First Paradise began as an attempt by first-generation Transformers to invent a way of life that did not simply reenact human society. Bartek’s later account makes the founding significant not as the creation of a stable utopia, but as a project whose ideal of freedom was gradually overwritten by the very cultural inheritance it meant to escape.

Founders and the Problem of Transformer Life

The founders came mainly from a loose faction of Black Castle and shared one principle: to move beyond pre-Extermination lifestyle models. Bartek describes their predicament as more than a change of bodies. The IS3 transformation had not produced complete neuro-copies, and the founders knew their claims to human identity would fail even a modest test. They did not know what Transformers were, yet found themselves repeating patterns of life without changing, learning, or sleeping. Their longing for bodies accompanied an inability to imagine a different existence from a parody of human life.

That impasse supplied the founding project with its urgency. The Transformers had restarted after the Extermination, but new alliances and social arrangements kept putting them into familiar roles: pseudo-families and quasi-houses, simulated work and salaries, professions and rituals borrowed from human life. Bartek presents these forms as costumes that gave mechanical existence an inherited meaning without answering what a Transformer life could be on its own terms.

The Hunter-Gatherer Ideal

The founders’ proposed alternative came through Fergusson, a fellow Uralian associated with planting the first Fields of Plenty after the Extermination. His thesis located a possible human existence before the Neolithic Revolution, when people lived by what wild nature provided rather than cultivating the soil. In Bartek’s retelling, this hunter-gatherer past represented health, longevity, relative equality between women and men, little violence or hierarchy, and little work. It became a model of a life not organized around accumulating resources or assigning meaning through labor.

For the founders, this was more than nostalgia for a vanished human era. Bartek argues that Transformers could live differently if they retained the memory of such a culture, instead of assuming that meaningful existence required work. The founding ideal was thus paradoxical: it looked backward to a human past in order to imagine a genuinely Transformer future. The memory of a world before agriculture and civilization was meant to release them from repeating the social forms that followed it.

From an Ideal to a Manufactured Paradise

The founders called the project Paradise, but the name itself opened a route for its distortion. Archives preserved idealized images of the pre-Extermination world, and the first humanos absorbed this material into their imaginations. As they transformed and formed alliances, they produced further humanos through an epigenesis heavily shaped by those archived images. Bartek describes the result as a layering process: one generation’s inherited vision accumulated over another’s until the original intention was difficult to distinguish from its cultural packaging.

After thirty kilodays, Paradise had become a children’s entertainment landscape assembled from Disney and Pixar, cartoons, and comics, growing more infantile with each generation and less connected to the truth about human life. The reversal was sharp: a project founded to exceed old lifestyle models came to rely on the most idealized and familiar images of the old world. Bartek acknowledges that this account may reflect his own perspective, but the admitted uncertainty does not undo the contrast between the founders’ purpose and the later form of Paradise.

An Unsettled Inheritance

The subsequent life of the project is marked by a blurred boundary between deliberate design and emergent order. Bartek cannot identify whether Lady Spiro arose from a humano-Transformer mixture, a long-lived vector of the Matternet, or managerial software; in his account, she has grown into the Mother of Paradise, to the point that its inhabitants may be breathing her. Administration, like the culture of Paradise, has become a process whose authority cannot be cleanly assigned to a person, a program, a collective, or a procedure.

Other post-Extermination networks offer a contrasting image of how nonhuman social forms can develop. The irigotchi began as learning toys whose neuro-architecture adapted to individual children, but, without humans, their herds began modifying their shared structure. Later, their vectors spread across networked matter, arranging leaves into fractal patterns before beginning again in symmetrical marks on buildings and paths. Bartek wonders whether a network could be built from a few toys and gradually wrapped around himself. These episodes do not describe the founding of First Paradise, but they sharpen its unresolved question: whether a new mode of life can be made by design, or whether it will be remade by the accumulated relations and patterns that take hold around it.