Análisis de la calidad del agua en las quebradas intervenidas por

Arcadians- Many members of the Arcadians are bona-fide geniuses. Even those who aren’t spend much of their lives boosted to genius level IQ with the help of expensive smart drugs. Arcadians are often a cult of intelligence, valuing intelligence above all other qualities. They are so focused on intelligence they sometimes forget to develop qualities that make for pleasant and successful lives: emotional maturity, wisdom, self-control and social skills. The gang has more than its share of antisocial geeks who have problems connecting with people at anything other than a shallow level. About 1 in 10 Arcadians suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome (see p.100).

Nearly a third of Arcadians are psychologically addicted to Maxin (this means that 1 in 10 Maxin addicts in the city is an Arcadian). Every Arcadian has a friend who is addicted or who overcame addiction. Maxin addiction is bizarre: it is addiction to a drug that is thoroughly unpleasant. Most people don’t “get” Maxin addiction, but all Arcadians do.

Dragons- The first Dragons were rich kids who spent their early adulthood hanging around the city art scene, looking for something more out of lives than what their parents had. Specifically, they wanted some kind of transcendent experience, which drew them to Sitha Nith.

With her intense speaking style, strong personality and wild ideas, she seemed capable of providing them with a transcendent experience. Her guided mediations, in which she told people to imagine “being the dragon,”

were effective because those young people wanted them to be effective.

For almost every Dragon involved, the wild hunt is truly an altered state of consciousness. It is a sort of trance brought on by Sitha’s hypnotic rants and by the psychological effect of being in a mob of people all thinking and acting exactly the same way. Dragons in the wild hunt don’t feel that they are making decisions or following orders: they feel that they are part of some larger being with its own intelligence and free-will.

Dragons feel a sense of extraordinary power, bravery and freedom from responsibility.

Omniscients- Many paranoid people come to sense tech wanting to be able to sense people sneaking up on them, or hear what people are saying about them, or sense poison in their food or find ‘mind control devices’ hidden in their walls. When sense tech doesn’t find evidence of any conspiracy against them, a few become less paranoid, but more just become frustrated at not being able to sense what they are certain is there. Many of these paranoid people are schizophrenics, and schizophrenics rarely last long in gangs. Eventually they grow to mistrust the gang, or they grow too disorganized to be a productive member of the community, and they choose to or are asked to leave. Most paranoid schizophrenics who become Omniscients last about a year and then leave the gang.

Usually, the Omniscients are happy to see them go and don’t consider themselves to have any continued loyalty to them. One exception is Tavin Bean (see next page).

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The True Story of Tavin Bean

The story of Tavin Bean is known by enough people around the city that it has almost achieved the status of legend. Yet there is more to the story than most people know. The basic facts are true:

Tavin was a pleasant young woman who had a mild paranoia that led her to join the Omniscients.

Some elder Omniscients took her under their wings and with their assistance she became one of the best outfitted Omniscients of the time.

Her paranoia grew worse, she began to see the Omniscients as her enemies, and she ended up homeless. She now has the honor of having the best senses of any mentally ill homeless person in the city (possibly in the whole world). The Omniscients still love and miss Tavin and do their best to look out for her from afar, even though she doesn’t want their help.

The first Omniscients were a bunch of hopeless geeks who buried themselves into an obsession with sense tech. These were people who did not go to parties, did not hang out on the streets, did not have many sexual relationships. Over time they went from geeks to being powerful and respected gang members. However, an insecurity remained, an unspoken fear that their newfound status was not real or would be taken away. This nagging fear drove them to seek out the trappings of power: nice clothes, nice homes, fine wines and stock portfolios. All this was to make them feel less like the geeks they were and the more like the powerful people they had become. Some of the male sense-tech-geeks desired another trapping of power: a mistress; someone young and beautiful who respected them and did not want to be an equal.

Like many schizophrenics, Tavin grew up unsure of the universe and her place in it. As a child she often had an irrational fear that she was being accused of doing something wrong. When she was older she often worried that she had offended people. Tavin would worry if people did not show signs of liking her right away. Tavin developed the most likeable personality she could: sweet, ditzy, carefree and excited. She would often, without realizing it, act the exact opposite of how she was feeling. The more sad she was, the more happy she would act. The more uncomfortable she was, the more she would joke and giggle. The more tired she was the more bubbly and excited she would act. As she grew up she became quite attractive and enjoyed the attention of many young men, though she was too uncertain of herself or her relationships to become serious with any of them. (continued next page)

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The True Story Of Tavin Bean (continued) When Tavin decided she needed to enhance her senses to find out if people were really “saying things about her” she went to the Omniscients. She knew, by instinct, how they wanted her to act and she did it without even making a conscious choice.

