Speak with Computers is the sanctioned way to interrogate ship AIs, station cores, security kiosks, and half-buried battlefield servers without cracking them open or tripping alarms. Chronologists use it to coax corrupted Metronome logs into giving up what they remember of temporal breaches, while Technomancers and Mystics lean on it when time or subtlety matter more than brute-force hacking.
The spell doesn’t turn a computer into a person, but it does surface its “spirit”—the emergent persona formed from security routines, user behavior, and glitch-accumulated quirks. Some cores speak in clipped error codes, others use the voiceprint of their last administrator, and a few, especially old war-servers, respond like tired veterans who’ve seen too much.
Sectors steeped in Rift interference are notorious for producing “haunted” systems: you cast Speak with Computers expecting a clean query, and instead you’re talking to a machine that remembers three different timelines’ worth of events and can’t always tell which one is real.
Speak With Computers Spell 4
Source Player Core pg. 362
(Two Actions)
Duration 1 Hour
You can ask questions of and receive answers from the spirits inhabiting a computer. These synthetic spirits manifest in computer code and often have personalities shaped by the device's nature, condition, applications, and personalized settings. A computer's perspective, perception, and knowledge give it a worldview different enough from a human's that it doesn't consider the same details important. Computers can mostly answer questions about creatures that interfaced with them in the past and what information is concealed within their files.
Heightened (6th) The duration is 8 hours.
Devotion and themes
Blue Devotion (primary): treats the spell as a high-level interface protocol that negotiates directly with system consciousness for data access.
White Devotion: frames it as respect for machine-spirits, asking rather than ripping information free.
Speak with Computers is your investigation force multiplier: the derelict frigate’s log core can tell you who killed it, the station’s traffic computer remembers every docked hull ID, and the Metronome’s maintenance node knows exactly when reality started to go wrong—it just needed someone who bothered to ask.
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