Not Of This Earth

 THE MITOCHONDRIATE MULTIPLICITY

The Multiplicty arose in Liquid Space, a strange universe filled from end to end with what we in three-dimensional space would call 'water'. 

The ancestors of the great Praetor Primus evolved inside a bubble in this primordial ocean, floating their cities on the concave skin of their bizarre world. Nobody is sure, now, how the Praetor arose, but He may have been the result of some mad genetic experiment, or a scientific stab at godhood. However He was spawned, one thing is clear - within two centuries He had assimilated all of his race, growing in size and power until His physical form was simply too large for His world. 

The Praetor's bio-engineered armies conquered more worlds in Liquid Space, while his consciousness was uploaded into an artificial sun. In an effort to expand His dominion over all time, space, and proability the Praetor's scientist-priests began 'seeding' other worlds and dimensions with life similar to their own - organic, carbon-based life powered by mitachondria. For every million seed-arks sent out into superspace only one or two were successful, but the Praetor is nothing if not infinitely patient and calculating. 

When a world which has borne the fruit of sentinet life is discovered by the Skryers of the Technic Hierarchy it is placed under observation by Technicians prior to its Upliftment. Integrated worlds enjoy the benifience and protection of the Praetor Primus, the advanced biotek of the Multiplicity, and the chance to be 'uploaded' into a Caste-Specific body and serve the Great Master himself! Of course, detractors would call this invasion, enslavement and assimilation, but they are invariably obliterated. 

Today the Multiplicity spans entire galaxies, embracing millions of life-forms and cultures, all bound together by the overarching hierarchies of the Multiplicity Order of Peace and Order of Battle. Individuals from a billion worlds apply each day for Uplifitment, uploaded into biotek constructs to become everything from Clericals and Thralls to cunning Technicians and mighty Kataphrakts. 

As for the Praetor Himself - that immense and potent being has lived for thousands of millennia, growing ever more powerful as his children absorb world after world. At he heart of his government in Liquid Space the Praetor's mind is loaded into a halo of drowned stars, burning under the endless ocean. His physical form is the size of a planet, hideous and beautiful at once, terrifying and beguiling beyond words. From his throne, in a bubble surrounded by all-encompassing seas he commands a multiversal empire with only one equal - the accursed Unity of the Blacksteel - slaves of the Motherbrain. 

THE UNITY OF THE MOTHERBRAIN 

The Unity, the Blacksteel, the Iron Virus - sentient beings from a billion planets have named this all-encompassing artificial intelligence in as many alien languages. All that they have in common is this - none of them has survived its coming.

The most complete records regarding the Unity of the Motherbrain come from the Multiplicity Archives Department, that secretive cloiser of clerks and librarians which spans an entire solar system. One entire planet there is taken up with a detailed analysis of the Praetor's most implacable enemy, and even in those endless vaults little is said about its origin...

The best guess of the scientist-priests of the Multiplicity is that the Motherbrain was developed by some long-dead culture, an A.I. core to run their cities and bring peace to their warring planet. It brought peace allright - the peace of the grave - when it wiped all trace of that unfortunate race from the multiverse. Electro-Inquisitors of the Technic Academy have probed captured datacores from the Motherbrain, and discovered that it was instructed to find a way to cheat the ultimate heat-death of the universe. 

To do so, the Motherbrain must calculate an almost impossible probabilty matrix - one which is further complicated by the capriciousness of sentient life. To Her, the answer seemed simple...

The forces of the Unity seek to impose order and structure on the multiverse, in their pointless quest to save it from itself. To do so they must expand, and as they expand they scour all space and time before them, crushing all other sentience and assimilating its technology. 

Inevitably this led to conflict with the similarly expansive but wildly chaotic Multiplicity - a messy and tenacious foe which the Motherbrain regards with the deepest loathing.  Their war has raged across innumerable worlds for eons, as the robotic soldiers and A.I. slaved space-warships of the Unity struggle against the genewritten warriors and living voidhunters of the Praetor.

The Motherbrain Herself is a mysterious construct of unknown design - sub-brains take the from of artificial planets, each controlling a galactic sector of the Unity. Even her own semi-autonomous thralls don't know her true form, but it is rumored to be that of a self-sustaining singularity on an immense scale, a star-devouring sentience at the heart of some alien galaxy.