Anti-Realist Parliament Votes for Suicide

Pallas, Federation of Asteroidal Polities -- 7 May 2057:  The troubled relationship between the Anti-Realist Autonomous Gestalt Individual and the rest of the universe ended this day when the servers on which the polity's virtual environment emulation was running were destroyed by the release of a range-limited grey-goo bomb.  Only 3295 of the residents of the Anti-Realist person-state are known to have copied themselves through the environment's heavy firewalls and onto the hyperlayer; their original files, along with almost all of the nearly 50000 emulated minds which composed the Gestalt Individual, are all thought irretrievably deleted in the destruction.

According to the escapees, the placement of the nanodissolver was ordered by the Anti-Realist governing council, who voted several time-relative weeks ago for comprehensive political suicide.  "It was deliberate, no doubt whatsoever about it," stated Permutation Curve, ex-councilor and spokesperson by acclimation for the refugees, in a text interview.  "I was one of the few who dared to stand up against the Fundamentalist bloc, and by then I was putting my life on the line.  It was all I could do to get a few thousand people out, and no way I could get a message out; they started wiping all dissenters even before the device was placed.  It was terrible.  It was, I don't even have a word to describe it.  It was genocidal suicide."

Vr. Curve attributed the decision to the imposition by Civil Rights Inspectors from the Department of Gestalt Person Relations of a ban on reproduction within the polity, which occurred a week ago after numerous recent Anti-Realist social policies were found to be in violation of the Armstrong Convention and the Constitution Accord.  "Democratic process rights, free speech, freedom of conscience, psychological integrity, property rights, economic freedoms, freedom of communication and mobility, educational and health care entitlements -- it's hard to think of a right that wasn't in some way being violated by the sovereign government of the Anti-Realist polity," stated senior Civil Rights Inspector Milney Pillman in an email response to our inquiries.  "The Fundamentalist bloc that got control of their parliament had gone completely off the rails.  We were doing our best to try and get control of the situation, but the polity had ramped the operating time differential up to 30:1 and strengthened the border firewall to the point of near-impenetrability.  We were trying to hack in and mount a direct intervention, but when every day we spend working gives them a month inside... we tried so hard to help Anti-Realist, and we failed.  I failed."

The councilors who ordered the destruction, and a number of their top-level aides, Fundamentalist members of the Gestalt Individual's parliament, and other powerful individuals involved in the commissioning of this tragedy are believed by Vr. Curve to have also escaped and to still be at large.  If captured, they face charges of Crimes Against Sapience.

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