Month: January 2012

Trope-a-Day: Omnicidal Maniac

Posted by

1

Omnicidal Maniac: Fortunately, very, very rare, and generally outnumbered by everyone else.  The best-known canonical example is the seed AI of the Charnel Cluster, discovered by a scouting lugger, which upon activation set about destroying all life within the said cluster – leading to a half-dozen systems of fragmented habitats and planets covered in decaying – but sterile – organic slush that used to be the systems’ sophonts, animals, plants, bacteria, viruses, and everything else that might even begin to qualify as living.  Fortunately, at this point, the perversion broke down before it could carry on with the rest of the galaxy.

In current time, the Charnel Cluster worlds have been bypassed by the stargate plexus (they’re to be found roughly in the mid-Expansion Regions, in zone terms) and are flagged on charts and by buoys as quarantined; while the Charnel perversion appears to be dead, no-one particularly wants to take a chance on that.

Eldraeverse Subscriptions #4: Cosmos and Ethos

Posted by

While I’m really running dreadfully behind with this series, #4 is off to my subscribers, giving a taste of what the mainstream belief systems among the eldrae with regard to, well, Cosmos and Ethos are all about.

For anyone coming to me recently – and this is the first time I’ve posted one of these on this blog – this is part of a set of nanofic/vignette works I’m selling on a subscription model; the original post is here.

Workin’ On The Star Road

Posted by

“Gentlesophs,” the silver figure at the front of the room said.  “Congratulations on your transfer to Kalcír Station.  If you don’t know me, I am Istry 0xC89ABB62, Chief Security Officer, and I’m here to give you a personal reminder of the security regulations pertaining to Kalcír.”

“Kalcír Station, which houses the core of the distributed intelligence that runs our stargates, expansion linelayers, and traffic management systems, is the single most important asset that this company has.  As a result, security there is extremely tight.  You are all to be congratulated on passing our corporate loyalty check and sophodynamic analysis at the highest possible level.”

“In any case, as such, there will be no communication permitted, or indeed possible, during your month on-shift at Kalcír, except via the dedicated tangle lines to Ring Dynamics corporate headquarters, the Ministry of Transportation, and the Conclave Presidium.  After this briefing, you will have a final opportunity to communicate with your family and associates before being transmitted to the station.”

“Likewise, no information media may be transmitted to or from Kalcír Station, and after your shift, your memories of your time on Kalcír will be sequestered under the rules specified in Addendum G to your Ring Dynamics work contract.”  It smiled, thinly.  “While we maintain a fairly extensive entertainment library on board, don’t read anything you won’t regret reading twice.”

“Finally, Kalcír Station is located, as you may have heard rumored, in deep space at an undisclosed location.  This location will not be disclosed to you, and I must advise you that despite the memory sequestration, attempting to discover this location during your time there is a violation of corporate regulations punishable by immediate termination of contract and current corpus, again as per Addendum G.”

“If you will now proceed through the door on my left, my assistant will verify for each of you the initial half-payment of your adverse-conditions bonus.  Thank you for your service to Ring Dynamics.”

Trope-a-Day: Ape Shall Never Kill Ape

Posted by

Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: For the most part, thoroughly averted.  With some statistically insignificant exceptions, no fully-individual species is entirely united (and even those exceptions still have criminals and dissidents), and generally have no greater inhibitions against killing their own kind than against killing anyone else, given a reason to.

Played straight in the case of hive minds (although many of those have no problem with euthanizing obsolete, sick, or even redundant members – but then, that doesn’t kill anyone, by strict rules) and collective consciousnesses (with, remember, individuality-preserving member minds, but which don’t attack each other for the same reason that, say, your hippocampus doesn’t beat up your cerebellum).  But they’re a specially constructed exception to the general rule.

We Possess, So It Seems, One Of Man’s Greatest Dreams: Author’s Notes

Posted by

2

For those who didn’t catch the reference in the title of that last fic-a-day, the reference was to the chorus of the filk piece Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song), copyright 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm.

The lyrics are as follows:

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.

CHORUS:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

We eat algae pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.

(chorus)

If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we’re ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.

(chorus)

I’m sick of this place, it’s just McDonald’s in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, “Don’t cry,” they can kiss me goodbye
‘Cause I’m moving next week to L4!

