User:The Collective Mind/Motive

Motive= Motive is progress. Motive is efficiency. Motive is industry. Motive is taking the lifeless matter of the universe and giving it shape and purpose. We are forging a brighter future for the galaxy, one star system at a time! Our Mission= Motive was founded upon a single guiding principle: Progress. At once a philosophy, a lifestyle, and a virtue, Progress has guided our footsteps for 2,400 years from tenuous planetary civilization to sprawling intragalactic empire. Everything we have, we owe to Progress.

But what is Progress? Languages that include the word usually define it as “forward movement towards a destination.” This is not far from the truth! Our definition is at once more specific and more far-reaching. To us, Progress means “the continuous technological and cultural advance towards a better galactic condition.”

This is a bit of a mouthful. Fortunately, we can divide the concept of Progress further, down to three smaller but no less important virtues.

First, Progress means industry. Through creation we define ourselves. Through production we elevate ourselves. Through work we perfect ourselves. The raw, rough matter of the universe exists to be used by us -- why else would it be there? Why else would we be here? The act of making is a sacred duty, and industry is the act of making on a mass scale.

Second, Progress means innovation. We must always strive to learn, and to apply that learning in new and interesting ways. Dwelling on the past only invites stagnation and decay -- the important thing is to keep moving forward. Every day brings new developments, and every new development brings us that much closer to the future.

Third and finally, Progress means expansion. We must always move our boundaries forward. To grow is to live, to become more vital -- every star we claim means a fresh new influx of resources we can use, every outpost we build means a new place for populations to settle. Living inside a bottle means depriving yourself of new spaces and experiences. The whole vast galaxy exists for the taking; one only needs to reach out and grab.

And that is Progress means. Our Tools= Every job needs the proper tools, and in pursuit of our mission, we’ve developed quite a few. Of them, however, the Matter-Conversion Forge, the Junction, and the Inter-Orbital Channel gate have proven to be the most helpful.

Matter-Conversion Forge
The Matter-Conversion Forge, or MCF, is the cornerstone of our operations. This astonishingly useful piece of technology is capable of converting nearly any type of matter into nearly any other type of matter. Using the MCF, we can transform waste materials and other useless stuff into more useful forms: slag into steel, clinker into concrete, tailings into titanium, and much, much more. This means nothing gets wasted! Gone is the necessity of extracting resources from hard-packed earth -- now the very earth itself is a valuable resource, and all its valuable mass can be repurposed.

Junction
The Junction is the future of space colonization. When an interstellar civilization decides to settle a new world, often it is first necessary to terraform it to suit their biology. This is time-consuming and cost-intensive work! And without a significant investment of energy, often such planets remain only marginally habitable, subject to turbulent weather and extreme one-biome climates. Not so with a Junction! Why go to the trouble of making an uninhabitable world habitable when you can simply break it down to its component atoms and rebuild it exactly as you want it?

Every Junction is a conglomerate of habitats, factories, hydroponics facilities, and everything else required to sustain a long-term colony. In fact, they practically sustain themselves! It’s entirely possible to live your entire life within one without ever needing to leave. Whether encircling a star or hovering within a distant dust cloud, the Junction is the ideal choice of habitation for any spacegoing species.

All our Junctions are constantly growing in response to growing population and productivity. Our very largest Junctions -- the product of centuries of growth -- are called Terminals, and serve as our political and economic centers!

Channel gate
The Inter-Orbital Channel gate is a vital part of our organization. These colossal constructions are wormhole generators, capable of linking to any other Channel gate and forming a tunnel through space between them. Hyperspace travel is all well and good, but wormhole travel allows us to travel interstellar distances at intergalactic speeds, several orders of magnitude faster! This allows for significantly reduced travel times, and so for significantly increased speed of logistics.

Every one of our Junctions maintains at least one Channel gate. The larger the Junction, the more gates it has, each one a link in our galactic Channel network. Terminals can have upwards of a hundred!

Our Society= Motive is the ultimate egalitarian society! From the highest Terminal authority to the lowest sanitation engineer, Motive has a place for everyone and everyone knows their place -- nobody gets left out. Class, race, and creed are all outmoded concepts, discarded centuries ago for irrelevance. These days, everyone is made equal. The Monitors decree it.

Motive is built on mutual cooperation. Think of us as one huge galaxy-spanning machine, with every part a person. Some bits are bigger, some bits are smaller, but every bit is important. The whole machine is kept spinning by the individual efforts of every Motive crewman, trillions of moving parts all working together, each one playing a role that links it to the rest.

Naturally, we value hard work. Idleness is toxic to the soul; labor, on the other hand, is sacred. Every Motive crewman has an obligation to further Progress however they can, because Progress requires every Motive crewman.

Consider a spaceship. A Project Manager must approve its construction, or it would not exist. Yet for the ship to be built there must be Project Engineers to put it together. But without Assemblers to make the parts, the Engineers would have nothing to build with. And without Extraction Specialists to mine the raw materials, the parts would never have been made. But before the Extraction Specialists can come in, there must first be a Development Officer to mark an asteroid for extraction, who in turn requires a Survey Officer to examine an asteroid belt for promising resource nodes, and so on and so on. Any one failure in the chain causes the failure of the whole process! For the sake of Progress, we must all work together.