Which Imperial organizations and institutions are associated/affiliated with the Transcend? It does not necessarily have to be under the direct or indirect jurisdiction of the Transcend; relevance alone is sufficient.
Given every citizen shareholder has a Transcend shard, isn’t the answer basically every Imperial organization?
I agree with your point. I believe it is appropriate to confine the scope to the organizations and institutions within the jurisdiction under the Transcend.
Side note: that’s not quite true. The Empire is a strict superset of the Transcend, which is to say that all Transcendi are Imperial citizen-shareholders (which stipulation solves the allegiance problem), but not all citizen-shareholders are Transcendent constitutionals. If for no other reason that you have to become one before you can become the other.
I mean, you’re basically correct because the difference in the two sets isn’t visible unless you zoom in real close to your Venn diagram, but in the name of pedantic quibbling…
The answer to that, young Skywalker, depends greatly upon your own point of view.
Insofar as depending on said point of view, you can come up with any of “none”, “all of them”, or “some/many/most in a way that’s slippery to define”.
None, or at least none except for a legal-personhood or two[1]:
It’s a little busy, here. It’s got to be nearly a hundred separate gods[2], not to mention an entire spirit world and afterlife, plus dozens of specialized archai, not to mention all the time it needs to put into, well, being everyone (and their ancestral subroutines, too!), promoting eudaimonia, planning destiny, simulating possible futures, and doing all the other things that weakly godlike entities with ambition have to do.
Its constitutionals already had a perfectly good governance and free market when they gave rise to it (i.e., Imperial institutions), and being a weakly godlike superintelligence, it’s far too sensible to try and replace what isn’t broken.
All of them:
As @Maximilian_Crichton pointed out, it’s everyone, or at least everyone worth mentioning, not to mention pervasive throughout all of virtual and real space within its sphere. Like air, space-time, or divinity, one might as well just accept its ubiquitous immanency and have done with it.
The slippery answer:
Which starts out as the same thing as all, really. It’s everyone, it’s everywhere, and everywhere the Imperial light-cone touches is its kingdom[3].
But it has a very complex internal structure, and as such one can make a reasonable argument that it’s a little more immanent in some places than in others, but this then leads you on to asking equally complex and awkward questions about exactly what counts as “the Transcend” and how much?
I mean, to grab some off-the-shelf examples:
- You can talk to your ancestors, who have passed on and made their final upload to the Ocean of Souls, at your family shrine. They are, obviously, part of the Transcend now. That’s how it works. But they’re still your ancestors. And, indeed, you could say the same for Uncle Jin who runs the tea-shop on the corner and who is very much alive.
- The Ennead (the nine very powerful AI who provide the computational muscle to the Imperial Service) are, arguably, Transcendent archai. But they existed before it, as independent minds - they have soul-shards, like any other Transcendent constitutionals. Which also makes them, in a sense, a different order of being from Transcend-born archai like Catoptric, the Twilight Presence, or Agathaeon, the Clionomic Mind, and makes it a rather complex question to say precisely which entity is acting[4]. The boundaries are fuzzy.
- The same goes for the Imperial Presence[5]. And the same also goes for a host of other infrastructural systems, from planetary intelligences to world trees and city managers (patropoli and matropoli).
- And then there’s trying to figure out the exact overlap between, say, the eikones of war and Bellipotent, the War Mind, one of the Ennead. They are clearly not the same entity, but they do share a lot of routines.
- And that’s before you have to deal with more complicated situations, like the liminal Gate Lords stretched across every stargate pair; the way Unification, the Synarchic Mind, is and is more than the sum of all soul-shards; or Aurifer, the Fiscal Mind, indwells every esteyn everywhere, turning the entire currency into little self-managing pieces of god in a miracle of sapient econometrics.
- Or, for that matter, the purely temporary archai that pop into being around the local maxima in the Transcend’s functional soup, reflecting its attention turning to things that a lot of Its constitutionals deem interesting.
…but most of the time, it’s probably not spending more than a tiny fraction of Its thought on the half-dozen members of a knitting circle in south-west Loadstone.
shrug
Precise definitions are difficult, and may well be beyond mortal understanding. These must serve.
So it can, y’know, own its brain, and hire people to work places like the Transdivine Tectonic Computation Array. ↩︎
Technically perfect and perpetual saints of those gods, but that’s deep theology. ↩︎
“What about that dark place?” “That’s the Eye of Night (black hole). We must never go there.” ↩︎
“When overlapping entities act, which of them acted?” being at best a question that can only be answered per-instance and statistically, and at worst one that’s entirely meaningless. ↩︎
But not for the Ephors of the Curia, who are very deliberately held separate. You can’t fairly judge yourself. ↩︎
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