Hi. I think by now we’ve probably met a few times, so I’ll skip the intro, teehee!
This update probably is gonna only make sense to those of you reading within the next few months, but for archival purposes in the future, I’d like you guys to all think about it in context of major events occurring in your world & your timeline at the moment.
Think about how rapidly you’re obtaining information – verified or unverified.
Think about how people around you are processing the information.
Then, well, think about how quickly that affects you.
Shall we go on?
If you’re wondering about how in the world STEC hasn’t managed to leak any info to the general public yet, well, you’re looking at the shipgirl responsible for it.
Look to any major event occurring around the globe. You will quickly notice that there will be competing forces attempting to shape the “narrative.” That word gets tossed around a lot, but it really doesn’t have much of a meaning beyond how people perceive information. Different organizations – be it state-ran newspapers, mega news corporations, conspiracy theorists on talk radio, or citizenry produced new media (blog and social media equivalent to your folks – remember, technology has developed slightly differently here) all want to influence you based on whatever their goals are, which more often than not gets distilled back to wealth, fame, or power.
Identifying what these goals are within each organization is the first part of my job. Understanding whether these goals align with our purpose – to protect humanity from the Abyssals – is the second.
I happen to know, with a hundred percent certainty, what those goals are.
We are reasonably confident that we can obtain willful cooperation given that we know what these goals are.
We are furthermore confident in that we can, as a last resort, apply strategic coercion to enforce alignment.
Sounds like a perfect mixture of the carrot and the stick, right?
I got a better idea for you. How about we make an automobile so we won’t have to use the donkey to pull the cart, transport our goods?
It’s not a perfect analogy, because the civilian (or, really, “non-shipgirl” or “non-STEC”) sector here really can’t do a lot of the things we do, and in the above situation, a donkey can. If fighting the Abyssals rely on say, contributions from society, then that would be a part of our assessment. As the situation stands now, informing the public of the Abyssal threat at this stage has no appreciable benefits and will not accelerate further developments of our anti-Abyssal capacity. The disruption to daily life, however, would incur a significant and obvious harm.
I’m sure in some freakish parallel dimension-world whatever you want to call it, STEC and the other shipgirl organizations have fully taken control of every aspect of society. Factories are churning out extra food, medical supplies, whatever, 24/7 while every able-bodied man, woman, and child is mobilized into building whatever thing that might contribute to the incoming war effort. It’d be a nightmarish scenario straight out of that Spleens of Bronze or whatever that grand strategy game Batfish and her friends play, and run contrary to our purpose to begin with.
… Think about it. What does it mean to protect humanity from the Abyssals? Does that not include a critical component, which is our “way of life”?
Fundamentally, war is transformative. Let’s take the best scenario, a country like our own. How many children would spend their childhood in factories or shelters rather than playgrounds and schools? How many lives would have their potential cut short, with a future mapped out to them instead of what they would have reached out for on their own? This is to say nothing of the actual and often painful costs incurred as a result of war, and I need to say little of this since we all know what they are.
Every day in which America is able to live as she did before is a victorious day for us.
Did you ever think about it like that?