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Please note that the entirety of parts 1 and 2 are in the process of being rewritten, and if you became familiar with these works from the end of 2021-mid 2023 then much has changed. If anything is unclear, please leave a comment or reach out via PM. (tiredsn0w created the concept for this, and maintains this hub page, but Alzin Cdag and Fierce fauna have contributed much more to the worldbuilding.)
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An Alzin Cdag Essay
In the same way that Earth governments rule by virtue of their military and thus theoretical ability to protect their own people, the Kepler government rules by virtue of its monopoly on medicine. The military is small; the main use of the military is to destroy startup hospitals and other folks who want to start spreading medical knowledge.
The government presents itself as more valuable to be with than against; if the government fell, or if you cut yourself off from it, you would have nobody to take care of you when you get sick. It therefore does do the minimum and more than the minimum for all the disabled Ones.
I imagine the situation with the Twos, on the other hand, is much like the situation with the robots in Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel. Of course, the government values them over Ones for use in its wetwork, for maximum loyalty and minimum people outside missing them, or having to know about the trauma; but their symbolic value is much greater.
The government presents Twos as their own race of super-Keplerian. Ones are meant to look on them with envy, and to work harder in order to prove their own equality with the Twos, or to submit to more and more medical procedures (thus becoming further and further indebted to the government) in order to become more and more idealized, more and more perfect. To mix a feeling of rightful superiority with the feeling of present inferiority, the government assures the Ones that Twos have no feelings and are like robots. In this framework, Ones secretly admire Twos for their perfection and therefore despise them for imperfection.
But I think this gives a greater social context to Spliced. On the surface of the story, the rebels only needed a Two- any Two- to put in their experiment to create the Asu, and 5a82 was just the first one they happened to recruit. His aides 3f22 and 3f23 just came a bit later.
However, I don't think this is the case.
I think, no matter how versed in science the rebels were, they still had an ingrained religious awe about what the government was able to do with medicine. They are scared of interfering with the genetic code that is sacred, perfect.
When 5a82 enters, his existence throws all that into disarray. He is living proof of the fallibility of the government's process, that those in charge of the medicine there are merely mortal and prone to make mistakes. His imperfection is a signal of the fallibility of the virus.
He is also needed because nobody wants to experiment on "perfect" Twos, because of the remains of that religious awe. It is better to modify an existing blasphemy than pervert something already holy.
When he ends up saving them, they begin to transfer their religious awe to him. Every mortal has a religion, whether it be atheism, Unitarianism or Islam, and since the rebellion is necessarily bereft of the cult of the government, they fashion him as their new idol. This explains the transition between people being rude to him in Spliced and in awe of him in MNM.