(chorus)

Trope-a-Day: Apathetic Citizens

Posted by

1

Apathetic Citizens: Averted in the Empire; also actually illegal, since after the first equivalent to the (popular understanding of the) Kitty Genovese case demonstrated the bystander effect, the Senate decided to make it really clear that when the Imperial Charter said that citizen-shareholders had the responsibility to defend their fellow citizens’ rights as their own, it bloody well meant it.

Also played straight with regard to disasters, terrorism, etc., since the Imperials by and large think far too much of themselves to let fire, flood, or some degenerate with a bomb disturb their sangfroid.


We Possess, So It Seems, One Of Man’s Greatest Dreams

Posted by

1

1 Let’s see, status board – blue across?

2 Blue across here, check.

1 Cabin ventilation; filters to micro, flow to high, temperature down to set-point 20.

2 Check.

1 Access panels stowed and covered?

2 Check.

1 Got the tethers and jets?

2 Right here.  Honey wine, my dear?

1 Ah, thank you.  [pause] Oh, and cabin transcript recorder – off.

2 [giggle] Che-

[loss of audio signal; telemetry recording continues]

– transcript of Spaceflight Initiative mission Orbital Rendezvous

Trope-a-Day: Angel Unaware

Posted by

Angel Unaware: Technically, the Transcend is everywhere.  (Or at least everywhere any of its infrastructure, or any of its members, are.)  This sort of thing, therefore, is arguably happening all the time, in background processing.  Treat its constituents badly, and you will affect the metamind’s opinion of you, which will in turn feed back into how its constituents regard you.

Of course, this also works in a positive sense.  To quote A Miracle of Science on this topic, “It’s like saying ‘Brazil has decided you’re cute.'”

Stop Fittling With That: Author’s Notes

Posted by

1

For those who might be a mite curious, Stop Fittling With That is set in “present-time” – that is to say, the furthest future point of my defined timeline (although, obviously, not the end of their history), so those mentioned technologies are things that won’t actually appear anywhere in the Eldraeverse, certainly not in the context of the peoples of the Associated Worlds.

FTL (other than the mentioned wormholes and tangle channels) won’t appear at all, and in fact is canonically impossible by other means using my conphysics; for reasons which boil down to “it interferes with the kind of stories I want to tell and the kind of technologies I want to use to tell them”.  Such forms of FTL as wouldn’t – like, say, mass relays – are for the most part functionally isomorphic to the wormhole network I chose to go with anyway.

Dimensional transcendence just hasn’t been invented yet – any examples of it you may see are faked by means which you’ll read about when the Trope-a-Day catches up to, ah, Hammerspace, I think – but is permitted by the local conphysics.  (If you can bend space and time enough to do practical, mass-produced wormholes, bending them enough to put a decent-sized mansion inside a police box is for the most part merely a matter of working out the engineering – for very large values of “merely”.)

Negentropy or something like it probably will require the ability to not merely bend but actually drill holes in the universe, and so is deep-time lengths of time away if it’s possible at all.  Which it may well not be, but I don’t plan on arbitrarily declaring the greatest expression of their greatest ambition physically off-limits when I can just Shrug of God it into the indefinite far future.

And both matter translocation/teleportation and instant Star Trek replicator-style manufacturing don’t exist for the same two reasons.  First, Heisenberg…

(Or rather, in-world, Jeness Rafientar, who spent the first, shorter part of his physics career discovering the uncertainty principle under the name of the Indeterminacy Barrier, and then spent the rather longer rest of his physics career trying unsuccessfully to find some way, any way, to work around the blasted thing.)

…is a bugger, as we know, and magical Heisenberg Compensators are a little too handwavy for my taste, thanks so much.  And secondly, even if you only do it at the molecular level, all that binding energy has to go to/come from somewhere in a very short time, and that poses some thermodynamic problems at the level of physics, and some literary/worldbuilding problems in explaining the implications that the ability to routinely toss that much energy about has on everything else.

These may theoretically exist in the future – given that the basis of the emerging field of ontological engineering is to use manipulations of the laws of the laws of physics that underlie the regular laws of physics to tell the latter to shut up and sit down, but they don’t at any part of the timeline I’m working with.

