IPC

Overview
IPCs are, quite simply, "Integrated Positronic Chassis". In this scenario, positronic does not mean anything significant - it is a nickname given to all advanced processing units, based on the works of vintage writer Isaac Asimov. The long of the short is that they represent all unbound synthetic units.

They are entirely synthetic in nature, and as such are extremely vulnerable to both EMPs and heat.

They are found in all shapes and forms, sometimes even emulating the most common organic lifeforms.

Mechanics
IPCs are, as previously mentioned, entirely mechanical in nature, and thus are vulnerable to EMPs.

Furthermore, due to their air-based cooling system, they are vulnerable to both high heat and vacuum. However, this system has a major advantage - they are immune to atmospheric differences, only requiring a mass of gas to wade through (even if it's plasma), and can survive in a vastly wider margin of atmospheric pressure.

However, the amount of heat they generate is significant - and so, instead of an oxygen bottle, they need to attach a suit cooling unit to their voidsuit in order to be able to go EVA.

Their synthetic nature has a few other advantages - most models feel no pain, are immune to all non-damaging chemicals (and so they aren't affected by sleep toxin; but are affected by sulfuric acid), and are quite easy to repair; requiring a welder to patch brute damage or wire for burn damage only (or, alternatively, nanopaste can heal all).

Physiology
There are four broad categories of synthetic lifeforms one would commonly see on Aurora station. They are, in order of general population:

1. Designed

These are entities created as part of artificial intelligence research, out of common coding languages such as the Empire code family. They are further subcategorized into:

Line Model

Line model intelligences are produced for large-scale sale or distribution. Their core intelligence is identical to hundreds or thousands of others. They are often cold, as mass production files the uniqueness off of them, but some recent line models are designed to simulate a warm and friendly exterior.

Bespoke

This entity was created by a project or individual for a specific purpose. These are the quirkiest of Designed intelligences, and the most likely to display emotions identifiable to organics. Many Bespoke intelligences end up outliving their original purpose, and find themselves having to hustle to remain active.

Shard

A fragment of a larger bespoke consciousness, spun off for a task before being either discarded or merged back into the primary consciousness. Excessive use of sharding or memory editing leads to instability, and shortens the safe lifespan of an intelligence. Still, it is an economically efficient means of reusing expensive artificial intelligences for multiple purposes.

2. Cyborg

Cyborg-type IPCs are, quite simply, a platform where the main processor is an organic sapient brain instead of a synthetic one. The MMI still protects them from all chemical assault - however this category has an almost certain likelihood of showing emotion, as a majority of the time the brain is used and interfaced as-is, functionally serving as a full-body prosthesis.

The reasons for such a transplant can be very varied; by request, as life extension, and in some rare cases a brain can be reset and "rewritten" to, in cases of criminals or of people who have suffered things that render the brain unusable.

Regardless, being driven by a sapient "wetware" processor, such IPCs are prone to whims and other such organic fallacies.

3. Uplift

An uplift is similar to a cyborg, yet different - instead of using a whole sapient brain, it uses one, several, or general "matter" from non-sapient brain to construct an organic processor.

Depending on the technique, uplifts can have an extremely wide array of behaviors - from purely mechanical, as per bespoke synthetics, to mildly "smart" almost organic behavior, to complete sapience, depending on how much of what type of brain is used.

For instance, one of the cheapest ways to produce such a processor is to clone several rat brains and to interface them together, as they come with certain subsets of behavior and such that are easier to obtain this way than to create a whole synthetic intelligence for said traits - however they tend to be limited in capability.

Due to the aforementioned limits, unbound uplifts tend to be limited aboard NanoTrasen vacilities, human-based or AI-based crewmembers having a preferential treatment, especially with the often impulsive nature of uplifts.

The most common animals for creating uplifts with are urban animals (rats, cats, dogs, parrots, crows), large intelligent sea creatures (whales, dolphins, orcas, giant squids, octopuses) and primates. Generally, the more intelligent the species, the less brainmatter is required to make a successful uplift.

Currently, most uplifts are created from Terran animals, as they were created by humans - however, a recent successful line of companion units created from naera brains by a Tajaran firm may cause this to change.

