Forrest Cameranesi Geek of all Trades

(6x19) The War of Antiquity: Part 1, Episode 1

Eager to learn more about humanity faster, and to settle the burning questions he has about the role of the nanites in the development of sapience, Keius designs a plan to speed his research up. He plans to construct an enormous time-dilation field around the entire solar system of Earth, and have an agents inside intermittently turn off the time dilation field and transmit their findings in a burst, so that from the outside Keius will get a rapid stream of time-lapse data on the development of humanity. He quickly rejects any Ehrban, even himself, as suitable for this mission; briefly considers using the Asiron, but deems them too unpredictably and risky; then eventually settles on modifying another human, to live on an Ehrban spacecraft in orbit and, telepathically communicating with the first one on the surface, log her observations for transmission back to Keius.

Assembling a team of the Ehrban's best gravitomagnetic engineers, he tries to construct a working prototype of this device. But even they, who understand and design the reactionless nigh-luminal stardrives ubiquitously used by the Ehrban, are unable to come up with a working solution to Keius' goals. They attempt to learn more about the kind of technology needed by reverse-engineering the advanced gravitomagnetics that power the wormholes, which was invented by the ancient Ehrban AIs and then lost when they were destroyed.

But even figuring out how the wormholes themselves function is beyond Keius or the Ehrban scientists, as it has been for many generations; Keius is not the first to call for the reverse-engineering of the most advanced technology the Ehrban routinely encounter. But Keius realizes he has already created the solution to the problem. He employs the Asiron, his own "organic automatons", to help discover what the earlier automatons had built, and then to adapt that technology toward his new purpose.

Next: The War of Antiquity: Part 1, Episode 2