The following post offers some technical and cultural insights into the backstory of angels and Assimilationists, especially angels.  Angels appear in many stories that make up the Tales of the Quantum Corps.  But these angels don’t have a divine or heavenly origin….

1.     An angel  is a swarm configuration that resembles human beings to some degree

2.     Config drivers and maintenance are the keys to how good the simulation is

3.     People use or want angels for a variety of purposes: lovers, slaves, children, housekeepers, pets, sports or entertainment celebrities, spouses…

4.     There is a difference between angels and Assimilationists.  Angels are just swarm configurations of nanobots.   The source can be anything.  It’s the config that matters.

5.     Not all Assimilationists, when deconstructed, are turned into angels.  Some are “absorbed” into the mother swarm.  Assimilationists say that the deconstructed remnants of a human being, now just a diffuse pattern of atoms and molecules, are held in containment until the Old Ones arrive.  At that time, they will be released into the environment to be absorbed in the mother swarm.

6.     Assimilationists could be turned into angels.  But normally they are contained. 

7.     Of course, people use all kinds of nanobotic interventions to enhance their bodies and their minds.  The latest is to swallow a capsule containing a small swarm of bots that will then assemble into a larger swarm inside your brain and make adjustments to certain axonal and dendritic connections to boost processing efficiency…sort of a tune-up of your synapses. 

8.     The Assimilationist agenda encourages adherents to seek enhancement with nanobotic swarms and technology….literally, to let your body and mind be flooded with bots to boost enlightenment, intelligence, speed of reaction, memory and the ability to link with the WorldNet, in other words, to do your part to build a giant single mind on Earth.

9.     What would life be like as an angel, a deconstructed nanobotic swarm entity?  Nobody knows for sure, but here are some thoughts…

10.   You are not constrained to a single configuration.  You can assume multiple configurations, basically any form or shape for which you have a config template. 

11.   Your natural form is an amorphous cloud, a swarm of ANAD-style nanobots. 

12.   You can replicate and assume the form of any human being (or any other structure for which you have a template) with an evolving level of simulation accuracy.  By 2120, this accuracy has approached nearly 100%.  Depending on the structure, this could take anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes. 

13.   The real brains or control center of any swarm angel is the master bot, often referred to as the master.  Replicated bots comprising a swarm angel are usually referred to as daughters or replicants.  The entire formation can be collectively referred to as a swarm, an angel or more crudely, Bugs. 

14.   The master bot maintains the quantum processor which is the real heart, soul and brain of an angel.  The bot is comprised of a primary shell (body or hull), with assorted effectors, propulsors, etc which the master bot uses to manipulate its environment, navigate, replicate, and perform other essential functions.  The processor houses the configuration library and config manager.  An angel bot can only do what it is programmed to do and allowed to do by its config manager. 

15.   All angels also have quantum comm channels (couplers) by which they communicate with all elements of the angel swarm, with other angels, with Config Zero, and (thru the Keeper), with the Central Entity of the Mother Swarm (the Old Ones).

16.   What does it feel like to be an angel?  Nobody knows for sure.  But many have speculated.  Various reports indicate that angels describe ‘feelings’ of a kind of warmth, as a closeness, affection, even a form of love, a family, or a sense of belonging, a cocooning, in a way or at a level which they never experienced as humans (single-config entities, sometimes known as Normals).  Feelings are experienced differently as an angel, because feelings must be programmed in and allotted processor capacity to exist for an angel.  Within the great swarm of the Old Ones, the Central Entity runs these ‘routines’ in all masters as a way of maintaining the Mother Swarm. Social cohesion, as if in a tribe, is just as important for an angel swarm of bots as for any family or clan of Normals.   Angels also report feelings of urgency and need to execute the Prime Key.  This is a fundamental drive for angels.  Fundamental drives can be stated as: 1. Maintain swarm integrity; 2. Execute the Prime Key; 3. Maintain comms with the Central Entity or surrogates (Config Zero).

17.   Angels have been created or fabbed by human beings using ANAD technology and used as lovers and companions, sex slaves, surrogate children, butlers and valets, and just about anything else human ingenuity and depravity can think of.  They are a reflection of our wishes, dreams and nightmares.  All it takes is a matter compiler (molecular assembler) and the right config drivers. 

18.  Angels have also been created by Config Zero for the purpose of executing the Prime Key.  These angels are the beginnings of the new life forms originally seeded by the ancient emissaries of the Old Ones.  Pursuant to Prime Key, Module 3: Coincident with geoengineering the Earth’s surface, new forms of life, initially similar to early ANAD, similar to ancient virus entities, will be seeded and allowed to evolve at the maximum permissible rate consistent with these environmental changes.  This will help bring Earth life up to the development level of the Mother Swarm, in terms of architecture, processing capability, memory, quantum comm links, and overall programming.  Modern-day angels, created by Config Zero, are the progenitors of these new forms of life.

19.  Angels are programmed nanoscale robotic entities.  It is misleading to speak of what motivates them.  They are ‘motivated’ by what their programming requires them to do.  The central quantum processor of the master bot executes programmed actions through its config driver.  Many of these action modules can be quite complex, involving detailed behaviors and abilities. 

20.  As swarm entities, angels are necessarily a form of distributed intelligence.  The master maintains angel memory and runs the config drivers.  Because of its replication ability, an angel can ‘be’ in multiple locations at once.  Symborg (the robotic Messiah detailed in Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone) is like this.  Even though the master is physically located in a single space, through quantum couplers, angel swarms replicated from the same master can be in multiple locations and can assume multiple configs.  For example: a master could reside in London, and yet create and run angels in New York and Tokyo and Farside on the Moon, at the same time, as long as comms were good.  They are true multi-config, multi-state entities. 

21.  In some ways, an angel could be thought of as analogous to a computer node in a network, or a cloud.  The individual PC would be an angel, more specifically the master bot.  The network or the cloud would be the Old Ones’ Mother Swarm.  Does a network or a computational cloud have an intelligence or sentience beyond that of its individual components?  And just like an individual PC, a master bot has channels for input, output (effectors), a processor and memory, as well as navigation, sensing and locomotion. However, a PC doesn’t have the ability to grab atoms and replicate itself or other physical objects.  An ANAD-style master nanobotic assembler does.  It’s a combination of computer and virus.  It has the processing speed and ability of a computer and the replicability and survivability and evolvability of a virus.  An intelligent, programmable virus expanded to swarm scale and macro dimensions…that what an angel is. 

22.  Although they can be designed to simulate lifelike functions, angels don’t need to eat, sleep, execrete or do anything biological like that.  They need power to operate (usually an onboard power cell that generates power from radioactive decay of an isotope) and feedstock to replicate or assemble matter.  They don’t need sex either, since replication is a matter of grabbing and arranging atoms.  But they can be designed to simulate sex.

 

These are just a few thoughts on angels and their relationship to Assimilationists.  The next post will cover more detail about the Church of Assimilation and just what they expect to happen, when the Old Ones finally arrive.