Zelther Rathian Group
The Zelther Rathian Group was a short-lived offshoot of the Enhanced Autonomous Research Laboratory. It was founded by the genious Welgan Tyrox in a bid for greater autonomy in his research in to AI.
From its research labs, great strides in shipborne AI were made. Unfortunately, some human experiments were also conducted. This served only to diminish its respect in the community. Some journalists even speculated that Tryox was trying to find a way to embed human brains into computer hardware.
Those urban legends were caused due to the success of the Group in quasi-organic computing. This field of computing was in its infancy when the Group began, and Tryox was successful in showing how a silicone-based organism could be manufactured to function as both an entity and a computer. This led to a series of fastly evolving organisms–some of whom escaped altogether. This led to vidramas of silicone monsters coming back to humanity in a millenium and wreck devistation. However, the intelligence of these organisms never evolved beyond that of an average house cat.
The lessons learned by these experiments led the Group to several startling discoveries in non-organic silicone computing, including the ability to embed part of a computer permenantly in the Soup. This allowed a significantly larger computer to be stored physically in less space. Scientists try to describe this phenomina as an iceberg. What exists in real space is just the tip.
Unfortunately, after these discoveries there were few other advances. Problems in maintaining a Soup bubble with a ship that also travelled in both Soup and real space led to intense research that led to cost overruns. These costs caused the Group to go bankrupt and be reintegrated back into the Laboratory.