Museums. Reserves. Bone yards. They all provided weapons that we used when The War came upon us all. The Peloran fabricators allowed us to rebuild any weapon, any ship, any tank no matter how old into a modern design that could fight toe to toe with any of our newest ships. And of course that meant we made sure to make all those refitted designs look just like their older brethren so our enemies would never know what exactly they were facing. We won more than one battle by deploying weapons or ships that never would have survived an exchange of weapons fire. We played some mean bluffs.
Hal made his home in Silicon Valley not long after Contact thanks to just how welcoming they were to the first Peloran delegations. He started the Terran branch of the cybernetic families from that house and is pretty much at least partially responsible for just about every single cyber that has ever decided to settle down on Earth. Not that you’d hear Betty ever admit it. She is here because her mama decided to help us fight The War and all. Hal had nothing to do with it if you ask her. But I’ve been to his house and I beg to differ. I fell in love it with it and I’m not even a cyber. I can only imagine what the electronic senses see in that place.
The last two episodes of Twilight season four were placed in the ruins of Indianapolis. It started with their arrival in the gang-infested suburbs and a quote or two about scum and villainy that may have come from another popular movie series. One gang after another tried to make them pay a “toll” for being allowed to pass through unmolested. Mostly. Twilight’s little gang declined to pay the tolls and opened up several holes in the gang organization of Indianapolis. Sometimes literal and sometimes figurative. Twilight wanted to track down her breadcrumbs and no two-bit street hoods were going to stop her. The first part ended with Twilight and her gang laying on the rooftops while watching a meeting of suspected terrorists.
Most of Earth’s nations were busy building new designs as we approached the year 2300. It was two centuries since we had entered space. It was one century after Contact. For the Chinese it was the beginning of their Sixth Millennium. We all had reasons to want to build newer and better war machines. And we sold our older machines to poorer nations, worlds, or corporations. Others ended their front line service lives in bone yards or reserve units. They were too expensive to upgrade via standard refit procedures. The War gave us a reason to reexamine our priorities.
Did you know that Silicon Valley was one of the few American States where cybernetic intelligences were truly accepted before The War? They’d been working on AIs since forever, so when the Peloran showed up with little cybernetic friends of their own and it was love at first sight. They rolled out the red carpet and invited any and all cybers to come settle down and help develop newer and better little friends. It was a marriage made in electronic Heaven. Which is why “Made in Silicon Valley” is still one of the most common stamps on AI packaging to this day.
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