Bestiary

Beauty is truth. Beauty sells. The average person is much more likely to believe even the greatest absurdities if they fall form the mouth of a beautiful person. And so, our age of “alternative facts” may fairly be called a pageant of the MODES, wherein gorgeous icons — not fusty academics or crabbed pedants — guide the shape of our Consensus.

Taking the Technocracy’s love of acronyms to an absurdist level, the Union’s Media-Operations Diversionary Enterprise Specialists are literally manufactured celebrities. Based upon updates of the venerable Victor models, MODES emphasize physical beauty and dazzling charisma over the brutal strength of Victor models. Instead of field deployment for infiltration and enforcement, MODES models become sensations of mass and social media. In those venues, their good looks and engaging charisma earn followers worldwide. Versed in the most current modes of slang and expression, they host YouTube channels, cultivate TV personae, and keep Twitter and other platforms buzzing with their words. Because those words come from attractive people, their au­ diences are inclined to grant a greater degree of credibility to their vision of the truth.

Although it would seem the obvious MODES are young Caucasian women of the conservative persuasion, the Union plants these constructs everywhere. A well-known liberal trans activist is secretly a MODES, as are a righteous left-wing blogger and his TV counterpart. Whatever their apparent gender (a state as fluid among MODES as the opinions they produce) or affiliation might be, MODES share a common purpose: dictating the media metanarra­ tive in ways that enforce an authoritarian worldview even when they appear to undermine the status quo. Whether the approach favors top-down governmental controls “for the common good,” mockery of religious figures and other mystics, or the overthrow of politicians whose interests run counter to the Technocratic vision, MODES nurture discontent among their audiences and dispense whatever opinions suit the current agenda of the White Tower and Media Control.

In a Nephandic infiltration metaplot, MODES act as agents of venality, selfishness, violent propaganda, and outright chaos, working every angle of the socio-economic spectrum in an effort to undermine all forms of rational communication. These figures cultivate personas from the hard right to the hard left, tearing apart anyone who dares to cross them and hosting cross-platform proxy feuds with one another. In metaplots that emphasize a more stable, sympathetic Technocracy, MODES still play different ends of the field but aim their barbs at Tradition celebrities, Sleeper malcontents, and celebrities who buck the Technocratic cause. In all cases, though, MODES leverage the human desire for beautiful people who speak the “truths” those people avoid saying where anyone else can hear them. Folks

love, after all, to hear a gorgeous MODES verify what they always felt was true, giving them permission to step up and speak out for that truth as well.