The Gentodes Incident
The mythical vec Hundunggok begins to emerge from its lair
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The Gentodes IncidentThe mythical vec Hundunggok begins to emerge from its lair |
The Gentodes system was inhabited by a variety of clades,
inhabiting three 120-mile O'Neill
cylinders: Lortun, Koren and Taron. The three orbitals were
guided by a central AI, with a
male persona and su intellect, called
Vater by the general population. In 6717at unknown saboteurs infected
Vater with a virus, which made him a humanophobe. Though fail-safes
hardwired into Vater's programming prevented him from simply
obliterating the biosphere, he still caused horrendous casualties as he
tried to rid himself of the people living in the habitats using
puppeteered vecs and weapons manufactured via the station's nanofabs.
Within a week he managed to exterminate the entire population of Taron
and he had killed enough of the population of Koren to render them
incapable of reproduction, causing them to go extinct after 190 years.
80% of the population of Lortun was also destroyed within the first
week, but the remaining part of the population managed to barricade
themselves from the enemy without. The survivors found it necessary to
create a society capable of surviving without the use of the nanofabs
or other tools connected to Vater, and managed to convert to a neobarb
high tech society.
Though Vater continued his efforts to exterminate the inhabitants, and
succeeded in maintaining a high death rate, they managed to survive
either in heavily fortified settlements, or as nomadic tribes. As a
result of the high death rate, the survivors also maintained a high
birth rate, resulting in an actual population growth. As a result of
their return to high tech, the maximum life span fell to 300 years,
though most survived no longer than 150 before falling prey to disease,
accidents or Vater.
It took 500 years before a trader passed through the system, and culled
Vater. During that time 25 generations had passed, and the time before
the incident had been reduced to faint myths of a golden age. Though
the Lortununs had a nominally hightech society, there was a lack of
understanding about how the world actually worked, and in the place of
science, an entire mythology had been constructed about the world that
they knew.
The lortunun mythos features wrathful, invisible spirits which haunt
specific locals and calls upon other monsters, intelligent fogs which
devour the flesh and can only be killed with fire, and a wide variety
of vec monsters, such as Klartunun, Hundunggok, Vreylis, and Korentan.
It features precious few benevolent, or even neutral creatures, and no
gods or other omnipotent forces. The only trace of Vater in the
mythology is the ruler Farer, which ruled the lands during the golden
age, but went mad and summoned a horde of evil creatures, which took
him as their first victim, before spreading out to plague the lands.
A mythological creature from the Lortunun Mythos. The only mention of
Hundunggok that exists today is found in the myth of Johant of
Gronlund, where Johant had to sneak through its lair to reach the
mythical lands of Taron. The form of the myth, seems to suggest that
Hundunggok was a well known monster in the mythos, but any other myths
about Hundunggok must have been lost along the centuries.
According to the myth Hundunggok was a large vec, composed primarily of
hundreds of long arms, with its central processor hidden in a node in
the middle. Its many arms made it almost impossible to kill, though
Johant did manage to chop off three, as he escaped the lair. The lair
of Hunduggok was a large silvery structure called Bastong. The lair was
filled with large rooms, full of incomprehensible machines, in the
middle room resided Hundunggok, using its arms to create its minions,
which it sent out to harry the neighboring population centers.
