<h4>Chapter 2776 - Lifer Factions</h4>


    Every state was rife with division. As long as humans were individuals, they always found ways to disagree with each other.


    A dispute could revolve around something as trivial as the color of a uniform to something much more influential such as the prohibition against arming warsh.i.p.s!


    No single humanpletely agreed with the stances of another human. It was impossible.


    Billions and trillions of humans existed in a typical state. How could all of their rtionsh.i.p.s possibly remain stable with each other when every single one of them represented a source of instability?


    The reason why many societies hadn’t fallen apart was because a lot of rulers and governments had be quite good at manipting their own people.


    Nationalism, education and scapegoating were only a handful of the tools that officials used to unite different people and prevent them from shing against each other.


    Yet what happened if the people in charge disagreed with each other as well?


    After all, the people at the top were no different when it came to disagreeing with each other.


    In fact, their disputes were much more consequential and damaging due to the immense power and influence they possessed!


    This was why political disputes were so troublesome and dangerous to people like Ves. The bystanders and people at the bottom could easily get entangled by a feud between two powerful factions that were willing to go through any means to advance their cause.


    As someone who suffered quite a few times from political disagreements, Ves instantly became wary.


    "Give me a rundown on the local politics ording to your understanding." Hemented. "Who do we need to watch out for? Who are the crazies who have already resorted to extremes in the past?"


    Gavin expected to hear this question. He already prepared a small presentation. He waved his hand, causing a small diagram to pop up that showed some of the most influential factions in the LRA.


    "The LRA is a technocracy in theory. This means that the person at the top should be the smartest and most respected schr in the state. The issue with that is that the current Supreme Sage has always been in charge from the beginning. He’s a four-hundred year old fossil who doesn’t bother with any governance at all and usually engaged in extremely secretive high-level research.


    Ves understood the feeling. At a certain point, being in charge was an annoyance. If not for the fact that giving up all of that authority opened up the possibility of betrayal, holding on to it was a necessary evil in order to ensure that resources kept flowing in without interruption.


    "I take it the Supreme Sage is part of the conversative faction." Ves guessed.


    "You got it, boss. Due to the immense prestige of the highest leader of the LRA, the conservative faction has always been dominant. It’s just that different people who formed different thoughts emerged over the course of the LRA’s history. I’ve already mentioned the radicals. They are the second-most influential faction. They are mainly united by their d.e.s.i.r.e to overturn the cautious, restrained policies set by the conservatives and take on a more aggressive approach to promoting biotechnology."


    Ves grimaced. "These folk are the ones who benefit the most if I am able to defeat Dr. Navarro in a design duel, right?"


    "That’s correct." Gavin slowed. "In fact, we have already begun to receive messages that likelye from this faction. The individuals who contacted us have all offered to support you in various ways."


    "I don’t want or need their help. If there is one thing that I have learned, it’s that sticking our noses in a local dispute rarely benefits us in the end. We will only inherit the enemies of the people we get in bed with and increase the risk of getting screwed."


    "We are aware of that. We have always taken great care to project ourselves as neutral visitors who are merely merely interested in conducting transactions. It’s just that where there is a will, there is a way. As long as involving us benefits someone, it’s hard for us to avoid getting entangled. The best way is to project enough strength to deter improper actions, but we aren’t at that point yet. Our might is quite impressive whenpared to other individual organizations, but in the face of factions that united hundreds if not thousands of different power yers together, we are still small fry. Maybe the only constion is that factions are usually rife with division as well."


    "Tell me about the other factions in the LRA. I doubt that this state is as orderly as it seems. Scientists and researchers all look calm and collected on the surface, but when ites to their research interests, they can be quite fanatical about pushing their own views."


    Ves knew this quite well since he was one of them! Academics and engineers were supposed to view reality from an objective standpoint, but the reality was that no one was able to agree what objective reality was supposed to look like. This meant that even the skinniest nerds could turn into hulking barbarians when someone questioned their opinions!


    Since the LRA was basically ruled by thousands of biotech experts, that meant that it was actually being run by lots of nerds who constantly tried to push their subjective truths against each other!


    "The thirdrgest faction in the LRA are thebinants."


    Ves raised his eyebrow at the odd name. "Combinants?"


    "They’re basically a bunch of tech enthusiasts who want to embrace both biotechnology and ssical technology." Gavin borated. "Before you ask, they do have something inmon with the radicals. Thebinants broke off from the original opposition group because they wanted to go much further. For example, they’re usually called cyborgs because they want to augment every Lifer with abination of electronic and biological imnts."


    "That does sound extreme."


