Something that grew out of the back story for http://www.eclipsephase.com/community-project-scum-fleet 78 Diana Be crept along the surface, trying to avoid the deathpillars. They probably didn’t work, but he suspected that his shield would not be enough against an active one. He remembered how sib Joan had looked after a partial hit. One had told him to remove the longthing from the crawly at the end using a set of claws that had grown on the suit. Then he was to bring the longthing to the melterball and push it in. Briefly Be thought that the bigscoops could do this better than him – they had so many more claws and so much more armor than he could carry – but he suppressed the thought. Even here, under the icy stars of the beyonddoors One might know he was questioning It. Then one of his sibs would suffer. Usually you were not told you were the hostage until the pain or fear started. Last mega Trau had been slow, and Be had been grabbed by a wall and slowly violated until Trau came back. They had all been crying for a long time after that. He tried to move faster: he didn’t want any of his sibs to suffer. The longthing was resilient, but he got it loose. The crawly had a surface covered with strange markings – long strips of bars and squares that flashed colors at him. Joan said that was the curses of Two, the enemy of One. Only a sib that couldn’t read could see them and live. Be hoped he would never learn to read. Then the only thing he would be good for was being hostage. Background Before the Fall the United Miners of Diana Collective were mining the asteroid using an old Carp-class Mobile Mining Station named Egeria. The operation was never truly profitable, but kept the collective above the water and enabled them to build a small habitat besides the existing sprawling tin can additions to the asteroid. The first sign of the Fall was a series of malfunctions in the surface installations. Automation stopped obeying orders and instead began producing unknown equipment. AI support first turned slow and unhelpful, then completely disappeared as processor after processor were subverted. In panic the crew on Egeria took off, leaving the rest of the colonists to their fate. When Diana fell, it was taken over by a TITAN intelligence, ”One”. Unfortunately, TITANs were very good at hacking badly protected systems so it was soon followed by another, competing entity, “Two”, before One had manage to secure everything. One and Two (and perhaps more entities) were soon slugging things out, using anything that could be used as a weapon – fabbers, robots, the inhabitants. One realized that biomorph transhumans had the advantage that they were harder and slower to hack than synthmorphs, so One quickly took a suitable set of biomorph children as hostages and then sent off their parents to strike at the assets of Two. The operation worked, sort of. Two was soundly defeated and One was left as king of the hill. The adult biomorphs were mostly irreparably broken, but the entity did not have much further use of them. However, One found that it had been sidelined. The original plan was to take over Diana and use it for making equipment for the further expansion of the parent TITAN. But now it had changed/evolved/vanished (in fact, it appeared to be suspiciously similar to the dreaded Two), leaving One alone and isolated. Instead it set out to implement another project, perhaps a low-priority side goal or something it decided on for itself. Over the past decade it has quietly built things across Diana. The structures are baroque designs somewhere in-between robots, sculpture and buildings. Mined regolith is turned into bronze-colored bulging shapes with some similarity to Mayan temples mixed with quaternion fractals mixed with ciliates. Underground chambers house conglomerates of linked shapes, occasionally moving around. They sculpt the asteroid rock into random shapes – terrestrial fossils, images from popular culture, surreal designs that no sane transhuman mind could have imagined. While running Diana One had to decide what to do with the remaining transhuman children. It decided to keep them as semi-independent assistants, perhaps to forestall further hacking attempts. The children were reared by software and a few remaining nursebots in a set of pressurized chambers. As they grew up they developed their own culture. To them One is more or less God: a random, cold and mysterious force that will use ruthless operant conditioning to get them to do what is needed. Their parents were sainted heroes who sacrificed themselves to save them. They do not know anything about the outside world but have guessed that they are likely alone in the universe: the TITANs seem to be too powerful and smart to have ever been defeated. Instead they turn to each other for comfort, forming a tightly knit group where everybody is everybody’s sibling. When venturing out into the warrens of Diana and on the surface they use space suits designed by One, strange trilobite-like armored shells that both give excellent protection and allow them to use tools with multiple limbs. The transhumans are especially used for repairing and maintaining old systems, or recycling wreckage left from the Fall conflict – since some of the hastily manufactured battlebots and weapons are still potentially dangerous or have infectious software, One prefers to use the transhumans as buffers. This is also why it has not started to directly run their minds: as long as they are kept obedient by their unwillingness to have their compatriots suffer for betrayal or inefficient work, they are useful. If the situation on Diana were to be discovered many groups would want to help the poor adolescents. In particular the Egeira Miners onboard the scum fleet “Zhuangzi and His Fishes” would demand access, as being the closest to relatives they have. However, the adolescents still vaguely understand that they and their parents were betrayed and might not be happy.