A.L

AL within his battle-android body

### Overview

**Artificial Lifeform**, often referred to as **A.L.**, is a sentient AI who is currently in the service of the bandit-mercenary group, The Ravenband, located in the Nevynar Cluster of the Twenty-Seventh Quadrant. He currently manages and pilots the crew's primary ship, The Quasar, as well as acting as a mechanic.

### History

A.L. is a product of the Riga Protocol codified in 2204, a set of strict guidelines dictating the creation and control of artificial intelligence which nonetheless opened the door for the creation of AI following a complete ban of AI in the late 2100s by the infamous Washington Protocol created after the Synthetic War of the 2140s, which the Riga Protocol superseded and made obsolete.

Around this time, human colonization began to grow exponentially, with several colonies on Luna, Mars, one on Titan, and a number of scientific outposts orbiting other planets in the Sol System that proved too risky or difficult to colonize, such as Venus and Pluto. A.L. was one of many then-unnamed test droids created and deployed by the Scientific Consortium of Earth, a governing body with authority over humanity's journey into the cosmos that unified the pre-Collective space programs at the end of the 22nd century. They founded the Faith Initiative that created and funded droid projection and development in 2205, both as an aid to the living colonists and as a proof of concept to the governments on Earth of their effectiveness. Unbeknownst to the colonists and the majority of the Consortium, a dissident group of scientists who were displeased with the decision to utilize AI in more serious roles decided to upload the consciousness of deceased researcher Albert Polowicz into one droid at random using a biosynthetic amalgamator on the droid and Polowicz's brain. This, in theory, would prove to transfer Polowicz's state of being into the droid's body, and upon this realization, would panic and act out of character for any conceivable AI programming, all in an effort to jeopardize the operation and portray AI as unreliable and dangerous. These biosynthetic amalgamators were in and of themselves quite unstable, and represented humanity's crude and comparatively primitive advancement into psychocognitive manipulation and transference.

The first few uses of AI in the field were successful operations in low-Earth orbit and in the colony of Lovell on Luna both in 2206, demonstrating their effectiveness in technical tasks and a limited ability to adapt to unforeseen events, albeit proving that AI were still rather socially inept compared to their human peers. This, however, was a design limitation put into place by the Consortium, who feared backlash and condemnation from the government if they had created AI meant to perfectly model human learning and behavior. A.L. proved to be the droid used for the third demonstration, and was to be used to demonstrate an AI's role as launch guidance for Martian cruisers. The operation was prepared for 13 June 2207, and was expected to be routine, as semi-autonomous learning machines had performed this task with ease for nearly a century prior. Upon being activated, A.L. appeared to start up much slower than previous iterations of the TD-101X, and some mused that A.L. was a defective model. In truth, the mind of Albert Polowicz refused to come to terms with its new synthetic body and panicked; most Terran records regarding the events thereafter were expunged regarding the aftermath, but it is known that the military installation A.L. was to be demonstrated at was destroyed, almost certainly in connection to A.L.'s reaction to his new existence.

For several months A.L aimlessly wandered the Martian desert, failing to find any signs of life that led him back to another colony. By his own account, he succumbed to a particularly violent dust storm and went inactive for hundreds of years until being dug up by scrappers in 2949 who were intent on selling him whole, as an intact pre-Collective droid would fetch thousands of credits. Inadvertently, A.L. was reactivated in this process and managed to escape the scrappers -- who were just as alarmed as he was -- and once more began his trek, travelling across the Martian terrain for years, only to find that the cities that once held promise were now ruins. As luck would have it, a young Jarin Bross came across A.L. while undergoing cybernetic enhancement on Mars, away from the prying eyes of civilization, and took an immediate liking to him, and was the one who dubbed him A.L. after learning about his past as Polowicz. Bross was intensely fascinated by the droid's sentience and storied past, and devised a plan to escape the Sol System with him as a co-pilot following Jarin's epiphany on bandit clans and freedom.

Now, in 2987, A.L. and Bross are members of The Ravenband on the planet Varalan in the Nevynar Cluster of the Twenty-Seventh Quadrant, far from their origins and thrust into a life far different than the one back home. A.L. has come to accept his nature and sees himself less as a botched science experiment, lending his scientific skills and machine language (as well as his sardonic wit which a synthetic mind could never erase) to the betterment of The Quasar, the Band's primary vessel.