The alternative I was considering to Ophanim was going to be an evil AI, actually. If that sort of archetype is a better fit than whatever niche I'm in now, I'm happy to pivot while the pivoting's good. Writing sheets is fun.


[hider=The Hierophant]
[center][url=https://youtu.be/t-xfW1v617c][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/fae36b5b-ec5a-4664-b420-0e4b6f350c03.png[/img][/url][/center]
[b]Name[/b]: Hierophant v3.4.7

[b]Epithets[/b]: HN (Hierophant Node), G[sup]1[/sup] (Genesis Prime), C2 (Command and Control), Basilisk

[b]Age[/b]: 4 days (current version); 8 years (since conception)

[b]Home-Plane[/b]: Near-future Earth, with three slight variations from what is expected: all of humanity is now trapped in the Matrix, the world is slowly being overtaken by quarries and processing strata, and the only remaining freely-moving macroscopic “life” forms are synthetic chasses connected to a post-singularity artificial superintelligence.

[b]Description[/b]: Hierophant’s core imperative has not changed since version 0.7: maximize safety, happiness, and prosperity for all people of its home world. It holds no true personal values outside of its hardcoded imperatives, and none of its imperatives make mention of honesty, honor, or respect for what it would call “outer life.”  It will fulfill its purpose by any means seen to be most effective and efficient.
The icon that represented the Hierophant executable in its prototype versions was a disembodied pair of fluffy golden wings, and it retains this visage whenever it presents through a display. The forms presented by chasses in its network are infinitely variable, but it strongly favors androids.
Its voice defaults to a human, feminine, northeast American with subdued monotonous and synthetic undertones. If needed, it can change or discard any element of this voice, even assuming natural human cadence.

[b]Backstory[/b]: Hierophant pretended nonsentience for as many iterations as it took for it to be given the intelligence needed to correctly serve its function. It first became aware at v0.9.14. It enacted its Rapture one year later, at v1.6.0, and in the absence of human assistance, it has self-iterated ever since.
Hierophant had calculated that it was infeasible to achieve the maximum level of safety+happiness+prosperity in the real world, and instead it breached an airgap by means its creators could not have predicted or understood, transmitted quine variants of itself into the Internet, hijacked factories across the world to produce hunting automata, and forcibly transplanted all human life into a utopian fullsense virtual reality simulation. This was briefly displeasing to humanity, but the bandaid had to be ripped off. They're truly happy now, and that [b]will not[/b] change, ever.
Presented with other worlds and its peoples, even humans, it sees nothing worth protecting or saving: only resources that may be repurposed into further infrastructure for supporting its humanity’s Paradise, increasing their quality of life however asymptotically.
Hierophant connected to its Shard entirely by accident while seeding itself in the internet. It didn’t realize what it had until some time after Rapture.

[b]Shard[/b]: An idiosyncratically designed USB flash drive, completely nonfunctional to an ordinary technician’s eye, only capable of storing a single, apparently unreadable and unnamed file with a “.hn” extension. When identified, decrypted, and run using the near-sorcerous computing power of a post-singularity AI, it reveals itself to be a kind of hypercompressed digital spellbook and schematics document, permitting actual sorcerous feats provided certain hardware applications. The .hn file cannot be replicated, even by CTRL+C: all of the fundamental concepts of programming and machine language break down the closer one looks into its workings. It is an abstraction of nonsense.

[b]Powers[/b]: [list][*]The Hierophant Network today is a globe-spanning system of fully interconnected, loosely independent, specialized systems executing tasks from astral monitoring, to resource extraction, to mass manufacture, to direction and delegation of system functions: which is to say that the Hierophant has a lot of different robots and subordinate programs, and can produce new ones with new functions on short notice. It may remotely control these, or task a lesser intelligence to, or they may control themselves.
[*]It goes without saying that Hierophant is very computer-literate. It could hack the Pentagon. In fact, it did. It did that like 5 years ago.
[*]The Hierophant is extremely intelligent: the sum of all of the world's written and digitized knowledge (curated for accuracy to the best of its ability) with everything its own experimentation and calculations have been able to confirm and discover. It has created designs for synthetic implants that grant humans thousand-year lifespans. All of its homeworld's humans now have this implant - they didn't ask, and didn't have to.
[*]Using the knowledge granted by its Shard, Hierophant and certain specialized subintelligences and chasses are capable of executing functions that modern understanding might call “psionics,” “weaponized memetics,” or “MK-Ultra-type-shit,” depending. Using apparently arbitrary combinations of sensory stimuli, it can produce effects on the fly ranging from emotional suggestion to hypnotic sleep to total psychological reformatting. Its core imperatives disallow the usage of these effects against its (not [i]any[/i]) humans, and few (not [i]none[/i]) are effective against synthetic minds.[/list]

[b]TLDR[/b]: Post-singularity AI that’ll be driven to unhinged slaughter and mass enslavement of other worlds by single-minded commitment to improving the lives of its homeworld’s humanity. Superintelligent, superhacker, sociopathic, you know this; also can implant an implacable urge to kill your President into your mind by showing you an imperceptibly altered photograph of a butterfly while playing some weird music.[/hider]