We fear it may have lapsed due to unforeseeable circumstances. Now that we've been introduced to the cyborgs, we can see them in action. Just standing there they might have seemed just kinda odd, like halloween decorations, a bit goofy. I think this shows they are not :) art by Ferris again
Here we see a scene I imagined a while ago, a young Avra in her first posting, guard aboard a Fleet Tender ship that comes under attack. The gun in her hand is what's colloquially called a "22", and is the smallest Energy Enhanced weapon in the colonies. By modern standards it's a beast of a pistol (not sure the exact calibre yet, I'm bad at guns, if anyone has any suggestions for something that would be considered overlarge and impractical in the modern day, but still technically useable, I'm all ears), against a cyborg... well it's best to keep one round back to keep them from grabbing you. It's theoretically capable of punching through their force screens and armour, with repeated and rapid hits, but no one is ever keen to test that. The very definition of a sidearm, a last ditch backup weapon.
The cyborgs have gone through a lot of iterations over the century or so they've existed. At first they pursued fast and aggressive forms that could quickly take territory, heedless of the consequences, but ever since the metamorphosis they've slowly changed. See, the Microbots that are actually in the drivers seat aren't actually sapient, they were very purposely designed not to be (no Skynet please), but they have a vast library of pre-programed strategies and tactics to draw from, as well as a limited ability to mix and match them through relatively simple machine learning. The real danger though, is something the designers didn't foresee, an emergent interaction. See, the human brains rotting away in there, they aren't just being used as Wetware CPUs to run the Microbots programs, they're still sapient, just rotting, freezer burned, maddened, and subsumed. And when the Cyborgs run up against a wall, start taking what they now see as unacceptable casualties, they unexpectedly started to tap into what was left of those minds. This is a worst case scenario. The Cyborgs already have the numbers advantage, tens of billions of converted humans. The resource advantage, with all the built up infrastructure of the Sol system. The technology advantage, thanks to cutting edge pre-exodus military cyberwarefare programs rendering advanced computers to dangerous to widely use. The one advantage the Colonies have is that they're fairly predictable, slow to change their tactics. That state of being must be preserved as long as possible...
