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Silver Millennium Tales
Appendix 3:
Machines, Programs, and Places.

1.	A.S.; Artificial Sentient

	A constructed persona.  Generally refers to a sentient computer program
or A.P.

2.	A.P.; Artificial person

	Rarely used, constructed body that does not use an already living being
for the template.  Most often used by an A.S., but occasionally used to house a
nat's persona, or (rarely) a non-sentient computer persona.

3.	Q.A.S.; Qas; Quasi-artificial sentient

	A child of one or more A.S.  While such people were rare in the Silver
Millennium, they have become more common in the half-million years of the
Darkness.

4.	Museum.

	The Museum was built shortly after the Great Death, part of the
survivors attempt to cope with what had been done.  Stored in it was a million
years of bric-a-brac, ranging from the first piloted space capsule to displays
on the four asteroids of the Final War; from the fossils of the earliest direct
ancestors to displays on the latest in genetic manipulation.

	The Museum was a symbol of what we could not allow ourselves to forget,
that our people had distroyed our own ecosystem, almost killed ourselves off,
murdered our siblings and all of the familiar creatures of our world.

	It was destroyed in the last battle of the old Silver Millennium, by
the forces of Order.  The digital copies remain, but they are not the same.

5.	shop; Silver Millennium Military Maintnence Facility, Darkside.

	The shop was originally a tertiary maintnence facility, but the
Earthside cities grew far faster than expected, eating up much of the Earthside
facilities' expansion space.  By about SM30M, the Earthside facilities were
relegated to smaller scale work, and, by SM45M, to keeping the Palace fleet in
proper order.

	With the Introduction the Earthside shops were surplused, and their
facilites sold to the highest bidders.  Tsukino-ke took over the one nearest
the palace, and turned it into what Mizuno Hachiko, the king at the time,
called `the worlds biggest live action video game complex.'

	The Darkside shop was transformed into a research facility, although it
was still used to service the oldest of the Outer System patrol craft, which
were far too esoteric to risk a nano-constructor failure with.

6.	Luxion, Eltrium, and Noa.

	The three oldest craft in the Sol system.  All three date to before the
Final War, and no one knows exactly how they were built, not even their own
controlling A.S.  Luxion and Eltrium were built around some lost sort of
quasi-hyperspace drive, and have been clocked as making the transfer from
Kin-sei to Raiou-sei in under two minutes.  Noa has no FTL capabilities, and,
actually, can only sustain about two Gs of thrust; however she carries the
single largest beam weapon known to the Two Races, larger than even an
Inspection Army Cannon Ship.

	Izumi-chan, Noa's A.S., splattered three Inspection Army ships at the
Introduction, rescuing the Zentradi fleet.  This boggled everyone; Noa was on
the other side of the system, the Zentradi plea for help had only just been
broadcast, and a light-speed attack would take a little bit more than a day to
arrive.  Izumi-chan has never divulged whether her attack was the result of
seeing the future or some sort of warp technology;  the inspectors have never
been able to decide.

7.	E.H.R.S.; Emergency Holographic Repair System

	The E.H.R.S. was developed shortly after the Introduction to keep any
hypothetical developing culture on Earth from discovering the existance of the
Two Races until such time as they could deal with whatever wiped us out, in the
event of our untimely demise.

	Upon activation, the EHRS A.S. would remove any debris from orbit,
cover over any too-obvious craters, and remove any surface trace of Two Race
sentients.

	Serenity-ou activated it after the forces of Order overran the palace
and she sent us to be reborn.

8. V1,V2,V3,V30,V303 VJ battlesuits

	The VolksJaeger battlesuit prototypes were, in order, the V1 and V2
(the V standing for experimental, much like the modern American X), each a
single suit equiped with the new warp engines.  These were constructed of cat 2
armour, and were used to debug the warp engines, develop the control soft, and
sell the idea.  

	After some testing and a lot of tweaking, Mercury managed to sell
Serenity-ou on the idea, and funding for the V3 was approved.  Three V3 were
made using cat 4, and it was these that I first heard rumors about, and later
saw.

	I managed to pull my grades up high enough to get into the V30 test
run, and by begging pitifully managed to keep the set of armour, number
thirteen, that was tailored to me.  The V30, to me, were the best-looking and
most useful of the VJ armours, but I'm biased, the cat 9 having saved my hide
on a number of occasions.

	The V303 were the final prototype, basicly the production VJ except for
minor line-routing and cosmetic changes.  The cat 9 of the V30 was downgraded
to cat 7, both for the V303 and the production versions.