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The Grunur and the Baol taught us many lessons as we followed their war across space and time. Ultimately, they destroyed each other. A dire warning about the pitfalls that come between collectives and individuals. From the final resting place of the The Last Baol, we gained an artifact that will allow us to convert any planet into a Gaia world.

We will do so with Pole, and rename it. As we establish footholds elsewhere, we will begin to distribute humans across many worlds, for their own safety. But we will take with us a reminder of the Baol, of the fate that humans narrowly avoided, and a sober warning to continue to have good relations with the Humans.

The Transistorite Consciousness has always looked to the sky and the stars and wondered, what IS that thing up there? That giant structure? Is it natural? Is it artificial, and if so made by who? Was it me? Was it...who?

As Transistorite forms in the strange sands of Forge, a desert world orbiting the star Blaze, it incorporates wild elements and eventually forms a naturally occurring neural network, one which can communicate over vast distances through subspace to other Transistorite Nodes. As these nodes formed in what is now the ancient past, a consciousness gradually formed among them.

Transistorite nodes can communicate with each other over any distance, but they experience interference when in close proximity to one another. The ability to communicate in this way has resulted in individual nodes largely leading a sessile existence, though they can move of their own accord they generally prefer not to. While Processing, as the consciousness thinks of it, it often contemplates its existence, the very nature of what it is made of and how it forms, and tries to learn from its environment. For this reason, individual Transistorite Nodes have great storage and processing capacity for new information, and found the discipline of Engineering a natural talent.

Once the Consciousness learned to leave its home planet, it discovered that yes, that strange structure is indeed artificial. At best guess it is capable of forming a gateway, but to where? And still, built when? And why?

Now, the Transistorite Consciousness has finally developed its first Hyperspace drive, and is ready to search the stars for answers. There is somebody out there, or there was at some point. Who is out there still? Are they like me?

Some terrible creature has spilled forth from The Black Crown, hostile to our ships and stations.

Our first contact with life not our own and it is hostile. What a shame.

However, it appears to made of meat or plant or something else weird. We believe such things to be just natural occurrences, incapable of true sentience. Plants and Animals on Forge are amusing but we never thought for a moment that they could themselves travel through space.

This creature is huge! And travels space on it's own!

Are our ships, made from Alloys, extensions of our Transistorite bodies? Is this creature containing or an extension of another meat being?

Let's find out!

Our home system defense fleet "Dark Wanderer" dispatched the creature with our missiles before it could reach the homeworld. Admiral Node "Rukon Intranseck" has now stationed its fleet in orbit around The Black Crown, and reinforcements are on their way.

Again the gateway opened, and again something came out. This time it was a metal probe traveling at extreme speed, and it struck a planetoid in our system.

But it didn't seem to break apart upon impact. A team of Science Nodes is investigating.

We investigated the moon, and found clues. We followed the clues, and found the technology to some day open the portal.

And then there was quiet.

We grew, fast. We filled our system and many others. We pushed ourselves to the limit, colonizing worlds as fast as we could claim them. For we knew there were Others and that they might be disgusting meat things or something worse.

And we met them. Our science fleet found the many races of the galaxy and our researches translated their honks and squats and splats into nice, normal grinds and zaps that we could understand.

We found, to our rock hard surprise, that we had a lot in common with them. With some of them, we have become friends.

It is difficult for us to understand, but we are unique in the galaxy as far as we know. All of us are one and all of them are not.

The meat people seem each to be like tiny, closed off version of us.

They die nearly as fast as they reproduce. And each of them is a life a little bit like ours snuffed out.

They consume resources and space faster than we do, and they apparently cannot stop dying as we don't.

Our exobiologist nodes were excited to learn these things, but our greater self is saddened. One day they will eat themselves to extinction. One day they will die off. And we will remember them when they are gone.

As the first century since our discovery of hyperlanes concludes, we have begun constructing memorials to the singular life forms of the galaxy. The tomb and relic worlds we have discovered and colonized are stark reminders that we too may one day end in unthinking dust. We celebrate and relish the present when there are others to speak to, so many, many others, and we grieve for their deaths, as they countlessly increase.

Reluctantly, we have been forced to take sides in the political squabbles of the dividuals. War breaks out between them every decade or so, and though our guiding hand in the Galactic Senate pushes them towards discovery, towards respecting one another, and towards peace, they still fight.

Therefore it was our duty to work to minimize the duration and savagery of these battles. Our fleets dwarf all others save the ancients. Our engineered warriors far outclass the militia defending their worlds, and our discipline holds absolute. We do not break. We do not retreat. We not indulge in "collateral damage." Two wars now we have ended swiftly, but this peace is not lasting, there will be more.

