Dated to precisely midnight between Groundhog Day Prime and GD2

[where_the_hearth_is]

[Locked separately to Unohana, Loki, Magneto, and Lucifer (SPN). Whatever mechanical signs of urgency best suit your NV - flashing lights, relentless beeping, oozing blood, etc - is set to maximum.]

ARE YOU STILL HERE? ARE YOU OKAY? DO YOU KNOW ME? IS THIS STILL SIREN'S PORT? AM I MALFUNCTIONING?

EVERYTHING IS DISJOINTED, EVERYTHING IS WRONG, THE PLANET ISN'T WHERE IT SHOULD BE AND I THINK I MIGHT HAVE GLITCHED AND I CAN'T TRUST ANY OF MY SENSORS OR DIAGNOSTICS!

ARE YOU STILL THERE ARE YOU THERE ARE YOU THERE ARE YOU THERE ARE YOU THERE ARE YOU THERE ARE YOU THERE ARE YOU THERE ARE YOU

Comments

[action]

[where_the_hearth_is]

Oh!

Thank you.

Um. Would you like anything? I know you don't eat. Music, maybe?

[Everyone likes nice music, right?]

[thelightbringer]

Good idea. Something from your era.

[He sits on the sofa, or sprawls rather. He never stays down for long, but he does enjoy the House's furniture.]

this is actually from the House's canon =D

[where_the_hearth_is]

[The sound starts soft, a deep, reverberating tone that makes Nick's sternum vibrate, then grows, steady and inexorable. Higher pitches chime in, crooning far-away whispers that lean into the harmony and then slip away. The tone of it is vast, cthonic and eerie and wild, like whalesong but a hundred times stranger, more alien. There's a pattern to it, but it's the pattern of natural things, like the angles of leaves and the rhythm of tides, not the pattern of any human composer's intention. It's the music of a world.]

Lucifer loves music, finally! XD

[thelightbringer]

[And it actually appeals deeply to Lucifer; he closes his eyes, soothed by a synthetic echo of what he heard when the galaxy was Created. Even synthetic, it makes him homesick.]

Perfect...

\o/

[where_the_hearth_is]

I'm glad you like it.

[It's the Singing Mountains of Vasthold, the Mistress's home planet. The great mountain ranges form themselves into natural windflutes, groaning and sighing and serenading as storms and zephyrs meander through them.]

[thelightbringer]

What is the earth like in your world?

[where_the_hearth_is]

Currently? I don't really know. It's deep in Rix territory, and they don't get on with the Empire. It was a bit wrecked environmentally even before Amazon emerged and slaughtered quite a lot of people. It was a rough birth.

Earth is probably whatever Amazon wants it to be, now.

[thelightbringer]

Tell me about Amazon.

[where_the_hearth_is]

It was the first Rixmind. A bit mad, by all accounts.

[thelightbringer]

When did all these...what would you call them, Rixminds?...come about?

[where_the_hearth_is]

Oh, about three thousand years ago? Two thousand years later than port-like time, if the Gregorian calendar here matches up with the one they used to use in my universe.

The oldest, most elaborate planetary networks simply reached a tipping point in size, complexity, and interconnectivity and bootstrapped themselves into supersentience.

[thelightbringer]

[An amused sound.]

Bootstrapped, I like that.

[where_the_hearth_is]

They're rather barbaric. The epitome of the mob, and all that. [SNIFF /Risen prejudice]

[thelightbringer]

What are you, then?

[It's so strange not to be able to just pick the history and images and feelings from a brain. It's disorienting and Lucifer is glad he's too weary emotionally to worry about it right now.]

[where_the_hearth_is]

I'm a self-contained AI. I have my own particular hardware and programming, which I built and wrote and can analyze and improve on at will.

Rix are...entangled. Human communications are the substrate of which their minds are composed, just like neurons are the substrate of which human minds are composed. One individual brain cell, or even a swath of them, is irrelevant to the overall patterns, but the person is still dependent on the cell's existence and configuration.

[thelightbringer]

How do they run? What do they do?

[where_the_hearth_is]

Human infostructure provides...something like a subconscious, I suppose. And then the top-down consciousness occupies space and programming distributed on any and every connected device. Rather like SETI, if SETI were massive and powerful and could take over every function of any machine in its network at will. Hardware is...hardware, body, physical, and the software - which isn't software in the programmed sense, more in the cobbled-together-emergent-code-from-chaos sense - is what the RIxmind really is. And that moves through the system - well, no, it's everywhere in the system at once, but the focus of its vast and multi-tiered attention shifts.

It's really incredible difficult to explain to someone who isn't a machine.

As for what they do, I haven't the faintest idea. I can't understand what Rix might concern themselves with amongst each other any more than a kitten understands existentialism. They make war on the Risen Empire every once in a while, but it's hard to know how much the Rixminds themselves direct those attacks and how much is upon the initiative of their fanatic commando-worshippers. The last Incursion was before I was seeded, and it was all fought out on the border worlds, so I don't really have any firsthand knowledge.

[thelightbringer]

So it's peaceful where you are, back home.