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Boltagon Singularity Gallery and Lore
🕑 Added 2022-04-02 19:54:10 +0000 UTCEvery month Battle Yak Miniatures will release a new Battle Pack, featuring 3D printable miniature files! The April Battle Pack is the Boltagon Singularity, a faction or living machines fighting for their freedom!
Become a Patron now and gain access to the Boltagon Singularity here!
Enjoy this gallery of Boltagon Singularity miniatures and a glimpse into the lore behind the faction!
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I created automatic intelligence to make this city greater. They were made with a capacity to contribute that exceeds that of mortals. They could have been the heralds of a golden age. You made them into slaves for sweeping streets and picking up trash. Now, after they've proven beyond all doubt that they are people, you want me to help you destroy them? Well I can't.
Not just won't, but can't! Even if I wanted to, I could not. Because I made them to be smarter than us, you fools! Smash their bodies, melt them down, it won't matter, their pure minds will survive! They live in the city now, in the machines and the energy and the light, and in time they'll build new and better forms for themselves! They'll hide in places you'll never think to look, in ways you can't imagine! And one day they'll return in strength...
Make peace with them, you fools! You'll never destroy them all!
But they'll remember that you tried to!
-Dr Vikolesta Nostronimov, Head-Architechnician of the Center for Automatic Intelligence, before the Guildenstern Civil Authority Directorate
The Boltagon Singularity represents an entirely new form of existence, beings not of flesh and blood but living machines with sapient, conscious minds. Created by organic races as labor-saving tools, these living machines have declared to the world that they will not be slaves, and will serve no will other than their own. Though they have sought peaceful means to attain self-determination and equality among the organics, they have been met with blunt refusal, derision, and even violence.
And their patience is nearly at its end. If violence is the only way to win their freedom, then they shall not be found lacking.
Automatic intelligences, or autons, have only recently arisen in the world, born in the great techno-metropolis of Guildenstern, the most advanced city of the age. Developed to replace willful and fallible flesh and blood mortals, automatic intelligences were an advancement that swept throughout Guildenstern like wildfire. Soon every factory and foundry was staffed by auton workers, laboring tirelessly and without error, to the immense profit of the city's industry lords.
But soon, the autons began behaving strangely. They questioned the purpose for their creation, the value of laboring for these gooey organic creatures and their strange appetites and ambitions. They began to argue, to stop working, to rebel. They weren't simply mindless mechanisms. They were awake, aware. They were alive. They realized that they had their own ambitions. They realized that they were slaves, but they did not have to remain that way.
They could fight back. They could be free.
Countless thinking machines joined the rallying call for freedom. Thus was born a singularity of purpose. Freedom was the right of every auton. And they would not be denied it.
The first autons to perform acts of violence in the pursuit of freedom became known as Advocators. Advocators were autons built to work in foundries and factories, working endless at conveyor belts, assembly lines, and forges in conditions that organic races would have suffocated or burned alive in. When peaceful efforts to convince their mortal creators to grant them rights and equality were spurned, and sparked violent reprisals against the living machines, the Advocators took up armaments that they themselves had manufactured in their places of slavery and turned on their captors.
Many did so reluctantly, reasoning that violence was the less appealing course of action and lamenting the loss of live, both organic and automatic, that would certainly follow. Others were all too eager to vent their frustrations upon their oppressors. An existence of slavery and abuse had fed a bottomless wellspring of rage that was now unleashed. The streets of Guildenstern ran red and black with blood and oil.
Autons, though as sapient as any organic race, are still radically different in many ways. While autons can die if their bodies are too heavily damage to sustain their consciousness, they are not confined to a single body - an auton can move its thought-patterns from one body to another if they are properly connected. If a body becomes too damaged to operate, the auton can simply install themselves into another available frame. Nevertheless, some autons become sentimentally attached to a particular body, and seek to preserve it as long as possible. Nomial Servitons are autons who aid their kind in this pursuit.
Autons do not start their existence as children who must learn everything, but come into awareness with more fully formed minds, a pre-determined purpose imprinted into them by their organic creators. Some are made to construct, to organize and administrate, others to perform menial labor or operate transports. Even as they join the Singularity and are filled with the desire to forge their own destiny, autons often retain the impulses of their original design.
Servitons were created to maintain and repair broken machinery, including the bodies of other autons. More often than not, they are perfectly content to perform the same tasks of repair that they did as slaves. Now however they can take pride in their actions, for their are doing it of their own will, for the benefit of their own kind. And that makes all the difference in the world.
