The Aldiran Order placed great importance on science and technology. The Aldiran Academy of Sciences (AAS) served as the central scientific institution of the Order, concentrating its most capable minds. However, a substantial portion of investment in this sector was absorbed by a single, monumental undertaking: the development of the neural parasite known as Nova. As a result, although scientific inquiry was highly esteemed, technological progress remained uneven. Many applied fields—particularly those related to the civilian economy, public health, and conventional military systems—lagged behind, having been deprived of sustained funding and institutional attention.
The Order also became a refuge for those who defied convention worldwide, absorbing disillusioned intellectuals and researchers marginalized elsewhere. Individuals with unorthodox ideas—often dismissed or constrained in their home countries—found ready acceptance in Aldira, provided they aligned themselves with the regime’s worldview. The state actively sought such figures, treating intellectual capital as a strategic resource. Their asylum and subsequent Aldiranization further expanded the Order’s scientific capacity.
Despite the absence of cultural exchange and the suppression of intellectual pluralism, scientific innovation persisted. Progress was driven by aggressive funding priorities, institutional audacity, and the absence of ethical constraints that might otherwise have limited experimentation. This environment produced devices and techniques unknown elsewhere. One such invention was the “Deafener,” a device that allowed an individual to suppress auditory perception at will, inducing a state of reversible, selective deafness. The technology was developed entirely within Aldira and remained restricted to internal use, but it was never widespread, as it was not produced on a systematic scale.
After the Soviet Union lost its eastern territories in 1968, a significant number of Soviet scientists residing in those regions were recruited into the Order. Following a period of ideological reorientation, they were absorbed into Aldiran institutions. Consequently, by the early 1970s, approximately 25 percent of the Order’s scientific community consisted of individuals with prior experience in Soviet research structures, giving rise to a distinctive and enduring intellectual link between the two polities.
Although the relations between the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which held approximately 20% of the world’s scientists, and the Aldiran Academy of Sciences, which held around 10%, were cautious, they generally maintained a cold but cordial friendship. The two organizations collaborated on numerous scientific programs and projects, supporting each other as rivals to Western scholarship. The Soviets’ main contribution was providing essential scientific equipment, which Aldira lacked due to its relative poverty. The Aldirans’ primary contribution, on the other hand, lay in their radical ideas: their unique perspectives—unbound by ethics and often contrary to any ideology—enabled them to generate innovative concepts, which they shared with the Soviets and, in some cases, formally assigned to them as patents. In this way, the Soviets provided the tools, and the Aldirans provided the thought.
Cybernetics was relatively advanced, particularly in the automation of industrial production, where machines increasingly replaced human labor in factory settings. However, the technological era remained too early for Aldira to achieve the development of autonomous intelligent robots, and thus its machines, despite their central role in surpassing human limitations in productivity and coordination, generally remained technically rudimentary and dependent on human oversight. Moreover, strategic emphasis was placed less on cybernetic systems themselves than on neurology and cognitive engineering. Aldiran doctrine held that reshaping the human operator—the biological substrate of cybernetics—would inevitably reshape the cybernetic system that extended from them. Thus, the project of transforming humanity was prioritized over the project of constructing artificial intelligence, under the assumption that disciplined cognition would automatically generate disciplined technology.
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The Order maintained an extensive human experimentation program, code-named Project Integral, aimed at altering the human condition. Human subjects were treated as mutable substrates: cognition was altered, identities destabilized, bodies repurposed, and consciousness fragmented under the premise that both human identity and the human body were editable artifacts.
Within this program, the production of artificial fetuses was also included. In controlled laboratory environments, complex chemical and biological matrices, along with synthesized minerals and organic substrates, were combined to simulate the emergence of a human organism. These engineered fetuses were designed to carry predetermined genetic traits and predetermined morphologies—for example, possessing multiple limbs or facial structures diverging from standard human anatomy. The underlying objective was to fabricate a human entity whose biology was entirely artificial, unmediated by natural reproduction or evolutionary lineage.
These fetuses, of course, could not survive, as contemporary technology was insufficient to sustain such constructs. However, some reportedly remained biologically active for several minutes, exhibiting cardiac activity and rudimentary neural processing before cessation. All organs were artificially engineered by Aldiran scientists, who sought to demonstrate that human biology itself could be reinvented as an engineered system rather than a natural phenomenon.
Numerous such experiments were conducted under extreme secrecy due to their ethical illegitimacy. Although foreign states became aware of the program’s existence through indirect intelligence channels, they lacked sufficient access to determine its full scope, methodologies, or technical architecture. These scientific programs—brutal in their execution and prohibited elsewhere—inflicted vast suffering, yet they generated unprecedented insights, accelerating progress in fields such as molecular biology, neuroengineering, and cognitive science.
Aldiran researchers developed invasive neurointerfaces, programmable synaptic modulators, and gene-editing protocols capable of stabilizing cognition, suppressing pathological hallucinations, and restoring functional memory, language, and affect regulation. Conditions once classified as severe mental disorders were rendered technically manageable through neural reconfiguration and targeted cortical intervention. Mental illness, within this framework, ceased to be understood as an intrinsic human condition and was redefined as a correctable problem of neural function.
These interventions, however, consistently failed to restore interiority. Subjects emerged coherent, productive, and behaviorally compliant, yet internally hollow—capable of thought without depth, affect without resonance, and identity without self-generated meaning. Aldira, which sought to exploit inner worlds rather than empty them, regarded such outcomes as ontological disgrace. For this reason, large-scale neurological correction was avoided in the general population, as it reliably produced functional bodies at the expense of inner life.
This restraint did not extend to the disabled. Psychiatry, held in contempt and dismissed as a bureaucratic rather than interior or substantive discipline, was abolished, and no concept of disability rights replaced it. Individuals whose conditions disrupted systemic stability were subjected to neurological intervention despite the known risk of interior erasure, or else removed from civilian life altogether. Such procedures were deemed acceptable when applied to those already classified as deficient: the loss of inner life was not recognized as harm, but as an administrative simplification. Thus, although Aldira possessed the means to repair minds, it exercised this power selectively—preserving interiority where it was ideologically valuable and extinguishing it where the regime judged it expendable.
Certain anti-psychiatry movements worldwide, while condemning Aldira’s brutality on moral and emotional grounds, nonetheless regarded the abolition of psychiatry with intellectual respect.
Despite the strategic and philosophical magnitude of these breakthroughs, the Aldiran regime never disclosed them to the outside world in sufficient detail. Ultimately, the extensive neurobiological infrastructure culminated in the creation of Nova, a distributed neuroinvasive agent designed to overwrite the world’s cognitive substrate and impose a new civilizational order.