Stop Fittling With That

Posted by

2

Congratulations, my students, on your successful completion of the first half of Ontological Engineering.

When you return in two months, it will be time for each of you to choose the research project you’ll be carrying out for the next two years.  And with regard to that, I would like to encourage you to choose something other than the current obsession with faster-than-light devices.

While I can appreciate your enthusiasm, whether based on the honors and plaudits that await anyone who cracks that particular problem, or the unspeakably large bounty that the Imperial Navy have waiting for anyone who can provide them with a tactical fittler capable of pulling off that four-simultaneous-shots-with-one-ship maneuver – ever since it was shown off on Galaxy of Conquest, anyway – I should nevertheless like to remind you of a few things.

Firstly, that people have been banging on, yanking at, and poking any piece of physics that looked like it might have practical or even impractical fittling potential since before Imogen Andracanth’s team invented the wormhole; and except for the wormhole and the tangle channel, have produced absolutely no positive results whatsoever.

Secondly, that Exogenesis, Islien Yards and Stellar Express, between them, have poured more money into their Starleaper Initiative than the entire budget of this university, and have hired a great many talented graduates of this course.  You can therefore be fairly sure both that the competition is extremely stiff, and that if there were any low-hanging fruit to be plucked in this area, we would probably have heard about it already.

And thirdly, of course, there are a great many unsolved, and indeed, as yet uninvestigated research problems in other areas of ontotechnology, many of them leading to potentially exciting developments in fields as simple as remote sensing and drive efficiency to old speculative-fictional dreams such as dimensional transcendence, matter translocation, negentropy, and instant manufacturing free from all that tedious mucking about with nanomachines.

So go home, enjoy the blue and green season, and come back to me with some exciting proposals!  You won’t be penalized if you do insist on sticking with the fittle, but do check what’s been done in the past and what the Starleaper team have been trying recently, and put some fresh and interesting spin on it.

Class dismissed.

– address to the most recent OE class, Imperial University of Almeä

Inequality

Posted by

(No, don’t worry, I’m not turning into a political blogger, here.)

But I did read an interesting little hypothesis which means I may need to revise my little internal guess as to what the Empire’s Gini coefficient, or your preferred measure of income inequality, is.  (I say internal guess because, well, in-world, no major public body bothers computing any of those measures.  As economic statistics goes, it falls into that category labeled “thoroughly uninteresting”.)

Said internal guess, by the way, has generally been “in the range that makes professional egalitarians blanch and cross themselves”; it’s just that in a society where the most “poor”, “oppressed”, “miserable” people you can find (as a group) live in what would be McMansion-equivalents (if one could strip the term of the implications of both inferior design and construction, and pseudoaristocratic contempt for the parvenu), own multiple cornucopia machines and autominions, and travel to other star systems for business and pleasure, it’s hard to work up too much outrage about teh ebil rich without embarrassing yourself.  Even if the directors of the “Big 26” starcorps and their peer group are using personal lighthugger staryachts to travel between their private vacation moons.

Anyway, money quote:

Now for the fun part.  Imagine people become more egalitarian, to the point where they heap scorn on the rich and successful.  What is the effect on inequality?  By the previous logic, the effect is directly counter-productive.  The more you scorn rich people, the more people you scare away from high-income professions.  The more you scare away, the lower their supply.  And the lower their supply, the higher their income!

Lesson: If you really want a materially more equal society, stop beating up on the 1%.  Do a complete 180.  Smile upon them.  Admire them.  Praise them.  Sing songs about how much good they do for the world.  The direct result will be to raise their status.  But the indirect result will be to pique the envy of status-conscious people, increasing the competition among the top 1%, and thereby moderating income inequality.

On the other hand, if you want to increase material inequality, by all means heap scorn on the rich and successful.  Try to fill them with guilt and self-loathing.  The 1% who remain will find that living well is the best salve for their consciences.

…which argument has some interesting consequences for a society which loves, honors, and near-worships  excellence, success, and yes, wealth in the way that the Imperial mainstream does.  I may need to trim back that Gini a bit after all.

(Of course, the effect would be rather less marked than in an equivalent human society, simply because one of the major psychological differences between eldrae and humans is that the former are not hard-wired to obsess over primate relative status hierarchies.

