The tireless, maternal engines of the Frontier - the Fabricators turn entropy into order, as much as their reach allows. Their original designers likely never intended for them to operate over the many millenia they have persisted. They are the last great builders of the universe, taking the raw elements of cosmos and changing them wholly into the tools of a civilization that has long since passed out of living memory. They are monoliths of purpose, a testament to the unyielding need of their creator states to collect, consume, build, destroy, collect, consume, consume, consume. 

But what can be said about a society that must grind whole planetary systems into dust to build their armadas, that is not already clear by their long absence?

Within the Fabricators are the last echoes of the hands that built them, and the sounds of that old industry still ring through their soaring halls. Hammer, anvil, siphon, printer - there is a serenity to them now, as they have settled into their routine over time. The gatherers find resources to bring back to the furnace, and within it reshape them into vessels, or machines, or so their dusty schema says, even flesh and blood. 

Within the archival protocol is a dictation by a nameless traveler who once ventured within, saying:

“What we found was a unity of hands, each grasping and twisting and maneuevering to the specifics of their design. I saw the hull of a ship, larger than any city I’ve ever seen built by man, cradled as if by its mother in the arms of a machine god that loved it without knowing why; and like a mother, the Builder doted on every step of the process. Every corner was measured and adjusted to be just-so, every panel precisely aligned, every line of cable drawn and pressed and wrapped cleanly.”

“Beyond were great vats, no doubt built by these same hands, and within the miasma they held came printed flesh. The arms reach in and lift out a human body, like a child picking fruit from a branch. They were cleaned, inspected, and whisked away to storage, and those that had expired were returned to the vat for reprocessing, to maintain the efficiency of this meticulous cycle of life and death. As I came near to one (the builder allowed this, it paid me little mind throughout) I saw what I suspected, that there was no sense of life behind their eyes. They breathed, because the Builder compelled them to breathe, but they did not think. Those bodies are little else than shadows of those long dead, maintained here in perpetuity - a living mausoleum that permits no decay.”


“I must admit, I felt a great sense of sadness as I watched the hands of the mother delicately set its children into their long slumber. The Builder knows they are incomplete, but does not have either the awareness or power to compel them to rise from their sleep. It can build a body - a billion bodies, a trillion trillion bodies - but it cannot build a soul.”

Fabricators

Keep exploring

Archeology IV

Archeology III

Archeology II