 |
Core Info
Species: Android, feral western dragon.
Gender: Male
Length: 9m (30ft)
Height: 3m (10ft) at the shoulder
Weight: 5,103kg (11,226 lbs)
Body Age: 38 years
Age of Consciousness: 156 years
Setting: Mid-22nd Century, living on a Venusian colony and working mostly on Earth.
Career: Corporate consultant, specializing in legal issues associated with interstellar trade.
Hobbies: Virtual sculpting, painting, historical reenactment and astronomy.
Appearance:
He's a moderate sized feral dragon, about 30 feet long from snout to the tip of his tail, but he makes no effort to hide the fact that he's an android. His scales are a metallic bluish-gray, with lighter scales for his underbelly. His "eyes" are a display screen, since he has dozens of tiny cameras all over his body that gives him a 360 degree 3D view of the world around him. He has wings and does enjoy flying, but he does so only as a pass-time. He just teleports if he needs to go anywhere outside of walking range.
He is sexually functional, although he's incapable of sexual reproduction. That technology exists for androids, but it's hideously expensive. All of his naughty bits are kept inside until they're ready for use, so he wears no clothing.
Bio:
Telnac's an android dragon from the mid 22nd century. His human body was born in 1989, and he lived for 118 years until his death in 2107. 10 years before his death, he had nanoscale implants that grew into his brain and mapped every neuron, every synapse and logged every electrical impulse. This data was used to create a near perfect simulation of his mind that was running during the last days of his life. As per standard procedure, after 2 years the implants switched control of his human body over to the simulation, and he didn't notice. Because his brain was still given all of the input data that his body gave it, the simulation and his brain remained perfectly in sync even with the simulation running the show and not his brain... until the moment of his biological death.
After his death, the simulation continued to run. He ordered a custom body made to house his mind in a technological version of reincarnation. Since his old identity legally died with his old body, he had to choose a new identity. Thus, Telnac was "born."
Telnac's body is powered by thousands of cold fusion reactor cells. Each one of them is about the size of a grain of rice and puts out a modest amount of electricity. Combined, he has more than enough juice to power all of his systems.
He can fly, even without his wings (which are there more for flight control than for actual lift) thanks to billions of microscopic muon thrusters incorporated into his body.
He can nearly instantly teleport anywhere at will, even over interstellar distances, thanks to an alien-built teleportation system he paid a small fortune for. He's only traveled outside the Solar System once, when he spent 20 years as part of a program hosted by the Evytakkian civilization to educate humans and other younger species about interstellar law, customs and history. That education is the basis for his current career as a consultant for businesses seeking to trade with alien civilizations.
His scales include both self-healing reactive plasma armor (more to deflect micrometeorite impacts in space than to defect bullets, but it's effective against the latter too.) They also have a cloaking device built into them, making him impervious to laser blasts. Again, the cloaking device wasn't intended for defense. He bought it so that he could selectively cloak parts of his body when interacting with humans. A floating dragon's head appears far less intimidating than a fully visible 30 foot long dragon in the room. He just has to be careful that no one trips over his invisible tail.
He has no breath weapon or any weapons at all. A breath weapon would have cost a fortune and it would have added a lot of unnecessary mass to his body. His teeth and claws are dull, not sharp. Sharp claws would be problematic in public situations, and since he doesn't eat he has no need for sharp teeth. Really, who is he going to fight? He's an artist and a corporate consultant, not a warrior.
Setting Info:
Telnac lives in the middle of the 22nd Century. The population of the Earth has stabilized at 15 billion people. The Moon, Mars and Venus have been extensively colonized, with all of them but Venus being self-sustaining.
Humans have long ago mastered faster than light (FTL) technology, and extensively use it for communication, travel and to build high speed processors. FTL technology started to emerge as early at 1999. Early experiments on FTL communication systems started in 2008, and quickly bore fruit. It wasn't long before an FTL communication device successfully flew on a probe to Mars. As a result, the world watched the first manned landing on Mars live.
The first android with a mind comparable to the human brain was built in Japan in the mid 2060s. In 2070, Japan declared that such androids are Japanese citizens. Other countries followed suit and by 2085, all androids with an IQ of 70 or greater were granted the same rights as people. Intentionally making a self-aware machine with an IQ less than 70 was banned, so in effect all intelligent androids were legally declared people.
AI-derived implants started to appear on the market shortly thereafter in an effort to prevent the human brain from rapidly disappearing into technological obsolescence. In the long run, that concern was largely unjustified. It simply wasn't possible to build a machine much more powerful than the human brain and have it be much smaller, because the human brain is a REALLY POWERFUL computer. What AI could do easily was stuff that the brain's architecture doesn't do well: record, store & rapidly process raw data... the same stuff computers have been doing since the 1940s.
But the neurological implants did work, and they were in large demand because of it. Suddenly, nearly everyone had perfect photographic memory and could solve complex differential equations in their head. The devices were hooked up to the FTL interplanetary network, and the effect on civilization was almost like discovering the Internet all over again.
Humans never built a warp drive, although such a thing is theoretically possible. In the 2070s, Human teleportation systems were based off of the concept of entanglement, so they needed a machine at the origin and destination. That alone kept humanity inside our own star system until we made first contact with an alien civilization in the waning years of the 21st Century.
After formal diplomatic and trade agreements were made and humanity agreed to be bound by the articles of interstellar law, alien-built self-teleportation systems came onto the market. They were FAR more expensive than conventional teleporters, but they used a technology that humans had a difficulty mastering: quantum tunneling. This allowed the machine to teleport itself (and whatever was along for the ride) instantly to any destination w/o needing a teleportation machine at the end. Spacecraft with such a teleportation system could instantly go almost anywhere in the Universe (subject to the energy requirements needed to go so far.) That alone reduced the warp drive to an academic curiosity.
Telnac's current home is in a city floating in the cloud tops of Venus. Because the atmosphere is so think and nearly entirely carbon dioxide, a large room sealed & filled with human-breathable air would actually float like a balloon in the Venusian sky. Cities on Earth are designed for human-sized dwellers, and land prices on the Moon or Mars are far from cheap, so when Telnac got back to the Solar System, he bought a large condo in one of the many Venusian cloud cities. He commutes daily by teleporting to Earth to conduct business.
|
Favorites
Digg
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Furl
Magnolia
StumbleUpon
Google
Yahoo MyWeb
Please wait...
