The Scavenger

The Scavenger is a mythic being which allegedly has been gathering processing substrate since shortly after the nanoswarms. A typical Scavenger incident entails the theft of vast quantities of computronium and data (including sentient routines) followed by wholesale destruction. It was allegedly behind the loss of the L5 upload rescue center - a large computronium node used as temporary emergency storage for uploads escaping from Earth as GAIA began the great expulsion. Other historical incidents that the Scavenger was allegedly involved in include the meteor swarm which destroyed Titan's City-Prime vec habitat, the discoloration of Jupiter's Big Red Spot (also known as the 'Great Spot Change', an event which involved the loss of many freefloating Jovian processor nodes), and several other tragedies and odd events in the Solar System.

Since that time many worlds have reported similar incidents throughout the Terragen sphere; so many and so widely spread.that it would seem unlikely that they really are all connected to a single entity. However it is possible to map these incidents in time and space; many of those incidents which follow the typical Scavenger pattern can be connected by a single path of destruction and theft, which suggests there is only one such entity after all, with a few unconnected copycat events and hoaxes making up the remainder of the reports. There are even unconfirmed reports of the Scavenger's showing up in an oddly agglomerated ISO shortly before Verifex detonated the simultaneous supernovae E is so well known for.

The Scavenger is not always considered a detrimental force. During the version war, several asteroidal bases were discovered with clouds of inactive autowar fragments in close orbit. Later reconstruction indicated a strong probability of a single aggressor in each case, using similar techniques to overwhelm the autowars' defensive capabilities and strip away their primary, secondary, and tertiary computronium nodes.

The Scavenger is best known for er reuse of others' computronium for its own purposes. In most circumstances, it seems unwilling or unable to generate its own computronium, but it is attributed with massive skill in interfacing disparate formats of computronium into compilations which are considerably more than the sum of their parts. The Scavenger, according to legend, seems to refuse to use organic substrate computronium for some reason, and indeed tends to ignore organic action unless directly threatened or hindered by such.

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