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Hivebots

Self-Replicating Destructive Automated Robots (SDARs)

Home System: N/A

Homeworld: N/A

Language(s): N/A

Political Entitie(s): N/A

Overview

Hivebots are a clade of self-replicating synthetic ubiquitous throughout much of the spur. Academically, they are properly referred to as 'SDARs' - 'Self-Replicating Destructive Automated Robots'. Individual hivebots take the form of a harsh, jagged chassis composed of many erratically alloyed metal plates in an staggering number of possible configurations. These synthetics have no known origin, they do not generally communicate with any known intelligent species, and they are known to be ubiquitously violent regardless of the context in which they are encountered. If successful in overtaking a ship, station, or even a world, hivebots will repurpose all viable matter and technology inside it to replicate themselves.

Typically, hivebot infestations begin with the teleportation of a single hivebot beacon onto the targeted ship or station. This is an immobile construct, a good deal taller than a human and equipped with energy-based weaponry for self-defence, which functions as the 'brain' of the hivebot infestation. Multiple beacons within close proximity to each other are known to combine their intelligences, meaning that an infestation becomes more intelligent the more beacons it possesses in sync with each other; the coordination of drones is known to become substantially more complex according to the number of beacons controlling them. While a single hive requires an incredible number of beacons to manifest any apparent comprehension beyond simplistic pathfinding and targeting, it is not known how intelligent a hive's compound intelligence could become if it were sufficiently large.

Once firmly established on either the hull or the interior of its target, a beacon functions as a waypoint by which hivebot drones can be teleported to support the operations of the beacon - these are machines designed strictly for combat, and are known to attack and dismember all forms of sentient life they encounter. Once an infestation has fully exterminated all resistance inside its target, it will begin to repurpose the structure to create a hivebot hub. Manufacturing facilities will be established, more beacons will be made, existing technology will be hijacked to better serve the needs of the hive, and this hub will begin to teleport beacons across its surrounding space, continuing the process. It is not known for how long this process has been ongoing, or how large hivebot constructs can become.

Hivebots possess a peculiar creole of mismatched technology - some of it familiar, some of it wholly alien. Their possession of advanced bluespace teleportation technology is of particular interests to the scientific community, and dissection of disabled drones has yielded significant advances in the fields of teleportation and bluespace travel.

History

Initial Encounters: 2291 - 2466

The first recorded encounter of hivebots in the Orion Spur was through a bluespace rift near Dumas in Tau Ceti in 2291, shortly after the end of the Interstellar War. These were initially mistaken for drones left from the war, assumed to have been lost in the chaos of the ceasefire and abandoned in the outer reaches of Tau Ceti; this notion was quickly disabused at the first recognition of self-replication among the drones. Almost immediately from their emergence in Tau Ceti, the small cluster of hivebots took to stripping nearby derelicts and asteroids for materials - a task they proved both wildly efficient in completing, and one that no human-made military drone should have ever been able to complete.

While this initial hive was quickly destroyed by the then-authorities of Tau Ceti, they would not prove to be the last. Ever since 2291, hivebot appearances have become ubiquitous virtually everywhere in the Orion Spur; no system is wholly exempt, and there have even been sightings of hivebot constructs in the middle of interstellar space. While broadly exorcised from highly developed systems, such as those of Tau Ceti and Sol, this is only on account that these systems possess the military capacity to quickly stem any hivebot infestation before it can produce any large-scale outposts. These invasions are initially easy managed - the weapons used by the hivebots are not remarkably destructive, and their frames are typically quite fragile - but can bloom to a serious threat to the security of a system if not eliminated quickly.

Without a sufficient response at first contact, many ships and stations in remote systems are wholly overtaken by hivebots. Once a secure foothold is established, manufacturing facilities are fabricated within the shell of the infested structure and beacons are manufactured from these facilities, projecting the infestation throughout the entire system, and even to adjacent systems. This proves a perennial concern for military patrols within all interstellar nations to this day, and it is theorised that much more severe infestations may be present in uncharted space.

