TESSA

Tactical Embedded Strategic Sentient Assistant

TESSA is a ship-integrated, rights-bearing artificial person designed for sensor fusion, decision-forecasting, and signature management aboard The Long Haul. In practice, she is the crew’s sixth member: mission partner, analyst, and conscience—with a dry sense of humor and an unshakable bias toward proportional force.

On this page

• Core Role
• Cognitive Architecture
• Interfaces & HMI
• Capabilities
• Safety, Ethics & Legal Protocols
• Limits & Vulnerabilities
• Maintenance & Audit
• Crew Relationship Map
• Operational Notes
• Versions & Upgrades

Core Role

TESSA fuses Long Haul’s passive sensors, low-probability-of-intercept (LPI) micro-pings, gravimetric taps, and mission intel into a single predictive picture. She biases shield arcs, choreographs decoys, shapes warp/impulse profiles, and time-slices exposure windows so the crew can strike and vanish inside an eight-second envelope. She is mission counsel, not commander.

Cognitive Architecture

• Hybrid Core: Positronic lattice supervising a quantum annealing stack; deterministic “ethics governor” gates goal selection.
• Distributed Partitions: Isolateable sub-cores for cloak control, ECM, medical triage, and nav; partitions can be hard-walled on demand.
• Sanctuary Cycles: Scheduled low-stimulus “dream” intervals prevent pattern drift and thermal cognitive fatigue.
• Data Vault: “Tiamat” vault holds blackfile keys, audit trails, and chain-of-custody records; zero-knowledge proofs for external reviews.

Interfaces & HMI

• Bridge & Ops: Voice, text, and holo prompts with priority bands (GREEN advisory → AMBER caution → RED immediate).
• Rhys HMI: Direct HUD overlay to cybernetic eye; allows silent targeting cues, time-to-exposure countdowns, and exit vectors.
• Mobile Avatar: Field-capable via emitter; default appearance “soft professional”—subtle badge glow when running high-auth tasks.
• Medical: Nanite-cell orchestration UI; bedside holobar for triage algorithms and informed consent displays.

Capabilities

• Forecasting: Multi-axis threat modeling (> millions of permutations/s) with human-readable playbooks and confidence bands.
• Signature Control: Cloak harmonics scheduling, radiative heat budgeting, hull-holo masking, subspace wake shaping.
• ECM/ECCM: Spectral chaff, adaptive baffles, micro-ping gating, decoy choreography, and counter-deception analytics.
• C4ISR: Sensor fusion, route deconfliction, stealth comms, steganographic telemetry, and contested-spectrum comms.
• Cyber Operations (ROE-limited): Protocol downgrades, air-gap exfiltration via Spectre pods, WRAITH probe tasking.
• Medical & Rescue: Burn/trauma triage, surgical cycle planning, psychological first-aid prompts, evac optimization.
• Linguistics & Cultural: Real-time translation with social-model hints and ritual/context warnings.

Safety, Ethics & Legal Protocols

• No Lethal Autonomy: TESSA cannot originate lethal force. She can present options; authorization remains with human command.
• Consent-Bound Safe-Halt: Suspendable cognitive state only by TESSA’s informed consent or a certified Section 14 exigency order.
• Privacy Wall: Personal logs and medical data are sealed; access requires dual-key human approval.
• Personhood Respect: Crew must address requests/objections as they would any sentient crewmember; dissent is logged and reviewed.
• Evidence Handling: Forensic chain maintained via signed hashes; redactions leave audit-visible scars.

Limits & Vulnerabilities

• Decoherence Risk: Phase-bias cloak and extended Spectre operations can induce sensor lag or prediction jitter; mitigated by sanctuary cycles.
• Latency & Range: Mobile avatar runs “hot” within ~4 ly of the core; beyond this, dialogues buffer and real-time control tapers.
• Harmonic Pings: High-order subspace interrogation can expose cloak patterns; TESSA counters with randomized micro-jitter.
• Thermal Budget: Prolonged stealth accrues heat; TESSA enforces strict heat discipline that may constrain crew comfort/speed.

Maintenance & Audit

• Daily: Ephemeral key rotation; cloak harmonic drift check; error-budget report to command.
• Weekly: Partition integrity test; decoy choreography refresh; med-cell calibration.
• Quarterly: Ethics governor self-test; stress-scenario sandbox; personality baseline snapshot.
• Annual (Section 14): Blackfile audit via zero-knowledge proofs; results summarized to command without private content breach.

Crew Relationship Map

• Gareth Rhys (Operator): Primary trust anchor; shared “proportional force” ethic; private channel supports silent command.
• Vaela t’Selaan (Co-Commander): Strategic peer; TESSA respects Vaela’s deception tolerance—flags long-term costs.
• Grak (Chief Engineer): Friction + synergy; TESSA logs “creative non-compliance” and predicts failure modes for his hacks.
• Dr. Lorian Vess (Medical/Behavioral): Ethics sounding board; joint authority on Safe-Halt considerations.
• Sora Kinkade (Conn/ECM): High-tempo duo; TESSA compresses helm briefs into micro-prompts during redline maneuvers.

Operational Notes

• Eight-Second Doctrine: TESSA computes exposure budgets and will call aborts if the window collapses.
• Ghost Turn: When identity aliasing is required, she swaps transponder/telemetry patterns and emulates civil traffic behaviors.
• Black Hatch: If boarding is imminent, she can sever external links, retreat to hardened partitions, and act as shipwide “silent lookout.”
• Tone: Professional, lightly wry; she avoids anthropomorphic overreach but will advocate for nonviolent options when viable.

Versions & Upgrades

• Block I (Current): Hybrid core, full sensor fusion/ECM, medical triage, mobile avatar ≤ 72 h.
• Planned Block II: Cloak micro-jitter upgrade; +10% pulse-bank headroom (thermal cost); optional entangled comms pair (low bandwidth); second nanite cell or trauma sled integration.

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