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PRAXI: Protocol Against Xenoimperialism
🕑 Added 2024-01-27 05:28:50 +0000 UTCi've got something that isn't an underside dev diary this week: the charming magnesium oxide and i are working on a new TTRPG to be released under the HORIZON MACHINE name. it's going to be a short, taut little project, a fraction of the size of the already behemoth underside, so should have a much quicker turnaround. instead of a short pitch, here's the intro to it:
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When I first arrived in Moscow at the behest of a colleague from the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, I’ll admit it: I was skeptical. For those in my field, the hope of finding any documents from PRAXI has become something of a white whale over more than a decade of fruitless searching. Despite popular misconception, the lack of first-hand accounts of the protocol have never been a result of the project’s immense secrecy during the Occupation Period, nor one final gasp of censorship by the Concern or their collaborationist running dogs, nor even due to the destruction of physical records during the chaos of the People’s Struggle for Planetary Liberation. No, the much less glamorous reality is that PRAXI’s (mostly digitized) key operational documents were, in large part, lost to encoder decay and, of course, in the ‘03 transition from Cybersyn-2 to CONSUR.
Well over a decade into our newly emergent field, academic consensus has mostly settled on the position that any understanding of Occupation-Period PRAXI activities will have to come from the scant testimony of surviving operatives and liaison officers. The problem with this approach, of course, is that PRAXI was by nature difficult to get a clear organizational picture of--the Seven-Day War showed the disastrous results of rash adventurism in the face of xenoimperialist domination, and as a result the war that PRAXI fought was a shadow war, a war of plausible deniability, a complex and decentralized conflict only made possible by levels of international solidarity unprecedented in human history and by the centralization of all these disparate operations in top-secret Cybersyn control faculties.
It’s thank to this network-reliant organization structure that any individual survivor of PRAXI operations that historians like me locate for interview can often tell us nothing about PRAXI beyond their own personal involvement. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, they might know some scrap of organizational information: a KGB or Guoanbu handler, the real names of their fellow operatives, the location of a covert research facility. Each such piece of information has given us a dot in the matrix of the larger story of humanity’s resistance against extraterrestial fascism, with which to slowly assemble a black-and-white picture.
Having spent my academic career assembling this picture, the process of deciphering the tape reels with the wonderful team of archivists at the Academy feels like putting on glasses for the first time as a girl. For so long, we have painted a picture, dot by dot, and now I am seeing it suddenly snap to life in full colour. This innocuous-looking printout discovered in an unassuming annex of the Nekrasov Central Universal Scientific Library provides us the first clear-eyed look we have ever had at that period of great dread and greater hope, of all the peoples of the world coming together to fight fascism, imperialism, and galacto-capitalism. This was the heroic act of socialist solidarity that saved the world. This was PRAXI.
