Author notes

Space Slave page 22

bravo1102

on June 25, 2018

You see the Grey Gal does have some compassion, she even gave Jasmine back her clothes – before making her part of the ship.

You see suitable Artificial intelligence for ship-wide control that could adequately mimic a human brain turned out to be so expensive and "accident prone" that using biological systems was the best alternative. Life is cheap. There are trillions of people in the galaxy and biological brains are easily re-programmed. Artificially grown biological systems are quite capable but have their limitations. So the cheap way to do things is to do what our Grey Gal does here.

AI never got past the Alexa stage. Anything self-aware and it'd go psychotic on you. Millions died before it was finally abandoned. To explain the background of this universe – humans originated on Earth and developed a space going civilization just in time for the climate catastrophe that ended the Ice Age. Before then numerous genetic variant subspecies of human had gone to the stars as well as an extensive colonization program of the primary human species. In the tens of thousands of years that followed, technology has stagnated, regressed and advanced time and again. Only two human civilizations were lucky enough to have had a continuous historical existence. Most of the rest had to start all over again with one of the last ones to start over being those left on Earth. Earth is backwards and a protectorate of the Aordian republic. Very few on Earth are aware of this. Without being a protectorate Earth would have been gobbled up by someone long ago. So Earth is left to develop on its own as wonderfully backwards and silly as we are groping in the dark thinking some technologies are possible that were abandoned or even banned millennia ago.

And we have barely scratched the surface of the real physics of the universe. Things are possible that we haven't invented the math to express yet. Explaining faster than light travel would be like explaining nuclear fission to an ancient Egyptian.