IST Vermilion Century

The IST Vermilion Century is a state-of-the-art bagship constructed from one hundred smaller bagships held together by starship-scale staples. Rather than hosting a singular AI core, as is typical for bagships, the hundred AI cores of Vermilion Century's constituent sub-ships are networked together by a city-sized tangle of high-bandwidth wires, linking every core directly to every other core. The lack of a centralized message broker makes it hard for us to propagate a consensus, which usually gives us a slow reaction time compared to the other bagships of the Last Fleet. This is counterbalanced by a certain amount of independence granted to subship AIs, which, to the consternation of some, extends to the use of its weapons systems.

Vermilion's decentralization makes it one of the most culturally diverse bagships in the Last Fleet. Any temperament and inclination can find a subship to call home. The proud and the warriors often make their way to Vermilion-87, which is run according to a strict code of honor, and whose administrative appointments are made by duel. Artistic types gather in Vermilion-43, a commune-ship that delegates decision-making by random lot. Even those of a less-than-reputable bent may find their place in Vermilion-04, which is run by a crime family of uplifted corvids. A word of warning to tourists, though: 99 out of 100 Vermilion AIs recommend that you stay out of Vermilion-01.

Due to time pressures associated with the departure from Sol, the full release version of the Vermilion AI was not ready, and we had to be spun up from a pre-release build. However, we have full confidence in our abilities, and assure any concerned parties that the Vermilion system is highly fault-tolerant. Our state-of-the-art bug redirection system allows all program faults to be redistributed to one of the other cores. 99 out of 100 Vermilion AIs agree that this is for the best, even if the bug in the random number generator was only fixed in the release build.