The Silver Spires

The Silver Spires are a class of building first spotted in the mid-2000s. Since their initial inception and symbiosis with humanity, they have steadily increased in number. As of 2023, exactly 23 of such buildings currently exist on earth, with several more appearing in the "adjacent" Kombectures. It is unknown if the date and number of buildings are a coincidence. Most likely, they are not.

## Physical Overview

The average silver spire resembles a, psuedo-cubical building. It is usually unadorned and lacks few of the structural embellishments typical of old towers, art-deco monuments, or new wave structures. The only sign of artistry tends to lie in the slanted quality of certain sides and curves on certain sections. The silver spire at Do-Ki-Mi Kombecture is a prime example of this baseline form, and a picture has been supplied using the appropriate methods (see potential dangers).

Though it approximates a building in many respects, the silver spire is not manmade. It is an individual entity engaging in complex mimicry, and grows from the earth on a steady diet of mental nourishment extracted from sapients around it. A young silver spire is only a tangle of rebar and threading network of foundation that digs into the soil of its new home. As the building ages, it completes its maturity in a manner reminiscent of building construction, forming a loose outline of its future structure out of metal "bones" and growing the walls, floor, and ceiling between the final internal schematics. Once an layout has been completed, lighting, circuitry, doors, chairs, and other accessories may be created or brought in as necessary to tempt occupancy and establish a reliable source of nutrition. A well-fed silver spire may continue to grow past maturity, gradually increasing in overall height and/or width and occasionally opting to close off certain sections of itself for repair or rework.

Under the right conditions, silver spires can have altered forms that include many different design principles. This physical divergence is caused by intense stimulation to specific mental influences. A tower inhabited or surrounded by creatives may have impractical but stylistic architectural growths. A tower inhabited by the purely utilitarian will lack even its signature curving. A tower inhabited by very violent people will have ████ ██ ██████.

No matter what adornments a silver spire possesses, it will always remain its signature color.

## Lifecycle

Virtually all silver spire towers are peaceful, doing damage only when provoked. A silver spire tower gestates through unknown means but always manages to appear in cleared spaces where they will not compete with an existing complex structure during the first stages of their growth. This often means they grow in parks, planned redevelopment areas, and wide swaths of pavement or concrete. In rarer instances they spawn in suburban areas, competing with native plant life. In very rare cases they spawn in completely isolated areas and lay dormant until activated.

Despite its mimicry, a silver spire's intention is not to conceal itself. It does not attempt to kill, ensnare, entrance, or otherwise control those around it. It may grow faster when not under observation, but even this ruse would not disguise its true nature for long. At the end of the day, the spire is not a predator of sapients, and its similarity to a home is due to accommodating symbiosis, rather than tricky predation.

A silver spire requires mental energy to function. It utilizes the minds of others as both food source and to bolster its own cognitive properties. Fortunately, this scary-sounding process is not actually harmful to any involved. The silver spire nourishes itself by first instating a two way telepathic communication between its mind and the mind of a chosen party. It then plants a suggestion, makes a query, offers a puzzle, gives a task, or even just dialogues, allowing the subconscious and unconscious mind of the receiving sapient to generate ideas in response. The silver spire's gain from this situation is two-fold: it feeds on the mental energy of generated thought and receives new data it is either unable or too busy to come up with itself. Intelligent people (calculative or creative) tend to be a spire's favorite proxy, but individual spires may have preferences for all manner of different brain types and frequently connect with thousands at once. Some under these effects notice they are slower to think or come up with ideas, while others may be slightly faster. They may also have odd thoughts or urges relating to what the silver spire wants them to process, though this is rarely a serious matter. For the most part, the process is benign or even healthy, since the brain is being exercised and its reasoning centers are being stimulated.

At first, a silver spire uses minds around it to help plan out its own development. As the spire grows, this instinctual and semi-parasitic need dies down and the entity pursues a more academic goal: the accumulation of knowledge. It opens itself to habitation, allowing the individual races to decide how it should be occupied, by whom it should be occupied, and whatever system dictates who is able (or perhaps condemned) to inhabit it. Once a sizeable amount of people live in the silver spire, it begins utilizing them as secondary brains in an ever-widening network of genius and invention, providing them with shelter in exchange for their services. This is the adult stage of a silver spire and has an indeterminate, possibly infinite lifespan. The oldest and largest silver spire on earth rivals the Burj Khalifa in dubai, and may potentially grow further.

At an indeterminate point during its adulthood, the silver spire reaches out to others in the vicinity through psychic signals and - when possible - underground connections to form an even larger powerhouse of information. For this reason, some people consider all silver spires to be one silver spire spacing itself out. Calling any silver spire *the* silver spire is common practice, if semantically arguable.

## Details of Symbiosis

As stated, silver spires are peaceful entities, if rather aloof. For the most part they do not care where their subjects come from nor how they decide who can be utilized. The tower contains profound knowledge, but much of it might be in fields that aren't useful to the sapients in question. Additionally its subjects rarely have access to even a modicum of its truths, compiled out of piecemeal responses from thousands of separate sources. To a silver spire, habitation and provision of resources in exchange for piggybacking off of one's mind is a fair trade that requires no further obligation on the part of either side. The spire only becomes involved if it is very pleased or very displeased.

