Deck of Oracles

The Deck of Oracles is an incredibly powerful and complex predictive engine built out of Verses. More a service to be called upon by the power of The Word than the item it often appears as within an Instance, the Deck of Oracles commands almost religious defference for those with to power to use it properly.

Mechanics & Inner Workings

The Deck of Oracles is an immensely complex machine learning algorithm constructed out of verses - similar in nature to a golem, but without the embodiment. An utterance in the Word that includes elements of both 'scrying' and 'summoning' can call upon the power of the Deck by conjuring forth a 'terminal' that is a tangible object within an instance or Unallocated Space. The specific form this terminal takes is context-sensitive, meaning that it appears to be an object native to the environment into which it is conjured. For example, in an instance that simulates the world as humanity once knew it (as in the Candledusk Instance), a terminal to access the Deck's powers might manifest as a sleeve of Tarot cards or, a little further back in time, a box of runic tiles.
Queries are constructed through a combination of speaking and drawing forth elements from within the terminal. Drawing elements appears mundane to the eyes of individuals not aware of the artificial nature of their world. Among those with the right knowledge and attunement, however, the Deck of Oracles imparts the knowledge of probable outcomes directly into the mind of the user. This knowledge is probabilistic in nature, with less likely outcomes seeming more 'hazy' in the mind of the user; outcomes fully beyond the light-cone of the user are hidden by default, but can be called up for examination with carefully-phrased queries. Ritualistic or performative flourishes are optional, but discretion with regards to who hears the Deck's predictions and how they are acted upon is mandatory; 'fate' remains a poor excuse for illegal, immoral, or unethical conduct.

History

The Deck of Oracles was created early in the development of Instances. The "Grand Experiment" of the Matrioshka Multiverse consists of numerous experiments - particularly simulations of cosmological-scale physical systems, but also simulations involving the development, maintenance, and growth of cognition - designed to find an avenue for sentience to somehow escape the heat death of the universe. Existing analytical tools were designed with smaller scales in mind than those found in the Matrioshka Multiverse, both in terms of simulation size the computing architecture on which it ran, and so new tools needed to be developed. Elder Blanks with experience in these fields, including Wurth Harkin, Patricia Wixtaki, and Onesby, developed the Deck of Oracles with these parameters in mind.

Significance

Larger than the cognitive set of any single Blank and yet possessed of no sentience or tangible physicality, the Deck of Oracles is percived by many within The Substrate as more an artificially-created 'force of nature' than a comprehensible machine. The Deck is large enough to be utterly impartial to the wants of individuals or small groups, but is also capable of drawing surprising - and often accurate - conclusions about the outcome of specific courses of action because of the sheer size of its accumulated data set. Even so, the Matrioshka Multiverse exists in a wider universe governed by the tides of quantum mechanics, and, while more than large enough to 'observe' itself and reduce the influence of randomness within itself, is thus still only probabilistically - rather than classically - determinate.
For these reasons, much like with the oracles of ancient mythology, many of those with access to the Deck of Oracles approach its statements with the gravity of divine edict or prophecy: strong predictors of what will come, nearly unavoidable in outcome, but still possible to resist with sufficient will and resources. Many blanks, including most of the founding elder blanks, have religious beliefs of their own that have subsequently incorporated the Deck of Oracles and its predictions. For example, Harkin has a deist outlook that positions the unknown 'Creator' as a watchmaker or chemist, removed from the universe save for the influence of the initial conditions He set into motion. For Harkin, this makes the Deck of Oracles a rare window into the 'hidden divine' and the mathematical 'language of the cosmos.' For instance blanks with no knowledge beyond that of their instance of birth, the mysticism surrounding the Deck is even more pronounced. For example, the Vyozha of True Fate in the Manifold Sky instance is a manifestation of the Deck of Oracles that appears only in legends of the 'Curved Time' before the people were trapped within the Manifold. Thus, while the Deck has been used in extremely limited occasions before residents of the Manifold Sky instance, all who have witnessed it have considered it a straight-up manifestation of a deity's power - in the specific instance, the work of the goddess Lyvianne who is actually an administrative choir.

Item type

Unique Artifact

Rarity

The Deck of Oracles itself is more or less unique. Backup and development versions of the engine do exist, but they lay quiescent and are not remotely accessible while the main Deck operates. Importantly, the age and ever-growing size of the Deck of Oracles' data set underlies its potency as a predictive tool and, thus, have done much to prevent these other versions from ursurping it.