She listened attentively to everything they said, acted awed and impressed by everything they knew and had achieved. Without knowing it, Tavin had made herself into what the elder male Omniscients thought they needed to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, that they were no longer lowly geeks.

The elder Omniscients battled for her attention:

doing hours of research for her, getting her discounts and buying her gifts, all under the guise of wanting to help a promising young student. Some of this was a genuine niceness, but a lot of it was just them trying to get into her pants. She had a series of sexual relationships with three men, one of whom was married and one of whom left his current girlfriend to be with her. Something about these relationships made Tavin feel uneasy. It did not feel like love to her, and sometimes it didn’t even feel like lust, it felt like they wanted something from her but she didn’t know what. She began to believe that she had not found happiness or safety or security among the Omniscients, that this was no haven from the generally malevolent nature of the universe. Each of her three relationships ended sooner than the last, and though she remained on friendly terms with her former lovers, she felt a cold feeling that she was alone, that there was nobody she could trust save herself.

Then Tavin left the Omniscients, and a few months later word came back that she had ended up on the street, a homeless woman who could be seen talking to herself, when she would allow herself to be seen at all. There was sadness among the Omniscients:

everyone liked Tavin, even those who were slightly jealous of her, and they were sad that she had been robbed of everything she had by mental illness.

Among her three former paramours, and a few of the others who had battled for her affections and lost, a feeling of guilt crept in. They knew that they had been using Tavin and they knew they were partially responsible for her decline. These same men made the public promise to always look after he and keep her safe, no matter how crazy she gets.

So every day Omniscients, some of whom are too young to have ever known Tavin, keep each other up to date on the latest sightings and word of her current condition. Whenever some new danger pops up in the city, an Omniscient is sent out to warn Tavin, even though they will never get close enough to see her face. The Omniscients do all this out of love, out of kindness, out of loyalty and out of guilt.

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Many Omniscients took up Buddhist meditation to help them learn to use their new senses. Some have found Buddhist meditation helps them achieve peace and clarity in other areas of their lives. A few have converted to being full-blown Buddhists and try to spread Buddhist wisdom to their fellow gang members.

Purists- Almost everyone who joins the Purists has some level of phobia, from mild to crippling, of disease or contamination. A large number suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the Purist lifestyle is the logical progression of a ritualistic compulsion to keep clean and sterile at all times. The Purists, as a gang, has some of the character of obsessive compulsives:

exacting, uncompromising, humorless, obsessed with details and hating inexact language or ambiguousness.

A few Purists are paranoid people who joined the Purists because they thought someone was trying to poison them or infect them with a disease.

Andy Uto has his own theory of psychology. He thinks that people are messed up because they have dozens of motives in their minds and do not prioritize them at all. They want everything at once: fun, comfort, sex, excitement, accomplishments, friends, etc. Andy teaches that these various motives interfere with each other and make it so none of them are ever truly achieved. In Andy’s view, people “allow” harmful thoughts, desires, emotions, beliefs and addictions to take root in their minds. He blames this on the same complacency and lack of self-respect that causes people to allow their bodies to become polluted. Andy also believes that chemical pollutants cloud the mind. To Andy, purifying the body is just the first step. The second step is to purify the mind: to figure out one’s most important goals and to eliminate any thought, belief or emotion incongruent with these goals. Andy believes his is the only true route to mental health.

Some Purists believe they can sense pollution, including the pollution of the mind that manifests as mental illness.

Some seem to have some legitimate “power.” Many others are just imagining that they have this power.

Instead, they “sense pollution” in any place or person that they don’t like (including other Purists who they are having conflicts with). Andy Uto recognizes that this is something that some Purists do and he has counseled that

“self-indulgent beliefs, not based on rational facts, are a mental pollution that should be avoided at all costs.”

The Purists are the most cult-like of gangs. Andy Uto has some of the personality traits of a cult leader and many people who join the Purists are undergoing the same life and identity crises as people who join cults.

The majority of the city has decided that they are not really a cult, but not everyone has. The Purists recently attacked a group of deprogrammers who had kidnapped a young Purist and forced her to remove her biohazard suit. The surviving deprogrammers put pressure on the FBI to investigate, and Andy Uto ended up having to pay

a huge bribe to the FBI agent to keep him from calling the National Guard in to arrest all the Purists. Up until that point, the Purists didn’t care who thought they were a cult. Afterwards, Andy Uto deigned to meet with concerned parents and friends to explain that people are told exactly what they are getting into before they join the Purists and they are free to leave whenever they want.

Some have found genuine relief from mental illnesses after joining the Purists. These Purists really believe that Purism saved their lives, and they are Purism’s most enthusiastic supporters.

Becoming a Purist cut them off from temptations to things like drugs, unhealthy food and unhealthy sex. Many Purists were slaves to temptation, were physically and mentally unhealthy and hated their lives, and achieved a miraculous recovery after joining. The Purist focus on mental Purity (along with their newfound hope) helped them overcome more subtle temptations (fears, hatred, sexual fantasies, self-destructive impulses, etc.).

