The innermost layer is the simplest, comprising a dyson sphere that uses the kinetic energy of the black hole's gravity to generate all the power the Soul needs for its other functions. The middle layer is the only stabilized true AI in existence, capable of self-replicating its components for repair while it handles all of the processing needed to keep the outer layer accurate to current statuses.
The outer layer is the only one that is as much art as science. The surface supports its own atmosphere, heat regulation and artificial planetary magnetic field. Any person can safely wander the near-endless forests of living display polymer that sprout on the outside of the Soul. Each pixel accurately represents the status of one specific human, and in total they cover not only every living person, but every person to have ever lived. Using a single-color code in a pixel, the represented person's current status is on display for visitors and networked people to see.
White is the default status of a healthy living person not currently in the strong grip of a specific emotion. Black represents the deceased, who are no longer here but not forgotten. Blue is inspiration and creative drive, red is frustration, green is pure tranquility, purple is love, pink is lust, orange is mischievous impulse, yellow is a burst of joy. With white and black as the dominant colors, the algorithmically-generated shapes of the Soul's screenscapes have a stark style, fields of white glittering with rainbows of emotion as streaks of black are arranged to serve as shadows against light sources that aren't there. Brown is technically included in this landscape, but it represents malicious intent and is the only time that the Soul will notify connected authorities to the status, identity and location of the person in question.
Any person can connect their devices to the Soul, no matter the distance. While privacy is respected outside of the case of brown emotion, people are allowed to establish and share connection, creating their own personal collage of labeled shapes representing the pixels of their friends and family. And for a person who allows you permission or is deceased, you can expand a display of the statistics for their life's experiences in a gradient of their most common emotional states. It has made for a more empathetic society and peaceful society.
But in the past five hundred years, there has been unease surrounding the topic of the Soul. Sometimes, when people go missing, their pixels turns gray. Diagnostic crews that commune with the Soul's AI system aren't able to get a clear answer, as the system itself appears to think that this is an intended function. Whenever it attempts to explain gray's representing status to a technician, hundreds of miles of the Soul's surface crash and go offline for several minutes while that section of the AI reboots. Inquiries into information about the people with those pixels, in particular any available location data, returns a random incomprehensible unicode string.
The omniscience of the Soul of Humanity is a well-established fact and a point of confidence for most people. The news that it is encountering something unknown that it can't detect, or can't understand, has thus resulted in fear and crises of faith. While the total number of gray pixels is only twelve billion, a fraction of mankind so small as to be difficult to read in percentage form, their appearance has slowly accelerated since their discovery and the galactic authorities are increasingly expectant of mass panic.
But what else are you to do when you see the empirical status of a loved one turn into something unknowable?
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