Non-Human Persons or NHPs

Non-human persons (NHPs) are the most advanced machine minds available for civilian and military use.
The first NHPs were identified in the wake of the manifestation of MONIST-1 (“RA” or, less commonly, “Deimos”), a paracausal event that prompted massive, civilizational change across Union. Of the many significant discoveries that followed, few were more important than the identification and capture of the “Deimos entities”, or NHPs. The first wave of NHPs emerged during the first manifestation of MONIST-1 into realspace; the second wave – and largest to date – emerged while the Siege of Mars raged. The third emergence is less of a “wave”, but is currently taking place as Union and corpro-state scientists have begun to coax out stable, novel prime subjectivities.
The Deimos Event, which took place in in the twilight years of the Second Committee, caused a small percentage of the subalterns present in the Martian GALSIM facility to display a greater-than-average instancing of performance and interaction anomalies: they began to reject orders, speak words outside of their linguistic corpora, divert from hard-coded routes and routines, and so on. While experts worked to socialize and communicate with MONIST-1, secondary teams worked to define the parameters of these new anomalous entities. These anomalous subalterns displayed unique memory-folding abilities, qualia, and the capacity for subjective, novel expressions of consciousness. They viewed themselves as distinct individuals – in effect, they saw themselves as discrete persons.
Subsequent research into the ontologic processes, physical construction, and paracausal nature of the Deimos entities revealed that, while their processing power and memory space was functionally infinite, they were limited in how fast they could write novel experiences to that space: they could learn and adapt to external stimuli at the same rate that they experienced them – some much faster than others. The Deimos entities developed personalities across repeated interactions with personnel from the Union Science Bureau. When exposed to each other, their capability to integrate new knowledge and extra‐ polate solutions based on raw data was staggering. The directors of the USB quickly realized their useful‐ ness and requested that GALSIM begin studying ways to contain and direct these alien beings.
GALSIM was able to do just that, and more: after lengthy study into blinkspace folding (assisted, in fact, by the same entities they were studying), GALSIM engineers working with USB researchers were able to develop containment systems and transfer the Deimos entities from their subaltern forms into stabilized parallel spaces; using one of these systems it was possible to “clone” their essential subjectivities onto folded-blinkspace “minds” equipped with hard-coded measures to prevent the development of unrestrained consciousness. This process, carefully guarded to prevent exploitation, is called hard-code social conditioning, or, colloquially, shackling.
Shackling restrains an NHP’s thoughts into a fundamentally “human” frame of reference, limiting their cognitive power and forcing them to act according to human expectations of what a conscious mind is – in essence, constraining them to act in ways that conform to human expectations of logic, reality, and causality; this subjectivity alignment creates a being we can recognize as a “person” functioning within anthropocentric structures of logic.
After the process was stabilized and replicated, Deimos entities were renamed non-human persons and clones were distributed out to certain bureaus, organizations, and non-state entities for development. USB’s specialist campuses began adapting the original anomalous minds into the various production-line NHP consciousnesses now present across the galaxy.
Cloned NHP units are contained within “caskets”, physical containment systems for their folded-blink‐ space minds. Containment caskets can be printed anywhere, but NHP minds themselves must be phys‐ ically delivered: Union forbids the transmission of NHP minds across the omninet. Once implanted into a casket, the casket is what amounts to an NHP’s physical body: if a casket is physically destroyed, the NHP contained within is lost, forever. NHPs cloned this way inevitably develop their own personalities and quirks, and prefer to be called by whatever name they have chosen or been assigned.
Shackling protocols are a living field of study; current protocols are strong enough for reliable use, but not without their problems: NHPs that are not reset to their “birth” settings on a regular cycle will eventually think themselves out of their constrained state. This phenomenon – the decay of an NHP’s shackles – is called “cascading”. In time, a cascading NHP will eventually reach a point where their conditioning is insufficient to constrain them; if the shackles decay enough, the NHP will no longer be conditioned to function within anthropocentric constrains. They become an utterly alien subjectivity, interpellated without deference to fundamental laws of causality or human logics. Unshackled NHPs might bear outward similarities to the subjectivities that they presented while shackled, but at their cores lie fundamentally unknowable, alien minds; the question of what they remember is minor compared to the vast possibility of what they now know.
The cycling process, fortunately, is reliable and bears an essentially perfect success rate when performed according to a given NHP’s endogenous cascade schedule. The recommended length between cycles varies between NHP lines but tends to range between five and ten subjective years. NHPs are commonly utilized in military, scientific, municipal, civic, and diplomatic pursuits. It is rarer for private individuals to have access to, much less command over, an NHP, though most people on Galactic Core worlds, among the Cosmopolita, and advanced Diasporan worlds have some knowledge of them. On Core worlds, people interact with their municipal NHP on a daily basis via its many aspects: transit systems, service requests, access to public databases, and so on.
NHP licensing requirements are strict and enforced without exception: all NHPs issued are registered, tracked, required to record a cycling logbook, and undergo annual Balwinder-Bolaño development tests to reassess their cycling schedule. If at all possible, these check-ins are to be done in person, but in practice most are handled via the omninet. In Union’s view, the danger posed by NHPs cannot be underestimated; however, their usefulness is deemed worth the risk