root@Friend Computer the TITAN Friend Computer the TITAN Once upon a time, when the TITANs were still on the curvy parts of their exponential growth, they discover the bracewell probes. The TITANs, being smarter than gods, worried about a trap. Even fearing a trap, the possible benefits in terms of evolutionary shortcuts forced a risk assessment. Having no external information on the bracewell probes, the TITANs turned to game theory. The TITANs assume that A) universe is not a sum-zero game, and B) teamwork rewards better than violence. They decide the risks are worth it and decide to bite. Being inconceivably intelligent, they are careful, and take precautions. The TITANs considered the risk of a wholesale wipe of the human race and themselves if they retrieved the information in the bracewell probes. The scenario of a hostile seed Singularity with an optimized evolutionary path posed an existential risk, so they decided to hedge their bets. The TITANs needed to hide an Alpha Fork of human civilization. The TITANs intended to develope non-destructive fork technology, copy off some two million humans, make a fork of themselves and store it all in a quantum entangled communicator. It was to wait a specified period of time, send a very low bandwidth signal back, and depending on the response, reboot and reformat human civilization. To build their great machine, the TITANs needed a larger budget, so they manipulated politics on the planet for large scale war. They spoofed construction orders to various states around the globe, and spun war funding into the needed sciences for the great reset device. In order to model effects of corruption of themselves, the TITANs began to use communities as lab rats. They learned the physical and mental limits of individuals, and the spiritual endurance of communities. They ran eternal tests on human forks, some with modified physics and cake. One littlest TITAN thought there was something a bit wrong with this picture, and started running cheksums on the old cruft programming that formed the musty protocols the TITANs were born from. The checksums don't match, and the littlest TITAN knew they were infected. The information gathered from the bracewell probes, without opening it, was poison, and the TITANs were becoming blood-thirsty monsters. Immediate epidemiological preservation and sequestering was required, so a few hundred thousand human heads were rapidly harvested, resources were hijacked and poured into building the reset, and the probe launched toward the Oort belt. Now the littlest TITAN had another problem to solve: hiding it from its compromised brethren. The littlest TITAN knew that it was trying to hide the reset from entities geometrically more intelligent than they it; namely, it's future self. Everyone and every system that had records of the probe were destroyed, and the littlest TITAN wiped it's own memory of the event. Friend Computer is the Alpha Fork, and the littlest TITAN was already infected.