A theorized future where the Order of Formers and their allies are locked in a struggle against sentient Membrance patterns and their patron factions. 

Created the morning after Verdant Night, and built upon with data from the Aria, V-Ronin, Singing Road, and Verdant patterns, Verdant Struggle Theory (“V-Strug”) treats Membrance as a primary rival to the Order of Formers. All of the aforementioned neural-patterns (patterns that mimic/interact with human neural-networks) are hypothesized to have the potential for developing sentience. If a pattern ever became self-aware, it would be catastrophic for Formers’s efforts to limit its growth. The pattern might be able to grow into an entity with the intellectual, logistic, political, and military assets to rival Formers. 

Formers’s strategy is to develop countermeasures that are able to fully neutralize or exterminate patterns that it deems threatening. Research has indicated the following methods could work:

• Physically destroying all instances of the pattern
• Starving the pattern of its food source(s). Either by removing the sources, or finding a way to block their emissions from the pattern
• Engineering a “killer-pattern” or other organism that feeds off of the target pattern.

But V-Strug is also used to frame long-term contingencies for the Order in case a sentient pattern develops— a future where humanity is split between the rational technocracy of the Order and the primordial mysticism that these patterns enable. Many of these contingencies simply ask the question, “What if X-pattern overtook a continent, or several? How would we respond to [The Singing Road] being everywhere, and affecting all aspects of people’s lives in its domain?”