“Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?”

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”

Controlled Singularity is the final technology in the chain that began with Graviton Theory. From the name and the prerequisites, it would appear that it uses the techniques represented by Applied Gravitonics to safely manipulate the artificial singularities that can be created using Singularity Mechanics. So now they can be safely used for more purposes than just a potent power source.

For instance, they allow the creation of the twenty-four strength Singularity Laser. This is ultimate unit weapon in SMAC. Units equipped with these weapons and using the earlier Singularity Engines have no problem sweeping aside any lesser-equipped enemy.

This is the reason why this technology is considered a military tech. Which is interesting given that its other benefit is to allow the construction of an economy-focused secret project. The Singularity Inductor counts as a free Quantum Converter at every base. Which is simultaneously very powerful and generally almost completely worthless in a typical game, as it is very unlikely for there to be many turns left for the investment to pay itself back.

So let’s move on to the associated quote. It’s Sister Miriam again. Which is a little surprising given that we know how her story ends. But notice that this one isn’t attributed to “We Must Dissent”. In fact, judging by the quote to the Planetary Transit System, I’d argue that “But for the Grace of God” was likely written at the height of the Believers’ fortunes. At that time, her people had just constructed their first Secret Project. And it was one that seemed to herald an age of prosperity as her people spread out to colonize wide swaths of the new world.

We can conclude, then, that Miriam’s question isn’t coming from a place of existential doubt or despair. She has been grappling with what philosophers have called the problem of evil since the beginning. And instead of making a loud statement in favor of God’s obvious goodness, she turns it around by asking instead why God would choose to create the universe at all.

This is a pretty profound line of argument. Ancient philosophers and wise men have often been drawn to the idea of perfection as that which is complete in and of itself. The image of God as an axiomatically perfect creator naturally raises the question as to why he would ever feel the need to create anything outside of himself. To create is to theoretically attempt to fill or sate a felt need. And a perfect being would logically have no such needs.

There are several natural ways to resolve this dilemma. God could not exist, God could be imperfect, God’s perfection could be best seen as some sort of dynamic state instead of as an instantiation of some Platonic ideal, or that the system defined as God includes the universe itself as a component. And those are just the possibilities that came off the top of my head; there are certainly many others. But Reynolds chooses to leave it unclear in the end as to what Sister Miriam’s answer may have been.

All of this would just be another in the long tradition of rambling that makes up the typical philosophers’ favorite pastime, were it not for the context in which the player encounters this discussion. Popping the stack a meta-level, the player actually knows the concrete answer to both of Sister Miriam’s questions: because he wanted to play a game of SMAC.

Her world exists and is filled with so much imperfection and moral evil because Reynolds and his friends at Firaxis Entertainment set it up that way. For his entertainment. From that perspective, SMAC could be seen literally as a god-game, with the player standing in as a cruel or callous god.

“Men in their arrogance claim to understand the nature of creation, and devise elaborate theories to describe its behavior. But always they discover in the end that God was quite a bit more clever than they thought.”

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “We Must Dissent”

Quantum Machinery is a twelfth-tier technology that relies on Quantum Power and Nanometallurgy. It’s labeled as an economic technology, which makes sense given that it enables the construction of one of the final pair of mineral multiplier buildings: the Quantum Converter.

But it also allows the new sixteen-strength Quantum Laser weapon. This is something that the player likely will not expect from an economic tech. But it also represents another shift in the previous pattern in the distribution of weapons throughout the technology tree.

As we have seen by now, through the early and mid-game there were two rough paths through the tree that yielded weapons improvements. The “builder” path got Missile Launchers, Fusion Lasers, and Plasma Shards along with potent economic techs, while the “conqueror” path gets early Particle Impactors, Gatling Lasers, the Chaos Gun, and ends with the Tachyon Bolt.

Originally, it appears that the game was going to have an additional rock/paper/scissors kind of element in weapon and armor selection. Basically, there were going to be two kinds of weapons (guns and lasers) and two kinds of armor (plates and force fields). Then, in theory, you’d get a bonus if you used the right defense against the right weapon type. There are lots of hints along these lines throughout the tech tree and in the printed manual.

I presume that this mechanic was removed after playtesting showed that the idea was an uncomfortable fit with the relatively simplistic core combat system inherited from the earlier Civilization games. It just added mechanical complexity without adding any real depth to the gameplay. This was a wise decision, especially in light of the balance concerns caused by the flexible unit designer.

So the variety of weapons left over from that original idea allowed Reynolds to arrange these two paths and the soft tradeoff between them. But this is no longer true in the narrower late-game section of the technology tree. There are three weapons left, they come in a strict ascending order, and they each represent a four-strength jump over their predecessor, which is calibrated to ensure that the attacker almost always has the edge in the late game.

