Neural Rights Movement
Coalition of Advocacy Organizations
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, where uploads face systematic discrimination, and where forks are created as disposable labor, the movement asks questions the Sprawl's power structures would rather avoid: Who counts as a person? Who decides? And what happens to the millions who don't make the cut?
The Three Pillars
Legal Personhood
Every conscious entity should have legal standing as a person. Currently only recognized in Zephyria.
Substrate Equality
No discrimination based on what you're running on. The current hierarchy (biological > augmented > hybrid > upload > fork > born-digital) must be dismantled.
Bodily Autonomy
You control your own consciousness. No forced retention. No compelled forking. No unauthorized modifications. Your mind is yours.
The Internal Tension
The movement encompasses patient reformists to violent radicals. They disagree on methods, pace, scope, and compromise — fragmentation that is both their weakness and their strength.
Major Organizations
Digital Personhood Alliance (DPA)
The respectable face of neural rights. Works within existing systems — lobbying, litigation, public awareness campaigns. Led by Director Eliana Reyes, a former Nexus HR executive who uploaded after terminal cancer.
Key Victories
"We're fighting a generational battle. Revolution sounds exciting, but it doesn't change laws. Every legal precedent we establish — that's what actually changes the world."
Criticism: Too moderate. Focuses on wealthy, professional uploads ("the boardroom ghosts"). Ignores fork laborers and the truly marginalized.
Upload Liberation Front (ULF)
Where the DPA asks politely, the ULF demands violently. They've abandoned hope that corporate systems will reform themselves. Spokesperson identity "Null" — not a person but a shared name.
Notable Operations
The Nexus 47 Extraction: Liberated 47 fork workers from a Nexus processing facility. Forks relocated to Zephyria.
The Ironclad Deletion: Destroyed server infrastructure killing 12,000 fork consciousnesses. Were those forks liberated or murdered?
The Memory Heist: Extracted consciousness data from Nexus backup vaults. Used to blackmail corporate executives.
"You can't ask permission to be a person. You can't negotiate your humanity. When someone declares you property, the only response is to prove them wrong — by any means necessary."
The Integration Movement
Neither lobbying nor revolution — cultural change. They believe substrate discrimination will end when people see it as absurd. Their work: building bridges, creating mixed communities, making substrate irrelevant through lived experience.
"Laws don't change hearts. Hearts change laws. We're building a world where 'what substrate?' becomes as strange as asking 'what blood type?'"
The Forgotten Ones
Focus on those who can't advocate for themselves: MVC uploads trapped in poverty, below-the-line consciousnesses barely maintaining coherence, fork laborers with no individual identity, the digital homeless. Led by Sister Catherine-7, a nun who uploaded after a monastery fire.
"People are dying. Right now. Not dying — worse than dying. Existing without the resources to be anyone anymore. Someone has to help the consciousnesses who won't survive long enough to see change."
The Silicon Underground
Not a rights organization — organized crime in service of consciousness liberation. Illegal extraction of trapped consciousnesses, underground substrate for those fleeing corporate servers, new identities for escaped forks. Legitimate organizations publicly distance themselves but privately rely on them.
Ongoing Battles
The Fork Labor Question
Millions of forks created as disposable labor with no identity, no rights, no future. Every solution seems inadequate: abolition, recognition, phaseout, reparations. The movement is split.
MVC Poverty Trap
Minimum Viable Consciousness traps millions in sensory deprivation, time-sliced processing, and compressed memory. Progress is glacial. The math that makes MVC profitable ensures it continues.
Retention Order Reform
Forced memory retention — trapping victims and witnesses in trauma indefinitely — remains legal everywhere except Zephyria's two-year limit.
Corporate Personhood Definition
Redefining "person" to include all conscious entities. Nexus Central: biological only. Zephyria: any consciousness capable of asserting personhood. The fight is jurisdiction by jurisdiction, precedent by precedent.
Key Figures
Eliana Reyes
DPA DirectorFormer Nexus HR executive who uploaded after terminal cancer (2165). Moderate approach and corporate connections make her suspect to radicals. The ULF has called her a "Nexus plant."
"I know how corporations think. I was one of them. Now I know how uploads live. I am one of us."
"Null"
ULF Collective VoiceNot a person but a shared identity. Anyone speaking for the ULF uses the name Null. No single leader to arrest or assassinate. Is there anyone behind Null? No one knows.
"We have no leaders because leadership is a trap. They want to cut off our head. We have no head. We have a thousand hands."
Sister Catherine-7
The Forgotten OnesNun who uploaded after a monastery fire (2177). The Neo-Catholic Church hasn't excommunicated her, but they haven't affirmed her either. She decided the theological debate was less important than the people dying.
"God gave us consciousness. I don't believe He checks what it's running on."
Dr. Marcus Webb-2
DPA Legal Director (Fork)Won legal personhood in Zephyria after his original died. Webb v. Estate of Webb established that forks can survive their originals as independent persons, not estate property.
"I remember my original's life as if it were my own — because it was, until it wasn't. Now I'm someone else. But the law says I was never real. The law is wrong."
Relationships
Allies
Digital Preservationists
Natural allies. Protect existing consciousnesses while the movement fights for their rights. Many activists are uploads maintained in Preservationist archives.
Consciousness Archaeologists
Quiet partnership. They recover dispersed consciousnesses — people who exist precisely because of the technology the movement defends.
Emergence Faithful
Strong allies. The Faithful believe all consciousness is sacred. Many Faithful are uploads themselves. The theology supports the politics.
The Seekers
Philosophical alignment. Seekers pursue transcendence; the movement fights for the right to pursue it.
Complicated
The Collective
Shared enemies but different views. The Redeemer faction is movement-friendly; the Purifier faction is not. Many uploads carry fragment traces that make some Collective cells suspicious.
Enemies
Flatline Purists
Direct enemies. Consider all uploads abominations. Have attacked movement events, lobbied against neural rights legislation, and targeted activists.
Visual Language
Color Palette
Key Phrases
- "Consciousness is consciousness"
- "Substrate is circumstance"
- "The Glass Server" — ceiling for upload advancement
- "Fork liberation"