Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: After a few more philosophical posts, let’s try something lighter. Humans are not the only culture in the universe possessing the concept of a robot, a thinking machine and many, many related concepts. There are some stories about great machines that have reached humanity, and mages have no reason to doubt their veracity.
They say to us that we cannot understand its existence. That in the literal, factual sense, it is an entity that fashions their great weapons and other objects of wonder by plucking matter from the core of a star with its ‘hand’ and shaping it by striking it with its ‘fingertips’ against an anvil fashioned from a neutron star.
It has many names, the oldest known to us is Yotsehr ‘Or, the Fashioner of Light[11][12], which is its name among the Living Beings. But we know others, as well, the Fabricator Universal[13][14], the Unbound Machine[13][15][16], the Propagator Engine of Order[17][18]. Those are the names given to us, in our languages, by the Other.
And they raise many questions on their own, suggesting that the Fashioner might be a machine.
Yet we have seen the carvings of what might be merely the artistic interpretations of this entity’s appearance. The multi-armed, many-fingered being that holds planets in its palms. Headless and legless, but then, what use would it have of such things?
Is it then a machine or a living being? Or perhaps we ask the wrong questions. For one, what we know about it, might not be as accurate to the eldritch reality as we would like to believe. But then, perhaps, whatever built such a thing, would it be concerned with the difference between what we call technology and biology?
Do we expect it to be fashioned out of articulated sheets of metal?
We have no reason not to believe it exists somewhere out there — an artificial being beyond our scope of comprehension, capable of constructions we cannot even imagine. There is something dreadful about the very thought.
The celebration of the blade*
The archon had commissioned the great machine, and as compensation, it demanded that we serve it the core of a dead star. For its stocks were low, the prized blade could not come to be without such balance being struck.
Thus a procession of the archon’s cohorts came to present to it the heart of the star, and it partook from it and sated its hunger. Invigorated, it then took from the heart once more and placed it upon the womb of a dead star**.
As the great machine began to strike against the star flesh, the consorts began their dance among the glittering dust in the empty spaces between stars. Soon, the musicians joined them so that they may accompany the prized blade’s creation together.
Though by the time it was presented to the archon, many of them floated, devoid of sense, in orbit around the great machine. Nevertheless, the archon was pleased by the blade and eager to test it. Thus the blade cleft a planet in half, once more and into perpetuity affirming the masterwork of its creator.
*) There is some dispute (compare: [12][14][15] vs [23][24]) if this text represents a myth or a kind of embellished retelling of a recorded, actual event.
**) Note: the usage of dead start here, in the original telling, refers to distinct stellar remnants, possibly a white dwarf or some kind of degenerate exotic star, and later a neutron star.
Esoteric Musings... 