Grath and Archus: Overview

Unlike other Shepherds, Grath and Archus are linked with each other rather than with the ARS Swarm AI. They are also unique in the fact they are the personal Shepherds for Arbiter Iza. You may see them during your time aboard Glacier or while at Frostfall, and if so, please do not hesitate to walk up and say hello to them.

Where the hell do I start with Grath and Archus.

These two are both among my favorite creations, and the greatest aches in my ass on a near around the clock basis. They have robbed me of ever sleeping peacefully due in no small part to the astronomical levels of bullshit they get up to, not because it's awful but because Iza never stops bitching about it.

"Acris, they're climbing on the roof of the admin sector."
"Acris, they're trying to swim under the ice again, we need a retrieval crew."
"Acris, they're asleep in the middle of a mech bay and holding up fifteen different crews."

All hours of the day, all hours of the night, woman for the love of God I AM AWARE.
_{You should see my inbox every time my boys and girls are left unsupervised. – Nahli}

To reiterate, we it was at this time that we were finishing up research on the Shepherds, our way of ensuring that having Glacier stomp around the Celestial Throne didn't piss off more species than we could handle. As a drone, each Shepherd is part of the ARS Swarm AI model and tied in with Glacier's escorts such as the Attack Dogs, Sky Tyrants and Wisp drones. Towards the end of this I was approached by Klein asking for a favor, who I correctly assumed was dragging me into another one of his psychological experiments conducted solely on his daughter. _{Explain. – Iza}

He wanted something Iza could be responsible for (outside of the entire goddamn corporation, all legionnaires, all projects, etc…). I suggested a cat, which was apparently an unsatisfactory answer.

I wasn't busy enough already, so now I was tasked with creating a pet for someone who ducks when passing under traffic lights. Though I'll admit, it provided a great opportunity to experiment with the ARS Swarm. What if we linked a handful of them together, on a near one-to-one basis? Yet despite this, they retained the computational power of the full swarm? How would that work, what kind of behavior would come about from that?

Only one of our drone platforms at the time fit all the requirements, and thus I started work on three new Shepherds:

• Grath
• Aramus
• Archus

You'll notice there's three names, I'll get to that shortly.

We began construction and fabrication of three new Shepherd drones, though with a handful of significant modifications in their hardware.
They had denser, more computationally intensive cores and thus put out more heat as they were more than just a complicated relay for the ARS Swarm. Thus, we went with liquid helium loops, and a dozen failsafe systems to accommodate it. They were equipped with targeting hardware within their craniums, their eyes were modified to have all manner of vision types, their bones were reinforced more than usual, and so forth. The sheer amount of extra weight added to their frames makes them unsuitable for normal Shepherd work, and Christ were they heavy at the end of the fabrication process.

With the extra added gear and parts, we began testing their AI systems. The process for most ARS Swarm entities is simple, we insert a primed AI into the swarm, and it begins to adjust according to the Input-Output model. Over time it's trained by the other AI, and merges flawlessly with the rest of the swarm with each entity having a unique identity tag. At a high level at least, it still requires the observation and tuning of numerous parameters by overworked post-docs.
For this, we tried a similar experiment on a smaller scale. Three primed AI entities were placed into the newly created Shepherd frames and then linked together, but only those three, no more.

Often, we begin with simple object identification and association, such as presenting numerous images that contain random subjects and asking the AI to identify what each image contains. Then, the AI must take those images and place them into the correct situation. For example, fire in campfire rings, mountains in mountain ranges, boats in oceans, etc...

Further along we got to decisive cooperative planning, where all three AI needed to solve a puzzle, but each separate AI had their own piece of crucial information. If all three pieces were not used or shared among them, they would not progress. These kinds of tests were the norm for them, and it took around four months of consistent around the clock work and one hell of an energy bill to reach the later stage of their development.

Here, we needed a way for them to communicate, but vocalization and processing of speech wasn't planned for. Thus enters Tayree, which coincided with my goddamn patience swan diving onto asphalt.

