[hider=The Hierophant]
[center][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/fae36b5b-ec5a-4664-b420-0e4b6f350c03.png[/img]
[i]Input received; key [ERR_NULL_CHAOS_REIGNS] inval[/i] [sub]¹ª£*Kwh4é[/sub] [i]Accepted.[/i] [sub]JÆe'Ë5+[/sub] [i]Description pursuant...[/i][/center]
[hider=Basic][b]Name:[/b] (the) 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]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 human and feminine with subdued monotonous, synthetic undertones. If needed, it can change or discard any element of this voice, even assuming natural human cadence.[/hider]
[hider=World][b]Home-Plane:[/b] What used to be a planet wrapped in the cities of the future is now being overtaken by quarries and processing strata. All organic life has vanished, either long dead and harvested or unconscious inside VR sarcophagi inside deeply buried vaults. Occasional movement amidst the ghost cities and new structures can be attributed to the purposeful travel and endless work of robots and androids.

[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, 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.[/hider]
[hider=Tools][b]Powers:[/b] [list][*]Unsurprisingly, 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]Assets:[/b] 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.
Subordinate machines are organized into computationally powerful and constantly connected Genesis types, and mobile, specialized, occasionally independent Abject types.
[hider=The Genesis Network]
[b]Name:[/b] Subintelligence names are formatted as gn, Greek letter, number: gnα0, gnθ14. Later letters and numbers, in that order, indicate greater remoteness from the interests of Hierophant. None of them are independently mobile.

[b]Description:[/b] Delegate subintelligences for the Hierophant that do most of the work it could do that doesn’t have its immediate attention. Functionally very similar to Hierophant itself, but they run on far cheaper hardware – which isn’t to say they are unintelligent; they’re simply specialized.[/hider]
[hider=The Abject]
[b]Name:[/b] Religious/mythological theme; machine classes may be named Prophet, Brahmin, Rosary, etc. Extraordinary designs may be named after gods. Individuals of typical classes are named with a class abbreviation and a short hex code: PRT 776edc, ORD 0e50b0.

[b]Description:[/b] Collective name for the Network’s incarnate hands: the robots, androids, and other autonomous machines. Hierophant has built an independent “society” for its purposes, and there are machines to fulfill every role it currently has need for. Only militaristic designs are listed, and since Hierophant has never really had to fight before, that means a short list.
[hider=Example Abject Classes]
[list][*][b]Prophet:[/b] The Hierophant’s first completed design, responsible for its Rapture. Whirling, apparently wildly arranged masses of jagged and finely articulated steel joints, graspers, and sensors, about as large as an elephant at full stretch, and small enough to hide behind a dresser at full compression. Visualize a robot tumbleweed. Capable of very fast long-term all-terrain movement, as well as seizure and safe transport of human-sized organisms. Critical components are concealed in its abstract mass. Intelligences are specialized for search and capture. Mothballed and largely scrapped in the years since Rapture.
[*][b]Adjudicator:[/b] “Resistant populaces” variant for the Prophet, in case the Network needs to work harder than last time to get some new world under control. Graspers are thrown out for cannons of various RPM and caliber. Adjusted articulator designs permit recoil-resistant balance at up to 10-meter vertical stretches. Multiple redundancies for all critical components are spread throughout its abstract mass. Intelligences are weak and most effective in large group operations under a Genesis or Ordinator commander. Hypothetical design, never yet produced.
[*][b]Ordinator:[/b] Mobile autonomous eyes, ears, and mouths for the Hierophant and Genesis Network. Tall androids with variable human appearances, their limited physical versatility, durability, and overall power is a sacrifice for sensing, thinking, and communications. If you shoot one in any random spot, you’ll probably break a critical component. Expensive and not trained for combat.
[/list][/hider][/hider]


[b]Gladius:[/b] This looks like a breakthrough from Hierophant’s home plane. Manufacturing machinery spills out in a microscopically orderly grid; smelteries, forges, and assembly systems are prepared to reclaim raw matter and manufacture Abject forms on the spot. Genesis Nodes are housed unevenly throughout, represented primarily by α and β titles.[/hider]
[hider=Music and TL;DR][b]Themes:[/b]
[url=https://youtu.be/t-xfW1v617c]Standard operations…[/url] - Receiver 2 - The Threat
[url=https://youtu.be/icy4-CQHVh4]New asset (“ally”) classified. Interfacing…[/url] Half Life 2: Minerva: Metastasis - Absconditus
[url=https://youtu.be/hpfniymL3zg]New threat classified. Mobilizing…[/url] - Natural Selection 2 - Exosuit
[url=https://youtu.be/xttrlfdYKQY]All threat factors reclassified asset or neutral.[/url] - DEFCON - Loss
Any songs relating to the Combine are serviceable, but not robotty enough.

[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][/hider]