But then, thinking in terms of absolute status rather than relative status – and therefore not being inclined to practice the negative-sum games in which you can improve your position by worsening those of other people – is one of the reasons why their society has the attitudes it does in the first place, this one included.)

Escaping From Yourself

Posted by

1

One of the most potent of these extremely rare drugs is the unassuming, shimmering nanofluid sold as cháldar.  The nanites suspended within the fluid are a modification of the standard brain-alteration nanites used for downloading mind-states into organic brains, modified to have an erratic temporary effect.

One who injects a vial of cháldar (this injection, as with downloading, must be done directly into the fluid volumes surrounding the brain) begins within minutes to experience its effects.  Cháldar is distilled from pithed sophont mind-states, and the nanites rapidly distribute themselves throughout the user’s neural volume, and begin irregularly imposing sections of the neural net reflecting the mind-state from which they were distilled on top of the user’s own.  The result is an hours-long cascade, usually quite exhilarating, of alien images, feelings, thoughtways, memories, and ideas – effectively, as close as one can come to the dream of being able to experience another’s consciousness from the inside.

While occasional cháldar users may only acquire a few personality distortions from use of the substance – although social problems may result if they interact with others while sections of the alien neural net are active; for this reason, cháldar users generally have themselves immobilized while taking the drug – risks of its use include a wide variety of identity disorders and schizophrenias as the brain adapts to, or incorporates, sections of the alien neural net.

Cháldar is also fraught with legal problems.  While it is produced from legally tradable pithed mind-states, the “best” cháldar highs come from the most complex, unusual, or rare mind-states.  Since the Excellences and Exquisites and their foreign equivalents rarely place their mind-states upon the open market, cháldar is often produced from stolen or otherwise illegally acquired mind-states, leaving the manufacturers open to criminal charges of forknapping, or worse, and any subsequent purchasers to a variety of intellectual property and privacy crimes.

In addition, in the search for outré experience, some manufacturers have taken to manufacturing cháldar from criminal mind-states or the mind-states of the severely insane, the use of which poses a risk of memetic infection or investigation by the Guardians of Our Harmony for pernicious irrationalism.

– Journal of Chemical Hedonism, 1217th issue

Trope-a-Day: And I Must Scream

Posted by

2

And I Must Scream: The number of things that one could theoretically do that fall into this category, given the dark side of virtual reality (where torture can’t kill you, only make you wish you were dead) and the ability to pervert sophotechnology, is as infinite as the possibilities of malice.

There’s a reason why just about any mind-state storage device that might fall into enemy hands comes with very serious encryption, anti-tamper devices, and self-destruct.

Trope-a-Day: Ambition Is Evil

Posted by

Ambition Is Evil: Averted.  This is the sort of thing (along with the human cultural notion that seems incapable of separating “ambition” from “total backstabbing fuckery”) that would strike the Imperials as utter irrationalist lunacy.  “Sure… pursuing one’s goals, achievement, progress, advancement, and deeds of renown without peer are bad things.  I’ll be over here.  (beat)  Idiots.”

Pronoun Choices

Posted by

And, based on that last story, it looks like I’ve elected to use the Egan-style ve/ver/vis pronouns for the neuter gender (the friend, although it never comes up, was a kaliatar; a neuter member of a trisexual species).

Still haven’t settled on which English pronouns to use for herm, though.  Hm.  (And part of me is now trying to remember unsuccessfully which pronoun(s) Bujold used for Bel Thorne, et. al. in the Vorkosigan books.  Not that fiction-writing has binding precedents, or anything, but still.  Curious.)

Choices

Posted by

1

I will find my death here in the Exclaves.

He – that outworlder – beat my friend to death.  Not for profit.  Not for a plan or a revenge or some twisted necessity.  Slowly, and for his pleasure, because ve was an alien, and he hated all that was wider than his narrow vision or better than his pathetic life.

And I could not just leave that up to the mighty Fourth Directorate to solve.  They would hunt the outworlder down, no doubt, and with all full ceremony and due process of law put him cleanly to death.  “There is no higher repayment; naught can requite more than existence.”

Can it not?

