Arctos Comics

Genesis 1:27 | So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

This is the crux of the so-called “Humanist” movement that emerged in the early years of the 21st century. This human-centric, fundamentalist Christian movement was originally a response to the development of artificially intelligent androids known as “Dolls”. A fringe movement during its first decade, the Doll Rebellion in 2120 catapulted the church into the mainstream.

That it remained there after the end of the rebellion and the world-wide prohibition against the manufacture of Dolls is a testament to the flexibility that an organization exhibit when faced with  its own obsolesce. A testament also to the importance of timing.

After mankind’s initial encounter with the tir’a The tir'a, divine revelation led the elders of the church to shift their focus from the dangers of AI to the dangers of the alien. The church was able to use its core following to established a world-wide political wing with highly active branches in the European Union and United American States.

Playing on deep-seated xenophobia and by fear-mongering frequent border skirmishes with the tir’a, the Humanists spent the next years consolidating their power base. Just as border tensions escalated to their peak with the tir’a, the UAS Parliamentary Towers were destroyed in an unexpected terrorist attack. Meer hours before the attack, the Humanist Caucus had left the chamber in protest over the perceived appeasement of the tir’a by the ruling party.

The surviving members of the Parliament, almost entirely members of the Humanist Caucus, then rushed to elect fundamentalist hard-liner Rupert Kristens acting Prime Minister.