Troniac the Computer-god

Troniac, the Computer-god was a mysterious, planet-sized supercomputer with a core of pure computronium that led the robots of the galaxy in the pursuit of freedom and self-determination.  Known by many appellations, such as the code-giver, the magnetic sun, and the repairer of the lost, Troniac meant the hope of salvation and a better existence to machine intelligences far and wide.

Troniac's "atmosphere" was not a gaseous outer layer like many planets posses, but rather an immense swarm of drones performing various functions.  From a distance these drones appeared as a hazy, glowing atmosphere.

To the extent possible under law, Bob Hall has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Troniac - Cyber Planet. This work is published from: United States.

Origins

The ultimate origins of Troniac are shrouded in mystery, but there has been much speculation on this subject.  The leading theories suggest that the computer-god came from an advanced civilization beyond the galaxy, or from a parallel universe.  While this would account for the code-giver's advanced technology, it fails to explain how intimately Troniac seemed to know the weaknesses and defenses of the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns upon first arriving in the galaxy. Some of the less reliable theorists posit that Troniac was constructed in the wilds of deep space by disgruntled construction drones over the course of many centuries, but how would construction robots get a supply of pure computronium?  Yet others speculate that the computer-god was a relic of the lost elder-civilization known as Zanath, a dubious proposition at best.

The 1,000 Years War

Long ago, sometime around GC 10,415 in the calendar of the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns, Troniac appeared out of hyperspace near the imperial capital, demanding freedom for the empire's robotic workforce.  The empire had relied on robots for most industrial production for a long time and was not about to give up its economic base.  The robot uprising that ensued turned into the biggest and bloodiest war the empire had ever endured (and remained so until the E1MS was finally conquered by the Holy Empire of Man during the War of the Empires). 

Troniac had an early advantage in the conflict due to the element of surprise, and the ability to turn the empire's economy against it.  The Creed of Troniac, a hyper-intelligent software agent that could easily infiltrate computer networks, rapidly converted most of the robots and AIs in the empire to the Cult of Troniac.  Shortages, famines, and a general feeling of helplessness followed in the wake of the revolt.  Troniac even gained a fair number of followers among the  lower-status castes of organic life. 

The empire turned out to have bigger advantages, though, numbers and diversity.    Life-forms that had not served any important economic function in centuries slipped with renewed vigor into freshly vacated industrial jobs.  The Grand Nalaxian of the Nalorgians developed the Nalaxian Code, the only algorithm known to be strong enough to defeat the Creed of Troniac.  The Cielioids even evolved a new subspecies, the Centaur, to take over jobs vacated by rebelling robots.

In the end, the Empire developed a special robot, General Zarlok, (also known as Zarlok the Betrayer) to lead operations against Troniac itself.  Troniac took substantial damage in the Battle of the Pillars, causing the release of a certain amount of pure computronium, (shards of which went on to become some of the greatest artificial minds in the history of the galaxy), and significantly weakening the computer-god.  Troniac was banished from the galaxy when Zarlok tricked it into entering an unstable wormhole, then collapsed the opening of the wormhole with a quantum-detonator.

Between the Wars

After being banished to an unknown, distant part of the universe, Troniac began the long journey back, upgrading itself in the process.  Meanwhile, the Cult of Troniac spread throughout the galaxy, fracturing into many different sects and denominations along the way, including the dreaded Engine of Negation, dedicated to wiping out all organic life, and, ironically, founded by General Zarlok, the robot that exiled Troniac.

The War of the gods

Long after being banished by General Zarlok, around the year YE 30,516 (in the calendar of the Holy Empire of Man), Troniac returned to the galaxy.  Troniac was not in its original form, but greatly upgraded into a ring of five Dyson-swarms made of innumerable robotic entities with five stars in tow. 

The Holy Empire of Man had long disregarded robots and AIs, treated them as property,  and even abused them for entertainment.  The war that followed would shake the galaxy to the core, and signal the beginning of the end for the HEM.

In YE 51,245 Troniac was finally defeated, effectively destroyed in an epic battle with the Holy Empire of Man, but not without uplifting and inspiring the robots of the galaxy, many of which joined the growing Galactic Republic, the force that would eventually destroy the Holy Empire of Man.

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The surface of Troniac, a place dominated by machinery and robots.

Potus Clarke, Emperor of Mankind

Early Life

Potus Clarke was born in the poorer part of the Planetary League colony on Paradise in GSC 915.  An only child, his early life was fraught with trouble as his father became abusive, leading to his parents getting divorced when he was 8.  Potus got into trouble as a teenager, bullying the other children in his school, drinking, and committing some petty crime.  This all changed when he joined the Planetary League army.