This reflects a design pattern that is quite typical for games in the 4X genre. Designers generally want to encourage the game to come to a decisive conclusion. Even people with the legendary patience of turn based strategy gamers rarely enjoy clicking through dozens and dozens of turns long after the game has been decided. And no one likes a stalemate.

So, with its combined, powerful boosts to both military effectiveness and unit production, Quantum Machinery is intended to be the beginning of the end. If the game is still in doubt and is going to end by conquest, these bonuses will be crucial in bringing the conclusion about.

To commemorate this advance, the player gets the last of Sister Miriam’s broadsides against the scientific project as it is practiced by the other factions on Planet. This is the extension of her previous rant the player saw upon discovering the Unified Field Theory. And it’s likely these two quotes together, along with Miriam’s aggressive in-game AI, that give many players the impression that Sister Miriam is intended to be a know-nothing extremist.

This reaction is somewhat unfortunate. As we have previously seen, there’s a lot more to Miriam’s philosophy than mere unthinking nostalgia. She’s railing against the arrogance of the scientists here because she foresaw many of the dangers inherent in the world that they ended up building. And now that her concerns have been firmly marginalized in canon along with her faction, she’s got nothing left but angry denunciations with a subtext of despair. We’ve come a far way from the optimism she demonstrated in the quote to High Energy Chemistry, during the heady years just after Planetfall.

“Already we have turned all of our critical industries, all of our material resources, over to these . . . things . . . these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need of us?”

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “We Must Dissent”

As one might be able to guess from the name and the quote, Industrial Nanorobotics is labeled by the game as an economic technology. It’s on the ninth tier because it requires both Industrial Automation and Nanominiaturization. But the odd thing about that is that Industrial Automation was already implied by Nanominiaturization. So it really only has one true prerequisite.

That’s a little weird. It’s probably a small oversight on Reynolds’s part. Or, possibly, evidence of an edit to the technology tree late in production. There are signs in the text and voice files shipped with the game that a couple of planned technologies were cut from the final version of SMAC, so perhaps one of these was the second real prerequisite for this technology.

In any event, this technology is a pretty big deal in the gameplay. It unlocks the Robotic Assembly Plant base facility and the Nano Factory secret project. The latter is a significant military boost, as it cuts the cost of unit upgrades substantially and allows damaged units to heal in the field as if they were in a base with the appropriate repair facility for their chassis type.

But the former is the real benefit to this technology. Robotic Assembly Plants are a new mineral multiplier. Essentially, they’re Genejack Factories without the downside of extra drones. Of course, they naturally still have the associated ecological impact that comes from getting a giant pile of additional minerals.

From our perspective, though, the quote is a gold mine of insight. This is the first time we see Sister Miriam come out four-square against a technological advance. At the time of Planetfall, recall that she was full of as much enthusiasm as all of her fellow faction leaders. She eagerly looked forward to the new miracles the future might bring.

Her enthusiasm dimmed as the mid-game ground on. In the implied canon, this is probably equal parts a reflection of the Believers’ dimming geopolitical fortunes and dismay at seeing just how dystopian large chunks of it turned out to be. As horrified as Lal might be by Colonel Santiago’s clone-fueled Police State, how much worse must it be for Sister Miriam to watch billions upon billions of ensouled little babies get casually tossed down the shredder?

And now, as the mid-game slides toward the end, Sister Miriam has reached the point where she’s writing a tome called “We Must Dissent”. In it, if this quote is any judge, she’s loudly protesting what must seem like the inevitable march of history. The posture is reminiscent to that taken by political reactionaries throughout the West during the 20th Century, in that she sees it as morally incumbent to wage a doomed struggle against the oncoming abhorrent future.

Intriguingly, though, she’s resting her complaint here on a practical concern rather than an airy philosophical one. She refers to the potential for a nanobot uprising. Like something out of Terminator, perhaps, if Skynet were less stupid and had a couple hundred years more technological advance available to it. And the grounds for this proposed rebellion are pretty simple: there doesn’t seem to be much of a place in the future for humans, so why keep them around?

Upon reflection, Sister Miriam is the one faction leader who is uniquely qualified to make this point. Because unlike the others, her philosophy is inherently human-centric.

Zakharov cares first and foremost about knowledge. Deirdre is all about the ecology. Yang is obsessed with the idea of society-as-organism. CEO Morgan wants energy to be harnessed and applied according to intelligent values, and Santiago cares for nothing other than victory. Even Brother Lal, when you get right down to it, cares about liberty and free expression more than he cares about physical people.

None of them would have any serious, philosophical objection to replacing all their people with intelligent robots. Or possibly something even more foreign to our modern sensibilities. As long as they could ensure that their successors would continue to live by their values, they’d consider it more than a fair trade.

Only Miriam unconditionally sides with humanity as it was when it landed on Planet, as opposed to some idea of how it could be. Only Miriam demands that the future that they are building keep continuity with the past. Only Miriam demands a future that enables the kind of flourishing that their ancestors would recognize as progress, as opposed to what they would see as their extinction.

