iteration X (yes, they exist) and maybe even to the Computer. Their enemies are mainly the same enemies who fight all Virtual Adepts, like the Technocracy and the more nature-oriented traditions, but they also have abstract enemies. Since they so strongly fight against Entropy, Matter and Imperfection, spirits and beings linked to these archetypes are the natural enemies of the cybergnostics.
One unusual and dangerous way of influencing reality is the art of invocatorial manipulation. Masters of cybergnosticism merge themselves with spirits or concepts, literally becoming a part of them. In so doing, they hope to influence them in the right direction or perhaps gain some of their power. This practice is of course extremely dangerous, and more than one cybergnostic has disappeared forever into a powerful being. But apparently the Masters still regard the practice as worthwhile, perhaps because they also have the ability to make backup copies of themselves in case something goes seriously wrong.
Some cybergnostics also try to influence the growth of the digital web, to make it grow to higher spiritual planes. To do this, they seek its secret sourcecode, using advanced disassemblers and simulations. There are also rumours that Turing was in fact the founder of cybergnosticism, and that they have found a way to communicate with his spirit which permeates the Net.
[ Each success adds another dice of countermagick to all attempts to upset the order of the area; normal randomness and decay are almost completely removed].
[ A purified person will be pure information, and no longer feel any need for sleep, food, sex or other biological functions. However, a purified pattern no longer works very well in material form, and cannot be downloaded again].
[ This very efficiently cuts them off from the use of Spirit and Prime, if they need the Net as a foci, and also from communications with other Adepts. The spirit can even contact the Technocracy and give them the position of the Adept ].
Up to the Virtual Adept PageAnders Sandberg / nv91-asa@nada.kth.se