The Precursors

"The precursors. A modern enigma. Enigmatic, ancient civilisations that lived hundreds of thousands, if not millions or billions of years ago. These are the empires that ruled the stars when Sol was occupied by nothing more than primordial soup.

What we know of them is gleaned from ancient databases, derelict starships and the ruins of once mighty civilisations. That is, when we lowly monkeys can even begin to scrape together an understanding.

Take, for example, the "best known" of the precursor epochs. The Stygians. Their ruins are the most prominent across the galaxy. Intact and operational. The Stygians seemed to be synthetic artificers beyond compare. Crafting AI and nanites that makes the near ascendant warmind AIs of the Coalition look like a calculator. They are the only ancient race to have a living progeny. Depending on your definition of living.

That progeny? The Stygian Automata Ascendancy. An intractable, enigmatic synthetic hegemony that exists beyond the dark space between spiral arms. These ancient machines may not have been born with sentience... Or maybe they were? Either way this ancient race has menanced the borders of every empire that dares reach towards the void between the arms. Especially those who try to play with their masters' toys."

— Excerpt from 'On the ancient stars' by Dr Hayley Bishop, senior fellow, Solar Academy of Sciences , Circa 2411

The precursor races are a mystery that has dominated interstellar politics from the moment they were first discovered. Where they were discovered, they helped catapult those who found them into the stars. It is rumored that the origins of the Solar Empire came from Stygian ruins on Venus. The first entries into the great repositories of the Fahikh came from an Ancient repository on Indi. Although the truth of this is still hotly debated to this day. Precursor relics, ruins and even the smallest bit of detritus of these once powerful races often get treated as the highest of imperial priorities, universally referred to as artifacts. The technological supremacy of both the Coalition and Directorate speaks to why they’re treated so.

Doctors Gerald Skipson and Hayley Bishop of the Solar Academy of Sciences are credited with establishing the baseline of precursor knowledge. Firstly discovering the distinct radiological signature that all precursor technology seems to share, and developing a classification system to catalog all discoveries. In the subsequent four hundred years of research and discovery, their work continues to form the foundation of all research into the Precursors, no matter the empire of origin.

The Erandi Codex

Whilst precursor sites have been researched since the empires reached the stars, it wasn’t until first contact in 2320 that a comprehensive profile of those who came before was established. Just over a hundred years after the Directorate and Solar Empire met, the Stygian war would exponentially increase the wider understanding of precursor technology, as a Stygian database was captured following a battle with a Stygian fleet. Named the Erandi Codex, after the system it was recovered in, it became the de facto, declassified database on just what the Stygians and other precursors were.

The Erandi Codex revealed that the Stygians were a galaxy spanning empire, with a proclivity for developing exceptionally powerful synthetic and artificial intelligence. It detailed how these AI empowered them to spread throughout the stars, uncovering the history of the “Ancients”. However, unlike the empires of the current era, the Stygians saw the relics of the past as an existential threat. They poured considerable resources into cataloging their discoveries into discrete databases, which we have called Antediluvian Index’s. Once recorded in an Index, the Stygians would secure them on “vault worlds” that spanned their empire.

It was for this purpose the Erandi Codex indicated the Stygian Automata Ascendancy (SAA) was created. A force dedicated to the hunt for artifacts, no matter the cost. Like all their AI, it was empowered with what appears to be almost total free will to complete their mission.

The Codex had a notable gap, a break in its recordings where the only translatable references mention a  “torrent” and nothing more. Its last, consistent recordings refer to an empire now extinct. On the run from their own servants, the SAA. The codex makes no explanation for why the SAA were hunting and eradicating their creators, but some scholars have argued the last line entered offers some clue.

“We built a garden. A safe… yet we didn’t account for the weeds…Weeds we didn’t even know existed…hidden deep…We built a garden.”

— Erandi Codex , Z-22110-D

Ofcourse, the translation could be entirely wrong. What is known of the Stygian language is cobbled together from the Codex and several Indexes and even after three hundred years of research, nothing is certain.