House of the Broken Gods

"Get the moral imperative configurator online, dammit!" the foreman bellowed.

"We can't bring it back online until the logic unit reboots," the technician protested.

"Well, reroute around it. We don't have to have the logic unit," the foreman rallied.

"But without it, the configurator can't apply any limiting parameters to its moral judgment unit."

"So! This is a god-machine isn't it?" The technician almost wept. "Why should it have limits anyway?" the foreman continued.

"Well, this is only one node. The stochastic nature of the voting algorithm will ensure limitless possibilities, but each individual unit needs to have its own set of parameters based on its primary directive, even to the point where each node is technically deterministic, if you could ever aggregate the entire contents of memory for analysis."

"Spare me the jargon. When will it be ready?" the foreman grumbled.

"The LPU will be back online within the hour. Then we can restore the moral configuration from quantum backups. Once that's going, we can reinitiate the main cognizance thread for this node and reconnect to the network. I'd say a couple hours should do it."

"Gods shouldn't have this much downtime," the foreman thought. "Why can't we just reconnect now?"

"Huh! You can't bring the neural interface back up without the LPU for sure. So you know what kind of chaos that would cause? There's a reason why certain failures cause automatic disconnects. Even then, we'd be reckless to let the node back online without its MPU."

"Two hours then!"