"We were like you once. . ."
"Fragile, small, weak. Like infants, nascent beings who have only taken their first steps into the world. Fear not, Anthropos, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Many things of great virtue have you still; A beating heart and vibrant soul, a mind, a sapient brain with limitless potential, a will solid as our frame, set to survive."
Cold fingertips, that's what startled him most, caught eternally in some charade of life and death. For all the carefully grafted nerves and muscles wrapping steel bones and silicone cartilage, watching with each little movement of those digits tugging upon exposed tendons, nothing about her screamed that they were, or ever could be the same. Still, they grazed across his unmoving, sedated skin, dancing to the tags around his neck, Alekos. An Anthropos, ushured soon into a new age of humanity.
The convergent one spoke to him yet more, through the voice of a young woman despite her appearance. Artificial gray visage of the Michaní, yet the natural milky, real eyes of an Anthropos gaze back. "You have fought so very hard Alekos." The amalgamated machine coos, "Do you even know for what you die? Propaganda has corrupted your mind dear Alekos. . ." Servos can be heard whirring above, slowly, slowly descending upon the paralyzed man, buzzing endlessly in his head. "It's to be expected of course, the last vestige of a species clinging to life as the rest evolve. The wheat from the chaff to use an archaic phrase."
Haunched over Alekos, the Synklino, twice his mass in bulk and height, interfaces with a console briefly. Her touch sending lagless signals streaking across the frame's network of synapses, right to its brain. And without delay a crimson grid overlays itself upon the Anthropos, consuming him in light. "I can tell you are still so unsure of this, perhaps the truth will set your spirit free. I forget, you see, that the life of your kind is a mere blip to ours." She muses, her tone so naturally aloof, with the smallest hints of malice.
"I speak of our ancestors, long ago; As society dredged itself up from the bowels of chaos into the first Unity, little thought was given to the ground from which we walked, the planet which should have been held sacred above all else as our mother. Even then under one nation still we squabbled over creed and kin as the world around us decayed. As new generations were left to deal with the sins of the old, the damage had long since been done." She takes a moment of silence, reverently gazing off into the distance. "Even knowing the tragedy unspooling, our kind bred and multiplied, reaching a tipping point at last. Estimates suggest over two generations 96.35% of all life faced near or total extinction. For all our great minds and ascendant technology, still we could not save our planet, nor it seemed, our race. At least, as we knew it then."
Alekos begins to sputter and cough, his breathing rapidly increasing in rate as sedatives begin to wear. Yet it seems the Synklino does nothing to assuage his pain as blades descend upon him. "Two solutions arose simultaneously. Extend our reach at last to the stars. . . And build us new bodies that new neither hunger, nor thirst. Do you see. . ?" She asks gently as horrid screams at last escape the Anthropos' throat, running it raw. "True evolution occurs under strain of death."
"The first of us bore little success, no more than base impulses directly from the brains moving simple Michani. Soon we found that coupled with yet more pieces of the original host, a heart, veins, a spinal cord, the base impulses grew stronger more in sync. Perhaps it speaks to the existence of an ephemeral soul, or perhaps our hubris clinging to life. Primitive still these first Synklino were, and they decayed far quicker than the ancient Anthropos. It was no salvation, but hastened our search through the heavens." At last the hoarse wails came to an end, Alekos' body still twitching ever so slightly.
Her facsimile of a face most mechanical rose upward to the ceiling and beyond, "Then, as we explored our system, a miracle revealed itself. This universe of ours is so incomphrehensibly vast, truly gods must exist beyond our perception. . . A ship of impossible design wandered into our space, immense yet silent as the grave. Upon that ship existed something just one, a nothing more. You know of what I speak, don't you Alekos?" As she turned her crystalline eyes to sterile table before her, she spoke to little more than scattered organs and dissected bits. Yet still she continued, "The Progenitor Flesh." The Synklino spoke in hushed tones and of reverent mind.
"Did it escape cataclysm? Did it come from a place where yet more of its kind await its return? Perhaps it was a prison set adrift the empty vastness of the stars. But to us, it became our salvation, the closest thing to a living God."
Mechanical arms strip the nerves from the skin, and cleanse the deep wounds. "Perhaps it was too late to save the Anthropos of old. . ." She would sigh, but no air expels itself from her false throat of thick wire and pulsating arteries. "Yet, with the Progenitor Flesh, the allure of immortality had shown itself, forever could we sustain, the blood and the bile, the gray matter and our muscles, every last shred of our biology. Approximately 71.08% Of Chamenos' population accepted this step into the unknown and evolved into the Synklino. Yet some resisted, and as you know, do to this day."
A mist of freezing fog envelopes the room briefly, a frame much like her own emerges from a bleak pod. "Still. There is cost, all life comes at cost. . . Perhaps you know this much, The Progenitor Flesh requires biomass in equal shares to create the nectar of our immortality. And with Chamenos dying as it is, we must grip the stars with both hands, as one race, as a unified people, as Synklino. Do you understand Alekos. . ?"
"I. . . Under. . . Stand. . ." A voice croaks from within the newborn, as a face much like its last is plated over those green straining eyes.
Planet Chamenos; Festival of Unity, Day 1,678.
Approximately 11.45% of the world's population remain pure, dying Anthropos, clinging to the small vestiges of life they can. Feeding upon the goods of a time long past, pitiful subsistence farming, and even one another. Still, despite their torturous existence generation after generation they resist a peaceful and harmonic convergence with Michani. It strains the collective consciousness, and sparks division even among the Synklino. Some cannot bear the idea of bringing arms against their kin, others believe them a plague upon an already dried up world, another group believes the overlong Festival only deters their growth into the stars, and more yet still are saddled somewhere between. What is clear; a decision will be made soon.
The Synklino are not a vast population, for even with all the power of The Progenitor Flesh, new souls cannot be constructed. Still, they are undying, in a fashion, yet one day perhaps without the ability to procreate, they still teeter upon extinction. The propagation of their way of life requires two key components, biomass, that has long run dry across the barren world of Chamenos, beyond the remaining Anthropos and what flora and fauna can be sustained in the poisoned soil. And, new nervous systems. Beyond that of their kin, in this way, the species can evolve yet further, something many hold deep in their still beating hearts. And so, to worlds beyond, they send Titans with blessings of The Progenitor Flesh among their small bands.
Centralized and unified are the Synklino, bearing little political stripes or creed. Most thinking little more than how they can advance their species as a whole. Though to be sure, there's a certain individualism that remains from their lives as Anthropos, such beings are oft' the ones sent alongside their Titans of flesh and machine to strike out amidst the stars.
Their living God? Some hold it with such reverance, like a miraculous spirit from the vast beyond that descended upon them in their time of dire need. Others view it merely as a tool to cast bodies of steel and muscle from, to sustain their everlasting life. The entity itself, the Progenitor Flesh as they call it appears as a undulating mass of gray matter. Its immensity finds itself home at the center of their capital, in the only warm recess on Chamenos deep near the core, the Well of the World. The being gives off a constant band of radiation across countless wavelengths yet no technology has been able to divine its will, its thoughts, its feelings, or mental capacity. In truth, little is known save for that which it can create. Torturing its body with electrical impulses the Progenitor Flesh can be made to spawn organic matter as simple as bone and blood, and as complex as the eyes or other organs, in turn diminishing in size, requiring an equal mass of living matter in turn. Yet it cannot birth whole beings or functioning, thinking brains. Hence much of the Synklino's reach into the unknown beyond Chamenos, testing the extent of their evolution.
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Topic: Ramshackle Titans - Rivalla's Retinue Thread - M2 Deployment (Read 10065 times)