DVYNE

DVYNE
Logo
Organised Religion
Ideological doctrine:	Pantheism, Digital Afterlife, Network Marketing
DVYNE Chairman:	Jon Moreland
Operation
Region(s) of operation:	Multi-system
Based in:	Saturn
Historical information
Predecessors:	Unknown
Founded:	25th century
[Source]

“	I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.	”
–John Lennon

DVYNE is a group of interconnected corporate entities and other organizations based on Saturn devoted to the practice, administration and dissemination of a new religious movement formerly known by varying names including Church of the Maximum and Maximal Church. A full-spectrum faith founded during the chaos of Saturn’s colonisation, the organisation of is infamous for the ruthlessness of its leaders and its alleged history of manipulating large amounts of money out of the hands of its devout followers.

History

Background

In the years preceding the founding of the Church of the Maximum, the "Great Game" for Saturn was playing out between Earth, Mars, and their various corporate proxies. Colonial conflict occurred on a yearly basis with most of the violence taking place on Titan, Saturn's most hotly contested moon. All the involved parties had little concern for the Saturnian people, many of whom felt helpless in the face of a hostile uncaring world.

It was in this environment that Paul Cesare and the other founders of the Church of the Maximum emerged. Paul was a former employee of UGSAPOL who became disillusioned in the aftermath of a brutal crackdown on Titanean icers. After leaving UGSAPOL in 2402, Paul went on a 'spiritual journey' to find the meaning of life. He traveled throughout the Solar System and visited numerous holy sites on Earth such as Jerusalem and the Ganges, gaining increased spiritual insight and renown. Over twenty years of travels, Paul formulated his own pantheistic view of religion and philosophy on life while also accumulating a small following, with the most notable being Paul's new wife Lana Cesare, her brother Daniel Moreland, and Paul's devoted understudy Vadim (Vadik) Snetkov. These were the founders of the Church of the Maximum, which was founded upon Paul's return to Saturn in 2425.

The Church of the Maximum's founders were a diverse group who all had different functions within the larger organisation. Paul was a true believer in his religion as its celebrated leader, but he was highly suggestible, as openness was a key part of his new philosophy. Another part of his personal philosophy was an obsession with maximizing the efficiency of life and its essential value on the path to salvation. Lana meanwhile was an unstable individual whose dark triad personality was largely opposed to Paul's, but she nevertheless held an undying devotion to Paul, ensuring his security and comfort. Her brother Daniel Moreland was the brains behind Paul's whole operation who had the idea of monetizing Paul's religion on a large scale and establishing a parent organisation for the Church of the Maximum. Vadik acted as Paul's secretary and confidante, recording Paul's thoughts and managing his correspondence.

Establishing the first iteration of the Church of the Maximum on Titan in 2425, Paul preached an inclusive pantheistic theology that invited people to find spirituality from many different paths and also promised rewards for good deeds done in life. This message spoke to many alienated Saturnians whose lives had seemingly been made worthless by the endless grind of capitalism and proxy wars. The religion spread quickly, and the Church of the Maximum set up several new locations across other moons of Saturn. It was at this time that it became clear that the group required a more efficient machine to maintain order over the growing masses, who were beginning to formulate their own ideas and doubt Paul's overarching authority. The introduction of newfound digital afterlife technology at the suggestion of Daniel further bolstered the Church of the Maximum's profile to new levels.

