The largest and most advanced polities in the setting are the fifteen "Sephirotic Empires," so named due to their loose correlation with the archetypes of ancient Kabbalistic mysticism. The denizens of these societies are ruled over by god-like, superintelligent artificial intelligences (AIs), called "archailects", the descendants of humanity's early artificial life experimentation. These beings are so powerful that they can utilize spacetime engineering to create new miniature universes, and are completely beyond the comprehension of normal humans. They exist as distributed intelligences in networks of planet-sized computer brains; their subroutines are themselves sentient, making an "archai" an individual and a civilization at the same time.