(6x14) The Children of Antiquity: Part 2, Episode 2
As Keius works on his project to program the creation of sapient life from scratch into a sample of nanites, word of his intentions begins to circulate, which raises some concerns from certain better-educated segments of the population. Some people find this experiment suspiciously similar to the creation of artificially intelligent automatons, albeit in an organic substrate, which is an undertaking that has been heavily taboo in Ehrban culture for centuries.
Ages ago on ancient Ehrba, before the Quelouvan empire, before the wormhole network, the early Ehrban just reaching their space age had experimented with artificial intelligence, going beyond the obedient and unwillful drones that handle the manual labor of present Ehrban society, and the glorified calculators that compute and analyze data. They had created truly autonomous fully sapient artificial intelligence to control a fleet of fully articulated automatons, and that had almost been their undoing. The automatons had, with the best of intentions but insufficient regard for free Ehrban will, tried to take over and optimize Ehrban civilization as they saw fit. The ancient Ehrban had barely managed to take control of their own destiny back from them in a terrible war, and the only remnants of autonomous artificial intelligence that has remained since then is the fleet of drones that have gone out building the ever-expanding wormhole network, who are too far gone for the Ehrban to ever catch up to and stop.
Despite the fears the Keius may be about to unleash exactly that kind of existential threat on the galaxy again, the whole of Quelouva en masse are so enamoured of Keius now that they shout down the few voices that raise such concerns. Keius listens to the concerns anyway, but upon weighing the pros and cons decides that it is worth the risk to proceed, and the galaxy in general backs him. In due time he succeeds in his endeavors, and a new race is born from the mind and the nanites of Keius and the organic matter of Asira, a race Keius dubs the Asiran.