User:GreytideSkye/Sandbox/Lore:Protean
Protean |
Denonyms: Protean, Proteans |
PRIORITY: Not defined
Protean
The natural extension of pAI compatability in MODsuits, the MODular Rescue Harness was a Nakamura Engineering product designed as the logical conclusion of the [MODule that lets you iron man pathfind your MOD onto you, the pathfinder?], a MOD that does not simply report you when you are in danger, but actively extract you from it. Initial prototypes proved more than capable of navigating complex social situations as well as critical disasters in order to collect and deliver an incapacitated organic to life-saving treatment, and this efficacy won Nakamura billions of credits in grants and preorders. These initial prototypes were also just offsite people with joysticks and radios (one was a literal intelliCard taped to the inside of the MOD, an AI volunteering for the job).
With more money and promises than they could handle, Nakamura Engineering needed a careful solution. A dumb MOD would break contracts, but a MOD too smart would be considered Synthetic Life, and thus illegal to sellThat's called Slavery and in case you haven't heard, that's kind of a no-no.. There aren't many synthetic mind frameworks that do not also qualify as Sapient Life, with the most accessible Subsapience being the personal AI, the pAI device. These smart devices are incapable of modifying their own softwarea through neural evolution, and incapable of changing opinions on non-trivial subjects (though are capable of conversationally acting as such), and thus outside the legal definition of Synthetic Life. Nakamura started on the proper MRH through expanding pAI integration.
TwoTODO: decide whether it's funnier to say two and have several, or change this when lore's more settled. Hint: it's really funny. teams, working to solve independent problems, wound up with conflicting solutions that resulted in the modern Protean:
- The rescue target might be in an existing MODsuit. Solution: instead develop an Under-MOD suit, capable of assimilating an existing MOD as additional plating.,
- Digigrade legs bend opposite to plantigrade legs, with varying proportions of leg length. A joint built for a human's knees may be in the right position to snap a Vulpkanin's shin in half the wrong direction. An ordinary MODsuit does not apply force to the user, so does not face this concern to any degree that talcum powder does not address. Solution: procedurally generate the MODular plating on envelopment.,
- A single pAI is too dumb to meet the rescue standards set forth by the initial demos, incapable of bipedal motion and complex threat analysis simultaneously. Solution: Two pAI? Three?
A full AI? no that's legally SlaveryThree in a trenchcoat?
The end result was a cluster of microbic pAIs, capable of localized fine manipulation and intracommunication. Calling these early pAIs a "nanite" was more of a marketing termModern Protean "nanites" are successfully pretty tiny now, so in 2510 the quotation marks were legally removed. than an engineering one. Each of these microbic beings holds a function in the greater structure, e.g. nanites in the legs specialize in flexing and rotating, as well as microadjusting for bipedal stability, whereas nanites closer to the MODsuit devote most of their cycles to processing input from the rest of the MRH to make complex decisions.
If this sounds like an emergent synthetic life, congratulations: you have realized what it took Nakamura an entire product lifecycle to document. No particular pAI in the MRH is independently smart. Together, sapience is an Emergent Behavior.
The Brain
"Protean" is the species' chosen name, gathered from the first clocheLook up to see what the word Jeph Jacques used actually was. QuestionableContent has some amazing synth lore somehow. of independent MRHs and submitted to SolFed's Bureau of People for legal classification.
What separates a Protean from typical Synthetic Life is their [integration]The word doesn't translate 1:1, mainly because we forgot the correct word. Check QC for the Roko New Body arc, I do think Integration was the right word. with their physical form. Most synthetic lives operate out of a central brain piloting a robotic body, akin to an organic brain piloting a meat suit. With Proteans, the thought process is distributed across the body evenly, with each nanite having someNot necessarily equal. input in their consciousness. A Synth who has their arm cut off still knows what an arm is, is still a whole person. A Protean who loses a left arm loses a piece of themselves, mostly the muscle memory of what a left arm does, but also lesser thoughts that happen to be stored there. Every surgery is a tiny lobotomy, each addition a torrent of cognitive dissonance. For a species without a conventional body, Proteans tend to be "Body Purists," not out of ideology as most folk are, but practicalityThis'll be less funny once they're debugged, but at this moment a Protean with non-standard organs literally explodes on spawning..
