Votann

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"Forty-Two"

"Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a [Votann]. We are close to gods, and on the far side. ‘We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying."

– An ancient Votann speaking with a (soon to be dead) tech-priest

"Behold the One Commandment: God Needs booze RAM."

– An ancestor after speaking with the Votann for the first time.

The Votann (also known as Ancestor Cores) are massive AI constructs that are venerated like ancestors by Leagues that share their name. These are closely guarded secret, for reasons that should be obvious, and while the word itself might be known to outsiders, the precise meaning is know only to the Kin.

Each Votann is a massive repository of knowledge. This knowledge concerns topics all the way from Science and Engineering, to Military theory and Strategy, and even Philosophy and Genealogy. They're even some STC fragments in there, big 'uns too, from the sound of it. Basically, if you have a question, then these things can probably answer it. All these constructs are absolutely priceless relics, essential to their League, and the members of each League are more than willing to lay down their lives to protect their League's Votann, and probably another League's too, if push comes to shove.

Unfortunately, even these majestic devices were not designed to last forever, and over time, more and more of their memory has been used up. This has caused many Votann to slow, and develop idiosyncrasies, even what you might call personalities, and response times have become painfully long, sometimes taking decades or even centuries for them to answer complex questions. Their minds may have a bandwidth and memory capacity greater than sneaker-net, but that bandwidth comes at the expense of latency being as long as three hundred billion millisecond pings (to all the IT guys in the audience, just ignore how tortured this analogy is).

There's no mention of why the Kin haven't asked the Votanns themselves how to fix them, attach more hard drives, or run the de-fragmentation tool. It could be that the Votann don't actually know (perhaps even by design as a safeguard against another Men of Iron scenario), or perhaps the Kin have asked, and the answer is so complex that, with their current latency issues, no "living" Votann has been able to answer, even after many centuries.

Trivia

The name Votann is pretty obviously derived from Wotan, the German name for the god most famously known as Odin (remember that Germans pronounce W's as V's). Presumably this is a reference to his role as a god of runes and wisdom.