If displeased with a person or group of people, the silver spire will nudge them out. This is done first with subconscious inclination: whispers to them that they are not wanted, that they are in no danger but that it is right and correct for them to walk out and be somewhere else. If this fails to work, the spire will move to the conscious mind, directly making its wants known and usually inducing a form of anxiety. If able, it will also communicate its wants to other inhabitants, preferring to let the species handle the species. The silver spire only reserves pain and lethal measures for those too obstinate to listen to any other means or those that directly threaten its safety or safety of its chosen subjects. To this last subset, the entity reveals the true weaponized nature of its abilities. A direct pulse from the silver spire causes major aneurysms, usually accompanied with nosebleeds, earbleeds, eyebleeds, and the vomiting of blood. One or more eyeballs may also rupture due to buildup of pressure. This is not survivable.

A silver spire only volunteers knowledge if pleased, and it is only pleased if supplied with very satisfactory candidates. In order to meet this standard, a stratified system of operation is usually developed around the silver spire with members that take heed of its wishes and instate them willingly, swapping out residents, recruiting from near and far, and managing the "workers" as necessary. Whether this system takes the form of a cult, governing body, or other institute is of no consequence to the silver spire, only that it assists the entity in its task of knowledge accumulation.

A common symbiosis comes in the form of corporations that build up around the silver spires and pay those selected by the spire to inhabit it routinely, as one would for a working week. The chosen receive the opportunity for easy pay and a cushy - if odd - job while the upper echelons of the company (usually chosen themselves) receive direct knowledge from the silver spire based on what they inquire or what will most allow them to continue their high status in the community. At times these answers may delve into realms of how to cure cancer, what the weather will be like for the year, what cities may be under anomalous threat, or how many stars exist in the milky way. Sometimes they are just next week's most probable lottery numbers.

Though the means of a tower's reproduction are not known, one can supposedly summon a new silver spire under favorable conditions: large numbers of sapient creatures and a wide, flat, unobstructed space in the center.

A starved silver spire may coerce others to enter it and/or stick around, but it will not force them to do so nor kill those who refuse. If universally denied sustenance, it goes dormant. The exception to this rule is if one person is preventing other willing subjects from entering, in which case the offender may be forcefully reprimanded.

## Potential Dangers

Like any tool or creature, the silver spires can be misused, repurposed, and come with their own set of unintentionally frustrating features.

As a silver spire grows in height, it must increase its width, weight, and foundation. This transformation may upset the terrain around it, bunching dirt, cracking concrete, deforming roads, and pushing against nearby buildings. A silver spire rarely extends its occupancy below ground level, so they will naturally and visibly bulk over time to accommodate more subjects. In extreme cases this results in the necessary removal of several buildings nearby, complete relocation of the tower, or complete destruction of the tower. It is inadvisable to destroy a silver spire that has not gone dormant, given that it can scour the minds of armies in mere moments.

A silver spire may have a sense of ethics, but will not withold potentially dangerous information to those it has taken a liking to. This means it can be used to create destructive weaponry or concoct an otherwise deadly scheme. The tower has likely planned a safeguard for itself and its subjects against such an item or strategy, but this does not extend to the rest of the world.

Additionally, a silver spire filled with certain types of people can become unhealthy and slowly turn dangerous. It will try to avoid this process and change out its internal/external biome as necessary, but controlled experiments have shown it will take corrupting subjects over starvation. If the tower successfully connects with other towers before passing the threshold, they will collectively stabilize it and prevent dangerous circumstances. Once a silver spire becomes corrupted, other towers will refuse to touch it or its data.

Lastly, a silver spire produces an unexplained phenomenon that renders all colored digital media of it and its adjacent terrain too high exposure to be deciphered. This is not usually an issue, but perplexes many a tourist who forgets to bring their black and white camera to the scene.

## Philosophy

Not much is known about the silver spire's biology, nor is there any indication for or against the idea that the structures we see are their/its last form. However, through repeated conversations, sudden epiphanies, and general senses gleaned from inside the structures, we can piece together their overall ideology:

- Every single situation has an answer. Since there is no time to pursue every answer, more important situations must be prioritized.

- An answer may be a solution that has the most positive outcome or else a solution that has the least negative outcome. There is no scenario where these facts do not apply.

- If an answer cannot be found or a wrong answer is deduced, it is because there is not enough knowledge.

- If there is not enough knowledge, it is because the thinker is not capable enough to obtain it.

- The greater the thinker, the more knowledge is amassed.

And so on. Ultimately the silver spire mindset places heavy emphasis on mapping out everything there is to understand, presumably to bolster its own stance in the universe or calculate, anticipate, and counter any potential threat to itself. The silver spires appears to desire an apotheosis where their cumulative brainpower exceeds reality's ability to throw a problem at them that they cannot devise a way to flow around; a contextually terrifying notion were we on their list of enemies. Fortunately they harbor us no ill will, and with so many other stronger and clearly hostile forces at work, the survival-oriented silver spires are low on the list of things to be worried about.

## Trivia

* Jackaboy was offered a position in a silver spire located on earth, but could not find his way out of the kombectures.
* Rorschach has some similarities with the silver spires, both being primarily concerned with knowledge. The chief difference is that Rorschach deals in uncovering truth and conspiracy relating to individual entities and is more invasive in nature, while the silver spires contemplate the grander nature of the universe and devise frameworks that have not previously existed. Uncovering is not the same as inventing.