The Mech Touch

Every state was rife with division. As long as humans were individuals, they always found ways to disagree with each other.

A dispute could revolve around something as trivial as the color of a uniform to something much more influential such as the prohibition against arming warships!

No single human completely agreed with the stances of another human. It was impossible.

Billions and trillions of humans existed in a typical state. How could all of their relationships possibly remain stable with each other when every single one of them represented a source of instability?

The reason why many societies hadn't fallen apart was because a lot of rulers and governments had become quite good at manipulating their own people.

Nationalism, education and scapegoating were only a handful of the tools that officials used to unite different people and prevent them from clashing against each other.

Yet what happened if the people in charge disagreed with each other as well?

After all, the people at the top were no different when it came to disagreeing with each other.

In fact, their disputes were much more consequential and damaging due to the immense power and influence they possessed!

This was why political disputes were so troublesome and dangerous to people like Ves. The bystanders and people at the bottom could easily get entangled by a feud between two powerful factions that were willing to go through any means to advance their cause.

As someone who suffered quite a few times from political disagreements, Ves instantly became wary.

"Give me a rundown on the local politics according to your understanding." He commented. "Who do we need to watch out for? Who are the crazies who have already resorted to extremes in the past?"

Gavin expected to hear this question. He already prepared a small presentation. He waved his hand, causing a small diagram to pop up that showed some of the most influential factions in the LRA.

"The LRA is a technocracy in theory. This means that the person at the top should be the smartest and most respected scholar in the state. The issue with that is that the current Supreme Sage has always been in charge from the beginning. He's a four-hundred year old fossil who doesn't bother with any governance at all and usually engaged in extremely secretive high-level research.

Ves understood the feeling. At a certain point, being in charge was an annoyance. If not for the fact that giving up all of that authority opened up the possibility of betrayal, holding on to it was a necessary evil in order to ensure that resources kept flowing in without interruption.

"I take it the Supreme Sage is part of the conversative faction." Ves guessed.

"You got it, boss. Due to the immense prestige of the highest leader of the LRA, the conservative faction has always been dominant. It's just that different people who formed different thoughts emerged over the course of the LRA's history. I've already mentioned the radicals. They are the second-most influential faction. They are mainly united by their desire to overturn the cautious, restrained policies set by the conservatives and take on a more aggressive approach to promoting biotechnology."

Ves grimaced. "These folk are the ones who benefit the most if I am able to defeat Dr. Navarro in a design duel, right?"

"That's correct." Gavin slowed. "In fact, we have already begun to receive messages that likely come from this faction. The individuals who contacted us have all offered to support you in various ways."

"I don't want or need their help. If there is one thing that I have learned, it's that sticking our noses in a local dispute rarely benefits us in the end. We will only inherit the enemies of the people we get in bed with and increase the risk of getting screwed."

"We are aware of that. We have always taken great care to project ourselves as neutral visitors who are merely merely interested in conducting transactions. It's just that where there is a will, there is a way. As long as involving us benefits someone, it's hard for us to avoid getting entangled. The best way is to project enough strength to deter improper actions, but we aren't at that point yet. Our might is quite impressive when compared to other individual organizations, but in the face of factions that united hundreds if not thousands of different power players together, we are still small fry. Maybe the only consolation is that factions are usually rife with division as well."

"Tell me about the other factions in the LRA. I doubt that this state is as orderly as it seems. Scientists and researchers all look calm and collected on the surface, but when it comes to their research interests, they can be quite fanatical about pushing their own views."

Ves knew this quite well since he was one of them! Academics and engineers were supposed to view reality from an objective standpoint, but the reality was that no one was able to agree what objective reality was supposed to look like. This meant that even the skinniest nerds could turn into hulking barbarians when someone questioned their opinions!

Since the LRA was basically ruled by thousands of biotech experts, that meant that it was actually being run by lots of nerds who constantly tried to push their subjective truths against each other!

"The third-largest faction in the LRA are the combinants."

Ves raised his eyebrow at the odd name. "Combinants?"

"They're basically a bunch of tech enthusiasts who want to embrace both biotechnology and classical technology." Gavin elaborated. "Before you ask, they do have something in common with the radicals. The combinants broke off from the original opposition group because they wanted to go much further. For example, they're usually called cyborgs because they want to augment every Lifer with a combination of electronic and biological implants."

"That does sound extreme."

In general, every human should be able to choose their own implants if they had the means to obtain them. This was a general principle that many people upheld. It was frowned upon to force someone to integrate a specific collection of implants. This represented a violation of human rights.

