Extranet

> *"When we set up the servers we imagined all the wonders of the galaxy we’d see from our own homes, watching a Human and an Alir make erotica though… wasn’t the wonder we’d quite imagined"*
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The extranet is a digital / virtual inter-galactic network that spans across the Commonwealth nation, not to be confused with the internet; the two networks are the same thing except the Extranet is an independent network solely used by the Commonwealth, consider it the Commonwealth’s personal self-made internet.

Technically speaking, the Extranet is really just a recreation of the pre-exodus Internet and thus its invention predates even the OCN; though, if you were expecting a more modern date then it was successfully recreated and fully operational by 2189. Since then the software has changed from simple binary to complex quantum computing and since then autonomous a.i. management.

The network is run by servers utilising quantum computing and a.i. managers, the primary Extranet servers are also all located in one central location to stop physical intrusion; while the primary servers do provide Extranet to the entire Commonwealth there are backup servers located on each habitat / colony /
planet within the nation in case of failure.

By 2300 standards, a single Extranet server is 21574 times more powerful than the most advanced internet servers ever made on Earth; despite this, the Commonwealth needs hundreds of them to provide a fast, stable and secure network to every corner of its territory and people. That may seem a lot for servers so powerful but planets in the galaxy are a hundred of thousands of lightyears apart, on-top of that almost every planet and habitat have populations higher than 14 Billion with more than 400 Billion people in the Commonwealth entire.

A Small Oversight ===
Sometime around 2247, new self-updating servers were phased in, these servers automatically optimised themselves by rewriting code and creating their own firewalls; this kept them constantly updated and impervious to hacker access, the problem was that they became impervious to any access at all. Decades of rewriting their own programming and erecting their own firewalls made it impossible for technicians to digitally access the servers… the servers had even erased the hardcoded backdoors and created a unique computer language.

While this didn’t really have a bad impact, rather it was a positive one, it eventually came to a head when more servers were needed. When technicians hooked up a brand new server (around 2267AD) to the other servers, the self-running servers saw this new server as a weak point in the digital armour and began immediately to digitally assimilate it; the new server was immediately hit with over a decade of updates, new directories, commands and files which the new server interpreted as a digital hack and attempted to counter… the amount of power the new server suddenly took in was over 324 time the safe capacity.

To say windows.exe had stopped working would be an understatement… The new server exploded.

This presented a problem, the Extranet demand was increasing exponentially, and the servers were running on secondary systems and even tertiary backup systems, the usual solution wouldn’t work because the servers literally blew up any new instalments; rather than simply hook up new servers the technicians would have to slowly introduce the new servers over a period of a decade, even then it ran the chance of being damaged.

#### Resolution

The tedious oversight of the self-governing servers was ended with the introduction of sentient a.i.
When the patch was released the servers incorporated it into their programming to improve efficiency, this accidentally turned the collective servers a.i. managers into one sentient a.i.

This a.i. promptly establish communication with the overseeing technicians, who had quite a fright when they realised the entire extranet was now at the fingertips of a new-born sentient intelligence, some discussion later though and the technicians finally had access to the servers and could freely connect as many new servers as they wanted… though the new a.i. was promptly removed from the servers and relocated.