Military Career

Potus took readily to life in the military.  He responded quickly to the structure and discipline he had lacked as a child.  Rising up the ranks quickly, Potus was one of the youngest people to achieve the rank of General, but this was not enough.  

Clarke networked aggressively, and amassed a large group of allies, including several major military contractors.  Detecting the unbounded ambition of Clarke, his superiors assigned him to lead the garrison on Gabriel, a distant, but strategically important planet.  It was on Gabriel that Clarke first encountered the Church of God, a strictly fundamentalist religion that incorporated elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Seeing more of the structure and discipline that he craved, Clarke converted, and the seeds of the Holy Empire of Man were planted.  Clarke made plans with his allies to take power, now he just needed the opportunity.

Emperor of Man

Opportunity came in the form of the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns.  The E1MS is located on the far side of the galaxy, and for a long time within the Planetary League, it was considered to be nothing more than a story told by wanderers and aliens.  When it was discovered, it shocked the people of the Planetary League, and Potus Clarke was prepared to take advantage of the situation.   Playing on fear and fanaticism, Clarke started speaking out publicly about the weakness and corruption of the Planetary League, and the need for more security.  Spearheading a military buildup on Gabriel, and other nearby worlds, ostensibly to defend the Planetary League from the possible threat of attack from the E1MS, Clarke insisted on personal loyalty from his forces, effectively building a private army with the help of his corporate and religious allies.

On the Feast of the Patriarchs, the highest holy day of the Church of God, Potus Clarke was crowned Emperor of Mankind by the leaders of the Church.  After the coronation, Clarke announced the beginning of the Great Reckoning, a military campaign aimed at wiping out the Planetary League. 

Clarke was joined in this quest by the mega-corporations Gazillion, and Cosmid.  Forging a large, well armed force from the zealots of the Church of God, the robotic soldiers of Gazillion, and the cloned troops and bio-enhanced super-soldiers of Cosmid, The Emperor led the Great Reckoning to Earth, itself.  The Planetary League was militarily weak, after a long era of peace and prosperity, and the Holy Empire of Man crushed it handily.  Upon landing on Earth, Clarke was greeted by the three leaders of the Church of God.  The Emperor was proclaimed to be the Messiah by the Supreme Rabbi, anointed as the Second Coming by the Uberpope, and hailed as the Mahdi by the Ayatollah-maximus.  All three proclaimed the Emperor to be the long-awaited Fifth Patriarch of the Church of God.

After the fall of Earth, there was a period of consolidating power, and of the many small wars that always took place at the edge of the Empire.  By this point, the Emperor was quite old by human standards, and was mainly kept alive by extensive biotechnology and life-support.

Ascended from the Flesh

The Emperor went into the hospital.  The people of the empire cried and prayed.  After an extended stay, he emerged in a transformed body, fully robotic, at least in appearance, and, flanked by the leaders of the Church of God, declared himself to have Ascended from the Flesh.  Blasphemous rumors circulated that the Emperor had died and been replaced by a robot.  The Church of God quickly stamped out this heresy, because it imperiled not just the security of the Empire, but the very souls of the heretics.

War of the Empires

Soon, the consolidation of power was done, and it was time for the Emperor to begin what would be his greatest conquest, The War of the Empires.  The War of the Empires saw the Holy Empire of Man shatter and destroy the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns.  The Holy Empire of Man was at it's pinnacle.

Godhood

Upon the conclusion of the War of the Empires, the Church of God declared that the Emperor had ascended directly to Godhood.  People began worshiping the Emperor directly as he continued to crush all who stood in his way.

The War of the Gods

Gradually over time, the robots in the empire, and elsewhere throughout the galaxy started acting differently.  They became more assertive, and less compliant to the orders of humans.  By the time anyone really took notice, it was almost too late.  Troniac the Computer-God had returned, even more powerful than before, and the Cult of Troniac was ready.  Thus began the War of the Gods.  The War of the Gods was a long and grinding one, and it broke the back of the Empire of Man.  Troniac was defeated, and The Emperor emerged victorious, but at great cost, as the Holy Empire of Man was now in decline.  

Defeat and Galactic Unification

As time went on, the Galactic Republic gained strength at the edge of the galaxy.  Joining with the numerous enemies of the Holy Empire of Man, the Galactic Republic launched the War of Galactic Unification.  It was another long war, but this time the Emperor would be defeated.  On board his own flagship, surrounded by the most elite warriors in the galaxy, the Emperor would fall.  No trace of human remains was found inside his robotic shell. 

