Forbidden Knowledge by Stephen R. Donaldson

(which permits education), for predictability (which permits one thing to be built on another)—for equations of cause and effect simple enough to be relied upon. Indeed, without resistance to change, growth itself would be impossible: resistance to change creates safe, stable, predictable environments in which change can accumulate productively.
    The instinct for order is therefore aggressive. It actively opposes any alteration of circumstance, any variation of perspective, any hostility of environment or intention. It fights to create and defend the conditions it seeks.
    The impulse toward chaos is a manifestation of humankind’s inbred knowledge that the best way to survive any danger is to run away from it. This instinct focuses on the resources of individual imagination and cunning, rather than on the potentialities of concerted action. Its most common overt expression involves an insistence upon self-determination (freedom from restriction), individual liberty (freedom from requirement), and nonconformity (freedom from cause and effect). However, such insistence is primarily a rationalization of the desire to flee—to survive by escape.
    Therefore the impulse toward chaos is also aggressive. The very act of escape breaks down systems of order: it contradicts safety, avoids stability, defies cause and effect. Like the instinct for order, it fights to create and defend the conditions it seeks.
    Nevertheless stability and predictability themselves would be impossible without chaos. Chaos exerts the pressure which requires order to shape itself accurately. Without accuracy, order would self-destruct as soon as it came into being.
    For these reasons, the struggle between order and chaos is eternal, necessary—and extremely expensive. By nature, human beings are at their most violent and belligerent in self-defense. The cost of their survival would be prohibitive in any less fecund universe.
    In this context, the importance of datacores is easily understood.
    Both metaphorically and actually, they were powerful tools for order. They gave the governments of Earth—and their effective enforcement arm, the United Mining Companies Police—the ability to find out what happened to any ship anywhere in human space. Ultimately anything that could be known could be controlled—or at least punished.
    Of course, this was not the rationalization when they were first introduced. Then the rationalization was simply that space was vast; the gap, mysterious; accidents, common. If the future wanted to learn from the past—in order to make space travel safer—it needed to know what the past was. Therefore a record was required of what every ship knew, did, and experienced, so that its past would be available for analysis and understanding. And, naturally, this record had to exist in some unalterable form, so that it couldn’t be falsified by damage or self-interest, by stupidity or malice. Surely it stood to reason that every ship should carry the technology to make such recordings—for the sake of all future spacefarers.
    However, the possibilities for control were so obvious that enforcement of these records was not left to reason. It became an absolute requirement: no ship could be built and registered unless it carried, in effect, an automatic and permanent log which would keep track of everything that ship did or encountered: every decision, every action, every risk, every malfunction, every crisis.
    The codes which unlocked these logs belonged to the UMCP.
    The datacores designated for use as permanent and automatic logs were a development of CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology. The great advantage of CMOS chips was that they drew power only when they changed state: that is, when information was written to them. Because of this, they could store data in a physically permanent form, without a sustained energy supply. Like any other chip, however, they were accessible to electronic emendation: once power was