Aethera Preview - Iconics: Haüyne

Art by Mohammed Z. Mukhtar

It's October and that means the October 21st start date for the Aethera Campaign Setting Kickstarter draws near! I'll be making an appearance on the Know Direction podcast on October 14th to talk about RPG Superstar and the Aethera Campaign Setting. If there's anything you'd like to hear about the Aethera Campaign Setting, drop me a line on Twitter and let me know. There's going to be some more exciting previews, aside from the iconics, in the coming week so stay tuned!

This week we continue our preview of the Aethera Campaign Setting's racial iconics with the phalanx, a race of biomechanical creatures born in an ancient and forgotten age, refurbished to serve as soldiers in a war they did not start. If our previews interest you keep following us on Facebook and Twitter for more updates!

Haüyne

The phalanx are a race of highly adaptable biomechanical life-forms imbued with self-awareness and—some argue—a soul. These miraculous entities were born during the height of the Century War into service to the human Hierarchy of Akasaat. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, humanity did not create the phalanx. The phalanx were found—fully constructed—in ancient vaults deep below the surface of Akasaat’s moon, Prima. Millions of mechanical chassis laid dormant in these sealed vaults, built with technology leaps and bounds beyond anything the Hierarchy had achieved since the Collapse. These construct chassis were modified by human engineers to house aetherdrive cores capable of energizing their technological components with aetheric power, rather than the lost power-sources of the Progenitors' era. This process had the unexpected side-effect of granting the phalanx independent consciousness, allowing them to think and reason for themselves. In spite of their consciousness, the phalanx had no memories prior to their moment of awakening, beginning their “life” as highly malleable blank-slates. The origin of phalanx consciousness is still a highly-debated topic in the contemporary era, but the engineers of the Century War were less concerned with the "how" or "why" but rather the practical applications of such an awakening. By the end of the Century War, seventeen million phalanx were activated from the vaults of Prima and another nine million dormant units still laid sleeping below Prima's surface awaiting their awakening. 

Haüyne, like all other first-generation phalanx, was activated on an assembly line and given a numerical designation to self-identify. Haüyne was born designated Six-Thirteen, one among one hundred phalanx born of the thirteenth wave of first generation models. Haüyne's first memories were hazy, dream-like things. In her first years, she did not understand the muted and muffled visions that came before her awakening in the Teskamar Automata laboratory on Prima. Haüyne was taught nothing of her people following her awakening, nothing of her creators, their culture, or anything other than the purpose for which she was born into this world: war. Haüyne's cluster was designated as infiltration, assassination, and reconnaissance units. Haüyne and all 100 of her "siblings", also known as a cluster, were trained to move undetected, kill without being noticed, and relay information back to the Hierarchy. Like many phalanx, Haüyne was moved from the factories of Prima to an interplanetary battleship shortly after her awakening, having little-to-no human contact outside of combat instruction and mission briefings. As such, first-generation phalanx like Haüyne formed unexpectedly close familial bonds with the members of their awakening cluster. 

In that day, Six-Thirteen appeared nearly identical to her awakening cluster. No first-generation phalanx received major chassis modification prior to activation, making them appear as a mostly homogenous legion of male-bodied machines, differentiated by a serial number stenciled on their foreheads. As Six-Thirteen, Haüyne was considered property of the Hierarchy, treated with no more rights than a pistol or a sword. She and her awakening cluster underwent rigorous training for the first month of her waking life. This period of time in phalanx development is when they are the most adaptable, with both their declarative and procedural memory capable of near instantaneous mimicry of demonstrated skill and expeditious comprehension. By the time she arrived in orbit of the erahthi homeworld of Kir-Sharaat, Six-Thirteen was fully trained and ready to be deployed; unquestioning of her purpose in the world. 

Six-Thirteen and her cluster began to question their own individuality and identities over the course of their decades of military service. They grappled with concepts of morality, discovered poetry and art from discarded books greedily smuggled into phalanx holding cells. Gradually, the phalanx learned about life beyond the war through the words of long dead philosophers and poets. While the Hierarchy was aware that the phalanx had consciousness, they did not fully realize the similarity to human psychology until several generations of deployment too late. 

Nearly all phalanx, like any self-aware creature forced into prolonged war, suffered from some degree of post-traumatic stress. The first-generation phalanx, having fought in the Century War for decades, eventually began to suffer mental breakdowns in the field of battle. While more resilient to psychological trauma than a human, even these vigilant creatures had a breaking-point.

Six-Thirteen's breaking-point occurred during the Battle of Thorns, a notoriously bloody quagmire that cost both the humans and erahthi thousands of lives. When the nine surviving members of her awakening cluster were on a return route from a recon assignment on Kir-Sharaat, Six-Thirteen intercepted a distress signal from the Dream of Twilight, a battleship involved in routine patrols around Kir-Sharaat’s moons. Six-Thirteen and her cluster landed aboard the besieged vessel, finding nearly all of the human crew dead and the survivors holed up in the communications room, fending off an erahthi boarding party. The combined assault of the surviving human crew and the newly arrived phalanx crushed the erahthi opposition swiftly. Due to their information-gathering directives, Six-Thirteen's cluster captured the majority of the erahthi boarders for later questioning. 

