Beyond All Reason

Cold and ruthless place Our galaxy has been scarred by epic wars raging for millennia. It is a cold and ruthless place, where the remnants of Armada and Cortex factions still battle each other in an ancient struggle for domination. Most of planets resources have been depleted and turned into machines of destruction only to fight and get reduced into wreck fields that stretch to the horizon. These junkyards are a common sight among the once live and habitable planets. This is where our Scavengers story begins. The Sardoth-11 event No one knows for sure where did they come from, what made them alive and hungry for destruction. It might have been some alien technology, a random short circuit of a processing unit or a deliberate action of the mother nature to end the destructive war between Armada and Cortex. One thing is certain – some unknown event has influenced the AI algorithm of a group of Cortex bots left over on the planet called Sardoth-11 after one of the major battles between the two factions. Protocol 1: Scavenge Their original algorithm was tailored to realize a simple task of finishing the leftovers of Armada forces and setting an outpost on this planet. Yet for some reason they suddenly started doing something totally different – picking up the junk from the battlefield and using an advanced resurrection technology that utilizes tachyons (particles that travel back in time) to put the life back into those wrecks. All of this would end up being just an interesting little phenomenon for scholars of the future to analyze. But there was yet another fact that changed everything… Protocol 2: Multiply It turned out that the novel process of resurrecting had one more interesting aspect to it – every unit which got back to life by the Scavengers has been infected by a copy of the very same malicious algorithm that told them to scavenge the wreck fields and resurrect every single piece of junk to do the same over and over again. This unstoppable feedback loop has resulted in an exponential growth of their numbers, in just few days taking over the whole world of Sardoth-11. Protocol 3: Upgrade The scavenging algorithm had some flaws, as could be expected of a protocol that arose from seemingly spontaneous reasons. Sometimes it wasn’t able to rearrange the unit pieces in a correct way and used scraps from next wreck they could find. Sometimes the piece recognition module just bugged out creating frightening Frankenstein-like unit mashups. In some instances it resulted in totally useless abominations, but every now and then the chimeras turned out even stronger than the sum of their parts. After almost all metal on the planet has been used there were still some leftovers that due to fragmentation or damage couldn’t be used to make operational units. However the scavenger protocol was very strict about metal – it had to use every single remaining scrap of it. The spare metal was used to put more armor and more weapons on original units, creating bigger and stronger versions of them. They were even able to build the frightening giant Commanders. The outbreak to be continued...