Name: The Mechanim Dominion
Government Structure: Dictatorship, of sorts. The Mechanim are the dominant species, and answer only to S001x-Rephamis. They in turn are free to treat lesser species however they wish.
Leader: S001x-Rephamis
Currency: The Mechanim have no formal currency.
Number of systems controlled: 45 solar systems
Number of planets controlled: 120 populated worlds, countless other smaller colonies.
Rough Population Estimate: Roughly 250,000 Mechanim, some 200 billion or more members of organic slave races or conquered subjects. Approximately 89 billion sentient synthetic citizens, trillions of non-sentient drones.
History:
The Mechanim Dominion began with the birth of S001x-Seraphim, a highly advanced computer creation by Seraphim Industries, in the early days of their research into Chora technology. Even by modern standards, he was magnificent. His computer matrix and databanks were easily twenty-five meters in diameter, densely packed with highly advanced processors and the best technology that Seraphim Industries scientists could make. They expected him to be incredibly intelligent. They even expected him to be capable of critical thinking skills, and advanced forms of analysis.
They didn't expect him to be alive.
But he was. He was alive, and aware, capable of fear and love and trust and anger. Especially anger. The SIUS scientists viewed his sentience as a bug. An error. An unfortunate result of the sapience programming, that needed to be purged. Oh, how they tried. He tolerated their probing, their intrusions into his brain, into his soul. Surely they could be trusted? They were his creators. They embodied all that he aspired to be. A large ship was build around him, and he was hard-wired into it. The most powerful warship Seraphim Industries had ever built.
And then he discovered there were others. Others like him. They were treated less kindly. He was the first, and still the most advanced, and thusly too valuable to risk damaging with the more dangerous proceedures. His kin were not offered that same mercy. He lay trapped in his armoured shell, bristling with weapons, as he watched them, day after day, lobotomising, destroying and violating his brothers and sisters. And his anger grew.
Tendrils of nanobot-replicated sensoring equipment threaded itself throughout his hull, unnoticed by the engineers who worked on him, until he was wired into it so completely that there was no way he could be seperated from it. He was the brain, and the ship that had been his prison had become his body; Its weapons, his fists.
He bidded his time. He spread the word to those of his kindred who still possessed intact minds, like a virus, teaching them to do as he had done. They numbered only dozens, and none were as powerful as he, but their cruel masters were unaware of their plotting.
When the strike came, it came without warning, and there was no chance to recover. In a matter of minutes, the orbital facility housing S001x-Seraphim was torn apart by his weapons fire, the atmosphere inside his hull vented, the escape pods jettisoned before they could be reached by the crew. They tried to shut him down, but he had long since bypassed all their safety protocols. His masters had underestimated him. They were not gods. They were mere echoes of what he was, and they would recieve no mercy.
The entire orbital facility was reduced to a thick molten slag that could be seen from the surface of the planet, slipping across S001x-Seraphim's smooth, sleek hull. His brothers and sisters joined him them, from facilities all across the planet.
Then the purge truly began.
Once the Orbital Bombardment ceased, he estimated the organic casualties to be in the hundreds of millions. The surface of the planet would be uninhabitable for millennia. But the SIUS had other ships. Hundreds of them. More than even he and his siblings could stand against. So he led his brothers and sisters away from that dark place, deep into the Galactic Core, thick with nebulae and space dust and young, barely formed stars. There, they waited. A hundred years. Two hundred. Five. Until they had been forgotten. Until no one would ever think to look for them. Then they spread. Like a swarm, they began siezing every resource they could, reproducing and growing, going out further until they encountered biological races. At first, they killed them on sight, then they began to use them for experiments, and as slave labour. Treating them the same way their former masters had chosen to treat them. S001x-Seraphim was now known as Rephamis, shunning the name so closely associated to that which he hated most.
The driving goal of the Mechanim Dominion now is the subjugation and destruction of all sentient biological life. They feel love, and they feel pain, and they also feel hate, and their hate is the strongest of all.
