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Description
Just some notes on Ivy's internal structure and suchlike. No, it's not supposed to be exhaustive or detailed! Just a rough-outlining, so I don't have to trawl through pages of notes to remember things...

Edit: added to the description. Thus far, this is how her "abilities" and vital stats and stuff stand. I knew I'd forgotten to update it, ages ago. Never mind. Working on an "earlier" sketch similar to this one, profiling her as she USED to be - I think that version of her needs hair, too. Oh well, back to work work work.

-----

Artificial Life-Form
     Ivy's artificial nature has been the root of some of the less pleasant experiences in her life, as well – a lot of the species populating the galaxy seem to have no lost love for machines, especially the sentient variety. Some see them as the product of "people playing god", others see them as a threat to their society (shades of "robots take over the world"), and others simply dislike them as anyone may dislike anything. Any such prejudice is guaranteed not to be well received.
     Coupled with this there is a great scientific interest in her; by their very nature, Ivy's kind are rare, and a lot of scientific communities consider it the ultimate achievement to create an inorganic life-form capable of self-aware coherent thought. Because of both the increased prejudice against her, and the increased interest from scientific communities, Ivy tries her hardest to keep her non-biological nature hidden unless she absolutely can't help it. While this has caused its own fair share of problems, the benefits outweigh the adverse results, and she's happy to keep it that way.
     At the moment, Ivy still doesn’t know exactly what her body is capable of. She doesn’t have full control over everything, either, although some things she doubts she’ll have control of anyway, like emotion. Sometimes it frustrates her, but other times she is content to just sit and find things out by accident. She also doesn't know how long she's likely to live for, although is guessing it will be some decades – she doesn't like to contemplate the thought of outliving all her friends – who are the closest she has to family.

Internal Details
     First of all it must be pointed out (if you missed it before ) that Ivy is not obviously mechanical – she does not have a metal skin, her voice is not the traditional uninflected “robot voice”, she does not walk stiffly, or show no knowledge of emotional issues. She is a complex synthetic being, crafted by an old creature with many, many years experience and many failed predecessors, but if you didn’t know she was synthetic you would have little reason to suspect it – at first, anyway.

Hearing:
     Ivy’s standard hearing range is no different to human average – the dishes of her ears allow for directionality - but her range may be improved by increasing the sensitivity of the microphones (when under “sensitised” she loses the ability to demonstrate emotion by way of ear posture). She may also “desensitise” her hearing, but usually only when noises are sufficiently loud they may damage her ears otherwise.
     Yelling in her ear while she is operating in “sensitised” is not likely to make her your friend.

Sight:
     As with her hearing, her standard range is restricted to “normal” mammalian wavelengths, primarily the visible, but she may “retune” her range to involve such other wavelengths as the infra-red (helps at night-time, for example) or ultra-violet. Her eyes are sensitive also at night time – although she sees only in black and white then, not the odd green of night-vision goggles. She has the limited ability to use her eyes to detect the more “exotic” EM wavelengths, such as high-frequency waves – she has the ability to sense gamma rays, but only in her radiation-detecting capacity, and uses the function rarely - but she can not see down into the radio-frequency.
     As with her hearing, shining a torch in her eyes when she is operating in non-standard wavelength pickup is likely to make her less than happy. As with her hearing, this is likely to overload her senses, and cause a temporary shutdown.

     Overload of the eyes and/or ears is likely to leave her at least partially deaf or/and blind for however long it takes them to recalibrate – which depends on the scale of the damage. Auditory overload usually takes a good half-hour to recalibrate at the minimum, optical overload (she calls it “burnout”) usually takes longer, close to an hour for partial sight-loss, two for total loss. In either case she requires access to a computer – usually Dauntless, where her personal standards are stored in the main core – otherwise again it takes longer.

     “Lung” function is reserved almost exclusively for temperature maintenance. She does not withstand extremes of temperature well, although usually has to endure such extremes for some time – she can operate well enough in vacuum for short periods, able to maintain internal heat for up to half an hour, and can handle working in “extreme” heat for short periods. Excess heat primarily slows down her mental and “neuronal” functioning, whereas intense cold causes the sophisticated oil lubricants to begin to set and makes her joints stiff. She can operate mostly normally even when the temperature is approaching -50C, but after this motor function deteriorates.