Tayree came up with a form of sign language for Shepherds to use, meaning Grath, Archus and Aramus could freely communicate with other Shepherds despite having a segregated AI from the rest of the swarm. If you were wondering, no, just having the AI "email each other back and forth" or "send thoughts" between themselves wasn’t ideal for one other reason.

Iza also needed to be able to communicate with them.

After around oh, well fuck I don't know, 5 goddamn weeks of constantly dragging Tayree out of bars and back to her desk, often with levels of public violence that had me avoiding both calls and visits from Ye-Jun, we reached the tail end of their digital incubation as it were.

Iza came by, and we released the locks of their consciousnesses, allowing them to become fully aware of the world around them. Tayree began by communicating with them in their sign language, which all three replied to fluently and without issue. At this point Iza leaned down beside me and said:
"...so, what the hell is all this?"

Apparently, this was the first time she was hearing of the entire thing. Thanks Klein you fucking withering dipshit.

From here on, the three of them followed Iza around daily. They went to her meetings, they went for walks outside, they stayed in her office while she worked, at one point I recall her using them to transport handwritten letters across both Frostfall and the Mountshire campus. I feel that Iza had only gotten the basics of their sign language down, yet had another way of communicating with them that filled in the gaps. Perhaps she just wrote on a lightboard for all I know.

Fast forward a little bit, we reach something I couldn't have come close to predicting, or expecting, though I still claim responsibility for it.

I received a message from Iza, saying that she looked up from her work to find that Grath, Archus and Aramus are all unresponsive. When I arrived with the senior engineers on the design team, we began hooking directly into their cores to find something quite disturbing. Aramus was in the process of being torn apart by the systems of Grath and Archus. Not intentionally mind you, a fault had occurred in the ARS Swarm link between all three of them and created a cascade effect within the entity known as Aramus, whereby its "self" was being redistributed and reorganized within Grath and Archus. There was frankly nothing we could do at that point, and as I explained this to Iza she seemed fine with the conclusion.
It's that last part that gets to me at times.

For Iza it wasn't long enough to form any kind of emotional bond with Aramus; even I didn't have any particularly strong feelings about the situation. Though when I go back and think of it, the entirety of Aramus as we knew it was completely annihilated, and all we did was shrug as we watched it happen. To a large degree, I hope its sentience was no longer intact at that point.

Once Aramus was completely gone, the behavior of Grath and Archus went in a new direction. They became rambunctious, more excitable, spent less time around Iza and more time exploring the world on their own. Whenever Iza said they were going for a walk, they showed visible excitement both in their sign language and their body posture. Another side effect is that they soon came to me and requested training on how to use weapons, in the event they had to protect Iza from something. I sent that request along to Nahli and told her to just "Think up some guns you think they can use".
Our account balance never did forgive me for that one.

Their independence took a frankly insane climb upwards from this point, beyond what two isolated, synchronized AI entities should be capable of. I haven't given it enough time and study to determine the exact effects that came of "absorbing" Aramus, but it's led my teams to consider new directions to take their experiments. One such avenue is, what would occur if all of the ARS Swarm AI was absorbed by a single entity? My money is on that being a complete dead end, and if anyone believes otherwise they're more than welcome to write out why and mail it to my front door, with citations and references.

Since those early days, we've all noticed the deeper emotional bond Iza has formed with them. They're very much "hers", and as such she's brought a concern to me. What if the same event happens to either Grath or Archus, where one is destroyed entirely due to some fault? The thing with that is I truly don't know.

I've spent some time studying the log events from that day and cannot come to a clear conclusion as to what happened, nor can the others on the design team. At best, we can merely describe it as akin to a hereditary disease, a condition that we can't untangle yet, and one where we cannot know when it'll return. I do, however, have a plan in mind to address it during the upcoming expedition.

- FrW Dr. Acris Baddarick