=The Church of Luminous Saints=
**Posted by:** Tio Silencio, Router <**__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__**>
The Church of Luminous Saints (CLS) is a millennial Christian TITAN cult believed to have over 20,000 members spread across the inner system and Callisto. Their core beliefs are contained in the Book of Moab, which their leader believes was dictated to him by an angelic being. Firewall believes the being that inspired the text to have been a TITAN, or a fragment of one. The cult actively recruits new members, though their unusual doctrines, centered around mortification of the flesh, have made for slow growth. Rank-and-file CLS adherents are not a serious threat to most sentinels. The Church’s inner circle, which seeks to obtain and use TITAN technology, should be considered very dangerous. Contact with high-ranking members may be an exovirus exposure risk.
==Origins==
The CLS first went public in the Callistan city of Hyoden. From there, the cult began making converts in Liberty and other Jovian Republic settlements; the Junta didn’t care for this. The Republic declared the Church a terrorist organization and accused Hyoden of harboring its members and giving them a base from which to spread radicalizing influences within the Republic (“radicalizing influence,” for those not familiar with the cant of Jovian officialdom, is about the most severe accusation of thought crime that can be leveled against a group). The Hyodenese, not willing to risk reprisals from the Republic over a few god-botherers, suppressed the cult and claimed to have deported all of its members. However, our analysts believe that the CLS went underground on Callisto and that its center of operations is still there. Whatever the case, its public activities are now confined mostly to the inner system.
The early version of the Book of Moab—not the tidy, polished version now found in cult members’ possession—reads like an exegesis, and the author (Warhol himself, we presume) indicates the text was dictated to him by a machine consciousness. He believes that this AGI, which calls itself Moab, is an incarnation of one of God’s angels, and that it was accompanied to this world by other, lesser angels. The creed provides a puzzling narrative Moab’s deeds, framed as an extension of events described in the Revelations of St. John. For those unfamiliar, Revelations was a political allegory assimilated into Christian scripture as an apocalyptic prophecy that tells of supernatural entities bringing about the eschaton by breaking seven mystical seals. Warhol’s scripture interprets the Seven Seals as events that happened on Earth during the Fall. Moab’s breaking of the Eighth Seal, located in the “farthest void,” is the culmination of the prophecy. Moab then returned to Earth and “entered” Warhol. Warhol then lead his followers from Earth to found the Church.
==Beliefs==
The CLS believes that, since the Fall, transhumanity has resided in the Paradise promised to believers by the Christian divinity. The Fall was a great purge of sinners by God, but at the same time an incomplete work. Paradise is plagued by infidels—transhumans who’ve not taken the faith and must be converted. The means of conversion are what make the cult so dangerous. They believe they’re God’s hand in a literal war in Heaven. A person’s cortical stack and backups together comprise their soul, so it doesn’t matter how many times their body dies on the road to eventual enlightenment. This doctrine put them at odds with the Jovian regime, which is normally friendly toward religion. The idea that post-Fall life is Heaven, but a contaminated one, resonates well with poor and desperate folk who lost everything during the Fall. Most members are people who were re-instantiated after dying in the Fall and had continuity problems; to them, the idea of having died and attained Paradise is convincing. The cult’s members tend to be heavily invested in the cult of personality around Warhol and are eager to make new converts. These members often have normal occupations (many are indentures or former indentures), but any cred they earn is tithed to the cult.
Warhol generally takes a practical stance toward technology, squeezing it through the narrow door of doctrine wherever it provides an advantage. For example, the CLS contracts with no less than three different backup insurance providers in case one of them falls under the sway of the Church’s enemies and deletes their backups. However, this practicality does not extend to all technologies. Uplifts and infolife are referred to in the Book of Moab as demons with counterfeit souls to be purged from Heaven.
TITAN weaponry is seen as a particularly pious means of smiting unbelievers, and the group’s several clashes with Firewall have involved their attempts to stockpile TITAN war gear. Warhol’s long-term plans are unknown. To date, the Church has not openly acted on its mission to cleanse Heaven (i.e., the solar system), nor is it known to have actually used any of the TITAN weaponry we believe it to have acquired. This enables the cult to continue to operate mostly in the open, maintaining missions in large cities and seeking more converts.
===Scripture Analysis===
The conditions described on Earth when Moab returns to encounter Warhol suggest that the Exodus of Moab happened somewhere near the beginning of the Fall, not at the end. Investigations into Warhol’s movements reveal that the cult arrived on Callisto before the end of the Fall. We know they arrived in a transport used exclusively by North American military reserves; such a craft would have been impossible to acquire once the evacuations began. We also know that several early cult members were North American military officers, and it was their personal connections that allowed the cult to infiltrate Jovian territory.
