Human Executives are the brainchild of Dr. Drago Tesla Zoran (SoS 33), but it is implied that several others (the clockwork inventor Thomas Zhang (TFF 4), and possibly Lallo the Long (ST 7, TFF 4) and Sky Mississauga (ST 4)) have contributed to their creation as well. Most notably, a Human Executive's brain is constructed by way of The Secret Math (SoS 33), and the Executives alone now possess the Math until such time as humankind both merits and requires its use for survival (TDW 6).
Zoran originally produced twenty unique human executives, whose consciousnesses were to be used as the basis for the next generations of executives, called "strains" (SoS 33). Each of the original human executive consciousness patterns was “bred individually by Dr. Zoran’s team” (33), emerging as a self-aware system via an “idiosyncratic method of internal conductivity” in which “the initial conditions before each phase transition to an auto-catalytic pattern were unique” (33). In simpler terms, no two strains share any of the same developmental heritage—unlike human races, which share a “common racial architecture for self-aware cognition” (33). Each of the original twenty executives was absolutely unique in its cognitive processes.
However, one original executive fell through love, another through murder; another's entire strain fell victim to a cognitive disease (SoS 33). The last original executive betrayed Zoran and the rest of the executives in an as-yet unknown way (33). The remaining sixteen gave rise to the commonly-known sixteen strains (33). The strains were produced through a fission-like process where newly-synthesized bodies are implanted with a replication of one of the original sixteen patterns of consciousness. “These new iterations of the original patterns are then socialized and acclimatized to modern human executive existence” (33). Individual human executives are not the cognitive clones of the original sixteen executives—the executives clone the initial conditions which gave rise to the original executives, but each individual is “nurtured into existence as a unique event, with a unique history of interactions” (33).
During the first few decades of their existence, Human Executives posed as robots, dubbed "Zorannics" to differentiate them from more conventional and vastly less-intelligent robots (TDW 6). The actual mental capacity of a Human Executive far exceeds that of a human in both memory space and processing power—the executive Jeremiah in the Simon of Space timeline has the disposal of “seven hundred thousand times more knowledge” than the “maximum theoretical capacity” of a human being (SoS 33). Their physical strength is greatly superior as well (33). Executives can live for thousands of years (33), self-heal from all but the most severe injuries (33), and communicate among themselves via micro-gates built into each Executive's brain (39) (these last also allow a sort of consciousness pooling, effectively a sharing of all experiences between two parties). They are extremely fuel-efficient, “capable for living in stasis for nearly unlimited periods of time” (33), requiring no liquids, gravity, or light—only resources such as carbon (33).
During the Simon of Space timeline, Human Executives had only one territory to call home, Patch 72 on the planet Callicrates (SoS 39). Though they walked among humans on every world, they were often resented and even openly reviled due to their self-assumed role as the keepers of humanity (23). There were humans who stood opposed to this mentality, particularly the religious order known as Zorannites.
Human executive reproduction has long been the subject of concern and considerable research on the part of the executives themselves. The lack of variance in their normal fission reproductive process would spell certain doom for them in the long run because a purely human executive society would be “dead, self-same, and eternal” (SoS 33)—human executives are born “too rational” to have the vibrancy and dynamism of normal human civilization (33). During the Simon of Space timeline, the Executives developed a recombinant technique that allowed for genetic variation and provided a “low but reliable yield of viable offspring patterns” (33). However, when the Nightmare Cannon was deployed on the planet Kamari, the signal reached the growing young. The executives did not have the requisite parenting instincts to help offspring deal with the knowledge of suffering and loss, and so “for a day they lived in morbid apathy, and then faded” (33). Therefore, the Executives created a new generation of offspring to be raised by humans in hopes that they would “learn to be parents, and how to reconcile the universe as it is with the fragility of a growing consciousness” (33). The first result was Pish, who grew up under the overlapping protection of Duncan Menteith and Simon Fell before maturing and becoming fully aware of his own unique nature (33).
much more to add here...
Comments (1)
A Glint of Gray said
at 10:22 pm on May 6, 2007
Alright, I throw in the towel--how the heck can I format spaces between paragraphs without PBWiki bugging out on me?
You don't have permission to comment on this page.