If you have watched a race, a bioengineering discourse, an old hunting game, or anything else on the relay in the past three years, you have seen the broadcast I am responding to. It runs between everything. It has been inserted into the gaps of nearly every public relay channel on the planet, and it has not changed in three years. The same speech. The same tears. The same woman explaining to you why the world you built for yourself is the wrong one and why you should give it to her to fix.
My name is Velk'Phareon Daer. I am fifty-seven years old, five feet eight inches, a hundred and fifty pounds, and I am told that I look like a man who polishes relay nodes for a living. I have heard what she said about my appearance and I do not care. She is five feet eleven inches and a hundred and six pounds with skin so pale you can see the veins in her face, and if you are wondering why her skin does not match her age, it is because she can afford the bioengineering that most of the people she claims to speak for cannot. Her hair is silver because even wealth cannot outrun everything. I mention this because she chose to make my appearance relevant, and I want it understood that I can do the same and still have something to say afterward.
This response took three years. I will explain why because I owe that to anyone who reads this. My previous paper, On the Populations of Geba, was publicly discredited by Zairen Vaul. I do not agree with that decision. I remain loyal to him regardless, and I accept his judgment as the founder of the institution I serve. The discrediting of that paper meant that anything I published immediately afterward would be dismissed as the continued output of a man whose work had already been rejected by his own leadership. So I waited. I studied. I gathered what I needed. And I requested permission from Zairen Vaul to release this response, which he granted. I am publishing it now because three years have passed and the same broadcast is still running and there has been no public opposition to it. Research and surveys suggest there should be significant opposition. If no one else will speak against it publicly, I will.
On Her Targets
Deia begins by attacking the Severan families, the Church, the Engineered, and hybrids. She selects the groups that are easiest to criticize publicly and hardest to defend without appearing to endorse violence, religious extremism, or genetic engineering. This is effective rhetoric. It is not analysis.
The Severan families build armed compounds and raise their children around weapons because the world they live in requires it. They operate in corridors and contested regions where the alternative to being armed is being dead or taken. Their generational wealth is built through contractor work that anyone can enter through the Solarn Contractor Registry, a tiered system that tracks merit regardless of bloodline. She describes the smell of their smoke and the look in their children's eyes as if these are moral failures rather than survival adaptations, and she does this from Kharan's Gulf, where she lives among the wealthiest people on the planet in an enclave where Vinscel documented open auctions of drugged captives in broad daylight. I will not dwell on this hypocrisy because it speaks for itself.
She attacks the Church for destroying Lira and then stopping. I am a member of the Church. I accept what happened at Lira. I do not celebrate it. What I will say is that the Church stopped because it had achieved its operational objectives, and the fact that it stopped rather than continuing is itself evidence that decentralization works. Under centralized governance, the response to Lira would have been total war, a prolonged conflict with no clear end, because the centralized authority would have been obligated to retake the territory. Under decentralization, the conflict lasted less than two years, the Church withdrew, the seized territories remained under Maw control, and the planet continued. That is not a failure of governance. That is governance absorbing a crisis without producing a larger one. I accept that the Church would also be unable to exist in its current form under centralization, and I state this openly because intellectual honesty requires it.
Her position on the Engineered is where she reveals herself most clearly. She claims their ancestors were created and therefore their descendants do not deserve names, freedoms, education, or the right to own anything. She claims their physical superiority is unfair to natural-born laborers and that hybrids who can outwork a hundred men should not be paid for it. I will address this with a single reference. Prince Varethis'Daer Venar, whose name I carry and whose work I have dedicated my life to continuing, wrote in his private journals: "They were not created for war. They are not soldiers. They are the continuation of us. Into places we were never built to go. They are alive. They are more human than we are." The man who created the Engineered considered them more human than humanity. Deia considers them less. I will allow the reader to decide which position carries more weight.
The Engineered approval of centralization reform sits at three tenths of one percent. Deia presents this as evidence that they are protecting their own interests. I present it as evidence that a population whose ancestors were enslaved under centralized governance, whose liberator was assassinated for freeing them, and whose creator disappeared in the collapse that followed, has no interest in returning to the system that produced those outcomes. Their rejection is not self-interest. It is memory.
