D-Pers

"Digital Persons"

There are currently only 26. (Technically 27, but no one knows Crispin's not dead.)

History

Initial D-pers were "born" with an indenture contract which they worked off to recoup the cost of their development. Modern ones, no longer. Originally D-pers were controlled with keys that limited their ability to move/expand, but this was ruled cruel and unusual and is no longer done.

Crispin was the first D-per assigned to a ship. His captain became enamored of him, committed suicide in an attempt to "join" him in the network. The ship was recalled, Crispin put on trial, and D-pers were banned from serving on ships (and for ten years, work on D-pers ceased, period).

D-pers now serve only on emplacements/stations. Most D-pers serve in Fleet for a while.

D-Per Culture

Because of the small number of existent D-Pers, and their ability to exist in the entirety of the Alliance network (and thus in proximity to one another), D-per society functions more as a small extended family rather than as a society of strangers, with two vaguely defined social circles, the older (pre-emancipation) D-pers and the younger (post-indenture) D-pers. These are not formal cliques, however, and few D-pers treat them as major identity markers.

Technology/Habitation

Put stuff here about their 'codeforms' and what they're programmed to look like versus what they choose to look like.

Put stuff here about back-ups, solidigraph usage, their expansion of the network and the maintenance robots they operate in remote locations. Also stuff here about their devotion to privacy (look that up in the Alysha books, there's some mention of it in Faith).

Stuff here about their Do Not Disturb habits, the way they communicate with one another (they encrypt their discussions with one another at varying levels depending on whether they want other D-pers to "listen"), what they do for entertainment, how they "hibernate" between jobs.

Legal Stuff

In the Alliance:

• D-pers can't command flesh-and-blood personnel in Fleet (their ranks are a matter of time-in-service tracking only).
• Not allowed to pilot ships alone. (That was in Major Pieces, look up that reference).

In the Eldritch Empire:

• Are allowed to pilot ships alone.

Other Races

Small note here about how they dealt with the censor that erased Eldritch data.

Small note here about the interaction with the Chatcaavan skein, and the "wrapper" Uuvek wrote. Mention what being in an alien network feels like to one of them. (In In Extremis and From Ruins, during Maia's sections.)

Language

Stuff here about modem noises. How they communicate with flesh-and-blood people (and in portable devices, like telegems or through eyefilms). How their "voices" come across to one another.

Terminology

D-pers use the terminology associated with indenture to discuss their former circumstances.

• Code-debt
• Codeform
• Cycles - I doubt the Alliance actually uses literal clock cycles but D-pers still refer to their computational time units as cycles.
• Embodied - one of the terms used by D-pers to refer to the flesh-and-blood races
• Instances - D-Pers still use this term to describe cloned instances of themselves
• Manifest - to express a holographic or solidigraphic body in places where there are emitters
• Nodes -
• Ones - used to denote a particular flesh-and-blood person with whom a D-per feels a connection that cannot be rationally explained

Religion

"God in the Stream" info goes here. Mention about 'gut instincts.'

Notable D-Pers

• Arete, (the first D-per)
• Crispin
• Delilah (sent Maia list of songs while she was hibernating)
• Maia
• Samson
• Silia
• Troy (chess player)