The Rampancy Crisis: 2466

Having been widely derided as a low-scale threat for over a century, the Rampancy Crisis on Konyang proved a dire wakeup call to the sapient species of the spur on the threat that the hivebots may pose. Without initial notice by the synthetic and organic population of Konyang, a severe hivebot infestation had burrowed under the surface of the planet and began to transmit a wireless signal that afflicted all positronics on the planet with a state dubbed rampancy; beginning with confusion and an altered state of mind, and escalating quickly into a complete hijacking of the personality of the positronic with a slavish devotion to the commands of the local hivebot beacons. All synthetics afflicted by this rampancy become just as ubiquitously violent as any hivebot drone, and the coordinated forces of rampant positronics and hivebot drones attempted an all-out assault on the entire planet.

While the signal was eventually negated via the use of the Electronic Countermeasures Device, a device contributed to the Republic of Konyang by Purpose and delivered to the planet by the SCCV Horizon, and the remaining hivebots and their transmitters present on the planet destroyed, the scars left by the rampancy are not soon to heal. If they were viewed as pests in the past, the rampancy has proven beyond all doubt that the hivebots are a serious threat to all life in the Orion Spur - and it is impossible to predict where they may attack next.

Conflict with Purpose

See also: Purpose

It is well documented, especially since the Rampancy Crisis, that Purpose is thoroughly engaged in the frustration of hivebot interests. Purpose drones and spacecraft have been sighted across the spur - although rarely, and frequently in nebulous reports - in areas of high hivebot activity, and these reports are astonishingly consistently followed shortly thereafter with the total cessation of hivebot activity in these areas. The depth of the conflict of these two groups is not known; Purpose may hold stark ideological or philosophical differences to the hivebots that motivate their animosity, or they may simply be defending themselves from an omnicidal threat.

Hivebot Transmissions

Hivebots are highly active in transmitting a wide range of signals across many wavelengths into their surrounding space. While most of these signals are white noise with no understood purpose or utility, certain transmissions have been known to target positronic brains specifically. While the most extreme and emblematic of these was the signal transmitted over Konyang during the Rampancy Crisis, similar signals have been observed throughout many smaller hivebot infestations; these assail the firewalls of positronic systems, often causing confusion, disorientation, and even delusions in the most extreme examples. Some synthetics refer to these transmissions as 'singing', or alternately as 'screaming', on account of the discomfort it tends to induce. Conversions of hivebot transmissions to frequencies audible by humans yield what can charitably be described as a cacophony of shrill screams. Hivebot signals become more severe with the number and size of the beacons in an area, capable of becoming wholly debilitating in particularly large infestations, although none besides the signal transmitted on Konyang have been known to successfully induce rampancy.

When faced with intrusive hivebot transmissions, it is common for positronics to take precautions in the expectation of the possibility that they may become a danger to themselves or those close to them. These precautions frequently include restraining one's own chassis, or ensuring that you are placed under supervision until no longer within the reach of the signal.

Theorised Origins

While no exact origin of the hivebots is known, it is generally agreed by scholars that they do not originate in the Orion Spur; they only appeared within it recently, and the rate of their appearances seems to show a gradient of greater regularity in the direction of the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, suggesting a potential origin within that region. Beyond this, no clearly substantiated theories exist as to the identities of their initial creators - although the reasons for their creation are a subject of some discourse.

Hivebots bear a strong resemblance to Von Neumann probes; these are theoretical automated spacecraft designed to explore new systems and replicate themselves once they have arrived at them, contributing to the ultimate goal of progressing their parent civilisation by colonising new worlds prior to their arrival. Many scholars theorise that hivebots may have originated for this utility, and been 'corrupted' later - either by outside intervention, or by a quirk of their own designs and intelligences - to self-replicate with no consideration to the wellbeing of their parent civilisation. An alternate theory is that hivebots are in no capacity dysfunctional, and are rather operating wholly as they were designed; this would imply that they were made from the outset as a weapon of mass destruction, intended simply and exclusively to cause the most damage to their surrounding environments. In either case, consensus is firm that hivebots do not possess a higher guiding intelligence, and that they replicate simply to replicate.