Earth Central Security

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Earth Central Security is a government organisation tasked with protecting security of the human Polity. Originally developed as the security force of the AI Earth Central (ruler of the Polity), it has since expanded to include the Polity's military, rescue services, medical systems and Intelligence Services. It does not, however, include the police, who have a separate administration (although federal policing is still the responsibility of ECS). Some of ECS's personnel, notably Ian Cormac and Horace Blegg, have attained a mythical status in Polity society.

ECS agents, responsible for dealing with serious crime and national security issues, are known as "monitors" or "enforcers" depending on their training and function. To become an ECS agent, it is necessary to have several years military or law-enforcement experience, and to undertake a rigorous training and conditioning programme. High-ranking ECS agents have access to vast resources to assist them in their asigments (when investigating a terrorist attack on a Polity space station, Agent Cormac was given control over a four-kilometre interstellar dreadnaught).

“	Like a discarded child-god's building block, the two-kilometre cube of ceramal which was the headquarters of Earth Central Security rested on the shore of Lake Geneva. There were no windows or doors in this structure and, for the 50,000 people that worked there, the only ingress was via runcible. They came in naked and left naked, and were scrutinized molecule by molecule each way, yet even they had no idea what information was gathered, what decisions where reached, and what orders given. Each time they left, they left part of their minds inside, downloaded into another mind that knew it all. Some comedian, at the inception of the project, had christened him Hal, after the computer in an ancient classic, but that was now classified information. Earth Central was an AI, and an exceptionally large AI for a time when a planetary co-ordinator could be lost in an ashtray. Earth Central was the size of a tennis ball, but then terabytes of information were processed in its etched-atom circuits in picoseconds; information received, collated, acted upon. Orders given. The ruler of the human polity was not human.	„
—Gridlinked, Prologue

Notable ECS Operatives

Ian Cormac- regarded as perhaps ECS's best agent. Eventually turned against ECS after discovering Earth Central's corruptoin.
Horace Blegg- the highest ranking human in ECS, belived to have survived the Hiroshima bombing. Later found to be a creation of Earth Central, with implanted false memories.
Sable Keech- ECS monitor who hunted down 8 infamous war criminals from the Prador War. When killed, his body was converted to a "reification" cyborg to continue his investigations.
David McGrooger- sent as a polity representative to the foreign worlds of Bromal and Sudoria, where he barely survived the conflict his arrival caused.