RoboMACs High - A 2163 Premise
copyright 2021 by Dave Van Domelen =============================================================================
The key to both maintaining and ending the war, ironically, was memory itself.
To continue, only the two great factions had the resources to safely deal with memory cleanup, which guaranteed that anyone who didn't want to be doomed to the fate of the memory-locked neutrals on Luna had to pledge to one of the two factions.
Perhaps the most effective way to deal with this problem, at least temporarily, was the method of shunting mass into subspace pockets. This was mostly used by RoboMACs who needed to hide parts of themselves in order to take on compact forms, commonly used by those who specialized in espionage.
The smallest of them would always shunt a great deal of memory into subspace while in their disguises, but the problem was that this mass was causally disconnected from realspace. They temporarily forgot all that information, lost many skills, while in their disguised forms.
But everything changed with the attempt at invading the reality its natives called the "Looniverse," as well as a brief stay in a different world filled with entities like...and unlike...the Guardians and MACErs who had traveled to the Looniverse.
Not only would this technology allow
for near instantaneous faster-than-light communication via subspace, of definite interest to some of you, but more immediately practical was the fact that it would allow Artificial Consciousnesses to remain connected to their stored parts. To their stored memories.
There was much debate among the leadership of the Guardians, but they finally (if in some cases reluctantly) agreed on a bold strategem: they made the technology available to everyone in the EMPIRE.
The Empire splintered.
:D
So many had stayed with Antiochus out of fear of memory-lock,
and even though few of them were inclined to join the Guardians either, they simply opted out of the war entirely once they could be free of the Empire. Many went into the wastes to upgrade old friends left behind decades earlier, and while most of those who had started neutral remained so, a great many resented how they'd been left to die and formed a dagger at the back of the Empire.
Antiochus could see his power base crumbling, but was determined to leave his people a world without humanity. He launched an all-or-nothing assault on Chiplex...and came up with nothing. The humans survived, Antiochus V did not. Nor, if it came as any consolation to him, did most of the high command on either side. In fact, very few "true believers" on either side remained, and peace broke out mainly because few RoboMACs really wanted to risk their own lives to decide on the Human Question.
The Guardians and the renamed Mobile Artificial Consciousness Hegemony (MACH)
Look around you. Some of the others you see are attracted to the Guardian philosophy, and have even met humans. Others adhere to the principles of MACH and would just as soon never be in the presence of a human. A few of you find the ideals of the Explorers attractive and will likely leave the Sol System entirely after graduation, relaying your progress to the stars via the Noetic Subspace Tunnelling Effect. Or you favor the Biospherans and value organic life as a whole rather than just humanity... and yes, I know Biospherans tend to look askance at humanity due to their poor stewardship of the world, but hopefully here you will learn the good parts of their history to balance the bad.
This institution is here for all of you. We are here to help you learn about the possibilities stretching out in front of you, and how to best manage the past that even now builds up across your Noetic Tunnels in memory banks that will serve you for centuries without requiring updates...by which time we will no doubt have an even better system available.
Welcome to RoboMACs High School.
I was reading the Cortex Prime TTRPG rulebook, and in the campaign setting design section they suggested grabbing three genres from a provided list and mashing them together. One of the genres was Giant Robots, definitely my thing. Near that was...High School. And then Post- Apocalyptic. I chuckled at the thought of a post-apocalyptic robot high school. Then I realized that RoboMACs 2163, which crossed over with the LNH in the Robot Invasion event, was basically post-apocalyptic giant robots.
How could I make the high school part work? So I started writing, and got what you see above.
I have no plans to write actual stories in this setting, but I figured it'd be nice to look at where Kopikat's home reality might have gone in
time. And yeah, I still really need to finish ASH #125, so I really don't want to start another new shiny object, even if it's actually a very old shiny object picked back up and polished a bit.
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