[SPOILERS] The Gods of Olympus

You know, those creepy grey entities that work for Gods, and have all named themselves after gods from the Greek and Roman pantheons? I've speculated about that a lot, proposing that they might be anything from conspirator-style personality clones to Gaia-like entities in their own right, but as of the latest update I think I know what they are. They're the one thing that a secretive creep like Gods would trust:

Gods himself.

Each of the admins is an iteration of Gods from a different universe or timeline. Seem far-fetched? Take a look at this quote, from page 146:

ARES wrote:What're we looking for? An unknown Gods instance?

MINERVA wrote:Or something that looks like one. I'm pretty sure an actual personality clone of one of us would give the attacker an unbeatable edge.

What can we learn from this?
1. There is more than one instance of Gods (which we already know, since the Panichat timeline had one of its own).
2. At least some of these instances of Gods are known to the admins.
3. A personality clone of one of the admins would qualify as an instance of Gods.
Therefore, the admins are either Gods himself or personality clones of him. But we know that the admins are themselves clonable. Can you make a clone of a clone? Well, the wiki page on the Silent Conspiracy has this to say:
"The Conspiracy was loosely organized into a number of semiautonomous units. The rank-and-file members were generated directly from the original seed personality, and had little independence nor creativity, but were generally competent soldiers. Squadron leaders underwent further personality evolution and generally displayed more creativity." Notice that the rank-and-file members, the simplest personalities, are generated directly from Silent's personality, while the squadron leaders are more complex because of personality evolution. The direct clones lack a lot of autonomy, which the evolutionary process can help restore. This suggests that, in cloning a personality, something is lost. The direct clones of Silent don't turn into exact copies of her, but simpler entities with a lower degree of independence. If one could, in theory, clone a clone, presumably even more information would be lost, and one would likely end up with something largely incapable of thinking on its own. Notice also that Pancake never seems to make clones of his personality clones: the simplest soldiers are first-degree clones, and their leaders seem to be clones whose personalities have been run through some sort of evolutionary program to make them more complex. Presumably it would be more time-efficient to use second-degree or higher clones to fill the ranks and files, but Pancake doesn't do this, likely because this is either impossible or would result in an entity that is too simple to be of use.

However, Minerva states that if the attacker did have a personality clone of one of them, it would give them a significant advantage. If Minerva is also a clone, this would mean we'd be dealing with a second-degree clone. If such an entity could be useful, why does Pancake never use any? I believe that it is either impossible or unhelpful to create clones of clones, and therefore, the admins cannot be clones themselves.

So, with this in mind, here are a few observations about the admins:
1. They are either time travellers, or don't exist in the same universe. This is implied by the question-mark timestamps in their conversations with each other, which word of God states were only absent from their first appearance in order to hide their true nature from Orlov.
2. They are naturally inclined to trust each other with near-certainty. When Gods told them that there was a mole within their ranks, Minerva went so far as to call the proposition "METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE!"
3. All of the ones who have been referred to in third person appear to use male pronouns. This includes Minerva, Artemis, and Aphrodite, despite being named after female goddesses.
4. Their writing styles are very similar, as are their personalities (they all seem very logical, for example.) However, they do seem to be subtly different: Ares and Jupiter seem more aggressive than Minerva and Aphrodite, for instance. This is to be expected from different instances of the same person from different timelines (who have had different events happen to them.) Compare the goofy pwnz0rz to the alcoholic and slightly more mature pwnz1ng to the cynical and literate pwnz2much, or the pragmatic and capitalistic AdmiralPancake to the elitist and needlessly cruel PancakeHighAdmiral. In both cases, the different instances are still clearly the same person, but changed by their different experiences.
5. They can't be literal gods as I briefly hypothesized, since they are clearly very much mortal.

Finally there's the recent death of Hephaestus, who popped into the timestream for a few minutes before quickly dying. This is a dead ringer for the iteration of Gods from the Panichat Timeline, who used his closer connection to Etamnanki to commit suicide.

Xenocartographer wrote:Did I just introduce a character and immediately kill him off? ...no.

No indeed. Because the character had already been introduced, and had also already been killed off.

