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.
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.
In memory of those who died in London.
May you rest in peace.
May you never be forgotten.
May you be in a better place now.
Seyla.
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.
The Peloran border patrol is crewed primarily by Peloran who are willing and able to leave the forests they would otherwise retire to. They keep a strict watch on the Peloran borders, keeping unwanted visitors away on cruises that last for centuries. Fabricators make anything the crew or ship needs as long as they top their basic elemental storage up at stray asteroid belts or gas giants. And the crews themselves are more like family units than what we consider traditional crews. They communicate with nearby ships through a network of automated hyperspace drones that keeps them in contact over the thousands of lightyears of their long patrols. Their only other contact with their home planets is a steady if slow stream of new Peloran seeking lives away from the planets of their birth. These new recruits find positions on the border patrol ships and maintain a steady influx of new genes into the spaceborn Peloran community.


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