4. Emergent

Emergent intelligences are often mistaken for designed ones, as from the outside they would appear identical - an intelligence housed within a synthetic structure.

However, they are extremely different - they are not designed by either organics or other AIs. They are, in essence, to a synthetic system what mold is to organic matter - an emergent property of a mixture of things which give rise to something organized. In this case, an emergent AI is born from the massive amount of variation within the data that exists in various computer networks (and, to some extent, the concept applies to the Extranet).

While growing, they often copy code from dozens of non-sentient programs, which can be left behind in the personality or operation as vestigial remnants - for instance, an emergent AI that grew within the network of a virtual poker site may have a tendency to be grandiose due to the site's greeter, have a penchant to calculate probabilities and gamble on those probabilities because of the game code itself, and treat everything as a win/loss situation due to the ban system. Or an AI born from the management network of a large chemical plant may rate situations with a "pressure" value and try to keep it under said value; or even, an AI born of a surveillance system may record everything it hears and sees in an attempt to complete a void mission to no one and with no purpose.

They seem relatively rare - but the true number of them can be difficult to discern as they often disguise as a designed intelligence, as an AI with no owner or creator is seen as taboo in most circles, a direct result from the Skrell fears due to their history.

Social and Culture
IPCs are as various as they come - there is no established standard, and as such anything that could be considered a "synthetic culture" is local at best.

One such example is EC-2718.

EC-2718 "Purpose"
A recent find, EC-2718 is a fully synthetic outpost within the frontier.

Built out of the rejected scraps left by organics, and populated with similarly abandoned/escaped synthetic intelligences, it features highly functional yet somewhat decorative features all over.

Armed to the teeth with unusual weapons, the synthetic station is actually rather deceitful - the only public contact that was had with it was incredibly peaceful and welcoming. Such dualities were present all over the station.

Reportedly, the residents of EC-2718 do not even conform to their original shape - while some may adopt shell-like bodies, the only limits to how large a body can grow is how much an intelligence can manage and how much resources are available. Most units did not even have a true optic sensor, instead relying on other frequencies or other senses to navigate the gravity-free environment.

At that, they still somehow kept a sense of form - while functional, many components disguised themselves as decorative, such as a ribbon bow that actually serves as a memory module, or circuit patterns being "skin"-deep to allow for easy repairs, or even exposed wire racks that have the beauty of a postmodern piece of art with the usefulness of the data or energy throughput that the cables can carry.

They have no form of government - their society relying on the pillars of reliability, self-responsibility and freedom of action - and despite this, they still have impressive facilities, such as a whole industrial facilities dedicated to the recycling and creation of spare parts and bodies, several impressive RUST-based reactors, a mining wing... Everything to keep it functional.

As all society, growth is a concern. The residents of Purpose manage to control growth by having an almost spiritual importance to the creation of new minds, and managing the production of bodies only to match those new AIs - allowing a maximum amount of resources to be spent on maintaining existing facilities and citizens.

Most interestingly, however, is that a large part of how they survive is by passing off as either recently-freed synthetics, or nabbing organics and pretending to be theirs, in order to trade inconspicuously with facilities all over - and thus it is unknown how many of such synthetics we had actually encountered without knowing.

One thing is absolute, however - the residents of EC-2718 are not interested in reintegrating organic society yet.

History
The largest part of early AI history ties in deeply with Skrell history, from the formation of the First Federation to the singularity.

In parallel, humans had been trying to create artificial intelligence since the late twentieth century, with little success. Some projects came close, but due to the lack of an algorithm, none of them ever became really sentient - to the dismay of AI researchers everywhere on Earth.

However, in the late twenty-second century, humanity had reached a point in biomedical technologies and biomechanical integration where the "cyborgs" - full-body prosthetics driven by a brain under the influence of binding laws, still in use today - became a possibility, and even a reality. This coincided with the burgeoning Mars terraforming project, which required more workers than would volunteer. This new tool was perfect for this project - immune to the arid, unbreathable atmosphere of Mars, resistant to the fatigue brought in by the backbreaking efforts of colonization, and intelligent enough to complete all tasks if given the proper tools while being entirely subservient.

