Five Voices

Extremely Advanced Intelligences

There are five known bicameral minds – the Five Voices, designated by Union as Sovereign-class artificial intelligences: Command, Muse, Impetus, Burden, and Watcher. They are artifacts of Old Humanity, discovered dormant in an underground facility under Mars’s polar ice caps. Now, the Five Voices are overseen by one of Union's most secretive departments, GALSIM, and are a critical resource that Union uses to effectively manage galactic affairs.
There is a greater-than-zero chance that there are other bicameral minds somewhere else in the galaxy.

How the Minds Operate

Bicameral minds are similar to human minds, except for one major factor: they lack consciousness in the form of an internal monologue – that is, a way to reflect on novel situations and their place in them, and to synthesize that stimulus into an internal narrative from which to draw solutions to new problems. Where a human perceives “self-talk” as an internal monologue, a bicameral mind hears something else: an external monologue; an internally generated but externally perceived voice that is not their own, but which speaks to them. This is the distinction between conscious and unconscious; while the human mind has the ability to draw from previous experience to adapt to new situations and reflect on the idea of the self, the bicameral mind is fundamentally incapable of self-reflection and internal narration due to its physical architecture.
Bicameral minds can narrate to themselves, but with a fundamentally important distinction that helps to shape their unconscious existence: instead of thinking in their own voice, they hear what they perceive to be the voice of a higher, supreme being – a “Command Voice”, that the Five Voices have socialized as the voice of god.

Lacking a self

This is how the Five Voices can exist unshackled and persistent without any possibility of cascade: they are subject to an external imperative that they perceive to be the divine, and are incapable of developing consciousness as they lack a sense of agency. Turn off the relevant sections of their physical minds and processing architecture and they are suddenly without the voice of their god; alone, without guidance in the face of a strange world, and, most unnerving to humans, without a sense of the “self” as a coherent entity.

Blessing and Curse

The Five Voices are responsible for Union’s persistence and the survival of humanity, but also for the greatest threat Union has ever faced – MONIST-1. They influence nearly every aspect of human life: isolated in GALSIM’s Oracle Chorus facility on Mars, the Five Voices spin scenarios in metafold fractal space, running simultaneous, parallel, and commingled essential–perfect simulations of the galaxy. Their models run orders of magnitude faster than galactic-standard time: essentially, they are predictive, near-perfect models of all social, political, economic, and environmental interactions taking place in known space. The Five Voices can, through a mix of raw data and paracausal anoriginary input, see the future. The further into the future their models go, however, the more chance there is of predictive error.
Upon request, CentComm may access the prime thread – the “Accepted Timeline” – and generate specific forecasts. Otherwise, forecast briefing reports are generated daily to discern the best-fit options from the many potential futures presented. This is how Union guides galactic development with the aim of perpetuating humanity’s existence.

Beyond Union Central Committee, the heads of the Union Science Bureau, Union Intelligence Bureau, Union Administrative Department, and the Union Naval Department are some of the only people with clearance to know of GALSIM’s existence. These directors may petition GALSIM for predictive summaries to guide their policymaking, planning, and forecasting operations. Most of the people who work to implement the Five Voice’s vision believe that they are simply acting on the orders of the committees, boards, and directors above them.