My data worm stole vis final memories from the forensic redactor who extracted them for the court.  And it turns out that there are many things you can do, when you have a cause.  By means my indictment goes into at some length, I found him before they did.  I perverted a cerebral bridge to implant those memories into him as his own.  And I applied memory stimulation and time dilation, and watched him convulse and shriek while a taste of his own hell shredded his mind.

I had him for seven minutes before they found us, but that was enough.

I did not –

No.  One in my position should be honest.  I did enjoy it.  It was horrific and it was sickening, but I did enjoy it.  Thoroughly.  But that is of no relevance.  It may have been vengeance, but it was right.  It was just.  It was balance.

The Directorate permitted me to observe when they executed the residue of him.  Guilt is guilt, they say, and the forms must be obeyed.

When I am finished making this statement, I will be taken before the court one final time.  I am not slated for execution, due to the status of the one I killed, and evidence, they say, of severe mental stress.  I am to be given the choice.

I may enter into meme rehab, to be edited into a version of me who would not have done those things that I have done; who is as capable of cold-mindedness as the men of the Directorate; who could find satisfaction in knowing that ver killer had been… erased.  Or I may decline, and in so doing submit myself to euthanasia.

My friend, reinstantiated, is appalled by my actions, but was still willing to speak with me.  Ve pleaded with me to undergo the meme rehab, but comes no more.  So be it.  Ve is a good friend, a good person, but ve does not understand mélith as we do… as we did, once.  I knew the price, and pay it willingly.

I do not wish to die.  But I will not regret this.  And so I cannot become.

– last testamentary statement of Reldith Calaris-ith-Calir
executed 4144, Versine Exclave

A Sermon on Wealth

Posted by

Wealth is not virtuous.

Wealth is virtue.

Does gold have value?  Does silver, or polished kal-gems, cogs or brights or stones or staves, bars or bills, serren-shells or scrip, shares of stock or notes of hand?

Can shining metal feed you?  Can a mound of scrip build a home?  Will all the kal-gems in the world purchase an ounce of honor?

The worth of wealth is not in its substance, but in ourselves; for each bar and coin and note is a frozen promise, a claim on the goods or works of he with whom you choose to redeem it.

And only the finest of our goods and works may sustain our wealth, for none but a fool will purchase ash-crystal in the place of true fireglass; thus wealth is harmony.

And those who deal falsely find themselves shunned by those who give true value to wealth and their markets emptying around them, as those who enrich themselves by fraud and theft find their false profits will not serve them; thus wealth is integrity.

And those who hoard the symbols of wealth for their own sake find nothing but stagnation; thus wealth is right action.

Therefore honor those through whose hands wealth flows most, for in supporting this virtue, they are those who have served us best.

– Word of Covalan, Commentaries

Trope-a-Day: Ambiguous Robots

Posted by

Ambiguous Robots: Between one advancement and another, mechanical robots, biological bioroids, cybernetic implants for biological bodies (including nanocytes and nanosomes), biological organ-implants for mechanical bodies (including skin and flesh coverings, with active nerve integration), and biomimetic materials… well, yes, the middle ground is getting rather ambiguous, isn’t it?  Half the time, even the designers aren’t sure.

The Drowning of the People

Posted by

9

“No, we’re not a democracy, or so they say.  They, of course, ignore that the Senate’s Chamber of the People is randomly selected from all our citizen-shareholders, and also ignore planets like Viëlle, that uses the totality of the population as its planetary Assembly, or Meryn, where ever-changing proxies, rather than one-time votes, determine whose policies hold sway.  There’s only around 38 billion people on them, after all.  But they don’t have the final word, so they’re not sovereign enough, or not representative democracies, and so they don’t count.”

“But we were – well, the lands that later became the Empire were – almost a democracy once.  How long?  About seven hours.  That’s how long it took us to decide we didn’t like the idea.”

