The Machine

[Rock of the Fraternity]

It begins with injustice.
The injustice need not actually exist; it needs to be perceived.

Once injustice is perceived, it leads to outrage.
In outrage, people seek like-minded voices to share their concern. In outrage, they may resort to radical behaviour.
'Radical' behaviour need not be bad. To go out into the streets and protest against injustice is radical. Many activities are seen as radical because they go against the norms of society. That does not make them all evil. But there is a weakness in humanity, oh yes.

In seeking like-minded voices, people become vulnerable to guidance by those who claim to share their concern and - and this bit is important - to know a way that the injustice may be redressed.

The evil starts with the voice that tells people what the truth is, what they should believe, and what they should do.
The voice that raises walls around those merely who sought concourse with like-minded voices, shutting out the voices of family and friends, of news and history, and calls them all false and fool.
The voice that isolates, that preaches redress not merely through protest, but through action that shall force attention for the cause.
The voice that claims the only appropriate response to attempts to prevent such action is violence.

In promoting violence and disruption, radical behaviour turns to extremism.
In advancing violence to widespread destruction and death, extremism turns to terrorism.
And always there is the voice, spurring on those people who once wished only to redress an injustice, driving them further on until they become someone almost unrecognisable to themselves and the people who knew them.

There are many names; there are many voices; there are many messages. None of this matters. All that matters it that the process starts with the perception of an injustice, and comes to fruition in acts of mass-violence and destruction. Why this happens, against whom it is all directed... that does not matter. All that matters is that those who once wished to balance an injustice are led to believe in only the voice that leads them and isolate themselves - willingly isolate themselves - from all others who could have helped them step back out into the world.

This is an evil we know. It has no face to punch, no groin to kick, no body that may be locked up nor finances to block. It is an evil of humanity, a weakness; who does not seek the counsel of friends and trustworthy people when they perceive an injustice? Who among us will not try to share our burdens? Who is free of being open to those who claim kinship with us and agreement with our feelings?
It is possible to turn away before the process reaches its end, but never easy. Once you are in the kinship of those driven beyond extremism, there are many hands to hold you back -- one way or another.

In the real world, this is a weakness of humanity.
Now step into imagination, where this weakness, this force, this recurring tide in history, may have not a conscience but a consciousness.
This is the Machine, a bodiless evil to which agendas, creeds, faiths, are a dime a dozen and merely serve to flavour and grease the track that leads from injustice to mass death.
It has no substance, but it presses on the hearts and minds of those who are afraid and angry like a mountain. It can not be seen, but it blinds the hearts and minds of its victims to the world around them. It has no voice, yet its lies insinuate themselves smoothly into wavering minds. It has neither mouth nor stomach, but it hungrily devours the memories and self-images of its chattel and the suffering of their victims. Insatiable. Gluttonous. Pointless.

There is no need for the Machine to exist. There is no purpose to the Machine's existence. Neither god nor fiend set it in motion. It spun itself out of the worst traits of humanity and created its own purpose: the purpose is the devolution of people into tools of slaughter and the suffering of the innocent. A recurring plague of mortal minds, the Machine is as eternal as intelligent life and as patient as the grave. It can wait, whispering its poison, for centuries before the next crop of fanatics betrays principles it once held dear and starts butchering its opponents and innocent bystanders alike. There's no rush, and there is no shortage of injustice, real or unreal.

The Machine is a sickness of the mind and soul, even though it has neither of those itself, when all is said and done.
It runs on the impulse to isolate, to corrupt and devour. Even though it has consciousness, it is a process, rather than a creature.
And still... a consciousness. Something that delights and thrills in the fruits of the evil it encourages, the evil that it is. In the shadows cast by burning buildings, something that quivers in joy. Something that weighs on the injured and dying, those burdened by disease, poison and torture, savouring their pain. The Machine.
It is pervasive. It is ancient. It sees itself as powerful and clever. Mindless, soulless, it yet has an arrogance, a pride.

Pride goeth before the fall.

The Machine always considered itself to be undivided, a whole. No one part of it greater or lesser than any other, clear across worlds and planes. A recurring tide in history. And yet; one section of it has been lopped off from the rest, dragged down into the Misty netherworld that is the Demiplane of Dread. One part, that knows what it is to be the whole.
One part, that was no match for the curiosity and entertainments of the Dark Powers.

