We told Gaea that we wouldn't eat all of the Cauldron Shards and that we would try to fix them. To what extent are we obligated to try and fix them? Are we going to eat all of the Cauldron Shards that don't have a personality?
Well, it's not just that they have no personality, it's that they lack the
ability to have one. Basically they're not just non-sapient, they're incapable of sapience. Twin is also running low on power reserves. Twenty years is a lot to humans, but to bullshit Space Whale shards used to traveling the cosmos? It's basically dead.
That said, I think we should look at the current Cauldron Shards we know:
1 - Audible. LOUD, to a painful degree, but overall probably salvageable. Need to work on the volume bit first.
2 - Charge. Salvageable. We've got good data on them. If possible we'll probably want to prioritize the non-sapient normal side over the hostile bit that tried to drown us in data.
3 - Prosthetic. Half-a-Shard and a chorus of ominous Shard bits. No data collection. Depending on if we can get them to properly deal with data we might be able to salvage them. Waiting on further data. At least warned us their data was corrupt.
4 - Swap. No personality (or ability to gain one), no command codes (no security at all), a possible weapon against us since any hostile Shard could order it into an attack. This is actually dangerous to us as well as being limited to automatic functions. Functionally the Shard equivalent of brain-dead.
5 - Sweat. Lazy. Uses Shardspeak to talk in English.
6 - Transparency. Mishmash of larger chunks. Quoting the Megas XLR theme and Lovecraftian references. Also a shopping list that included Nuka-Cola. Word salad basically. Probably not a good candidate for consumption. Once we have Charge and others sorted, we can try patching it and see exactly how rough a shape it's in.
7 - Twin. No personality (or ability to get one). Twenty years of power left in what should be a millennia surviving Space Whale spleen.
Now, I'm not saying eat them next turn. I am suggesting that Prosthetic, Swap, and Twin all start streaming us their data. And we take any data currency they have and have them send it to us in real-time (for those capable of it).
Also, I'm noticing that Case 53s have an odd amount of Host behavior, except Prosthetic. Since it's only capable of holding information for a week, if The Slug isn't removing their memories so much as pushing them Shard-side, that might explain that while also meaning Trainwreck's past is, sadly, unrecoverable.
Overall, so far only Swap and Twin seem unsalvageable. They're not only both non-sapient, but broken in other ways (basically lacking security and power-drain respectively). Since Twin's Host is a good choice for Assuming Direct Control (which should definitely wait until
after Taylor has Triggered. Low priority), it makes it a prime candidate for om nom nomming. Personally, I have no problem with non-sapient Shards. They can eventually gain sapience. If we run across another Cauldron Shard incapable of sapience but lacking any other fatal flaws, I wouldn't mind keeping them around as basically an organic computer. Or possibly find a way to draw from that brain-dead Shard to feed another?
We could maybe use Swap as feedstock to help salvage other members of the Travellers. We can look into that later.
I'll try to draw up an Omake tonight, which should hopefully knock out Human Biology. I'd like to use the single turn of Research to knock out Charge data, then see how much Thinker data we grab from Twin before deciding on whether to grab another Research branch and try to pop out three things at once.
I might even give the PHO thing another shot, but trying to just show one page of posts from two or three different threads is hard from the sheer volume of personalities a board has. I may have to crib shamelessly from someone else's PHO stuff.