Oni2:META

META is an original concept of a totalitarian state established shortly after 12/3.

It was basically generated from scratch during the discussion on the A storyline for Oni 2 thread of Oni Central Forum.

Some concepts come back to other projects of mine, though.

geyser

This is meant as a seed for discussion rather than an authoritative statement.

History

AVATARA

BGI

Double benefit

META is the synergy of the WCG and Syndicate. It inherited from the infrastructures and administration of both entities, and controls virtually everything. While the merging may have appeared as a military coup by the Syndicate, it can also be seen as an accomplishment of the WCG : both sides have reasons to regard the victory as their own. The resulting organization is just as faceless as the WCG or the (pre-Muro) Syndicate.

BGI

A possible precursor of META is Oni's BGI.

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Symbolism

Etymology

The Greek prefix is rarely used on its own (mostly in the context of Internet Technologies, where systems and languages are organized in a few layers of abstraction). Using it on its own gives it an absolute meaning, as it's "beyond everything". Beyond influence, beyond unterstanding. Beyond Good and Evil.

In Latin, "meta" is a noun, and means turning point, goal, end boundary, frontier (originally, the pyramidal posts at the end of a circus where the cart races were held). It's ironic how the Greek and Latin meanings are fundamentally opposed : the Latin "meta" introduces the notion of a limit (artificial or not), and the Greek "meta" discards the limits, widens the scope, etc.

Not sure about native Japanese reading... Katakana for ME and TA exist, anyway.

Globality

The four letters M E T A are shared by the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, and are pronounced the same, too (unlike e.g. "H", which is "n" in Cyrillic, "X" which is "kh" etc). Thus META is a universal word (the capitals are crucial, because small letters differ greatly between e.g. Cyrillic and Latin) : while the word "metaphor" is spelled and pronounced with slight variations in various European languages, the prefix META is a cultural invariant :)

Anagrams etc

One may note the many anagrams one can form with those 4 letters : MEAT, TEAM, MATE, TAME...

In Russian, TEMA means "theme" (and ONI means "them", hehe).

In German, ATEM means "breath", and ATME means "breathe" (imperative).

AT∃M adds another dimension to the ATEM anagram, namely : META viewed from the inside, as in "behind enemy lines".

For instance, if META is written on the "front door", AT∃M is how you'll see it while "infiltrating" : mirrored.

Logo

One can merge a capital M, or a small MU, with a small ETA. The former is perhaps more "readable", but the latter is more appealing because of the extra symmetry and the "broken wave" symbol. The "elevation" or "upgrade" proper to Daodan symbiosis may appear within the very MU-ETA symbol (images coming soon).

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Architecture

(from Fahrenheit 451)

The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south. Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colours, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.

The Russian translation is better...

back-translating some time soon...

Take an ascending mass of water (or air or steam). Either a fountain, slowing down on its way up, or a "reverse waterfall" : let it go the higher the faster, all the better if it "doesn't make sense".

Let it carry "tiny" pieces of glass and concrete and metal : as if it was all woven from those little pieces of material. Let that fabric unfold itself, higher and higher, for hundreds and hundreds of yards, morphing through itself, sparkling in sunlight.

Freeze. You got it. Something no architect has ever dared to imagine. Beautiful and horripilating at the same time. Shattered dreams, or rather, dreams constantly being shattered. A snapshot of destruction which is paradoxically soaring up, not tumbling down.