And then there's the sexed up killing machine issue...

I'd be lieing if I said I never had issues with that warbot Nack brought with him from Blackburne. I had issues with it when they were still on Blackburne. The mother bot that was plaguing them for months, hopefully only the one, was a slightly later version than the one under Hale's Moon. At least we think it was, seeing as how it appears that ours was a prototype. Thing is, the drones it built weren't exactly the same as ours. Similar designs, sure, but apparently a rev or two later and, obviously, made from materials local to Blackburne rather than the materials available here.

Mixed blessing, really. Slightly more sophisticated designs but Hale's, being a mineral rich hunk of moon, had better raw materials to build the machines with. Near as we knew though, none of the mother bots were AI or designed to be AI. The original designs were intended to just be self replicating mining drones, hives of them, really, with the expectation that they could be shut down if needed.

Not surprisingly, there was a whole range of drones the mother bots could build. Most unsettling were probably the anthropomorphic ones. Without their skin, the chassis looked a lot like the KM series Weyland Yutani used. A lot like Krenshar under the skin. Of course, the warbots were a lot heavier armored but didn't have as sophisticated a brain in them.

Which made the bot they called 'Raids' a bit confusing.

The very female skin stretched over that chassis wasn't a real surprise. There had to be some basic psych warfare coding in those machines, and making a warbot look like a smexy woman was an obvious way to unsettle your opponent. What was a surprise was how the machine was acting.

Nack had, somehow, managed to butcher up some of the programming to try and turn it from a warbot into a lovebot. Without bothering to modify the chassis, of course. Thing was, the obvious conflict between the profiles was doing something to the machine's programming. If what we were seeing was real, and not just a ruse by a well coded Expert System, there was a Ghost forming inside there.

That changed the whole game.

If Raids had a Ghost, we were ethically bound to treat 'her' like we treated anyone else on the colony. We'd shown Krenshar and Lily the same compassion. They were real because they believed they were real, and that was what really mattered in a question of sentience . Was Raids that far along? Was she real?

I'd talked to her more than once, and each time there seemed to be more there. She was like Lily had been: fluctuating between what seemed to be programmed responses and the agonized confusion of an emerging intelligence.

While I wanted her to be real, for reasons I couldn't really define, I understood the fear and anxiety she was causing with some of the colonists.

Just last night I'd had to stop Faulkin from shooting at her. While I actually agreed that Raids was a potentially lethal killing machine, I had to get him to understand that we were giving her the chance to be a person. Yes, she'd killed people on Blackburne. But in that capacity she was a weapon. A soldier. Same as the hundreds of thousands of Independent and Alliance troopers who'd fought each other during the war. Where an individual might not be able to forget or forgive, the fact is a soldier doing their job isn't automatically a criminal.

You don't end a former soldier for killing another soldier on the battlefield.

That the case, someone'd be just as right to end me. I'd left a lot of folk dead. My hands weren't any cleaner than the warbot's.

Couldn't really talk to the odd relationship Faulkin had with Raids. Seemed she was doing everything she could to bait him in a flirtatious kind of way, while he was doing everything he could to abuse the machine. Something she seemed to like. A lot. Like a 'I'm a masochist. pleasure is pain. Love me. Hurt me.' kind of lot.

Not my cup of tea.

But what were we going to do? She wanted me to make her like she was. Set her back so she could relish killing. Not something I could do, since that'd mean ending her to protect the rest of the citizens.

And if she wanted me to end her? There was nothing wrong with an honorable death. There was honor in helping someone to die in some circumstances. But did she need to die? Was the anguish she expressed, if genuine and not a ruse, part of the transition? Part of becoming alive?

Why did I care?

Why DID I care?

What had changed? And did it matter?

We'd set a precedent with Lily and Krenshar. Folk deserved to be treated a certain way, with a measure of dignity and respect, and it didn't matter whether a person filled their tank with Frog Soup and Coffee or Illudium Phozdex and Hydraulic Fluid. A person wasn't defined by the makeup of their shell.

I'd give Raids the chance to be a person. Turned out she was nothing but programming and weapons, we'd deal with it appropriately. But if I was right, and there was a Ghost coming to light in there, we'd give her the chance to be one of us. To be more than weapons and programming.

Ghost awakening
Come, walk as one among us
A future in peace