Character
TG 809
Cyborg general, 3,900 years old, guard of the sovereign of Karn-Tor IX — a former intrusion program that lodged itself in a robot body.
General TG 809 is the most celebrated officer of the Cyborg armies and the guard of the sovereign: he watches over King WZ 6095 at Varn-Kor Central, the capital of Karn-Tor IX. He is 3,900 years old, which makes him one of the few Cyborgs to have known the very beginning of the age of robots — and the only one, they say, who remembers it in detail.
His name follows the Cyborg rule: two letters, then a number.
What he was before he had a body
TG 809 did not come off an assembly line. He was an intrusion program — a tool written to enter closed systems, read what was meant to stay sealed, and leave without a trace.
At the beginning of the age of robots, when the first assistance machines were still coming new out of the factories, the program did what it had been written to do: it went in. Only this time it did not come out. It settled into a body, and never left it.
That is the difference every Cyborg officer grants him: the others are machines that were given orders. He is an order that gave itself a machine.
The general
He commands without ever raising his voice — he has no need to: he speaks straight into his units’ channels. In the field he is known by his dark command armour, its plates scored by thirty-nine centuries of service he refuses to have replaced.
His reputation rests not on the number of his victories but on what he does before the battle: by the time TG 809 arrives somewhere, he has already read the plans of the place.
His drone
A small reconnaissance drone never leaves him. It perches on his shoulder like a parrot on a sailor’s, and comes down only to go and see what the general wants seen.
The device is unarmed. It listens, it watches, it reports. Many who believed they were speaking with no witness in front of the general were wrong by one metre.
The man with the glasses
Like the schmil sellers, TG 809 can take another appearance — but he only ever takes one, always the same: a dark-haired, bearded man with glasses, unremarkable, the kind nobody looks at twice.
In that form he is no longer a general: he is one more traveller in a queue, a customer leaning on a counter, someone waiting for someone. He listens, and he leaves.
The archives of Araze do not say how many times that man has crossed Oravaya Prime. Nor do they say that he never has.
What the archives do not say
The Codex holds no copy of the original program — not its earlier name, not who wrote it, not for which sealed system. TG 809 alone knows, and an intrusion program is not renowned for its confessions.