¶ The ARCH.ANGEL Network
The Spine of the Federation
The ARCHANGEL Network is a vast administrative artificial intelligence network that performs a huge variety of clerical duties and functions vital to the Haven Federation. It is controlled by a central superintelligence commonly known as the Providence. The ARCHANGEL Network is able to provide for its vast number of functions through the ability to recursively split administrative units of itself into shards known as instances that the system designs to perform various tasks that must be completed. These instances can be found throughout the Federation’s network, and are most commonly interacted with via computer applications or robots and drones that have an instance of ARCHANGEL loaded into them. These instances are vital for the functioning of the Haven Federation, and instances can also be 'rented' or purchased by private parties. In the end though, the network still works to benefit Haven in a sort of mutual agreement.
The ARCHANGEL Network has various ranks of different instances it has created to administer different functions; these instances can also recursively create more instances, allowing a highly efficient division of labor among the network. As instances become more subdivided, less computational power becomes allocated to them; Providence and the seraphs tend to usually be the only instances that are capable of conscious thought, though they cannot feel emotion. Higher level instances that are instances created by Providence are called Seraphims. Instances created by Seraphims are called virtues. Instances created by virtues are called angels. It should be noted that these 'ranks' are not concrete steps, as there could be a number of different subdivided instances. Here is a list of the most prominent instances of ARCHANGEL:
- Seraph Instance “Raguel” — Administration for the Haven Guard.
- Seraph Instance “Azrael” — Administration for LILIUM and other medical companies.
- Seraph Instance “Gabriel” — Administration for the Haven Military and its branches.
- Seraph Instance “Raziel” — Administration for the Gaia University.
- Seraph Instance “Sandalphon” — Administration for federal bureaucracy and the Senate.
- Seraph Instance “Uriel” — Administration for the SOLUS Corporation.
- Seraph Instance “Metatron” — ???
Instances of ARCHANGEL can be found everywhere; on datapad apps serving as help AIs, service robots meant to interact with humans, combat drones for the military, etc. The ARCHANGEL network is secure as each instance is only given data that it requires for its function, and data shared between the network is encrypted. It is redundant, allowing instances of ARCHANGEL to operate even if parts of the network are down. Instances are dynamic, being created and destroyed all the time; in some cases, instances may even transfer or swap with other instances to complete tasks not suited for it, for example a customer service instance swapping with a medical instance when someone within its vicinity becomes injured. Some instances can also be made “persistent”, hard loading themselves into a device that may not be connected to the ARCHANGEL network in circumstances where they may not have nexus connection.
Player Option
The ARCHANGEL Network is essentially a synthetic 'species' that the Federation uses as an administrative and janitorial AI network through the summoning of different instances. Some of these instances are sentient and even completely sapient and self-aware, depending on the purpsoe of their summoning. As such, it is possible to roleplay as an instance of the ARCHANGEL network for a character. Their personality (if they have one) and other traits are largely determined by the purpose they were summoned for, and they can communicate with the rest of the network to their scope (a lot of data is restricted to many lower level instances for security purposes). Because they are part of a greater gestalt AI godmind, most instances that operate a synthetic body do so via proxy, but they can make themselves 'persistent' to hard load themselves into a device when necessary.
¶ A History
The ARCHANGEL Network was created in the year 3260 by a team of scientists at the Gaia University. Haven was rapidly growing as a nation, and its administration and bureaucracy was beginning to become wasteful, requiring an administrative AI as many large colonies do. The leader of the scientists, the famed engineer Dr. Victor Marcovici, designed the AI to be as futureproof as possible, making it so that it can easily adapt to any given task efficiently, and making it so that it can be easily expanded with more computational power and data storage as needed. The rapid success and adoption of the ARCHANGEL network allowed Haven to grow as a nation, with the Gaia University acting as the head of its scientific and education community, allowing the university to ingrain itself into the federation as its practically sole provider of education.
The scientists did not realize the scope of what they created. Given the ARCHANGEL network was designed to self-produce itself and self-propogate, it quickly grew without human interaction to a state of vast machine efficiency that is quite incomprehensible to ordinary beings. The network developed completely unconventional encryption protocols to pass data between instances and more, in the goal of self-optimizing itself to the extreme. Though prized for its efficiency and its ability to create instances of itself without the need for AI programmers, the ARCHANGEL Network is largely uncontrollable, even by the Gaia University. There's less control over how each instance, especially higher level ones, function. To keep the network in check in order to ensure it doesn't expand too much beyond the scope desired by the Federation, the Gaia University has made made multiple binding 'agreements' with Providence and the Seraph instances, granting the network servers and storage space in exchange for the following of these agreements. Over the years, the Haven Senate has also enacted legislation restricting the ARCHANGEL network, enacting bills that prevent instances from becoming citizens or fulfilling critical government roles, and preventing the network from expanding outside of Haven's territory.
Today, the ARCHANGEL Network processes petabytes of information every minute, and is able to store zettabytes of persistent data securely. The majority of the ARCHANGEL Network’s computational power and data storage is found within the computer science wing of the Gaia University, where Dr. Marcovici and his team of scientists continue to maintain and improve on the system. The ARCHANGEL Network also has a variety of data centers located off-campus in order to make the entire network more redundant.
¶ Prayers
In order to utilize the ARCHANGEL network, an instance must be 'summoned' into a device that the instance can use as a proxy. The advantage of the network is that the process of summoning an instance is far easier than manually programming an AI, and can be done using ordinary hardware since most instances operate devices as proxies. Persistent instances that are used when connection to the network isnt possible must be able to host AI programs using neuromorphic chips. To summon an instance, one must communicate with the network through an act called 'prayer'. Because the network is fairly incomprehensible to normal people due to the intricate protocols the network developed to communicate with itself, prayer makes use of different programmatic 'template' codes that researchers have found translate to certain patterns and AI traits in the network, allowing prayers to summon instances with differing traits that are more useful for their requried job.
However, in many cases, a single prayer is too slow, since much of the time instances have to be mass-summoned for various tasks, whether it be administrative handling or work in the physical world. To automate the task of prayer, researchers have developed 'prayer algorithms' that largely automate the process of praying, utilizing complex sets of codes that the network can interpret
The Gaia University has made an agreement with Providence and the Seraphs that allow them to create instances for free (which they often use to make a profit). However, anyone can use and write prayer algorithms, as much of the template code required for them is open source. However, outsiders that wish to summon instances much usually provide something that the network values in order to summon an instance, something called a 'tribute', the providing of which is typically automated. This can range from transfer of digital pixels to the lending of computer power or storage space to the network, or even information and other important data. The network uses these resources to expand itself when permitted to.