#there's also an entry for house lolita but it's hardly worth posting

[seveneyesoup]

lolita (transcript below cut)

[Begin transcript:

The 101-Project

It had long been suspected that it might be possible to engineer a timeship which thought like a living, growing, biological creature. No experiments had ever been performed, however, as the entire concept was simply... unpleasant. Biology was still vaguely repulsive to the Houses, the situation only beginning to change after the rise of groups like Faction Paradox and the suggestion, in the face of the coming apocalypse, that biological breeding on some level might be a wise precaution. A century and a half before the War, the ruling Houses had already sanctioned the production of several machine-hominids - artificial sentients, actual robots, previously thought to be too “vulgar” for words - and after that it wasn’t long until the obvious suggestion was made.

A new breed of timeships, said the Homeworld’s more progressive elements. A timeship which was intelligent, in the biological, hominid sense of the word, a timeship which could commmnicate and therefore receive orders.The coming War would require troops, and a timeship which was in itself a self-aware unit would have been an agent worth entire armies. However, in principle nobody was sure how to go about creating such a ship. It wasn’t possible to simply graft an artificial intelligence onto a Pre-War vessel. A “normal” engineered brain wouldn’t understand the more subtle processes holding a timeship’s body together, and it was even speculated that no mind could know what a timeship knows without becoming so abstract that communication became impossible. Clearly an entirely new breed of ship had to be grown, nudged toward hominid communication rather than programmed for it, slowly educated and nurtured as it grew in its cradle. The first attempt at this was known as the 101-Project, the Presidency declaring that an entirely new numbering system would be brought into use with the new breed.

The 101-Project was an infamous failure. Nobody outside the Homeworld could have been shocked. The idea of the Houses “nurturing” a whole new species, when even their own children were force-bred and force-educated, was simply laughable. They knew little of psychology, and cared even less, attempting to steer the 101’s course by constantly attacking the craft with heavy-duty biodata waldoes. But at least the first bio-timeship was successfully reared, even if it was never actually going to be controllable.

Almost nine-hundred years earlier, a similar bio-application of technology had been attempted when the Imperator Presidency had sanctioned the breeding of the insane, unstable babels. The pattern now repeated itself, although on an even grander scale. The Houses had repressed their primal heritage for so long that they’d simply forgotten what biology meant, so the protean, struggling thing born out of the 101-Project could only have been a surprise to the Houses themselves. As it lay in its cradle of dampers and manipulators, screaming and lashing out with its multiple biodata strands while desperately clawing at nearby time to find some form of escape, it's possible that the technicians started to remember what their culture had spent the last ten-million years trying to suppress.

End transcript.]