Meet Uurah: the immortal king’s ultimate android assistant #MilitarySpaceOpera #MFRWhooks

Uurah (OOH-rah) is what Pietas calls his assistant, doctor, keeper-of-Peril-rules, bodyguard, walking calendar, and form afficionado android.

When asked, Pietas always says that in Naro, the language of the Ultra people, Uurah means servant. Pietas is fond of the name. His first flagship was the Uurahkal.

Uurah Acrostic

UURAH as an acrostic gives us some interesting possibilities because those two U's make it feel slightly unusual—which suits an android. If I meant it to read like an actual designation that later became the name Uurah, I could lean toward technical rather than poetic. A few ideas:

Universal Utility, Retrieval, Analysis Hub
Since Uurah was originally designed as a sophisticated multipurpose system. "Hub" also works beautifully because other androids receive updates through Uurah.

Unified Utility, Research & Analysis Hub
A little more academic/technical. It suggests information management rather than physical service.

Universal User Response & Assistance Hub
This sounds like an original service-oriented designation—which becomes rather amusing considering what Uurah eventually becomes.

Unified User Relations & Assistance Humanoid
Very plausible corporate/android terminology. It also has that faintly sterile manufacturer's-label quality.

Universal Utility & Response Android, Humanoid
More explicitly identifies what Uurah is, although the grammar feels slightly engineered to produce the acronym—which corporations have been known to do.

But I could make this more specific by stating what Uurah was built to do, rather than what he does now.

The android is ancient Ylyptyan technology, extraordinarily capable, Pietas's personal attendant, he maintains and upgrades other androids, and has become vastly more than a glorified assistant. If the original creators gave Uurah a technical designation, it could be almost comically inadequate in retrospect.

Something like:

U.U.R.A.H. — Universal Utility, Retrieval & Assistance Humanoid

"Oh. It's an assistance unit."

Twelve thousand years later:

"The 'assistance unit' knows everything, maintains the android network, manages the king, and apparently runs half our civilization when nobody is looking."

That feels on brand for him.

I should add - one of his most important responsibilities is to act as a referee in the immortals' role-playing game, Peril. There, he—not Pietas—is the final authority.

But what if I went with an acrostic as a character description rather than an acronym/designation? That's a different and much more fun direction:

Unfailingly precise
Unflappable
Resourceful
Attentive
Honorable

Not bad. It fits him. Or, from Pietas’s point of view:

Utterly
Unable to
Respect
Authority regarding unnecessary
Household forms.

Uurah: My lord, the household forms remain necessary.
Pietas: And now you see my problem.

Whatever the original meaning, this android is now Pietas’s shadow. If the king needs something done, Uurah sees to it. He has his own fleet of android assistants to make things happen.

I created a sigil for him. Simple, effective, standard colors for the Empire. If you can’t tell, the design is patterned after a gavel, since so much judgment is left to him. But it also resembles connection points to plug into for information or access.

Uurah as Archivist

As an assisstant, he has nearly unlimited access to data, and—to the surprise of Pietas—has become a highly reliable friend. Which does not mean Pietas can get away with skipping paperwork.

As an official archivist for the Imperial Archives, Uurah adds comments using one of two sets of initials:

UA — Uurah Android: Uurah’s own statements and opinions
UQ — Uurah Quoting: statements made on behalf of Pietas

Which leads to exchanges like this one in the Imperial Archives:

UA: This is the established administrative procedure.
UQ: My lord says we are not doing that.
UA: That does not alter the established administrative procedure.
UQ: It does now.

That means Uurah can disagree with Uurah anywhere on the site and have proper documentation supporting the confusion.
Which has to be the most Uurah statement ever in the history of Uurah.

There may be no force in the Empire capable of defeating Uurah—except Uurah acting under a different job description.

If you click the link below because you want to see how an android can bureaucratically argue with himself on behalf of an immortal king, just know:

You are my people.

Discover bureaucracy – android style