Utopia Now is a compact of hunters that first appear in the book Mortal Remains. They are a business-driven collective of utopians, libertarians, and businessmen that hunt demons, especially institutional ones, for parts in order to build a utopia free of their influence.
History[]
Utopia Now was founded by William Horn, a Witness who saw the demonic forces behind the ailing tech behemoth he worked for. He uncovered the existence of institutional demons, and determined that the only way to get away from them would be to build a world free of those diseased institutions. He went back to school. He got a PhD and recruited his fellow students to form a mobile app startup. He found venture capitalists. And Horn succeeded the way everyone else dreams of. Now, he’s a respected entrepreneur who lives in Pacific Heights, the once-exclusive San Francisco neighborhood where new tech billionaires are taking over house by house from the city’s old money residents. He’s often courted by charities. But William Horn doesn’t believe in charity. He believes in earning your place, and the place he’s planning to earn will blow everybody’s minds.
The first step in Horn’s master plan is to build a floating town off the coast of northern California — essentially, a network of boats that will form a neighborhood, then the beginnings of a city. His utopia will be founded on principles of self-governance and self-sufficiency. The individual modules of his floating environment will be able to produce goods for themselves with 3-D printing and other cutting-edge advances. The technology’s there to create things like complex aquatecture, wireless networking, and so on. The problem, however, is that there’s no way for an upstart community like this to be truly self-sufficient. The power would have to come from somewhere, and building adequate medical infrastructure in limited space is a problem.
That’s why Horn’s grand design revolves around finding institutional demons, exorcising them, and then scavenging their infrastructure, the secret processors, reactors, and so on that provide the demonic soul with its power. Who knows? He might even discover that some of the demons’ conceptual powers can be dismantled and used. It’d be awfully handy to draw prosperity by using a piece of a demon of greed, or recover faster from a gunshot wound by visiting a demonic hospital.
Horn’s goal is a perfect example of the startup thinking he admires and is well on his way to mastering: taking bits of the old system and building on those structures to create something new, something disruptive that takes the world by storm — and changes it forever.
Purpose[]
Utopia Now aims to create a demon-free utopia as a floating town off the coast of northern California, using demons as the power source and infrastructure but not as the leading forces.
Organization[]
Horn's organization operates through three different types of work: scavenging of occult lore and destruction of demons who would interfere with the utopia's creation, tracking down institutional demons to dissect, and determining how to adjust the mechanisms run by demons to run without their influence without outright destroying them.
The Cure are the most traditional hunters of the lot. They scavenge occult lore, they run monsters to the ground, and they end them, making sure that they can't parasitically corrupt their utopia.
Operators do the footwork to track down the really big targets, the institutional demons Horn wants to dissect. They analyze financial reports, police blotters, and any other information they can get their hands on to identify demons. Then they eliminate them using a combination of business acumen (to break the institution) and old school exorcism (to get rid of any remaining part that might seek revenge). Afterward, their acquisitions group takes apart the demon’s physical components and ships them back to Silicon Valley.
Incubators examine the occult patterns on which institutional demons were built, seeing if they can rearrange them for a better world. They take the reactors that run on blood, and determine what they can boot up using artificial plasma.
References[]
- HTV: Mortal Remains, p. 134-136