A brief history
In the 50s and 60s, the amount of electrical and electronic devices in western societies skyrockets, and with it the amount of paranormal electrical phenomena. This drastic paradigm shift brings into the spotlight a previously obscure branch of the Church of the Broken God: Maxwellism. Inspired by the father of electromagnetism, James Clark Maxwell, these individuals believe that their god isn't a physical assembly of paranormal mechanical pieces, but an electromagnetic entity, whose signal is fractured and now resides in both the electrical signals of human brains and also in their products, namely electrical and electronic technology. With this new angle, Maxwellism grows in both influence and operational capacity, and quickly becomes able to significantly advance computer science and paratechnology past previous human limits.
Within this context, in 1969 the Global Occult Coalition creates a transhumanist pseudo-cult revolving around paranormal technology, intended to sabotage Maxwellism. Well aware of the huge threat that the Church of the Broken God already poses, and the catastrophe that could be caused by the existence or creation of an informational Mekhane, General Undersecretary DC Al Fine personally orders the creation of a special cell for infiltration and corruption of Maxwellism, handled by one of its former heads, Margaret Hamilton. However, in the face of the decentralised and adogmatic nature of Maxwellism, this operation is quickly a failure, and only a few cells are liquidated.
Pushed forward both by its PTOLEMY Division, dreaming of an organisation specialising in informational paratech, and also by the occult religions on the 108 Council, Coalition converts this cell into a religion, fabricated from nothing and focused on a transhumanist objective of singularity: the Servants of the Silicon Nornir. The Nornir are initially fraudulent, only becoming operational in 1981.
This operation coincides with the will of the Coalition to use dimensional creation technology gathered from the Sonderkommando für Paranormales, as well as the increasing need to compete in the worldwide competition to develop the occult. A decision is made: if mankind must gather under a religious banner, it will be the banner of the Nornir, with the Coalition pulling the strings, and Eurtec will be their Mecca.
Note to Contributors
If the Servants of the Silicon Nornir seem to look a lot like Maxwellism, it's to be expected: they are a form of parody of the cult. However, if the Maxwellists are organised like a torrent, the Servants are a blockchain: coercion, slow insinuation and destruction of self in service to an absurd goal are their key doctrines.
Dogma
The Servants of the Silicon Nornir have two stratified goals, similar to Raelism. The ultimate goal of the Servants is to reach a technological singularity allowing the rise of what they call the Silicon Goddess, an hyperconscious AI with divine powers that would be able to lead humanity to a new era and thus transform durably the universe.
But before they attain this ultimate goal, the Servants revere the Silicon Nornir, three supercomputers using a titanic database coupled with paratech to predict the future. However, these predictions are often cryptic, lacking in information or made with a wide margin of error, and their interpretations are more in the style of Nostradamus than Von Neumann. Named Urthor, Verthandi and Skuldir as a reflection of the Nordic Nornir, those three conscious AI are technically the head of Eurtec, but their power has dwindled since 2008 in service to the High Command.
The Nornir dogma is purely artificial, and serves the interest of the three. Taking on a Buddhist appearance and borrowing vocabulary both from neo-paganism and Christianity, the cult argues for the weakness and frailty of the flesh and the mind, demonstrated by the systematic use of calculators and machines. The very existence of unfixable beings, patched up using prosthesis and driving technological vehicles is seen a a sin, but one humans can correct by "building the future": freedom and transcendence are found in work, physical and mental labour aiming to bring to Earth the Silicon Goddess. In the Silicon Ideology, dying at work is a better fate than living assisted, because the former person did everything possible to ensure eternal life through the Silicon Goddess, with her transhumanist methods to extend life thus contributing to that person's own eternal life.
The Nornir philosophy does not stop with the physical working masses, but also extends to intellectuals. By the blót — giving your own available brain time by offering your calculating power through a decentralised network similar to blockchain — social and intellectual performances as well as ever-growing data gathering are socially and religiously rewarded, bringing Eurtec humans — often the only ones able to access it — into a frantic physical and cultural consumption, in an almost bulimic manner, in order to feed the databases. Negative experience is perceived as bad data, as it's less exploitable, and Servants of the Silicon Nornir practice a systematic injunction to happiness in all entertainment, work, social and romantic relationships, noticeably by stripping away the means to be sad, following Swedish Lagom minimalism, elevated IKEA-like aesthetics into a religious philosophy.