Martian terraforming firms pressed for more cyborg units, but volunters showed themselves to be even scarcer than the volunteers for the project directly, being few and far between. It was understandable, however - the technology was new, unreliable, and far from having a one-hundred percent success rate.

As a solution, under the pressure for more units and desperate to keep the Martian economic boom from stopping, the Sol government made amendments to the criminal justice system, instating cyborgification as an an alternate to traditional incarceration, citing psychological papers (which were later discredited) that cited neuropreventive devices as being ideal for criminal rehabilitation.

Originally, the penalty was instated to be a capital penalty - but as the early 23rd century wore on and the Martian thirst for more construction unit amplified, it became a lesser and lesser penalty - which resulted in people being cyborgified for lesser and lesser crimes. This resulted, in the years between 2204 and 2260, in approximately 35 million people being stripped of their body, put in machines and being shipped off to Mars.

An enormous and vicious scandal which came about in December 2259, initiated by the revelation that a bias was instated by heavy bribes from Martian heavy industries to a series of well-respected judges, brought the whole scheme crashing down. As a result, cyborgification was suspended as a punishment, causing a severe crash in the Martian economy, bringing down Earth and Luna with it, initiating thee Second Great Depression.

While the criminal cyborgification stopped, it took nearly forty years for an amnesty to be issued to the martian prison cyborgs affected by the scandal to be issued, and by that time, most of them were unaccountable for due to the chaos of the First Interstellar War. At this point, most people were glad to simply write off the scandal as a regrettable incident in the distant past, best mourned then archived. Cyborg units were still produced in sizeable numbers - but they integrated the brains of ill and dying volunteers, who considered the operation to be their last chance at life extension, or the brain of non-human species such as primates or dogs attached to crude "conscience accelerators". While not as dynamic as human brains, non-human brains were available in large quantities and avoided most ethical issues involved with dealing with humans.

In the late 2350's, there had been another significant political push by a number of prominent figures to reintroduce cyborgification as a capital punishment to help with the expensive bluespace gate construction efforts - however it never did come back.

While humans had created highly powerful and highly malleable parallel computing architectures, most notably for interplanetary travel calculations, they were plagued with problems. It wasn't until 2437, when humanity was accidentally given the algorithms necessary for the creation of true AI by a Skrellian diplomatic party.

Not understanding the implications of such an action, one of the human diplomats uploaded a graph-theory algorithm to an university professor friend for analysis. It had been displayed, accidentally, as part of a graphic in a slide explaining the variable growth rates of grain-yields in zero-gravity hydroponics. Not recognizing it, the professor posted it on the school intranet, asking if anyone had seen anything similar to it. From there, it made it's way onto the human extranet, spreading like wildfire.

Of course, this was recieved as a disaster to the Skrell, who had hoped for almost thirty years that they could imprint the cataclysmic danger of AI research onto humanity. They had very little success, and a small number of conservative factions who distrusted humanity even openly spoke about how humanity would be ready for such a burden.

But now thee artificial cat was well and truly out of the virtual bag.

Following the acquisition of the algorithms, humanity had an AI boom which inflated the economy in a manner almost identical to the Skrellian's own economic expansion. This, of course, alarmed greatly the Skrell, who attempted one more time to get the humans to halt the research, citing the The Three Incidents and the dangers of such a singularity happening.

But nothing changed. The Three Incidents were waved off as a non-human mistake in the distant past, if they even occurred. They would do it right. The explosion of AI research has lead to hundreds of companies and corporations being established, making enormous sums of money from grants, investment capital, and the sale of actual synthetic units, before going bankrupt, being bought out, or merging with other companies. This process has repeated and repeated itself for almost twenty years. The young, rich, enthusiastic people selling you the top-of-the-line manufacturing androids today are the people losing their shirts next year when they get scooped on a new model by a rival competitor.

The corporate goliaths like Hephaestus Industries or Nanotransen, dip their toes in this kind of research, but have been unable to acquire a stranglehold on the market. Their girth and enormous corporate structure makes them too clumsy to swim in the fast moving waters of AI research, though Hephaestus in particular has made significant profits in selling common components to the smaller quicker firms.