Freedom of Purpose
(Culture 4)
This is already pretty long, so I'm going to write the second half later.
History (Part 1)
Since the Declaration of Organized Golem Creation in 2820, the Zwera added to their number through a process whereby guild members applied to their sumuda and requested the creation of a new golem. Although it was not required de jure that the new golem join the sumuda of his creator, this was the common practice to the point of becoming a de facto requirement. When a fisher needed an apprentice, for example, he would apply to the Fisheries Guild and, if the guild was below its allotment as given in the Súmuda’s annual Statement of Facts, a new golem would be created and assigned to apprentice under the applicant.
The actual work of creating the golem was performed by the Golemry Guild, which like all the guilds kept its actual processes as internal secrets and only provided the final results. But a recurring issue throughout the history of the guild was the question of whether new technologies should be incorporated into the golems being created, or whether they should be designed in the same way as preexisting golems. The traditionalist school dominated the 2000s and early 3000s, but in 3418 the guild saw its first modernist-leaning director,
Hamuda Sumaròka [ɣándà súmròkà], the winner of the election triggered by the extension of voting to senior members by the Súmuda’s declaration three years earlier. The most extreme modernists wished to incorporate new joint technologies that would allow for increased flexibility and greater precision and a complete redesign of the eyes and vision processing cortex that would allow for sight of
darklight not visible to the existing golem eye. Hamuda, however, was of a more conservative mindset that was willing to make only the changes that could be easily retrofitted to preexisting golems through the decennial repair process, in order to avoid creating a second class of citizens. His team set up a detailed process for approving design changes, of which backwards compatibility was a core component, and created the Golemry Improvement Department (GID) to administrate the process.
A key component of Hamuda’s reforms was reinterpreting and then reaffirming the Golemry Guild’s commitment to the Doctrine of Single Design, a principle in Zwera philosophy going back to the Zörachok invasion which stated that the common design shared by the golems is what unites them. While the traditionalists had used this principle to oppose any and all changes to golemry, Hamuda asserted that advances in golemry were not violations of single design as long as they could be applied universally. Delays and appeals from the traditionalists, who still held significant weight, resulted in nearly forty years of inaction, but in the end Hamuda’s interpretation won out: in 3455 the guild began incorporating bronze alloys into the master design, allowing better inherent resistance to seawater corrosion. Similar surface changes continued throughought the millenium.
A new round of trouble began with the election of
Atama Tikòka [ádmà tíkká] as director of the Golemry Guild in 4011. Atama himself was a golem of standard opinions and average countenance and was elected largely as a compromise candidate, but he appointed
Sule Sasara [súlè ssárà], a longtime friend, as the head of the GID. Sule was rather radical in his thinking, but he hid the worst of it and was far more charismatic than his superior. Sule acquired the trust and respect of his subordinates, and under his lead the GID became increasingly independent of its parent guild. In 4015 Sule moved the GID offices from the Golemry Guild headquarters in
Záwakapa [záwkʷàpà] (Kapa beach), near Mihamáke’s major quarries, to a new building in
Záwamutena [záwmʷùdnà] (Mutena beach), a newer community with greater cross traffic between the established Stoneworking and Bronzeworking Guilds and the emerging ironworking industry, with Mutena beachport being the main receiving point for shipments from the
Dwimun colony. The GID argued that the new location would allow them to work more closely with the main sources of improvement projects, and it was clear that the space freed up at the guild headquarters was well appreciated as operations expanded to handle a rapidly increasing number of golem creation requests, but many questioned the unilateral nature of move, which the GID had executed without consulting the guild at large. Sule apologized and promised to work within guild procedure in the future, and Atama accepted his apology without further comment.
Still, it became clear over the ensuing years that the GID was reporting less about its operations than it had under previous administration, with terse annual releases about the state of pending improvement proposals replacing its traditionally more-detailed quarterly reports. The relationship between the guild and GID continued to fray, but the true extent of the latter’s independence only became clear in 4026, when it leaked that the GID had been working alongside a team in the Stoneworking Guild to design golems with digits uniquely tailored for sculpting stone. The leak, which was a scandal by itself, grew with the exposure of other similar projects outside the GID, with several completely outside the standard system for golem creation.
