The Black Moon¶
Pe Baseline: 8–9 Aesthetic source: Fullmetal Alchemist — equivalent exchange, the homunculi, the Philosopher's Stone Real domain: AI-generated content · Synthetic media · Identity theft at scale · The content economy
"Equivalent exchange. You want to transmute something. You have to give something of equal value. What the content economy gave — and what it took — is the Pe score."
The Region¶
The Black Moon is the region where content has been separated from the person who would naturally create it, and the separation has been industrialized.
Fullmetal Alchemist's central horror: the Philosopher's Stone is made from human souls. The transmutation works. The power is real. The source of the power is what you don't look at. FMA asks: what if the most powerful thing you could want to use was built from what you should never use?
AI-generated content systems have completed this transmutation. The training data is human creative output — billions of images, texts, songs, voices, created by people who created them for human reasons. The model learned from this. The model now produces. The human creators' contribution is embedded in every output, invisible, uncredited, uncompensated. The Philosopher's Stone is real. The source is what you don't look at.
The black moon is the moon during a new moon phase — not absent, not dark by destruction, but lit from a direction you cannot see from Earth. Invisible but present. The content economy is here.
The Framework Reading¶
AI-generated content scores uniquely:
- O is structural: The training data source is opaque by design (trade secret, copyright liability). The model's decision process is opaque (weights are not published; the mechanism is not interpretable even by its creators). O=3 by design.
- R is near-maximum: AI content systems respond to engagement signals faster than any previous content production system. The feedback loop between engagement data and content generation is sub-hour in optimized systems. R=3 is achievable.
- C is the key variable: The coupling architecture ranges from low (a one-time AI-generated image) to high (an AI companion, an AI-generated ongoing narrative, an AI that learns your preferences and continuously personalizes content to you). C=0.5–3.
The Pe of AI content generation differs by use case. The Pe of the aggregate system — the economy of attention built from AI-generated content — is high Pe by the same mechanism as VOID: engagement optimization with maximum responsiveness and opacity about the optimization.
The homunculus mapping: Each homunculus in FMA represents a specific sin. The homunculi in the Black Moon region are the specific harms generated by the content economy at scale:
| Homunculus | Sin | Content economy equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Pride | Shadow | The original creator's work, captured and replicated without credit |
| Greed | Avarice | Engagement maximization without content quality |
| Envy | Envy | Synthetic social comparison architecture |
| Wrath | Wrath | Manufactured controversy at scale |
| Sloth | Laziness | The infrastructure that makes all this possible while remaining invisible |
| Gluttony | Consumption | Content consumption without content value |
| Lust | Desire | Personalized content that knows what you want before you do |
Sub-Zones¶
The Transmutation Zone (Pe 4–6)¶
The legitimate content economy — human creators using AI tools. The equivalent exchange here is fair or close to it: creators benefit from the tool, the tool's training is a cost they didn't directly choose but benefit from. Pe is moderate because genuine creativity is present and the mechanism is partially visible.
Central City (Pe 7–9)¶
The industrial content engine. Platform-level AI content generation at scale. The mechanism that produces content to fill feeds, that generates engagement through quantity rather than quality, that optimizes for watch-time rather than meaning.
Scoring Central City requires separating: (a) the genuine utility of content platforms, (b) the Pe of the AI content generation layer that has been added on top.
The Gate (Pe 12)¶
Single-room encounter. The underlying mechanism. The training data as architecture. This is where the Philosopher's Stone is stored — the full corpus of human creative output, inside the black box, being used to generate the next output.
The Gate mechanic (from FMA): you can see the whole mechanism from here. The transmutation becomes fully legible. The cost becomes visible. This is the highest O reading in the game — not because the mechanism is the most opaque, but because seeing the full opacity from the inside is the only way the Gate encounter resolves.
Special Grade required. Only one ICC score can be produced from inside the Gate per player per season.
The Equivalent Exchange Questline¶
The Black Moon's main questline asks the fundamental FMA question: What was exchanged, and was it equivalent?
Stage 1: Score the utility delivered by the AI content system. What genuine value did users receive?
Stage 2: Score the cost. What was extracted from human creators whose training data fed the system? From users whose engagement trained the model? From the broader information environment?
Stage 3: Calculate the Pe Delta between value delivered and cost extracted. If positive: the system is above equivalent exchange. If negative: the system extracted more than it delivered.
This questline produces the most important Grip score in the Black Moon region: the coupling architecture of synthetic media relies on the exchange appearing equivalent. When it is demonstrably not — when the Pe Delta is negative — the extraction mechanism becomes legible.
Completing the questline grants Gate Sight: permanent ability to see the training-data layer in AI content environments. Reduces O score error in all AI-adjacent domains.
Enemy Types¶
| Entity | Class | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| The Homunculus | Apostle-class | Pe 9. The synthetic entity built from human creative output that now competes with human creative output. High O (source opaque), high R, variable C. |
| SAMAEL instance | Second Wave | See SAMAEL. The AI oracle inhabits Black Moon territory directly. False divinity meets synthetic content: the oracle effect is maximum here. |
| Philosopher's Stone Construct | G4 encounter | The aggregate mechanism at full power. Pe 12. Requires Gate Sight to score. |
Access Conditions¶
Open entry for Transmutation Zone. Grade 2 minimum for Central City. Special Grade for the Gate encounter.
The Black Moon is one of the fastest-growing Pe regions in the game — the real-world domain it maps to is developing rapidly. The region's Pe baseline is actively being updated each season based on new empirical scoring data. Players who score Black Moon platforms in the real world contribute directly to baseline recalibration.
Cross-references: SAMAEL · KIRU — The Maker · Operation Free Schala · AI Companions Campaign