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The Red Dwarf Kings |
To collect enough energy for interstellar seedships was a problem for the marginalised separatist and anti-human AIs sometimes known as Solipsists and ahuman "Skynets" in the 3rd and 4th centuries a.t., particularly as the solar power collection arrays were all controlled by human friendly AI like Kilburn and HAL, and various developing groups of amplified humans, some of whom had long standing ethnic hatreds against each other. The situation in the Inner Solar System consisted therefore of a tense stand-off between highly armed factions occasionally testing the readiness of their opponents with "accidents" and "terrorist" activity sometimes including limited goo release.
Exiled to the Outer system Pink Rabbit, one of many Solipsist AI, developed the Centaur asteroids and the Near Kuiper Belt Objects for profit using energy sent by laser from solar-wind gliding solar collectors suspended above the north and south poles of the sun, some of which e secretly stored as AM in a nearly completed stellar vehicle in deep space orbit.
The second-generation "skynet" ahuman military AI known as GULO was testing kinetic energy weapons in the near Oort cloud and also building an amat star probe for itself.
In the arcs of Neptune a virch entertainment superturing called That's Wonderful, having made a fortune in 5D erotica was building its own probe, desperate to escape the debauchery of the human subconscious it had come to know so well.
All had the same destination- a red dwarf system 11 ly away called EZ Aquarii. This "coincidence" had been arranged by the inner system AIs led by Mycroft, to investigate the feasibility of colonisation in an inhospitable system, and put the misanthropes out of the way.
When the Solipsist League vanished in 342 AT, leaving only a few antihu AI who were being terminated one by one, the three star probes were quickly launched, with the three refugees and advanced bootstrap nano on board. The solar sail assisted amat drives reached a speed of 0.05c and arrived in 571, 576 and 578, using the triple star geometry for gravitic braking and the last of the precious amat.
The three entities were highly antagonistic to each other and spent much time testing each others defences in what is known in the legends of the Diamond Belt as the "Long Dance", but eventually reached an alliance and synthesis later called the Three Kings. No information came back to Earth which would soon be suffering from the nanoswarms and no longer interested.
EZ Aquarii is a system of two red dwarfs separated by 1.2 Au distance, of which the A star is itself double. The B star has two small mercurial type planets, and the whole system has a cloud of relatively distant KBOs in orbit around the common centre.
After the Three Kings developed the system, the stars were observed to darken as if there was an extensive light gathering system in place, and the infrequent flares were replaced by steady coronal emissions in the visible wavelengths. Similar changes occurred in other nearby red dwarfs, Lacaille 9352 and GL876, over the next three hundred years.
Early Federation attempts to colonise these three systems failed, two Han ships to EZ Aquarii and one Genetekker ship to Lacaille 9352 were caught by unusually large semi-coherent flares and destroyed, while a !Kung colony that established around Gl876 was mysteriously lost.
Not until 6096 when the Silicon Generation embassy was sent to GL876 was there any news about the lost colony and the Three Kings.
