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Stories

•  Waking the Dead Dan Blan is recovered by necropsycologist Dr. Eprho.
• Pickers young adults scavenging the ruins of Consumer culture 

Mac Quotes

Some of these are MISTOBs. "Maybe I said that once, but..." Commonly concludes "...it doesn't fit in my current context."

• Mac's serenity prayer: "All I want is to do the best I can with the tools at hand." 
• "I have a vocabulary and I'm not afraid to use it." 
• "If you disagree with me, you are probably wrong. I have a long record of being right."  [Well he is a Marty Stu.]
• "In the face of changing data, consistency is not necessarily a virtue."  -- when accused of being inconsistent.
• "Last time I looked, the Mac Collective was completely self-sufficient in all material needs. We supply 90% of the world's energy, 80% of its telecommunications, and 70% of its long-distance transportation. Exactly why do I need to be tolerant?" 
• "Stupidity is contagious. You get it from other people. The primary vector is this disease called 'friendship.' The better other people make you feel, the more they erode your capacity for thinking critically." [Too misanthropic? MISTOB? Current phrasing might actually work cyber-neurologically.]

Vocabulary 

"I have a vocabulary and I'm not afraid to use it." --Mac

• Corporate relativism -- cultural relativism as applied by corporations to stifle criticism and competition in the marketplace of ideas. 
• Cyber-neuroscience The study of neuroscience, particularly that of the human brain, from a cybernetic point of view. Subjects of interest are computational neuroscience, brain-machine interfacing, and brain uploading.
• MISTOB "Maybe I said that once, but..." Common response by Mac and co. when accused of being inconsistent. See quotes, above. 
• Neumensh A neo-Nazi group trying to "rescue" Hitler and other Nazi officials from the virtual necropolis.
• RPQ -- Relative Productivity Quotient. Ration of Cultural Added Value per unit of energy consumed. Under Cybermonasticism, this is considered measure of personal worth.
• RugBugs replace vacuum cleaners. Biomimetic robots about 1cm long. Resemble insects, with usually 6 legs. Several pairs of mandibles clean individual carpet fibers and dig dirt out of carpet backings. Once the dirt reservoir is full, the deposit the dirt directly into the recycling system. Individual "BugBots" are cheap. A whole swarm plus its "hive" cost about the same as a vacuum cleaner. Cleans even better than a vacuum cleaner while using a fraction of the energy. Invented by the Mac Collective. Mac and his dupes need clean floors because they like to go barefoot indoors.

Pseudobiblia

Works by Mac, mainly for exposition, epigraphs, Encyclopedia Exposita

• The Pentamac 
• The Decline and Fall of Homo stupidens: How YOU Contributed to the Collapse of Civilization. Goes into some detail on the causes of the Final Breakdown, using brain scans from the Plutarchs as well as private records.
• "Death by Romance" Notorious for blaming both consumerism and the Final Breakdown on the Romantics. "Civilization is not the natural state of humanity. If we wish to maintain civilization, we must defy our own nature.  (Not sure I'll keep this.)
• "The Greatest Con Ever Pulled" argues that the US welfare state was actually a con to transfer money from the middle class to the rich, using the government and the poor as middlemen. Money which the middle class might have saved was taken as taxes by the government and given to the poor. The poor spent it on personal consumption, giving it to the corporations, which transferred much of it to the rich. Mac names this "the Greatest Con" because "it went on for seventy years and no one ever caught on. The debate on the issue centered on whether the poor were entitled to public assistance. This served to distract people from the fact that most of the money was ultimately ending up in the hands of the rich." 
• Deconstructing Humanity: How the Human Brain Works...and How It Fails to Work. Builds upon the previous work, pointing out the fallibilities of human cognitive processes. Also deconstructs Humanism [may not be the correct term. I'm referring to the philosophy that humans are basically good in nature and that proper social conditioning is sufficient to ensure good behavior] as being founded on an incomplete/erroneous model of human behavior. Although bordering on misanthropy, it set the stage Neohumanism/Neurohumanism, Humanism informed by Cognitive neuroscience. 
• The God-Shaped Hole: Pascal's Region and Its Role in the Final Breakdown. Describes Mac's theory of neuroviruses. 
• Beliefs that Work A defense of science that takes Cultural Relativism into account. Using his studies in neurology, he shows how humans tend to choose one set of beliefs over another because one set appears to "work" better than the other set. He then shows that, for people interested in advanced technology, science works better than any rival belief system.
• Cybermonasticism: Living Productively for the Long Term Outlines Mac's personal philosophy, Logisticism. Veneration of Logos as God of Truth  Justification of empiricism as reliable method of developing workable models of physical reality. Importance of logistics --planning ahead to make do with limited resources. Promotes asceticism, eschews hedonism, pleasure for pleasure's sake. Cybermonasticism, a lifestyle that encourages productivity while consuming minimal resources. "The Autarchs and their government servants were destroyed by their own stupidity. Their lies and secrecy created a self-destructive pattern that corrupted their minds, eventually dooming them....We, the Mac Collective, will expose their lies and secrets for what they are. The God of Truth always prevails in the end. A self-sustaining pattern must be founded on the truth and maintained by living in the light. It is such a pattern that the Mac Collective seeks to create."
• Please Don't Feed the Idiots Basically Mac snarking about trends in popular culture of which he disapproves. Annual suppliment covers new developments.
• Maclopedia. online encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia, edited primarily by Mac dupes. Many articles have been peer-reviewed by non-dupe scientists and researchers, so it's considered rather more authoritative than Wikipedia. Encyclopedia Exposita.  

Characters 

• Melvin Ames "Mac" Carme, b. 1984
• Dan Blan, b. 1986, earned Bachelor's degree in English 2008
• Stan Blan, b. 1984, enlisted 2003 

Places

• Necroverse: A virtual reality inhabited by the recovered brain images of the dead.
• Chesapeake 1580: Chesapeake Indians
• New River 1660: Cherokee
• Draper's Meadow 1755, reconstruction of settlement before Indian massacre, inhabited by victims of the massacre and other victims of the French and Indian War
• Boonesborough 1776, Daniel Boone settled here 
• Washing Town: former slaves of George Washington and other former slaves, so named by the inhabitants, member of FABA
• Vernon: northern Virginia ca 1800, home of George Washington and another of other revolutionary figures. 
• Alamo 1836, soldiers who died there, both sides
• Parral 1920, Pancho Villa and many of his former soldiers 
• Cosmopolis: entirely new community designed by Necroverse inhabitants 
• FABA: For Africans By Africans, union of African-American communities
• United States of the Americans [USotA]: union of US communities, pre-WWII and red-zone post-WWII, conservative
• NewCal: union of US communities, predominantly West Coast urban, liberal
• Union: union of US communitites, predominantly Northeast urban, liberal, dominated by trade unions