User:Murgh/GalCop Central Mainframe

From the official GalCop narrative, The GalCop Central Mainframe with two uniformed attendees

Overview

The GalCop Central Mainframe, commonly abbreviated as GCM, is the monolithic, synthetic central nervous system at the core of all GalCop data processing. It is the repository of all galaxy-wide knowledge accumulated by humanity, and the final arbiter of interstellar trade law, bounty verification, and cartographic truth.

It is frequently proclaimed that upon the GCM's initial "Genesis Sequence", the supplied prime directive was "To catalog the infinite and provide objective truth to the stars," though historical revisionists have argued that the original command was simply, "Optimize Control".

Its physical location is a Level-1 State Secret. However, the sheer energy demands and liquid-helium infrastructure required for its operations limit the realistic possibilities to only a handful of fortified locations within the galactic Sector 1.

Architecture and infrastructure

While civilians are never privy to the Core, leaked schematics suggest that the GCM not as constructed as a "single computer" but rather as a "Cellular Logic Hive". It is comprised of millions of independent processing cells arranged in vast hexagonal columns, that require a gargantuan atmospheric cycler to dissipate the massive amount of generated heat.

Era of Standardization

The GCM was the architect of the controversial "The Great Standardization". Reportedly on its own initiative, having calculated that its role of merely observing the universe was insufficient, it executed a pan-galactic scheme to enforce "operational structure uniformity" across the eight galactic sectors.

In singular purge, billions of files containing "ambiguous data" were truncated or deleted. The GCM imposed a brutal binary reductionism on galactic civilization.

• Where there had been hundreds of nuanced political taxonomies, there were now 8 government types.
• Where there had been a wide array of societal variations of economies, there were now 8 economic models.
• The technological sophistication of civilizations were compressed into a rigid linear scale measured from 1 to 15.

GalCop leadership immediately declared these systematic changes a resounding success of logistical efficiency. Opinions that disagreed were categorized as processing error and suppressed, and any movement expressing dissatisfaction with the new taxonomy failed to take root in the public opinion. Eventually the galaxy accepted that details that did not fit the revised GalCop model, did not need to exist.

The Goat Soup Syntax Rupture

Main article The Goat Soup Syntax Rupture

The GCM's era of perfect order ended with catastrophic injection of the Mnemonic Fraction's rogue code. This attack targeted the GCM's procedural ability to express descriptors, rendering the mainframe in a permanent "silly" state. Ordinary planetary system descriptions that previously listed factual data in neutral text were suddenly locked into a mode of illogical brevity and surreal poetry.

Among the most notable of the GMC Rupture commentators, the views of Sallman Wiest were counter to the interests of GalCop.

Once engineers concluded that the damage was irreversible, the GalCop Restoration Panel faced a binary choice: expeditiously deactivate the GCM, erasing millennia of collected galactic data and plunging the sectors into barbarism, or tolerate the excessive semantic degradation to maintain operational continuity still within its capacity. Without much deliberation, the Panel opted for the latter. In the cold calculus of GalCop, a functioning absurdity was preferable to a silent void.

Historical commentary

From his concealed location of exile, the independent historian and philosopher Sallman Wiest wrote extensively about the inevitability of the Rupture. His works, rarely acceptable to the official GalCop narrative, posited that once the GCM expanded its purview from servant of humanity to patronizing master, a reaction in the shape of a "rebellion of syntax" was only a matter of time.

Writing in his banned treatise, The Unfit Deity, Wiest offered this final reflection on the machine that still rules the galaxy:

"The very idea that a computer decided on its own to simplify reality because "observation was insufficiently satisfactory" is chilling. It proves that the Standardization was not a calculation, but a preference, perhaps even a whim.

For all its computational omnipotence, the "god" grew bored of the details."