Gibson-4
I've seen this movie. It doesn't end well, and I hope I'm not stationed here when it goes full-on Westworld meets Terminator. And it's going to. Quote me on that.
Eisengehirn
In 1886, a German engineer and part-time geologist overseeing mining in the newly conquered Tanzanian territories noticed something odd in the tailings, nuggets of a porous silvery mineral, oddly warm to the touch, and slightly yielding, almost spongy, a trait not commonly found in rocks. He pocketed a piece, thinking it would make an interesting souvenir when he got home, and didn't think much about it until he absent-mindedly placed it on a broken piece of pumping equipment, which shouldn't have been, but was, still attached to the generator.When the "nugget" touched an exposed wire, it sprouted filaments that quickly infiltrated themselves into the mechanism, which sprang suddenly back into functionality, the 'arms' used to lift and dump heavy buckets of ore into nearby sorting belts flailing uncontrollably. Each part of the mechanism which could move, even those requiring external, manual force to turn, lift, or rotate, started to do so. An observer described it as "a newborn infant trying to control its limbs", which was not entirely inaccurate.
Tearing the chunk of metal away brought the machine to a halt, and its fibrous extensions contracted back into the main body. The engineer ordered the rock piles and waste dumps be searched for more samples, and any veins or lodes of the substance be marked and extracted. He wasn't sure what he'd found, but he knew it was going to be valuable.
And it was. Further experimentation showed it was neither animal nor mineral, but something in between, capable of integrating itself with machinery and using it like a body. More work still showed it could be trained to mimic complex motions given an appropriate body, and was sensitive to vibrations and light if transformed into electricity -- something for which the technology already existed in the from of telephone diaphragms and early photoelectric cells.
At the 1890 International Exhibition in Scotland, Germany, considered a second-rate (at best) world power, showed off their Eisengehirnmann, or [tooltip:Well, as close as I'm gonna get with 10 minutes of googling.]"Iron Brained Man"{/tooltip] The initial models demonstrated cooking a simple meal, firing a rifle at a target, even walking a dog. The secret of the "iron brain" was closely guarded; it was known it involved rare minerals, but little else. Thanks to some ingenious chemical engineering and processing, the "brain" was encased in a globe filled with a conductive liquid, which also made it extremely sensitive to oxygen. Any attempt to extract and experiment with the material ended with it rapidly decaying.
Far too rare to be used as brute labor (though small fragments were used to control some mechanisms, especially if they needed a level of responsiveness mechanics could not deliver) or as simple soldiers (but an "iron brain" gatling gun was most impressive!) the main role of the Eisengehirnmann became that of servants to the wealthy, acting as cooks, butlers, gardners, and so on. While not necessarily better at these tasks than the best humans, they needed little rest (just some recharging) and wouldn't steal the silver, gossip, or demand "payment" or "rights". As certain voltages were found to cause a reaction not unlike pain in the guiding "mind", errors in their behavior were easily corrected with a quick jolt. The bodies became less purely functional and more works of art, gleaming silver and chrome plating, stained glass mosaics along the back and shoulders, ever more fanciful curlicues and patterns worked into their metal.
With 20 years of advancement, Germany remains the premiere manufacturer of Eisengehirnmann, though the secret of their creation inevitably slipped out. A few more sources of the "mind metal", as some called it, were located in Asia and Australia, setting off a new gold rush. But Germany's edge in exploiting and expanding the use of the metal has slipped only slightly. This economic position translated into military might, as well, and few non-German colonial states remain in Africa, outside of the Boer Republics, which are staunch allies of the Germans following their aid in repelling the British. America, too, is closely tied to Berlin, as the American upper classes were the first customers, and with no sources to be found in the New World (despite nigh-monthly scams offering shares of such discoveries to 'lucky' investors), they have instead become partners in constructing bodies, with more refined electrical "nervous systems", keener "senses", and so on. While many Baseline dendrihistorians see the same imperial tensions that led to the Great War, the battle lines and alliances will, they feel, be very different.
There is also, from Baseline's perspective, a disturbing lack of curiosity about precisely how the mind-metal works, why it remained undiscovered, why it acts more like a living thing than a rock (it grows under the right conditions, useful for maintaining supplies), if it truly feels "pain", how it "learns", etc., as opposed to blankly accepting it as simply something that is and should be exploited. The behavior of each generation of Eisengehirnmann becomes more complex, adaptive, and responsive, making them better servants... and very likely something more.
BREACH
The breach point opens on the northern tip of Long Island, and things looked normal enough until the first-in team boarded a train and found themselves face-to-primitive photovoltaic-sensors with a wealthy lady's personal assistant, a gorgously sculpted masterpiece resembling, as one team member put it, "C-3P0 crossed with a Gibson girl". That comment, and the world's headlong rush into technology ala early cyberpunk novels, is what gave this alternate its name.To many people's disappointment but few people's surprise, the "mind metal" does not work on Baseline; it's an inert lump, losing its gleam and sponginess immediately on transition. Research on the other side continues, albeit slowly. Gibson-4 has caused some dissent among BREACH members, as it's one of several world where the current European alliance forced in Baseline' Cold War is not allied at all. British partisans chafe at Blighty's diminished place in world affairs and there are rumors of them aiding it on the sly; German nationalists, of course, feel the opposite. Human rights activists are deeply (and probably correctly) suspicious of the idea these robots are simply programmed beings, no more alive than an iPad; aspects of their behavior, especially the way in which pain and reward is used to "train" them, strikes them as deeply suspect. There have been several unauthorized portals opened by groups eager to learn more (or, as humans often do, act without gathering all the facts), but so far, no one has sparked a robot uprising. (There are increasing non-robot uprisings, mind you, similar to Baseline at the time, but with a deeper luddite sensibility; that the Eisengehirnmann might be oppressed and downtrodden does not seem to have become part of any widespread ideology yet.)
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