1000 Years Later
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 72172
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Alexandria is a planet in the Outer Rim ruled by a civilization of
historians. During the fall of the Old Republic, a few dedicated scholars,
fearing that all knowledge of history would be destroyed by the newly-
risen Emperor's censorship, fled to an obscure planet at the very edge of
the Empire's power. It was a desolate rock with no valuable mineral
resources, in a system riddled with asteroids and which could be
accessed by no hyperspace route. Naturally, no one travelled deep
enough into the system to find that the first world from the sun was
almost completely amarantine. Even if they had found out, it wouldn't
have made that much difference, because amarantine was a relatively
common although important substance (used to make Imperial
computers) which could be easily synthesized. But if someone wanted
to make an unthinkably large computer where no one could find it, this
was the perfect place.
And that was exactly what Clio Herodat, the founder of Alexandria, wanted to do. He would create the ultimate historical resource, a computer that would store not only information but also lives. The ArchiveBots (Herodat came from the Mid Rim world of Ashkalon, where "Bot" rahter than "Droid" was the common term for robotic workers) would take "snapshots" of a person's mind which would then be brought back to Alexandria and encoded in amarantine, although to be properly accessed they would have to be decompressed and downloaded to a terminal. The robots were sophisticated shapeshifting machines which were almost sentient, programmed to seek out both new lives and machinery and organic components for the clone banks. (The shapeshifter that ended your first life was not one of these beings, but a similar machine that had been constructed for completely different purposes, as the ArchiveBots only preyed on nonsentient life. But that's not important yet.) Since Herodat did not have nearly enough followers to start a proper civilization, and he wanted to encourage stability, he started a clone-based civilization. The clones were mostly of either the planet's founders or great historians of the past, and they were modified so that they were completely asexual. (Although even the best system of cloning could be a bit dodgy, considering the complexity of sentient lifeforms' DNA, so not all clones were.) And thus, Alexandria stood at the edge of known space, surviving while political turmoil erupted all around it. It watched and collected lives as the galaxy made its way through the First and Second Galactic Civil Wars, the Vong War, the War of Ascendancy, the Seventh and Eighth Sith Wars, the Galactic Great Depressions, the Jedi Master Investiture Controversy, the Core Riots, the War of Anakin's Ear, and innumerable other upheavals major and minor. Alexandria never revealed itself to the galaxy, for fear of making itself vulnerable. Finally, they found a way to construct a mirror site on the opposite side of the galaxy, and after the world had existed for a thousand years, the Heptarchy of Alexandria revealed itself to the rest of the galaxy. Meanwhile, your mind, in compressed format, has languished in the depths of Alexandria's archive for a thousand years. You have not been aware of this, or even aware at all. The archive was not accessed until 25 years after Alexandria went public, when an outsider historian named Rachel Windstar began researching a very strange and potentially dangerous subject...
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Knight Random, who was rather in love with infodumps back then
12/12/2007 7:23:22 PM
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