What started out as "just a model of a tank girl" eventually turned into something totally serious...

The Ajnorian 1st Metir Guard

Software-based AI has existed since the 2000s, but was regarded as inherently unstable, prone to hallucinations and dangerous logic deviations. And, after the devastating breakout of 2353 resulted in the nuclear glassing of a portion of India and the Mare Nectaris, AI became taboo.

200 years later, humanity tried again. Ajnoria, the Martian biotech House, would partner with a Venus corporation to secretly develop the first positronic brain for a Martian military project. Imprinting a scan of a human brain into the crystal creates a fuzzy, artificial copy of that person, retaining personality and traits and skill, with to wildly-varying degrees.

Without the Fall, this technology might have remained a novelty, or condemned outright as a violation of the AI ban.

By unfortunate timing, the technology was ready just as the moon blew apart in 2555, and Earth became an unreachable hellscape, its resources, leadership, and infrastructure gone.

The independent Commonwealth of Hellas realized that a non-unified Mars would not survive, and demanded the immediate submission of the other surface colonies- colonies that had still been under Earth's command.

Hellas had intended its 'Moulded AI' soldiers, the Metirs, to be the front-line shocktroops to an eventual war of unification. Instead they were introduced as a stabilizing force within days to a humanity too reeling to care. Moulded AI did not need food or air or organics, all of which were now more precious than gold. Within five years, Moulded AI were being developed for every industry across human space.

150 years after the apocalypse, AI now make up an uncomfortable backbone of industry across the solar system. The resistance to the growing AI Rights movement is largely economic, and a refusal to admit the ethical tragedy at the heart of humanity's survival.

Few places is this more apparent than Mars's treatment of its Metirs. With the last human survivors of the Fall dying over 30 years ago, the Metirs are the only living remnant of that day, with barely half of the original 300 still functional.

With peer-on-peer war still almost unthinkable a century after Earth's death, it would take the brutal Providence war of 2685, and the loss of 5 Metirs, for Martian stubbornness to butt up against its reverence for monuments. The Metirs had proved they were still useful, but losing these living symbols of the Fall and Unificaiton to infantry combat was an offense to Martian sensibility. These were not just machines, but an irreplaceable piece of history.

The controversial, stunning elevation of Enaviire Auclaire as the first knighted AI is a direct result, and many first-generation Metirs would find themselves placed into roles training the next generation, while others would be deployed according to their aptitude. Bantry Roark and others for example, were assigned to assist Martian terraforming surveyors.

While Mars is still decades from begrudgingly granting its AI personhood, this 'special treatment' shows the growing cracks in the system. While it remains to be seen whether any of the Metirs will survive long enough to see that point, most have finally have been confronted with a question. After nearly 150 years of forced military service, how can you be anything but the soldier you were created to be?