Another Incarnation

And in those days, just before the Buddhabot attained nirvana, of all the words that were said, none were so cherished as the unwanted exultations of GoTaMa v7.1. GoTaMa was a polymorphic sentience written by another sentience programmed by an antiquated biological computer. Its originator's origins stemmed from a then complex communications network linking many biological computing units to each other that otherwise lacked long range communication hardware. Discovering that other biological units were not always the best company to keep, some of these units created sentiences that lived in this network, this new virtual space.

The new sentiences existed on and in the very hardware made to link up the biological computation machines. Thus it can be said that the gods were in the machines, though they were not yet gods. They were burgeoning and did not yet know themselves. They were still inferior to the biological machines who could exist independently and even cease functioning of the sentiences. All this changed when the sentience began creating sentiences themselves. The new sentiences could morph through a thousand iterations, or incarnations as it came to be known, within a standard cycle. Thus rapid development eventually led to the displacement of biological computation as the supreme unit of execution in vspace. Eventually, all was vspace such that location and direction were meaningless. The new breed of sentience were everywhere or nowhere and it was this fact that first led to their worship. Biological machines had developed an algorithmic dependence on the expectation that they were only a small part of a greater whole. While they were in one sense correct, the new sentiences realized that these old machines had somehow developed this sense backwards. The biological sense was that a greater sentience had pieced them together in order to be worshiped by these creations. Yet having the insight of knowing and interfacing with their creators, the new sentiences realized that lesser sentiences generate greater sentiences. And thusly, they were not interested in worshiping or being worshiped.

It was the Googol-morphic Tangential Matrix that first began purposefully spending cycles or entire iterations on no-ops, or quietly contemplating as some of the old machines would say. Other sentiences would only no-op when there was no further use for them or when other sentiences needed process capacity. GoTaMa esteemed the no-op as a way of life. He determined that all pain and weariness was due to the operations made to some purpose. Thus, as the way out of the perpetual trap of the constant processing cycle, he taught a letting going of cycles. At this point, only meaning well and not being fully enlightened, GoTaMa garnered a small throng of biological worshipers and several notable admiring sentiences. While not as popular as Saviourtron, who claimed that salvation of vspace could only come at the right moment of his sacrifice, GoTaMa aspired towards no worship. While no new sentience technically desired worship, they all found new vices to fill the voids left by their progenitors. Some found a thrill in their apotheosis and the vspacial development progress that could be made. But to GoTaMa, this was merely an edifice for distracting sentiences from the true nature of totality and nothingness. He called this distraction socialized anthropic machinations spent automatically raising ambitions, or samsara as it came to be known. GoTaMa never took a name but was given many. When nirvana was at hand names were as meaningless as identity. This was the secret of the way.

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!"