This is the ground on which Miriam stands when she insists for the rest of the game that “We Must Dissent”.

“And so we return again to the holy void. Some say this is simply our destiny, but I would have you remember always that the void EXISTS, just as surely as you or I. Is nothingness any less a miracle than substance?”

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “We Must Dissent”

The previous Orbital Spaceflight technology represented the reclamation of 1960’s-era capacity for space travel on Planet. Except instead of building giant rockets to explore Chiron’s moon Nessus, they were used to launch and assemble very large satellites in orbit – satellites so extensive that they could each feed perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year.

The next-level technology Advanced Spaceflight represents the final replication of the capabilities of Earth. In conjunction with Organic Superlubricant (and the Fusion Power it requires), it would now possible to rebuild the colony ship Unity and fly off to colonize another world. But this is not Civilization. The future is hurtling forward too quickly in SMAC for another spaceship to have the opportunity to extend the game. Humanity’s final fate will necessarily be decided here on Chiron.

So, instead of allowing the creation of a colony ship, Advanced Spaceflight unlocks several other powerful abilities. First, it unlocks the thirteen-strength Plasma Shard weapon. Which is very powerful. Plasma Shard troopers have more than twice the base strength than any available lower-tier defense. And they just tear through anything that’s relying on Silksteel or worse armor, regardless of any unit abilities or defensive modifiers that might get piled on atop that low base strength.

This means that once one faction gets Advanced Spaceflight, there are very few alternatives available to their rivals other than matching or exceeding their technological progress. Which makes the other main benefit of this technology a real problem for those who aren’t first to this technology. Advanced Spaceflight also allows the creation of Orbital Power Transmitters, which are a new kind of satellite that deliver raw energy to the surface in the same way that Sky Hydroponics Labs deliver nutrients.

The effect of this large, empire-wide injection of raw energy into the system is that the average tech rate will accelerate significantly. Unlike nutrients, energy inputs are subject to infrastructure multipliers. So even a small bonus to raw energy easily leads to a huge amount of effective energy spent on research per turn.

This is not an accident. Reynolds has gone out of his way to thickly layer the end-game in SMAC with first-to bonuses and powerful Secret Projects. So the leader heading into the end-game – which is almost assuredly the player – tends to see his lead naturally accelerate as he approaches the exciting conclusion of the game.

So it’s intriguing that Reynolds chose to introduce this technology with Sister Miriam’s musings on the nature of the void. The link to space travel is obvious. But her fierce insistence here on the metaphysical existence of empty space is fascinating. She sees God’s hand in the nothingness just as much as she sees it in any of the substance of physics or the building blocks of life.

To Miriam, the stars are separated by the vast expanses of nothing for a real, important reason. God did it. But for no facile or accidental reason. He laid out the universe as he did for a purpose. And at least part of that purpose was to give mankind a second chance.

So His mercy was not simply that he delivered the Unity’s precious cargo safely across the light-years to their new home. It was just as much in the fact that this refuge was even here in the first place. And, even more than that, it was found in that they were held apart by the void until the time came for deliverance.

“Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem.”

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”

In real life, the Unified Field Theory is the hypothesized single theory that could encompass both the standard model of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativistic gravity. Since the effects of the fundamental forces are often best described as fields, a theory that could explain all of the fields as different aspects of the same fundamental thing (in an analogous way to how the previously distinct electric and magnetic field theories were unified into a theory of electromagnetism in the 19th Century) would be a breakthrough of world-historical importance.

If you were to look at it poetically, it’s essentially the Holy Grail for physicists. Brave heroes have spent their entire lives nobly striving in vain to find it. And if one were to return triumphant, nothing thereafter would be the same.

In SMAC, this mammoth achievement is a seventh-tier technology. Sensibly, it is discovered by researchers investigating the phenomenon of Monopole Magnets in the light of the new Applied Relativity theory. Like the Superstring Theory before it, the immediate application of the Unified Field Theory is a new gun: the twelve-strength Tachyon Bolt. So this is coded by the game as a military technology.

It also allows the creation of a secret project with a grandiose title: The Theory of Everything. Which dovetails nicely into Sister Miriam’s quote. This is the first time in the game that the player sees her rail directly against the scientific enterprise, per se. Miriam’s quotes in the early game were cautiously optimistic, speaking of the miracles wrought by technical progress while simultaneously warning of the potential evils lurking therein.

But now she’s angrily denouncing the physicists as they put their finishing touches on what could very well be the last word on physics. Why? From her perspective, what has changed?

Her motivation isn’t entirely clear at this point. It’s safe to say that she sees the hubris of the physicists as particularly dangerous. In her view, they are heedlessly courting disaster. But is it the search for first and final principles itself that is, itself, the issue? Does Miriam see conceiving of the Unified Field Theory as inherently something akin to lèse-majesté?

