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Most people thought the drones were androids: human-shaped robots. They only knew them from TV: unit after unit standing motionless in a row, black rubber skin gleaming, with a drone commander unit with its orange shoulder patch at the front, dark lenses staring blankly ahead. But it had turned out that building a device this complex was easier when you took advantage of some … prior art. Human nervous systems still out-performed all but the most advanced computers, and growing a clone in a vat was cheaper than assembling a robot from parts. Separating the higher-level cognitive functions from consciousness had proven to be trickier than expected. But by inserting a mediator between the cortex and the brainstem, the drone creators were able to take advantage of the autonomous functions of the vegetative nervous system, as well as tap into the cognitive processing power of the cortex, all the while staying in control of the drone’s actions. But even the creators didn’t know what w...