Major Tom Rogers

by on March 26, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

I know few men older than Major Tom Rogers, and most of them are members of my family. He was a hotshot young pilot in 2170, when he secured a position as pilot aboard one of NASA’s Vulcan Missions. They were the last, grand venture of that old agency, and it was shut down entirely not long after. But the Vulcan Missions continued to outpace the news of their dissolution all the way to their destination. The Wall was our name for the bubble of debris hundreds of lightyears across, the surviving shockwave of an ancient supernova still spreading out around our region of the galaxy. No ship could pass through it in hyperspace safely, and it would take decades to pass through in normalspace. The Vulcan Missions were sent to find a way through, and Major Tom Rogers did not disappoint. He flew the NASA rocket ship Independence Seven through The Wall in 2205 and ushered in a new age for all of mankind.

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Juliet

by on March 25, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Juliet came from a purely Peloran cybernetic family, which makes her an immigrant. A lot of cybers are, especially War-Era cybers like Betty, but Juliet was the first of her kind. That gives her a very unique position in the hierarchy of the Terran cybernetic families. She was the first ambassador of a race that most of us had never truly thought of as alive. AIs were just complicated programs, and the fact that most AIs really were dumb helped engrave the idea in our minds. But when Juliet came to Earth for the first time, she came to show us all that cybernetic life forms were just as alive as any biological life form we knew of. And there’s a certain religious fervor around her. To the AIs who grew up on Earth before Contact, she’s like Moses, come to set her people free from their enslavers. Not that she ever used that word. Oh, no. She was far too tactful for that. That was one reason she was so effective.

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A Primer on the Races of Humanity – Peloran

by on March 24, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Peloran border patrol has over the centuries become a world unto its own. Individual families man each ship that watches the border. They marry, they have children, and when their population becomes too large for a single ship to support them, they build a new ship. A new home. From the handful of ships and Peloran that first took on the job two thousand years ago to now, their numbers have expanded exponentially until they are the single largest number of ships and Peloran who live off planet. They trace their family lineages across ships thousands of years apart in both distance and time. Entire generations have grown up on those ships, rarely if ever seeing a planetary surface. They have a completely different culture than their planetbound brethren, and many consider them to be effectively of different races.

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Juliet

by on March 22, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Juliet is the oldest cybernetic intelligence born in our little corner of the galaxy. Not the first one on Earth, and not the first we knew of that was born. And there are still many who debate whether or not she is really the oldest. And there are many more who doubt the good sense in arguing over a lady’s age. But I met her after she joined the Cowboys and spent a fair bit of time with her. I asked her if the stories were true. It took her a while to give me a straight answer, but I dug it out of her eventually. She was born on Independence, when the Peloran made Contact with the first Earth ship to navigate through The Wall of debris left over from an ancient super nova that surrounds our region of space. And just like everyone from Independence, she says it happened before Aneerin made Contact with us at Earth. And you know what? I believe her.

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