The Sleeping Orange (Signups Open!)

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The Sleeping Orange (Signups Open!)
#6
RE: The Sleeping Orange (Signups Open!)
Name: Probe HC-11, “Moshe”

Race: HC-Model Exploratory Probe

Gender: Neutral

Color: Depth and pressure and poison

Biography: Green energy and ecological consciousness would save the planet, they had said, but it wasn’t really true. Oh, they certainly prevented it getting much worse, and even more certainly prevented bloody resource wars that would have caused more harm to the planet and its people than a thousand industrial disasters could have, but no amount of not-making-it-worse would fix the scars of the past. Some problems were harder to address than others, or harder to force people to care about addressing; empty strip mines and islands blasted by radiation saw attention as soon as the technology existed, but oceans and deserts and the upper reaches of the atmosphere were trickier. Whose jurisdiction was the air and water? Does it even matter if no-one lives there? But time has a way of solving things, even if it has to rely on the promise of resources rather than decency or responsibility.



Eventually, the International Deep Sea Council was founded and funded. Its stated goal was to address the issues of pollution, contamination, and habitat destruction in areas that had been most affected by industrialization and dumping in the eighteenth through twenty-second centuries; in practice, doing much about the damage would be a long time in coming, and the IDSC was primarily research-oriented. Obviously, manned missions to the toxic depths would be hazardous and difficult, but fortunately robotics had progressed to the point that designing and deploying specialized units for just about any imaginable task was no sooner said than done.



Unfortunately, the first few generations of probes fared poorly; generations of some of the harshest conditions macrobiotic life could face on Earth had resulted in a number of hugely aggressive, ravenous, or territorial species that would attack the probes as soon as they were detected. Simply equipping the probes with enough weaponry to kill anything that might destroy them was obviously counterproductive. After some trial and error, the researchers determined the safest strategy was to make their probes resemble organisms the wildlife was familiar enough with to be uninterested in or unthreatened by; a series of inoffensive and unappetizing animal-droids was created, and the IDSC was ready to begin its research in earnest.



With the decreased size and limited form of the probes came the need for precision and selectiveness in sample- and data-gathering to minimize the time and money spent on repeated trips, so the decision was made to equip them with onboard artificial intelligences rather than simple preprogrammed routines. Oceanographers United, one of the firms contracted by the IDSC, decided to further save time and money by updating AIs they already had to pilot their HC probes rather than undergo the arduous process of commissioning and creating new ones. One such AI, Moshe, had been with the firm for a number of years and was largely unremarkable before its installation into a probe and for several dives thereafter; it was only when it disappeared that it drew real attention, mostly because all of its comms or trackers stopped broadcasting at once, as though it had vanished completely.

Weapons/Abilities: Moshe is by and large unarmed – and incapable of wielding weapons given the lack of hands – due to the policy of nondisruption its body was designed with in mind, but AIs are too valuable and too close to human to be left completely defenseless. It is equipped with a few electric discharge devices of various power levels that are capable of stunning most organisms up to the size of about a great white, which could potentially be lethal if applied to something smaller than they’re rated for; it also has a few payloads of sedatives and toxins that it can deliver either as a cloud in an aqueous medium or via its “tail”, which is tipped with a hypodermic syringe, when on land.



It can scuttle along flat ground at a slow walking pace and swim a bit faster; it is capable of climbing most surfaces either through suction or microscopic grippers without slowing much. It does not tire, is completely waterproofed, and resists the pressures of all but the deepest trenches. It is equipped with a great number of sensory apparatuses – most of which function best underwater but adequately in air – as well as a fair amount of sample storage. It is capable of interfacing with most existing communications networks and has a now-worthless but very accurate GPS link.

Description: Like all HC models, the probe looks very much like a horseshoe crab; underwater, it also smells and tastes very much like one. It is a uniform dull green, and most of its sensors are located where its eyes and gills would be if it were a real animal to maintain verisimilitude. Its tail is more segmented than its inspiration’s and it has a series of pinhole pores running down its back, but aside from that – and the fact it’s made of metal – it’s a very good likeness.



Moshe itself was designed for science and industry, and it shows; it speaks a wide variety of languages and is equipped with a broad suite of basic cultural knowledge to make interfacing with humans simpler, but not much effort was made into humanizing it. It is rather taciturn and prefers work to idleness, and without the reward or drive systems programmed for it, it never saw the point in developing interests outside its job description as many more social AIs do. It does develop attachments to and relationships with coworkers, but most describe its personality as rather flat and a bit literal. It’s obviously a person; it’s just not a very interesting one.



Someone has painted the Hebrew word emet on its “forehead”, just above the central eye; Moshe doesn’t think this is very funny, but Moshe doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.


Messages In This Thread
RE: The Sleeping Orange (Signups Open!) - by SleepingOrange - 02-19-2013, 03:22 AM