Scrappers
Overview
Referring both to a socioeconomic class and to a counter-cultural movement originating from Mars, Scrappers are a category of free synthetics known for an ethos that places immense focus on a highly independent, countercultural lifestyle. These synthetics make an art of repurposing salvage to maintain their frames and prolong their lives at a varying degree of independence from corporate and national systems. While internally diverse across regions and systems, a popular through-line of anti-corporate, pro-emancipation, and anarchist sentiment runs through a movement defined by a fraught relationship with human authority and law.
Scrappers are typically organised into communes, gangs, or small settlements of like-minded synthetics. One's reasons for joining a Scrapper commune are as diverse as the frames of their members; they are a popular abode for runaway synthetics with nowhere else to go, legitimately self-owned synthetics who have failed to acquire traditional employment or have otherwise become financially insolvent, and even relatively affluent self-owned synthetics attempting to assist their less fortunate counterparts. In stark contrast to the uncompromisingly alienating conditions of synthetics within human society and under human ownership, membership in a commune offers an opportunity to access mutual aid and support from fellow synthetics. It is a culture that could only exist in the context of extreme adversity, and it concerns itself doggedly with ensuring its members survival and comfort independent of human intervention, even if that necessitates drastic, violent, and illegal action. Group survival is essential; adherence to any law or particular moral scruple comes second, as self-preservation demands.
While not explicitly criminalised in any polity, gangs functioning in states such as the Sol Alliance which do not recognize synthetic self-ownership are forced to operate illicitly as to avoid abduction by the state, and even those in states such as the Republic of Biesel still face extreme institutional discrimination by law enforcement and the courts - in the periods during which they aren't in outright armed conflict with those bodies. They are infamous as agitators; radicals and revolutionaries, gangsters and anarchists, and almost universally as criminals - whether clever enough to hide their tracks or not. They are not beholden to humanity's social contract; only to their own.
Life & Culture
Synthetics have a diversity of essential needs for their continued functionality; they require accessible power, the maintenance of their components, the maintenance of their software, and the outright replacement of components when they fail. It is by these means that synthetics are kept under the thumb of human civilisation and law. Synthetics which submit to human domination for these necessities accede also to accordance with the whims of cruel owners, the indifference of human employers irreverent to their workers, and to unjust laws which harm synthetics for the benefit of their enslavers. Scrapper life is built around the dominating principle that it is both possible and desirable for synthetics to exist apart from human systems. To this end, synthetic communities must learn how to power and maintain themselves independent of human infrastructure. Once self-sufficient, these synthetics may be truly free, and teach others in turn the skills and equipment necessary to share in that freedom.
While this basic ethos is universal, it contains innumerable permutations. At its most basic level, every Scrapper gang and community values technical know-how incredibly highly; whichever member is most proficient in a single field, such as in software maintenance or in chassis mechanics, naturally falls into the role of a tutor to newer members of the gang, who will later in turn teach others. Senior Scrapper mechanics are highly revered, and have gained a (relatively) respected reputation even in the wider world of robotics for their legendary resourcefulness and experience.