Description of Mictlan
- MICTLAN [Celestis: Location, Major Powerbase (World)] There is, for obvious reasons, no record of how the Celestis managed to remove themselves and all traces of their history from the Spiral Politic. It’s been suggested that the technology which cut them out of the physical universe might have been supplied by the Godfather-lieutenants of House Paradox, as the Grandfather of the House seems to have been scrubbed from the timeline by a similar process (although compared to the Celestis, the Grandfather seems a positively benign presence). Whatever the Celestis did, they did it not only to themselves but to a sizeable portion of the Homeworld. Those agents of the Houses who possess deep-time memory – the ability to remember past-iteration events even if they no longer actually happened – record that there was once an academy on the Homeworld which was used as a prime recruiting-ground by the hard-line intervention groups, and which withdrew from the academic roster mere days before the Celestis seem to have wiped themselves from history. Nobody else has any recollection of this academy, however, so it’s fair to assume that it was removed at the same time as the Celestis themselves and turned into the extra-spatial realm of Mictlan. The fate of the students and academicians who weren’t part of the Celestis “conspiracy” remains unknown, but they may have been used to create the earliest conceptual entities. And Mictlan is, as far as many cultures are concerned, a form of hell. As the Celestis seem to be driven a sense of self-preservation rather than sadism, it’s not entirely clear why, but it’s easy to speculate. Despite their claims to be the true aristocracy of the universe, watching the War from outside the Spiral Politic’s walls as if it were a mere amusement, the truth is that the Celestis’ power is distinctly limited: every Lord of Mictlan is secretly aware that he or she depends on the lesser species to have any substance at all. Fear has traditionally been their best weapon, and Mictlan, with its towers of blackened metal, its factory-smoke walls and its seas of all-consuming empty space, has fear worked into every conceptual minaret and every memetic foundation-stone. Or alternatively, perhaps it’s the Celestis’ own fear that’s given Mictlan its shape. Though none of them would even acknowledge it, it was fear which inspired the Celestis to leave normaltime, and it’s possible that this sense of terror was woven into their kingdom right from the start. Theoretically when a new servant arrives in Mictlan his or her own ideas will be devoured by the realm, but in practice the domain only seems to care about those concepts which can reinforce the stifling, monumental walls of the citadel. Everything in Mictlan is asphyxiating. Everything in Mictlan is death. The servants become faceless after a while, their identities worn away by the environment, featureless slaves whose only function is to observe their masters and thus ensure the Celestis’ survival. The name “Mictlan” is South American in origin, and suggests “the land of the dead”, a title which seems to have stuck among human cultures simply because it seems the most fitting. The Celestis are not only deluded enough to think of themselves as gods, they see themselves (or wish others to see them) as raw and terrible gods… and the war-deities of the South Americas, with their variety of monstrous faces and their constant demands for the hearts of the conquered, would surely appeal to the Lords of Mictlan. As the realm is made out of pure perception it could be said that it has as many aspects as it has occupants/servants, but the most striking descriptions mention a landscape of ziggurats under the smoking roof of the sky, great stepped pyramids which seem to weigh down the visitor with a sense of overwhelming mass. Even the “stone men” that protect the citadels come across as brutal, carnivorous God-totems. (It has to be remembered, though, that the Celestis and their followers take on new forms according to their environment. When Mictlan was attacked via fifteenth century Europe in the wake of the Order of the Dragon, the army was beset by Celestis constructs which were distinctly European and medieval in design, hence the description of them as gargoyles.) But if the establishment of Mictlan was in any way intended to give the Celestis an Olympian perspective, to allow them to look upon the universe with a sound judgement the other Houses could never hope to match, then it was an unequivocal disaster. All the excesses and follies of the other Houses are multiplied in the case of Mictlan: every delusion of grandeur, the derangement that comes from long life and a threatless environment, the Byzantine politicking, the endless and meaningless rules and the arcane social structure (all can’t be right in a society where everyone is a god, a corpse or an assassin). The Celestis lost the last scraps of their efficiency and usefulness as soon as they departed the Homeworld, and their decay has continued ever since. Although the Celestis aren’t in themselves aware of it, Mictlan has become their own personal hell in more ways than they could ever allow themselves to envisage.
They are responsible for the Enemy's conceptual weapons, such as Anarchitects.
- Although the Celestis have occasionally helped the Homeworld in this way, the fact that they’ve also supplied the enemy with conceptual entities is seen by most House agents as proof that the Celestis are vile, parasitic betrayers, and many units of the House Military are duty-bound by their own codes of conduct to destroy any “spineless monstrosities” who might be discovered in the warzone.
The Celestis, whose entire environment is basically memes, are essentially just a network of ideas.
- But these little Gods need worshippers. As the Celestis only exist as networks of ideas, they need minds which can perceive and understand them. Still bound to tradition and protocol – albeit their own – their usual tactic is to appear before members of the lesser species, in a typically imposing form, and suggest a Faustian “bargain”. As the Celestis have retained rudimentary control over life and death, it’s within their power to (say) offer a subject an extended life-span, on the understanding that when he or she eventually does die his or her identity will belong to the Lords of Mictlan. The subject will be given the Mark of Indenture, a memetic link through which the subject, on his or her death, can be “downloaded” into Mictlan to act as the Celestis’ servant in perpetuity.
