This day in Trinity Universe history
Jun. 17th, 2004 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aberrantangelsBENWAY: "Balderdash, my boy... We're scientists... Pure scientists. Disinterested research and damned be him who cries 'Hold, too much!' Such people are no better than party poops."
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
The "Rational" Experimentation Group was (is?) only rational in the sense so (too) many people believe, that the rational and the moral are natural enemies rather than natural allies. I think this comes from the same semantic confusion that led Ken Hamm, of the creation "science" group Answers in Genesis, to ask on a PBS special, "If I can't trust what the Bible says about geology and biology, how can I trust what it says about morality?" (Yes, I know, I sound like an Objectivist. I happen to thinkAlissa Rosenbaum Ayn Rand got a lot of things right. A lot of Objectivists go too far in the other direction, deciding that anything she was right about, she was completely right about, and thus that it's the religious, not the irreligious, who can't be truly moral. But enough of that.)
There were two aspects to the REG. One built isolated lairs for mad scientists, like that bunker. The other kidnapped people, like those youths, to be guinea pigs in those lab lairs. (This second section worked closely with the Condotierri, an international crime syndicate above all others, of which the Camparelli-Zukhov Megasyndicate is but an echo.)
Though their names were never directly linked to the REG (except perhaps on the three Swiss account boxes that paid for the construction section), Æon had reason to believe that three individuals were at the top of the Group. And I realize I haven't talked about any of them. One was Jackson "Mister Saturday" Harley, the psychic "voodoo" master who had been Dr. Sir Calvin Hammersmith's butler at Atlas Cross before (and when) the Telluric Engine was demonstrated; after the blast, he relocated the mansion, stone by stone, to Haiti and used it as his base of operations.
Another was the Ubiquitous Dragon, a Chinese crimelord a la Dr. Fu Manchu. As the Condotierri's "King of the World" stood at the head of the crime syndicates of Europe and the Americas, the Dragon controlled Asia's underworld. (In the late 1930s, they may have decided the planet wasn't big enough for both of them.)
The third was Hephaestia Geary-Wexler, the estranged wife of Æon co-founder Benjamin Franklin "Professor" Dixon. (Both had been lab assistants to Hammersmith.) Geary-Wexler dreamed of a world where all the heavy lifting was done by "metachinery" — a word she coined to replace "automata" (which she deemed inadequate to her "Sanguine Prometheus"). The more physically-oriented could work as mechanics, doing those repairs that the metachines could not perform on themselves; the intellectual elite could expand the possibilities of Sanguine metachinery. To fund this dream, Geary-Wexler sold her inventions — some to Æon, most to the criminal underworld (which knew her better as "the Machinatrix").
If these people are still around in the Nova Age, they're keeping themselves hid well. Then again, we know Michael Donighal is still around, and we know he's hiding well (for now).
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
1919
[Adventure!] The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department discovers that a number of kidnapped youths have been held in a bunker in the mountains and subjected to bizarre experiments (later linked to the Rational Experimentation Group).
The "Rational" Experimentation Group was (is?) only rational in the sense so (too) many people believe, that the rational and the moral are natural enemies rather than natural allies. I think this comes from the same semantic confusion that led Ken Hamm, of the creation "science" group Answers in Genesis, to ask on a PBS special, "If I can't trust what the Bible says about geology and biology, how can I trust what it says about morality?" (Yes, I know, I sound like an Objectivist. I happen to think
There were two aspects to the REG. One built isolated lairs for mad scientists, like that bunker. The other kidnapped people, like those youths, to be guinea pigs in those lab lairs. (This second section worked closely with the Condotierri, an international crime syndicate above all others, of which the Camparelli-Zukhov Megasyndicate is but an echo.)
Though their names were never directly linked to the REG (except perhaps on the three Swiss account boxes that paid for the construction section), Æon had reason to believe that three individuals were at the top of the Group. And I realize I haven't talked about any of them. One was Jackson "Mister Saturday" Harley, the psychic "voodoo" master who had been Dr. Sir Calvin Hammersmith's butler at Atlas Cross before (and when) the Telluric Engine was demonstrated; after the blast, he relocated the mansion, stone by stone, to Haiti and used it as his base of operations.
Another was the Ubiquitous Dragon, a Chinese crimelord a la Dr. Fu Manchu. As the Condotierri's "King of the World" stood at the head of the crime syndicates of Europe and the Americas, the Dragon controlled Asia's underworld. (In the late 1930s, they may have decided the planet wasn't big enough for both of them.)
The third was Hephaestia Geary-Wexler, the estranged wife of Æon co-founder Benjamin Franklin "Professor" Dixon. (Both had been lab assistants to Hammersmith.) Geary-Wexler dreamed of a world where all the heavy lifting was done by "metachinery" — a word she coined to replace "automata" (which she deemed inadequate to her "Sanguine Prometheus"). The more physically-oriented could work as mechanics, doing those repairs that the metachines could not perform on themselves; the intellectual elite could expand the possibilities of Sanguine metachinery. To fund this dream, Geary-Wexler sold her inventions — some to Æon, most to the criminal underworld (which knew her better as "the Machinatrix").
If these people are still around in the Nova Age, they're keeping themselves hid well. Then again, we know Michael Donighal is still around, and we know he's hiding well (for now).
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