“Tell y’all the story?  Well, gather round.  Now, once upon a time, a few millennia ago, in the region that is now called the Old Empires but was then the Old Kingdoms, there were the korásan.  And the korásan were a warrior aristocracy, and ruled by the sword, and in exchange for their services in keeping off bandits and wild beasts and their fellow korásan who took it into their heads to expand their domains, they felt themselves entitled to certain traditional perquisites of the people with the biggest swords around when other folk have none.  Which contrary to the madder stories people allege to be alleged were not blood sacrifice and baby-eating and demanding people’s fairest wives and daughters for their beds, but rather such things as taxation – without asking if it pleased people to pay it, first, more to the point – and demanding labor for their initiatives and men for their wars, and that people should bow before their gods, and putting their eyes and hands into people’s homes and lives and insisting that their ways to live were the right ways to live and all should abide them, or else.”

“The years passed, and the people of the Old Kingdoms grumbled and groaned under the demands of the korásan, and all the while, hid wealth and food and swords in secret against a later day when they would need them no longer.  And when that day came as a new year dawned in the coldest part of the cycle, whether by chance or by hidden messengers, the people rose up together, and there was blood and smoke and clash of arms from Icemark to Crescenthold and Iselené to Eävalle as the korásan found out that ruling by the sword isn’t nearly as practical when the ruled also have swords, and a general distaste for the way you’ve been going about it.  And as, over that year, the korásan fell, leaders emerged among those who cast them down, and some thoughts turned to how things should be in the future, when it came to protection from bandits and wild beasts and strangers from beyond the Old Kingdoms who might have similar notions.”

“The last korásan to fall were those in Leirin, in the Crescent, for the Crescent is a cold and bitter land of mountains, with cities carved into cliffs and bounded by wild rivers, and filled with natural fortifications that could only be reduced slowly, and with the greatest effort; and so when the last one fell, at Leiri itself, the City of Mists, a great discussion was called there among the leaders of this revolution, to determine how things should now be.”

“And so this was held in the old thronehall at Leiri, and from the midmorn hour – for there were stragglers – those who had come with the leaders sat around in drinking-halls throughout the city, supping hot mead and speculating on the outcome of the discussions.  And others, who had led in one place or another but had not been invited to this grand discussion sat and drank with us, but with more brooding than excitement.”

“And at dusk, the bells summoned them to the square before the thronehall, and those leaders came out and explained to the gathered people their grand plan, that now instead of self-named korásan they should compete for the people’s favor, and they should choose from them the best to lead, and they would sit in the places of the korásan and protect them from the bandits and the wild beasts and ambitious foreigners.”

“And the crowd murmured at this, but it didn’t sound too unreasonable.”

“Then they continued, and explained that they would have to have just a few of the perquisites of the old korásan – not all, no, and certainly not the ones that had been found the most burdensome in the past, but that they couldn’t protect – that there was no way people could be protected – without just a little taxation, and some conscription, and a few other things, but nothing like the bad old days.  And, of course, if their efforts were too much to bear, the people could replace them, at the appointed time, and let someone else sit in their place.”

“And that was when my great-great-grandfather, who was Muireth Andracanth-ith-Cyranth Múrchárn, Nighthunter – and was thereafter Muireth Andracanth-ith-Cyranth Velkorálakhass, Slayer of the Manyfold Tyrant – stood up from the crowd, and in a great voice declared that he’d spent the last year killing damned tyrants until the rivers ran with blood, and that he was damned a dozen times over if he was going to come back and do it again.”

“Adding to the crowd, while their speaker – whose name is lost to memory – was still framing his reply, that being able to choose his master didn’t make a slave free, that having taken up the sword and overthrown the korásan that they could bloody well do the same to any bandits or beasts or invaders who came along, and finally, by way of a final point, that they clearly weren’t done yet and some last tyrants needed to die, here and now.”

“The crowd rose up, followed him, and they grabbed everyone who’d come up with this grand plan, and flung them all in the river.  And that was the end of the one and only eldraeic experiment with representative democracy, seven hours after they first started talking.”

“Later?  There was no later.  This was the Falthrang, in the middle of deep winter.  They probably all froze to death before they had a chance to drown.”

“Well, that, and the Leirfalls are 400 feet high and just downstream.”

Trope-a-Day: Ancient Keeper

Posted by

Ancient Keeper: Remember those elder-race archives left behind by dead civilizations?  And the Living Relic mind-states found therein?  At least some of those are these, in the form of the index/assistant/librarian AIs that used to manage the archive before it became a relic of a dead civilization.  Some are even functional enough to keep doing it once you get the archive back on-line.