     Her speech processors are located in her throat, like with the average mammalian humanoid. She can speak without lung function, like if she were to close her lungs off to keep noxious gases out, but it sounds a lot more “organic” when she uses her lungs. Her voice has a very slight synthetic edge to it when speaks without her lungs, although it wouldn’t be very noticeable unless you were looking for it.

     Her strength is considerable, but not boundless – her muscles are linked in to her skeletal structure, and work by a system of microhydraulics as well as tensile polymers. Her ability to lift is of course limited to the strength of her skeletal structure – it is a strong, lightweight carbo-polymer-composite, but not indestructible, and like organic bone is comparatively weak to crosswise blows. They can withstand more than the average organic bone, but repairing breaks to her skeletal structure is difficult since it is so highly linked to the musculature.
     While she is strong enough to take care of herself, she has a few little additions that she uses for defensive purposes that she added in herself. Beneath the claw/nail of the index-finger of her right hand is located a tiny hypodermic needle, sheathed within the “bone” itself if not needed, with a small reservoir loaded with a sedative/hypnotic; the nail itself is pulled back to get it out of the way when she uses it. While theoretically the reservoir could be loaded with poisons, she prefers to use it strictly to “stun” any assailant. Her claws are otherwise used almost exclusively for traction – and when those on her feet are not in use they are retracted, as a cats, with a mobile sheath protecting them. She rarely uses her teeth for defence – a hangover from what she picked up from the native Skelna that lived around her home, who saw it as rude to go around biting people.
     Her other means of “defence” is a rather more dangerous one to herself as well as any assailant – she is capable of generating and storing a higher-than-normal electrical charge in nonessential areas of her body, which she can discharge in one go, the resulting effect a little like a small lightning-strike. It is poorly directional, and in spite of the fact her own systems are extensively shielded and protected it typically knocks her out cold at the same time as any assailant, so she usually has to have friends on hand – and warned – to get her away afterwards.

     Every so often she must correct the internal electrolyte balance of her carrier fluids – she has a “blood supply” which her body utilises for repairs (it carries tiny nanites/cellular machines, which are able to perform repairs to small-scale damage such as breaks in the skin and sensor-mesh of the substructure) and keeping her joints lubricated. Components of her “blood” can also be used to approximate certain biological fluids, such as tears, and are involved in the chemical analysis of ingested compounds – her “gastric juices” if you like. The fluid must occasionally be topped up; she can either do this directly, with a drip feed into a special port under the skin of her wrist, or else indirectly by way of ingestion of foodstuffs. She prefers the second as it is less obviously a mechanical process, and of course she enjoys the social side of it – a drink or a bite to “eat” with friends. This second does require egestion of the waste, but this is more by “regurgitation” than the human-typical excretion (think “owl pellet”) – since not all chemicals in a given foodstuff can be utilised, for instance carbohydrates and proteins are unlikely to be needed.

     Her “digestive tract” ends at the stomach; there is no gut past this. Her lower abdomen contains other “organs” not present in an organic creature – while she does have sexual “organs” (courtesy of Neev, who didn’t understand why Ivy was lacking them in the first place), the majority of her “gut” instead consists of pumps and energy-handling systems. The pumps are for her blood – her heart is not in her upper body – and are not continually functioning; they only operate when necessary, when the peripheral sensors signal there is an electrolyte imbalance.

     The fur covering her body, while soft and silken in texture, is thin and poorly insulatory – temperature control is a mostly internal operation. She has control over the lay of it, tiny synthetic muscles attached to each hair (another of Neev’s alterations), although she rarely uses this function except for emotional purposes. When she’s scared she puffs out the fur of her tail, for instance.

     Ivory does share some other “organic” traits, such as the need to “sleep”, although this is more an operation involved with memory than mental health. Sleeping allows her brain to filter out the “important” from the “unimportant” events from the day, to prevent her memory filling with things she does not need.
     She sleeps also to restore her energy cells – she can keep going almost indefinitely, but this consumes twice (or more than) as much energy per unit time than operating with the periodic shutdown. Her energy source itself is complex, involving efficient microcells spread throughout her body, and relies on her ion-rich blood for fuel – sleeping also promotes the restoration of this ion balance, hence “recharging”.

