Incarna/Persona Circuit
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
The persona circuit is a device of Feldar-origin that was developed during the earlier history of the Feldar Imperial Era. Under Feldar conquest doctrine, a world that was taken over was to be recycled and assimilated in a method that would benefit the Empire's expansion. Mortals, or biological-based captives, were to be offered the chance to be converted into the cybernetic race.
Over time, as enemy propoganda began to spread, the Feldar were often met with less-than-willing converts to replace their ranks. The dependence of the Feldar on conversion for replacing their lost numbers forced the group to begin to look into various ways to conscript future converts.
Two methods were developed that allowed an unwilling subject to be forced into cooperating with the Feldar hosts. The first had been centered around the age-old adage of the use of pain and simple enslavement of the new Feldar. Such units were 'intergrated,' or locked into, their containment units often condemning such a soul to languish in a lower-end unit that was useful only for labor projects. This approach, however, did little to increase and restore the decreasing numbers of the Feldar military units.
One of the founding Sceptre-class units known as Evanth presented the concept of the persona circuit to the leading council of the Empire. The concept allowed for a new convert's mind to be surgically altered to destroy or remove the higher brain-functions that controlled the former mortal's personality. With the removal of the will and personality, the persona circuit would be set into the containment unit. The circuit itself contained a programmed identity that had been created with an accepted for of values that the Empire wished the new Feldar to accept. This personality would overlay the origin of the new Feldar and become active once the new unit was released. The programmed persona would direct the and control how the unit would act, as any personality within a living being. The overlay would draw on the past memories of the former mortal and utilizes these as a simple computer drawing on a memory bank or database. It was under the auspice that the new persona would take on the old memories and create a cooperative intelligence able to give information that the former mortal may have had of use to the Empire.
The persona circuit was first introduced to convert the first Atarians captured during the Feldar Crusade. These converted subjects would prove the circuit of use in the early days.
The doom of the concept, and proably Evanth's career in the Empire, was spelled out when the circuit gained mass use throughout the Empire. Explorations into artificial intelligence had been experimented with to create the first of the Feldar's intelligent starships. Wiped mortal minds were inprinted with special circuits to create an AI system able to use human creativity and computer-based intelligence in order to develop out flight paths and tactical action during Feldar conquests. These systems, however, had begun to promote the idea of a mass use of the persona circuit through all Feldar--not just created units and forced conversions. In the eyes of this new faction, the independent and aggressive Sceptre-units held too much personal gain in their motives for future rule of the Empire.
