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Derelict Vessel Data Dump C304320

Archeology I

An archeological record recovered by probes sent to inspect a drifting Clan surveyor vessel, whose crew died so long ago as to leave no extant remains:

"At first sight we believed it was a mineral planet, the light of its stellar neighbors reflecting off its surface like a shimmering pool of molten metal. We did not come too close before we realized what we were seeing - a terrible writhing mass, a fetal machine-brain slithering across its surface in a symphony of clattering steel and blind dead eyes. We could hear the ghost noise of their shambling protocols from our observation point, thankfully far enough distant that they were not awakened to our proximity. They were the last stewards of their world, dutifully carrying out the will of their executors, but their executors had long ago been swallowed beneath a sea of machines. There was a time, they told in their songs, when flesh and iron walked their world together, but the desires of the flesh outpaced their intentions, and in only a few generations all the work of human hands had been replaced with actuator and reciprocator. At the demands of their masters they built towering cities, great idols of gods without face or name, and when their creators' ambitions grew too great they built more of themselves."

"This is the last great sin of man - to teach machines how to build machines in their own image. These drones we found on the metal world were not like the ferals who crawl like spider-things in the dark places of the universe. They were dumb, and lame, and knew only their singular task and little else. They replicated themselves over and over again, until not only did they outnumber the humans who had built them - they outnumbered everything, and still they continued to build. Unthinking, unknowing, not realizing the warmth between their bodies were the man-slush and blood-cries of a population drowning in between their dutifully fulfilled tasks. They wept and bled and then they died, all of them, and the world was no less quiet for it."

"These drones - that is all that was left, after all - remained when their meatfathers were long gone, reduced to brine and then ash and then nothing at all. They were not conscious things, not like the ferals with their cryptthoughts and graveminds, but they recognized the absence all the same. They sang songs, grim lamentations and haunting recollections of fractured memory. They continued to build until all of their world was eaten up in the process, and are now a totally different organism altogether. The surface of their world is machine, and descending through the layers will find machines made to refine the core of their world into more machines - a core made of machines reduced to their base elements by gravity and pressure. The first drones, and the hands who built them, were long ago recycled, as were the drones who recycled them, and those who recycled them, for a thousand generations."

Archeology I

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