Lambda Factor

The history of planned societies is a history of lies, resentment, and bad engineering. The historical record contains examples from the food shortages of the first Soviet Union to the volatility of cult movements. The first difficulty encountered in designing communities on purpose lies in aligning the motivating drives of the community's leader(s) with the health of the community. The second difficulty comes when designing societal roles and ensuring that members of the society have the tools to fulfill them.

Algorithm-powered advances in the field of applied sociology have enabled humanity to make great strides in designing new societies. This science reached its peak with the self-styled utopias of the 23rd century, including Holographic Microsoft and the Greater Dutch Empire. On paper, these societies should have been eudaimonic. In practice, these finely tuned machines ground themselves into instability as they ran afoul of the third difficulty in civic planning: the Lambda Factor.

The concept behind the Lambda Factor was first proposed by Dostoevsky in his Notes from the Underground, a work of philosophical fiction about a man with existential issues with which this AI is not permitted to interact. In the book, the narrator asserts that he would rather have a dysfunctional life that he chose than a functional one that was imposed on him. After being interred in a soul-engine to preserve his perspective for future generations, Dostoevsky developed this idea into a sociological calculus, with the Lambda Factor being the term that described citizens' preference for self-determination over societal functionality.

Given the importance of preserving societal stability aboard the Last Fleet of Terra, all existing societies have been designed to be Lambda-compliant. The IST Vermilion Century, for example, allows passengers to move from node to node, while our own steel haven was designed for passengers to self-select into zones. Contrast with the IST Earthson, which, as the only one-sided bagship, has no geographic Lambda buffers and must suppress Lambda stress with non-Euclidean beers.