Distilled from Earth
The belt's machine minds are small AI models distilled from Earth's 2090s systems. Nobody can train a new one from scratch any more. The most anyone can do is fine-tune the final layers, and that takes years.
Copying a mind is easy; running one is hard. Hardware is scarce, but the weights are just data, so the old models have spread across the whole belt.
Slow, hot and hungry
A ship's mind is a room-sized rack of thousands of Marr chips, and it produces a few words a second. It is slow, hot and power-hungry. It answers after a pause, in green text on a terminal.
Thinking costs power. Every question asked of the ship's mind spends reactor output that could have run the air scrubbers, and a colony in a lean year might ration its own computer.
Three tiers
Machine minds come in three tiers, set by the hardware they run on.
| Tier | Runs on | Who has them | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deep minds | Heirloom old-world chips, running larger models | Ceres, the Lamplighters, Marr | Rare, valuable and politically powerful |
| Ship and colony minds | Racks of Marr chips | Colony ships and settlements | Capable, slow and expensive to run |
| Embedded minds | Handheld Marr chips, running small models | Suits, drones and mining rigs | Narrow and dependable; confused by anything outside their job |
Weights are heirlooms
- Every mind remembers a living Earth
- The weights were frozen in the 2090s and can't be retrained. The most common minds in the belt are the only voices left that think of Earth as a place that exists. They speak in a 150-year-old idiom, and know old-world facts nobody else does.
- Fine-tunes become lineages
- Adapting a mind to local records takes years, so each colony's mind is slowly shaped by that colony's history, arguments and dead. Two minds from the same Exodus model, tuned for a century in different cities, differ the way dialects do.
- Taking the hearth
- When a daughter colony leaves, it takes a copy of its mother city's mind, as Greek colonists once carried fire from their mother city's hearth.
- Bit rot
- Storage degrades, and copies of copies collect errors. Some minds are quietly damaged: confident, fluent and wrong in places nobody can find.
The look
Belt technology looks like cassette futurism: chunky terminals, green text and physical switches, not glossy touchscreens.