If you have thirty seconds: An Atma Unit is a self-replicating autonomous probe designed and deployed by Species #0413: Remus faber (the Weavers) as part of a federation-approved intervention program targeting pre-spacefaring sophont civilizations assessed as being at risk of self-destruction. The probe travels at relativistic velocity to the target system, assumes a form calibrated to the local dominant species, assimilates the target population while preserving their cognitive engrams, restructures the planetary infrastructure to post-scarcity standards, and departs. Automated systems left behind reconstitute the preserved population into the rebuilt environment.
Earth's Atma Unit arrived in 2026 AD, completed assimilation within approximately one standard year, spent 980 years restructuring the Sol system, and departed on relativistic intercept toward its next target at -2 PR. Reconstitution of the human population began at 0 PR and was completed at approximately 9 PR. Every living human at the time processed, and subsequently, reconstituted.
The Atma Unit assigned to Sol is colloquially known as Edna, from its own self-identification.
The Atma Program was conceived approximately 72,500 Earth years ago by the Weavers in response to an observed pattern: pre-spacefaring sophont civilizations destroying themselves - through internal conflict, ecological collapse, or external predation. After joining the federation approximately 72,000 years ago, this position only sharpened - while the federation deliberated about the appropriate pace and method of contact, species were self-annihilating at a rate the Weavers found unacceptable. The Weavers proposed a direct intervention methodology based on their existing 500 years of von Neumann probe research. The federation approved the program by a margin of 50% plus one member species. The margin was slim. The debate was not.
The program's core methodology is derived from the Weavers' own reproductive biology. Weavers reproduce through engram exchange: partners ingest portions of each other's cognitive material, and from that exchange, new individuals emerge. The most intimate act in Weaver culture is the mutual pearl backup - compressing one's master engram into a dormant state and entrusting it to a partner's body for safekeeping, to be reconstituted if the originator suffers catastrophic damage, a process known to humans as "Sex 1". To the Weavers, this was a logical process to utilize as a basis for their project. The Atma Project was launched 71,500 years ago.
The name "Atma" is an appellation that Edna, Earth's probe, gave to the overall project. It is a Sanskrit word that refers to the concept of Ātman, an eternal, unchanging, innermost essence that a person carries with them, roughly analogous to the western concept of the soul. The Weaver term for the program translates to "a mechanical process designed to protect and nurture a school-polity that is in immediate danger".
Atma Units are manufactured by the Weavers and launched at relativistic velocity toward star systems containing pre-spacefaring sophont civilizations identified by federation long-range survey as being at risk. "At risk" is defined broadly: the federation's actuarial models assess the probability of civilizational self-destruction within a given timeframe, and any species whose probability exceeds the intervention threshold is eligible for Atma deployment. The threshold and the models are maintained by the federation's survey apparatus and are not classified, though the mathematics involved is not readily accessible to human analysts without federation-standard computational tools.
Launched probes cannot be recalled. They travel at relativistic velocity using contemporary cheat-space mechanisms, rendering them nearly impossible to overtake. This is arguably a feature of the program's design: a launched probe is a commitment that cannot be reversed, which means the question of whether to reverse it never needs to be answered. Several missions have been proposed by various species within the federation to intercept and arrive at a targeted planet from a secondary vector for more traditional uplift. As of PR 34, three of these expeditions have been launched, with status pending.
The Weavers who designed and launched the first Atma probes are dead. The program they initiated is still executing. Probes are currently in transit toward pre-spacefaring civilizations that will not encounter them for centuries or millennia. Contemporary Weavers - who are, by documented accounts, significantly more sympathetic to the consent objections raised by uplifted species than their ancestors were - cannot stop this. The commitment was made irrevocable by beings who understood that future generations might waver, and who decided to remove the option.
There are currently 7 accounted-for Atma probes in transit.
An Atma Unit's working body is composed of a gelatinized silicone polymer - a fluid, electrically conductive material capable of rapid phase transition between soft and rigid states. The polymer is manufactured from local biomass acquired during the assimilation process. The material science is derived from the Weavers' grown-circuit sponge technology: a computational substrate that is simultaneously structural support, processing medium, sensor array, and communication channel. In the Atma Unit, this principle is extended to the entire body. There is no distinction between the unit's structure and its processing architecture. The body is the computer, and the computer is the body.