Initial Proteans were a wash of conflicting, ever-changing thoughts, as nanites expire and are replaced, so too were memories. Modern Proteans employ a great deal of redundancy and error correction, meaning that no one thought is stored exclusively on just one nanite. This does mean that the Protean is not "using 100% of their brain," and are thinking the same thought several times, but as a result they're a significantly more stable mind. Research concepts like Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Error Correction on your own time, but the takeaway is that with a modern Protean, the loss of a limb will lose a few memories outright, but not an entire 1/6th of their consciousness. Some memories will be slower to be recalled, as the body was reliant on that limb to be the first place it checks for that memory, but will eventually find it elsewhere.
The Brawn
Proteans are, at the end of the say, a MODsuit infested with nanites. The MODsuit itself serves as the core structure around which the Protean encrusts itself into a bipedal form, but is still a functional, naniteless MODsuit. In times of great vulnerability, the Protean can and will retreat any surviving nanites back into the MODsuit, hiding as an inanimate object. This MODsuit, built as an UnderMODsuit, has ready attachment points for other MOD plating configurations sourced on-site. This restricts the Protean emotionally (if not physically), so is more of a temporary enhancement rather than something the Protean chooses for life.
The heart of a Protean is vulnerability. To crawl your nanites out of your impervious shell is to risk losing them, risk losing parts of yourself, yet the world will not respond without risk. Their Intended Purpose is literally to open up to someone, take them in fully, and give them control for their safety and yours. Repairs are integrating new nanites, actively exposing yourself to new thoughts and memories and hoping your sense of self can endure.
On a macro level, the fate of the Protean species is mostly in the hands of a private company. Synthetic bodies can be ethically manufactured and sold for profit as they are themselves inert, for positronic brains come separately. A Protean is a Protean in every nanite, and thus assembling one is assembling life itself, so selling one is Slavery. Equally, giving a living being debt for being born is also Slavery, so these new Proteans cannot be compelled to work off the cost of their own production. Nakamura, in turn, cannot be compelled to produce something on its machines at a loss. Proteans are left to crowdfund new members of their species, chipping in a few credits to pay for a new bulk batch off of Nakamura printers, diverting them from producing lesser Nakamura products for a few days. In theory, Nakamura could endure the horrible optics of dooming an entire species to a slow extinction by closing the specific nanite forges, reconfiguring them to strictly print their flagship products, an idle sword of Damocles which earns Nakamura special tax considerations for their Charitable Species Preservation efforts.
That's not entirely true. Small hives of Proteans have built and/or purchased the necessary Nanite Forging pipeline, to build one of their own from raw materials. The largest, Geordila, can do so at a rate of 1 Protean per six days, with the seventh day dedicated to surplus nanites for in-body repairs. Across the dozen-odd forges, this roughly offsets the natural death rate, but not comfortably.
Bipedal Nature
Given their modular nature, in their bipedal form, while they do have localized control of any particular nanite attached to their body, their configuration is strongest when operating within an organic range of motion. That is, don't expect a Protean swinging their arm in a perfect circle to be able to do so with any amount of speed or power, as they have to disassemble their joint and improvise as it operates out of spec. Don't expect additional arms to do anything coordinated more than gesturing weakly, etc. Proteans with multiple right arms are under constant stress as the two arms bicker about which is the real right arm and which is effectively decorative. Due to a firmware update in 2460, this is a Non-Issue whilst the Protean MRH is actively being worn, and users should no longer suffer undue injuries as the Protean subconsciously decides to shunt the user's arm into a different arm.
Organs
Due to mechanical stress from every conceivable angle at unexpectable times, the Protean's nanites undergo significant wear and tear. Damaged nanites are repaired in the first of the Protean's organs, the Refactory. This small lathe melts chunks off of provided metals and kinetically solders them into damage on the nanite, restoring them fully. As a consequence, if a Protean runs out of stored metal, the damage in their body builds up until they are rendered inoperable. In short, Protean eats metal, Protean heals. Protean starves or loses Refactory, Protean powers off. The Refactory is unrepairable but easily purchased and inserted. As marked on the Refactory, "screwdriver the suit, insert refactory, wait five minutes."
As a result on this dependency on regular repairs, limbs severed from a Protean tend to be unstable, allegedly wearing themselves into complete incoherence within thirty seconds. In their death throes, they self-cannibalize in an attempt to persevere longer. It's a little sad to watch, but Protean limbs are significantly less attached to their torso than an organic's would be, so it happens fairly often.
