: But you have a point that maybe most other races, the ones the Pfhor sell
: slaves to, are too cautious about AI to even accept that level of risk,
: and so prefer to rely on easily-crushed slave labor instead of
: might-accidentally-turn-your-planet-into-paperclips robot labor. Maybe,
: even, the thing that makes the Pfhor the bastions of military might that
: they are is their reckless use of dangerous automatons. Although you'd
: think we would have seen more of them in that case, but I guess we never
: really see a full-on Pfhor slave-taking force show up in any of the canon
: games. We see the crew of a random scoutship in the first game, and the
: staff of a backwater planet on punishment assignment in the other two.
: Maybe when the Pfhor returned to sack Tau Ceti IV, it wasn't fleshy
: Fighters and Troopers and Hunters but huge hunter-killer drone ships and
: an army of Terminators marching the slaves into autonomous transports
: before the network of planet-killer drones positioning themselves in the
: skies above nuked the whole place to bedrock.
One thing worth noting is that we seem to encounter more cyborgs than actual robots throughout the entirety of the Marathon series - and I'm not just thinking of the S'pht here. The Pfhor themselves use all manner of cyborgs or cyborg-like beings to implement their will. The most notable one is of course the Pfhor controller we kill on Pfhoraphobia, but there are others too: most importantly, the Assimilated BoBs and Juggernauts both embody a combination of organic and mechanical parts (Juggernauts bleed, at least in the first game). I'm not perfectly sure what to make of this, but it certainly complicates the picture a bit.
Vale,
Perseus
