The Copernicans are responsible for calculating the best course into the future. As statisticians, they spend their lives dedicated to understanding and assessing risks; like actuaries they look at all the potential factors involved in the future of humanity and make a calculated decision about whether it should be adjusted.
This requires millions of pieces of information and algorithms that take over entire buildings of computing, but since they are based in the 16th Century, most of their computational power is clockwork. They are notoriously slow, the ‘Clackers’ as they are known amongst the rest of the Order (because of the noise from their machines), and methodical, everything is checked and rechecked a hundred times before something is submitted to the Continuum, but it does mean that some changes can take centuries to come into effect.
The Continuum is a timeline stored in the Infinity Engine; it holds every amendment, note and course correction ever taken to history. The Continuum is a four-dimensional model of time, the Copernicans have developed a scientific language of symbols to describe it and use the Engine to simulate possible futures. It is held in a secure vault and only the highest levels of the Copernican Guild are allowed to use it.
Copernicans are obsessed with maintaining the correct about of balance between order and chaos, they have developed thousands of ways to detect a shift in the universal standard of random. They are deeply suspicious of electricity and its properties and have based their operations in a period prior to its invention.
The Copernicans instruct their agents (known as Watchman) using notebooks known as Almanacs, which are continuously updated in the past and create pages of ever-changing notations and diagrams.