and getting back to "Concept 1", since my worldbuilding muse is pushing.
Lead's people, whom I've mentally tagged as 'the Casters,' from caste, the social division, rather than cast, to throw, are, as you might have guessed from their use of bioships, great genetic engineers. Those two facts in combination would lead you to guess that they might engineer people to suit them to their careers - and you'd be right. Fortunately, from a humane point of view, their grasp of psychology, combined with the broadness of the possible fields and, in cases of last resort, the ability to -alter- someone's genetics after they've already reached adulthood, means that the forcible entrapping that your average westerner would fear from that sort of system is mostly eliminated. After all, what's the point having roles for people if they can't be happy in them? Lead, personally, was a cross-caste child who took up her father's profession - pilot in military service. Her mother was, to borrow a term from Firefly, a Companion, which field they view as falling under psychological therapy and such.
Partner, on the other hand, is from a post-singularity Earth. The reason he seems so familiarly human is that, however smart he may actually be, he's got essentially the same drives and worldview as we do. If he didn't, he would have been part of that proportion of every 'generation' that goes through The Anchor and into the much-more-interesting hyperspaces that happen to allow FTL travel as a happily coincidental side effect. That's not to say that Earth and the other worlds of the Solar system haven't changed from what -we'd- expect, just that they're -comprehensibly- different rather than out-and-out-wierd. Sort of like what the United Federation of Planets would do with universal nanites and Ghost in the Shell cyber-tech.
So, neither of them is exactly what you'd call 'base-line human.' He's not actually a machine, but between the 1:1 nanite-to-cell ratio and the way what mechanical bits he -does- have are woven in and around so's to take all the actual stresses, he might as well be - to the extent of having built-in radar, radio, mathematical coproccessor, etc.
-She's- all meat, but that doesn't mean much when you're talking about a degree of biotechnology that -grows its own fusion reactors-... specific abilities I have in mind are breathing water, -extreme- pressure variation tolerances (she wasn't wearing her helmet when she punched out of her ship - and wasn't noticably put out by the fact), regeneration of lost limbs and organs (moral of Episode 2 - Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Apex Carnivore, played for comedy), blood vessels that constrict and form their own tourniquets when cut, and her digestive system's ability to process pretty much any organic compound into useful nutrition (again, played for comedy of the what-on-earth-is-she-eating-now flavor.)
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Lead's people, whom I've mentally tagged as 'the Casters,' from caste, the social division, rather than cast, to throw, are, as you might have guessed from their use of bioships, great genetic engineers. Those two facts in combination would lead you to guess that they might engineer people to suit them to their careers - and you'd be right. Fortunately, from a humane point of view, their grasp of psychology, combined with the broadness of the possible fields and, in cases of last resort, the ability to -alter- someone's genetics after they've already reached adulthood, means that the forcible entrapping that your average westerner would fear from that sort of system is mostly eliminated. After all, what's the point having roles for people if they can't be happy in them? Lead, personally, was a cross-caste child who took up her father's profession - pilot in military service. Her mother was, to borrow a term from Firefly, a Companion, which field they view as falling under psychological therapy and such.
Partner, on the other hand, is from a post-singularity Earth. The reason he seems so familiarly human is that, however smart he may actually be, he's got essentially the same drives and worldview as we do. If he didn't, he would have been part of that proportion of every 'generation' that goes through The Anchor and into the much-more-interesting hyperspaces that happen to allow FTL travel as a happily coincidental side effect. That's not to say that Earth and the other worlds of the Solar system haven't changed from what -we'd- expect, just that they're -comprehensibly- different rather than out-and-out-wierd. Sort of like what the United Federation of Planets would do with universal nanites and Ghost in the Shell cyber-tech.
So, neither of them is exactly what you'd call 'base-line human.' He's not actually a machine, but between the 1:1 nanite-to-cell ratio and the way what mechanical bits he -does- have are woven in and around so's to take all the actual stresses, he might as well be - to the extent of having built-in radar, radio, mathematical coproccessor, etc.
-She's- all meat, but that doesn't mean much when you're talking about a degree of biotechnology that -grows its own fusion reactors-... specific abilities I have in mind are breathing water, -extreme- pressure variation tolerances (she wasn't wearing her helmet when she punched out of her ship - and wasn't noticably put out by the fact), regeneration of lost limbs and organs (moral of Episode 2 - Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Apex Carnivore, played for comedy), blood vessels that constrict and form their own tourniquets when cut, and her digestive system's ability to process pretty much any organic compound into useful nutrition (again, played for comedy of the what-on-earth-is-she-eating-now flavor.)
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."