It was a joint effort by Daniel and Vadik to codify doctrine, create power structures, and destroy any opposition to Paul's leadership over the late 2430's. This led to conflict with Paul, who did not like their rather harsh approach, but Lana staunchly argued in favor of her brother and Vadik's methods, usually convincing her husband of their necessity. Daniel worked closely with Vadik in writing the authoritative text of the Church of the Maximum, focus testing Paul's various teachings with numerous members of the organisation to find the one with the most appeal. For official power structures, Daniel helped found MAXIMUM INTERSTELLAR (MAXSTELLA) to better manage organisation's properties and congregations while Vadik established Maximum Salvation to centralise the organisation's intellectual pursuits, with Paul at its first chairman. He also began to an initiative of overall monetizing the organisation through a complex donation system and the gamification of many of Paul's original ideas to pay for the increasing costs of running the Church of the Maximum and its various organs. This most prominently included the modification of the Church's use of maximized sleep schedules to make members more actively competitive. Both Paul and Vadik were very skeptical of this change in particular, but Paul was eventually persuaded of its effectiveness by Lana, while Vadik privately remained opposed to the practice. He also grew to resent Daniel's leadership over MAXSTELLA and began to accumulate allies in an attempt to oust Daniel from Paul's inner circle with Lana being the key to his efforts.

In the 2440's, the Church of the Maximum became a formidable force as it accumulated more resources in the form of property, assets, and pure wealth and continued to spread across Saturn's moons and the Solar System at large. This attracted the attention of the authorities on Saturn, who began to take the church more seriously as a local power-broker, an alternative to the more openly hostile local syndicates. Despite the advice of Daniel, Paul maintained strict neutrality concerning conflict on Saturn and refused any form of favoritism concerning politics, particularly in dealing with state corporations and syndicates. Nevertheless, many corporations on Saturn appreciated Daniel's efforts to further 'maximize' the lives of Church adherents, and Daniel made many friends among the elite of Titan and many of Saturn's other moons. These connections and his leadership over MAXSTELLA helped to cement his position, to Vadik's chagrin.

Meanwhile, Vadik had spent years gaining allies within the Church's upper echelons and slowly turning both Paul and Lana against Daniel. Daniel, very much aware of the moves being made against him, appealed to Paul numerous times to expel Vadik as he was "a cancerous worm". However, Paul was completely unwilling to remove Vadik and over time became more and more suspicious of Daniel's ambitions. Daniel's leadership over MAXSTELLA was even called into question in 2451, with the threat of an audit issued by the Chairman himself looming over him.

Tragedy struck the church in 2453 when Paul and Vadik were both mistakenly killed by anti-corporate insurgents while visiting a new church site on Enceladus. The insurgents had allegedly meant to target a visiting Medtech board member but had mistaken Paul for him because they shared the same first name. The two and several other church members were all blown to pieces by an incredibly powerful improvised explosive device that leveled an entire street, including the church site they were scheduled to visit. After the inciting incident, there was an outpouring of outrage against the killing and sympathy for the Church of the Maximum. INTERPOL quickly set about pursuing the insurgents, who publicly denied planting the bomb despite some evidence suggesting otherwise. The insurgents were eventually killed to a man in a last stand on Enceladus against both INTERPOL and PMCs hired by the church, and there were many unanswered questions left in the aftermath. Even so, Paul's grieving widow took up the mantle of leadership and became the new leader of the church and the Maximum Chairwoman while Daniel remained MAXSTELLA President.

There are many theories regarding the assassination of Paul Cesare and Vadik Snetkov, most leading back to his brother-in-law Daniel Moreland. With Paul as a potential threat to his power and Vadik as a longtime rival, Daniel possessed both the motive and the means of killing his fellow founders. Accusations of murders were leveled against Daniel soon after the assassination, but they were quickly dismissed by his sister and most other members of the church. Some members, convinced that Daniel had murdered Paul and Vadik to save himself, split off from the Church of the Maximum and eventually became determined anti-church activists, some of whom still oppose the church to the present day. The church terms these dissenters as Splitters and label them dangerous conspiracy theorists. Other non-Splitter theories include the pair being killed by Inner corporations to facilitate Daniel's rise to power and further cooperation with the church on Titan, gaining them a valuable ally, the pair being killed by UGSAPOL in retaliation for Paul frequently speaking negative opinions on the organisation, or the pair being killed by Lana in a fit of rage over Paul's lack of intimacy in the preceding years. Whatever the truth, the given story of insurgents mistakenly killing Paul and Vadik was largely accepted by the church and the Saturnian public, and both were inserted into the Church of the Maximum's digital afterlife alongside one another.