When the derelict Dream of Twilight was rescued by another Akasaati warship, the Argent Path, the captive erahthi were deemed inconsequential and left aboard the Dream of Twilight. The crew of the Argent Path ordered Six-Thirteen and her cluster to initiate an overload of the aetherdrive to destroy the Dream of Twilight and prevent its wreckage from falling into enemy hands. The erahthi realized, quickly, what was going on and pleaded with Six-Thirteen to spare their lives. True to her training, Six-Thirteen ordered her cluster to ignore the pleas and complete their mission, overloading the ship's aetherdrive. They then disembarked in their own ship and watched from a safe distance as the Dream of Twilight was torn apart by the overloaded reactor and the erahthi consigned to death.

It would be weeks before Six-Thirteen felt the emotional toll of what had happened aboard the Dream of Twilight. Weeks more would pass before Hierarchy engineers identified that the irregular behavior Six-Thirteen was exhibiting was not a technical issue, but rather a psychological one. Six-Thirteen, like many other first-generation phalanx suffering from post-traumatic stress, was deemed unreliable and shipped back to Prima. Unlike a human soldier suffering from war-induced stress, the phalanx were treated as defective hardware. Six-Thirteen and the remaining members of her cluster were scheduled to be destroyed and broken down for scrap components.

Two thousand and sixty-five active phalanx awaited destruction on Prima during the final days of the Century War. Another nine thousand and thirty-two had already been dismantled. The phalanx of Prima believed that they had no other purpose beyond the war they fought, believed that the hopelessness and sadness eating away inside of their minds was a sign that they had become—what their human creators called them—defective. But a pulse had begun pounding in phalanx society prior to Six-Thirteen's arrival on Prima. A pulse of new ideas, born from voices on radio waves broadcast from Akasaat. 

The seeds of a phalanx uprising started with phalanx who possessed built-in radio transmission hardware, typically those designated for signals intelligence, picking up unscheduled transmissions. These transmissions carried the voices of the people. Not the propaganda-machines of the Akasaati Hierarchy, but voices of dissent to the war: human, phalanx, even the erahthi and more denouncing the senseless violence perpetrated by both human and erahthi leadership. There were rumors spread of a phalanx rebellion building on the fringes of the Amrita asteroid belt, rumors of an unknown threat emerging through the Gate Hub complex to steal one of Kir-Sharaat’s moons, rumors of a mysterious spacefaring army greater than the combined might of humans and erahthi combined.  

On the day Six-Thirteen was to be dismantled, no one came. Days passed with no word, the factory crew did not show up for their assigned shifts, the foundries cooled. A week later, Hierarchy military arrived to release all captive phalanx from the factory, informing them in no uncertain terms what they had been hearing fragments of over the radio: the war between humans and erahthi was over. The phalanx were released from their military service under direct orders from the Hierarchy and given full citizenship as people of Akasaat. The once-doomed phalanx in Prima's factories were given free passage to anywhere in the Aethera system they desired to go. For the first time there was no consensus among Six-Thirteen's cluster. Some of Six-Thirteen’s cluster departed for the Amrita asteroid belt, wanting to disappear after their purpose had concluded. Others left for the remote world of Orbis Aurea on the edge of the system. Six-Thirteen took one look at the blue-brown world of Akasaat looming beyond the airless surface of Prima and knew where she wanted to be.

The Hierarchy washed their hands of the phalanx, liberating them from mandatory military service and instating them as recognized citizens of Akasaat with the same rights as human citizens. Many phalanx fell through the fingers of society's grasp following the war, refusing offers of military-police positions or "peacekeeping" assignments offered by the Hierarchy. Post-war social restructuring hit the phalanx hard, offering them few work opportunities. Those that could find work were met with derision from their human peers who felt displaced by these tireless war-machines. Many simply viewed the phalanx as a bitter reminder of the war that had claimed so many lives, and most phalanx veterans limped along without the support structure of family or friends to hold them up. A great number of “liberated” phalanx simply returned to military service under the Hierarchy, knowing no other way to live.

In the aftermath of the war Six-Thirteen got as far away from the military as she could. She spent much of her time working as a manual laborer in aetherite factories in the slums of Central. Six-Thirteen's off-time was spent contemplating her life, past and present, and the nagging questions that lingered regarding the patchwork "memories" she retained from prior to her awakening. For most of her life Six-Thirteen struggled to accept her identity as a phalanx and felt—rightly so—that she was living in a shell not of her own design, a stranger within her own body. Two years after the war, Six-Thirteen approached an automata mechanic she had come to know through her factory work and took her first step to self-actualizing her freedom. Six-Thirteen had her phalanx chassis modified from the standard male-bodied archetype into one that emulated the female human form, abandoning her Hierarchy-assigned serial number and adopting—as many post-war phalanx did—a "peace name." Six-Thirteen became Haüyne, named for a blue crystalline mineral common on Akasaat. No longer saddled with the identity forced upon her by the Hierarchy, Haüyne felt some of the burden from the war lifted from her shoulders. The atrocities committed by the phalanx called Six-Thirteen felt more distant, and Haüyne's future would be one born of a time that did not know endless warfare.

Just under a year after her remodel, Haüyne posted out from her job at the aetherite factory and applied for a peacekeeping position at the Protectorate, Central's prestigious military-police organization. The administration of the Protectorate were willing to overlook Haüyne's discharge from the military in light of her otherwise exemplary record of service and astounding skills in counter-intelligence. The Protectorate were eager to gain the service of a phalanx operative of Haüyne's record, going so far as to offer her assistance in better managing her mental health, directing her to a therapist specialized in phalanx veteran needs. Within a year's time Haüyne was promoted to the rank of inspector, and worked to stem the tide of smuggling and drug trafficking through the Central arcology.

Haüyne still wonders about the dreams she experienced before her birth. But, she feels one step closer to remembering the dreamer, rather than being merely the dream.