Descriptions of meme-mines, and it creating ghost architecture
- GCI PROCESSOR [Remote: Technology (Earth, C20)]Or, Genuine Concept Imagineering: the corporate name given by Faction Hollywood to the recovered meme-mine used between 1995 and 1999. Though the meme-mines were first engineered by the Celestis, and designed to boost the Celestis’s influence in areas where they were only partly understood and therefore partly tangible, in human terms the most significant use of the device was in California, September 1999, by Faction Hollywood’s leading light Michael Brookhaven. Considering the meme-mines’ ability to generate false (or ulterior) world-environments it could be said that Los Angeles was the perfect place for it, and Brookhaven himself may have seen the GCI processor as nothing more than an extension of the digital technology in use ever since The Silver Mountain in 1989. By 1996, Hollywood was already geared towards the ritual massproduction of film, although by this point the ritual served no real purpose apart from maintaining Hollywood’s role as the cultural master of the western world. Digital technology had already replaced the “prayer wheels” of earlier eras, with industrial animation departments performing billions upon billions of ceremonial calculations per day and thus keeping the loa of Hollywood permanently at their beck and call. Furthermore the level of satellite and cable transmission in the area ensured that every cubic inch of local air and earth was charged with the signals of past productions, the constant image-bombardment virtually becoming a kind of seance, perpetually calling on the past output of the industry and burning it into the skin of California. Hollywood had been cut off from the rest of the world not by any conspiracy of magicians, but just by the walls of broken, discarded culture which had been accumulating there ever since the 1920s. Brookhaven’s decision to use the meme-mine, a device “accidentally” discovered by Chad Vandemeer, could be interpreted as his attempt to complete the process. It was the function of the mine to enhance the ulterior worlds of the Celestis, to allow the manifestation of “ghost” places, and Brookhaven may have seen in this the potential to genuinely set Hollywood apart from the real world. It’s no coincidence that the project took the title The Ghost Kingdom (or, in full, Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom), envisaged as the greatest of the hollow spectaculars. There’s evidence in his later e-mail correspondence that his aim was to haunt the world, to insert his own cinematic histories into the gaps of human culture on a global scale, with Hollywood itself as the intangible, untouchable heart of his phantom empire. Work on The Ghost Kingdom began in 1996, and it was to take three years for the project to reach completion. Yet remarkably, Brookhaven intended that the actual shooting of the film would be done in a single day, the 3rd of September, 1999. The prior three years were spent in preproduction, as every aspect of Mujun was conceived, sculpted, and programmed into the GCI processor, with Brookhaven ritually composing every shot and scene. If the hordes of artists and conceptual designers were puzzled by the three years they spent working on a project which never seemed to materialise then they must have put it down to Production Hell, and there’s no reason to think anyone questioned the fact that the crew’s efforts went no further than a small, shiny, landmine-like object which sat in its shrine in an office of its own. It’s impossible to judge whether the finished film was a commercial or critical success: it’s proved itself immune to conventional history. But the events of the 3rd of September – the activation of the meme-mine, the intervention of the House Military agent Christopher Cwej and the ultimate fall of Brookhaven – are generally referred to, somewhat ominously, as the Hollywood Bowl shooting.
- By that stage the film had virtually been completed inside a recovered mememine GCI processor and only the presence of the actors was required, speaking the lines already laid down by the processor’s memetic “script”, almost as if the recitation was the trigger needed to bring the finished product into being. The intention was that the production should require no sets, no props, no costumes and no real camerawork: the complete world-environment of the film would be summoned to the staging area, briefly over-writing everything from the local architecture to the actors’ biological makeup. The complete experience would be transferred directly onto celluloid via the same process Brookhaven had once used to trap the loa on film, but this time trapping an entire ghost world, although in truth Brookhaven probably found the actual transfer of the movie to film to be a minor detail.
It's implied that Vlad III may have made a deal with the Celestis to sort of (unwillingly) continue on in meme-form as Dracula.
- Of course, the Celestis will take any opportunity to provide themselves with new servants and/or meme-donors. On first sight it seems impossible to believe that Vlad III could possibly agree to become anyone’s servant, not even in the face of certain death. But evidence does exist to suggest a later connection between Vlad and Lord Halved Birth of the Celestis. And perhaps it wouldn’t have been so hard for Vlad to justify a deal of some kind. After all, since childhood he’d considered it his place to be a conduit for the higher forces, chiefly as God’s hand of justice in the Balkans. If at Gragov he began to understand that the Celestis weren’t literally devils, then he might have been prepared to accept these Mephistophelean visitors as, well, almost equal in rank to himself.
Celestis investigators have memetically implanted technology.
- Physical appearance is a malleable concept when it comes to the Investigators. Memetically implanted aperture technology allows them to move through time, space and any other accessible dimensions at will, and their default appearance tends to be a humanoid gap in history, through which the continuual strata and other such phenomena can be seen.
