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. 

Amadeus Krieg

Biographical Outline

Born late in Era-0 on Mars, Amadeus Krieg was an industrious and entrepreneurial human.

In early adulthood, he went to Mars's L5 point as part of the asteroid mining boom, and founded Krieg Enterprises.  Through a combination of hard work, family connections back on Mars, and luck, Krieg Enterprises became the most prosperous mining company in the Martian L5 region.  

As a way to cement his wealth, Krieg became instrumental in the founding of the Autonomous Republic of Lindbergh, an independent state with low taxes that became a haven for the rich.

Krieg Enterprises rapidly expanded its operations into the main asteroid belt, where its fortunes continued to rise.   

Wealth and power were not enough for Krieg, though.  Immortality beckoned.  Krieg began using the state of the art in bioenhancement technology to extend his lifespan.  Secretly, he set up a deal with Cosmid, the leading biotechnology company, to have himself cloned.  Cloning an entire sentient life-form was illegal in the Planetary League, technically illegal in the Autonomous Republic, and generally taboo among democratic societies.  Cosmid, having an abundance of financial interests, and a lack of ethical principals agreed.    

Krieg became reclusive, hoping to avoid unwanted attention as he raised his "sons".  Eventually he left the eldest, Wolfgang, temporarily in charge of the business, as he went with the rest to a medical resort in a Cosmid-controlled system to get his brain  transplanted into one of the younger ones.  On the way, their ship was caught up in a gravity storm in hyperspace.  

Much later, when the ship (which had been drifting for a very long time in hyperspace, with everyone on board in suspended animation) crash-landed on the planet New Albuquerque, Krieg was killed, but most of his clones survived.  Disappointed at the end of their lives of luxury and wealth, the clones formed a criminal gang known as The Happy Lads, and spent the rest of their lives bullying and terrorizing the population of New Albuquerque.

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.

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