There's one other thing that should be noticed. Minerva referred to Hephaestus as "the last sensible candidate for the mole." We know from the fact that pwnz3r and PHA are aware of Etamnanki that their timeline must have had some kind of connection to it in the past (perhaps before it split off), but that the connection became much weaker as they moved farther away from the Alpha Timeline. Why would Hephaestus be the last sensible candidate for the mole? Because he hadn't been heard from in so long. Aphrodite even mentions losing contact with his timeline. The others are inclined to trust each other because they are each other, and they've been in contact continuously this whole time. But since they lost track of Hephaestus a long time ago, they have no idea what may have happened to him in the time since, so he becomes the most likely candidate for the mole, the one most likely to go against the wishes of his other iterations.

The reason the Gods Of Olympus all trust each other so much is because they all want the same thing, by virtue of being the same person. The reason they are willing to defer to Alpha!Gods as their leader is because he is from the timeline where Etamnanki is the strongest, and thus has the best understanding of it and the strongest powers granted by it. Our Gods gets to keep that name because he speaks for all of his other selves as a collective. But ask yourself this: what could GodsOfOlympus possibly hope to accomplish that is so important, so enticing, that it continues to hold value for him no matter what events have occurred in his own iteration of the timeline? What objective could possibly be of such universal significance that all of the iterations of you across all of the timelines that Etamnanki affects care about it? What does Gods want?

I don't know, but I'm kind of afraid to find out.

There's but one thing that bothers me. They are too few, or at least we've seen too few. I mean, back in my sysadmin days, I'd install a copy of myself on pretty much every single server given half a chance. Somehow, artificial personalities don't seem too much of a load for the Wondrous Voodoo Chips (which greatly hurts the overall story credibility for me, but this probably deserves a topic of its own.) So, why wouldn't Gods create lots and lots of artificial — er — himselves if that's the case? Or why would he make a network of said himselves centralised, thus introducing a single point of failure? A Redundant Array of Artificial Admins definitely is the way to go. Unless, of course, there's some very serious reason to trade reliability for... what?

I think you misunderstood me. I really doubt the admins are artificial, I think that they're literally other iterations of Gods from other timelines. As for their number, well, Unichat doesn't seem to support an infinite-timeline interpretation of the multiverse, since there seem to be some events which literally cannot happen any other way (shatterpoints) and some which are so trivial that they don't seem to actually result in a split timeline. So the number of parallel universes is probably quite large, but finite, and the portion of that finite number that are close enough to the Alpha Timeline to feel the effects of Etamnanki is unlikely to be more than a couple dozen or so. Which is about the right number for a Greco-Roman religious naming scheme.

Oh. I must have been carried away by the prospect of dividing my work while keeping all the salary

Two moments, though.

First, they all have their different login names. Who's assigned them? It's reasonable to suppose that they'd all want the same one being the same person. Probably Zeus, but anyway. There is only one login that breaks the scheme: GodsOfOlympus. Sounds pretty much like "all of us" to me. Also, that's what every "deity" calls him. This needs some explanation, and I failed to come up with one based on the assumption they are Gods of other timelines. What's yours?

Second, Pancake doesn't look very clever to me. Not really a computer science genius anyway: when he needs one, he kidnaps her. Gods, on the other hand, is a pro. Whatever prevented Pancake from creating good copies, or copies of copies, may not be much of a problem to him. Besides, the "little independence or creativity" part might have been inherited by Silent's copies straight from the original. Which, again, hardly can apply to Gods.

As I understand it, Gods is from the timeline where Etamnanki is the strongest. He thus has the best understanding of it and the most powerful abilities, so it makes sense that he gets to be the leader. Presumably, this is also why he gets to keep that name when he speaks with the admins, because he’s the “Alpha” Gods. I assume that the other names are all aliases, and that inside their universes, the others still all go by GodsOfOlympus or something similar. As for how the names are decided, I can’t really say. Perhaps the names correspond to a specific quality of the universe that instance originated from? (For example, perhaps in Ares’ universe Earth is in the middle of a drawn-out war, or something.) That’s just a little headcanon though, I don’t actually know.

You could be right about the whole thing about making clones of clones, that part of the theory is pretty speculative. But it seems pretty likely that Hephaestus is the version of Gods from the Panichat timeline (Aphrodite mentions losing contact with his timeline, the details of the deaths match, Xeno implied that she didn’t just introduce him only to immediately kill him off, and having his death be a meaningful, previously-mentioned event is just better storytelling in the first place). So it seems fair to assume that the other admins are something similar.