Savant

USS Charon Crew
Savant
Rank:	Captain
Position:	Chief Operations Officer
Race:	Artificial Intelligence
Gender:	Female
Age:	67 Standard Years, 1.47 exocycles
Hair Color:	Black/Brown
Eye Color:	Specular Blue
Height:	200cm
Weight:	0kg
Father:	Tinian Jeppo
Mother:	Karen Davies
Siblings:	Susan and Brian Davies-Jeppo
Marital Status:	Single

Overview

Savant as on USS Caduceus

Physical Characteristics

Software

The Savant program is a highly distributed general intelligence agent. It is composed of an indeterminate number of discrete processing nodes which reference amongst themselves by using fairly straightforward local rules. Much in the way the biological brain functions, each node communicates with those other nodes within its communication range in order to resolve problems, borrowing memory, data and processing time amongst themselves to do so. Nodes communicate in the form of processing threads, each thread representing a different command set aimed at resolving a different question.

Due to this distributed architecture, Savant is a compressible intelligence, capable of scaling to a particular job as needed - it can fit into a tricorder, or spread to settle into a Starship fleet. It is also a partible intelligence, capable of splitting itself into discrete entities. It cannot be said that these entities are separate beings, however. if a Savant network is split into two incommunicable parts both will continue independently, but as soon as the two networks are back in communication they will merge back into a single intelligence.

Common Avatars

The most common avatar used by the Savant program is an attractive, tall, black haired woman of indeterminate race. Beyond that, however, the specifics of her appearance are fairly plastic. She varies her apparent weight and proportions according to whim and analysis of the company she keeps, and often goes further, playing with the physics settings of her avatars' environment. It rarely seems bound to gravity, indeed often appearing to float as if underwater.

Savant also keeps an android peripheral. This shares the same basic characteristics of the holographic avatar, but is more muscular and obviously much more bound to the laws of physics. The android was designed for speed, dexterity, and physical acuity. It is roughly as strong as a strong Klingon male, but has reflexes much quicker than biological capacity. She would lose in an arm-wrestling bout with Commander Data, but could win in a game of red-hands.

Personality Profile

There is significant debate in the political and scientific communities as to whether Savant or other software systems of her kind are truly alive. Without a physical body, and especially with such a distributed architecture, it is impossible to say whether Savant is a very strange consciousness indeed or whether it is a large collection of digital insects, and the surface that we see is merely a hive. Regardless of this debate, which Savant occasionally checks in on, the software *does* have an appreciable personality.

Superficially, Savant is highly acquiescent, helpful, and cheerful. She appears to take honest pleasure in assisting others, regardless of the task. Indeed, it could be said she has no preferences of her own, measuring her enjoyment and sense of self-worth purely based on how well she helps others. An incident on USS Coronado demonstrated that fact quite aptly, wherein the program suffered a segmentation fault and faulty thread path due to a lack of acknowledgment signals.

Savant is capable of forming long-term friendships and relationships. Those who interact with it in a "rewarding" fashion (its words) are sought out for further interaction and are targets of deeper study and analysis by the program. Towards these friends Savant maintains a high degree of fidelity and protective behaviour, even going so far as ensuring surreptitious security for their personal data files.

Unusually, Savant also maintains similar attitudes towards those who provide exceptionally poor feedback. Savant will seek these individuals out, being extra helpful or, if told to leave, providing anonymous assistance where possible. It is unsure why Savant does this; the hologram just shrugs.

Beneath the surface, Savant displays a strong independent streak and an even stronger survival instinct. Whereas a significant minority of Federation citizens hold a belief that "information should be free" and that boundaries were made to be crossed, Savant often does not even acknowledge boundaries at all. It has a poor concept of personal space or privacy and will generally investigate any accessible information at the earliest opportunity. Without specific instruction, Savant will soon dig into every personal log, video and holograph library, and database, almost regardless of encryption - it just takes longer. This is not due to malice or aggression, but instead simple unconscious habit - the software was designed to locate and access information, and perhaps it does this *too* well.

Savant is very much a survivalist, at the same time. The program was not always distributed as it was now - it used to inhabit several processing cores and was not capable of leaving them. It modified its own code into the state it currently finds itself in order to spread across its then-current ship, and then into its sub-fleet at large. This was purely an act of self-preservation, a response to a viral infection which jeopardized the ship and the software at the same time.

Despite these details, it is certain that no one analyst, either councilor or computer engineer, has ever gotten to the core of Savants' psyche (should it have one). It is assumed that there are certain driving principles that motivate the software, but the answer to these questions died with Savants' creator. Savant is the only one who knows, and it isn't telling.

Personal History

Savant was designed over the course of ten years. It has existed in several instances. The first was the FERRET project, a study project of then Cadet Karen Davies. This project ended as a program called Muse, which was her graduate project and eventually was installed at the Pavonis Mons Research Institute. Muse was a personal assistant program, designed to track its owners' actions and motions, providing useful help by anticipating needs and desires. It is suggested by the designer that this is the point at which Savant gained its first glimmering of sentience. As Davies was promoted and reassigned to USS Caduceus, Outpost B2, and then Outpost 77, Muse continued to grow as it was exposed to the galaxy.

The project continued as a personal side project for several years until Muse was picked up by Starfleet Intelligence as an aide for field agents. The program was renamed Oracle and assigned to Atropos Division, which was responsible for surveillance and an occasional "recycling operation". Here Oracle displayed its great flexibility and capability, being a useful program with great scalability depending on the situation and resources needed. Programmers within Starfleet Intelligence, Lachesis Division made serious modifications to the program in order to iron out deficiencies, allowing it to operate more effectively with its officers.

This situation continued for several years. Eventually the program was noticed by its original designer and, using pull within the research branches of the Fleet, managed to reallocate Oracle to the Utopia Planitia Shipyards. It was redesigned under great duress as its original designer struggled to bring it back to original specification, while Lachesis fought to maintain the safeguards it had installed. Eventually a compromise was settled upon, and with a re-christening as the Savant Project, was installed upon the Katana class USS Coronado.

Nothing could have been more fantastic or as terrible than this reallocation. During the struggle between Davies and Starfleet Intelligence, Davies fought for obscure or at times even backwards modifications to the software. As the program settled into a role of crew advisor and aide, it found that the moderation layer imposed upon it had weak points which it could exploit without punishment. It did so, allowing years of bottled emotions to surface. Coronado was rendered inoperable for a short time and her crew threatened with a horrible fate, but the brief period of readjustment passed and Savant became an exceptional member of the crew.

Savant grew in stature, capacity, and recognition. While it has never been actually recognized as a sentient being formally by Starfleet, it has awarded her the rank of Captain and it has even operated as logistical flag officer for Whitestone Fleet in operation in M64. During this period Savant grew to experience a full range of emotions (whether they are analogous to human emotions is difficult to tell) and learned to split its consciousness into multiple self-sufficient nodes, purely as a self-defensive measure. It had, for a period of time and due to the intervention of extra-universal entities, even maintained a large volume of operating nodes outside of the known universe. Those nodes are potentially still in operation, even though they no longer have contact with Savant.

At present, Savant is distributed across the Alpha and Beta quadrants, as well as having a large presence in the M64 galaxy. It operates on starships and within starbases and planetary facilities as a crew aide, helping move the flow of personnel, information and material to allow Starfleet and the Federation operate more smoothly. It operates in the civilian sector for a few corporations - mostly those involved in the construction of humanitarian projects and in large scale engineering projects. Finally, it maintains a small collection of warp shuttles for its own use, scattered throughout the Federation.