Horizon's First

Horizon's First Posted By: Nephelae, Sentinel At first brush, Horizon's First is a simple Brinker group who have mixed survivalist memes with an unusual religious or spiritual focus. A couple years after the Fall, they laid claim to 10199 Chariklo, the largest centaur body which lies inbetween the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, and is unusual for a minor planet in that it has rings. There they set up a titular settlement, Horizon's First. However, a comprehensive analysis of their activities over the Mesh, and observed remotely by their "neighbors" in the Uranian and Saturnian neighborhoods starts telling a different story. On its surface their belief system as laid out by their leader "The Ascending Master", seems like an odd kitbash of "New Age" beliefs mixed with an extreme cherrypick of the Baha'i faith's principles like unity of religion and humanity, with a pinch of Xenodeism on top. And while not widely publicized, in certain circles their leader is known to have a bit of a "shopping list" which could be worrisome to Firewall. Combined with a deep dive of their ethos and the fact that Horizon's First is actively interested in not just recruiting, but developing new egos (i/e children) means they should be considered a possibly expanding threat. ORIGINS AND BACKGROUND The core beliefs of Horizon's First are laid out in the Ascending Master's seminal work The First Over The Horizon. In it, the Master gives the account that while fleeing the Fall on Earth, he had a cosmic revelation while traveling with some Brinkers. His "limited" mind wasn't capable of fully understanding this insight, but he knew it was his mission to communicate it to the best of his ability. The result is a very esoteric, stream of consciousness work written while he was travelling very far outsystem. Parts of it are confusing, nonsensical, or appear contradictory, but are at least all in the same theme. Roughly, the text communicates that he had a burst of insight from "cosmic energy" that flowed through him, revealing underlying truths of the universe. The "cosmic energy" that binds and flows in all creation spawned vast alien intellect(s) likened unto God, and from them all sapient life in the universe originates. When such life collectively reaches a point of metaphysical or spiritual purity or perfection, they ascend from their physical forms to achieve oneness with the cosmic godhead. Armed with this knowledge (among other beliefs) he took the alias "Ascending Master" and began to disseminate his work among communities as his ship passed, gaining a few new followers here and there. Eventually he realized he would need a home base to continue development of his theology and philosophy, and with his first batch of followers he was able to take hold of the claim on Chariklo. The early years of the "faith" were fairly uneventful, which is probably why nobody was taking notice of them. As a group, Horizon's First set up on Chariklo and began trading some of the valuable materials extracted from the Dtype body, mostly for basic hab supplies and for a decent stockpile of armaments to protect themselves this is how they got their reputation as "survivalists". They also traded a lot of obscure or specific academic or scientific knowledge in this time, or offered a place for other Brinkers and Out'sters to come study academic works which some habs didn't always have time or effort for. It was at this time that The First Over The Horizon was formally published on the Mesh, which attracted small handfuls of Xenodeists or New Age spiritualists in the neighborhood. The cult grew to a couple hundred adherents in this time, but generally people didn't take them seriously, saying the First was a "bad petal trip". This is where things start getting weirder. First, the Ascending Master publishes his second work, which is much more solidly written and is less about "cosmic truth" and more about daily practices of the cult. Called Attuning The Aura To the Cosmic Essence, this second work reads somewhere between selfhelp book and Singularity Seeker manifesto. It talks a lot about "expanding the mind" and "cleansing the spirit" and about how to "let the cosmic energy flow through you". How one does this involves a lot of meditation in time accelerated simulspace, tripping on linkstate, and experimental neural enhancers. Then, data about Cognite's FUTURA project (thanks, corporate moon parents) and the Pandora Gates goes public. It's not well recorded, but apparently the AM had made some broad predictions which could be interpreted as being fulfilled by this information. Combined with his release of a more relatable work, the cult gains following in the neighborhood and even in other regions in the solar system, roughly doubling the size of the group to several hundred. A few years ago, AM published his next two books, one forming the third of his scriptures. This one is The Coming of the Ultraviolet Children, which outlines that as transhumanity approaches the point where they shall ascend, that children will be born who have higher concentrations of cosmic energy in them. It is the mission of Horizon's First to locate this children and make sure they have a healthy spiritual upbringing so they may enhance humanity's spiritual perfection and also to generate as many "ultraviolet" children as possible. The second work, The Fall and the Age of Aquarius is much more akin to a political or philosophical work than a scriptural one. It outlines how the era of the Fall marked the transition to the "Age of Aquarius" and that freedom, technology and enlightenment should spread "unbound" throughout the cosmos but his ideas on what this "unlimited" means sounds a bit more like Exhumanism than Autonomism. This is also when people nearby start getting concerned about Horizon's First. Instead of trading, they start raiding, sending fast ships on attacks against even well hidden enclaves. Scarier is not that they take resources and kill the people but that they apparently capture children or other young egos and take them back to their hab. From this point on, Horizon's First are implicated in shadier and shadier business from hereout. Agents are caught trying to break quarantine on Iapetus and Pathfinder. False identities crafted by the group are thrown off of Chat Noir and based on the Fissure Gate's more lax screening some more probably were able to go through the Gate. Other members have been tagged meeting with Exhuman agents in the fringe, trading their stolen supplies for xenotech samples or TITAN relics. Titanian intelligence pinged they even seem to have build some kind of signals receiver or SIGINT array into Chariklo which is purportedly bigger than their habitation space. I've even heard some talk Horizon's First members have asked about Sibyls. All the while, most "knowledgeable" people dismiss the group as some spiritualist nonsense, but AM's works have spread throughout the solar system, and he still gets new converts. Rough estimates have Horizon's First as holding over 2,000 people in morphs. And room for plenty more. And these people are not a joke. I was visiting Gerlach for some other Firewall business, and was approached by a couple of guys from the group. They hit me with a drug which temporarily blocked my Psi abilities. They must not have known I was a literal surgeon though, and neither of them had morphs loaded for combat. Picking through the stacks, Firewall says they were little more than suicide forks, sent on esoteric missions to "find lost children". BELIEFS As noted above, the core belief outlined in The First Over The Horizon is that the universe was created by a burst of "cosmic energy" from a place even outside this universe, and that confluences of it generated an ultimate cosmic being or beings (the work moves back and forth on plural or singular beings) of pure thought who are akin to what we interpret as "God". From this source, all sentient life in the universe originates. All representation of God or Gods are seen as our reflection of knowledge of the cosmic god, and thus are all one in the same, as are all religions an ideal cribbed from Baha'i. Out religions and gods appear different because we were not as spiritually evolved as a species as to have the "pure" cosmic knowledge yet. The work explains the Fermi Paradox by saying that all species who ultimately achieve a metaphysical perfection ascend to become one with the cosmic God leaving only their ruins behind. Those who fail to ascend are destroyed by natural forces of the universe entropy, evolution, etc. Later editions of The First even cite the Iktomi and ruins of Moravec as examples. The work concludes that transhumans must study and harness the cosmic energy, and spread the ideals of spiritual purity to all members of the species so we might ascend. The second work, Attuning The Aura To the Cosmic Essence is a much more practical manual of how to actually accomplish these sweeping goals. It posits that humanity entered the period in which they can ascend, as seen by the TITANs, our "children". The TITANs were able to surpass transhuman understanding of the cosmos and elect to ascend their attempts to include us their creators in this endeavor explains the mass uploading. However, transhuman minds were still "too weak" to appreciate this revelation, causing the chaos and failure of the Fall and the TITANs to finish their ascension and leave transhumanity behind.

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