A3 post-civilisational diaspora of ancient alien bioconstructs
Systems determined by Owner investigation or observation to possess traces of Great One activity
There is no Great One client as such, for any theorised polity or ancestral civilisation is either extinct, and has been for millions of years, or it has long since ceased to exert meaningful control over their race, fading into stagnation or dormancy. Instead the beings are granted clientship individually as encountered, pending successful interaction. To date the Owners and client species of the Nexus have made contact with three Great Ones, achieved meaningful communication with two, and excavated the remains of a fourth found dead and drifting in orbit of a rogue superjovian in deep space.
The Scutum-Centaurus Volume, the Cryojovian Volume, or simply the Volume is a broadly agreed upon term used by those client species aware of the Great Ones' existence to refer to the extent of their interstellar voyaging. It is highly irregular in its dimensions, its epicentre uncertain but presumably located somewhere within the 'locality', a portion of the eponymous spiral arm where the ancient traces of their activity are most dense. Beyond this, however, virtually nothing is agreed upon.
For the Great Ones are nomadic beings, and the Volume represents not expansion but an outward exodus from an unknown point of origin. They claim no territory, it is vanishingly rare that they leave any archaeological remnants behind, and in a universe where FTL does not function its true extent can only be hypothesised, based off ambiguously artificial EM signals and anomalous observations of distant celestial bodies.
Some estimate that the Volume extends for a few tens of thousands of light-years across the Scutum-Centaurus arm, brushing the outer reaches of the Sagittarius and the Norma. These clients refuse to speculate, basing their estimates only off of evidence deemed reliable by the Owners to a high degree of probability. Others point out that in the millions of years the locality's megastructure ruins have been dated to, it would have been possible for them to spread across the entire galaxy even at STL speeds. Empiricist critics raise the objection that they would then be ever more thinly spread out among the stars, for despite their enigmatic, seemingly spiritual preoccupation with the 'the Child', and childhood, it is not known whether they can actually reproduce. The dead remains studied by the Owners revealed that Great One cells contain no genes, their repair and division presumably mediated entirely by advanced technology.
The Precursor beliefs of the Church of Autology are another data point used in favour of the radical position. This human client located in the Orion spur - the opposite side of the galaxy - is a tantalising clue to some. Yet no definite connection can be proven, further weakened by the fact the Church is not aware of the existence of the species or the Volume.
Whatever the case, and whatever the truth may be, its definition is now complicated by the Nexus. A Great One has already crossed into clientspace, and more troublingly still, reports of sightings and discoveries have been dug up from the archives of many clients dating back tens of thousands of years before their first contact with the Owners at all. None of the Great Ones so far observed possess the technology to burrow between universes, but they are three out of an unknowable number of the beings.
What could be out there, deeper into the arm?