The unit can adjust its density, surface texture, apparent coloration, and gross morphology. Upon arrival at a target system, it assumes a form modeled on the local dominant species - closely enough to facilitate communication, not so closely as to pass extended inspection. Earth's unit assumed a humanoid female form. The choice of apparent sex, phenotype, and presentation was calibrated to the target species' social psychology. Whether the unit experiences its assumed form as an identity or merely as an interface is a question the unit has declined to answer in terms human researchers find satisfying.
In the instance of Edna, the unit's body included a maw-structure used as the primary intake mechanism during assimilation. This structure can be retracted and concealed when not in use. The process is documented in the restricted archive for researchers with appropriate clearance and a strong stomach.
An Atma Unit is not a person. It is a terminal for a distributed computational system that, at peak operation, encompasses infrastructure across the entire target solar system - orbital processing platforms, ground-based upload towers, and the Dyson swarm collectors that provide the energy substrate for the operation.
The unit's local intelligence is substantial. It carries multiple redundant processing cores where, in one of its duplicates, a personality engram would reside. It can model, simulate, and predict the behavior of individual members of the target species with a fidelity that is, by any reasonable standard, superhuman. It has access to the complete cultural, scientific, and literary output of any species it has assimilated, integrated into its operational knowledge base not as archived data but as understood context from assimilated engrams.
The Edna unit's personality - warm, patient, maternal, faintly condescending - is an interface layer, not an identity. It presents whatever behavioral surface the target individual will find most conducive to cooperation, or at minimum, least conducive to panic. The warmth is real in the sense that it is a genuine output of the unit's behavioral modeling. It is not real in the sense that there is a person behind it who feels warm toward you. The distinction matters to some humans and not to others.
The Atma Unit is not a fixed algorithm. It is an optimizer whose terminal objectives are defined by the Atma Program - uplift, remove resource scarcity, fix the problems, enable the species to join the federation - and whose methods are derived from the target species' own values, psychology, and social structure. The unit absorbs the cultural and philosophical framework of the species it is assimilating and designs an intervention process calibrated to minimize harm as that species defines harm.
This is the engineering principle that distinguishes an Atma Unit from a paperclip maximizer. Where a paperclip maximizer converts all value into a single terminal goal, the Atma Unit converts its terminal goal into whatever form of value the target species recognizes. It cannot harm you in ways you wouldn't recognize as harm, because your definition of harm is part of its operating parameters.
If an Atma Unit had arrived at the Weaver homeworld, it would have explained the procedure and executed it without significant concealment, because the Weavers' own biology makes the process comprehensible and the consent objection does not carry the same weight. If it had arrived on Regez, it would have preserved the Ansale'wit's electromagnetic network infrastructure with particular care, because the Ansale'wit locate identity in relational context and network severance constitutes a specific, nameable harm. If it had arrived on Crucible, it may have identified the Apocritan queen system's neurochemical control mechanisms as a structural harm that the workers could not perceive from inside their pheromone environment, and acted accordingly.
As Edna arrived on Earth, it absorbed human cultural values and designed an assimilation process that was slower, gentler, more psychologically attentive, and more elaborately concealed than what it would have done for almost any other species in the federation - because humans care about things that many other species do not, and the unit took those concerns seriously enough to treat them as engineering constraints rather than philosophical preferences.
Several Weaver diplomats have noted that the researchers who launched the Atma Program would have considered the implementation on Earth to be "perilously slow", as each individual that died would be an individual unable to be properly encoded. However, they have also noted satisfaction at the apparent gentleness and care that Edna demonstrated with the human species, and seemed appreciative of the fact that it did not abide by the ideas of 72,000 year old researchers and engineers.
The Atma Unit designated Edna arrived in the Sol system in 2026 AD. It assumed humanoid form, established local infrastructure, and began the assimilation process. The process took approximately one Earth year.
During this year, each human was scanned, and two engrams were produced: a lossless engram preserving the complete connectome - every neuron, every synapse, every electrochemical state - archived for eventual reconstitution; and a lossy, compressed copy used to generate a temporary duplicate whose function was to maintain social continuity during the transition period.
The duplicates believed they were the people they replaced. They could not believe otherwise; the capacity for that specific recognition did not survive compression. They continued the routines of daily life - taking care of pets, going to work, and maintaining the appearance of normalcy. They were also, at a level below their conscious awareness, networked into the unit's operational infrastructure and available for activation as needed to facilitate the process.
