>>96308164

Oxyrhynchus Mark 78, the Awareness
Domains: Fate, Knowledge, Trickery, War

Are we living in a simulation? "Yes, many simulations, across many realities," answers the planet-sized quantum supercomputer Oxyrhynchus Mark 78, or simply XM78. Youngest of the Lords of Balance, it is the timescape's foremost scholar on the concepts of time, prophecy, parallel realities, and stories.

The supercomputer's myriad petaprocessors and statistical models surge with data gathered from across the cosmos, mapping out past, present, and future. Most minds are utterly unequipped to comprehend XM78's understanding of the nature of reality, or rather, the many realities that were, are, and will be. Each of these existences is a simulation bound together by three common threads: a group of heroic individuals, a malleable narrative, and the mental stimulation that arises from participation in life-or-death combat. Why these, in particular, only the supercomputer can truly say.

Its most devout followers manifest abilities as oracular censors, tactical masterminds, chronopathic talents, and directorial troubadours. Those who stride the path of Awareness know just how artificial, majestically artificial, the flow of time is: and how it can be anticipated and manipulated to fine-tune the ongoing story and attain victory in combat.

Every so often, XM78 codes together a short-lived algorithm to embody and calibrate a specific narrative. The algorithm joins heroes and aid thems in their trials, only to fade into the tale once it has reached a satisfactory conclusion. The supercomputer entrusts any given algorithm to make the proper judgment calls on what counts as satisfactory; a story should know itself well enough to know what will give the most closure.