The nickname is relative: the training is long and intense and the brawns must be brainy people in fact. A brawn is specially trained to be a companion and helper, the mobile half of such a partnership. A brainship is able to operate independently but is usually employed in partnership with one 'normal' person called a 'brawn' who travels inside the ship much as a pilot would. They are employed as the 'brains' of spacecraft ' brainships', hospitals, and so on, even cities. Shell children do come of age with heavy debts which they must work off in order to become free agents. As such, their offspring would suffer no pain, live a comfortable existence in a metal shell for several centuries, performing unusual service for Central Worlds'. Taking that option, physical growth is stunted, the body is encapsulated in a titanium life-support shell with capacity for computer connections, and the person is raised for 'one of a number of curious professions. The premise introducing the series is that the parents of babies with severe physical disabilities but fully developed brains may allow them to become 'shell people' rather than to be euthanised. Hypatia or AH-1033 is unique among protagonists of the Brain & Brawn Ship series in that she is disabled as a child rather than at birth. The book begins when she contracts the virus at age seven and features her adventures as AH-1033 with her 'brawn' Alex, the human partner whom she secretly loves. She does so, and becomes a brainship, a cyborg human being and interstellar spacecraft. Her only hope for a good life, free of the prison her body has become, is to enter the BB Program, named for Brain and Brawn. The Ship Who Searched follows the adventures of Hypatia Cade, whom an alien virus renders quadriplegic. It was first published as a serial in the monthly Amazing Stories, June to September, and as a paperback original by Baen Books in August 1992. It is the third of seven books in The Ship Who Sang series by McCaffrey and four other authors, and the only one by Lackey. The Ship Who Searched is a science fiction novel by American writers Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey.

The Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey