Mercurions, Aka Cyborgs

Mercurions, aka cyborgs

In my setting Union Station, humans have been in space for more than a millennium and as such have culturally diverged a lot from their terran ancestors. The history of the mercurions is kinda complex. For one, they aren't actually from mercury despite the name, they instead originate from the colony-ship Mercurion which was created as part of the New Horizon Initiative by the governing bodies of the sol system. The goal was to set humanity among the stars, but the Mercurion never arrived at its intended destination, and instead ended up 100 light-years off course in an unknown and hostile star system. Early, FTL at the time, was very risky.

Multiple catastrophe's aboard the mercurion caused the handful of survivors to turn to reproductive cloning and later cybernetics to survive.

As a culture, their society is highly stratified as a result of the Merilink system, a state-enforced caste system managed by a super computer (to be clear not a sentient AI). The initial idea behind Merilink, was to create a meritocracy, were all mercurions were born at the same level of citizenship / rights and could elevate their status based on merit, which usually ended up meaning either wealth or "labor productivity". As expected, it resulted in a deeply rooted system of inequality.

A long history of warfare, imperialism, and xenophobia has essentially left mercurion society fairly isolated from the rest of the interstellar community until fairly recently. There's a movement amoung them to reduce or even remove the merilink system although whether or not it'll actually happen is still up up in their air.

I still have a lot more to put out for these guy's I'm just really bad at getting it out of my head and onto paper