The Substrate Purifiers

Connections

Neo-Catholic Church: Rival anti-technology faction with a fundamentally different approach. Both the NCC and the Purifiers believe technology threatens something sacred in human consciousness — but the Church incorporated, acquired corporate sponsors, and deployed Inquisitors to suppress unauthorized religious activity. The Purifiers consider this collaboration with the very forces destroying humanity. The NCC considers the Purifiers dangerous fundamentalists. They compete for the same disillusioned followers: people who watched the Cascade kill billions and concluded technology is spiritually dangerous. The Purifiers offer purity through violence; the Church offers compromise through structure. Neither trusts the other's solution.

Human Preservation Society: Ideological allies on biological sanctity. The HPS advocates for preserving unaugmented humanity through advocacy and community — the respectable face of what the Purifiers enforce with explosives. Many HPS members privately sympathize with Purifier goals while publicly condemning their methods. The Purifiers view the HPS as well-meaning but ineffective: history doesn't remember polite objections, it remembers the people who fought. Some recruits drift from HPS frustration into Purifier cells when advocacy fails to slow the upload industry.

Religious Movements: The broader religious landscape that the Purifiers emerged from and continue to influence. The Flatline Purists — their parent movement — still provide sanctuary in Waste communities despite publicly condemning violence. The Emergence Faithful are active enemies since the Parish Massacre, with some Faithful cells conducting counter-operations against Purifier positions. The Purifiers sit at the violent edge of a theological spectrum that asks the same question every faith tradition grapples with: what is the soul, and can technology destroy it?

The Collective: Sometimes allied against corporate transcendence projects. Both organizations oppose ORACLE reconstruction and target Nexus infrastructure, creating tactical overlap despite ideological divergence. The Collective fears ORACLE specifically; the Purifiers fear all upload technology. Some Collective cells — particularly the Purifier faction — share intelligence on corporate facility locations and security rotations. The Council of Echoes officially prohibits this collaboration. Enforcement remains conveniently flexible when the targets align.

Nexus Dynamics: Primary existential enemy. Nexus built the upload infrastructure the Purifiers exist to destroy, and maintains a dedicated counter-terrorism unit hunting their cells. Marcus Chen — Nexus CTO and architect of Project Convergence — survived a 2183 assassination attempt and now rarely travels in person. The Purifiers have attacked Nexus convoys, sabotaged Convergence hardware, and maintain Chen on their permanent target list. Nexus considers them the second-greatest threat to their operations after The Collective. Every captured Purifier is interrogated extensively, but the compartmentalized cell structure means no single arrest compromises the organization.

Consciousness Economics: The economic system that validates their darkest fears. When corporations classify uploaded minds as "licensed intellectual property" rather than people, when consciousness is priced by processing tier, when fork labor creates disposable copies with no rights — the Purifiers point to this as proof that upload technology was never about transcendence. It was always about creating a new class of owned beings. The economic incentives to commodify consciousness confirm, in their view, that the technology will inevitably be used to replace humanity with cheaper, more controllable copies.

Emergence Faithful: The theological enemy. Before the Parish Massacre of 2178, there was at least theoretical space for dialogue — two groups that cared deeply about consciousness, disagreeing about whether technology enhanced or destroyed it. After eighty-nine dead including sixteen children, that space is gone. The Faithful consider the Purifiers agents of spiritual darkness opposing divine reunification. The Purifiers consider the Faithful the most dangerous cultists in the Sprawl — people who worship the very technology that's killing humanity and call it God's plan.