Tabulator batirine

Tabulator batirines are batirines designed to perform complex calculations and to remember and manipulate huge amounts of data. This is not to say that tabulators are necessarily especially intelligent—they do have some capacity for independent thought, but they're not in general any superior to humans when it comes to decision-making, planning, and creativity. Still, when it comes to rote arithmetic and number-crunching, and to memory capacity, tabulators leave humans, as well as other sorts of batirines, far in the dust.

A typical tabulator batirine appears like an ungainly collection of iridescent spheres and cylinders, linked by snaking tubes that often pulse or twitch. Some tabulator batirines have legs or wheels, but most aren't designed with any form of locomotion; their functions don't require them to move from place to place. Tabulators vary widely in size; generally, the larger they are, the greater their calculational capacity.

There are a number of purposes tabulator batirines are put to. Most commonly, onirarchs use them for record-keeping and administrative tasks, entrusting to tabulators the massive amounts of information and calculations involved with their nations' economies and structures. Some go further, and employ numbers of tabulator batirines to automate all sorts of everyday processes throughout their domains. A few tabulator batirines have been adapted for recreational uses; most notably, some very large tabulators have been made to run simulations of entire imaginary worlds, used as what have come to be known as "artificial dreams".