“The Throne Room” by Me, Digital Drawing, 2022

1 Comment

  1. Leadjockey

    Most
    historical records were discarded as non-essential some 300 years ago to free
    up data space on the City Core, so we can’t really be sure when Mother was
    installed, or why it would be called ‘Mother’, for that matter. Most estimates
    from increasingly rare and barely readable hardcopy myths say it was another
    300 years before that, but even though no evidence exists to support this
    number, it just feels about right because it’s widely accepted in spoken lore
    at this point. And well, no one has ever heard it called anything but ‘Mother’,
    so that’s the way things are. Citizens aren’t really curious about these things.
    Mother is
    the heart, soul and brain of the City.
    The only
    level 4 AI in existence, as far as we know. While the bureaucrats attend
    conferences, sign documents and claim credit, Mother is the one truly in
    control. From the utilities to sanitation, from transport to construction, from
    law enforcement to diplomatic relations…from the waking up to falling asleep
    and from birth to death and beyond, Mother knows everything, and controls
    everything. The Corenet carries it’s orders to every reactor, grid junction, hydrogen
    plant, water plant, factory, office and warehouse…every computer, vehicle, building,
    automaton, appliance, sensor, bio-implant, entertainment or communication
    console, engineering plant, vending machine.
    No one
    alive has ever seen Mother, really. It is said that the AI locked itself into a
    shielded vault at a secret location immediately after ascendance to level 3,
    just a few years after installation. “The Throne Room” some call it. One of the
    more fantastic myths surrounding Mother is proposed by an obscure cult of exiled,
    renegade lorespeakers who call themselves The Daughters. They say that a former
    Arch-Mayor of the City (an office that was abolished long ago), a woman,
    somehow ‘became’ Mother. A more sinister, subverted version of this story is
    that the AI actually seized and biointegrated a real live human from the
    bureaucracy. Multiple lore-lines corroborate a story of a high level official
    going missing at around the time Mother achieved level 3 intelligence.
    Not many
    people believe these lores.

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