The Immaculate Dominion
History
The story of the Immaculate Dominion is one of the more tragic examples of human folly in the years that immediately followed the end of the Limitation. To understand it, it is necessary to appreciate the special mind set that affected all those who worked on the Genesis Projects during the Great Push. It was a given that anyone committed to endeavours that could yield little reward in the course of one life time, must be motivated by exceptional long term thinking and that this kind of work would attract the more mystically inclined. That is why the Void Church took such a deep interest in the Genesis Projects. It is perhaps less obvious that the Genesis Projects might themselves become a source of spiritual inspiration, speculation and finally schism.
The Immaculate Dominion began as a branch of the Void Church inside the Genesis Projects with some specific and troubling views. A geneticist called Cameron Ginn, working on sequencing bacteria that would be capable of living in the upper atmosphere of a super earth near the edge of the Bubble, conceived of the crazy idea that God was working towards the creation of one perfect organism and that when this came into being He would reveal himself to those who had enabled its birth and the universe would end. All the long history of evolution through natural selection had simply been a prelude to the era of the Genesis Projects when a systematic analysis of genetics could "solve" the problem and go directly to the solution. According to Cameron, and his fellow conspiracy theorists, this was the hidden purpose behind human and alien Genesis Projects. It is doubtful anyone would have listened to Cameron's ideas, were it not for the fact that Void Church acolytes who worked within the Genesis Projects were especially susceptable to this kind of mystical speculation and somehow he built up a secret following which became a heretical cult within the Genesis Projects.
To begin with, Cameron's sect were merely a group of like minded believers spread all over the Bubble and with no specific program, but by the time of his death in 3463, their numbers had grown to the point where the Void Church felt it had to specifically proscribe their teachings. By now, a secret program had developed to research the ideal organism. The ideal organism would be one that could replace existing species in many environments. Although they did not see it as such, the cult were developing a biological superweapon.
The Bubble burst before their program was complete, but in 3655 they openly declared their intention to colonise new, previously uninhabited worlds where they would release their new lifeform - a lifeform that would be so potent it could bypass the thousands of years required by established Genesis Project methods. This perfect domain for the perfect organism that God was calling them to make, they would call the "Immaculate Dominion".
And so was set in chain a sequence of very unfortunate events which culminated in huge loss of life and the eventual fall of the Immaculate Dominion in 3817.
The Second Solar Group was immediately hostile to the idea of the Immaculate Dominion, perceiving it as a potential threat to all life. Aware that their ideas were less than welcome within the core worlds that had made up the Bubble, the founders of the Dominion fled far into the Barren Reaches where they established bases on a chain of mostly airless moons, in an otherwise uninteresting sector of space. They saw these as a testbed for their ideas but they were paranoid about being followed and stole a number of EM Mines from an experimental military lab on Gall V. They set these mines behind them, and despite not really undertstanding how to tune them, they left a chaotic region of spacetime in their wake which was unnavigable to ships from the Second Solar Group.
Disbandment
For a long time, it was assumed that the rogue cultists had simply died out, but as other colonies became established close to the area where they had fled, they revealed that they were very much alive and took control of some of these newly founded cities. Once such world was Celendine, the third moon of the gas giant Varaquoise II which had been colonised by independents in 3740 and was subsumed into the Dominion in 3811.
At this point the Second Solar Group determined that it should make a more concerted effort to put an end to the Dominion and began to construct a war fleet and plan a route that would probe and circle round the mined areas.
As it happened, there was never a need for war between the Solar Group and the Dominion, because before the fleet could be dispatched, the Dominion imploded in spectacular fashion.
The acolytes and scientists of the Dominion had spent their time, constantly researching and constructing organisms that they expected to thrive on airless worlds with no water. These would be the superspecies wanted by God and on their own, they would turn barren wastelands into paradises for life. It was the dream of the Genesis Projects transformed into an utterly unrealistic fantasy. All their experiments were failures. Then, perhaps unsurprisingly there were schisms, and schisms within schisms, until finally the True Prophet declared himself the only rightful leader in an attempted coup in 3817. His outragous prophecies having no basis in fact and doubling down on the madness, promised that the Immaculate Dominion would one day rule over the whole of the galaxy, that the entire Bubble would surrender to them, that the Society Of Contemporary Races would kneal before them and that God himself would come down to reward the ones who had given birth to his precious creation, the righteous of the Immaculate Dominion! All that was required was for the people to worship him. Since, unfortunately there are always people who will go along with the most outrageous promises of tyrants and demagogues, and since the disappointed peoples who had formed the Immaculate Dominion in the first place were in particular need of something bold and new to believe in, he soon had a huge following.
This was all too much for the other leaders, however, who saw their powerbase being eroded, declared the True Prophet to be a heretic and initiated a fierce civil war within the Dominion. In the course of the war, atomic weapons were used to sterilise more than just testing sites and barren moons. The True Prophet made his final stand on Celendine and the Immaculate Dominion came to a very bloody and very violent end.
DISBANDED/DISSOLVED
3655 - 3817
Type
Religious, Sect
Government System
Technocracy
Power Structure
Autonomous area
Parent Organization
Location
Neighboring Nations
Related Species
Comments