Of course, this did not stop determined states and organizations from attempting such. They merely resorted to milder means of persuasion such as excluding benefits to refusers or indoctrinating the population to favor one kind of implants of another.

"What else do these combinants want?" Ves asked.

"I'm not sure. They're rather messy because they have all kinds of personalities in their ranks. Some want to pursue immortality by unlocking the secret to digitize human consciousness. Others want to develop cyborg mechs that blend organic and mechanical parts to take advantage of both. They even want to develop cyborg beasts species that are able to breed new offspring that are also half-mechanical in nature!"

Okay, that sure sounded out there. Research related to digitizing human consciousness was highly controversial. Plenty of overconfident researchers attempted to transfer their thoughts and personality into a computer, only to kill themselves and a lot of people in the process!

Since the Big Two didn't like all of this killing, the researchers mostly experimented with beasts these days. This was a much better approach because they might stumble upon a special lifeform whose minds were much easier to digitize than human minds!

This was their holy grail. As long as they could find the right species, they could study creatures and decipher what allowed them to succeed where others failed!

Once the researchers cracked the secret, it wouldn't take long before a geneticist developed a new gene template that might be able to transplant the same properties to humans!

As for cyborg mechs, Ves had never encountered them so far. The conservatives pushed for pure organic mechs that were grown rather than assembled. Anything that tarnished this purity would definitely attract a lot of backlash!

They existed, though. Development on them was rather slow because there weren't a lot of mech designers to push these mechs forward.

"Cyborg mechs are even harder to design than biomechs." Ves spoke. "The barrier to entry is extremely high because the amount of knowledge you need to know before you can even begin to design a cyborg mech is insane. You not only need to learn how to work with biological components, but also know all of the ways to combine them with mechanical parts without anything going wrong."

Gavin nodded. "This is why the combinants are more obscure. They are constrained by their inability to expand their numbers. There aren't a lot of mech designers in this state who graduate with a balanced focus in both biotechnology and classical technology. It's either one or the other."

"I understand. What do they think about our upcoming design duel?"

"That's difficult to determine, but I think they are even more excited at the prospect of our classical mechs beating biomechs. However, they don't want us to win too easily. The combinants want to show to the public that biomechs are weak, but classical mechs aren't much stronger either. In order to gain support for their agenda, the combinants have to persuade the LRA that the best way to go forward is to take the best of both worlds and combine them into cyborg mechs!"

There was no chance of this happening. Unless the combinants were led by genius biomech designers, it was far too difficult to come up with a cyborg mech that clearly performed better than other kinds of mechs!

Cyborg mechs were rife with complexity. Not just the parts themselves but the relationships between the parts had to be regulated. An excessive amount of variables introduced more failure points and more interconnected problems that were insanely difficult to balance.

In practical terms, this meant that it was ten or even a hundred times more difficult to optimize a cyborg mech!

Perhaps that might change in the future. As long as technology continued to advance, mech designers became capable of performing greater feats.

Yet Ves seriously doubted that such a possible transition might happen at all. No matter how he looked at it, biomechs and classical mechs already possessed plenty of advantages on their own. Adding a third kind of mech to the mix that took far more time, knowledge and effort to design was not competitive!

Still, cyborg mechs held a kind of charm that was hard to resist. They were most prevalent in dramas where fictional mechs did not have to be practical. This was why there was always a group of diehards in the mech industry that insisted on blending organic and mechanical matter in a single mech frame!

"Do we have to worry about the combinants messing around, Benny?"

"That's difficult to say. I think Calabast can tell you more about the dangers coming from that direction. From what I can see, the combinants are much smaller, so their influence isn't big. Even if they want to try something, the conservatives and radicals will surely oppose them. Even if the latter two groups are opposed to each other, they are still advocates of biotechnology. They merely differ on how flexible the LRA should be in propagating their tech."

All of this sounded a bit convoluted. The conservatives and radicals were enemies to each other, but didn't hesitate to band together to oppose other factions if it served their interests!

Ves was beginning to see why Majestic Teal was such a complicated place to live in. The current discussion merely covered domestic politics. The friction between the different second-rates of this star sector was also troublesome!

"Okay, I think I got the gist of the combinants. Are there any more groups that we should be worried about?"

"Well, there are plenty of groups that I haven't mentioned yet. There are beast supremacists who want to increase the presence of living beasts in people's daily lives. There are hivers who wish to live on giant planets that are completely made out of organic matters. There are hundreds if not thousands of groups like these!"