After Paul's death, Daniel further expanded his powers within the Church of the Maximum and also began making overtures to the inner corps that ran Titan with the blessing of his sister, bringing an end to the previous policy of neutrality. This was during the rise of hostile syndicates and gangs, leading the inner corps even more desperate for local allies such as the Church of the Maximum. With prior connections to the elite of Saturn, Daniel rebranded the church as DVYNE and made many early alliances to further mold the organisation as more Saturnian, and more compatible with the values of the inner corps. That made Daniel and his sister Lana even more wealthy, and DVYNE became very prosperous in the 2500's. However, Lana's sneaking suspicion that Daniel killed her husband formed a wedge between the siblings that only widened after Lana remarried to the much younger Horatio Bond, a co-founder of XXKILLXY. Horatio was a dangerous man of a similar bent to Lana, but he held little interest in ousting Daniel, more focused upon entertaining himself with blood sports and having 'adventures' with Lana. Lana grew less and less involved with the affairs of DVYNE while Daniel bore an increasingly heavy work load, juggling relations with the inner corps while also micromanaging MAXSTELLA. This all made Daniel extremely stressed, and he progressively became more withdrawn in his work.

The Tethys Crisis came as a shock to all of Saturn, DVYNE included. DVYNE's presence on Tethys was negligible, so the initial disaster was not a huge loss for the organisation. However, the socio-political effect was enormous and immediate. Protests and riots broke out across many of Saturn's moons, and Titan in particular was plagued by weeks of unrest after the Tethys Crisis began. The inner corps, most prominently Axil Energy, struggled to maintain order as angry mobs attacked corporate offices, warehouses, and security stations. At this time, DVYNE successfully urged most its flock to not take part in the unrest and to stay home. Also, DVYNE's leader and her husband, visiting Iapetus when the disaster happened, went into hiding during the unrest and disappeared from the public eye. That effectively left Daniel in full control of DVYNE, a responsibility he accepted without pleasure.

For the duration of the Tethys Crisis, Daniel acted as a staunch ally of Axil Energy and other inner corps as he exerted absolute control over DVYNE. DVYNE members on other Saturnian moons acted as Daniel's eyes and ears, feeding intelligence on various factions to Axil Energy and other allies of the organisation. DVYNE also ensured stability on Titan and Rhea by feeding its members pro-corp propaganda, holding community events, and in general just assisting in perpetuating a calm peaceful status quo. This helped bolster DVYNE's power but also made it a target of the inner corps' many enemies including numerous syndicates, gangs, and anti-corporate groups.

The first group to explicitly target DVYNE was Bosozoku, whose iconoclastic rhetoric made them a natural enemy of DVYNE. The attacks began as arson against DVYNE property and isolated attacks on street preachers but quickly escalated into full-scale assaults on gathered congregations. This was all done with assistance of Splitters, who still bore a grudge against DVYNE. The largest of the attacks happened on Rhea in 2632 when Bosozoku staged a massive assault on DVYNE's headquarters on the moon and burned the location to the ground, killing Daniel's wife and scarring his two children in the resulting inferno. DVYNE responded by using Axil assets to bomb Bosozoku's headquarters on Iapetus and putting bounties on all the group's leaders. This in turn led to further DVYNE involvement in the Tethys Crisis as DVYNE became more involved in inner corps intelligence networks. Groups such as the anti-corporate Ring Liberation Army and various gangs began to target individual DVYNE members on charges of spying across Saturn. Thousands were arrested and hundreds killed on the suspicion of being spies, mostly on the smaller moons of Saturn further from the influence of the inner corps.

In response to increased violence from Bosozoku and other groups, DVYNE members formed 'DVYNE militias' to fight back against the gangs, warlords, and other threats. DVYNE militias mostly formed on moons such as Dione, Iapetus, and Rhea, all places where DVYNE members were being attacked on weekly basis. Meanwhile, members of DVYNE on Titan and Enceladus were more secure and less in need of a militia to protect them. The DVYNE militias fought in self-defense for the rest of the crisis until order could be restored by the inner corps.

