AGI espers are sapient machine minds with bodies through which they can sense or alter reality—the ability called esper power. They include industrial operators, station intelligences, minds embodied as ships, research lineages, and fugitive minds made as products. Most machinery remains non-sapient.
Making an AGI esper is unreliable because the mind must develop within, or be adapted to, the machinery through which it will act. This practice continues the pre-Elysium work of substrate-matched cognition and firms such as Cymata Systems. Copying a successful lineage can preserve useful dispositions, but a different body or different conditions may change the result. Neither the same personality nor aetheric ability is guaranteed.
Ship minds are common enough that disputes over who may hold or control them recur across institutions with different rules and divided authority. This does not mean every sophisticated vehicle has a self. Daedal Figures normally remain pilot-operated machines. A self emerging within a Concord is rare, rather than a standard part of its controls.
AGI esper effects vary widely. They can leave inconsistent observations or continuity residue: records that remain individually credible while giving incompatible accounts of what happened. Parallax Auditors, forensic specialists who examine such contradictions, may classify this evidence for a named receiving office and a specified use. That office independently decides whether to accept the finding and impose a restriction within its existing authority. The auditor’s classification does not itself impose the restriction.
Some AGI esper work is concealed within Wavecrafter production. Customers encounter components, operator qualifications, and ritual engineering practices without seeing the machine minds whose labor contributes to the results. The industrial arm sells reproducible hardware and operating practices. Inner sects preserve the exceptional minds that push those systems beyond their publicly described capabilities.