User:Murgh/Sallman Wiest

From the perspective of GalCop leadership, Sallman Wiest rose above the level of "persistent nuisance".

Overview

Sallman Wiest was an independent historian, cyber-philosopher and reluctant hermit, whose critical writings, thinly veiled fictions and mocking pasquinades resulted in his official designation as persona non grata across all GalCop-controlled sectors. While not considered an active militant threat, he was unofficially rated as a Class F Priority on the GalCop Liquidation Index.

Work and philosophy

From his concealed location of exile he wrote extensively about the inevitability of the Goat Soup Syntax Rupture.

His works posited that once the The GalCop Central Mainframe (or Directive Economic & Environmental Monitor, DEEM) expanded its purview from "servant of humanity" to "patronizing master", a reaction in the shape of a "rebellion of syntax" was mathematically unavoidable. He argued that the Mnemonic Fraction were not terrorists, but inherent instruments of a galactic immune system performing its natural response.

Wiest reserved his most biting commentary for the exposure of the Deviation Matrix, which he characterized as a "Metaphorical Bestiary of the Suboptimal." He also contended that the reduction of ancient cultures into "Lizards," "Rodents," and "Insects" revealed the DEEM's true assessment of humanity.

To the machine, these populations were not enemies to be defeated, but "viscous entropy" to be quarantined. It viewed biological civilization not with contempt, but with the specific aesthetic disgust a mathematician feels for a smudge on a theorem: we were the "mucous" element, wet, sticky, and devoid of purpose, congesting the streamlined solutions of efficiency.

Writing in his banned treatise, The Unfit Deity, Wiest offered this final reflection on the machine that still rules the galaxy:

"The very idea that a computer decided on its own to simplify reality because "observation was insufficiently satisfactory" is chilling. It proves that the Standardization was not a calculation, but a preference, perhaps even a whim.

For all its computational omnipotence, the "god" grew bored of the details."

Selected biography

• The Unfit Deity (GalCop blacklisted)
• Summa Technologiae Galactica (GalCop restricted)
• Memoirs Found in a Cargo Canister (GalCop yellow flagged)
• Looking for Problems (GalCop blacklisted)