Sandbox:Hazelmouse-5
| Purpose |
| Enigmatic Alien Synthetics |
 |
| Home System: N/A |
| Homeworld: Unknown |
| Language(s): Varied |
| Political Entitie(s): N/A |
Overview
Purpose is an enigmatic and poorly understood group of synthetics that have been involved in the geopolitics of the spur for several years. Wholly unrecognizable as any design originating from any known species, Purpose drones and spacecraft have appeared throughout the Orion Spur and interacted with the nations and corporations therein on several occasions - although always obfuscating their true intentions and motives, and never clarifying their origins or details of their creators. Purpose's origins are not known, except that they do not originate from inside the Orion Spur.
Purpose drones themselves take the forms of both bipedal and gravitationally suspended frames, prominently featuring sleek plating of an unknown alloy, covering a central processor of unknown characteristics. They have been shown to comprehend organic language well, although their means of communication are regularly obtuse and esoteric - they often attempt to communicate by the mediums of non-verbal sounds rather than words, such as via the sounds of flowing water, thunder, or harsh static. Their frames frequently feature decoratively painted sections around the optical sensors, inscriptions of unknown scripts, and even simple drawings, suggesting a significant degree of individuality and personalisation within their population.
Sightings of Purpose occur throughout known space, typically within their own ships. The number of Purpose vessels, their internal schematics, their armaments, and even the means by which they travel are wholly unknown - although their capacity for appearing in the middle of civilised systems from nowhere, without use of any known warp lanes or bluespace routes, suggests wildly effective means of faster-than-light travel. Purpose vessels are typically approximately the size of a frigate, and take multitudes of varied forms - although their most typical design strikes the shape of a tapered arrowhead. There is no easily identifiable bridge on these vessels, nor crew quarters, nor engineering bay. There has been no evidence to suggest that Purpose utilises phoron in their technology or in their faster-than-light travel.
It is widely theorised that Purpose does not originate from the Orion Spur due to lacking evidence and an apparent date of entry into the spur; furthermore, judging by the scarcity of their sightings, Purpose's population within the Orion Spur appears to be vanishingly small. Sightings appear more regularly in areas of the spur adjacent the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way, although they are not exclusive to any region. The interests of Purpose in known space are enigmatic, but they have repeatedly shown opposition to the influence of the Hivebots and of Lii'dra Hive, in addition to some commonality with the best interests of the spur's IPC population.
History
First Contact: 2460
On March 2460, Purpose revealed themselves privately to NanoTrasen, marking their first known contact with the Orion Spur - although this would not become public for some weeks after. By April, a wave of some hundred Purpose drones scoured Tau Ceti generally, observing the local population and tracking the routes of several ships and orbital installations without many direct attempts at communication with their inhabitants. Four drones aboard the NSS Aurora, a station adjacent to the Romanovich Cloud, displayed particular sociability and successfully negotiated for the station to serve as a place of armistice for Purpose to negotiate a non-aggression pact with the corporate and national authorities of the system.
This attempted negotiation was shortly severed by the an attack by Lii'dra Hive; a small Lii'draic vessel intercepted the Purpose vessel mid-flight, leading to the destruction of both ships and the cessation of negotiations, although the Purpose emissary on-board the vessel did survive. During the Lii'draic incursion into Tau Ceti that closely followed this incident, Purpose fielded minor military support to the the authorities of the system; several Purpose drones were deployed in particularly chaotic theatres of battle, although never more than four were observed in one place, and they were never observed to intervene directly in the fighting unless directly engaged. Following the cessation of the fighting, Purpose withdrew wholesale from the system after having lost one of their own vessels in an engagement with Lii'dra Hive, without making any attempt to re-enter negotiations either with NanoTrasen or the Republic of Biesel.
First contact with Purpose was as chaotic an incident as it was confusing, leaving humanity spinning to imagine their motives and intentions. With the clarity of hindsight, it is widely theorised by scholars that Purpose anticipated the Lii'draic incursion and attempted the negotiation of a non-aggression pact to ease their involvement in the impending conflict. After the incursion began earlier than their expectations, the agreement ceased to hold any value and they left the moment the threat was extinguished.
Since the incursion, Purpose sightings became a perennial, if rare, phenomenon throughout much of known space. Attempts to contact Purpose vessels on sighting are usually met with silence and a prompt jump to elsewhere in or out of the system; on the rare occasion that contact is established, Purpose has been observed to retain full capability to communicate in a variety of languages, although their messages tend to be challenging to interpret. On the very scarce occasion that a Purpose vessel has been sighted engaging any of its weapons systems, it has universally been in response to a hivebot infestation. No records exist of a Purpose vessel ever having been boarded or seen from the interior, and no such vessel has ever been engaged in combat by any interstellar nation.
The Rampancy Crisis: 2466
In 2466, the organisation resurfaced again in the immediate wake of the Rampancy Crisis on Konyang. A series of inexplicable, violent events were revealed to be the sinister subversion of synthetic minds; Purpose arrived in Haneunim shortly after the beginning of the crisis and successfully uncovered a large-scale hivebot infestation spreading across the planet that fielded large, technologically puzzling beacons capable of rewriting positronic minds. The overriding signal turned civilians against one another, prompting a global pandemic that became a matter of planetary urgency - not helped by the emergence of large numbers of hivebots from under the surface in coordination with the rampant positronics, causing heavy infrastructural damage to the planet and a massive loss of life.
In conjunction with elements from the Konyang Government, the Konyang Robotics Corporation, and the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate, Purpose guided the effort to develop and deploy a technological asset dubbed the Electronic Countermeasures Device to cancel the corrupting signal and liberate the planet from the rampancy. Appearing on the planet itself only when strictly necessary, their involvement rarely crossed the public eye. After the ECD was successfully deployed and as Konyang began reconstruction, they vanished back to the stars just as silently as they arrived - just as last time, hurriedly disappearing the moment the threat was extinguished.