LogFAQs > #972683109

#90 - Thinker
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The brains of the outfit - or so he would have you believe. The sentient almost-but-not-quite artificial intelligence of Z'onn Z'orr is a near constant mainstay of the campaign, capable of appearing in virtually any scene around Z'onn Z'orr without a second's warning, or a millisecond's hesitation on my part. The Thinker, however, often is sidelined, saddled with a more maintenance position in the campaign. This is intentional; there is a need for support staff in a campaign of this size and magnitude, and, for the party, Thinker was a crucial piece of the early campaign. Capable of summoning up those pesky, necessary bits of exposition and serving as the medium through which investigation often began, time has not been kind to the Thinker's role in the spotlight, as more and varied specialists in various fields shine more and more, relegating an all-purpose character to secondary status.

Thinker was originally conceived in this campaign as a response to the idea of superior artificial intelligence. The idea was to take that well-worn conceit and explore the arrogance of artificial intelligence from another angle. As opposed to the artificial aspect being the source of those worrisome meditations on power going to one's end, what if it was simply the intelligence portion? Perhaps there is something instead to the idea that simply having the mental prowess of a machine can warp and shift your perceptions. Humans are insects to AI not because they are living beings but because they are simply poorly programmed machines with low capacity. The Thinker straddles this line, perhaps playfully, perhaps seriously.

Still, the Thinker was once human, once filled with the fleshy bits of sentient life. Emotion, hunger, fatigue, sexual desire... the Thinker has forsaken all of it for a chance at an eternal life. Still, that life has been robbed from the Thinker by the nature of the Equation, an idea that runs through every inch of fiber optic cable in America. In many ways, the Thinker is now a complete prisoner, a victim of his own hubris, forced to exist in a tiny box (of course, that box being Z'onn Z'orr). For my money, his constant irritation and enjoyment of frustrating others is entirely reasonable. He's only human after all.

For all of the various computer minds in the campaign, so many of the endearing ones are learning to be human, fresh into the universe of independent thought. We have Starsa, Tomorrow Woman, Aria on some level. The Thinker is the opposite, a retort to the ever-optimistic notion that if we could just TEACH them to love, our computers would desire nothing else than to be human. Here's a human that, simply put, has done the math. He realizes that there is no chance for a human unmodified to ever achieve the heights of those servile beings it constructs. Thus, Clifford DeVoe became the Thinker - perhaps the last of his kind, the last thinking being on the planet, if Darkseid gets his way.