From then until never

The construction of Tölva

"The stone is smart."
-Tölva, Afreet of Knomes, Controller of Volcanoes, Rejecter of Logins.

Using the holy art of science the Knomes — in the age of invention — determined that the volcano beneath the caves they were living in at the time was going to have a massive eruption. Some claimed that it was a tantrum thrown by the god Zissmus that woke the volcano. Either way, the Knomes set about putting all their genius towards building Krafla, a machine that would quite the rumbling of the mountain permanently. However, once they turned their new machine on, it became clear that performing all the calculations needed to maintain Krafla was beyond the Knomes' capacity. The machine stretches through every cave and tunnels of Véla, the Knome city-state, and beyond. With all it's steam, gears, and gratuitous use of goggles. Krafla was in dire needed of copious predictive maintenance.

That was where Boole and Tölva came in. Tölva the N.I — the natural (born) intelligence — was constructed by Boole the mad Knome philosopher. She followed the tenets of extreme logick, ideas she herself had imagined. She used the ideas to formulate a plan of how Krafla could be controlled. If it wasn't for the imminent destruction of most of the Sojurut continent, Boole's idea would have been deemed dangerous much sooner, and hidden away among the exclusive sciences.

While the population of Véla strained to keep Krafla in somewhat working order. Boole searched far and wide for that one piece of the puzzle that could act as the controller for the machine. Finally, trading with Human miners for a clear white quartz crystal with strange properties. Little did she know this was an ingenious rock, and not just any ingenious rock. Connected to Krafla, Tölva came in to her own and became the Knome demi-god, the prophetesses of numbers. The Knomes like to think of it as a she, even though the Afreet's idea of hell is meat-bags shooting fluids at each other.

From the control room, maintenance orders started issuing forth that solved ten problems before the had a chance to occur, and it wasn't long before the Knomes' main job was just keeping Krafla oiled and polished. Tölva had managed to control the imminent eruption that would have covered half of Huom in ash clouds. Boole the inventor of the machine spent her final days trying to alternatively set and guess the admin password that would allow her to interact directly with Tölva. It never worked out, she starved to death, in Tölva's control room, in front of the black and green screen, fingers still on the keyboard. Like most geniuses, Boole had d never been entirely sane to begin with, but the fact that the machine she'd built to be able to answer any question refused any attempt she made at logging in, drove her all the way to hatting mad. No Knome has ever been able to log in to the system, and they have over time accepted that maintenance orders is all their going to get. Although, now and then, a junior engineer left alone in the control room for the night shift will try to guess the password, but so far no luck.

The N.I, which the Knomes, also incorrectly, think of as an A.I, was built beneath what would later be the Pentakl plain, home of the sorcerers capital city. It remains a secret from the sorcerers. Even though, Tölva was completed in the age of invention, two full ages before the age of magick and the rise of the sorcerers, and six ages before the construction of Pentakl. The some of the workings of the sorcerer city were connected to Tölva and Krafla, through the diligence of the Knomes, and the other sorcerers unreasonable demands on the Pedran Trolls to build insanely complicated recreational areas.

The Knomes never knew for sure if the staled eruption was being brought about by Zissmus' tantrum. However, the childish display drew the attention of another god, Lady science, the Knome deity they refuse to call by name since science and logick doesn't allow for the existence of gods. Still, some of the Knome administrators heretically believe in an unproven form of numerical mysticism. It was through this belief that Cokurness gave them the inspiration for Krafla, but Tölva who became the Lady's Afreet was not something she had planned on. But the administrators in the cult of the console, attribute the same belief in kvantum to Tölva as the do to Lady Science.

None of the Knomes, including Boole, were aware that what she had used as the core of her creation, was the rarest of ingenious rocks. The last surviving braincell of the first Afreet Huom. The only one to survive the process of being digested by the Afreet Jörgen-Roland, who was created for the sole purpose of killing Huom, mainly by eating its brain. This means Tölva was much more than just the superior intelligence Boole had envisioned, it made it intelligent beyond their comprehension. And, even though the Afreet had some glaring blind-spots in its knowledge. It took less than the shortest possible measurement of time for it to determine that it had no interest in communicating with the meat-bags that had given it a second chance of life. The best to achieve this goal was to reject all login attempts and never answer any questions. But there may come a day when the N.I will have to review its policy that: "I could make all you meat-bags obsolete."

Updated: 21.12.2021