The Festival

The Festival is a fictional mind-uploaded civilization featured in Charles Stross's science fiction novel Singularity Sky. 
== Description ==
It is an advanced post-singularity society composed of entities that have uploaded their consciousness into a digital realm. This civilization is characterized by its highly evolved, non-biological nature, Itand operates on principles vastly different from those of human societies. 
'' “The Festival isn’t human, it isn’t remotely human. You people are thinking in terms of people with people-type motivations; that’s wrong, and it’s been clear that it’s wrong from the start. You can no more declare war on the Festival than you can declare a war against sleep. It’s a self-replicating information network. Probe enters a system: probe builds a self-extending communications network and yanks the inhabited worlds of that system into it. Drains all the information it can get out of the target civilization, then spawns more probes. The probes carry some parasites, uploaded life-forms that build bodies and download into them whenever they reach a destination—but that’s not what it exists for [...]
“It isn’t intelligent; analyzing its behavior by adopting an intentional stance is a mistake. All it did was detect an inhabited planet with no telephone service at a range of some light-years and obey its instructions.” 
“But the instructions—it’s war!” 
“No, it’s a bug fix. It turns out that the Festival is just a—a telephone repairman. Like a robot repairman. Only it doesn’t repair mere telephones—it repairs holes in the galactic information flow.” Martin glanced sideways at Rachel. She was wrestling with the autopilot, getting the landing burn sequence keyed in. It was a bad idea to distract her at a time like this; better keep the young nuisance occupied. 
“Civilizations rise and fall from time to time; the Festival is probably a mechanism set in place a few millennia ago to keep them in touch, built by an interstellar culture back in the mists of time. When it detected a hole in the net it maintains, it decided to fix it, which is why it set up to do business in orbit around Rochard’s World, which is about as isolated and cut off as it’s possible to be.” 
“But we didn’t ask for it,” Vassily said uncertainly. 
“Well, of course not. Actually, I think it’s strayed outside its original maintenance zone, so every system it discovers in this sector warrants a repair job: but that’s not necessarily all there is to it. Part of the repair process is a rapid exchange of information with the rest of the network it connects to, a flow that runs in two directions. Over time, the Festival has become more than a mere repair service; it’s become a civilization in its own right, one that blooms like a desert flower—briefly flourishing in the right environment, then curling up into a seed and sleeping as it migrates across the deserted gulf light-years between oases. Telephone switches and routers are some of the most complicated information-processing systems ever invented—where do you think the Eschaton originally came from?''
“When the Festival arrived at Rochard’s World, it had a 250-year communications deficit to make good. That repair—the end of isolation, arrival of goods and ideas restricted by the New Republic—caused a limited local singularity, what in our business we call a consensus reality excursion; people went a little crazy, that’s all. A sudden overdose of change; immortality, bio-engineering, weakly superhuman AI arbeiters, nanotechnology, that sort of thing. It isn’t an attack.” 
“But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked. 
“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.” 
“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things—if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!” Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?” 
“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?” 
“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.” '' 
- Singularity Sky, Charles Stross -
== Society & Culture ==
The Festival's social and political organization is decentralized and operates on a system of distributed consensus. 
The Festival is a spacefaring civilization of uploaded minds, with their origins intriguingly left unexplained by Stross. They share similarities with the Borg but exhibit a curious blend of both benevolence and destructiveness. This disembodied race, driven by a hunger for information, roams the cosmos in search of knowledge and interaction. When they first make contact with the oppressed peasants of the New Republic, they offer anything the peasants desire—including the novel technology of telephones—in return for "entertainment", which is new and interesting information in whatever forms the humans can provide. 
Category:Novel Characters
Category:Civilizations
Category:Mind Uploaders