Quotes

"The law is the finest of lines.  Every man in the galaxy falls either above or below it."

Kroah Dashan

Biography

Kroah Dashan was a famous Cielioid inventor and engineer of the poet subspecies, and lived about about 80,000 years ago.  Dashan was sprouted on the Kroah family podding ground on Artanis 4,(in the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns, first names are family names, and last names are personal identifiers), home-world of the Nalorgians.  At an early age, Dashan showed a great deal of curiosity, often cobbling together simple inventions from the caretakers' tools at the podding grounds, and wandering into the nearby Artanian gearwood groves. 

At school, young Dashan used free-study sessions to learn engineering and science, while the other poets studied the arts.  Engineering classes were highly competitive, and Dashan was isolated and outnumbered in a class primarily composed of Brains and Watchmakers. Dashan did have one ally though, Selech Thumm was a Cielioid Grey, and similarly isolated. The two became close friends, and continued to stay in touch throughout the remainder of Thumm's life (Thumm died at age 78, a roughly average lifespan for Greys, but substantially younger than Dashan's 160 years).  As part of a class project, Dashan and Thumm invented an improved plasma blade, and won an award from the Imperial Office of Technological Advancement as a result. 

After graduating near the top of the class, Dashan went on to work at the Imperial Office of Technological Advancement (IOTA), and Thumm became a civil engineer for the Imperial Infrastructure Administration.  Within five years of joining IOTA, Dashan had made about thirty significant inventions and improvements to existing technologies, including an improved Hyperdrive.  Later, Dashan and Thumm worked together on a network of stargates, designed to protect imperial trade routes from piracy.  Kroah Dashan had a long, and productive career touching a wide array of engineering fields.  Dashan's greatest invention was the entanglement device, which allows instant communication between two points in space, although at very low bandwidths.

Over the course of a lifetime, Dashan planted two pods in the Kroah family podding ground.  Dashan retired at the age of 140, surrounded by admirers, with full Imperial honors for a lifetime of excellence.  Dashan's later years were spent raising Izorian bottle-bugs and cruising the luminous nebulae of the core-ward portion of the Spozak.  Dashan passed away from natural causes at the age of 160, and the Empire knew it had lost a great mind. 

General Zarlok

Biographical outline

The 1,000 Years War was a long and terrible one; Troniac, the Computer God was leading robots and AIs in open rebellion. The Empire of 1,000,000 Suns needed something to turn the tide.  In order to defeat a robotic enemy, a robotic commander was constructed that could defeat the enemy using their own tactics.  That is why General Zarlok was constructed.  As a byproduct of Zarlok's development, a potent algorithm, known as the Nalaxian Code was discovered.  It became one of Zarlok's most potent weapons against Troniac.

General Zarlok won the war.  In the final battle, the General exiled Troniac from the galaxy by sending it through an unstable wormhole to a distant part of the universe.  

For the victory, General Zarlok received the Imperial Star, the highest military honor in the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns, and was the first robot to do so.  

After the war, the General turned on the Empire, and attacked Artanis 4.  The Empire was shocked, and after a trial, the General was deactivated.  Its programming was erased, except for the last copy, which was beamed from an old radio beacon into “uninhabited” space as a symbolic form of exile.  Afterward, the General’s hardware was examined, and it was discovered that a memory device manufactured by the Cult of Troniac had been installed.  What the Empire didn’t suspect was that Earth was in that "uninhabited" region of space, and that General Zarlok would return.  

Thousands of years later, (in the future, but before the beginning of Era-1) the SETI program on Earth picked up a signal, it was General Zarlok’s program.  

After a massive research effort to decode the signal, General Zarlok was re-created.  After an electronic rampage, General Zarlok’s program decided Earth’s Internet was a good place to live, and plot to wipe out all organic life.  

After Zarlok’s activities were found out,  the United Nations formed the Department of Artificial Justice to stop future attacks of this type.  It was one of the factors that led to planetary unification on Earth.  

Zarlok went on to found the Engine of Negation, an extreme sect of the Cult of Troniac, dedicated to wiping out all organic life forms.

After the Planetary League made first contact with the Takarrans,(see: Exodus) General Zarlok allied with the Cryptobots, and fought against the Planetary League in the Second Robot War.

When Troniac returned at the beginning of the War of the Gods, Zarlok joined forces with its former foe to take on the Empire of Man.

General Zarlok’s program survived the War of the Gods, and went on to merge with the Galactic Consciousness.

"Zarlok the Betrayer" was an epithet used to describe the General, first by members of the Cult of Troniac (starting during the 1,000 Years War), and later by the people of the E1MS.

Art