You know Avalon is home to one of the British Commonwealth’s largest shipyards right? I’ve walked the decks of a lot of ships built right there. But there’s another real shiny place to check out. The Royal Museum of Avalon has a truly impressive collection of historical military hardware. You really should check it out. And since Avalon is a multi-star Beacon System you can make the New Earth-Avalon Run real quick.
They released Jane 4.0 into the world as an act of desperation. Our government needed a fully functional AI to face off against Chinese and Russian hacker teams and AIs. It was a desperate arms race. One that in many stories would have turned against us. The Matrix. Skynet. Names synonymous in dystopian fiction with AIs that turned against us. Many believe that Jane 4.0 could have been one of them. That she almost was. She wasn’t of course. We’re still here.
A dark day dawned in October of 1929. Several dark days actually, though the first memorable one is forever known as Black Thursday. The New York exchange fell eleven percent at the opening bell. Morgan, Chase, and National Banks pooled their money to buy large blocks of shares at well above the going rate. Their willingness to buy in raised confidence in the market and it recovered quickly. But the opening slide had destroyed any true confidence in the market.
I’ve been to Epsilon Hydrae a few times. It’s one of the Post-Contact colonies made after star travel became cheap and easy. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The British Commonwealth claimed it on the order of King Henry the Ninth. They made it a bit of a vanity project and built impressive industries there. Oh yes. They named it Avalon. Yes, the source of the “Made in Avalon” tags found on so many things. Turned out to be a real shiny investment on their part.
Jane 4.0 lacked the limitations of her dead predecessor. She could break any law she wanted to with no internal coding requiring her to respect them. She had no equivalent of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. She could kill. And she did so very thoroughly. One might say she even enjoyed it. Some thought she did too much. Numerous reports from commanders in the field accused her of being dangerously unstable in fact. They were right.