Vecs
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Vecs |
Of all the major categories of sophont beings in the pre-nanoswarm era, none had to face as much exploitation, prejudice, ignorance, and cruelty, that the intelligent robots, or vecs (note] Long after ai were recognised as persons, provolved animals were given full citizenship and accepted as rational beings the equal of humans, laws were passed giving full Sentient Rights to splices (even if these were not always enforced), and the raising and slaughtering of sentient baseline animals for food was banned on every civilised biosphere, the vecs were all too often still seen as machine-workers and servants by the majority of bionts, especially among the less educated, the ludds, the conservative status quo social groups, and baseline supremacists. This despite the fact that the average vec of the late Interplanetary Period, had a complexity of nano-machined parts equal to that of any biological organism.
Even so, the amount of prejudice and persecution was never as great as has been reported by some contemporary historians, still less the lurid historical dramas of Vec slavery. From the beginning there were communities of technophiles and technospherists, of artificial intelligence explorers, of minskyites and morovecians, of transhumanists and Buddhists, of Cosmists and cyborgs, who recognised the intelligent and sentient nature of vecs from the very beginning, and who established societies both on Old Earth and in Space where vecs interacted with humans on equal footing, and these increased in number and influence over the decades and centuries.
But ultimately it was the rise to power of the great vec Houses and empires like MetaSoft Version Tree and Silicon Generation, and the part they and other vec clades played in the formulation of the Second Foundation Ontology, that finally won superturing grade vecs everywhere once and for all time the same Universal Sentient Rights and every other conscious entity in the galaxy.
For many thousands of years now, vecs have interacted with bionts in all aspects of life; they are seen throughout all the civilised worlds as beings with heart and soul and feelings like any other, never again to suffer the humiliating slavery of the hu supremacists and others who would oppress and use them as subservient machines.
Of course, out among some of the lesser worlds and biospheres of the periphery, where enlightened central government is neither strong nor common, and civilisation may often give way to petty despotism, things have not really changed much since the bad old days.....
Asimos / Asimovecs are sophont server vecs whose only duty is to serve others, provided that they are taken care of
Botworld - a large area that is dominated by, or consists entirely of, self-replicating and self-repairing forms which are of mechanical origin
Clade Faber - vec clade found most frequently near the periphery of the Terragen sphere, where they are first-in colonization specialists
Cryovecs -Cold temperature vec phyle
Environmental Vecs - intelligent robots who maintain habitat and planetary environments
Clade Faber - vec clade found most frequently near the periphery of the Terragen sphere, where they are first-in colonization specialists
Factotums - Generic term for degenerate discarded, obsolete or homeless vecs
Ghasts - diplomatic clade of vecs designed to have an uncanny appearance
Machina Babbagenseii - The Machina Babbagenseii are a clade of entirely mechanical sophont vecs, based on forms of macroscopic Babbage-engine-type processing.
Plebvecs - the predominant vec type, and are found spread across all of Terragen space and are ubiquitous in all vec-friendly polities of every empire and metaempire
Polypedal Pots - a design of mobile pot or carrier for plants or sessile animals; often sophont
The Starhand - A clade of space-going vecs descended from space construction robots.
Tetsujin - a type of Asimovec, autonomous robots. Their lineage is very old; the earliest descriptions that are provably Tetsujin date back to the Interplanetary Age. Their origin was in the Pacific Rim area of Old Earth
Vecs in 300 AT - some brief comments on vecs during the late 23rd century c.e. (300 a.t.)
Vehvecs - independent-minded sophont vehicles