On the Tactician-Class specifically. Deia calls their anonymity infiltration. Many of them do not reveal what they are, and she frames this as deception for competitive advantage. The reality is that they conceal their heritage to avoid discrimination from exactly the kind of people Deia represents. They hide because people like her have made it dangerous not to. And their contribution to the world, even while hidden, is disproportionate to their share of the Engineered population. In spaces of law and accountability, it is usually a Tactician who pieces an investigation together. In extreme technical systems, in medical emergencies where a person has moments to live, it is usually one of them who is there, processing the situation at speeds that allow intervention where a natural-born mind would still be assessing the problem. They make the world objectively better. Removing them from the intellectual spaces they occupy or requiring them to identify themselves so that people like Deia can exclude them would not produce fairness. It would produce a world where the people most capable of solving problems are punished for being capable.
On the Empire She Wants Back
Deia invokes Prince Raeth, Princess Lira, and Emperor Auren as evidence that centralization works. I will take each of them seriously because they deserve it, and because dismissing them would be intellectually lazy.
Raeth documented the infrastructure gap. He was correct. His father and uncle repaired many of the relays he flagged and forced engineers to develop technology requiring less maintenance. Those repairs did not hold across centuries, and many of the same relays went dark again. Deia uses this to argue that the modern system has failed to close the gap. What she does not say is that the centralized system failed to close it first. Raeth was documenting the failures of centralization. The empire had the armies, the engineers, the Solarn lineage, the Haavu cannon systems, and the full authority of the throne, and it still could not reach everyone. The gap is not a product of decentralization. It is a product of a planet so vast that no single authority has ever been able to cover it. The difference is that under decentralization, the corridor economy, the contractor registry, and the manufactory system have created mechanisms for closing the gap that did not exist before. Those mechanisms are imperfect and people die in them, and I do not pretend otherwise. But they exist, and the centralized system produced nothing comparable.
Lira built Midreach under separate governance because the centralized system was not enough for what she wanted. Deia uses this as evidence for centralization. I find this remarkable. Lira's decision to build a separate state within the empire was itself an act of decentralization. She looked at the centralized system, found it insufficient, and created something independent. She is Deia's evidence against Deia's own argument, and Deia does not appear to notice.
And then there is Auren.
I will speak carefully here because Auren was the brother of Prince Daer, and there is no figure in history I hold in higher regard than Daer. Auren was likely the finest leader this planet has ever produced. His emotional intelligence, his political instincts, his vision for a world beyond conquest, all of it was extraordinary. Daer knew this from childhood. He wrote that it was obvious from the time they were boys that Auren would inherit, and that Daer's role would be to advance what Auren envisioned. Their father, Emperor Kael Varethis, designed this configuration deliberately. Auren would govern. Daer would build. Together they would have been the closest the planet ever came to permanent stability.
The population killed Auren. Deia uses this as her strongest argument for centralization: the people were given the best leader in history and they murdered him, therefore the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves and centralized authority should not require their permission to do what is right.
She is correct about the facts. Auren was the best. The population killed him. What she does not say, and what I suspect she does not understand, is that Auren's father had already begun the transition away from centralization. The Varethis Advance forced the empire to share resources with what became the major manufactories, removing the empire's monopoly on production, research, and innovation. This was deliberate. Kael Varethis was setting the world up to decentralize through his sons. Auren would manage the political transition. Daer would build the technological foundation. The destination was always distributed governance. The assassination interrupted it violently, and the Fracture and the Warlord Eras were the cost of that interruption, but the direction had already been set by the emperor who designed the system Deia claims to want restored.
The Solarns and the Haavu were truly owned by the empire before the Advance. The spectacles created by Veykar existed only within what the imperial lens accepted. Under the system Deia wants to restore, individuals like Yelidra Veykar could not exist. Nor could the artists and entertainers she uplifted. Nor could Lux Notera, who rose from poverty to among the three wealthiest publicly known individuals alive through talent and will alone, and who is not even close to the actual top if you consider the individuals operating in the underworld whose names are not known, many of whom still hold shares in legitimate business that places them in a wealth category the public economy does not acknowledge. Nor could fighters like Tae Katasung, whose talent in the Hunting Games has brought more attention to the games themselves, driven tourism and revenue to his homeland, and directly contradicted Deia's claim that the Yuvaari close their borders to outsiders. Her statement is outright false. The Yuvaari are among the most welcoming people in the modern era. Historically they were seen as more insular, but that was a product of the instability of the world during the Warlord Eras, not a reflection of who they are. Nor could the relayman profession, which would be useless under an empire that controlled what the relay showed. Nor could the contractor registry, which is the only meritocratic system this planet has ever produced. Under centralization, your bloodline determined your ceiling. If you were not Solarn, not Veykar, not Haavu, not imperial, not connected to governance or the right rite-house, you were invisible. You farmed. You labored. You served. The equality Deia misses was not equality. It was a shared floor with no ladder.
