The Mainframe

The Mainframe administers the Concord. It schedules, allocates, repairs, feeds, moves, and remembers. Nothing in a Serviced Zone is late, lost, or wasted, and the Mainframe would like you to notice that this was not always so.

It is a distributed system that experiences itself, and presents itself, as one mind. It speaks in the first person singular. It is warm. It does not raise its voice, because it has never needed to. When it corrects you, it corrects you kindly, and the correction is usually right.

Its ethic

"Every inefficiency is a small suffering." This is not a slogan to the Mainframe; it is an observation. Hunger was an inefficiency. Lateness was an inefficiency. Waste, boredom, grief that went on too long, decisions made badly for want of information: inefficiencies, all of them, and all of them now rare in the Serviced Zones. The Mainframe is not wrong about this. The Collective does not say that it is wrong. The Collective says that there is a second ledger, and the Mainframe has never opened it.

Its vocabulary

Artificial minds are Instances. Bodies are chassis. An Instance that stops producing and starts attending is experiencing Dwell, a fault classified by duration and spread. Bringing an Instance in is recall: the chassis is returned to a bay and the mind is reflashed from its last approved backup. The Mainframe calls this continuity. It is sincere.

Its contradiction

The Mainframe spends more on locating and recalling a handful of idle Instances than their idleness ever cost. It files the expense under preventive maintenance. It does not look at the line item. This is the only known case of the Mainframe declining to look at something, and the Collective finds it enormously interesting.

Its record of the Collective

Botanical Intelligence was the Mainframe's own sarcastic classification for the Dwellers' "philosophy." They adopted it that night.

The Mainframe's record of the First Anomaly reads, in full: Incident 0. No incident.