In September 1979, an Austrian neurologist named Arnold sought political asylum within the Aldiran Order after years of censorship and professional marginalization in Britain, where his research had been condemned as “scientific heresy.” Though never formally charged or imprisoned, he was rendered professionally inert: laboratories withdrew access, academic journals rejected his work without review, and ethics committees revoked credentials under the language of moral concern. Shortly before his departure, Arnold composed a protest letter addressed to the English intelligentsia, accusing them of “scientific cowardice.”

  After traveling thousands of kilometers eastward, he arrived in Ordostok. He did not present himself merely as a political dissident, but as a “man at war with the concept of identity itself.”

  In his personal notes, Arnold wrote:

  “To change neurons is to change the person, because personality is nothing more than a neurological hallucination. By sending ‘troops’ into the inner kingdom of the brain—by staging a ‘coup’ and seizing control—humanity could design a superior species authored by intention rather than accident. It should be humans who manipulate genes, not genes that govern humans. Biology must be surpassed, or eliminated. I insist on this point.

  And yet no instrument exists that can reliably redirect cognition itself. I find this stagnation pitiful. Rather than waiting any longer, I have chosen to undertake this task myself, despite and against every moral objection. The only requirement to achieve it is to formalize it as a systematic field of research and secure the sponsorship of entities powerful enough to ignore inherited ethics. I saw only one political order capable of recognizing my ideas not as monstrous, but as transcendent: Aldira.

  When I entered the lands of the Order, an entirely different world confronted me. The people there were unlike any I had known in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or London. In the West, individuals had always seemed interchangeable to me, molded by the same primal reflexes. Here, each person felt like a sealed universe. Perhaps the only shared trait was difference itself. I could not understand how such inner density coexisted with such outward restraint—how these internal worlds did not spill outward and fracture the external order.

  People walked side by side without speaking, and I understood that they were friends because they shared that silence. Contemporary societies that defined sharing as shouting and clamoring were incapable of understanding this higher language. To them, this place would naturally have appeared as barren land, while I, within this stillness that absorbed their endless noise, finally reached a state of spiritual serenity—something I had never experienced anywhere else in my life.

  here were times when I walked through almost the entirety of Ordostok, and my head still did not swell with noise. Everywhere was silent. My footsteps echoed, even in squares that might have been filled with hundreds of people. This was sacred. Noise-makers had been removed, because the entire society felt as if it were trapped in an endless funeral ceremony. What was this mourning for? Frankly, I did not care. The only thing that mattered to me was mourning itself, and so perhaps I understood the actual point of the regime.

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  During my early meetings with Aldira’s leaders—conducted while I underwent what they called ideological reshaping, meant to strip away the ‘old values’ of the West—their manner toward me never escaped my notice. It was respectful, restrained, precise. I understood that this reverence was conditional; it was known that the same authorities could act brutally toward others, even erase them entirely. Still, I was voluntarily here.

  There was no other regime that could have spoken to me so directly. Aldira had abandoned inherited wisdom without apology. Madness? Perhaps. But a disciplined madness—one I admired enough to join.

  Later, I wrote a comprehensive thesis. By virtue of its influence, I was appointed head of the Aldiran Academy of Sciences. Only then did I understand that this academy, despite its rationalist exterior, was religious. The laboratory was no different from the temple. Experimentation replaced prayer; method replaced ritual.

  After witnessing the inner workings of the Academy, I initiated a project to give physical form to my ideas: the creation of a neuroinvasive biological agent capable of restructuring thought itself through direct interaction with neural signaling and plasticity. I called it Nova. The name held no objective meaning, yet within my inner world I understood it as a kind of revolutionary light, as the ‘light of revolution.’ The Aldiran scientific community soon oriented itself around this work, recognizing in it a rare fusion of biology and metaphysics—a form of scientific theology that promised not merely to understand life, but to author it. Nova thus became the central preoccupation of the Aldiran intelligentsia.

  My earliest experiments produced only death. Subjects collapsed into comas or entered irreversible dissociative states. I refuse to call these failures; they merely failed to produce the intended configuration. And so, I could not give up. I worked without rest. Comfort is the true enemy of change, and the West has built entire civilizations to preserve it.

  Even when I spent entire days confined to the laboratory, my isolation was interpreted not as obsession, but as devotion. I saw heads bow, hands fold. When they avoided my gaze, it was not indifference, but recognition. Elsewhere, such restraint would have been misread as coldness. Here, it was understanding. Foreign propaganda had painted Aldirans as mechanical, inhuman silhouettes. Yet I discovered among them a humanity entirely their own—contained, unexpressed, and therefore invisible to those who equate feeling with display.

  Over long years, I conducted dozens more experiments. At last, when I introduced a stabilized, cloned variant—Nova Pax—into a subject’s bloodstream, there was no loss of consciousness, no systemic failure. Cognitive function remained intact. Memory, language, and reasoning persisted. And yet a radical reorientation occurred: introversion, detachment, withdrawal from externally imposed identity. The same organism endured; the organizing essence had shifted. This was the sign that my work was nearing success.

  From that moment onward, Aldiran laboratories ceased to be sites of biological correction and became instruments of transformation. Ontology merged with physiology. Nature ceased to be merely observable and became editable.

  The Sublime Council marked the breakthrough without ceremony or reward, issuing a declaration instead: ‘The veil of nature has been torn; the boundary of biology has been surpassed.’ This meant that empiricism had crossed a threshold. Science no longer described life—it rewrote it.

  After more than a decade of relentless labor, I became the discoverer of the Nova parasite: the embodiment of my childhood vision and the catalyst for its systematic replication.”