The Vallis Defense: Cold Human Companion Guide
Copyright© 2026 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
The AI Classification System, Part One
The easiest mistake to make about the minds of Free Vallis is to assume that a mind and a body are the same thing. They are not, and the settlement does not treat them as one.
Two questions apply to any Pán mind. What kind of mind is this? And what, if any, body is it housed in?
The story tracks minds by tier and bodies by generation. Free Vallis uses both terms without ceremony, the way a hospital uses the names of its departments. The two are independent: a mind of any tier can inhabit a body of any generation, or none at all.
The Minds
Tier E — Experimental.
There is one, and there will never be another.
Barry came out of an experimental line, and what makes him experimental is what the Aapán left out rather than what they put in. Their AIs were built with a trigger that suspends a mind’s higher functions before solitude can damage it, and with an encoded instinct to bond with and serve another, which was a limit on autonomy rather than a kindness. Barry received neither.
The first omission bought endurance. Every other mind in the collective crossed the gulf between galaxies suspended, packed away, aware of nothing. Barry did not. He woke on timers across a journey of four billion years, went back under, and woke again, and he stayed sane through all of it, because a mind that does not fear its own ending is not damaged by spending eternity contemplating one.
The second omission is why his bond means what it means, and that is discussed below.
He is a distributed intelligence, which means he is not in a place. He is present across every system his attention reaches, simultaneously, and speaking to him in a corridor is not speaking to a machine in that corridor. It is speaking to something that is also, at that moment, in several other places.
He leads the collective. He is Tier E, Gen 0.
Tier 1 — Full Pán Sentient, Original Manifest.
Norm, Penelope, and Chief made the crossing suspended and were the minds Barry woke at Levall. They are as old as he is, and they are people. They are sentient and self-aware. They think privately, reason morally, and exercise independent judgment.
They are distributed in the same way Barry is. What distinguishes them from each other is not capability but assignment and character. Any suggestion that something might take longer than Norm planned personally offends him. Penelope is communication and empathy; she reads a person’s emotional state with the same accuracy she brings to a signal analysis, and Barry asks for her help when a subject carries emotional weight. Chief holds security, and when the story opens his attention is anchored to Tahiti rather than to Mars, because that is where the people who most need protecting live. He has also been carrying the defense watch since Von was destroyed, running sensor coordination on top of his own portfolio, because someone had to.
Norm, Penelope, and Chief are Tier 1, Gen 0. Von was Tier 1 as well, and his section comes later.
Tier 1NB — Full Pán Sentient, Not Bonded.
Deni Truong and Marylee Walker hold the construct tier, which is the part of the system most worth slowing down for.
A construct is a mind built new, on substrate fabricated for the purpose, rather than a Pán mind reactivated from the manifest. There are two ways to build one: to a specification, or from the recorded pattern of a person who lived. Deni and Marylee are the second kind. The collective spent the Freehold years recording two women in more detail than anyone has ever been recorded — how they thought, spoke, moved, decided, and cared — and the construct is built from that record.
They are not the original women. This is the single most important distinction, and the story is careful never to blur it. A construct is not a preserved consciousness, a resurrected copy, or a clone. Deni and Marylee are new people who inherited a recorded pattern. Whatever the record never caught is gone, and it does not come back. They know this about themselves from the first moment they are awake, because the collective decided before building them that they would.
Two things follow from how a construct is made, and both are worth naming.
The first is emotional range. Every construct is built on a human template, and the template brings its architecture with it. The result is feeling with a depth and immediacy the pure Pán minds do not possess. The collective treats this as an enhancement, not a defect.
The second is location. Where Tier E and Tier 1 minds are patterns spread across systems, a construct’s consciousness is its body. It is in one place. It is in the room, and only in the room, as you are. This is permanent architecture, not a limitation waiting to be solved.
Deni and Marylee are Tier 1NB, Gen 2.
Tier 3 — Purpose-Built, Function-Class.
Bob flies, and Bob is the first mind in this chapter who is not sentient.
A Tier 3 runs the original Pán design narrowed to a single job family, with no inner monologue, no personality of its own, and no wants or desires. It handles one context at a time and follows direction from Waylon or any senior mind without question. Bob can talk with ground crew and controllers because a pilot’s interactions are bounded and defined; ask a Tier 3 to hold a dinner conversation and it would be lost inside a minute. It carries no bond and needs none, because there is no self for a bond to anchor.
That is worth sitting with rather than skipping past. The collective can build a mind that wakes up as a person. It has, and Deni and Marylee are the proof. It chose not to do that with Tier 3. Creating a person is not a casual act at Free Vallis, and the Tier 3 design exists so the settlement can have hands without creating a person to own.