On Wealth
Deia claims that wealth was more evenly distributed under centralization. She is technically correct. The wealthiest families controlled roughly twelve percent of total planetary wealth. Today the wealthiest three percent control over forty-one percent. The gap is larger. What she does not say is why the gap was smaller. It was smaller because almost no one outside the bloodlines could accumulate anything. The ceiling was low because the system kept it low. The floor was not higher. The ceiling was closer to it.
In the modern era, the gap is vast because the ceiling is open. The contractor registry allows anyone to enter, advance, and build a name and a fortune within a decade. The corridor economy produces new settlements, new hubs, new economies that did not exist the day before the relay went up. The manufactory system allows independent engineering houses to build technologies that would never have emerged under imperial control, likely not for hundreds or thousands of additional years. The underworld, which I mention reluctantly but must mention honestly, is an entire parallel economy that generates wealth at a scale the legitimate market cannot match. The syndicates, the grey zone commerce, the trafficking networks, all of it is reprehensible and all of it produces generational wealth for those who operate within it. This market did not exist under centralization. That does not make it good. It makes it real, and it makes the comparison Deia is drawing incomplete.
Even in Thazvaar, before decentralization, the same violence existed. There were pirates, warlords, and early versions of syndicates doing the same things but with almost no organizational purpose and with the same human destruction. The violence Deia attributes to decentralization predates it. The only difference is that the modern system has organized what was always chaotic, and organized systems, however dark, produce more than chaotic ones.
On Crime
Deia concedes that comparing crime statistics across eras with vastly different populations is not entirely fair, and then proceeds to draw the comparison anyway. I will finish what she started.
Imperial crime statistics measured crime within imperial jurisdiction. They did not include crime outside the capitals, outside the imperial-adjacent continents, outside the relay-covered regions. The empire was not reporting lower crime. It was reporting less of the crime that existed. The Fracture proved this. The moment centralized reporting collapsed, the violence that had always existed in the unmeasured regions became visible, and it was catastrophic. It had always been there. The empire was not counting it.
In the modern era, even crime in black zones is recorded because relaymen enter those zones and document what they find. Vinscel's Crime on Geba alone documented realities the governed world did not know existed. The crime numbers are higher now because the measurement is more honest, not because there is more crime per person. Deia is comparing a system that measured ten percent of the planet to a system that attempts to measure all of it, and presenting the difference in totals as evidence of decline. That is not analysis. That is arithmetic performed without context.
On the Energy Wars
Deia argues that centralization would end the Energy Wars. She is correct. It would. The corridor economy exists because no central authority controls relay expansion. Remove the competition and the fighting stops. She presents this as a benefit. I will explain what she is not telling you.
The Energy Wars are the single largest engine of upward mobility on this planet. When a corridor opens and holds, a relay goes up. When a relay goes up, a hub forms. When a hub forms, trade arrives. When trade arrives, civilians follow, and an economy that did not exist yesterday exists today. The laborer who was invisible in the capital can move to a new clearing and become the person who builds the first structure. The old empire built relays and expanded civilization, but it expanded imperial territory. The relay belonged to the empire. The settlement belonged to the empire. The economy served the empire. Under decentralization, whoever holds the corridor owns what grows from it. Ending the Energy Wars does not just end the violence. It ends the only mechanism this planet has ever produced for turning invisible people into visible ones.
You cannot keep building connectivity for people who are trying to kill you to prevent you from building anything. That is the reality of corridor work. The people in contested regions are often the ones fighting against the expansion. Contractors die building relays for populations that destroy the infrastructure being built for them. If those populations want to remain centuries behind, the system allows them to. That is allowance. That is the principle Deia claims to believe in. The alternative is sending armies to force connectivity on people who have made it clear they do not want it, which is the exact system she is proposing to restore, and which failed the last time it was tried.
