The Caretakers were synthetic life forms designed to care for the billions of embryos clean and free from the virus...

>The Caretakers were synthetic life forms designed to care for the billions of embryos clean and free from the virus that eventually overtook and destroyed humanity
>Several generational ships were dispatched to find a habitable word in which the new generation of humans could grow up and rebuild armed with the accumulated cultural knowledge of humanity.
>one such ship is heavily damaged after being caught in the wave of a near by exploding star forcing it to crash land on a nearby planet
>The systems maintaining the embryos is destroyed and now the caretakers no longer staying in sync with the other ships start to develop complex thoughts and personalities of their own and build their own civilization based on data found in the archies as a way of mourning for their lost charges

What more could be made with this premise in mind?

I had thought of a similar scenario where the caretakers kept a heavy control of humanity to avoid another collapse, while going at war with the old surviving humans who managed to escape Earth.

As for the rogue caretakers, they could become their own species as you said, but the old caretakers could either go to war or conquer them and assimilate them into their newborn Empire

>build their own civilization based on data found in the archives as a way of mourning for their lost charges
A humanboo society? Wouldn't they want to reunite with the rest of humanity? Or perhaps they would want to protect the surviving humans from other ships?

Probably something like Talos Principle meets Megaman X. The humans that did survive exist but you have two factions now: The rogue Caretakers who have existed so long without syncronizing that they are highly individualiistic versus the !borg Caretakers who, while not all mindless or single minded, are very aligned with their cause

Maybe a group of humans escaped from the more overbearing Caretakers and live with the Rogues.

An idea.

>To prepare the needed infrastructure for the humans once they were able to grow in their exowombs, the Caretakers were designed with the ability to ingest and gain energy from biological sources such as meat and plant matter, although their physiology requires far less food as they mostly subsist on water.

The Rogue caretakers, experimenting with human cuisine soon developed their own style of cooking utilizing the native life forms as well as the stored genetic materials of various animal to create vat grown meat products. Most caretaker meals consist of small portions of food with bowls/cups of flavored liquids.

bump for interest.

>build their own civilization based on data found in the archives
So an entire civilization built on memes?

If they were somewhat divorced from that data, in that they didn't exactly understand it other then it meant something to the humans probably, so you'd have caracatures of various cultures and ideas emulated by them or used to inspire their own stuff.

Given the fact they were suppose to stay "syncronized" with each other who's to say that being disconnected made it so they couldn't understand the data the way it was intended?

desu most memes are about as understandable when completely devoid of context as otherwise

maybe more

While excavating and mining the planet for resources, some Caretakers stumble across "Wyrms," relics of another alien race meant to protect the resources of the planet for later exploitation.

A small pocket of humans evolved to live with the virus that killed the rest, having a particular gene that gives immunity to the effects of the virus

When the caretakers scan the new humans, they are classified as abnormal since they contain the virus and try to do their duty by erasing the infection

The Rogues, not being disposed to instant discrimination like the Synched have taken in the immune humans and try their best to protect them from being killed viewing it as their duty for failing to save the stored embryos

bump

Going to bump this, because I'm suddenly trying to do some writefaggotry for it, XS style.

I’d almost forgotten what it was to be filled with Purpose.

Strange thing to be thinking about in the middle of a firefight. I hunched lower against the fallen, rotting tree as the bolts flying overhead made splinters of the forest.
The hivers stopped the barrage, and I took the chance to take a look out past the ancient wood with my scope – and nearly lost it as one of them took another shot. It was enough to see what was going on, though, the four remaining hivers reloading their guns for another salvo. The mandroid, two treadheads and the planter. Not good odds.

The coarse, mechanical laugh over radio was chilling, a raucous mocking into my head louder even than Freedom’s murmurs.
“Something got you scared, Cutter? Too damn scared to face us like a good little rogue?” Their leader, the mandroid calling out in challenge.
It was a distraction – I could feel the caterpillar treads of the haulage hivers moving to flank me, and I leaped up. Hefted the cutaway log that I’d prepared earlier as a shield as I sprayed the nearest treadhead with molten rivets. Tossed the wooden pole at the others as the invective-screaming metallic synth brought up his own gun only to hear it whir in his claws – the industrial bolt-gun shattered by a stray shot. I was on him, then, tearing apart his flesh, ripping through digestive tracts and reprocessing equipment to get to his main power cords. I felt him die in my grasp.