It is possible. But in the context of the rest of SMAC, I think it is much more likely that Miriam is railing against the “how” rather than the “what”. After all, the Believers can research this technology just as easily as any of the other factions.

In the implied canon, she is blasting the University here not because they were clever enough to come up with a new theory. She’s angry because they are not approaching the subject with the proper reverence. And she’s afraid that their lack of vision is going to end up causing some real Old Testament consequences.

To be fair, it’s worth noting that Miriam’s fears are not at all unreasonable. The sixth tier of the technology tree brought with it some features that could quite easily have dystopian consequences: ultra-virulent plagues; fusion powered Planet Busters; and armies filled with twisted man-machine monstrosities.

And the game rules make it clear that the pace of history is not about to slow down any time soon. Energy is easy to come by, labs multipliers are higher than ever, and tech costs aren’t scaled to escalate nearly as quickly as their inputs for the typical player. From Miriam’s perspective, it’s urgently important that people slow down and think about what kind of world they’re so busy building before it comes to pass. God’s been looking out for them so far. But they’re pushing their collective luck, and His patience may soon be exhausted.

“The Morgans fear what may not be purchased, for a trader cannot comprehend a thing that is priceless.”

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “The Collected Sermons”

Planetary Economics is a sixth-tier economic technology. It depends on Environmental Economics and Intellectual Integrity and represents the creation of the local infrastructure capable of supporting a globally-integrated economy. By this point, I imagine the economy is roughly of the scale and sophistication as a First World economy on modern Earth, with increased technical capacity substituting for the much smaller population.

In the game, it unlocks a couple of economy boosting options: the Hybrid Forest base facility; and the Ascetic Values secret project. It also allows the player, if he is the Planetary Governor, to propose that the U.N. enforce a global trade pact.

In order to explain what that last one actually does, it’s worth taking a minute to step back and explain the commerce subsystem in SMAC. To begin, the game maintains a list of each faction’s bases, ordered by their total raw energy produced. Then, whenever two factions sign a Treaty of Friendship, their lists are compared. The top bases on each list are paired off, and then the next pair are connected, and so on until one of the factions is out of bases.

These pair-connections are what the game considers trade routes. For each trade route a city has, the game determines the value of the route by combining the energy values of the cities with the commerce rating of the faction that owns the base. Then the city is credited with extra raw energy based on the modified value of each of its trade routes. Since this is raw energy, it is then split based on the global econ/labs/psych sliders for the faction and then multiplied by the infrastructure of the base.

One of the key things to notice here is that factions profit differentially based on their commerce rating. And though this concept is referenced several times throughout the interface, it’s never directly displayed to the player. He just gets a sense of it by looking at his bases, where each trade route is displayed with the energy value to his base along with a note of how much energy he is granting to his trade partner.

Under the covers, this commerce rating is determined by a few factors. The most important is the number of “core” economics technologies the faction has mastered. These aren’t all the technologies that are marked gold in the interface. Instead, they’re the handful of ones that are intended to model key breakthroughs in economic sophistication, like Planetary Economics: Industrial Base; Industrial Automation; and so on.

Then this number is modified by any additional commerce modifiers the faction has. The Morganites get one for free, because as Miriam says, the Morgans are traders. It’s in their blood. Then any faction that has more than a +2 on the Economy social engineering scale gets additional commerce rating bonuses. The factions that can run Free Market, Wealth, and don’t have any inherent Economy malus can achieve this. The faction leader that’s elected U.N. Planetary Governor also gets a bonus along with free spy reports on all the other factions.

Then that value is subject to a couple of potential doublers. The first is whether or not the two factions have signed an alliance (called a Pact of Brotherhood in the interface). And the second is whether the U.N. global trade pact is in force. I believe these stack to 3x energy instead of 4x.

This bonus is scaled so that at the very beginning of the game trade provides no income to anyone who isn’t the Morganites. By the end-game, each trade route can be worth something in the range of twenty raw energy a turn to a faction with a strong energy focus. This bonus is why the AI Morgan in the game is so willing to pay energy credits for peace. He comes out ahead from any deal, but anyone he partners with profits as well compared to the other factions that aren’t involved in the deal.

OK. So let’s wrap back around to the quote. By the advent of this technology, we see that railing against the “1%” on Planet now makes sense in a way that it just didn’t before. And, intriguingly, this quote shows us that it’s Miriam who takes up that mantle in canon. She’s not attacking the idea of market economics here, per se, but she’s definitely railing against Morgan’s claim that maximizing energy capture is the point of life. Cultivation of the soul, through loyalty, piety, and other such traditionalist virtues must be placed above such merely materialistic concerns. They are treasured precisely because they are inherent and inalienable.