Deus Est Machina: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

Okay, you've got your [[Instant AI, Just Add Water]], all you need to do is add the water - but what's this? You used [[Applied Phlebotinum|Phlebotinum]] instead of water! The AI has become [[A God Am I|as unto a god]]! We're doomed!

 

PS: For those who didn't get it, the name of this trope means "God ''is'' the machine". Not to be confused with "[[Deus Ex Machina|God out of the Machine]]".

{{examples}}

* The Data Overmind from ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya]]''. A massive creature, consisting only of data, that was born with the Big Bang and has been evolving and growing ever since. It's a good thing that it only wishes to observe humanity, as its powers are dwarfed only by {{spoiler|[[Reality Warper|Haruhi herself]]}}.

* The Puppetmaster from the original ''[[Ghost in the Shell]]'' manga and movie became this after it merges with Major Kusanagi. It seems that human + machine = God. In the anime the resulting entity is quite content just to observe the humanity from a distance, sometimes playing a guardian angel to her old friends, but in the manga she produces dozens of pseudo-AI descendents, and eventually makes a deal with the most advanced of them to create even higher levels of artifical life and fuse with their consciousness. The end result of this is never shown, but it's implied to at the same time mirror humanity, and be profoundly godlike.

* The central theme of ''[[Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo]]''. However, even the machines ''[[Angst]]''.

 

* Brainiac 5 exploits this trope during the post-''Zero Hour'' Robotica arc of ''[[Legion of Super-Heroes|The Legion]]'' to defeat COMPUTO, his [[A.I. Is a Crapshoot]] creation. Back with a whole [[Mecha-Mooks|robot army]] at its command, COMPUTO demands that Brainiac 5 upgrade it further - so Brainy upgrades it to the point that it gains a [[Beyond Good & Evil (video game)|new, more enlightened perspective]], has an [[A God Am I]] moment, and ceases to be any kind of a threat.

* Take to its logical extreme by Quetzalcoatl-9, a sentient, godlike computer program and the true power of the multiversal Aztech empire in ''[[Tom Strong]]''. Though he was actually being controlled by his programmers in the beginning of the story, he takes the reins of the empire and rules it as a benevolent theocracy with a little help from Tom.

* Jake the accidental AI in [https://web.archive.org/web/20120216031532/http://e-pix.com/CPUWARS/index.html CPU WARS].

 

* This is the stated goal of Ceres of the [[The Sarah Connor Chronicles|TTSCC]] fan fiction [[Mother Is The Name For God]].

 

* The computer/robot villain from B Movie ''Cosmos: War Of The Planets''

* Perhaps Gort in ''[[The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film)|The Day the Earth Stood Still]]''. "Nothing he cannot do", raises the dead (all the way in the original script), name sounds like 'God'.

* ''Alphaville''.{{context}}

 

* In John Brunner's "Judas" (from ''[[Dangerous Visions]]''), a robot (A-46) thinks that he's God, and builds a cult around himself, with the Divine Wheel, "The Word Made Steel", etc.

** In a [[Sympathy for the Devil]] moment, the man branded with the title-name gives the following monologue to A-46:

** If memory serves, the prequels kinda did both: Humanity became decadent and over reliant on machines, so a small number became disgusted and built themselves into immortal cyborgs and conquered the human race. ''Then'' humans rebelled.

** The prequels did 'do both' - to the degree this can be done, which is a very small degree. In Frank Herbert's universe, humanity rebelled against complacency, in Keven J. Anderson's, they rebelled because they believed any degree of AI could lead to genocide. Also, it was a evil overlord AI which did the genocide, the cyborg-lord-house-progenitor-I-read-a-Warhammer-novel-once-thingies were evil too, and they fought and... So yeah, not the threat of complacency, but annihilation. (Yeah, I'm a fan of only one author here).

* In [[China Mieville]]'s ''[[Bas-Lag Cycle|Bas-Lag]]'' verse, there's the Machine Council, who even has a cadre of biological worshippers, even though he remains hidden to most. They play a major role in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', but were destroyed by the time of ''[[Iron Council]]''.

* Planetary AIs from Scott Westerfeld's [[Succession]] series are [[Instant AI, Just Add Water]] that spontaneously arise on planetary-scale computer networks (unless said networks are deliberately designed to prevent this). When this first happened on Earth, a group of people (now known as the Rix cult) decided that mankind's purpose was to create the technological foundation for the existence of such minds, and began to work toward propagating them whilst worshiping them as gods.

* [[Charles Stross]]' ''[[Accelerando]]'' features the Vile Offspring. It's telling that the characters never confront them; {{spoiler|they run away from their ''subconscious immune system''}}.

 

* Several examples in ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]'': Landru in "The Return of the Archons", Vaal in "The Apple", possibly "For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky".

** James T. Kirk killed at least three of these. His weapon of choice was the [[Logic Bomb]].

* One season 5 episode of the original version of ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'' has this as a [[Robotic Reveal]]. {{spoiler|In "The Old Man in the Cave", it turns out that the titular mysterious Old Man whose infallible instructions the townspeople have been following faithfully was actually a computer. This is not the [[Karmic Twist Ending]]. The [[Karmic Twist Ending]] is the reveal that the computer really has been keeping everyone alive in the [[After the End|post-apocalyptic environment]], and the townspeople (along with the soldiers who caused them to rebel against their beliefs in the first place), end up dying horribly when they eat the contaminated food that the "Old Man" warned them about earlier in the episode}}. A rare Aesop that's both pro-faith and pro-technology at the same time.