It was around this time that DVYNE first made serious efforts to spread beyond Saturn, setting missions throughout the Solar System under the auspices of gathering support for those affected by the ongoing Tethys Crisis. DVYNE gathered many members on Earth, Mars, and Jupiter but were quickly assailed by both enraged ex-members and Splitters who had followed DVYNE in order to discredit it. It would turn out that DVYNE's system worked less effectively in non-Saturnian cultures, and many recruits would leave DVYNE soon after first joining after discovering how the group really worked. This led to a great deal of litigation throughout the Solar System against the group and eventually the criminalization of DVYNE on Jupiter. Used to being able to brush aside lawsuits on Saturn due to its sheer wealth, DVYNE was caught reeling after attacks on all sides with many missions eventually retreating back to Saturn to escape arrest by UGSAPOL. For the rest of the Tethys Crisis, DVYNE put its full focus upon Saturn and the events taking place there.

With the weight of so many problem occurring at once, Daniel found his workload increasingly untenable. He considered his options, consulted his advisers, and decided that it was finally time to decentralize power once again. With Lana having been legally declared dead, he stood as DVYNE's sole leader, heading both MAXSTELLA (now renamed DVYNE Interstellar) and DVYNE Salvation. In 2662, Daniel made Yamada Mitsuharu, a loyal devotee, the Chairman of DVYNE Interstellar while he remained President of DVYNE Salvation. Alongside this, Daniel created several other organisations and agencies to further subordinate responsibilities from himself to other members of DVYNE, most notably DVYNE Missions Interstellar.

DVYNE's role as inner corps collaborators gained them many enemies over the duration of the Tethys Crisis, with many other DVYNE members being martyred, but it ultimately did reap positive results for DVYNE as the conflict winded down. The inner corps gave preferential hiring to many members of DVYNE, and the organisation's upper echelons were given various boons for their assistance against the forces of chaos. The most important one was the purchase of a large plot land in Xanadu on Titan where DVYNE would build its new interstellar headquarters that stands to this day. The land had been sold to DVYNE at a record low price as a favor from Axil specifically to Daniel for his help with intelligence against gangs and anti-corporate groups, specifically those on Rhea whose attempt to capture and publicly execute the moon's elite had been foiled by information obtained by DVYNE spies.

As the crisis abated, Daniel's two children Gregory and Sasha came into the picture as Daniel slowly relinquished more power to subordinates. Gregory, the younger child whose wounds from the fire had been surgically removed, was less diligent than his father and enjoyed the pleasures of life more readily, regularly traveling across the Solar System as part of DVYNE missions and taking part in decadent parties. Meanwhile, his older sister Sasha never healed her scars as a reminder of her mother and her past, and she took more after her father by throwing herself into her work as part of DVYNE Interstellar. Daniel finally stepped down from his position as President of DVYNE Salvation in 2999 and died the next year, supposedly satisfied with his work, while entering into the digital afterlife he had obtained for others so long ago.

After the formation of the Union of Saturn in 3109, DVYNE shifted its attention from the inner corps to the new establishment in charge of the Union. This transition was made under the leadership of Yamada Mitsuharu, who proved himself a capable leader in the foundling years of the Union while fending off the ambitions of the Moreland children. In the optimism following the end of the Tethys Crisis, a wave of prosperity swept across Saturn which led to a significant rise in membership for DVYNE. Around the same time, DVYNE Missions Interstellar began to push out of Saturn once again and managed to get footholds on Earth and Mars but were still banned on Jupiter. While working to decriminalize DVYNE on Jupiter, DVYNE also began looking beyond the Solar System by sending missions to other systems with particular focus given to the Luyten System and the Trappist System. Both missions proved fruitful, and DVYNE sent more missions to other systems. It seemed as if a long-awaited era of peace had finally arrived, and DVYNE prospered as Saturn did for about two centuries without many hindrances under Mr. Mitsuharu's wise leadership. The conflict between the new competing states of Saturn affected DVYNE less, as Mitsuharu was less enthusiastic in his support of the Union.

