Anarchitects

Anarchitects are a form of conceptual entity created by the Celestis. The anarchitects are the most misunderstood of the misunderstood, simply because their effects can be so devastating that victims often refuse to believe that there’s no physical cause. While most conceptual entities will begin an attack by entering their victim’s perception, the anarchitects instead occupy architecture.

Architecture has a special importance to most civilised cultures: it defines how a species related to its entire world-environment and as a result, every architectural construction is a lodestone of high-density meaning. Anarchitects exploit this by “possessing” buildings. This much is reasonably easy to follow. However, once an anarchitect has taken over a piece of architecture, it can then alter that architecture. Bridges can disappear underfoot, simple corridors can become impenetrable labyrinths, while spaces can become oppressively small or horrifyingly large without warning. Yet, anarchitects achieve this without changing the substance of the building.

To an observer, the matter may seem to rearrange itself, but the matter is irrelevant and has quite simply been ignored. If the universe notices this sudden gulf between what’s probably there and was obviously there, then it does nothing to set things right again. But then, as generations of theorists have noted, most phenomena already exist in the gap between the provable and the obvious. The anarchitects only make this process slightly more blatant.

Indeed the lesson is so hard for cultures to grasp that when the first crude anarchitects were encountered by posthumanity, the posthuman forces believed themselves to be under attack from some form of nanomachinery which disassembled and reassembled the architecture on a molecular level (obviously untrue, as the Celestis wouldn’t resort to such vulgar technology).

Only after the event occurred did it become clear that the molecules had nothing to do with it.