HIDDEN ARCHIVE / CONCLAVE

Founding

The new era of space exploration brought on by Dr. Scott Childress and his self-sustaining quantum drive engine created unimaginable new opportunities for the previously Earth bound human race. The universe was now humanity’s fruit for the picking and millions were eager to step out the bounds of our solar system. This new era rekindled human curiosity and created a powerful thirst for knowledge. The Conclave was born out of this common desire for knowledge. Its founding members consisted of scientists, entrepreneurs, and politicians who wished to create a common source of knowledge accessible by all who wished to learn and contribute to the exponentially growing amount of information, this became known as The Grand Archive.

With the vast amounts of knowledge becoming freely available to all citizens of Earth, exploration, trade, and society flourished. Citizens with humble beginnings were able to access valuable knowledge that were otherwise inaccessible to previous generations. Many talented scientists and entrepreneurs were born from access of knowledge offered by The Grand Archive.

The Fall

While the abundance of freely accessible information provided many boons to humanity, too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Unfortunately, caught in the euphoria of the new space age the Conclave was naive in its philosophy of open access to knowledge. Within The Grand Archive, all knowledge was considered valuable and to be shared with the public. Such knowledge included the personal information of all Earth’s Citizens. While this information was a vital contribution to many ground breaking medical discoveries, key social reforms, and technology breakthroughs , the government and several megacorporations saw value in more sinister uses.

Certain sectors of Earth’s government had always dreamed of demasking and subduing certain troublesome groups and individuals among Earth’s populace. With the creation of the Conclave’s Grand Archive, that dream quickly became reality. The many billions of citizens actively contributing their personal and public information into The Grand Archive for the benefit of humanity gave these government sectors exactly the tools they needed to weed out troublesome citizens from the herd. Eventually, this led down the path of removing key opposition leaders to unpopular legislation and the silencing of political opponents.

Many megacorporations were also quick to realize the value in so much unrestricted information, targeted advertisements became more aggressive and manipulative digging deep into the vulnerabilities of each individual. Potential competitors were squashed or absorbed in its infancy to ensure the continued dominance of the megacorporations.

In the early years, these sinister actions were dwarfed by the immense benefit The Grand Archive provided. However, as more and more information began to leak out regarding the actions of these government sectors and megacorporations conflicts and social unrest grew to dangerous levels. In desperation the government attempted to seize control of The Grand Archive which resulted in riots across the planet. It was during this time of fighting and bloodshed that the decision was made for The Grand Archive to be completely demolished.

The Conclave was utterly devastated by the destruction indirectly caused by The Grand Archive, what was suppose to be the a source of enlightenment for humanity has caused it great suffering. When the decision to destroy The Grand Archive was made, most Conclave members bitterly accepted its fate. Following the destruction of The Grand Archive, the Conclave itself was disbanded and soon forgotten from Earth’s history.

At least that was what the public was made to believe…

The Hidden Archive

Prior to the destruction of The Grand Archive, the inner council of the Conclave consisting of its Chief Librarian and Senior Archivists met to discuss the fate of the Conclave and The Grand Archive. It was decided by the inner council to save as much knowledge as possible from The Grand Archive in a secretly built library named The Hidden Archive. This new library was built to continue the Conclave’s mission in collecting and organizing all of humanity’s knowledge in the hopes that one day such knowledge may be used to usher in a new age of enlightenment…