|
Drone Squads Metal Cyclone Alpha and Beta The Etherials needed a political way to integrate the members of a human colony that had decided to join the Tau Empire, the Gui'La, the humans, had to be made to serve the common good. Many were assigned to various prestigious jobs according to their abilities; this also served the political purpose of encouraging other human colonies to defect too. Humans would see that they would be equals among the Tau, and wish to join in droves. Unfortunately, the ideas and interests of humanity were both foreign and frankly incomprehensible to the Tau, and this effort sometimes led to situations that were generally considered errors by the highest of the Etherials; ultimately heads needed to roll - figuratively, rather than literally. Perhaps one of the more unhappy errors was the assigning of human programmers to Gun Drone research and development. On the surface, it seemed a good idea; human input should permit the Drones to handle the forces of Humanity all the more efficiently, and increase the overall level of diverse experience that the artificial intelligence of the Drones could handle. What the three soon to be disgraced lesser Etherial Nobles who initiated this program were unaware of was that their choosen human programmers had an insatiable love of ancient terran comics, cartoons, and trivia. Oops. Soon Gun Drones came rolling out of the production lines sure that they were real people, or cartoon animals, or characters from books; some demanded to be taken back to their storybook worlds, others picketed for full civil rights as citizens of the Empire. The worst situation involved a massive 'passive resistance' activism where over a thousand Gun Drones took over the Great Halls Of The Castes demanding a sixth Tau caste: the Drone Caste. It took hundreds of Earth Caste workers to move the unresisting, but heavy Drones, and even then no one knew what to do with them; machines had essentially shamed the Etherials with their peacful demands for equality. Much debate raged, and continues to rage, about whether or not the newly sapient (if insane) Drones could ethically be reprogrammmed, or whether they had to be accepted as equals. For this trouble to the Common Good, the original Etherial Nobles, and two squadrons of Drones, have been shipped off to a place where, if they survive, they can think about their rash behavior. That place is Vas'Quez 4.
|
|
