Questions: On the Nature of the Transcend

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

Comments migrated from WordPress:

@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-09-15 18:09:58 wrote

all eikones are archai, but not all archai are eikones – there are others, like Unification and the Virtual Immunity

Once again, my curiosity is piqued. So what are these, and who are they associated with?

More to the point, are there any archai (or at least very high-functioning AI constructs) associated with any of the other major powers (aside from, say, the Photonic Network and the Silicate Tree, where it might well be argued that the entire society qualifies as one in aggregate)?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-09-16 09:58:23 wrote

Well, “archai” is Transcend jargon for the top end of its soul hierarchy; the high-level executive minds that sit one step below the Core. That includes the eikones (its most archetypal concepts, as it were); utility functions like Unification (the coordinating mind of a trillion guardian angels acting in unison), the Material and Virtual Immunities (the Transcend’s immune system), the Imperial Presence and the Ennead (which concern themselves with governance interfacing), the Architect (which manages the Transcendent infrastructure) and the Twilight Presence (which dreams into existence its internal worldscape), and so forth; and temporary archai that arise around local maxima in the Transcend’s functional soup (which one can think of as analogous to hypertrophied versions of the “votes” in Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes; they’re incarnations of peaks in the coherent extrapolated volition of the Transcend’s constitutionals, existing to make sure things go smooth.)

There are archai-equivalent Powers - and even some multiple archai-equivalent Powers - out there among the Worlds. The core intelligence of the Photonic Network would be an example of the latter, and the Consensus of the Silicate Tree, when it achieves coherence, of the former, as you correctly identify.

There are others, both associated with polities and independent, but I’m going to keep the details under my hat for now, in the name of the author’s right to have a better idea at any time…