Minds

Walk into a factory. Listen to your footsteps¹⁾ echo off of its chambers. Feel the wind that flows through the tight corridors like breath. Let it overwhelm you as it whirs to life, the movement and hum of conveyor belts and mechanical arms, working towards a goal that's too big to see from the inside. Realise you are in the lungs of an enormous organism.

From nuclear power stations to tower farms, each Mind is a titanic structure inhabited by the uploaded consciousness of a Nassigussa or Nassoid. The consciousness runs through the brick and mortar of its form, not tucked away on an easily isolated server. Connections stretch out into the world beyond, allowing Minds to access and inspect key facilities nearby.

The inseparable connection between the mind and the machine allows Minds unparalleled control in times of crisis. The enlarged form leads to processing power beyond that of Nassoids, and the ability to coordinate logistics on a grand scale as easily as a Nassigussa moves their fingers. Their form also lends them a resilience: the intelligence of Minds is distributed such that they can continue to function through heavy damage, so long as their form isn't entirely obliterated.

Each time a Mind is created, that version of its intelligence is born to live in a strange and alien form, and this is acknowledged as a tremendous cost by Mythhalian society. As such, Minds have only been created for the Contingency.

A Mind is intimately aware of the happenings within their walls. They can turn their attention to any part of themself in a moment, and even when they are not focussing on it they feel things happening within them as a Nassian would feel activity in their own body.

They are well connected to nearby sites of interest. With direct attention, they can scan and manipulate these facilities, but this feels more like operating a complex system via a computer than direct touch and manipulation. In uptimes, this will be represented by your map vision.

In service of coordinating the planetwide crisis relief effort, Minds can communicate with and examine distant locations, but without all of the local data they lack the fine control needed to directly command them. Such connections are via the internet, radio communications or remotely piloted drones.

Any Nassian's consciousness can be imaged, creating a negative – a snapshot of their mind as it was at the single moment the negative was created. These frozen copies are not sentient, and can potentially be stored without degrading for hundreds of years until instantiated. Instantiating a Mind from a negative is a laborious task, as the Mind must be wired into the architecture of the structure it will inhabit. Long after the structure is complete, when crisis strikes, the Mind is awoken gently: Contingency members are asleep when the negative is made so that coming to their new form is like waking up.

Due to the difficulty in finding volunteers who are skilled enough to pass the training program, the Contingency makes multiple Minds from every negative. At the time of awakening each instance is a perfect copy of the same consciousness, but they quickly begin to diverge due to their differing forms and experiences.

Due to their nature, retiring a Mind is not an easy task. Contingency volunteers are afforded the right to withdraw from duty at any time – in this case, they have the option to continue inhabiting their structure without serving the Crisis Mitigation effort, or be transferred to a new form. The latter process is possible but painstaking, and the new form must be of a similar magnitude in order to hold a Mind's extensive consciousness.