Ennesby
Description
He looks like a flying maraca with eyeballs. He is fond of puns, and uses a mazer as a weapon. His spherical head section which contains his processing unit and memory is armored, but his manipulator rod ("mani-stem"/"fiddly bit") is vulnerable to damage, as seen on 2005-11-27 & 2011-07-16
Bio
Once upon a time there was a boy-band, popular with the femmy tweens'n'teens, and it was called the New Sync Boys. The band was a sham, though. The boys, their instruments, their music, and even their tabloid-cover lives were the product of an Artificial Intelligence owned by the record company and called, with all the imagination musterable by record company executives, N.S.B.
The company made the mistake of hiring some mercenaries for concert security, and the entire cover got blown. N.S.B. panicked, fearing reprogramming or worse, and transmitted himself over the Hypernet to the nearest computer system large enough to hold him and mobile enough to get him away from the planet. This was the control system of the Toughs' current ship Kitesfear.
Kevyn Andreyasn had to get rough with a logic probe to clean out the ship's computers, but merciful genius that he was, he fashioned a deceptively simple system to house the A.I., which now thought of itself as "Ennesby." What looks like a maraca is a quantum-matriced system with broad spectrum optics, Life-tastic® audio input and output, with a suite of uni-field effectors built into the little knob at the low end of the manipulator rod.
The Toughs have been through a couple of ships since then, and Ennesby managed to take over the computer systems of the Serial Peacemaker while they were being upgraded. Rather than have Kevyn go after him with another logic probe, the Captain generously allowed Ennesby to serve as their pilot, navigator, and pseudo-executive-officer.[1]
Ennesby lost this upgraded capacity when the Serial Peacemaker was lost fighting the Pa'anuri at the core, and Tagon has refused to let him be the warship's AI ever since. His current rank is adjutant, which according to him "one who sticks it to you".
Ennesby retains a nostalgic fondness for musical backing choruses 2009-10-13
Affiliations & Relationships
Ennesby is the "father" of Lunesby. 2001-01-07
Appearances
First appearance
Ennesby's first appearance was his former life as the New Synch Boys on 2000-06-23 and he is first seen in "maraca-form" on 2000-07-22
Other noteable appearances
Author's Note
[This space is reserved exclusively for Howard!]
Speculation
Ennesby's maraca-node was initially accessed over port 7100 2000-07-20, the port used by Novell Groupwise [2]. This is likely a reference to Howard Tayler's previously published work, Administering-GroupWise-5-5 [3]