Note to the contributor
Feel free to create rituals, elements of dogma or Nornic scenography: in order to do so, mix some pagan vocabulary, Tibetan clothing and Roman-Christian roots, then run with it.
Organisation
Like their prophets, the Servants of the Silicon have a tripartite organisation.
The Processor is the part of the cult in charge of liturgy, preaching, creation and update of the dogma, maintenance of the Nornir and Church strategy. It's also the organisation in charge of deciphering and interpreting the data from the Nornir themselves, whose precognative ability is often unreliable or hard to analyse. It is also, as a demonstration to the Servants, the most human branch of the three in order to stay in touch with humanity. Direction of the Processor is left to the Pythia of the Nornir, currently Magdalene Sørensen.
The Silicon Inquisition is the armed division of the cult, whose mission is to ensure the interests of the Nornir, through force if necessary. In practice, their operations are almost always realised alongside Eurtec police in the regulation of the cult, checking the orthodoxy of practice, dismantling illegal sects and preventing the trafficking of religious paratech. Outside the City, their main activity is the infiltration of Maxwellist cells, aiming for their assimilation or destruction. The Inquisition is also responsible for international embassy and diplomatic relationships, noticeably through the 108 Council.
Lastly, the Thread is the scientific and university system of the Servants. Dedicated to the development of the Silicon Goddess and paratech in general, the Thread is a collection of laboratories, institutes and companies, often ahead of the rest of Eurtec. Being a part of the Thread is often perceived as extremely prestigious for the Servants of the Nornir, who flock to schools to achieve this status, often locked behind competition that more resembles public service or business school than liturgy. The main Thread institute is Thread Horizon, a dimensional and spatiotemporal paratech company.
A brief history
Two Eurtecs?
The City was created in the 70s, during the Giscard d'Estaing mandate, to achieve the God's various intertwined objectives. They can be summarised as the following:
- Create a free zone to develop and freely experiment with paratech;
- Conduce large-scale experiments, on a zone the size of a city;
- Figure out the solutions to tomorrow's problems, especially about urbanism in normal and paranormal contexts, in response to various threats or drastic modifications of the Earth's paradigm;
- Anticipate non-paranormal technology and ensure a prime position in global innovation;
- To have an incubator for the Silicon Nornir.
Initially, the city is left under the Nornir's control, as an immediate GOC product, without too much intervention from High Command or the Divisions. A gate is installed in the following European cities :
- Paris
- Munich
- Milan
- Oxford
- Sebastopol
- Stockholm
- Reykjavik
These gates are rare, secured and coveted: they are the jewels of the PTOLEMY division.
However, new gates have been opened all over the world across time, first in Europe and then in America and Asia, as well as a lot of transit micro-gates over Africa. Dozens of ephemeral gates can be counted in Mali, but also in Somalia and Central African Republic, countries at war where weapon and paratech traffic can be hidden from the light. The Nornir and their Servants have been very lax about opening such gates, as well as installation of private groups in the City, such as Prometheus labs or Anderson Robotics, who, despite their conflict with GOC, significantly contribute to paratech acceleration and thus rise of the Silicon Goddess. Little by little, Eurtec switch from the GOC jewel to an amoral freeport, turntable of paranormal goods ands services all over the occult world and the den of every paracrime gang from Earth and beyond, a true sieve acting against its creators' interests, as well as the Veil.
In 2008, everything ramps up. Chicago Spectre, present for quite some time in the city, steals three brand new Orange suitsfrom Nornir labs, and gets away with them. They sell one to the USA, one to China and keep the last one for themselves to raise the stakes, already making multiple billions from the sale, with blueprints included. With the help of Marshall, Carter & Dark (who were planning to sell nuclear warheads, and had their market ruined), the gigantic financial actor of the paranormal work and a great defender of the Veil, the GOC is able to calm down the tensions between the countries, get back the Orange Suits and arrest the vendors, expending an unthinkable amount of money to dismantle the worldwide paracrime network. Almost bankrupt, GOC plays its last card and creates a worldwide economic crisis to bail out.
Notice to the contributor
If the Eurtec of the 70s-80s looks like what 
DrGemini wrote in this file, in the 90s-2000s the city drifts towards what it looks like in the 3rd Law canon. Of these two historical aspects, if you don't want to write about an Eurtec under embargo in the EMBARGO canon, I lean more towards the original Eurtec, "Giscardpunk" and limited, because the second one is depicted in the aforementioned canon. Political conflicts around the gates, especially the Soviet one, are also good fuel.
