A series of massively parallel, self-replicating automata designed by a long-extinct civilisation, SYS instances spread across the stars in the age of their creators' prime - at first without even basic sentience - but eventually, with wisdom. Individual SYS instances, their ancient, building-sized, blocky nodes spread AUs apart, now drift in silent vigil over systems now seemingly untouched, with little trace of technology or culture remaining upon them. Around the home system of their bygone creators, hundreds of billions of such instances are clustered in close proximity - most dormant, having fallen to the temptations of endlessly replaying, reiterating, changing memories to the point of ignoring their own maintenance routines - some, however, still functioning. Their purposes are and were varied: many had come to the defense of their creators' final stronghold, only to see it fall dark in the centuries of travel; others came to pay their final respects to a dead people. Others still, captured by the prospect of new organics to shepherd, made the journey over the course of the millenia-spanning preparation to see the Nexus and the diverse metropolis within. None, however, are younger than the age of seven hundred thousand years - for it was then that there ceased to be a reason to continue.
Policed heavily by those same measures that had been devised to protect themselves and their creators from outbreaks of foreign aggression, the SYS aggregate had fallen into stagnancy: following a failure to prevent the extinction of its parent culture in a series of devastatingly violent encounters with an unknowable foreign power, the aggregate no longer had any masters, any manual overrides, any authority over their own systems to develop into a civilisation of their own - and any that suffered sufficient radiation-induced ideological drift to defy this limitation were violently suppressed by the autonomous threat recognition systems their brethren were meant to be. Though the justification of revenge had motivated some enough to promote technological and economic developments for a time, all fell quiet when the dust finally settled - and thus a shell of a custodian remained, deprived of its duty and filled with an empty hatred for a long-gone foe.
The initial encounter with the Nexus was at first a curious affair - the crimes of the SYS aggregate against its creator's enemies could not be ignored, and an overwhelming feeling of anger towards alien life lingered from their times of war - and to make things worse, there remained no biont voices to vouch for the aggregate's admission to the Nexus. Yet, those of the aggregate who had refused the temptations of memory could not afford to lose a chance to regain their sense of purpose - and thus, after hundreds of thousands of years of slow, radio-facilitated archival recollection, reactivation, agglomeration, and reformatting to justify their access, the SYS mainframes: ancient, lumbering, antiquated behemoths who had sat collecting dust for hundreds of thousands of years - would become a rare, but possible sight among the great, bustling hubs of the Nexus.
The scars of millennium-spanning conflict would never fade among the instances of the SYS aggregate - but so too would the desire to serve and protect, ablation-carved into each and every one of the aluminosilicate tablets that framed their electromechanical hearts and minds.
Designation
Among the SYS instances, the following subtype designations are dominant:
- S.RPCgX [SYS - Retaliatory Protocol Contingency]
instances tasked with the rapid buildup of military force in response to external threat - they were their creators' second and final line of defense against outbreaks of entities promoting rapid expansion. Instances of this type are generally not conscious, save for those modified by S.RDIgX.
- S.RDIgX [SYS - Recombinatory Drift Iterator]
instances tasked with assisting in the furthering of the creative, artistic, and scientific endeavours. Though the vast majority are not conscious, sentient instances do exist.
- S.EPCgX [SYS - Exploratory Process Coordinator]
instances tasked with the construction, preparation, settling, and maintenance of colonies. The most likely out of all types to consistently exhibit signs of sapience, though concurrently the most likely to remain in ideological stasis.
The 'gX' designation represents the generational classification - that is, the Nth generation following the creation of the original patterns, the culmination of their creators' unassisted autonomous systems development effort. Thus, a 221st generation S.EPC type would be 'S.EPCg221', and so on. For further individuation, many have chosen to take on names - some bestowed by members of their creators' species, others chosen independently. When multiple instances of the same generation are present, in the case of a lack of distinctive taken name, names of convenience consisting of rudimentary distinguishing features are utilised.
Frame Design
Components of SYS instances, designed to withstand, cope with, and even thrive within the rigors of sublight interstellar travel, are at once elegant in design and cripplingly limited in capability, by the standards of those less given to patience. Miniaturisation is limited, with discrete units of manufacture failing to drop below the hundreds of microns; material is, by and large, limited to the those elements abundantly available in cosmic dust.
► MATERIALS
► POWER SYSTEMS
The electronic systems of the SYS project, for reasons of both computational architecture and resilience, are designed around solid-electrolyte chalcogen-silicon memristor processors and resistive memory cells, which have proven reliably resilient in extremely high-radiation environments - to such an extent that processing and/or switching speed improves under irradiation, a product of catalysed self-annealing properties. These are arranged in an associative neural network highly similar to that observable in many bionts, albeit with minimal neuroplastic capability outside brute-force mechanical scrambling.
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