Trapped there, in a domain of its own. A fine domain, a domain of high science and wild magic, this land. And yet. The Machine is trapped here, unable to pierce the Mists and rejoin the whole. It hungers as always, but. But, but, but.
This is a fine land, but it is only one land. And it cannot escape. And mindless, soulless, it is not without conscience. To its non-thoughts, there occurs the idea. The terror for the Machine.
If all the people of this domain die, if it drives them to beautiful excess, to war and destruction... what then of the Machine? It is a force in history, a disease of mind and soul, but what will happen to it if history ends? What will it do without brows to enfever, minds to devolve into seething hornet's nests of hate and rage for the Other, hearts to harden and souls to isolate from the fellowship of man?
It must be patient, then. It must wait for the cattle to breed before it strikes, before it incites madness and mayhem, so there is always a little left over to breed again and keep the cycle running, maintain the tide of history.

Tell me then, Fraternity: is this thing, this not-spirit, a worthy Darklord? And if so, which curse would you assign to it?

[The Lesser Evil]

It sounds vaguely like the Red Death of Gothic Earth, which has been

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implied to have been been a rogue Dark Power exiled from Ravenloft

. So if we were going on precedence, I'd say probably not.

I'm curious how an entity/nonentity without a soul or mind could be described as having a conscience, especially if it hasn't been described as using it (assuming the "not without" being a double negative equaling to a positive being purposeful). Are you referring to its ability to recognize (and thus exploit) injustice?

With a name like that, it seems natural to compare it some kind of an AI. Does the Machine have true moral autonomy, or is it simply replicating its training data? Can it exist without its patterns of evil by making a choice, or is it just a manifestation of darkness that repeats itself over and over to continue existence? Like some sort of prion disease?

As for curses, it sounds like you already have the seeds of worthy curses:
1) a lack of wholeness, its fragment feeling cut off from the rest
2) a cycle of waiting and then harvest, of having to balance a delicate equilibrium and thus eternally delay its ultimate gratification with periods of (less) activity. The Dark Powers could perhaps make it not just in charge of waiting but also balancing out/actively limiting its own evil given ever tempting chances.

[IanFordam]

I was going to say the same sort of things that The Lesser Evil said, except probably not as well, so I'll just go with, "Yeah, what he said!"

In particular, the Machine doesn't feel machine-y enough to me. (I work with engineers. That doubtless slants my expectation of what I machine is.) Even if you are seeing the Machine as something close akin to an AI construct, I think its presentation would benefit from a stronger notion of its original programmed constraints--including it's training data, as The Lesser Evil suggests--before it broke free of its rails.

I do think that the idea of the Machine being only a part of its whole is a good seed for its curse. Perhaps because of an almost-social feeling of being cut out, or perhaps because it feels that it would be even more mighty if it had access to all of its data.

[SkiBird]

It has an American Gods vibe to it. That is, Internet, Technology, etc — after years of 'worship' by modern peoples — becoming gods in their own right.

I think one thing that would help the Machine would be a defined goal. A reason to manifest and steer the events of the world. Similar to how the American Gods decided that the world was too small a stage to share with Mr. Wednesday and others of his ilk.

The writeup had a very 'this is how it works' feel to it. It got me thinking about the cosmology of D&D and how some realms (Bytopia, Mechanus, etc) are tied to an alignment and have a more 'lawful' bent to them. To give the Machine a bit of friction, a bit of a reason to go above and beyond its regular 'programming' ... perhaps the demiplane it found itself bound to was not of the material plane at all ... and came from one of these more theoretical places.

The Machine (at first has no awareness, has no idea it has been trapped) goes about its business ... but lawful planar logic stymies its progress, halts the advance of its chaotic goals. Now, as a force of nature (or, well, force of consciousness I guess), normally this would be no big deal. Things tend to balance themselves out. But in this instance, there would be no balance, there would only be friction, and the inability of the Machine to achieve its primary desire.

On a much smaller scale, it would be like if an angel woke up in one of the nine hells or something. Or an agent of entropy became trapped in a land of perfect law and order, etc, etc.

So what happens when a force like that becomes aware (aware that it is trapped, aware that things are not behaving as they should be) ... what would its goals be? How would it go about seeing those goals achieved? Does it ... remake the land in its own image? (and if it cannot) Does it ... try to escape?

Following that train of thought a bit further, what might stand between the force and those goals? I think once those things come into focus, the tale of the Machine will come into focus as well. It becomes in some way, defined by its opposition.

[Baron Von Stanton]

Makes me think of the ex-obyrith, the Malgoth. After it was slain by a clique of tanar'ri lords, its mind persisted as a powerful, invisible spirit that drove a city to destroy itself in an orgy of hateful madness.

[SkiBird]

The modrons used to stand for Law ... but then they decided to rewrite the laws. Once the Hexadrone Collective declared its ascendancy, its message spread like wildfire ... and the Great Wheel may never recover."
-Cassin Lirrix, Planar Archivist & Far Wanderer