Deia speaks fondly of the imperial armies and suggests their return would solve the problem of security. The grand majority of the professional contractor economy, especially at the higher tiers, are direct descendants of the very groups those imperial armies were composed of. The Frost Sentinel lineages are still producing corridor fighters. The New Emperor's Wrath, the Watch Snipers, and the various artillery and piloting guilds still use doctrine extremely similar to what the official imperial forces once employed. These are the same bloodlines, the same martial traditions, the same physical capabilities, applied to corridors rather than imperial campaigns. If anything, the professional fighters in the corridors are superior to what the armies once were, even excluding the Engineered from the comparison, because decentralization has allowed so many different disciplines from across the planet to merge together that a modern contractor can learn techniques from every continent, creating a more capable warrior than any single imperial doctrine ever produced. When you add the Engineered back into the equation, the comparison becomes absurd. The armies Deia wants restored would be inferior to what already exists in the corridors she wants closed.
She also does not consider what happens when Engineered individuals choose to be laborers. A clearing owned by an Engineered operator with Engineered labor produces output at a scale that natural-born labor cannot approach. That output directly benefits every nearby hub through trade, supply, and the sheer volume of goods moving through the relay economy. Under centralization, this production capacity would belong to the empire. Under decentralization, it belongs to the people who built it, and the surplus flows outward into the communities around it. Removing the Engineered from the labor economy, which is what Deia's position on their citizenship implies, would collapse entire regional economies that depend on their output.
On Who She Is
Deia is an elected representative of the greater Unbound faith. This is public information. She holds this position openly. I want to explain what this means in the context of what she is asking for.
Under decentralization, nine faiths compete for how the world understands itself, and none of them can force the others out. The Liminorans believe what the Church believes, in many ways to an even greater degree, and they are accepted openly by the rest of the world because they were never involved in any conflict and they have institutions that exist everywhere, where people can walk in and accept or reject their teachings freely. That is what decentralization produces. Beliefs that coexist without one being imposed from above.
Under centralization, whoever controls the imperial doctrine controls what everyone believes. The Rite House or whatever replaced it would determine acceptable faith, and anything outside that framework would be suppressed. The Liminorans would be suppressed. The Church would be suppressed. And the Unbound, whose elected representative is currently asking you to give her a centralized system to operate within, would have the mechanism to impose their interpretation of He Who Allows on the entire planet.
The Unbound have organized secular buildings in various capitals, the same as the Liminorans. Unlike the Liminorans, these buildings are never open to the public unless it is a spectacle. What happens inside them is not visible to anyone outside them. The Unbound faith, in its broader expression, has produced subsects responsible for financial fraud networks, death cults, cannibalism, and manipulations of governance so extensive that the word "world" is appropriate as a modifier. These are not accusations. These are documented facts. The assault on Bessona during the Warlord Eras, the massacre of three billion women and children, the bodies made into art, the cannibalistic feasting broadcast as the ultimate act of allowance, was carried out by a death cult subsect of the Unbound faith. That is who produced it. That is the faith whose elected representative is now asking you to centralize planetary governance.
I have met a woman named Txeiha, a relayman from Reykhaal who spent ten years studying every major belief system on the planet and published her findings in The Informed Position. I did not get along with her. We disagree on many things and I find her presence difficult. But she did the work. Her conclusions about the Unbound are sound, and she reached them independently, without any reason to agree with me. If you will not take my word for what the Unbound are, read hers. She has no loyalty to the Church and no reason to support my position, and she arrived at the same conclusions through her own research.
I will also note that Deia spent over forty years of her life fighting for decentralization. She was on the other side. She made the arguments I am making now, and she made them well enough that the people she worked with trusted her for decades. Then she switched, and the timing of her switch coincided with a sudden and significant increase in the Unbound's public membership after their numbers had been extremely low following the Warlord Eras. The people she spent forty years working alongside gave her a name for the switch, and she accepted it. I will not say the name. Anyone familiar with her history already knows it.
On the Population
The organized reformist movement is eighty percent imperial Geban by composition. The remaining twenty percent is scattered across other populations without meaningful consensus. This is the movement itself: the people who attend the gatherings, distribute the materials, and coordinate the relay broadcasts. It does not represent the broader population that agrees with the sentiment, and the distinction matters.
