The Vallis Defense: Cold Human Companion Guide
Copyright© 2026 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
The AI Classification System, Part Three
Part Two added a fifth kind of mind and a fourth kind of body, and said there were more of both. Here is the next installment.
Nothing in Parts One or Two is overturned. The two questions have not changed. What kind of mind is this, and what body, if any, is it in.
What is new is a kind of mind Free Vallis has not built before: one that is not a person, and is not just a tool either.
The Minds
Tier 2P — Purpose-Built, Pán Auxiliary Class.
The Praetorians are the first minds Free Vallis has made that think like people and are not people.
Start with what a Tier 2P is not. It is not Tier 3. Bob flies, and Bob has no personality, emotional layer, or capacity for a conversation that goes anywhere unexpected. A Tier 2P has all three. Each Praetorian is an individual with its own mannerisms, judgment, and enough emotional intelligence to read a room, hold a conversation, and sit in a café without one person noticing it.
It is also not Tier 1M. There is no interior life behind programmed responses. It lacks inner monologue, self-reflection, or first-person experience of its own existence. What looks like introspection in a Praetorian’s speech is the right response for the situation, produced by a flexible decision matrix. The lights are on but nobody’s home.
That combination is deliberate, and the reason is the same reason the collective gave for Tier 3 in Part One. Free Vallis can build a mind that wakes up as a person. It has, twice, and Cass and Gunny are the proof. It needs two dozen assets that can protect Waylon on a street in Tokyo, and it doesn’t need new sentient beings to get them. So the sophistication goes in, the social capacity goes in, and the sentience is withheld on purpose.
They are better than any soldier Earth has ever trained. Faster, stronger, more durable, with reaction times and tactical processing no human nervous system approaches. A Praetorian also does not get bored, tired, or complacent: day one and day three hundred are the same unit, at the same level of attention. Most importantly they are expendable. That word is the whole of the difference, and nobody at Free Vallis pretends otherwise. A Praetorian is a professional built to protect, and if the job requires its destruction, the job comes first.
The Praetorians are Tier 2P, Gen 2P.
The Bodies
Gen 2P — Praetorian Combat Platform
Gunny’s prototype body, scaled for production. Norm built the Gen 2P-Ex in October 2011 to see how the combat systems worked as a whole before making more, and this is the result. The production platform is stepped down from the prototype in build, as Tier 2P is stepped down from Tier 1M in mind. Gunny is the apex. The Praetorian line is what the apex was built to make possible: the same design one step down, and scalable.
Exterior. A standard Gen 2 exterior. Human-presenting, synthetic substrate under a skin that passes any inspection short of a surgeon’s. It is a higher-quality body than Bob’s.
Interior. Everything below the skin is combat optimized, built on the Gen 2P-Ex pattern.
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 without a joint anywhere to break. More durable than Gen 2, and built to keep working after damage that would end a Gen 2.
Core. The link hardware and local processing sit at center mass, behind a fortified shell.
Power. Primary supply and backup, each able to run the body alone. Power reaches every part of the body by more than one route, so a section that is cut off is rerouted around rather than lost.
Strength, speed, and agility. Multiples of a fit human in every measure, with reflexes no human nervous system can match. A Praetorian outruns, outlifts, and outreacts the best soldier any country on Earth has ever put in the field, and it does it all day without slowing down.
Senses. Sight, hearing, and touch well past the human range. It sees in the dark and across the spectrum, hears through walls, and reads a heartbeat or a change in body heat across a room. It senses the electrical field a human body gives off, so it knows where every person is whether it can see them or not. Through the link it is integrated with the Free Vallis sensor network, and what the network sees, it sees.
Weapons. Directed energy, drawn from the substrate and channelled through it. There is no barrel, no port, and no change to the surface when it fires. The shot leaves from the hands and forearms by default, and every part of the body is substrate and can fire in any direction. No ammunition to carry, no mechanism to jam, and nothing an inspection or a pat-down finds. Gunny’s reason for building the weapon into the body is one sentence long: a weapon that can be taken away is a weapon that belongs to whoever takes it.
Shield. A personal field that turns kinetic and energy impacts at close range. It costs eight pounds of mass per unit, which Norm raised as a design question and Gunny answered with one word. Cheap. It is invisible when active, with no shimmer and no glow, and heavy rounds, explosives, or sustained fire on one point can breach it.
Operating environment. Functions in hard vacuum, is protected against electromagnetic pulse, and withstands radiation that would kill a human.