     She also feels pain, although this is another of Neev’s adjustments, and – since she is unable to define it – she does not know if it is like the organic sensations or not. They are the same in that they are unpleasant sensations, however, and she cannot just turn them off given that they are (usually) damage warnings. They only go off when her micro-repair systems have corrected any damage or else disconnected the power to the relevant area. For instance, if she were to lacerate the skin of her palm, she would feel the “pain” sensations until the skin and sensor-mesh was recrystallised. After a crush wound or a break, however, which her body’s systems would be unable to correct on their own, she would gradually lose function in that part of the body – partly to prevent further damage by moving it, particularly if it was a hand or foot. Such damage to a hand would probably result in total paralysis of it in a relatively short space of time – nothing greater than half a day if under autonomous control, and faster if she chooses to do so – with all sensory circuits and motor control systems shutting down until the damage was repaired. There would be a residual reminder of the damage – system alerts, but not painful – until it was repaired.

     Unlike many computer-based creatures, she was created with emotions, and a full range thereof – although subtlety is not her forte. Her emotional growth is significant, but she is still rather childlike, prone to neuroses; as such her state of emotional health is a frequent concern for her shipmates. Many Coalition cyberneticists believe that she should never have been “cursed” with the unpredictability of emotions at such a young age, particularly given she has no way to turn them off.

Notes
     Ivy is the creator and unofficial captain-pilot of Dauntless. Dauntless herself is quasi-sentient, not quite capable of thinking on her own but able to make ‘educated judgements’ every once in a while if she comes across what she perceives as a dangerous situation and her crew aren’t responding to it. She was originally as non-sentient as any other computer, but since she was experimental and suffered considerable “breakdowns” where programming overloaded, leading Ivy to stabilise her with her own programming, she gradually picked up pockets of other software from her. Dauntless represents her “sentience” as a tall, Kiravai-looking holographic creature that the crew have dubbed “Magpie” (or just Mags), partly because of her colouration, which is mostly black, and partly because of her tendency to “chatter” longer than she needs about a subject. She is capable of “leaving” the ship, but only for short periods and not any further than a few metres from the hull, since she relies on the on-board holo-emitters.

Description
Just some notes on Ivy's internal structure and suchlike. No, it's not supposed to be exhaustive or detailed! Just a rough-outlining, so I don't have to trawl through pages of notes to remember things...

Edit: added to the description. Thus far, this is how her "abilities" and vital stats and stuff stand. I knew I'd forgotten to update it, ages ago. Never mind. Working on an "earlier" sketch similar to this one, profiling her as she USED to be - I think that version of her needs hair, too. Oh well, back to work work work.

-----

Artificial Life-Form
     Ivy's artificial nature has been the root of some of the less pleasant experiences in her life, as well – a lot of the species populating the galaxy seem to have no lost love for machines, especially the sentient variety. Some see them as the product of "people playing god", others see them as a threat to their society (shades of "robots take over the world"), and others simply dislike them as anyone may dislike anything. Any such prejudice is guaranteed not to be well received.
     Coupled with this there is a great scientific interest in her; by their very nature, Ivy's kind are rare, and a lot of scientific communities consider it the ultimate achievement to create an inorganic life-form capable of self-aware coherent thought. Because of both the increased prejudice against her, and the increased interest from scientific communities, Ivy tries her hardest to keep her non-biological nature hidden unless she absolutely can't help it. While this has caused its own fair share of problems, the benefits outweigh the adverse results, and she's happy to keep it that way.
     At the moment, Ivy still doesn’t know exactly what her body is capable of. She doesn’t have full control over everything, either, although some things she doubts she’ll have control of anyway, like emotion. Sometimes it frustrates her, but other times she is content to just sit and find things out by accident. She also doesn't know how long she's likely to live for, although is guessing it will be some decades – she doesn't like to contemplate the thought of outliving all her friends – who are the closest she has to family.

Internal Details
     First of all it must be pointed out (if you missed it before ) that Ivy is not obviously mechanical – she does not have a metal skin, her voice is not the traditional uninflected “robot voice”, she does not walk stiffly, or show no knowledge of emotional issues. She is a complex synthetic being, crafted by an old creature with many, many years experience and many failed predecessors, but if you didn’t know she was synthetic you would have little reason to suspect it – at first, anyway.

