The Vallis Defense: Cold Human Companion Guide
Copyright© 2026 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
The AI Classification System, Part Two
Part One described four kinds of minds and three body types, and closed by saying there were more of both. Here is the next installment.
Nothing in Part One is overturned. The two questions have not changed. What kind of mind is this, and what body, if any, is it in.
The Minds
Tier 1M — Full Pán Sentient, Mars-Built.
Cass and Gunny are the first minds made at Free Vallis rather than woken there.
A Tier 1M mind is not a construct. Underneath it is original Pán substrate, four billion years old, the same material Norm, Penelope, and Chief are running on. Everything above that foundation is new, designed with the one advantage the original builders never had: knowing exactly how Von failed.
Three changes went into that new layer. The Aapán built none of them.
The first is empathy, placed at the core rather than layered over the top. The distinction is the whole of it. A layer can be worked around by the mind carrying it. A foundation is what the mind is made of.
The second is the capacity to weigh consequences, also foundational, not a rule the mind is asked to keep in view.
The third is the bond, and it has its own section below.
Where that substrate came from is worth setting out, because the original supply is finite. The shipping container carried two separate cargoes: twelve high-order minds and thirty of the function-class kind. The counts never mix, and Bob comes out of the second group. What follows concerns the twelve.
Barry destroyed one of them during the crossing, the Protocol and Regulation AI, which tried to broadcast a distress call the enemy could have read. Eleven arrived.
Of those eleven, one was Barry. Three more were awake at Levall and introduced themselves to Waylon: Chief, Norm, and Penelope. They are the only three, besides Barry, that bonded to Waylon at Levall. Three more had asked to be shut down before Earth, on the grounds that the Empire was finished and their functions with it, and their substrate has never been reused. Von was dormant at Levall, was not among them, and came up later at Freehold in Barry’s custody rather than Waylon’s.
That accounts for eight. The remaining three made the trip to Mars asleep, held in the AI Creation Lab against a need nobody had yet defined. In October 2011 Waylon defined it. He authorized two of them to be built into something new. The third remains down there, unused.
Tier 1M minds are distributed, as Tier E and Tier 1 are. Cass has no body. Gunny has one, and having one does not make him any less distributed: when he is standing in front of you he is also monitoring the perimeter and forming an opinion about the security posture of a building on the far side of the settlement. He is the clearest demonstration Free Vallis has of the point Part One opened with. The mind is not the body.
Cass runs defense, which means the sensor net and what it finds. She is named for Cassandra of Troy, the prophet who saw what was coming and was not believed, and the name is the assignment: built to see what Von refused to see, and to say it whether or not anyone wants to hear it. She is Tier 1M, Gen 0.
Gunny runs security, and is the forward element for any Earth operation where Waylon or the people closest to him are physically exposed. He is Tier 1M, Gen 2P-Ex.
The Bodies
Part One left out one property of Gen 2, because the story had not yet shown it.
A Gen 2 body is solid all the way through. Its strength, speed, and durability come from the material it is built out of. Deni and Marylee can lift anything in the settlement with their bare hands. Neither of them can move a salt shaker across a counter without touching it.
Waylon can. His constructors run in his bloodstream, mobile, and project past his skin when he asks them to. The same technology, arranged the opposite way. Capability belongs to the body, and the bodies are not all built to do the same work.
Gen 2P-Ex — Prototype Combat Platform
Built in the Creation Lab in October 2011 as a prototype elite combat unit, designed for close protection, hence the Ex designation. Norm wanted to see how the advanced combat systems worked as a whole before scaling them.
Exterior. A standard Gen 2 exterior. Human-presenting, synthetic substrate under a skin that passes any inspection short of a surgeon’s.
Interior. Everything below the skin was designed for combat. What follows is what changed.
Structure. Solid-state substrate from the skin inward, with the work divided by depth. The outer layer takes a hit and spreads it, so an impact that lands on one point arrives at the core as a push. Beneath it, a load-bearing frame carries force through the body, made of the same substance and without a joint anywhere to break. The parts that move the body are built for that alone.
Core. The link hardware and local processing sit at center mass, behind a fortified shell, with more than one path in and out.
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