    In general, every human should be able to choose their own imnts if they had the means to obtain them. This was a general principle that many people upheld. It was frowned upon to force someone to integrate a specific collection of imnts. This represented a vition of human rights.


    Of course, this did not stop determined states and organizations from attempting such. They merely resorted to milder means of persuasion such as excluding benefits to refusers or indoctrinating the poption to favor one kind of imnts of another.


    "What else do thesebinants want?" Ves asked.


    "I’m not sure. They’re rather messy because they have all kinds of personalities in their ranks. Some want to pursue immortality by unlocking the secret to digitize human consciousness. Others want to develop cyborg mechs that blend organic and mechanical parts to take advantage of both. They even want to develop cyborg beasts species that are able to breed new offspring that are also half-mechanical in nature!"


    Okay, that sure sounded out there. Research rted to digitizing human consciousness was highly controversial. Plenty of overconfident researchers attempted to transfer their thoughts and personality into aputer, only to kill themselves and a lot of people in the process!


    Since the Big Two didn’t like all of this killing, the researchers mostly experimented with beasts these days. This was a much better approach because they might stumble upon a special lifeform whose minds were much easier to digitize than human minds!


    This was their holy grail. As long as they could find the right species, they could study creatures and decipher what allowed them to seed where others failed!


    Once the researchers cracked the secret, it wouldn’t take long before a gicist developed a new gene temte that might be able to transnt the same properties to humans!


    As for cyborg mechs, Ves had never encountered them so far. The conservatives pushed for pure organic mechs that were grown rather than assembled. Anything that tarnished this purity would definitely attract a lot of bacsh!


    They existed, though. Development on them was rather slow because there weren’t a lot of mech designers to push these mechs forward.


    "Cyborg mechs are even harder to design than biomechs." Ves spoke. "The barrier to entry is extremely high because the amount of knowledge you need to know before you can even begin to design a cyborg mech is insane. You not only need to learn how to work with biologicalponents, but also know all of the ways tobine them with mechanical parts without anything going wrong."


    Gavin nodded. "This is why thebinants are more obscure. They are constrained by their inability to expand their numbers. There aren’t a lot of mech designers in this state who graduate with a bnced focus in both biotechnology and ssical technology. It’s either one or the other."


    "I understand. What do they think about our uing design duel?"


    "That’s difficult to determine, but I think they are even more excited at the prospect of our ssical mechs beating biomechs. However, they don’t want us to win too easily. Thebinants want to show to the public that biomechs are weak, but ssical mechs aren’t much stronger either. In order to gain support for their agenda, thebinants have to persuade the LRA that the best way to go forward is to take the best of both worlds andbine them into cyborg mechs!"


    There was no chance of this happening. Unless thebinants were led by genius biomech designers, it was far too difficult toe up with a cyborg mech that clearly performed better than other kinds of mechs!


    Cyborg mechs were rife withplexity. Not just the parts themselves but the rtionsh.i.p.s between the parts had to be regted. An excessive amount of variables introduced more failure points and more interconnected problems that were insanely difficult to bnce.


    In practical terms, this meant that it was ten or even a hundred times more difficult to optimize a cyborg mech!


    Perhaps that might change in the future. As long as technology continued to advance, mech designers became capable of performing greater feats.


    Yet Ves seriously doubted that such a possible transition might happen at all. No matter how he looked at it, biomechs and ssical mechs already possessed plenty of advantages on their own. Adding a third kind of mech to the mix that took far more time, knowledge and effort to design was notpetitive!


    "Do we have to worry about thebinants messing around, Benny?"


    "That’s difficult to say. I think Cbast can tell you more about the dangersing from that direction. From what I can see, thebinants are much smaller, so their influence isn’t big. Even if they want to try something, the conservatives and radicals will surely oppose them. Even if thetter two groups are opposed to each other, they are still advocates of biotechnology. They merely differ on how flexible the LRA should be in propagating their tech."


    All of this sounded a bit convoluted. The conservatives and radicals were enemies to each other, but didn’t hesitate to band together to oppose other factions if it served their interests!


    Ves was beginning to see why Majestic Teal was such aplicated ce to live in. The current discussion merely covered domestic politics. The friction between the different second-rates of this star sector was also troublesome!


    "Okay, I think I got the gist of thebinants. Are there any more groups that we should be worried about?"


    "Well, there are plenty of groups that I haven’t mentioned yet. There are beast supremacists who want to increase the presence of living beasts in people’s daily lives. There are hivers who wish to live on giants that arepletely made out of organic matters. There are hundreds if not thousands of groups like these!"