Hearing:
     Ivy’s standard hearing range is no different to human average – the dishes of her ears allow for directionality - but her range may be improved by increasing the sensitivity of the microphones (when under “sensitised” she loses the ability to demonstrate emotion by way of ear posture). She may also “desensitise” her hearing, but usually only when noises are sufficiently loud they may damage her ears otherwise.
     Yelling in her ear while she is operating in “sensitised” is not likely to make her your friend.

Sight:
     As with her hearing, her standard range is restricted to “normal” mammalian wavelengths, primarily the visible, but she may “retune” her range to involve such other wavelengths as the infra-red (helps at night-time, for example) or ultra-violet. Her eyes are sensitive also at night time – although she sees only in black and white then, not the odd green of night-vision goggles. She has the limited ability to use her eyes to detect the more “exotic” EM wavelengths, such as high-frequency waves – she has the ability to sense gamma rays, but only in her radiation-detecting capacity, and uses the function rarely - but she can not see down into the radio-frequency.
     As with her hearing, shining a torch in her eyes when she is operating in non-standard wavelength pickup is likely to make her less than happy. As with her hearing, this is likely to overload her senses, and cause a temporary shutdown.

     Overload of the eyes and/or ears is likely to leave her at least partially deaf or/and blind for however long it takes them to recalibrate – which depends on the scale of the damage. Auditory overload usually takes a good half-hour to recalibrate at the minimum, optical overload (she calls it “burnout”) usually takes longer, close to an hour for partial sight-loss, two for total loss. In either case she requires access to a computer – usually Dauntless, where her personal standards are stored in the main core – otherwise again it takes longer.

     “Lung” function is reserved almost exclusively for temperature maintenance. She does not withstand extremes of temperature well, although usually has to endure such extremes for some time – she can operate well enough in vacuum for short periods, able to maintain internal heat for up to half an hour, and can handle working in “extreme” heat for short periods. Excess heat primarily slows down her mental and “neuronal” functioning, whereas intense cold causes the sophisticated oil lubricants to begin to set and makes her joints stiff. She can operate mostly normally even when the temperature is approaching -50C, but after this motor function deteriorates.

     Her speech processors are located in her throat, like with the average mammalian humanoid. She can speak without lung function, like if she were to close her lungs off to keep noxious gases out, but it sounds a lot more “organic” when she uses her lungs. Her voice has a very slight synthetic edge to it when speaks without her lungs, although it wouldn’t be very noticeable unless you were looking for it.

     Her strength is considerable, but not boundless – her muscles are linked in to her skeletal structure, and work by a system of microhydraulics as well as tensile polymers. Her ability to lift is of course limited to the strength of her skeletal structure – it is a strong, lightweight carbo-polymer-composite, but not indestructible, and like organic bone is comparatively weak to crosswise blows. They can withstand more than the average organic bone, but repairing breaks to her skeletal structure is difficult since it is so highly linked to the musculature.
     While she is strong enough to take care of herself, she has a few little additions that she uses for defensive purposes that she added in herself. Beneath the claw/nail of the index-finger of her right hand is located a tiny hypodermic needle, sheathed within the “bone” itself if not needed, with a small reservoir loaded with a sedative/hypnotic; the nail itself is pulled back to get it out of the way when she uses it. While theoretically the reservoir could be loaded with poisons, she prefers to use it strictly to “stun” any assailant. Her claws are otherwise used almost exclusively for traction – and when those on her feet are not in use they are retracted, as a cats, with a mobile sheath protecting them. She rarely uses her teeth for defence – a hangover from what she picked up from the native Skelna that lived around her home, who saw it as rude to go around biting people.
     Her other means of “defence” is a rather more dangerous one to herself as well as any assailant – she is capable of generating and storing a higher-than-normal electrical charge in nonessential areas of her body, which she can discharge in one go, the resulting effect a little like a small lightning-strike. It is poorly directional, and in spite of the fact her own systems are extensively shielded and protected it typically knocks her out cold at the same time as any assailant, so she usually has to have friends on hand – and warned – to get her away afterwards.

