We’re back with PMC Quinton Aldren. If you remember your acronyms, PMC stands for Personality Matrix Constructs which boils down to walking, talking sentient computers. These were former humans who had chosen (volunteered) to have their brain downloaded into an Energy Storage System (ESS) which was then supposed to be in stalled in these PMCs. A PMC then could walk around and talk just like a real human, but they didn’t have the frailties of a human. And they were just as intelligent as a super computer when things went right. They were subsequently used by the military to enhance weapon systems, naturally.
Unfortunately, PMCs began going insane and started attacking anyone and everyone. They were eventually outlawed and any found active were to be destroyed. Another group of purely automated military hardware was created to seek out these PMCs and end them, but this group was going way beyond their original directives in that once the latched onto any PMC activity, the completely destroyed everything associated with it without mercy! Entire space stations had been wiped out and domed cities obliterated because the Sentinels detected a PMC signal of some kind coming from the space station or domed city. The Sentinels didn’t ask questions or attempt to track down the exact source of the PMC signal, they just destroyed anything and everything in the vicinity of said signal until it was no longer detected. Then they moved on. Quinton Aldren is a PMC and he should be dead.
After supposedly preparing to die on an old Acheron Confederacy Naval (ACN) space station, his consciousness was transferred to a highly advanced and experimental ACN starship that had managed to flee the ACN stations destruction. He woke up in an artificial body designed specifically to hold an ESS and be a fully functional PMC. This was the first time Quinton had felt this way since his shut-down a long, long time ago. That shut-down was to have been temporary, but it turned into to centuries. Now he awoke in a totally different universe, one that he was hunted for, while not knowing why or how come. He’s been learning and leaning on some humans who have agreed to help him if he can help them against the Sentinels. So, now he and his “friends” aboard the ACN Wayfarer are trying to find out where the Sentinels are controlled and get them to stop.
It turns out though, that another PMC has been operating as the leader of one faction of salvagers. That’s what comprises present day civilizations is group or clans of salvagers who sort through the wrecks of the previous Federation War and attempt to recover working technology. It now appears that two groups, the Union and the Collective, are fighting each other, with the Union leader sending false PMC signals into Collective space getting the Sentinels to do his attacks for him. What he doesn’t know is that a PMC by the name of Admen Desher was planting false PMC signals everywhere and causing the Sentinels to attack everybody, civilians that had nothing to do with either salvage clan. Quinton had to stop this killing.
The way he’s going to do this is by commanding another supposedly ACN space station. He has already found several former ACN PMCs and has them working with him and his human friends. Still, he’s different because he is the only one of the PMCs classified as a “Commander”. So when he arrives at the space station, he finds he can take command of all it’s facilities. This is a huge, huge construct! And, it turns out that it’s actually a very gigantic, moon-sized starship! This just might give him a chance against the million of Sentinels in the galaxy. Maybe!
Good reading and very interesting. I’m looking forward for book three, but as of yet, there’s no mention of when it will be available.