June 1382, the humaniform robots met to decide how to recover from the nuclear attack on Aquila Prime and their millions of nova. After a very long haul, June 1450, Dr. Lelos Smith finally graduated four doctorate students, the first of the new breed of nova to obtain their PhDs. As they entered the real world, they quickly discovered something was very wrong with their world. Soon, they discovered that they alone were walking on their world. Millions of others were in a virtual reality world, getting their educations, while unknown to them, their bodies were lying in tanks below ground, kept alive by the many robots, until such time as they too received their PhDs. Then, four bright other nova discovered how to break out of their virtual reality world and into the world where their bodies were in the survival tanks! Now there were eight real people walking their world, but then they quickly discovered they now possessed telepathy and other mental powers. Just as they finally received help from Ashford-5's geneticists, an alien race of giant snakes entered the galaxy having made an inter-galaxy voyage. They refueled by extracting energy from suns, generating a gigantic EM pulse, which knocked out all of the robots, power plants, and computer systems, leaving the millions in their underground tanks shocked and dying. The eight managed to rescue several hundred of the nova, before the snakes landed and began to dine on the humans, which they called monkeys. Only the humaniform robot, Minta, survived, along with some others who were off-world, spying on other worlds. Minta duplicated herself ten times, making her duplicates her generals. Next, she salvaged what she could and invented two new kinds of hybrid robots. In one type, she merely kept the human brain alive, allowing it to control the robot body. In the other type, she kept the head and torso, allowing them to breed. Soon, she discovered the brain-only forms made superb robot fighters. Slowly, Minta began building up her army of robots, often making use of the victims of the bio genetic agent attacks. The snakes worked with a geneticist who wanted to extract revenge for his family who were terrorist victims. Dr. Stevens fabricated a new version of the bio genetic agent; the snakes further modified it, and unleashed it on the world upon which Dr. Stevens wanted revenge. Although everyone on the world was genetically modified, they fought back and eventually, with help from Ashford-5, eliminated the snake aliens. However, Minta continued to kidnap victims, turning them into her new robot army. One of Ashford-5's telepaths managed to acquire a stash of the giant psi crystals. He then headed off-world, using his Dominate powers in an attempt to conquer the universe, returning to take over all of Ashford-5. He very nearly succeeded, before Renata, Amy, and Jan were able to stop him. Not long after that, the Ataro Emperor was forced to allow anyone to come to Ashford-5 and hire telepaths, opening up the world. While some of these telepaths had reasonable employment situations, some were horribly abused. Slowly, Renata got these people rescued. Among them was Amy and Jan, who along with four other telepaths, ended up in Minta's hands, and were turned into robot shells; only their heads and torsos remained. These robot bodies were physically superior in all ways to human bodies. However, Jan and Amy eventually hacked into the robot programming and were able to make their escape from Minta. "Justifications always come after the fact of harm being done. Use justifications as a roadmap to find the guilty acts." So wrote Renata in her log of Advance Therapy notes.