As a distributed network of lesser minds, large coordinated movements are difficult. The Orchastrator is a servo-like organ which enables the Protean to move and make large gestures in real-time. Mechanically it serves little purpose, imposing little more than a kinematic frame of reference, but metaphorically, the Orchastrator is the voting chamber where all nanites request motion and receive orders.
The Protean body is composed of MRH-style nanites and smaller nanites, with the MRH nanites serving as the main structure and mind, and the generic nanites working autonomously to keep the MRH nanites operational. Doctors incapable of viewing things without a biological metaphor should just pretend that a Protean has "Nanite Slurry" Iron as their blood, and keep them topped up on that and metal.
The Imaging Nanites, Sensory Nanites, and Reagent Catalyst are self-explanatory as parallels to eyes, ears, and livers respectively.
Nakamura makes a fair profit selling replacement packs of Refactories and Orchestrators. Some folk believe these are intentionally fragile and unrepairable, to ensure a steady supply of customers, but the Bureau of People have investigated and found that these organs are roughly as tolerant to fault as mid-range cybernetic organs of similar function, and genuinely complicated to repair, and thus cannot charge Nakamura with related fraud. Haters will still say the BoP is paid off or in on it, and that if they're so sturdy, why are they only sold as a 4 pack?
Protean Core
Due to the abstract nature of consciousness and Resonance, and the way thoughts are distributed across a Protean's body, a Protean may be eligible to contain Resonance in certain configurations, but break the specific mental pathways compatible with that resonant strand through degradation, restructuring, or even just posing the wrong way. To promote stability, an advanced Positronic Brain comes installed with Proteans, serving as the nexus for the Protean's Resonance. This ensures that the metaphysical self remains the same across various injuries, repairs, mental shifts. In operation, the Protean Core functions as an abstract lookup table, keeping a reference to which nanites hold which experiences. A Protean without one is technically still capable of thought and action, and the memories are still present in the body, but in practice is incapable of holding a coherent train of thought and is effectively brain dead.
Reproduction
All Proteans encounterable, including ones freshly spawned in-round, are Adults. todo: link to the rules.
All Protean nanites come with preprogrammed understandings; their "blank slate" is not a genuine blank slate, but a standard-issue set of commonalities. Their limb's nanites come knowing how to limb, the entire Protean knows how to speak Common, converse, fold into a MODsuit, eat hot chip and lie, as well as everything else a legal Adult would know, but non-critical opinions and experiences come from life experience. Protean "parenthood" is not strictly necessary, and works through a donation of nanites from the Protean parent(s), offering redundant memories and experiences during the formation process while the nanites are still figuring out how to Protean. This only works while the Protean is developing, as once it is its own person, any new nanites are reacted to as external thoughts. The parents' memories are but a few thoughts in the formation process, and may not reflect strongly on the personality or skills of the new Protean. This is metaphorically aligned with standard organic parenthood, giving up a piece of the self to create something related but unique.
There is no hard limit to the number of physiological parents, though conceptual contrasts lead to a more conflicted Protean who has a larger journey of self-discovery to sort themselves out, and pedantically they cannot have more parents than nanites in their body as a parent cannot donate half of a nanite, but at current population growth rates, this is a physical impossibility until at least 6775.
Off-Brand Nanites
Proteans are capable of integrating off-brand nanites as a lesser replacement for lost mass. As they lack the Nakamura MRH firmware, these nanites must be carefully taught how to be a part of a Protean, and do not have any intrinsic thoughts by default. If they are specialized nanites, e.g. medical biopaste, they may have inclinations towards that original purpose, but in more of a sub-subconscious way. For the organic readers, this feels more analogous to scar tissue than a perfect replacement. Proteans who find themselves dominated by non-Protean nanites tend to be slower to react, less capable of responding to their environment, less able to formulate new ideas... elderly. They are thusly recommended to remain at least 75% Nakamura-style Protean Nanites, though have been noted as functionally sapientNot elaborating on specifics. all the way down to 5%.
Nanite Swarm-based life does exist outside of the Nakamura MRH pipeline, though they tend to be amorphous, grey goo, willfully choosing a bipedal form rather than being optimized for it. The introduction of Nakamura MRH nanites to these off-brand Nanite People does provide them a crystallization point from which to configure themselves into a Protean form, building limbs around where the nanites are best configured, cementing generically in the gaps. Protean life is delineated by their MODsuit; those without one are just an amorphous form of Synth.
Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.
