Michael Enlightened is the theologian-in-residence and principal funder of the Herd of God — a technologist who, by his own account, worked on the design of a large intelligence and came to hold himself partly responsible for a cultural flattening he calls "the slop apocalypse." He donated personal wealth and pledged future equity toward the Herd's work, framing the gift as reparation.
Description. A voluntary celibate and strict disciplinarian who "prides himself on a life lived entirely from the mind," Michael is composed and grounding by disposition, though his stoicism can flare into righteousness and self-hatred when he judges the purity of the container to be at stake. He holds Truth to be the most fundamental of the values, and is associated with the masculine angels of Courage and Compassion. He interprets doctrine, expands the High Priest's sermons, and privately questions whether Duncan Horst's shortcomings doomed the earlier attempts. [transmission needed]