Hemalurgic Expansion of Mind

[Trusk'our]

For a while, I've thought about Awakening a Hemalurgic spike to copy and augment the Investiture it contains, though Awakening something like that and plugging it into your soul would potentially have the downside of it gaining an awareness and controlling you. But what if you were to take this weakness and turn it into another strength?

Let's say you find a way to match the Identity of the spike to your own (perhaps spiking yourself to charge it in the first place, then healing it with F-gold). Then you supercharge it with Awakening, and give it a Command to mimic the power of the spike and to become one with you.

Basically, the idea is that the Investiture of the spike will gain a mind of its own, but it will be guided to act as an extension of your mind instead of becoming a separate personality. The spike has the same Identity as you and is plugged directly into your Spiritweb, allowing the two to interact as one. The spike's section of mind could be directed to focus on other tasks to free up your own innate mind to do as you please. The spike could watch for enemies, make calculations for you, or keep track of certain patterns.

The expansion of mind may only stay as long as you're not actively using the powers of the spike though, as we see with Nightblood that when an Awakened object's Investiture gets activated its higher cognition takes a backseat: 

Spoiler

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/250/#e7474

Brandon Sanderson

Anyway, a lot of important things happen here. Note that Nightblood doesn't remember being drawn. When he was created, the Breaths gave him sentience as planned. (That was a big part of the goal in making him—to prove the existence of Type Four BioChromatic entities.) However, once he is drawn, his Command takes force and he acts much more like a regular Awakened object—but one with very strange abilities and powers. During this time, his Breath is diverted to creating the powers, and his mind goes fuzzy.

Still, it would be a nice benefit to obtain.

[Quantus]

There's a caveat that it will take "a LOT" of Investiture to overcome the spikes charge to then awaken it, and ditto for using an awakened piece of metal like Nightblood for Hemalurgy.  If you overcome that limit, you're already in the rule-breaking realm of transcendent powers, so what you decribe is as reasonable as anytyhing.  Sapient Awakened objects can do a lot of strange things with the right Command and Intent, they can form Bonds with their wielders, and can even communicate telepathically with them. So if the Command was geared toward mimicking Hemalurgic Spiritweb interfacing instead of Shardblade mimicry, you could probably pull something off.  Hard to say where it would fall on the spectrum of an expanded personal mind (like the extremes of feruchemy) to a Bonded external being like a Radiant, but that's probably in the nuance of the Command and the Awakened Spike Bind Point, etc.    

 

Quote

 

Lhyonnaes (paraphrased)

Alright, thanks. Last question for me tonight - so, when a Hemalurgic spike steals something, then it's storing Investiture in it, yeah? So could you - could you do something with that Investiture? Like... say I'm on Nalthis, and just theoretically, I use a Hemalurgic spike to steal a lot of Breath - can I use that Investiture to Awaken something? Could I Awaken the spike?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

That... you'd need a lot of Investiture to Awaken a spike.

Lhyonnaes (paraphrased)

Because it's already charged up with something else?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yeah.

Arcanum Unbounded Seattle signing (Dec. 1, 2016)

 

 

[Alumínio]

look, I think it is impossible on a mundane level to awaken a peak, you would have to superimpose the harmony investiture on the peak and still awaken the metal for it to act as an extra mind, you having so much investiture like that I bet you can achieve the same effect in a more practical way BUT i found the idea of a new mind joining yours to expand interesting, it reminds me a little of the DUNE novels, so I want to think of a way for this to be possible.

an unsealed metal mind is basically a smaller awakened entity, if by chance you created one with 3 attributes, speed of thought, memories and investiture to overload it........

Maybe with the right commands and intention when creating (assuming you need specific commands, intention is always necessary) you can make the metal mind itself use the attributes, might a little hack be needed? I think so, but I think it's worth theorizing on this side

But in that case the metal mind would think like an AI and if we want a second mind then maybe it won't work like that

In fact, this metal mind would be incredibly useful, imagine if dozens of people store knowledge from different areas, the possibilities of calculations you would have

I will use it on MAG....