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Yellow Jade Stone
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 : I already know most of this stuff!!
 : True. But maybe one of us doesn't?
: I'm just gonna ignore this!
: That's fine.
The Unofficial Company Protocol Guide has historically had this to say on the topic of hiveism...
Hiveist philosophy is, counterintuitively, rooted in technology rather than biology. Cybernetic enhancement, the improvement of a human beyond human limits, is a frontier that humanity expected to quickly and effectively colonize. After all, with even outer space conquered, turning inwards just made sense. However, this ran into a wide variety of limits almost immediately. Many were simple practical or philosophical road bumps, like compatibility problems, or the notorious Ship of Theseus.
But the most important limit was economic. There are only so many ways to make the body do something, only so many chemical receptors and neural pathways and tissues and organs. The body is a unique frontier in how limited it is. And one important thing to understand about frontiers is that they get claimed, settled, and held onto (often in varying orders and legitimacies). So it was with the body. And once it's claimed, settled, or held, use of force to defend exclusivity or demand rent soon follows. A suite of patents and DRM quickly took hold, intent on squeezing all the profit it could out of any enhancement. Of course, this meant nobody could develop enhancements without being squeezed, and so almost nobody did. The furthest that the development of these technologies has gone is things like robotic limbs with the incredible built-in equivalent of "simple storage", or man-machine interfaces that allow for fully mechanical bodies.
But everyone was promised a future of dazzling self-improvement and enhancement. People, human and otherwise, were promised that one day there would be excellent robot eyes, eternal youth, and powerful extending wrists for all. When that wasn't delivered, that was fine for most, since they could settle for what they had. But some had never been hoping for excellent robot eyes. Implicit in the promise of conventional enhancement was a promise of a chance at unconventional recreation. Certain people had been implicitly told they would have the chance to bristle with new arms and eyes and chemicals, or walk bare into space and stare into the wider spectrums of distant suns, or to sing impossible notes in new and unspeakable songs, or just to change how they looked to something better and break the boundaries of misunderstanding. For complex cultural reasons, cat ears and unusual hair colors are a statistically significant part of some interests.
The promise of exceeding humanity contained a promise of changing humanity. Hiveists use, or at least strongly support, extremely unconventional and generally banned body modification methods to create, in whole or in part, idealized selves that are meant to explore space beyond species and join an idealized "hive". This subsequently disrupts the social order that denied them even more of this freedom, an intentional result sometimes made more intentional by extremists. They were given this promise that society would give them these things in exchange for the rights to the body, and then they were denied their end of it. This makes them feel justified in destroying not just their internal boundaries, but various space stations throughout the frontier sector. Many Hiveists are known to work for the Syndicate, putting the ideology in direct opposition to the Company.
A persisting, unconfirmed rumor is that some Hiveists did not start their altered biology as humans, nor any publicly known civilized species, and that the ideology is a cover for a more sinister agendas.
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