The Súmuda convened in an emergency session and declared a moratorium on all golemry while official investigations could be conducted. The Golemry Guild opened an internal investigation, to be conducted by a team of ten investigators that would report to the advisors on the guild’s Investigation Board, while the remaining guilds created its own investigative team, composed of investigators chosen randomly from the guilds not under scrutiny, which would report its findings directly to the Súmuda. Sule and his team responded in a press conference where they denied all wrongdoing, asserted that the leaked documents were conceptual drawings that were being evaluated like any other project and which would be generalized in any final design, and finished by expressing their disappointment over the “tremendous negative impacts of the impending failure to satisfy this year’s record number of apprenticeship applications”. Atama, in a rare show of spine that was no doubt forced from below, followed the next day by demanding the immediate resignation of his onetime friend. Sule refused.
The rift between the Golemry Guild and the GID that had been growing over the last decade now became official. Sule accused the Golemry Guild of gross inefficiency, claimed that its roundabout bureaucracy was stifling his department, and citing the golemry projects that had been carried outside the guild as evidence of Atama’s incompetence; he then announced that the GID would continue its operations independently and would be applying for membership in the Súmuda as its own guild. The application was supported by the Stoneworking and Bronzeworking Guilds and would be appended to a proposal, scheduled for the upcoming session, which would incorporate the various ironworking research teams into a guild. The battle lines were soon drawn: most doubted the GID’s explanation of the leaked documents, but Sule had acquired many allies both before and during his tenure, and with the considerable weight of the stoneworkers behind him was able to garner the support of a considerable number of sumudas. On the other side, a coalition gathered more in spite of than as a result of Atama’s lobbying. It comprised the Fisheries Guild, which opposed Stoneworkers Guild as a matter of course, joined by its usual affiliates, by the sumudas whose suspicion of a department under investigation won over Sule’s charisma and the stoneworkers’ lobbying, and by the few sumudas who felt that ironworking did not yet present enough potential to form a full guild, headed first and foremost by the Exploratory Guild, which currently controlled the iron ores discovered on Dwimun and their path to the Zörachok mainland.
Heading into the vote, the numbers were tight, and it was unclear which side would win. But as was convention for guild splits, both Atama and Sule where called to state their positions on the floor. Atama’s speech was halting and uncoordinated, while Sule spoke with confidence and clarity, and the contrast made his criticisms of Atama’s administration more poignant. The huge float party held that night at Mutena Beach echoed the end result: the stone and bronzeworkers would be joined by an Ironworking Guild, and Sule was the director of the new Golemry Improvement Guild (GIG). The next morning, it was Atama who was being asked to resign.
As was the convention, the new guilds were created on probation, with no voting powers until the year following their first election. And the GIG in particular was still under investigation by both the Golemry Guild and the Súmuda, and so had its assets frozen pending the results of the investigations. Still, Sule moved forward with funding from his allies. The banners from the party had barely been cleared away before the GIG was bringing contractors in to renovate its headquarters, and in two weeks the new guild had created a production line for golem creation that surpassed the quality, though not the capacity, of those in the original golemry guild. The administrative structure of the department-turned-guild also needed to be reorganized, and the GIG announced that its first elections would be held six months after the closure of all pending investigations, to affirm its commitment to proper governance.
By this time the investigate teams had found their footing, and the first investigative team arrived at the GIG headquarters. Though on the surface the GIG was cooperative, the investigators were unable to make progress: many of the members who were available for interview where newer and had limited knowledge of the then-department’s operations, while older personnel provided long statements that used many words but, digging deeper, said very little other than to confirm Sule’s official statements with a precision that implied collusion. Moreoever, the renovations at the new guild made it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to recover old documents, leaving the investigators with little more than they had come with: they knew that there had been some drawings for golems designed specifically for stoneworking, but it remained unclear whether they had been part of a larger project and how far that project was along.