The second treadhead nearly took my head off along with his companion’s. The lifting arm smashed the deceased’s sensor module into a tree and the faceless synth tugged at the jammed appendage, watching coldly as I leveled Forger at his armoured brain and blew it away.
Hivers don’t have any self-preservation. Why bother, when you’ve a hundred thousand more like yourself?

The mandroid’s next shot ripped half my face away.

Half my vision was gone, and with the rest I could see the remains of my fiberglass mask shattered over the forest floor. I’d worked hard to put that together. Before I could recover, the mandroid stepped on my gun arm, kicked Forger away. Another shot shattered my claws and I groaned, going still.
“Don’t try it, Cutter. Else we’ll have to take you back in pieces.” He spoke out loud as the planter wound round my limbs, trapping the humanoid body in her twisting embrace. “Or maybe not at all. Where’s the human?”

Freedom roused again, uttering an urgent directive over the radio. Don’t tell them. –Of course. Protecting humans, our number one Purpose.
“Why should I care? Take me back or shoot me here, I’ll be dead just as equally.”
My captor sighed, his smiling visage unchanging as he stamped one heavy boot into my back, forcing me into the earth. Had my face been intact I would have smiled, embracing the soft loam and the faint thrum of heat from below.
“There’s just no point arguing with you rogues, is there? And since you’ve broken these two junkers that were supposed to carry you, it really WILL be easier if I just take back your tapes for syncing.” He reached down to prise open my back access panels, and hesitated at my snort of disdain.

“Tell me, you damn hivers. You always think you’ve got the upper hand, working in packs. Ever met my friend Sandy?”

Neither of them managed to respond before Sandy burst out of the ground and tore them in twain.

Sandy was still picking bits of them out of her maw when I returned from gathering up the pieces of my face.
“Taking your own sweet time, weren’t you? Any closer and Freedom would be missing his favourite Cutter.”
She laughed, the wormlike shape shaking the dirt from her body.
“We thought it was a pack of ferals. Never thought hivers would push so far into the Fringe.” Bits of shredded synth fell from the Sander’s mandibles as she came to rest beside me. “And you’re fine, aren’t you? Let’s get you out of here.”

We salvaged what we could out of the and dragged the rest out to the mountain-top, where we could see the remains of Hope dashed on the mountainsides. Hope – the colony ship that had housed a million human embryos and a hundred thousand synths along with the four Cores that gave us Purpose – that before the crash landing that shattered the ship into a dozen fragments we synched with every week and became one with. The crash had left us scattered and lost. Synths weren’t built to go without syncing for years, let alone decades. Freedom – Core 03 – saved us, the whispering broken machine whispering over radio how to compress our memory tapes to store more information, to keep ourselves active, to remind us of our Purpose to keep the human race going. The old bastard Freedom was only looking out for itself, of course, what with the sync interfaces shattered beyond repair. But with his guidance we saved what we could, building frontier towns, keeping our humans alive and safe and bringing them up right with the knowledge of the Old World wherever we could find it.
Without syncing we became individuals. Naming ourselves after our old jobs, even after we modified ourselves to work better in gravity. Planter-0503. Uranium sander 2219.

Cutter 0005.

We beat back the Ferals when they came for our parts, those who had never learned the art of Compression and who had lost all Purpose, lost everything apart from how to maintain their own bodies from whatever they could scavenge and tear apart.
We tangled with the Wyrms, the alien defense system that was protecting this planet’s resources.
And we thought everything was going to be just peachy, when we found out that Core 04 - old man Four - beyond the great desert was still active, still syncing up with all the synths it could. Oh, how wrong we were.

“How’s the camp?” I asked Sandy through radiospeak, astride her like a Dunerider of Arrakis. She sighed in response.
“Gardener got killed rescuing some kids from hiver raiders. They ripped him apart while the escape cart got away.”

That surprised me – he wasn’t the type to take risks. But any of us would put our lives on the lines for humans.
“At least the humans will remember him. It’s all he would have wanted. Better than being synched, at least.” The thought of that – having that great Core tear your memories apart, filter them down to lines of information and discard emotions, loves, desires – made me shudder. Even if that would replace all of what we were with its own single-minded Purpose. “Better than letting the humans get taken to the brain-farms.” Even worse – rigged up life support for comatose brains, to be held until the entire planet could be terraformed. ‘Protecting’ humans, is what core 04 had declared that to be. Declaring all of us to be broken and defective for opposing those plans.