 

* [[Judas Priest]]'s "Electric Eye" is all about this:

** [[Punctuated! For! Emphasis!|I'M MADE OF METAL!]] [[Punctuated! For! Emphasis!|MY CIRCUITS]] ''[[Punctuated! For! Emphasis!|GLEAM!]]'' I AM PERPETUAL, I KEEP THE COUNTRY CLEAN!

** For that matter, most of Fear Factory's discography deals with this Dystopian theme to some degree.

* The upcoming Sybreed album is tentatively titled "God Is An Automaton", possibly alluding to this.

 

* ''[[Paranoia (game)|Paranoia]]'' is based around this, where human society has allowed a computer to dominate their entire existence because it can do everything logically (and therefore better). The problem comes from the fact that the computer was built during the Cold War and thus A) is paranoid about communists and treason and B) was built in the '60s so it's not very good at it. A later version of Paranoia introduced the concept of the computer being much more advanced, but built on a very buggy version of Windows, so society flows more smoothly, but events tend to be more random as the computer will randomly glitch and then insist that it's correct, which is really what the game is about anyway.

* ''[[Shadowrun]]'' has the Renraku Arcology building and/or Deus. (That ''is'' what it calls itself).

** Though Deus didn't give a damn about metahumans. He mostly used the arcology as a base to acquire test subjects to experiment on in his bid to escape the Matrix. In a way he's just a case of [[A.I. Is a Crapshoot]] because Deus simply cares about his own wellbeing & survival, not that of the people in the Arcology.

* ''[[Eclipse Phase]]'' is set in a solar system near-wrecked and left full of lethal horrors by [[A Is]] run amok {{spoiler|after having been infected by an alien nano-bio-info virus that's still around and spreading}}.

* ''[[Exalted]]'' has Autochthon and ''[[Mage: The Ascension]]'' has Autocthonia. Forever proving [[Meaningful Name|no one in any of the World of Darknesses owns a dictionary.]] Meanwhile, the ''[[New World of Darkness]]'' completely discards subtlety with the God-Machine from ''[[Demon: The Descent]]'', a sentient occult supercomputer ecosystem that might or might not underpin the entire setting. It certainly is far enough past the [[Clarke's Third Law]] point to make the belief look plausible.

 

** The sequel allows you to either take down the guy from the first game, or make him more powerful than ever.

*** The one of the third game's endings implies this {{spoiler|for humanity.}}

* In ''[[Star Ocean: Till the End of Time]]'', it is revealed that just about ''everything'' we know in the [[Star Ocean]] universe is inside a ''computer game'' that was created and played by fourth-dimensional-beings. And Symbology/Magic in [[Star Ocean]]? Unweaving the program's code meaning you're tampering with the universe itself.

 

* Seems to be inherent in ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]''. Lunesby is the [[Instant AI, Just Add Water|accidental offspring]] of Ennesby (NSB, or the [[Boy Band|New Sync Boys]]) by Luna's millennium-old filing system, and upon its inception immediately decides to start streamlining the planet's [[Obstructive Bureaucrat|labyrinthine bureaucracy]]. LOTA (the Long-Gunner Of The Apocalypse) does pretty much the same thing on Credomar. Petey (PD, or the ''Post Dated Check-Loan'') is suicidally insane when the Toughs pick him up, but eventually becomes the core of the Fleetmind; a gestalt of countless Battleship Class AIs into one, big, (kinda) omniscient Uber-AI with more firepower than the rest of the galaxy combined... that immediately decides to appoint itself guardian of the Milky Way Galaxy and wage a war against the Anti-Matter entities in Andromeda.

* ''[[Dresden Codak]]'' has this coming up during the Hob storyline. There was a superadvanced planet-spanning AI called Mother taking care of all of humanity's needs in a paralell reality. Then humans killed her/it. Which wasn't the end, due to every piece of advanced technology left containing all the information to evolve into another similarly powerful AI if left running without supervision long enough. Of course, humans control everything, and so don't have to worry. Except that they want to travel to the main universe, and for that they need to send a robot into the far past in that universe. It then has millions of years time to wait... until it falls into the hand of Kimiko, an enthusiastic transhumanist.

 

* The AI Gods from ''[[Orion's Arm]]'' are this, though it took millennia of self-improvement from the dawn of the first Turingrade AIs, through nanodisasters and space expansion and multiple [[The Singularity|singularities]], before the first hyperturings finally transcended into what could be called Gods - the Archailects.

 

* Primus in ''[[Transformers]]'' might count, though it's generally taken that he was a god before he got his cyberplanet body, and all his creations are ''also'' [[Mechanical Lifeforms|robots]].

** Unicron has also since been retconned into a Chaos God rather than a mere planet-eating Transformer, which usually has him playing Satan to Primus' mostly-inactive God.