This coordinated effort lasted for almost eighty million years, during which its member species attained previously unimaginable levels of culture, welfare and technology. Each species colonized a few dozen worlds of their own; in which nations, cultures and individuals lived to the fullest potentials of their existence.
Needless to say, all of this was possible only through constant communication and a total openness to the Galaxy. Most communities took this for granted and dutifully participated in the galactic dialogues. But there were others, silent, darkened beings who refused to join in. Through them would come the ruin of the Empire.
Gravital (Descendants of the Ruin Haunters)
After the lesson of the Qu, Second Galactic Empire kept a constant watch against alien invasion. Ironically, they neglected to look among themselves. The second great invasion of the galaxy came not from outside, but from within.
The Ruin Haunters, who were lucky enough to inherit the secrets of the Star Men and Qu when other species were mere animals, had experienced a tremendous advance in technological prowess. All in all they were as sophisticated as, if not more, than the Asteromorphs of the void. But their ascendancy was not a sane one. Recall that most Ruin Haunters were already deranged with a twisted assumption of being the sole inheritors of the Star Men. They refused to communicate with their relatives on other planets, and kept to their own affairs. This neurotic hubris assumed truly dangerous proportions after the Ruin Haunters modified themselves.
The origin of this modification lay in an earlier catastrophe. The Ruin Haunters’ sun was undergoing a rapid phase of expansion, and the species, advanced as it was, could do nothing to stop the process. So the Haunters did the next best thing, and changed their bodies.
The infernal conditions of the solar expansion meant that a biological reconstruction was totally out of the question. Thus, the Haunters replaced their bodies with machines; floating spheres of metal that moved and molded their environment through subtle manipulations of gravity fields. In earlier versions the spheres still cradled the organic brains of the last Haunters. But in successive generations, ways of containing the mind within quantum computers were devised, and the transformation became absolute. The Ruin Haunters were replaced by the completely mechanical Gravital.
While not even organic, the Gravital still retained human dreams, human ambitions and human delusions of grandeur. This, combined with mechanical bodies that allowed them to cross space with ease, made interstellar war a frightening possibility.
Machine Invasion
It took a long time for the Gravital to prepare. Propulsion systems were perfected and new bodies capable of withstanding the interstellar jumps were devised. But when they finally decided that the time was nigh, nothing survived the slaughter.
The invasions followed a brutally simple plan. The target worlds’ suns were blockaded and their light was trapped behind specially-constructed, million-mile sails. If the dying worlds managed to resist, an asteroid of two finished them off. Enormous invasion fleets were built, but it was rarely necessary to deploy them. The Machines had caught their cousins completely off-guard.
The great dyings, all of which occurred in a relatively quick, ten-thousand year period, stretched the boundaries of genocide and horror. Almost all of the new human species; unique beings who had endured mass extinctions, navigated evolutionary knife-edges and survived to build worlds of their own, vanished without a trace.
Even the Qu had been loyal to life, they had distorted and subjugated their victims, but in the end they had allowed them to survive. To the machines however, life was a luxury.
Such thorough ruthlessness was not, ironically, borne out of any kind of actual hatred. The Gravital, long accustomed to their mechanical bodies, simply did not acknowledge the life of their organic cousins. When this apathy was mixed with their un-sane claims as the sole heirs of the Star Men, the extinctions were carried out with the banality of say, an engineer tearing down an abandoned building. Under the reign of the Machines, the Galaxy entered a brand-new dark age.
A rare instance of a direct invasion by the Machines, on one of the shore cities of the Killer Folk. Most of the time the inhabitants of the Second Empire were wiped out globally, without the necessity of such confrontations.
When Considering the Invasion
The Machine Invasion brought on the greatest wave of extinctions the galaxy had ever seen; for it was not a simple act of war by one species against another, but a systematized destruction of life itself.
When considering such a vast event, it is easy to get lost in romantic delusions. It is almost as easy to write off the Gravital as ‘evil’ as it is to consider the entire episode as a nihilistic, ‘end of everything’ kind of scenario. Both of these approaches are, as they would be in any historical situation, monumental fallacies.
To begin with, the Gravital were not evil, at least not to their own perception. These beings, although mechanical, still lived their lives as individuals and operated inside coherent societies. They had surrendered their organic heritage but their minds were not the cold, calculating engines of true machines. Even after giving orders that would destroy a billion souls, a Gravital would have a home to go to, and, as incredibly as it might sound, a family and a circle of friends towards which it felt genuine affection. Despite being endowed with compassion, their harsh treatment of the organics was the result of, as mentioned before, a simple inability to understand their right to live.
Furthermore, the Gravital did not constitute a singular, indivisible whole whose entire purpose was to wreck the universe. True, their technological advancement had allowed them to form a pangalactic entity, but within itself the Machine Empire was divided into political factions, and even religious faiths. Superimposed over these fault lines were the daily lives and personal affairs of families and individuals. Like any sentient being, they had a sense of identity and thus, differing agendas.
Nor did the Machine invasion mean the end of everything. There certainly was a widespread destruction of life, but what was lost was ‘only’ organic life. Consuming energy, directing it for reproduction, thought and even evolution, the machines were as alive as any carbon-based organism. Despite the turnover, Life of a sort survived, and as would be seen, even preserved some of its organic predecessors.
Subjects (Many descendants of the Bug Facers)
The Bug Facers; racially shy and xenophobic due to their background of repeated alien invasions, became the first species to face the Gravital onslaught. As ironic as their fate seemed, the Bug Facers were the luckiest of the post-humans. Instead of being exterminated like the rest of their cousins, they survived as the only organic beings in the Machine Empire.
The precise reasons for their retention remain unknown to this day. Perhaps the Machines hadn’t perfected their ruthless apathy by then. Or perhaps they pitied the poor organics, and allowed them to maintain a stunted parody of an existence.
Whatever the reason, the Bug Facers endured. But they hardly resembled their original ancestors anymore. Genetic engineering, the lost art of the galaxy-threading Qu, (and later, the Tool Breeders as well,) was mastered almost as comprehensively by the Machines. Not hesitating to warp the beings which they did not really consider to be alive, they spliced their way into the Bug Facer DNA, producing generations of literal abominations. Would a woman or man of today show any apprehension towards re-assembling a computer, or even recycling trash? Such was the attitude of the triumphant Gravital.