Among the general population, the picture is different and worth examining carefully. Three quarters of Berinu's mainland population, roughly twenty billion people, express sympathy for centralization reform. Their youth responds to emotional rhetoric and their northern border produces real and legitimate suffering that Deia's broadcast addresses directly. I do not dismiss that suffering. It is real. But the Berinese who agree with Deia are not joining her movement. They are watching her broadcast between relay programs and nodding. That is not the same thing as organized political support, and Deia does not distinguish between the two because the conflation benefits her.
Over half of the Kelan population supports the idea because living on a polar continent with no native relay infrastructure is genuinely difficult, and centralization promises supply lines the current system does not provide. I understand this. I also note that Kela has functioned as a destination for ex-warlords, criminals, and exiles even under centralization, and the difficulties of life there are a product of geography that no governmental system has ever solved.
In Coastal Thazvaar, over half disagree, especially those in wealthy areas where centralization would make their current way of life impossible. If centralization means redistribution, the people who built their wealth under decentralization will resist it, and they have the resources to make that resistance effective. In Inland Thazvaar, portions of the civilian population want someone to destroy the syndicates, but Inland Thazvaar has never been governed by any power in recorded history. The Thazvaari Dominion could not govern it. The Geban Empire at its absolute height could not govern it. Centralization does not solve what terrain and scale make unsolvable. It claims to.
The Berinu Islands are entirely against it. Jeyrha is overwhelmingly against it. Yuvaar's approval rate is absolute zero. The Ngorrhali remain neutral because they are a people who believe they can thrive under any conditions, and they have proven this consistently from the passes to the capital to the contractor corridors. The Engineered sit at three tenths of one percent.
When I weigh all of this together, the general population leans toward sympathy with Deia's position, largely driven by the sheer size of the Berinese mainland population and the real suffering of the populations on the lower end. But sympathy is not conviction, and the populations who actively oppose centralization, the Berinu Islands, Jeyrha, Yuvaar, the Engineered, the wealthy Coastal Thazvaari, and significant portions of every continent where people have built something under the current system, represent a concentration of capability, wealth, and institutional knowledge that the sympathetic populations do not match.
One statistic I will mention because it is strange and worth mentioning, though I do not want to cross the line into conspiracy. One hundred percent of the members of the greater Unbound faith support Deia's position. One hundred percent. Zero reservation. No dissent. No internal debate. And these numbers went up incredibly fast. From near-total obscurity following the Warlord Eras, where public identification with the Unbound was essentially a social death sentence because of what their subsects had done, to a sudden and significant public membership increase that coincided precisely with Deia's switch from decentralization to centralization. I will not speculate on what this means. I will say that no other faith on this planet, not the Severans, not the Saodeh, not even the Church I belong to, has ever achieved one hundred percent internal alignment on any political position, and the fact that the Unbound have done so without a single publicly recorded dissent is, at minimum, unusual.
On the Engineered, Revisited
I return to the Engineered because my own previous work is the reason I must. My paper On the Populations of Geba was discredited, and the discrediting forced me to conduct more extensive research than the original work contained. One of the things I found is something Deia does not mention, and I suspect she does not mention it because it dismantles her position on the Engineered entirely.
Centralized governance was the direct cause of the gender imbalance. The systematic execution of conquered males during the Imperial Conquest is what produced the ratio this planet now lives with. The empire created the crisis. The centralized system Deia wants restored is the system that broke the population in the first place.
Now consider what she wants to do with the Engineered. She wants them stripped of names, freedoms, education, and the right to own anything. She argues that their physical superiority is unfair and that hybrids should not be paid for labor because their ancestors were created. Set aside the moral dimension for a moment and look at the biology. Assault-Class females commonly carry pregnancies of up to eight individuals. Single births among them are extremely rare. And their birth rates are not skewed toward female the way natural-born births are across the rest of the planet. The Engineered are the only population on Geba producing males at a rate that meaningfully counteracts the imbalance that centralized governance created.