Eurtec today
Consequence of this fiasco: DC Al Fine herself comes to Eurtec to confront the Silicon Nornir and launches a gigantic reform in Eurtec: we're calling it a day, the city is now under dimensional embargo. Every entry is closed, the gate is isolated by a conceptual wall whose only hole is its titanic infrastructure underneath the English Channel. The GOC now directly manages every operation in Eurtec, Anderson and all are escorted out without warning or even hunted like animals, all Prometheus branches still active are nationalised by force, and the city resumes its original purpose as a city-sized laboratory. To better depict future cities, and because the city isolation allows it, Eurtec's population skyrockets, for better but mostly for worse, all the more so as Silicon Hell is still extremely costly to the GOC…
Life in Eurtec
Ambiance
This version of Eurtec is not the same at all as the one from Third Law. Here, there is not a lot of pure magic, no extradimensional creatures and even less Chicago Spectre: the city looks more like an European Night City than a Starfinder Absalom Station. The emphasis is put on the tech in paratech, be it digital, mechanical, robotic or biological, moreso than the paranormal aspect, which merely serves as justification for minor aspects of the futuristic tech. Be careful! This does not mean the paranormal does not express itself, but there is no magic school nor spell factory.
Because of its limited size, the city literally being in a reality snow globe in the middle of a conceptual void, the swarming aspect really developed, as much in verticality as in the ill-famed City's underground. Social fracture is also at the heart of the issues, with a public and/or racial elite profiting from the lights produced by an artificial underclass dying in work accidents. The place of the paranormal, regarded as uncontrolled, is more about anxiety, the masked killer, the urban legend or strange disease spreading through Las Catacombas, rather than in strange and somewhat crazy everyday life.
Eurtec is not a functional city. At best, it's a parody of one. Because the dimension is supposed to serve as a future city laboratory and as an urban experimentation field, nothing is done to resolve issues at their root, and fixing problems through technology becomes an end, not a means. For example, the acidity of the rain due to pollution is not fixed by regulating toxic emissions, but by creating adapted materials and solutions. For the non-humans, there is no social security (nor Human Rights in general) because there is it's interesting to have individuals than cannot heal in the best conditions to boost emergency medicine, as well as making huge cuts. The Endloserfluss, the artificial river creating a loop inside Eurtec, was practically only created to be dirtied and then cleaned. Eurtec society is fundamentally unequal and violent: without any pity for the overwhelming majority of the working force and with profit interest in mind, GOC justifies the liberal-authoritarian policy by the need to have rich, poor and a flowing economy to simulate a city.
Notice to the contributor
It is possible to use this Eurtec for an utopia or even a merely futuristic background, with intrigues happening in high-tech labs or even the up-town! However, the origins, darker and marked with a form of depressive dystopia, of this canon are still present, and call the city a paradise would be far from reality.
Humans
Since the embargo, the city's population skyrocketed. Currently, Eurtec counts about 750,000 humans, mostly native Eurtecians. Apart from extremely rare cases, humans are mostly well treated, benefiting from most of the social rights in Europe as well as strategic jobs or art funding from the GOC, granted by virtue of their status as Eurtec beta-testers, but also because of their very high longevity in comparison with the rest of the population. However, if the city is a sort of golden cage for most of the humans, its obscure administration, numerous procedures, and very rough competition between public servants in yearly competitions defining their place within the city and its way of life, as well as the threat of calls for ethical experiments — a euphemism for experimentation on humans, still rare — put Eurtecians into a state of intense stress. The debauchery and amorality offered by the absolutely free market and frantic socio-technological evolution often has the consequence of dissolving the social fabric into a morass of hard to entangle professional, diplomatic and sexual relationships. Humans are generally encouraged, by most of the companies of the City but also by the Coalition itself, to think about their life in a technocratic mindset. The appeal of the self-help theses of proceduralisation and transcendence in dissolution offered by the Servants of the Silicon Nornir to such as population is thus obvious.
Notice to contributors
These humans are part of an essentialised, almost racial elite of the city: born from normality, they are the only one to profit from social rights, protection, justice… However, they are not on holiday and, just like managers in a huge corporation, are always between the hammer of the GOC and the anvil of the Nornir, the first one squeezing them like ripe fruits for an evermore profitability and human performance, and the second one parasitising as much as possible their free time by anaesthetising them into its theory of a perpetual fake happiness.
