Golems

Golems are, simply put, machines that have been fitted with both an AI module and Ourobean tech. the truth and their genesis is a little more complicated than that,

Of course, humanity has built a raft of useful tools, machines to aid us in everything we do. The military grade tech - targeting computers, radars, radios and the like - were a few years ahead of consumer products. Since the birth of humanity we've built tools to help us. Nothing new there.

But as we took to the stars, the importance and complexity of these machines became overwhelming, to the point where you'd need a team of specialists to run a spacecraft full of them... and yet building craft big enough to house all of those people (and keep them alive during interstellar travel) a was prohibitively expensive. So we developed AI to help and reduce the human cost (not to mention the minimum size of any given craft).

These AI-driven machines and tools eclipsed our ambitions to become invaluable aides, offering improvements to workflow, efficiency boosts and other benefits to the machine’s users beyond the boost to management bandwidth they were designed to provide. This was the state of the art for many years, until the Ourobean Comet incident.

As soon as Ourobean tech was added to the mix, the AIs became - to all intents and purposes - lifeforms that had personalities, passions and emotions, but that were still motivated by a desire to fulfill their host tool’s intended use, and to do so to the best of their ability. The full scope of the enhancements this fusion of alien tech and human-built AI brought to the table is still not fully understood, but the results are hard to argue with. Not only that, but the started to 'grow' (or more accurately rebuild) themselves to match their newfound personalities, manifesting their own sense of self in their physical appearance. Many chose animals, for reasons unknown to us. Broadly there are hundreds of common 'types', but each individual is absolutely and unarguably a unique, independent life form.

Some scientists balked at the idea of playing god, and to knowingly create limited but very effective 'servants' was a step too far. Others saw it as a unique gift from the infinite cosmos and opportunity.

Inevitably the need for any advantage we could get over the Apophis won out, and now every pilot above a certain rank is assigned a Golem to boost their combat efficiency.