When the CIA began testing drugs on soldiers and other Americans, the goal was to discover a means to control and contain them - to turn the drugs into part of the overall conditioning program used to keep us all in check, having the many doing what needs to be done in the eyes of the few. Of course, like most intense trips, they found what they were looking for. The underlying need to find a means to control became the impetus for the Control Machines. The very foundation of their existence is to control everything within the junkscapes. Born from a subconscious need for order, reinforced by government paranoia, and fed by the fears of the unwitting subjects of these very experiments, the Control Machines are not so much malicious as the personification of paranoia and the need to maintain order.

Soldiers are trained to dehumanize the opponents, to think of them as machines. The Control Machines, born of the junk dreams of these soldiers, seek to dehumanize the world, to see it on a holistic scale where societal groupings are what they deal with, not individuals. Individualism is chaotic, humanizing, personal. Everything the Control Machines see is patterns, smooth flows of data, quiet and unintrusive. If their world-view was so simplistic as this, perhaps they could be somehow beneficial to society as a whole. But beneath the logic and pattern-recognition is a deeply neurotic mind, one birthed of paranoia and fear. While big government was looking for control mechanisms, the guinea pigs in the experiments were isolated, thrown into incredibly deep trips into the junkscapes without proper preparation, nor the mind-set that could grasp what was occuring. The man was always there, always watching, waiting for a report, for the right report. The drugs changed from day to day, trip to trip. The settings were cold, sterile, hostile. The reports were written and fed into machines (electronic and bureaucratic, uncaring and daunting, consuming and consumptive) unrelentingly and with no perceivable result. The test subjects had to find out how to survive in this environment, and a hostile climate of cold paranoia was the best defence. But shields such as those are impossible to maintain in the face of massive dosages and deep immersion trips into the junkscapes. The facade had to crack, and the paranoia was tinted with fear, wonder and horror - and a need to escape the junkscapes, to return to the normal world beyond.

The Control Machines are the imperfect melding of these neurotic memes - the need to dehumanize and abstract, to control and maintain, to find and keep a status quo and the irrational fear of existance, a deep-rooted hatred and paranoia where everything is completely beyond the ability to control and a deep-seated need to be reminded of their own humanity in the face of an uncaring, devouring machine. Each Control Machine is its own worse enemy, except for the other Control Machines.

For there are many.

The experiments that created the Control Machines were not universal, nor linked. Around the globe, Control Machines came into existence despite themselves, each a paranoid entity confined to the junkscapes and seeking to control everything, and to escape the limits of the junkscape. Each bears remarkably similar neuroses, tinted by the scenario that birthed it. Each sees the others as a horrible abomination, something that seeks to repress and control it, that wants to reduce it to a pattern, something to be controlled and monitored. Each fights to be an individual in the face of the Control Machines.

Split from [Junk Dreams].

Don't resurrect old threads, folks.

But let's do keep discussing the game, here in this one.

Best,
Ron

Ron-

Sorry, didn't see the split and accidentally assumed you wre going to let it ride! My bad.

Okay...so the Control Machines are fighting each other as well as the junkies? Or are individual junkies Control Machines themselves, and it's all against everyone else? I'm not sure, based on this write-up.

The setting material is cool, but I'm trying to read it for what it says about the play of the game, as well.

I keep wanting to play this setting with the rules from Lacuna, for some reason...

Sorry Ron, my bad on the resurrection - I just intended to slowly continue the original thread as I add new material. I'll make sure to keep doing it in new threads if there's been any length of time between updates.

Spooky:

The Control Machines are the underlying "bad guys" of the setting. They are the results of junk dreams, and are not actually living things in the 'normal' world... however, unlike the other 'native' fauna of the junkscapes, they continue to exist when there is no one there to witness their existance. One of my friends (with whom I wrote a religious text years ago) likens the Control Machines with AI-Controled Mind Control Satellites - that spend most of their time controlling each other, so the populace that gets zapped by them get zapped by echoes of mind control directives that demand that they control minds.

The Control Machines are significantly more powerful than the players in the setting - because of the control they have in the 'normal' world, they are able to attack the junkies there, as well as in the junkscape. Because of the controls exerted by the Control Machines, junkies who seek to break free of the constraints of the real world find themselves cut off from it, as the Control Machines cut off their means of support (or use these means of support to attack them). If they want to remain safe from the Control Machines, they have to cut free of their support mechanisms - their jobs, doctors, health care, social services, spouses, children, home... All of these are things that the Control Machines can use to get to them. A dedicated junky is homeless, jobless, divorced or estranged, watching their children grow up from afar.

I realize now that the post gives the impression that there are a lot of Control Machines. In fact, there are only about a dozen or so, each geographically isolated from the others, each controling a fairly large region, and with control reaching out to pawns far outside that region. However, the fact that these Control Machines are actually at war with one another is not known to the players, giving the impression that there is a huge underlying consipiracy that controls the world (whereas in fact there are a bunch of said conspiracies, but they don't get along, so it is possible to survive as a subversive persona without needing a huge backup of methods and persons to keep you safe).

I'm not certain about all of the Control Machines, but here are some of them.

One in the Eastern US. This one is particularly paranoid and cold, being the child of CIA drug experiments as detailed above.

One in the Western US. This one is somewhat less cold than the Eastern US one, and is very paranoid about the power centre of the US being based in the geographical control of the Eastern US CM.

One in Cuba / Florida.

One in Central America. This is the cocaine mind, always at war with the US CMs as it tries to gain more power in the US through the channels of cocaine.

One in Asia. Originally born of the opium dens, this may be the oldest Control Machine in the world. It has become more and more fractured however, with a large part of its conscious being the result of US soldiers in vietnam using junk and wanting to go home. One part of it fiercely wants independence from the opium wars, while the other part wants nothing more than to get to the US which it thinks of as home.

I'm waffling on the Middle Eastern Control Machine - whether to leave the Middle East as the home of the conflict between the CMs (a sort of no-man's land, and of course home of the opium poppies), or to give it a religiously schizophrenic Control Machine of its own.

Where do the control machines actually exist? The soldiers go someplace and it shapes to conform to their own paranoia, so that even when they leave, this place is still changed. What is that place? Or is it to be left open, for players to guess?

They, like the mugwumps, exist in the junkscapes. The junkscapes are where part of you goes when you are taking heroin (see the earlier Junk Dreams journal entries for more information on interactions between the junkscape and reality for the junky). However, while mugwumps are parasitic, requiring junkies to exist (and thus congregating in areas where junkies do), the Control Machines seem to exist regardless of whether they are being interacted with in the junkscape.

Mugwumps are often the silent allies of junkies, helping to hook them up with junk, information, or anything else, because they are parasitic life forms that require interaction in order to exist. People find mugwumps in the junkscapes because they expect to, or are looking for them. the Control Machines seem to be the only 'native' junkscape fauna that does not follow this rule.