User blog:DJay32/Topography Genera Center "writer's bible"

In case anyone wishes to write with the Topography Genera Center, it's been requested that I write up a series bible of sorts for it.

CAUTION: HEAVY SPOILERS FOR TOPOGRAPHY GENERA IN HERE

So the Topography Genera Center is a Fear-research organization. It has a West branch in America (in Topography Genera this is in Indiana, I believe, but this can be changed), an East branch in England (again, can be changed), a North branch in Iceland (can be changed), and a South branch in Australia (ditto).

The Genera was founded at some point in the second half of the 1900s by people code-named NO and CROWN. Or something. Maybe it was WEIGHTLESS and CROWN. I can't remember, it isn't even really that important, that information may have been propaganda rather than factual. It started out as just sort of a weird cryptozoological foundation, but somewhere around the turn of the millennium it started to get some backing by scientists like Doctor Cloud who were able to speculate and pretty much prove the existence of "fossil particles." Science mumbo-jumbo. This stuff actually pertains more to Topography Genera's specific thematics rather than the organization itself.

At some ambiguous point in time, EAT infected the Genera. Many of its higher-ups are Camper. Through this, EAT was able to establish relations with the rest of the Fears, and it introduced a strange gambit: "The Night Owl." The Night Owl is another name for EAT, but it works really hard to make it seem like the Night Owl is some new separate entity. Some Fears believe this, some don't. Selkie in particular never bought the ruse, being more than familiar with the art of putting on a performance.

(Also note that, at least in the Topography Genera canon, EAT and the Larks are one and the same. Every Lark is a Camper-bird, but EAT made sure the Genera filed these things separately for the purpose of further misdirection. Everything EAT does in that story is seeped in complex misdirection.)

Really, the Genera pre-EAT is unknown. It might never have existed. Maybe it was always EAT's project. Maybe not. But everything I describe here pertains to a Genera run by EAT:

Each branch is made up of four buildings: A parking garage, two office buildings, then a massive laboratory (separated from the other buildings by a frustratingly long corridor). Each building has either five or eight floors, and any building that claims to have five floors secretly has eight.

The office buildings are where database stuff and finances are managed. All the juicy stuff takes place in the labs. There's also more secret labs underneath the parking garage. Every building has mandatory medical facilities.

The labs have a ground floor full of cubicles and actual testing places, then four more subsequent identical floors below. The next two floors below that are "Hell's Kitchen," cell blocks for captured Runners/test subjects. Then the eighth sub-floor is a massive... structure, surrounded by the offices of the higher-ups. The structure itself is the office for the head of the Genera, and it doubles as a meeting room for Fears.

(There is more below this that I never explicitly wrote in either Rapture or Genera. At some point, the building gives way to caves-- EAT is still building more, deeper and deeper into the Earth.)

The East's head office is manned by WEIGHTLESS, who in Topography Genera is a consciousness existing entirely in a computer. Whether this is a Manufactured Newborn thing or not is not stated. I personally see it as another one of EAT's experiments, trying to create a Camper on a non-physical plane. Breaching the Topographic Ocean, as it were.

I want to clarify a matter about "the higher-ups:" It is never stated exactly how many there are, or whether they're all Camper or all Fear-related or what. This was intentional. The higher-ups are those who control everything the Genera does. Their hierarchy could extend infinitely ("it's higher-ups all the way down"). EAT wants this ambiguity, this misdirection. Some higher-ups work directly in the Genera, as simple bosses for employees, or overseers. Some are much more ambiguous, such as WEIGHTLESS.

In Topography Genera, MAD MAN MOON is the higher-up who is specifically there to manage promotng and demoting people. BLACKCAP is the regional manager for the East branch (or he's at least the physical manager, with WEIGHTLESS as the actual manager), so BLACKCAP is entirely and unambiguously a Camper. DOCTOR WALLS is not a Camper, in fact he's one of the only decent people in the story. LILYWHITE LILITH is not at first a Camper but later becomes one. MORDECAI is never a Camper, and he's hardly a higher-up at all, he's just the unlucky guy who's tasked with delivering orders and stuff to LIQUID LEN.

That brings me to another point: Many of the people the Genera hires are unpeople. The Cremator often finds a victim and wipes their memory (which often also wipes them from all records), wipes their identity, and EAT will often take these blank slates and give them new identities as workers. LIQUID LEN is an example of this, as was DUCHESS.

No one is ever fired from the Genera. No one ever quits. Any problems are solved by higher-ups sending the person for testing.

There's also the matter of AD A DGLGMUT. This means a lot of things to different characters, but ultimately it is the Genera's attempt to create a physical vessel for the Manufactured Newborn (made of flesh and metal, held together by Choir). By doing this, EAT is 1) giving Doctor Cloud something to obsess over, 2) placating the Manufactured Newborn and thus making the rest of the Fears see EAT as trustworthy, 3) establishing her power and influence to the Fears and to the world at large, 4) creating another problem for her adversaries to have to focus on, thus drawing even more attention away from her and misdirecting matters even more, and 5) experimenting, learning more about what is and isn't possible, how things work, how bodies work, how consciousness works, how life works.

In short, the Topography Genera Center is essentially EAT's primary means of interacting with and controlling the Earth. It doesn't have to do things this way; it is absolutely capable of just flooding the world, claiming the universe, and forcing all existence to play all over again to give her a clean slate to play with. But the question of why EAT is doing this at all, well, that's one of the bigger themes of Topography Genera the story, and I won't get into it any more.

It's hard to give all this stuff off the top of my head. Please feel free to ask questions and I'll answer them to the best of my abilities.