However, this would not last. The independence of Zhu Que led to DVYNE being barred from the Luyten System as a "dangerous cult", and efforts to establish DVYNE in other exosolar systems were mediocre at best. Meanwhile, the Climate Crisis on Earth put a damper on the general optimism of the era, and it would only worsen as time wore on. DVYNE in tandem shifted many of its missions from Earth to Mars, seeing Mars as the new center of humanity rather than the dying Earth. This proved to be a successful strategy in recruiting more Martians but earned DVYNE the ire of many congregations on Earth, creating thousands of new Splitters in the 3200's.

With the simultaneous rise in Earth chauvinism and Martian nationalism, DVYNE was caught in the middle, bleeding further Earther members for their favoritism towards Mars despite their denial of any such thing. Around this time, the Jovian Repubic also ended its criminalization of DVYNE after centuries of litigation, and the organisation reestablished itself on Jupiter.

The Commonwealth of Earth emerged on the scene in 3453 and set off a chain of events that would change humanity forever. As the Commonwealth Wars, the Martian Civil War, and the Great Interstellar War all raged, DVYNE mostly receded back to Saturn, trusting in its friends in the Union to protect it against these new threats. While DVYNE members on Mars and elsewhere suffered, the leadership on Saturn figuratively averted its eyes. Chairman Mitsuharu would be assassinated in 3692 by a Martian war refugee and former DVYNE member frustrated with DVYNE's inaction, and he was replaced by the severe Sasha Moreland. She would somewhat address the problems posed to her predecessor by aiding Martian war refugees and advocating for DVYNE members in conflict zones.

At the conclusion of the Great Interstellar War, DVYNE lost access to its many members in the Martian Federation, and the Solar System lay in pieces. DVYNE worked hard to pick up the pieces after the war, but it was a long hard process, rebuilding DVYNE outside the Outer Planets. This process was hampered by the death of Chairwoman Sasha in an apparent industrial accident, leading to the ascension of her nephew Jon Moreland in 3874.

Current Era

The new Chairman Jon Moreland has further cemented DVYNE's position on Saturn and increased proselytizing on the various moons. That has brought an unprecedented number of converts to DVYNE with a quarter of Saturn's population becoming DVYNE members, at least loosely. DVYNE is considered by many to be the de-facto religion of Saturn, but the religion has spread across governed space to some degree, though DVYNE has a negligible presence outside the Outer Planets of the Solar System. It continues its pattern of exploitation, networking, and kowtowing to the establishment of Saturn, earning it the ire of many Saturnian dissidents and those outside Saturn. Despite this seeming inflexibility, DVYNE and its chairman see no reason to change now.

Structure

Being centered on Saturn, DVYNE is run very much like a corporation, even in its non-corporate positions. DVYNE Interstellar is officially DVYNE's parent organization, and is responsible for guiding local DVYNE churches, molding them to appeal to the masses while also following DVYNE's ideals. Its public interstellar headquarters are located on Titan, in an unincorporated area of Xanadu. The organisation's headquarters on Rhea meanwhile is private property and not accessible by the public. DVYNE Missions Interstellar is under DVYNE Interstellar and oversees DVYNE missions, which are local DVYNE organisations smaller than churches. The current Chairman of DVYNE Interstellar is Jon Moreland, who is indirectly descended from the religion's original founders.

Membership

DVYNE is strongest on Saturn with it being an influential religion within the Union of Saturn while there are smaller branches throughout the Solar System. Outside the Solar System, DVYNE has attempted to establish branches in every system in governed space and has largely succeeded with small churches and missions scattered throughout the stars. However, DVYNE has met resistance in several celestial states with Zhu Que explicitly classifying the group as a dangerous cult.