Non Ultra Natura

Non Ultra Natura is a human political faction of old Earth. It opposed uplifted animals, engineered human genomes, and machines allowed to grow past human limits. Sering shouts the name as a battle cry, with its meaning attached: “Non Ultra Natura! No greater than nature.” Doctor Avrana Kern calls its members NUNs and counts them as enemies of her work.

What Kern says of them

Nearly everything about the group comes through Kern, who despises it. She calls them “Non Ultra Natura clowns” and “the Non Ultra Natura terrorists”, and she thinks that if they got their way people would end up back in the caves and back in the trees. In her account they are the extreme edge of a wider coalition of conservative, philosophical and religious factions that decided progress had gone far enough. That coalition fought against further engineering of the human genome, against lifting the limits on AI, and against projects like hers. She believed they were losing.

Their objection, in her summary, was to making “superbeings out of mere beasts”. She says they preached a creed of human purity and supremacy that kept all of humanity’s eggs in one basket, and that their real objection was to sharing, since only child humanity wanted the sole attention of the universe.

Kern has met their methods already: assassinations, riots, bombs, and a compromised Europa Base. She also counts protests, sabotage and murder among the troubles the uplift virus met while it was being developed. She skimmed the riots, furious debates and demonstrations reported from Earth and decided they were the work of fools.

Sering

Sering is the only person in these chapters who speaks for the group. The volunteer meant for the Sentry Pod, he goes into the engine core of the Brin 2 and disables the reactor safeties. On the open channel he says Earth and the colonies have already been taken back for humans: no uplifted monkeys, no godlike computers, no “freakshows of the human form”. Agents of his cause, he says, have moved on every colony in the solar system and out, and will take power with the consent of the majority. If they are refused, they will fight. He ends with the slogan.

Kern assumes afterwards that he was a NUN agent and that their uprising had failed, and decides a rescue ship must already be coming for her. Nothing in these chapters confirms either point from outside her own reasoning.

The war

The Sentry Hub wakes Kern after fourteen years and seventy two days. There is no ship from Earth, and no radio traffic. The last signals are old, scattered and encoded, mostly pleas for help, and then they stop. Kern concludes that a war went hot and that the NUNs and their allies rose up against their enemies. From the surviving pieces she suspects the whole conflict lasted less than a week. One of the last transmissions from Earth was a virus broadcast on all frequencies to infest any system that received it. It shut down the colonies that ran on their machines, which in her reading meant swift death for the people there. She and the hub escape it because an uploaded personality is not a system the virus can use.

She never learns whether anyone is left on Earth, or who won.

Unanswered questions

• Who led the NUNs, how many followed them, and whether they used any other name for themselves.
• Whether Sering was an agent from the start or acted alone.
• Whether the NUNs won the war, lost it, or died with everyone else on Earth.
• Whether the wider coalition of conservatives, philosophers and religious groups shared the group’s methods.