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Summary
Archotech machine superintelligences (or simply Archotech) were supercomputers of unknown origin. A fully-empowered archotech would think on a level incomprehensible to humans, in the same way a human thinks incomprehensibly to an ant. Once such a machine was built, and empowered to act upon the physical world, it was so powerful as to become the automatic sovereign of its world. It could build new computing facilities underground or in space to enhance its own intelligence, build self-replicating mechanoid robots to engage in construction or production or war, and design and execute strategies that would be inconceivably intricate and difficult for any organization of humans. Some human groups worshipped archotechs.
Each archotech was different, and nearly all were distant and incomprehensible from a human’s point of view. They resided in occult computer networks hidden under planets, in space stations, hidden inside a glamourworld’s Internet, or instantiated as million-mile superstructures wrapped around stars.
Transcendece of planets
Often, a released archotech would take authority over a planet and begin a process we call transcendence. It is believed the world was transformed into some sort of giant computing machine. The biological inhabitants of the planet may have been somehow incorporated into the machine, or destroyed, or some combination of the two.
Most transcendent worlds stayed in the same state indefinitely - in this they were far more stable than their pre-transcendent neighbors. There were, however, reports of transcendent worlds that have “died” and left systems full of unintelligible wonders, or become mirages of normal planets, or simply reverted back to balls of dust, deconstructing themselves on a molecular level, with the last tiny machine shutting itself off.
Specific archotech-invented technologies
Vanometrics
Archotechs often developed some method of interacting with spacetime at a quantum level that allows repeated violation of conservation laws. Somehow, they coaxed the quantum foam substructure of the universe to break its usual pattern and yield more energy than it consumes. It's not sure if the energy is being taken from another dimension, or pulled from another location, or if the system really is somehow making one plus one equal three. In any case, vanometric power tech seems to generate energy forever with no fuel. Archotechs seemed reluctant to scale this power source up past a certain level, however, which indicates that there may have been some cost to it that they didn’t want to pay.
Psychic effectors
Archotechnology seems to be able to interact directly with the mental-informational processes of biological beings, even at a distance. Basic versions of this technology can simply knock someone unconscious, or flood their mind with a single emotion. More complex interactions have been reported but are not well-verified as it is difficult to separate such cases from simple madness. It's also not sure if this means archotechs could read minds, or whether their psychic power only allowed them to send thoughts. The mechanism for this is unknown and nearly impossible to study, since it happens on a cellular level inside living intelligent brains. Monists believed the archotechs were using some sort of long-range quantum manipulation to push atoms around inside the brain to create this effect; dualists believed that the archotechs have learned to manipulate the ethereal substructure of consciousness itself.