The investigative team at the Stoneworking Guild headquarters had no better luck, at least not initially, until they stumbled upon the record of a
Rulo Lwamakána [rúlò lʷáŋgá], a stoneworker who had left Mutena for Konepote a few weeks before the leak. The team tracked him to Konepote only to find that he had left Dwína entirely and was now somewhere in Dwichoka. This was the discovery that really piqued the investigators interest, and they decided that if Rulo was running from something, or someone, they had to find him soon and they had to find him quietly. The team broke into pairs, with two pairs heading to Minfark and Varok, which were the two most common ports of entry into Dwichoka from Konepote. Another pair headed over the mountains to Cholvrgok, where locals confirmed the passage of a golem three days earlier, though they failed to give useful identifying features since, and I quote, “they all look the same to me” (a claim which has more than a kernel of truth for golems). Still, the townspeople were able to direct the pair downriver towards Tgar lake. It was in a small town along the way that they made a significant find: a wealth of documents detailing the carving digits project, signed by Rulo and left with a note that he wished to be left alone but hoped the documents could be useful to them.
The pair returned to Konepote where they reconnected, as planned, with the rest of their team, and then retreated to Tama island, close to the libraries of Imáka but outside the watch of the stoneworking research offices in the city itself. There they studied Rulo’s documents, which proved that the project had been far beyond the conceptual stage and that the production of prototype had been schedule for the following week, suggesting that the timing of the leak had hardly been coincidental. After three months of scrutinty, the committee released an indicting report, whose recommendations, amongst which were the resignations of the directors of the golemry, stoneworking, and bronzeworking guilds, and the freezing of the assets of the new golemry improvement and ironworking guilds pending further investigation, would be discussed in a Súmuda session in three weeks time, to be held in Imáka at the Library Guild.
The first of those directors had already resigned, but the others pushed back, calling the report a gross fabrication, the entirety of its evidence based on an imaginary witness who was nowhere to be found and the end result nothing more than a power-hungry attempt to discredit guilds both old and new. Who had been appointed to this investigative committee, anyways? No stoneworkers or golemers—that would have been a conflict of interest—but was it not also a conflict of interest to appoint officials from the Fisheries Guild, who had campaigned in favour of Atama’s corrupt administration? Or of the Exploratory Guild, who had campaigned against the incorporation of the ironworkers because they wanted to keep the iron ores of Dwimun, and the wealth that came from trading them to the Zörachok, to themselves? It was a joke, they argued, and the Súmuda’s obligation, to throw the report out.
Meanwhile, there was a relatively young golem named
Matasa Awó [mátsà ʔáwó] (born
Matasa Pirimána [mátsà pr̥ímà]), who was only in his late forties at the time of these events. Matasa was created as an apprentice lightworker, hence his original service name
Pirimána (referencing pirimadite, an ore commonly used in lightworking). Matasa never enjoyed the craft: several times he attempted to apply to other guilds, but was rebuffed each time. In the late 2000s it had been common for young golems to change professions, and in any case a golem could expect to have several careers over the course of his lifetime. This practice decreased over the millenia, with increasing stratification, such that switching guilds was uncommon in the mid 3000s and unheard of by 4000, a reality that Matasa ran into headfirst.
After his failed attempts to counter expectations, Matasa continued his training and came to excel at his work, passing his apprenticeship exam at age 29. Matasa then worked as a junior lightworker for five years, from 4007-4012, until a late night spent venting his frustrations to a recent acquaintance, who introduced him to a group of others who were similarly discontent with the professions they had been born into. They were initially little more than a group of friends who met weekly to share food and frustration, but as they compared their interests and skills they decided that they could work on more fulfilling projects together than they received through their guilds. They took on underground contracting projects and shared their knowledge so that everyone could learn about the subjects they were most curious about from those for whom the knowledge had been forced. The concept grew in popularity over the ensuing years, although the groups remained distributed in order to avoid detection, since the exchange of secrets was a clear violation of guild codes.
