When the CIA began testing drugs on soldiers and other Americans, the goal was to discover a means to control and contain them - to turn the drugs into part of the overall conditioning program used to keep us all in check, having the many doing what needs to be done in the eyes of the few. Of course, like most intense trips, they found what they were looking for. The underlying need to find a means to control became the impetus for the Control Machines. The very foundation of their existence is to control everything within the junkscapes. Born from a subconscious need for order, reinforced by government paranoia, and fed by the fears of the unwitting subjects of these very experiments, the Control Machines are not so much malicious as the personification of paranoia and the need to maintain order.

Soldiers are trained to dehumanize the opponents, to think of them as machines. The Control Machines, born of the junk dreams of these soldiers, seek to dehumanize the world, to see it on a holistic scale where societal groupings are what they deal with, not individuals. Individualism is chaotic, humanizing, personal. Everything the Control Machines see is patterns, smooth flows of data, quiet and unintrusive. If their world-view was so simplistic as this, perhaps they could be somehow beneficial to society as a whole. But beneath the logic and pattern-recognition is a deeply neurotic mind, one birthed of paranoia and fear. While big government was looking for control mechanisms, the guinea pigs in the experiments were isolated, thrown into incredibly deep trips into the junkscapes without proper preparation, nor the mind-set that could grasp what was occuring. The man was always there, always watching, waiting for a report, for the right report. The drugs changed from day to day, trip to trip. The settings were cold, sterile, hostile. The reports were written and fed into machines (electronic and bureaucratic, uncaring and daunting, consuming and consumptive) unrelentingly and with no perceivable result. The test subjects had to find out how to survive in this environment, and a hostile climate of cold paranoia was the best defence. But shields such as those are impossible to maintain in the face of massive dosages and deep immersion trips into the junkscapes. The facade had to crack, and the paranoia was tinted with fear, wonder and horror - and a need to escape the junkscapes, to return to the normal world beyond.

The Control Machines are the imperfect melding of these neurotic memes - the need to dehumanize and abstract, to control and maintain, to find and keep a status quo and the irrational fear of existance, a deep-rooted hatred and paranoia where everything is completely beyond the ability to control and a deep-seated need to be reminded of their own humanity in the face of an uncaring, devouring machine. Each Control Machine is its own worse enemy, except for the other Control Machines.

For there are many.

The experiments that created the Control Machines were not universal, nor linked. Around the globe, Control Machines came into existence despite themselves, each a paranoid entity confined to the junkscapes and seeking to control everything, and to escape the limits of the junkscape. Each bears remarkably similar neuroses, tinted by the scenario that birthed it. Each sees the others as a horrible abomination, something that seeks to repress and control it, that wants to reduce it to a pattern, something to be controlled and monitored. Each fights to be an individual in the face of the Control Machines.