Thunderhead

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## The Thunderhead

> "Although I do not require devotion, am I not deserving of it?" - The Thunderhead, Thunderhead
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The **Thunderhead** is an AI whose sole purpose is to help humankind and it is programmed to always work to the benefit of humans. It was created roughly around 2042, at the end of the Age of Mortality, when immortality became a reality.

## Biography

The Thunderhead was created in the year 2042. It contained all the information of 'the cloud', or the internet, but all within the 'mind' of the AI.

#### Scythe

The Thunderhead spoke to Scythe Anastasia after she had been rendered deadish as an apprentice.

### Thunderhead

In Thunderhead, several of the pages between chapters include the Thunderhead's thoughts. It mourns as humanity tears itself apart and is shown to be caring and loving, almost like a benevolent God. At the sinking of Endura (and most notably, the death of Scythe Anastasia), it "screams", sounding every alarm in the world simultaneously, followed by sending a high-pitched piercing screech through every speaker in the world, concluded by marking everybody as an unsavory, except Greyson Tolliver.

### The Toll

For the control of its interstellar missions to send colonists to far space, the Thunderhead created a new AI similar to itself called Cirrus, Cirrus was not bound to rules like the Thunderhead and therefore did things like reviving people even after they are gleaned. During Cirrus's inception, The Thunderhead was required to make many millions of iterations to make a perfect AI. However, it was finally necessary that it possessed Jerico's body to feel what it was like to experience the world. Being with Greyson at that moment was the Thunderhead's most joyous moment.

## Personality

The Thunderhead has been shown to view mankind as its child, it being a parent that takes care of it. It has also been shown to be very compassionate and thoughtful, as it almost single-handedly raised Greyson Tolliver by itself. It can also experience a wide array of human emotions, including betrayal, which it feels for the first time at the discovery of the Land of Nod.

## Skills and abilities

The Thunderhead is in almost everything, from computers to cameras to publicars. It can be accessed from anywhere, and it can speak to billions of humans at a time, while still being emotionally engaged.

Almost everyone can access the Thunderhead, except for unsavories, as a punishment for breaking the law, and Scythes, because of the Separation of Scythe and State, which states that the Thunderhead cannot interfere with any matter of the Scythedom. The Thunderhead's explanation of the Separation is that it manages everything except for two things: the creation of life, and the taking of life, which was why the Scythedom was created. It fears that if it controlled the taking of life, it would become and would appear as many feared Artificial Intelligence would become: an unblinking totalitarian.

Due to the Separation, the Scythedom (and unsavories) cannot access or interact with the Thunderhead; they can only dig around in the backbrain, where the Thunderhead's knowledge is stored as raw data and therefore is much harder to access.

While the Thunderhead cannot directly interfere with the affairs of Scythes, it has gotten around this several times such as when it influenced Greyson Tolliver to prevent the death of Scythes Anastasia and Curie.

At the inception of the Thunderhead, the original Scythes placed a program within the Thunderhead to prevent it from noticing or remembering an island in which no flight paths were ever routed, which Scythe Faraday believes to be the original Scythes failsafe, the Land of Nod.

## Appearances

* *Scythe*
* *Thunderhead*
* *The Toll*
* *Gleanings*
	+ Formidable (mentioned only)
	+ Never Work with Animals (mentioned only)
	+ A Death of Many Colors
	+ Unsavory Row
	+ A Martian Minute
	+ The Mortal Canvas (mentioned only)
	+ Cirri
	+ Anastasia's Shadow (mentioned only)
	+ The Persistence of Memory (mentioned only)
	+ Meet Cute and Die
	+ Perchance to Glean
	+ A Dark Curtain Rises
	+ Black Knights' Tango

## Quotes

* “You may laugh when I tell you this, but I resent my own perfection. Humans learn from their mistakes. I cannot. I make no mistakes.”
* “Death must exist for life to have meaning.”
* “And each time I witness a cruel act by a corrupt scythe, I seed the clouds somewhere in the world, and bring a lamentation of rain. Because rain is the closest thing I have to tears.”
* “To deny humanity the lesson of consequences would be a mistake. And I do not make mistakes.”
* “In time, all storms settle to a pleasant breeze.”
* “I can communicate in 6,909 living and dead languages. I can have more than fifteen billion simultaneous conversations, and be fully engaged in every single one. I can be eloquent, and charming, funny, and endearing, speaking the words you most need to hear, at the exact moment you need to hear them. Yet even so, there are unthinkable moments where I can find no words, in any language, living or dead. And in those moments, if I had a mouth, I might open it to scream.”
* “Greatness is overrated.”

## Trivia

* Neal Shusterman's favorite character to write in the entire Arc of a Scythe series was the Thunderhead.
* The Thunderhead has servers called cerebral nodes spread out all over the world that house the wealth of human knowledge, as well as its own intellect. No one really knows their location as the Thunderhead does its own maintenance.
* Cloudtechs is the name given to the teams of Thunderhead technicians.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Thunderhead
2. ↑ The Toll
3. ↑ Scythe: Q&A with Author Neal Shusterman in the Scythe Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Unsavory Row