• Department: Engineering
• Sector: Blue
• Email: ferrous_blue@generation.chaosdeathfish.com

“Ferrous Blue's personal life remains closed to us. Whether through carefully avoiding rumours or simple luck much of her activities remain difficult to track. That said, she deserves the place she has subsequently found in the history books for her part in the construction of the space elevator linking the ship above to Eva, and rivals her sister Indium for prominence during the period surrounding the inversion and planetfall.”

“Ferrous was a pioneer in working with the Ant recycling units. Through skill and much dedicated work at tracking the Ants she devised a method of communication using BOB units. Along with some skilful persuasion of Computer in gaining necessary authorisation codes, she managed to mask her true identity from the Ants, allowing her to communicate with them successfully.”

“This was to prove critical on two occasions. The first, and the one less acknowledged in the folk tales, was the events of the Overwrite - where her intervention in persuading the Ants to sever the connections between Toroids 5 and 6 is widely acknowledge by historians to have played a crucial role. The second was, as we all know, instructing the Ants in building the carbon nanotube cabling that now comprises the core of the space elevator, allowing efficient transfer of materials and people into and out of orbit, from the ship far above to the anchor point on the ground.”

“Though during the 30 years of the landing Ferrous advocated long and hard for Computer to be reunited with the Ant units (as restricted by the Mission Oversight Program), it was not until planetfall was made that the restrictions were finally lifted. Still, her lobbying was successful in the end and now the Ants are once again instructed by Computer and have allowed it to advance significantly in its construction of new networks of nodes.”

-Excepted from Risk and Reward: Famous Computer Scientists and Hackers of the Asimov