     Every so often she must correct the internal electrolyte balance of her carrier fluids – she has a “blood supply” which her body utilises for repairs (it carries tiny nanites/cellular machines, which are able to perform repairs to small-scale damage such as breaks in the skin and sensor-mesh of the substructure) and keeping her joints lubricated. Components of her “blood” can also be used to approximate certain biological fluids, such as tears, and are involved in the chemical analysis of ingested compounds – her “gastric juices” if you like. The fluid must occasionally be topped up; she can either do this directly, with a drip feed into a special port under the skin of her wrist, or else indirectly by way of ingestion of foodstuffs. She prefers the second as it is less obviously a mechanical process, and of course she enjoys the social side of it – a drink or a bite to “eat” with friends. This second does require egestion of the waste, but this is more by “regurgitation” than the human-typical excretion (think “owl pellet”) – since not all chemicals in a given foodstuff can be utilised, for instance carbohydrates and proteins are unlikely to be needed.

     Her “digestive tract” ends at the stomach; there is no gut past this. Her lower abdomen contains other “organs” not present in an organic creature – while she does have sexual “organs” (courtesy of Neev, who didn’t understand why Ivy was lacking them in the first place), the majority of her “gut” instead consists of pumps and energy-handling systems. The pumps are for her blood – her heart is not in her upper body – and are not continually functioning; they only operate when necessary, when the peripheral sensors signal there is an electrolyte imbalance.

     The fur covering her body, while soft and silken in texture, is thin and poorly insulatory – temperature control is a mostly internal operation. She has control over the lay of it, tiny synthetic muscles attached to each hair (another of Neev’s alterations), although she rarely uses this function except for emotional purposes. When she’s scared she puffs out the fur of her tail, for instance.

     Ivory does share some other “organic” traits, such as the need to “sleep”, although this is more an operation involved with memory than mental health. Sleeping allows her brain to filter out the “important” from the “unimportant” events from the day, to prevent her memory filling with things she does not need.
     She sleeps also to restore her energy cells – she can keep going almost indefinitely, but this consumes twice (or more than) as much energy per unit time than operating with the periodic shutdown. Her energy source itself is complex, involving efficient microcells spread throughout her body, and relies on her ion-rich blood for fuel – sleeping also promotes the restoration of this ion balance, hence “recharging”.

     She also feels pain, although this is another of Neev’s adjustments, and – since she is unable to define it – she does not know if it is like the organic sensations or not. They are the same in that they are unpleasant sensations, however, and she cannot just turn them off given that they are (usually) damage warnings. They only go off when her micro-repair systems have corrected any damage or else disconnected the power to the relevant area. For instance, if she were to lacerate the skin of her palm, she would feel the “pain” sensations until the skin and sensor-mesh was recrystallised. After a crush wound or a break, however, which her body’s systems would be unable to correct on their own, she would gradually lose function in that part of the body – partly to prevent further damage by moving it, particularly if it was a hand or foot. Such damage to a hand would probably result in total paralysis of it in a relatively short space of time – nothing greater than half a day if under autonomous control, and faster if she chooses to do so – with all sensory circuits and motor control systems shutting down until the damage was repaired. There would be a residual reminder of the damage – system alerts, but not painful – until it was repaired.

     Unlike many computer-based creatures, she was created with emotions, and a full range thereof – although subtlety is not her forte. Her emotional growth is significant, but she is still rather childlike, prone to neuroses; as such her state of emotional health is a frequent concern for her shipmates. Many Coalition cyberneticists believe that she should never have been “cursed” with the unpredictability of emotions at such a young age, particularly given she has no way to turn them off.

Notes
     Ivy is the creator and unofficial captain-pilot of Dauntless. Dauntless herself is quasi-sentient, not quite capable of thinking on her own but able to make ‘educated judgements’ every once in a while if she comes across what she perceives as a dangerous situation and her crew aren’t responding to it. She was originally as non-sentient as any other computer, but since she was experimental and suffered considerable “breakdowns” where programming overloaded, leading Ivy to stabilise her with her own programming, she gradually picked up pockets of other software from her. Dauntless represents her “sentience” as a tall, Kiravai-looking holographic creature that the crew have dubbed “Magpie” (or just Mags), partly because of her colouration, which is mostly black, and partly because of her tendency to “chatter” longer than she needs about a subject. She is capable of “leaving” the ship, but only for short periods and not any further than a few metres from the hull, since she relies on the on-board holo-emitters.