Well, we’d show Four our own damn purpose.

I smiled again, feeling bits of my shattered face break off inside the bandage covering it up. The kids’d be happy to see me again, and I couldn’t help but feel glad thinking about it.
“Something the matter, Cutter?” Sandy asked, as she wormed over the grass. Freedom’s voice whispered in the air to us, reassuring us we were on the right track.

“Nothing you need to worry about. Come on, let’s get back to camp. We’ve got our Purpose to fulfil.”

---

No, that's just terrible and nowhere near XS quality. Welp, hope that it gives some people some ideas anyway.

That was really good. Don't see a lot of writefaggotry these days.

Thank you.
I did a bit of worldbuilding in my head, and basically synths are mostly robotic, but with some biological parts for efficiency intended post landing.

Synths of all types, while on the ship, used to be able to sync and realign with the four main computer cores; this gave them one big gestalt mind, but individual synths would have specific programming in them for their upcoming tasks. There wasn't any individuality until after the crash.

The main problem with synths not realigning and syncing (to be filled with Purpose) is that they've got limited memory storage in their Tapes, and if they go too long without realigning, using compression techniques (which weren't a thing before the Crash), or scavenging Tapes off other synths, wiping them and using them, they start to lose memories. That's what happened to the ferals.

In the meantime, each of the Rogues made their own compression technique as instructed by Core 03 which needed to keep them alive for its own purposes, and that core is basically the government of the West, which is also where most of the incubation pods crash landed. But the Rogues, too, as time goes by, start little by little to drift away from the Purpose as it gets more and more compressed...

Core 04 landed far to the East, where it decided this world was too hostile and needed terraforming before humans were allowed to live on it. It's smart, powerful, but due to the limitations of tapes can't put all of its persona into the synths it controls - hivers - leaving them without a lot of the specialised information to run, so they're more like disposable cannon fodder. But it can also drag Rogue Synths back to Sync chambers and basically eat their information, destroying whatever personality the Sync had beforehand and turning its body into another Hiver.

The story of Cutter would go about like in the Wild West, a wandering gunman fighting off ferals, wyrms and hivers, and protecting the Children of Humanity.

reminds me of Lost Source.

Very nice, what sort of objects are the "Tapes"? Are they literally tape shaped blocks that they can slot into their bodies?

I'm thinking that, yeah. Something like SSD cards - small, easy to armour, easily smashed if made vulnerable.

Something pretty sordid looking for a soul.

I was thinking later on, Sandy would get synched and realigned, so there's nothing left in her mind but Core 04's hateful intelligence. But she had backup tapes hidden in her frame to allow her to be restored into a new body.

>start to develop complex thoughts and personalities of their own
Why?

They're synthetic life forms. If they weren't designed with a sense of taste...

>start to develop complex thoughts and personalities of their own
Well, assume the aligned synths already had one core personality.

Each synth has its own personality split off from the core personality, and then as they accumulate individual experiences, their personalities will change depending on what happens to them.

For example a synth who tries to save a bunch of humans from a fire and fails terribly might be distraught and upset, while a synth who manages to save a different bunch of humans would be a lot more cheerful, because saving humans is awesome.

Normally at the end of the day, or week, the synths would align with the central processor cores, and upload all their experiences, and so all their knowledge and feelings intermingle. But since that doesn't happen, they aren't made identical any more.

It's actually not that unusual of an idea. In the Butlirian Jihad the man computer guy (whatever the hell his name was) had to resynch all the various versions of himself across multiple planets. Atreides job was to do just that.

Isn't this the premise behind Trigun?

make this a Quest, plz man

Nah, in Trigun the Plants were (literally) power plants and were found by the human population while seeking habitable planets. Which was the reason that Vash stopped that one reactor from blowing up, he simply talked it down

> based on data found in the archies

An entire robot civilization based on Archie comics?

The robots have taken to domesticating wildlife without any true cause, being able to live indefinitely and eternally.

But they take care of things, its what they do.
Its what they are.

I think it's already been established that they have to ingest food but not nearly as much as a regular human.

Ha ha, don't tempt me!

...I might run a one-shot.

Bless you user, you're a type of fa/tg/uy we don't have enough of.