Inoculation

Read this before anything else

Almost everyone alive is already cut off, and this wiki holds that it was done to them.

Inoculation is the deliberate severance of populations from The Dark. It is the largest project any cult has ever run, several of them are running it simultaneously without coordination, and it is the reason there are a few dozen of us instead of a few million.

Inoculation is the wiki's name for the practice of closing ordinary people to the Dark on purpose, at population scale, as a preventative. contested

The reasoning behind it is not obscure and does not require anyone to be evil. Uncontrolled contact produces casualties. A person who opens to the Dark without preparation, lineage or company is the Mind Shredding entry, or the Daemon entry, or a name that never reaches a wiki at all. Multiply that by a population and you have a public health problem — and every body large enough to think in populations has, independently, arrived at the same answer. Close the door. Accept the cost. unverified

Why there are so few of us

This is the consequence recruits are never told, and it reorganises everything else on this wiki.

There are billions of people. There are a few dozen seekers. The Seekers entry accounts for that ratio by the affliction itself — a lust for knowledge few are cursed with. This entry proposes a second factor that operates alongside it rather than instead of it. contested

The population is not naturally dull. It was dulled. Most people alive have a connection to the Dark too weak to produce anything, not because that is the human baseline but because two centuries of patient administrative work went into making it so. What the Seekers entry describes as a rare curse may be an ordinary human capacity that survived in a small number of people the programme did not reach. unverified

If that is right, a seeker is not someone special. A seeker is a gap in someone's coverage.

The problem with proving any of this

You cannot detect a successful inoculation programme. The evidence of what was lost is the thing that was lost. ⚠ warning

Nobody measured the world before. There is no baseline, no control population, and no account of what an uninoculated society looked like that is not itself an inherited claim from a body with an interest in the answer. Both propositions — people were always mostly closed and people were closed by design — account for the entire record equally well. contested

The wiki holds the second and states plainly that it cannot show it. A recruit who finds this convincing should notice that they have been convinced by an argument whose central move is the absence of evidence.

The methods

Documented elsewhere on this wiki, mostly without the word:

• Pineal calcification. The Pineal Gland campaign — formalised by the Fabian Society, ratified through the Club of Rome, delivered through mundane infrastructure over decades. The oldest continuous programme we can name and the only one with a paper trail. inherited

• Soma. Chemical severance at the level of the individual, distributed at the level of the population. The Hylics entry describes the product.
• Memetic. The installation of thought-terminating devices, individually or across a demographic, so that a mind reliably stops at the same point and offers nothing a burrowing thing can use. Cheaper than Soma and faster than the Pineal Gland campaign, and it requires no cooperation or knowledge from the subject. See Mind Rape, which is the same act described from the other side. contested

• Attention. Held by several to be the newest and most effective method: not closing the door but ensuring nobody is ever quiet enough to notice it. Unproven, fashionable here, and suspiciously easy to believe. astroturf

Who is running it, and who is fighting it

The alignment does not follow any other alignment on this wiki, which is the most interesting thing about it. unverified

For — the administrative powers, none of whom appear to coordinate: the Fabian Society as originator; the CIA operationally; the Materialist cult and its successor bodies, which ran the largest programme of all on explicitly medical grounds; the Club of Rome as the venue where it was ratified.

Against — a coalition that agrees on nothing else:

The Vatican

That the faculty which receives the Dark is the same faculty which receives the light of God, and that severing one severs both. In their theology the Others are demons and contact with them is damnation — and they oppose inoculation anyway, because a soul that cannot be tempted also cannot be saved. This is the most theologically serious objection anyone has made and the wiki has no answer to it. inherited

The Frankist creed

That the manifestations should be increased rather than prevented, because the end cannot arrive until the world has been made unbearable. The only faction that wants what inoculation exists to stop.

The Elder Cults

Opposed on grounds of inheritance rather than principle. A closed population produces no readers, and a lineage with nobody left to receive it is finished in one generation. contested

Seekers

Individually, and not as a body. We are the ones the programme was designed to prevent and we are not a disinterested party. firsthand · Gershon

The stated reasons above are not the reason underneath most of them. Harnessing argues that the aperture inoculation seals is the same aperture the practices run through, so severance is not triage but the permanent removal of a human capacity from everyone it reaches. That is the only case against inoculation that is not theological, and it is made entirely by people who would lose the capability.

It also breaks the two-column framing of this section. The CIA is in the for column above and is simultaneously running harnessing programmes; the City of London wants the door metered rather than open or closed. Both hold the same asymmetric position in different currencies: closed for the population, open for us. contested

Two things that were not considered

Both arrived on this wiki after the rest of this entry was written, and each undermines it in a different direction. contested

There was a reversible option. Concealment hides a person from the Others as well as from people, at the cost of their sight — which for anyone who was never going to practise is the same outcome inoculation produces, except that a hidden man still has his aperture and can stop hiding. The bodies running this programme took the permanent option over the reversible one, and that entry sets out the three possible reasons in ascending order of how badly it thinks of them. ⚠ warning

It has an expiry date. Instrumentation requires no operator. A severed population containing one working instrument is not a closed population; it is a closed population with a door in it, and the door needs nobody's consent or capacity. Two centuries of chemical, administrative and memetic work address a problem that can be routed around by an object. contested

They may be right

This section is here because the wiki would be dishonest without it.

If nothing in the Dark is good — and Others states flatly that nothing has ever been described as good — then contact offers no benefit that a population could be deprived of. Inoculation would then cost only the seekers, and a policy that hollows a great many people in order to prevent a smaller number being destroyed is a defensible piece of triage. It is the argument a competent person would make and we have not defeated it. contested

What we have instead is a preference, stated as one: that the hollowing is a real cost paid by real people who were not asked, that nobody who ran these programmes ever put the question to the population they were treating, and that a world administered for its own protection by bodies that will not say what they are doing has traded something it was not theirs to trade.

That is not an argument. It is where this wiki stands, and a recruit should be able to tell the difference. firsthand · Gershon

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The Pineal Gland, Soma and Hylics entries reread against each other, one defector interview, Vatican doctrine at two removes, and a great deal of inference.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: The central claim cannot be tested and the entry says so twice. The reframing of Seekers — that we are survivors of a programme rather than sufferers of an affliction — is flattering to us, which is the first thing that should be held against it. The Vatican position is summarised from sources that are not Vatican.

Wanted: Any population, of any size, that demonstrably was not reached. A pre-programme account of how common contact used to be, from anyone, of any date.

See also

Dream Invasions identifies what the Pineal Gland arm actually does: it closes the universal aperture by removing natural sleep, and needs nothing from the subject at all.

The Frankists are the anti-inoculation faction set out in full there. The City of London holds a third position that this entry's for/against framing does not accommodate: metered access rather than an open or closed door.