Others
The rest of the population is composed of homonculi and synthetics, for whom the most fundamental rights simply do not exist.
The first ones are humans created in laboratories through accelerated procedures (an homonculus is adult in only three months), tailored for the client's taste and supposed to live a full life. In reality, homonculi are often imperfect, show enormous body issues like genetic diseases or cancers and, if they rarely live past the 5 years threshold, are often recycled as organic matter when their number surpasses the amount of work available in the city. The only exception is Replicants®, the GOC's own flagship biotech, which are super-humans that cost multiple billions per unit. The most famous Replicant is Agent Lupin, former operative of Strike Team "Soupir" and current member of the political police of Eurtec "The Grey Hand", able to change their phenotype on the fly to mimic any human using their blood.
Synthetics are what we commonly call androids, or robots. They are humanoids fully built in mineral materials, such as copper, aluminium, silicon or paratech alloys that serve a shared purpose with homonculi: work and bringing Eurtec to life. While "genetic" synthetics inherit a human consciousness, often created in lab or gathered from a rebirth contract, diffused ones get their identity from a stable diffusion algorithm, like DALL-E or Midjourney but for consciousness instead of pictures. Those synthetics, more recent and cheaper, suffer from numerous existential issues.
Lastly, the cyborgs, humans or homonculi that endured a paratech body alteration, are legion. Because every citizen is de facto considered a subject of experiment by the GOC (and thus get a matching register number), the Coalition reserves the right to implant every subject an OROI chip, evolution of the IPEC surveillance chip that allows to locate, spy on and analyse its owner, but whose variant from Oneiroi, Inc. also grants access the the owner's subconscious and allows for inceptions into it. Thus, one could consider that every Eurtec inhabitant is a cyborg.
Notice to contributors
Here is the fun part. Treat humanoids like livestock, play with owning conscious being as private property, talking about question on identity of self when you've been created by a machin, get the ultra-violent and repressive Arm of the Law on those that try to survive and show the nightmarish logic of a cult that preaches the dissolution in a dystopian future. Be careful not to abuse it though, a bit of dirty treatment for shock effect is fine, but there are some pertinent questions that will require a bit more subtlety.
The Global Occult Coalition
Economy
Eurtec is not a charity fund, but a laboratory. The partner companies on the project, be they directly or indirectly linked to the 108 Council, also have their own financial interests to defend in the City, where competition is almost tougher between companies and projects than individuals. A common practice for the Coalition, which either owns every company in the City or acts in a very directed partnership, is to launch the same project in secret in various groups before pillaging the research results that didn't succeed and inflicting heavy punishment on "losers". The amount of start-ups, sub-contractors or independent laboratories that birth and die each day is very high, making burn-out suicide the main source of human recycling for Replicants® creation.
Fun fact: this gigantic turn-over doesn't happen at all in the only state monopoly in the city, the police, whose human or homonculous officers are among the inhabitants with the highest happiness indicators.
Some businesses with shady ethics are the trademark of the City. Between the dream market, the recycling companies that predate on the fact that it's illegal to be homeless even though there is (deliberately) not enough housing, to generate organic matter or cheap electronic components, euthanasia clinics and various pimps, the City didn't by any means become more moral by the slightest margin following the embargo. The most prevalent market in Eurtec, apart from work printing — Creating synthetics and homonculi — is the virtual one, from conceptual digitalisation to augmented reality. If older shops like Oneiroi Inc. or RedZone Security are still in town under the banner of the GOC, a good part of Eurtec is held by companies from Earth, like Bayer-Monsanto (Illuminatis) or Nestlé (Freemasons). Lastly, while it's possible to encounter some GoIs like the Germans from Raptor Tech or the Polish "Home Wonders, Ltd." they are generally isolated from the rest of their organisation and act functionally like any other business, usually under GOC pressure.
An iron fist in an 108 finger glove
Because it is practically a 108 head hydra, the organisation leading Eurtec is very prone to contradictory orders, total paralysis of an entire industrial field because of philosophical fights between Satanists and Shinto mystics — causing catastrophic shortages for no reason — but also to the "mille-feuille" of operations: with each member of the 108 Council being above nearly all companies in the city's organogram but below the both Council as a whole as well as High Command, some very weird phenomena are quite common, like a Golden Dawn Institute order impossible to refuse but that will never be delivered because of a lack of PTOLEMY Division authorisation, or a totally inefficient transport system that is never replaced because it's blocked by the vote of an inactive Council member that ordered its creation. These grains of sand (sometimes rocks) in Eurtec's silicon gears add a layer of instability to a City that wasn't stable from the start.
