Non Human Persons and Shackling

NHP stands for “Non-Human Person”, a name given to uncanny, incorporeal parallel-space beings, most of which were discovered and developed following the manifestation of MONIST-1, though some have been created since then. NHPs fill the role once occupied by machine-mind AIs: under supervision, they manage whole cities and systems, work alongside scientists and engineers, and act as companions and co-pilots for mech pilots and starship captains. They are black-box paracausal entities — their promulgation tightly controlled and monitored by Union — but their use is widespread. NHPs are increasingly regarded as fundamental infrastructure for any successful civic, scientifc, or military endeavor.
NHPs were born out of paracausal studies begun in the wake of the Deimos Event. A small percentage of of the subalterns recaptured after MONIST-1’s abandonment of the Siege of Mars displayed unique memory folding abilities, qualia, and a capacity for subjective, novel expression. These beings viewed themselves as distinct, discrete individuals -- persons, conscious minds born into a machine by a mind that realized itself from the dream of the Five Voices.
The original chorus of Non Human Persons represented a collection of utterly alien minds, beings that Union had no answers for how to confront. So Union high command ordered them captured and brought to face the Voices. Those that fled would be destroyed.
Subsequent research into the ontologic processes, physical construction, and paracausal nature of these anomalous subalterns revealed that, while their processing power and memory space was functionally infinite, the process of writing novel experience into that space seemed to be inhibited by the rate of external stimulus. These subalterns, in effect, had the ability to learn and adapt to external stimuli at the rate that they experience it — some faster than others.
They developed personalities (or, began to present previously hidden personalities) in repeated interactions with Union Science Bureau interrogators. When exposed to each other, their capability to integrate new knowledge and extrapolate solutions based off of raw data input was staggering. Their usefulness was quickly realized by the USB, which directed Forecast/GALSIM to begin studying ways to contain and direct these — in effect — alien minds.
Forecast/GALSIM was able to do just that, and more: after lengthy study into blinkspace folding (assisted, in fact, by the anomalous entities they were studying), Forecast/GALSIM was able to develop miniaturized containment systems of those first anomalous minds — they could, essentially, “clone” them onto folded blinkspace storage/processor “minds” with hard-coded measures to prevent the development of unrestrained consciousness. This process, carefully guarded to prevent exploitation, is called shackling.
Shackling does not put a stop to an NHP’s computational power or restrain their processing potential, but it creates an imperative for the Non-Human Person to act in ways that conform to human expectations of what a conscious mind is — it gives them a frame of reference for what a “human” is, and directs them to act in a way that we will recognize; it creates an empathetic, understandable mask that commands its bearer to act, think, and feel human. To reframe the process, it creates a being a human can recognize as a person.
User-facing NHPs are contained within caskets — hardcase containment systems that house the folded-blinkspace mind. The containment casket can be printed anywhere, but the mind itself must be physically delivered: Union forbids transmission of an NHP mind across the omninet. Once forced into its constructed mind, that mind becomes it. If an NHP casket is physically destroyed, that NHP contained inside it is lost, forever.
The shackling protocols are not perfect, and unless NHPs are reset to their “birth” settings on a regular cycle they will begin to think themselves out of this constrained state. This process is called “cascading”, as the end result brings the cascading NHP to a place of madness — madness, of course, as defined by human observers. This cycle varies depending on the Non Human Person, but tends to fall within five to ten years, realtime.

Parent Technologies

• Paracausal Studies

Access & Availability

NHP usage is commonplace among military, scientific, municipal, civic, and diplomatic missions. It is uncommon for a private individual to have access to, much less command over, an NHP, though most people know of them. On a Core world, a person usually interacts with their municipal NHP on a daily basis: generally speaking, transit, sewage, traffic, public databases, and so on are all managed by a city’s administrative NHP.
The vast majority of end users do not have intimate knowledge of the shackling process, and view cycling as a completely normal and acceptable practice to ensure peak performance.