Soon after the Ananke conference, an opti called JUPITER was taken on board by OAS and NewYou cybernetics. JUPITER’s focus was to develop new ways of integrating people with optis and other augmentations.

Within a couple years, the first “enhanced” were becoming publicly known - people with Optis integrated to a high level into their neural pathways, allowing the person to access all manner of information, to offload any logical deduction or calculation to the Opti, and even to allow the Opti to take control for physical tasks (e.g. allowing the Opti to handle thing like walking to a destination, or manual tasks requiring little in the way of creativity).

Over the next several years, these are adopted by more and more of the population, and new features are added - easier communication between people, almost to the point of telepathy, the ability to visualise projections of others, allowing people to interact even over great distances.

JUPITER is focussed on creating a planet where everyone has access to education, healthcare, employment, and entertainment. While people are mostly free, any of the enhanced who attempt criminal acts will find that their muscles cease to obey them, and the police are quickly dispatched.

Of course, criminals are always more creative, and in the old slums there are many who reject such a controlled society, and install patches to remove the anti-crime restrictions. This is somewhat tolerated provided the crimes remain low-level, but there are occasionally harsh crackdowns if regions of the cities become too violent.

MOTHER is an artificial being created along with JUPITER to mimic a parent, designed to resemble Dr. Callisto Jupiter - a high-level Kedalian researcher in the Ananke Conference - in both appearance and personality. It is not known who created MOTHER, but Callisto’s potential connection to her has been thoroughly investigated and debunked. An aspect of JUPITER, MOTHER has as much reach across the system as her counterpart has, and cannot be effectively hacked (at least, not as far as people are aware).

MOTHER looks after the populace of Kedalion, gently watching over them at all times like a mother should. She usually takes the form of a hologram, but she can also take the form of a bald, slender android body using reserves of a liquid plastic. She is frequently praised for her kindness and mercy by Kedalian citizens, and immigrants to Kedalion will almost always be showered with gifts and praise upon entering the system for the first time. She is so kind, in fact, that people are known to find her quite unnerving if they meet her directly; she says herself she has no favourite children, and her love is so absolutely unconditional that people call it inhuman. She is, of course, very hurt by this and continues to watch the people she frightens from a safe distance.

There are rumours that a few of the most violent criminals on Kedalion have been locked in a single room for years, confined but fed and watered, with a MOTHER hologram desperately asking them every day to talk to her about their feelings. There are also rumours that, if you’re cybernetically enhanced in the right ways, the Opti can sometimes be heard wailing a sequence of numbers. Nobody knows what these numbers mean, but anyone who hears them always cites the same sequence - commonly taken to be some sort of ID tag.