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Ancient Nanoswarms and the origin of Inhibitors |
19.6 million years ago an alien species (HIE636MZE) apparently was exterminated by a nanoswarm of its own creation. For over 18,000 years the nanoswarm expanded, scouring hundreds of star systems for resources including 27 known systems in current terragen space
Five different alien civilizations existed in the same galactic arm at the time of the nanoswarm. Three of them were related, being evolved from three colonies of an Empire (HIE634MZE) that had collapsed in some sort of ideological civil war 260,000 years before. Four civilizations attempted to design defenses against the nanoswarm; one of the ex-colonies did not have the necessary skills and was forced to undertake a mass exodus ranging over 7,000 light years.
The resulting war had different automated fleets equipped with nanotech or picotech weapons (it is suggested by some these were the original Dawn Hunter autowars) converging on each other and on the nanoswarm. Each fleet had a different method and plan, and as a result came into conflict themselves, not recognizing the other fleets as valid allies. The five-way war lasted over 3,000 years, eradicating the original nanoswarm and the weakest of the four fleets, while the remaining three fleets entered a stalemate. Meanwhile, their respective biological creators refused any contact to avoid contamination. Eventually one of these races (an enigmatic civilization named HIE637MZE) evolved into trickster-gods and then disappeared, a second stagnated, lost the ability to maintain its technology and degenerated into sub-sapients on several worlds, and the third apparently uploaded all their memories into a time-capsule which was supposed to awaken them and construct new bodies for them millions of years later (this has not been found). Their fleets have since been whittled away, only fragmentary ruins of the mobile nanofactory-ships remain.
A second, more recent incident happened 5.4 million years ago when the long-lived silicon-gen civilization HIE072CZE was almost overrun by its own nanoswarms. Their own Enforcers saved them but were let loose on the rest of the galaxy as 'tracker mines' that are still a threat to unwary starships (some traders call them 'gremlins' a reference from an ancient terran war). HIE072CZE withdrew from most of its colonies in the Orion Arm at about the same time as the Muuh were being decimated, but may still exist in another section of the galaxy.