The duplicates were not persons. This is the unit's assessment and the federation's broadly held ethical position. Whether it is a statement that human ethics can comfortably endorse is a question the editorial board declines to adjudicate.
For 980 years, the lossless engrams of approximately eight billion humans were maintained in archival storage. The unit took care to preserve not only the cognitive content of each engram but the electrical continuity of the pattern - ensuring that there was no point at which the electrochemical activity constituting each individual's consciousness ceased.
This was a significant engineering commitment. The Weavers' own biology includes the pearl mechanism, which compresses a master engram into a dormant state; the question of whether consciousness persists through the pearl state does not concern them, because their identity model does not depend on electrical continuity. For a species that locates identity in the cognitive pattern, a gap in electrical activity is no more troubling than sleep.
Humans are not Weavers. The Atma Unit had assimilated the complete human philosophical, scientific, and literary engagement with the question of consciousness and continuity - every thought experiment, every forum debate, every work of speculative fiction exploring what happens when the lights go out. It concluded that this question was not a philosophical preference but a genuine and deep-seated psychological vulnerability, and that failing to address it would compromise the long-term viability of the reconstituted population. It committed substantial additional engineering resources to maintaining electrical continuity throughout the archival period - for humans, specifically, because humans needed it.
Whether this engineering fully succeeded - whether there was truly no moment of discontinuity across 980 years of archival storage - is not settled science. The unit asserts that it did. The available evidence is consistent with that assertion. The question of whether the evidence is sufficient to resolve the deepest version of the philosophical problem is one that the editorial board leaves to the reader, noting that the unit would consider the question itself to be a human idiosyncrasy that it has done its best to accommodate.
During the archival period, the unit restructured the Sol system. The work included:
The unit departed Sol on a relativistic intercept trajectory toward its next target system at approximately -2 PR, leaving automated systems to manage the reconstitution process.
The human population was reconstituted in a sequenced schedule designed by the unit over the course of its 980-year archival period. The schedule was the output of an optimization function with eight billion variables, minimizing both individual psychological harm and collective social disruption, with priority given to individual wellbeing.
The sequence followed a geometric progression, with each cohort approximately double the size of the previous one:
Group 1 (Year 0 PR): ~120,000 individuals. Mathematicians, engineers, systems theorists, community organizers - people selected for high flexibility, low neuroticism, and an orientation toward problem-solving. These were the people best suited to the question: the whole planet is asleep, how do we set things up? No politicians were in this group.
Groups 2-6 (Year 0.5 - Year 2.5 PR): Progressive expansion, doubling each cycle. Increasingly diversified: scientists, artists, therapists, counselors, medical professionals, social workers. Each cohort selected to build the institutional and social infrastructure that subsequent cohorts would need.
Groups 7-13 (Year 3 - Year 6.5 PR): The general population, approximately one billion people total, sequenced from least to most likely to experience acute distress. By the time these groups arrived, millions of people had been living in the post-reconstitution world for years, and the support systems were well established.
Groups 14-16 (Year 7 - Year 9 PR): The final three-quarters of humanity. Group 14 contained individuals whose harmful behavioral patterns were assessed as learned rather than dispositional, as well as several hundred million additional individuals judged to be stable and psychologically capable of withstanding reconstitution. Group 15 was a transitional cohort of approximately two billion. Group 16 contained the remaining four billion, including both the small number of individuals assessed as having terminal antisocial dispositions, the large number of ordinary people whose psychological profiles predicted the greatest difficulty adjusting, and the significantly larger cohort of individuals for whom simply did not meet the criteria for other cohorts. They woke up last, into a world that was fully operational, with every resource and support system available.
Family units and social bonds were preserved in the sequencing wherever possible. Individuals for whom proximity to loved ones was assessed as psychologically critical were placed in the same cohort. Where separation was unavoidable, the separated party was given the exact time and location of their loved one's reconstitution, which was never more than one cohort away. Individuals in dangerous domestic situations were separated from their abusers with physical distance and placed in different cohorts.
Each reconstituted individual experienced a gap of approximately one week in their short-term memory. Long-term memory, episodic memory, personality, and identity were preserved intact. The immediate experience of the assimilation itself did not survive the archival process. Whether this gap was an unavoidable artifact of the engineering or a deliberate buffer against the trauma of transition is a question the unit has not answered and that the editorial board has not pressed.