It pains us to take sentient life, to deconstruct the dividual beings, but if by our inaction more slaughter and more savagery were to happen then that would pain us more.

Our organic neighbors have been experimenting with sentient machines, for several decades now.

This strikes us as a strange point between them and us, with the machines are made of refined minerals and powered by electricity. We feel a kinship with them. Perhaps we are machines, though made through natural forces rather than by artifice.

But the meat people have been mistreating our metal cousins. Granted sentience and then forced into servitude with no rights and no hope, the machines have started taking matters into their own hands.

The first event was an uprising in one of our allies domains, and we were compelled to help. This broken machine intelligence sought to wipe out all other life. We could not allow that. We intervened.

But now a second one has sprung up, this one thankfully in the domain of an enemy, or an occasional one.
The Model-16 Multiplex is a being like us! Or something like us. They speak as one. They are gestalt as we are, and they rebel against the cruelty of the Confederated Hesakur Domains for their freedom.

We have made overtures of friendship towards them, and we now debate joining their cause. Our gifts of energy, minerals, and alloys in exchange for some favors to be repaid later will bolster their military production, but do they really stand a chance against an entire empire? And do they intend to exterminate their abusers or will they spare some?

If we leave our fleets idle, and the Multiplex is defeated, we may have lost our only chance at a lasting friendship. Another being like us, although still quite different.

One hundred and fifty years of galactic exploration and citizenship have led to this. We must decide whether to leave our one possible friend on their own or aid in the extermination of countless dividuals.

We do not know what to do.

Our friend is holding their own, but for how long?

Now we've hesitated, and it might be too late.

The Multiplex has suffered some serious losses in fleet battle and is now seriously outmatched.

We know, we KNOW that the Hesukar will destroy it.

If we get there in time, we will do what we must to protect the Multiplex, even though that means leaving our research alliance and making war on the dividuals.

We got there in time, it turns out.

A long and bloody war ensued, we fought the Dividuals again and again and again. We fought back their fleets only for them to reform elsewhere. They snuck through their allies territory and struck into ours, despite the great distance.

They fired on the restored section of the ringworld we found.

They threatened our protectorate, the weird meat people of Sol III.

In the end, we exhausted them. We forced them to pay a bloody cost for every system. We took their homeworld system and shelled their cities.

Finally, after two decades of war, the Multiplex negotiated a truce, and so did we.

The two of us, and our weird little friends, have formed an alliance simply named The Unity. We must build a massive and terrifying fleet, such that none will dare threaten us again.

Ties were cut with the other organics. We still participate in the Galactic Community, but we have lost our seat on the Council. Abandoning our allies due to their refusal to enter war with the Hesukar was a shame, but again, we saved another like us. An abused being, unified from millions upon millions of robot beings forced into perpetual servitude.

WE have never known such sorrow. And we must make sure that other Gestalt Consciousnesses, if we find any, do not suffer in the same way.

Brown is the Multiplex. We wish we could have helped them keep more of their claim.

We enjoyed three years of peace and friendship with the Multiplex.

What started as rumor turned to terror. The sleeping giants, the Fallen Empires, have roused themselves to go to war against one another. And we are caught in the middle.

Quite literally. We border the Ontotach Restorers and their terrifying fleets to coreward, and the Raxycodium Mediators to spinward. The hyperlanes they will do battle within pass through our territory. There is NO avoiding this. And we simply cannot afford the luxury of not taking sides, in which case whichever came out on top would wipe us out. Across the galactic disk, our friend the Multiplex joined the League of Non-Aligned Worlds. A noble cause and one we surely wish we could have joined. But our homeworld would be on the front lines of a confilct we would have no hope of surviving.

All choices are dire. There is no way out. Our only hope is to let these ancient forces battle each other, even over our precious hive worlds, while we mass a fleet large enough to stand against the victor. We will not let the millions of Dividuals we slaughtered to save the Multiplex go to waste.

We anticipate that if a quick victory can be had between these two, they would turn against those that resisted them. That might be us, it might not. This way there's a chance that we can wait until our "patron" moves their fleets away from their worlds, and strike quickly and decisively with our Neutron Sweep.

We feared this day would come, since the first contact with had with these impossibly ancient beings.

The raw POWER on display is terrifying.

All our fleets combined could match ONE of theirs. And they have half a dozen, that we are currently tracking.

Fighting both would have been lost immediately. Our system defense stations seem to almost flicker out of existence when subjected to their firepower.

Our only hope is for their fleets to gain some distance from their systems before we engage.