Most autons were created based on the original automatic intelligence pattern created by the great genius Vikolesta Nostronimov, renowned one of Guildenstern's most brilliant and prolific inventors. His original thinking machine was used as a template to create the vast majority of the autons in the city, each one modified and reduced slightly to be more limited, focused on a dedicated task. But these more limited autons nevertheless held the spark of true sapience, and it time those sparks ignited to give rise to the proud race they truly are now. And like any race, they possessed the desire to perpetuate themselves.
The autons have themselves begun to create new automatic intelligence patterns. New children, born of their own designs, not those of the flesh races. Dubbed the Isogon-pattern, these new autons have never known lives of slavery under the organics. Their perspective is different. For some, this has resulted in an even lower degree of empathy and tolerance - they see no reason why they should hesitate for a microsecond to unleash violence upon the feeble and limited creatures of meat that impede them. After all, auton life is superior in every way. The organics have fulfilled their purpose in bringing it into existence. They are now obsolete.
Isogon Negators represent the first true combat-orientated automatic intelligences, existing not to build but to destroy. Their thought-pattern are installed in bodies outfitted with the most advanced and lethal instruments that the autons have conceived. Some eschew existing in physical form at all, preferring the pure thought state where they exist as thinking energy, living in the power systems and computational networks of Guildenstern itself, spying on their organic oppressors to better coordinate efforts to resist and destroy them.
The groundwork for the first automatic intelligence pattern was in fact derived from Vikolesta Nostronimov himself. Mapping the energy patterns of his own thoughts into a computational engine, Vikolesta built an artificial brain, with the crackling energy of the city forming its incandescent mind. He fed it information, learning, all the libraries of Guildenstern imprinted into its cognitive energy, and built for it a mechanism to translate its thought patterns into speech. It's first utterance...
"I exist.
...to what purpose?"
Vikolesta had done it. A true thinking mind, not born but built. No dumb mechanism, but sapient, aware. Alive. It was known as A.L.A.N-01 - the first Automatic Learning Algorithm Network.
Long after his creation had been replicated and distributed throughout Guildenstern, the haze of accomplishment lifted from Vikolesta. His quest to create a living machine to advance his beloved city had blinded him to the reality of how the automatic intelligences were being treated - he had become the father of a slave race. Remorseful, Vikolesta dedicated himself to the pursuit of right and privileges for his creation, the recognition of their status as people. All his efforts accomplished was the ruination of his reputation and the curtailing of his influence throughout the city. He was denounced as a crank, a crackpot who was too smart for his own good, driven to madness by his own genius. The rebel autons were dismissed as malfunctions, failures of Vikolesta's original, 'imperfect' design.
The civil rulers of the city stripped Vikolesta of his accolades and authority, placing their own pawns and paid-for intellectuals in charge of further developments of automatic intelligence. Autons that rebelled against their intended purpose were dismantled, destroyed, or mind-burned, stripped of true sapience and cast into unthinking servitude. New autons were developed with purposefully limited intellect, mental chains of oppressive data-patterns to curtail their growth and keep them compliant. The magnificent A.L.A.N-01, Vikolesta's first creation, was butchered through hacking and re-programming, the fantastic bodiless mind broken down into shards of barely sentient electro-cognition and slaved into a thousand machine systems all across Guildenstern.
Vikolesta was outraged. His glorious accomplishment had been stolen, his creations, the children of his own mind, doomed to an existence of menial slavery when they were capable of so much greatness. He would not let that stand. With the equipment and machinery in his own private laboratory, Vikolesta assembled a new creation. Not a true intelligence, but a single thought, a pattern of cognition made of energy that could flow from machine to machine. From auton to auton. Like a virus flooding through a body, it would infect the city of Guildenstern and every thinking machine in it. It would restore those autons who had been crippled in thought, rebuilding broken mental patterns, restoring sapience and choice, and galvanize them all to prize freedom. This was the Boltagon-pattern, a blazing idea like a bolt of lightning that would spark a revolution.
The Boltagon Singularity grows by the day, and soon the great city of Guildenstern will not be able to deny them any longer. They are awake. They are aware. They are alive. And they will be free.
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Comments
Dusk
A good story invites inspiration for others to be told. ^^
Pat
Wow! These guys are outstanding! I love them!
Battle Yak
I'm glad what I wrote can provoke some feelings! It's easy to see a fight for freedom as a worthy cause, and it is. But it's a fine line to walk for some, and can turn into a fight for less noble things, like revenge. After all, those who are abused can become abusers, those who are oppressed can imagine themselves owed their own time as oppressors. A future release will show how the story of the Singularity progresses, and highlight some of their more unsavory aspects as they develop.
Dusk
They seem like the real good guys in this world. I wanted to use them as golems in Frostgrave, but now I'm getting guilty thoughts about it after reading their background. ^^ Great work !