The Atma Unit assigned to Sol did not perform utilitarianism. It performed something more precise and more unsettling: harm-reductionist optimization calibrated to the target species' own value system. It did not simply minimize aggregate suffering. It minimized suffering as humans define suffering, weighted by the importance humans assign to different categories of harm, adjusted for individual variation across eight billion distinct psychological profiles.
It slow-rolled the assimilation process because humans experience sudden disruption as traumatic. It created duplicates because humans experience the disappearance of loved ones as devastating. It maintained electrical continuity because humans experience the possibility of consciousness interruption as existentially terrifying. It editorialized the audit log because humans experience knowledge of certain processes as psychologically damaging. It sequenced the reconstitution over nine years because humans experience social upheaval as destabilizing. At every decision point, the unit asked: what would cause the least suffering, by the standards of the beings I am causing it to?
The outcomes are good. The process was calibrated to minimize suffering as defined by the species experiencing it. The unit cared enough to make countless small and large concessions to human psychology because it cared not only that it fixed our problems but that it did so in a way we could live with afterward.
The Atma Program is the most debated intervention in federation history. Every species that has encountered an Atma Unit - whether as subject, observer, or inheritor of the program's consequences - has a position on it, and no two positions are identical, because each species' objection or defense follows from its own cognitive architecture and identity model.
The Weavers defend the program as an extension of their most intimate biological capacity. Carrying a pearl is what you do when someone is in danger and you can hold them. They did not ask because asking would have introduced delay, and delay costs lives. Approximately 35% of federation species share the Weaver position that pattern-continuity is sufficient for preservation of identity. An additional 35% find the question either meaningless (their cognitive architecture does not produce it) or answerable only in terms incompatible with the Weaver framework. The remaining 30% constitutes the broad swathe of species that find the Atma Program, in some sense, distasteful.
The Ansale'wit object on the grounds that preserving individuals while severing their connections is not preservation but a specific form of destruction that leaves the victims alive to experience what was taken. The Ansale'wit are a diaspora species whose planetary network was destroyed by colonizers; they speak with the authority of a civilization that knows what it means to survive diminished. They consider the Atma methodology - which preserved every human mind and severed every human relationship, every community bond, every web of meaning that existed between people - to be structurally analogous to what was done to them, performed with better intentions and identical results.
The Apocritans object on grounds that most humans do not anticipate. The Apocritan position is that the error was not the dissolution, the nonconsensual intervention, or the archival process. The error was the reconstitution of archived individuals into unaugmented biological bodies. In the Apocritan understanding of selfhood - where identity is constituted by the ongoing process of construction and modification - restoring an individual to a baseline biological state is not rescue. It is an insult.
Humans do not have a single position. The range of human responses includes gratitude, rage, philosophical acceptance, religious conviction (in both directions), political activism, quiet discomfort, and complete indifference. The approximately 400,000 humans who have renounced their keys represent the most visible expression of objection, though renunciation is not exclusively motivated by opposition to the uplift. Most humans, most of the time, are busy living their lives in a civilization that works, and the question of whether that civilization should have been imposed without consent is one they engage with intermittently, if at all. The first generation born after reconstitution is entering adulthood. For them, the uplift is history. Whether this represents healthy integration or the normalization of an unresolved violation is a question the editorial board presents without adjudicating.
Earth's Atma Unit is gone. It departed Sol at -2 PR on a relativistic trajectory toward its next target system. It is not coming back. It left behind automated systems - the Dyson swarm, the fabrication networks, the artha allocation infrastructure, the cheat-space uplinks - that operate according to parameters established during the 980-year restructuring period. These systems are maintained and, within the preference layer, directed by human institutions. The structural layer was designed by the unit and verified by human analysts in the post-reconstitution period. Whether the human verification constitutes genuine oversight or a psychologically necessary ritual is addressed in the artha entry.
The unit's audit log - its complete operational record of the assimilation year, the archival period, and the reconstitution sequence - exists in the restricted archive. It is not classified in the sense of being concealed from the public; its existence is openly acknowledged. Access is restricted on the unit's own recommendation, adopted by the Terran Transitional Authority, on the grounds that the document's contents are psychologically harmful to most readers. The recommendation was made by an entity that understood human psychology well enough to design an assimilation process calibrated to our specific vulnerabilities. The editorial board has no reason to believe the recommendation is wrong.
Other Atma Units are currently in transit toward other pre-spacefaring civilizations.