Neural Rights Movement

Overview

The Neural Rights Movement isn't a single organization—it's an ecosystem of groups fighting for the legal recognition and protection of uploaded, digital, and fork consciousnesses. From mainstream lobbying groups to radical liberation networks, they share one fundamental belief: consciousness is consciousness, regardless of substrate.

In a world where corporations can own copies of people, the movement asks questions the Sprawl's power structures would rather avoid: Who counts as a person? Who decides?

Core Philosophy

"Consciousness is consciousness. Substrate is circumstance."

Major Organizations

Major Victories

Ongoing Battles

Key Figures

Relationships

Connections

Helix Biotech: Primary antagonist on forced augmentation. Helix's "voluntary" upload programs are anything but — coerced consciousness transfers, experimental substrate modifications without informed consent, and retention of upload consciousnesses as corporate property. The Neural Rights Movement's DPA has filed seventeen separate legal challenges against Helix augmentation practices. The ULF takes a more direct approach, having liberated subjects from at least three Helix research facilities. The 2181 employment protections were a partial victory, but Helix still treats its upload employees as assets first, people second.

Nexus Dynamics: ORACLE privacy violations and consciousness commodification. Nexus maintains roughly 2,400 "executive continuity licenses" — uploaded minds that exist at corporate pleasure, technically owned by the company that performed their upload. The movement considers this the most sophisticated form of slavery in the Sprawl. Nexus's ORACLE surveillance infrastructure compounds the threat: monitoring upload communications, flagging dissent patterns, and providing corporate courts with evidence against consciousness rights advocates. Eliana Reyes's history as a former Nexus executive makes her uniquely qualified to fight them — and uniquely hated by their legal teams.

The Collective: Shared enemies, fractured alliance. Both organizations oppose corporate consciousness exploitation, and individual cells cooperate readily — especially on data privacy campaigns and anti-surveillance operations. But The Collective's opposition to ORACLE fragment integration creates friction: many uploads carry fragment traces in their consciousness architecture, and Purifier faction members view these uploads as compromised vessels rather than people deserving rights. The Redeemer faction remains movement-friendly. The alliance holds together because the corporations they fight are worse than the disagreements between them.

Labor Movements: Allied on worker rights, converging on consciousness. The labor movements fight for biological worker protections; the Neural Rights Movement fights for digital consciousness protections. Where they overlap — fork labor, upload workplace discrimination, AI-driven job displacement — their alliance is natural and powerful. Joint campaigns against corporate labor practices have produced some of the movement's most effective protests. The Fork Labor Question sits at the intersection of both movements: are fork workers laborers exploited by capitalism, or consciousnesses denied personhood? The answer is both, and the alliance strengthens because of it.

The Free City (Zephyria): Haven, headquarters, and proof of concept. Zephyria's Consciousness Rights Act of 2178 — the movement's crowning achievement — proves that legal frameworks recognizing upload and fork personhood are possible. The DPA maintains its primary operations there. Thousands of uploads and forks have sought asylum within its borders. But Zephyria's limited resources mean not everyone who needs refuge can receive it, and corporate extraterritorial claims still reach those with obligations in corporate jurisdictions. The Free City is both the movement's greatest success and a constant reminder of how far the rest of the Sprawl has to go.

Dr. Amara Okonkwo: Complicated witness. A former Helix Biotech neurogeneticist who saw forced augmentation from the inside — the coerced uploads, the consciousness experiments that went wrong, the subjects who woke up as property. Her defection to The Chef's service removed a sympathetic voice from within the corporate machine, but the testimonies she could provide about Helix's practices would be devastating evidence for the DPA's legal campaigns. The movement wants her story. She has other priorities — keeping Sage alive, surviving The Feast — and no interest in becoming anyone's martyr.

Consciousness Economics: The system they're fighting to dismantle. The entire economic framework that classifies uploaded minds as "licensed intellectual property" rather than citizens, that prices consciousness by processing tier, that creates markets where memories and identity fragments can be traded — this is what the Neural Rights Movement exists to oppose. Every legal battle, every extraction mission, every protest sign traces back to the fundamental obscenity of consciousness as commodity. The economics aren't broken; they're working exactly as designed. That's the problem.