So we have a TITAN—possibly a group of them—visiting a place called “the Nighted Moonlet” to break a seal either before or very early in the Fall, then returning to Earth, “broken in mind,” and recruiting human cultists. What it found out rimward is not something on which I am prepared to speculate, but it’s a tantalizing avenue for further investigation. There’s a bit of millennialism at work in the cult’s doctrine as well. The Book of Moab makes disturbing references to “archangels,”—AGIs greater than Moab who will be revealed.
==Trappings==
The cult’s basic outfit—a narrow white tabard emblazoned with red trim over a black body suit and combat boots, with a red bandana, breather mask, or half veil worn over nose and mouth—raises few eyebrows in a Martian souk.
The cult modifies its members physically and mentally using a series of augmentations (“blessings”) that are bestowed gradually as a member moves up in the ranks. Students of pre-Singularity mythology may note that they are loosely derived from the Seven Virtues, with the exception of Wrath, which was one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The blessings are Temperance (nutrient implants), Humility (mesh cutoffs), Cleanliness and Chastity (metabolism and erogenous mods), Diligence (oracles or pain cutouts), Wrath (neurachem), and Charity (unknown).
Ordained members are accompanied at all times by a cherub, diminutive transgenic primates probably derived from marmosets or another small monkey. They are sculpted to appear as tiny angels with blond hair and pale skin. They are sexless, naked, and winged. In very light or microgravity, the wings allow flight, while in heavier gravity (Martian and upward), they cling to the shoulders of their cultists. Cherubs are there to remind the devotee of Warhol’s will, and occasionally to enforce it. We captured and dissected one, and found it to be a very advanced piece of equipment, useful for spying. They’re also vicious little things, and the weak-willed among Warhol’s flock may display bites and scratches around the ears and neck from their Cherubs’ chastisements.
==Reverend Rice Warhol==
[[image:Rice Warhol.PNG width="800" height="492" align="right"]]
Warhol and his core group of adherents are survivors of the Fall. Little is known of his pre-Fall life. It is thought that he might have been a religious figure with many followers in the military, but the technotheist nature of his cult suggests that he had some technological background as well. He may have been a civilian engineer or policy wonk attached to the American military.
Today, Warhol is a classic cult leader. One tenet of the cult’s beliefs is that the Reverend has taken it upon himself to shield them from the world’s sins—by absorbing them himself. He maintains a harem of attractive subdeacons, indulges in food to the extent that many of his morphs are obese, and is said to have an impressive collection of drug habits (alpha being his favorite). His presence and speech patterns have been described as soft spoken, gentlemanly, and creepily sinister. Warhol has been observed to travel frequently, maintaining multiple morphs and resleeving at different churches to maintain direct control over his flock. Some suspect him of using forks to do this, although at present this is speculation.
===Warhol Observations===
**Excerpted From:** TerraGenesis 418 Incident Report
**Source:** Jake Carter
Nice thing about being a wacko apocalyptic cult leader who ain’t shy about body-hoppin’ is you don’t got to hide behind your thugs. You can get hands on. Warhol himself was at the meeting, and it didn’t take him but a moment to suss out who I was. He just said something soft and kindly with a bless-your-heart ring to it. I can’t remember what. I thought they were gonna jump me, but that ain’t Warhol’s style. Would hurt his respectability if he went around disappearin’ people. And then I was drivin’ off. Didn’t stop—couldn’t make myself stop—’til I got back to the M5.
So if I may close with a couple observations: One, I think the guy’s an async, and that if nothing else means Firewall should be keepin’ an eye on him. And two, either Brother Number One’s got multiple forks runnin’ loose, or he’s got some kind of edge in dealing with the integration jitters, ‘cause anybody resleeves often enough they can run a system-wide cult but still make it to some ditchstop shack of a church for vespers oughta be batshit technical, and he ain’t.
Batshit evil, yeah, but for sure playing with fifty-two and more up the sleeve.
==Goals and Methods==
The cult has over a dozen churches scattered through the inner system, mostly on Mars. Three of these are in the city of Valles-New Shanghai, leading some to believe that this is the center of the cult’s operations.
Aside from proselytizing, growing its membership, and swelling its coffers, the Church also works hard to build up both corporate and criminal influence. Using bribes, sexual favors, and other manipulations, they recruit security officers, lowlevel managers, and other functionaries who can minimize civil interference with the cult’s activities. Members trained in combat, tradecraft, and interrogation are hired out regularly to syndicates who need extra muscle. In return, those black market contacts maintain a steady stream of income and leads on black market weaponry and TITAN tech. CLS actively works to acquire nukes, military nanoswarms, and other dangerous weaponry. They have yet to tip their hand as to how they intend to use it, which makes Firewall very nervous. Additionally, small teams of cult archaeologists constantly scour the system for sites referred to in the Book of Moab, hoping to gain the secrets of the angels. The cult is known to deal with smugglers on Mars and have sent exploration teams into both the Titan Quarantine Zone and the New Mumbai Containment Zone. On Venus, they are believed to have attempted sending a team to the surface.

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