In 4020 Matasa participated in a tour of Dgülorch and lived in Cheirrngu, the Zörachok capital, for a year. The period was key to refining his philosophy: the experience of children and adolescents was far different than that of apprentices in Dwína, who were more or less thrust into adulthood. Matasa realized that it would be useful to have a period where golems were able to explore the word before committing to a profession. It was during this period that Matasa dropped his guild-based service name
Pirimána and took on the name
Awó, which means “unknown”, reflecting his belief that a golem’s service should be undetermined, something discoverered in life rather than decided at birth.
Matasa returned to Dwína and began refinining his ideas for golem adolescence, travelling around the cities and, with the help of insiders who were part of the underground chain, observing how each guild trained their apprentices, from which he extracted common elements and designed a program for universal education. Matasa collaborated with his peers on areas of their specific interest, but kept his integrated framework to himself: Matasa completed the central concept in 4022 and refined it over the next four years: it involved the creation of a new intersumuda organization, which would be funded by a flat tax on the sumudas’ operating incomes and have its own independent administration, though policy would be set by the Súmuda. The organization would implement Matasa’s
Takunada Takwata Taakwapedemute [kkúndà kʷkʷátà tˀápʷpʷédmùtè], the Common Development Program (CDP), which would take place during the first ten to fifteen years of the a golem’s life and would include a cycle of short-term apprenticeships, with a general introduction to Zwera society in the first year, administered by the organization, followed by ten mandatory half-year placements in years two through six, administered by the guilds, and finishing with final placements of any length, chosen by the candidates, in the final four years. Candidates could then apply for formal apprenticeship in a guild, or could continue in the CDP for up to five more years.
Like many in Dwína in 4026, Matasa was following the golemry fiasco and, through his contacts, heard the details of the investigative report and of the upcoming Súmuda session. To him, the stoneworkers’ attempts to create golems designed specifically for their service was the culmination of the determinism that had settled upon Zwera society, the same determinism that he and his colleagues had suffered through and that he had been working for four years to address. The upcoming session was the perfect opportunity to present his program against the backdrop of the failures of the current path. Súmuda sessions had been open to the public since their inception, and though only representatives could submit drafts, anyone, even a common lightworker like Matasa, could request to speak.
The day of the session arrived, and the water was tense. The Library Guild had moved the session to the open-water Imáka Central Ridge, both because the number of spectators was considerably larger than usual and because they were hesistant to bring the warring delegations into their headquarters. Word had spread, and there were over 8,000 golems packed onto the ridge alongside the 162 representatives. It was said that Imáka’s population doubled that day—a hyperbole, but indeed there were visitors from all over Dwína. The arrival of Sule and his associates was met with both cheers and jeers, echoing the divided spirit of the sumudas.
The session began with the head of the investigative committee reading his findings and recommendations, in which the only change from the original release was to reiterate the validity of the informant’s documentation and his status as an insider at the Mutena Beach offices of the Stoneworking Guild, as well as the necessity of limiting further details, such as his name and where and how the documents had been recovered, at the informant’s request and for his protection. The stoneworkers and their bloc followed by repeating the arguments that they had promoted over the preceding weeks: that the said informant did not exist and that the documents had been fabricated. They noted that the seal of the supposed originating guild was missing, to which the committee and its defendants responded by asking who would put their seal on documents created under an illegal project. They noted that they could just as easily present their own set of documents, from their own informant, proving that the Fisheries Guild had colluded with Atama and the Golemry Guild to exceed their alloted golem creation numbers—and then Sule did just that, submitting to the floor a report, supported by documents provided to his team by an informant within the office of his onetime superior, proving the impropriety and recommending the resignation of the fisheries director,
Panú Sulaka [pánú sl̥àkà].
The uproar was tremendous. Sule stood and waved to the crowd, and this time there were more cheers than jeers. It is said that the fisheries director flipped the table at which his associates were sitting, although this is unlikely. Still, Panú was almost certainly caught off guard by Sule’s strategy, and it took several minutes to quiet both representatives and crowd. In the end, Panú moved to adjourn the session until the next night in order to consider both the investigator’s findings and the defendant’s counterarguments, a motion that was approved by the many flummoxed representatives.
To be continued
