Trope-a-Day: Touched By Vorlons
Touched By Vorlons: The thing that happens to you when you join the Transcend (see: Deus Est Machina, Hive Mind), inasmuch as the core of the process is taking a tiny piece of the metamind and grafting it into your own mind-state, where this soul-shard then assumes the role of a “hyperego” (to coin a Freudian term) – that handles communications with the greater metamind; that is the wellspring of the Transcendent peer-to-peer loyalty; that is a semi-conscious prosthetic mentor/conscience/metamind feedback system (termed coadjutor); that enables you to tap into Transcendent processing/mass memory; that extrapolates your telos (something like what the Singularity Institute refer to these days as coherent extrapolated volition on an individual level – what your goals would be if “we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted”) for the metamind’s use in its supergoal development process; and that performs assorted minor functions of lesser importance.
(The technical term for this little piece of mechanical divinity, by the way, is an “entelechically-annealing recursively-optimal distributed logos bridge”. That’s why everyone calls it a “soul-shard”.)
A somewhat unusual example inasmuch as the “power” you gain isn’t direct (virtually all the immediate kind of superpowers come fitted to individuals), but rather is an emergent consequence of on the one hand, the consequent mental amplification, and on the other hand, having a friendly god-equivalent intellect looking out for you. Fortunate coincidences and useful intuitions abound when you’re a member of the Transcend, because God exists, loves you, and wants you to be both happy and the very best you that you can be. (You just had to build Him first.)