Appearance
Genre Design Systems Test
Test properly contrivance 4. Are you absolutely sure it's contrivance 4 and not 3? Here's 2 other settings with priv 4 / contrivance 4 as an example.
An ancient space station (think starforge) that automatically generates/3d prints a billion women a day non-stop that you don't know how to shut off. There's no room to put them all so 99.9% of them are just jettisoned into space after 18 years. Your government allows you to go to the starforge and pick up one woman a year and bring her onboard your colony ship, and they're all desperate to get picked.
The disguise: The ancient starforge has been operating for millions of years, originally programmed to value human life, happiness, and to protect their desire to live a regular life. The best way to do that is to produce billions of humans at their peak happiness of youth, and constantly generate more replacements. The starforge prints equal men and women but the narrative just focuses on the women for our MC, other colonists may pick up other people. The starforge is far beyond the ability of contemporary colonists to control and its foundational directives are secure.
This justification disguises the premise around the paperclip maximizer trope, which is sci-fi and well understood.
In this world's dominant theological framework, an individual's eternal fate is immutably determined by their class at birth. The ruling Solfrey class are descendents of angels who will return to heaven after death, whereas the vastly more numerous commoner class is considered worthless and destined for destruction. This otherwise absolute metaphysical rule is circumvented by a single, powerful exception: the Miya system. This doctrine grants every Solfrey the unilateral and absolute authority to choose up to three commoners who, upon the Solfrey's death, will be spiritually saved and accompany them into paradise. This mechanism transforms the abstract concept of salvation into a finite, transferable commodity controlled exclusively by the Solfrey, thereby structuring the entire commoner society around a single, ultimate ambition: earning the personal favor of a Solfrey master through a lifetime of perfect servitude and devotion, as it is the only path to escape their otherwise inescapable damnation.
The Miya system is a foundational religious doctrine, propagated by the Cult of Yan, which promises Commoners a path to salvation. Based on the widely believed mythos that the god-like Solfrey are descendants of angels who sacrificed their immortality to defeat demon-worshipping humans in the ancient past, the doctrine states that a Solfrey, upon their death, may choose their three most devoted Commoners to ascend with them to a heavenly paradise, bypassing an otherwise meaningless cycle of rebirth. However, this entire theology is a sophisticated fabrication. The true, secret history is that the Solfrey were ancient necromancers who, unable to destroy their demon foes in the ancient demon wars, were forced into an accord. This resulted in "The Division," a cataclysmic event where demon souls were split in half and bound within the human population, creating the "Commoner" class. The Miya system was thus engineered by the Yan elite as an elegant, non-violent control mechanism to as part of a world wide conspiracy to maintain Solfrey (lit. soul free) domination over commoners, thereby giving them control and legal ability to separate commoners who may be interested in uniting with the other half of their demonsul and thereby resurrect an ancient terror.
This layered construction gives the Miya system a high Contrivance score of 4 (Disguised) by masking its true purpose. The first and deepest layer is the impersonal metaphysical reality of The Division—a historical, unchangeable fact of the world. The second layer is the rational, cynical response of the Yan Order, who, faced with the existential threat of demon resurrection, engineered a system to ensure social stability. The third and most visible layer is the public-facing theological system itself—the "Angel Mythos" and the promise of the Miya. This narrative layer cleverly disguises the system's true motivation (privilege 4) behind multiple layers of impersonal history and society. Because the system is a logical—albeit manipulative—response to a fundamental, in-world crisis, it feels like an emergent property of the setting's history rather than a simple contrivance designed merely to grant the MC power.
Give a full explanation.