The Purists are a community of people, like 12-steppers, who help each other stay clean.

Sexologists- Everything the Sexologists do and believe revolves around the dichotomy between a healthy attitude towards sex and an unhealthy attitude towards sex. In their eyes, they have achieved superpowers simply by maintaining the healthiest possible attitude towards sex. On the other hand, they see almost all of the city’s problems as being caused by an unhealthy attitude towards sex.

The culture of Sexology was highly influenced by the culture of therapy. City therapists were some of the first people to experiment with “peak sex” techniques, and they passed those techniques on to their clients. Although therapy has always been influenced by academic psychology and by popular culture, it has always had its own unique set of beliefs and practices. Therapists tend to pick out things they like from popular culture and from psychology and incorporate them into their methods. By taking things out of their original context they sometimes change the meaning completely. Some of the criticisms of Sexologists are the same criticisms lodged against therapists: they are self-indulgent, they believe things about psychology that have no scientific basis, they use pseudo-scientific terminology to make themselves appear scientific, and they apply their own standards of what is “healthy” to others.

Sexology was founded by therapists whose primary clientele were wealthy young women seeking therapy for sexual problems.

Many of these young women were sexually abused or exploited and this damaged their perception of their own sexuality, of the opposite sex, and of intercourse itself. The sex therapists sought to use “peak sex” states as a hallmark of what sex should be:

loving, intimate, satisfying and free from fear or self-doubt.

Many of the patients never thought they would ever achieve this kind of sex, and achieving it helped rebuild their self esteem and hope for their lives.

The Sexologists have made themselves intimately connected with the fate and lifestyle of every Sex Worker in the city. Nothing in the last few centuries has changed the lives of Sex Workers more than Sexologists. Many street walkers count Sexologists as their

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Psychological Profile of a Sexologist

From “Why Sexologists Should Suck My Butt and Then Crawl Off and Die, Vol. 1”

by Leticia “Big Dick” Young, Freak

“The average Sexologist was a rich chick who got diddled by some older dude at some point in her youth. Because her parents had money, she grew up never having to do anything for herself. And so she became lazy, not bothering to develop any talents or personality traits worth being proud of. In short, she grew up weak and when she was forced to prove her worth she couldn’t; she found she was a loser.

She wasn’t a total loser, though, because she remembered that she had been diddled. She had found someone to blame for her being a weak-minded loser, so she learned to harp about being a victim to anyone who would listen. It wasn’t really the diddling’s fault that she failed to make anything of herself, but it was easy for her (just like everything else had been easy for her) to believe it was. So when she grew up she used her trust fund money to pay for therapy. The therapy didn’t do anything to really help (because she’ll never admit the real reason she’s a wimp and a loser) but it got someone to pay attention to her and feel sorry for her, so she kept shelling out the cash. The therapist was either too stupid to know that this victim-shit is just an excuse, or was smart enough to play along and keep getting that dough, or bought into the same victim delusion.

Anyway, the stupid bitch hangs around with therapists long enough she becomes part of their culture. And eventually she gets introduced to this new wonderful form of sex therapy, designed to help cure her from the deep psychological wounds she thinks her diddling has left her with. What she finds, instead, is therapy’s version of fundamentalism. She’s given the message ‘we have the only correct attitude towards sex, and that makes us morally superior to everyone else.’ Now, keep in mind, she still feels like a big loser (because she is) and she sure would like to feel morally superior to everyone else, so she joins up and accepts the whole pseudo-religious bullshit unquestioningly. She learns a few neat psychic tricks, and uses this as proof that everything the Sexologists believe is right. And suddenly she believes that being diddled a few times in the sixth grade has made her the world’s greatest expert on what is sexually healthy and what isn’t. She enjoys going around proclaiming that the way people are having sex is unhealthy and is damaging their souls. She feels better about herself by making other people feel bad about themselves.”

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saviors, having chased off the abusive and exploitative pimps that preyed upon them. Many Sex Workers know they can go to the Sexologists for help hunting down or chasing away a violent pimp or john. On the other hand, many Sex Workers are afraid to talk to Sexologists because they are afraid of what the Sexologists will say to them. They are afraid that the Sexologists will say that working in the sex industry is ruining them and that it is both a symptom and cause of a deep self-hatred.

They are afraid that the Sexologists will ask them to stop, something they are not ready to do. Sex Workers also resent Sexologists wandering through the red light district scaring away potential customers. Recently, a group of Sex Workers mugged a group of Sexologists,

They are afraid that the Sexologists will ask them to stop, something they are not ready to do. Sex Workers also resent Sexologists wandering through the red light district scaring away potential customers. Recently, a group of Sex Workers mugged a group of Sexologists,