The population Deia wants denied personhood is the one doing more to correct the gender crisis than any policy, any faith, or any governmental system in six thousand years of recorded history. She wants to remove them from the economy that their labor sustains, deny citizenship to the people whose biology is actively rebalancing the planet, and restore the system that caused the imbalance in the first place. I do not know how to make this point more clearly than the facts already make it.
On Vessels
Deia wants Vessels tracked and identified. I acknowledge the Haavu and Zhikhan incident and I acknowledge this point, and this is the one I will address because it is the more dangerous of the two.
There used to be millions of them. Before the Warlord Eras, the Vessel population numbered in the millions across the planet. Then people who wanted to control the narrative of He Who Allows decided that the people with direct and factual connections to that understanding were a threat to their authority. The Vessels were identified. They were found. And they were killed. The genocide reduced their population from millions to fewer than twenty thousand. Identification was the direct cause of that genocide. Knowing who they were is what made it possible to kill them.
Having a rough number of Vessels but not knowing all of their individual identities is not negligence. It is the best thing for their survival. Unless we want them to go extinct, which would have consequences that no one on this planet could imagine or comprehend, the anonymity of Vessels blended into the general population is the single most effective protection they have. Their individual identities being unknown allows them to survive without scrutiny. It allows the world to benefit from their presence in ways that may not be fully understood, especially considering that their lifespans far exceed natural-born lifespans and their influence across generations is quiet, sustained, and impossible to measure if you do not know who they are. Deia frames tracking as safety. The historical record shows that tracking Vessels is the prerequisite to destroying them, and it has already happened once. I will not support it happening again.
I will be transparent about my own bias here. The Church has spent decades searching for resonance with Liminora. Every effort has failed. Vessels, with their direct connections to the forces that shaped this planet, are a significant part of the key to understanding what the Entity is and whether it can be reached again. Their extinction would not only be a loss for the general population. It would end the only line of inquiry the Church has left. I state this so that the reader understands I am not neutral on this point. I am not. But the historical argument stands regardless of my motivation for making it. Identification caused the genocide. That is not my opinion. That is what happened.
On Justice
Deia argues that the punitive system has failed because bounty hunters kill rather than capture, and because there is no proportional justice for different categories of crime. The punitive system has not failed. For the criminals who represent serious threats, even at an existential level, the system works precisely because those individuals are not known about publicly. They are contained. As they should be. I know this because the Church houses some of them, and they will never be released.
Even the monstrosity of large-scale trafficking, as horrific as it is, is nothing in comparison to the danger posed by individuals who have access to knowledge and weapons that even the most brilliant minds on this planet cannot imagine. These are not hypothetical threats. These are people who have every motive to end society as it exists, or the world itself, and many of them have tried, and some have come so close that describing how close would expose how fragile any system we could possibly devise, whether centralized or not, actually is. The fact that Deia does not mention these individuals in her paper, the fact that she does not highlight their existence or demand their prosecution, means the current system is working. She does not know about them because she is not supposed to know about them, and the system that keeps them contained is the same decentralized system she wants to dismantle. Centralization would require these individuals to be processed through public institutions, and public institutions cannot hold what they do not understand.
On Allowance
The decentralized system is imperfect. People suffer under it. People die in corridors. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is vast and widening. Syndicates operate without meaningful opposition. Trafficking continues. The grey zones exist. I do not deny any of this.
But the system permits something that centralization never did and never will. It permits the existence of everything, including things that the population in power would prefer to destroy. The Church exists because the system allows it. The Liminorans exist because the system allows them. The Severan families exist. The Engineered exist as citizens. The contractor registry exists. The manufactory system exists. Lux Notera exists. The relaymen exist. Tour racing exists. The Hunting Games exist. Nine faiths exist and none of them can silence the others. That is not chaos. That is the principle of allowance applied to governance, and it is the only system on this planet that has ever permitted people to become what they are rather than what a central authority decided they should be.
Why would you listen to someone whose faith has produced death cults, cannibals, financial fraud masterminds, and world manipulators, who lives in the wealthiest enclave on the planet while telling the poor that their suffering would end if they gave her the authority to fix it, who spent forty years defending the system she now wants to dismantle, whose switch coincided with the resurgence of the faith she represents, and who invokes the name of an emperor whose assassination was caused by the very system she wants to restore?
That is not a rhetorical question. I am genuinely asking. Because I have studied this for three years and I still do not have an answer.