Strategos

It was not the practice of the man-machines to encamp at night. They did not need to sleep. But we were breathing men, who had to rest, and so they would leave us to maneuver in the dark. The strategos was to stay with us for its safety. It was new. The old strategos had been destroyed. It had been beheaded by roundshot and it was still standing where it had died. The new engine wanted to meet its subordinates, and it summoned me first.

It was drinking. A little hole opened in its head and it squeezed ichor from a tube. It was writing in a book. There was an expenditure log and a description of a species of beetle. It was cleaning a slab-sided pistol whose lock was an electric spark. It was holding a baton of command. It was signaling a picket far to the west with flashes of light. All of these things, it was doing at once. It spoke through an interpreter, but it gestured in time to the speech.

The night was long and in good company. I woke early in the morning with bleary eyes and splashed my face with water until I was alert. The morning was windless and hot; I lead a small attack on the enemy. We were guided: the curling gunsmoke flashed through with rhythmic light.

- Nicomedo Iadanza

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I recall a story my mother told me when I was a child. It was a story her mother told her, but she told it in the first person. Maybe with enough retellings she believed it really happened to her. I'm sure you could find variants of it anywhere.

"The Signalman had lost its sight. This was after the Master Brain had fallen into its long decline and the kilns could no longer manufacture replacement parts for his pattern. His manyfold hands would grasp maps and dossiers and pieces of printed matter from around the world that held the stratagems of the Host's enemies and stare blankly with hovereyes that he didn't have.

After watching this for an hour or a day, or many days, I gently slid the copybook out of its grasp. The hand that no longer held the pistol (that too was broken) pointed at me. Accusing. Reproachful. I opened the book to the first page and began to read out loud. The Signalman sat inert, fingers flexing. Then the hands went still. The commlight began to flicker in time with my recitation as the information was absorbed and transmitted. Hour by hour, day by day, I read to the machine, and so was part of the synapse."

I think about the story whenever I write for other people.

- Borgia, Baba Gadou

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I remember the day I met the metal man. He was one of the brain children, the angels, though I was too young to know then. Just came in down the paved road, always hitting the middle of each stone. I was out in the field playing and he pivoted on a foot, turned right off the path. Came up to me. He had no head, just this sort of tower, like a big flashing light-house. Lot of arms all round his neck. All shod in steel like a knight. I guess I should have been scared, but you know how little kids are.

Mamma was scared but she didn't want to holler. She didn't want to come close. She was a believer and she knew he had to mean right. One of the brain children had once come by when papa was sick to die. He'd been some kind of doctor. Cut him open and closed him and gave him another twenty years of life. When the metal man picked me up I could hear her cover her mouth. Try not to shriek.

Later, when I was old enough, she told me. She said it wasn't like being scared from a wolf. More like a big wagon, where you've got to respect it, fear the force, not the spite. She was scared to death that he would hurt me without meaning it. Squeeze with those metal hands and crush me 'cause he didn't know how to be gentle. But he didn't. He turned me around a few times, ran a palm over my forehead. Didn't talk, but I could hear something inside his head. He let me down and patted me on the head a little hard. Went and did the same to a chicken, looked at our cow. Squatted by the house and traced a hand from the ground to the roof. Then he was off down the road. Never saw him again.

- Paolo Offredi

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Credit to mellonbread on the Stellar Jockeys discord for the second lore entry.

Quite a lot of lore for this one, hah- but then it made some impressions when I first posted it.

The idea behind Rygos is that it (was) an empire controlled by a massive Master Brain moored in their capital city, the crater-lake of Baba Gadou. It was a superhuman, but opaque and unemotional, intelligence that ran the land like a Starcraft player: intense, high-efficiency economic and military micromanagement, 24/7. Because it was very, very good at this job, people lived well under it, and they came to revere it as a god.

Its middlemen, elite soldiers, and heralds were its constructs. Constructs are "man-machines": clones made of fake flesh, built to often strange body plans, and who are much more durable and long-lived than regular humans. In the Brain's time there were myriad patterns of them for every purpose. This one is a "strategos": equal parts commander and radio tower.

Black powder-era Rygoles are, to me, one of the hardest design challenges in the setting. I want to convey an imperial, industrial strength to them; but also an efficient, high-tech, alien mindset- one that meshes with their 18th-century surroundings. Essentially, Rygos must always be in the future, but not too far into it that they'd feel out of place with everyone else. You could think of them as "contemporary science fiction".

I decided that their futuristic advantage, for this era, would be radio: specifically, early (rotary-spark-gap) radiotelegraphy of the pre-1920s kind. The Master Brain transmits orders through the air; the strategos receives and retransmits them for the rank-and-file, like a signal booster. But he also has to be able to work like a regular general: many auxiliary troops in the Rygo military are normal humans. And, because he's the nerve center of the army, he must be well protected and able to defend himself.

Now the picture starts to come together. He's covered in plate armor, from head to toe. His many arms permit him to both perform regular staff tasks (writing orders and reports) and to fight in all directions. (While I like the "ruff" of arm guards, in the future I'll probably split it into segments. He'll otherwise have trouble lifting his arms over his shoulders.) To signal to normal humans at a distance, he's equipped with a lighthouse of sorts inside of the radio tower that makes up his head. I wanted to emphasize his superhuman multitasking ability- so, after a "false start" (just a boring standing pose), I went with him sitting on a folding chair and making good use of all his arms instead.

His head is my favorite part of the design. When making complex pieces of Rygo technology in this era, I'm drawn towards three main inspirations: early 20th century industrial designs, Late Roman iconography, and the Space Race. Right away, any space nerd can identify the base of his head as Sputnik 3. On top of that, I've installed a big US Navy cage lattice mast; a little fluted column serves as the base of the antenna. Inside the mast goes a rotating Fresnel head for the lighthouse.

He's surrounded by emissaries (the floating eyes). They're naturally attracted to anything interesting, but constructs in particular seem to catch their attention.