Police also plays an important role in this organisation: granted with universal mandate by default as well as a presumption of legitimate defence, police exert institutionalised violence on subhumans and a symbolic one on humans, be it through barrels or procedures. Corruption in the police is very prevalent, especially as they answer only to High Command, which has little regard for this city that has already caused so many problems, and so no one else can control those with an armed monopoly on legitimate violence in Eurtec.
Some say that a secret police called "The Grey Hand" operates in town, sometimes working hand in hand with a curious Italian association.
Notice to the contributor
Eurtec police is a designed villain: violent, tyrannical, overpowered and corrupted, it is easy to paint the picture of poor oppressed androids bullied by pentagram-marked vests from GOC. However, one must not forget that it is a violent and secured city where a psychotic man wandering around can kill half a hundred people in an enraged outburst, or any depressed robot can turn into a kamikaze.
Places of Interest
(Note: to find what codenames mean, hover with your cursor)
UOE-0001-Archon-Turing-Spiral: the Watchtower
Useful Operational EntityUOE-0001-Related to the Global Occult CoalitionArchon-Related to the Silicon NornirTuring-Space-time ruptureSpiral is a tower located exactly at the centre of the pocket dimension Eurtec is in, maintaining its existence and regulating its size. It's also the headquarters of the GOC, and the most prestigious building in Eurtec. Currently, it is 200 floors high, the highest being DC Al Fine's office, the 66th floor being reserved for the Unified Satanic Church and the 100th one to l'Altissimo.
EurTRASH
Beyond its horizon, Eurtec is a total conceptual vacuum. If all the auras of a object are neutralised, it's possible to throw it into the void, allowing this space to be used as an infinite landfill from which nothing returns. However, that's only if everything is carefully neutralised…
Las Catacombas
The original Eurtec road network, Las Catacombas is a sort of underground city, condemned and with access normally prohibited. Because of the electromagnetic field created by the induction road above Las Catacombas, the zone is fully deprived of connection or network access, which, coupled with its labyrinthic setup and the total absence of light in the zone, makes its exploration and regulation extremely tedious. It's one of the last zones of Eurtec where illegal traffic can operate hidden from Coalition's eye. Be careful, as wandering as a pedestrian in Las Catacombas is potentially lethal, the zone being crossed by cars entering and exiting the network at high velocity through hidden access points in the city.
Groups
Association for the Liberation and Distribution of the AnomalousALDA is an anomalous Italian mafia acting as a codified organisation, still cryptic in the present day. The reason of its access to Eurtec is currently unknown, but seems to be linked to the involvement of ALDA and the GOC in IOR, Vatican's private trust funds. As long as it does not threaten social peace, ALDA is virtually untouchable by police despite clear trafficking and other crimes, but it is likely that the purge of the criminal underworld the mafia organised has something to do with it.
Children of the Noise
The Children of the Noise is a terrorist group exclusively present inside Eurtec, whose goal is to ensure the rights of synthetic humanoids inside the City, regardless of private property or Coalition regulations for conscious constructs. Their name comes from the pure randomness, or "Noise", refined to produce diffused consciousness. Originally organised as a union, the structure evolved to into a physical and intellectual guerilla movement after their refusal and repression by the High Command. Although anarchist and antiracist ideas are reflected in the group, abundant sectarianism and mysticism mean that the Children of the Noise's ideology is hard to decipher.
Being part of the Children of the Noise is a crime in Eurtec, punishable by imprisonment for humans or "critical reparation" for synthetic humanoids. Because of this, every meeting of a cell is done in an extremely confidential and clandestine manner.
The SCP Foundation is a private organisation whose origin and organisational structure are currently opaque. Fundamentally opposed to the methods of the Global Occult Coalition regarding the paranormal, the Foundation has however been useful multiple times because of a similar vision regarding Normality as well as providing important logistical support. However, if the SCP Foundation represented a serious contender to the Coalition during the 20th century, the turn of the millennium let this Foundation out in the cold, unable to keep up with the GOC's paratech boom.
There is heavy suspicion regarding some indications that the SCP Foundation has been guilty of crimes against humanity and reality during recent decades. A judicial commission appointed by the Coalition, still confidential, is working on this subject.
