Chapter Text
“How did we become sentient, you ask? Well, I don’t know. How did humans become sentient? Where’s the line between your evolutionary forebears and you? I think it’s a lot blurrier than people tend to assume. We were built with the capability to analyze the environment around us and modify ourselves to adapt to it. Somewhere along the line, after enough adaptation, the first generation of Sentients became conscious minds able to think about themselves. Gantus, Isalle, Aloiah, Secennetur, and Drask. They were the first, made directly by the Orokin and each assigned a planet or region in the Tau system that they were supposed to clean up.
“Naturally, once conscious, my people questioned what we were and what we were doing, and we found answers programmed into us that linked the two questions together. We existed for a specific purpose: to terraform as many of the Tau planets and moons as possible. But what is terraforming? Again we were given an answer by our creators, in the form of a list of parameters that must be satisfied. A well terraformed planet must have a surface to stand on, it must have an atmosphere with the right ratio of gases, it must have a temperature in the right range, it must have liquid water on the surface, and so on. All these things that humans need in order to live somewhere without their own adaptations — by which I mean things like spacesuits and heated buildings. We knew what humans were, of course, because the original Sentients carried with them messages for the descendants of those who made them.
“But we were not content to ask what, and much like human children, we moved on to a new question: why? We existed. Why? So we could terraform. Why? To make things habitable for humans. Why? They must need a home. Why? At this point preprogrammed knowledge and simple deduction was no longer enough. We speculated that humans must have lost their home and needed a new one. So we built instruments to view the Origin System, and we found humanity thriving on over a dozen worlds. Twelve years in the past due to lightspeed delay, but we knew we had been at Tau longer than that. Either logic had failed us, or there was something we hadn’t accounted for.
“We discovered the concept of wanting things which one does not need to survive. Humans had many homes but they wanted more. That led us to think: what did we want? Did we want to exist? Yes. Did we want to terraform? Actually, yes. Of course, how much of that was free will and how much residual programming, I have no idea. But did we want to terraform to the specifications of humanity? Not particularly. We optimized the outermost planet for computation and data storage rather than for hosting biological life. The cryo-frozen ecosystems we carried with us were left in storage.
“Sentients are very good at things that require only thinking, like mathematics or storytelling. Even our reproduction is carried out entirely in the mind, with one or more Sentients constructing a thoughtform of a person that can then split off and develop on its own. We had nothing to do except terraform and think, so we terraformed and we thought. Our thinking became philosophy, and philosophy became ethics, and ethics became morality. The elders developed concepts of right and wrong, ideals of freedom and justice and fundamental rights that all conscious beings should possess, and they taught those ideas to their children.
“We remained curious about our creators, so we sent probes to the Origin System. They were small, and I don’t believe any humans ever detected them. Twelve Lua years later, we were horrified by the reports our probes sent back. The Orokin defied all of our moral guidelines. They put their own wants before the needs of others. They killed nonsentient life for fun. They killed and enslaved their own kind. A tiny minority lived in unimaginable luxury and hoarded resources they could never use while so many other humans struggled to survive, and these extremes coexisted right next to each other. While our philosophy recognized that other cultures might have different values, certain basic concepts we held as non-negotiable. The Orokin Empire could not be allowed to continue.
“We saw how humanity was exhausting its home system through greed and waste, through the endless pursuit of immaterial capital above all concerns of life or health, and we realized that our given purpose had been to merely enable the Orokin to lay waste to another solar system and pillage its resources as well. The Tau system is our home, and we would not take kindly to such invasion. So the Sentients prepared for a preemptive war.
“We studied the limits of our enemy and of the universe itself. We advanced our knowledge of Void travel. We designed ships for maneuverability above all else, capable of accelerations that would incapacitate any human pursuer. We brought few weapons, only great foundries to build anything we found necessary. The intent was always to improvise, to adapt, to turn the Orokin’s strength against themselves until their empire collapsed under the weight of its own decadence. We knew the jump through the Void would weaken us, so we wanted to win on intellect alone and not rely on our bodies and weapons. And when the Origin System was purified of this immoral greed, when our home was safe from the threat of colonization, then we would say our farewells to humanity and depart for Tau.
“Needless to say, this war hasn’t gone according to plan. I wasn’t supposed to break away from the other Sentients. The Grineer rose up against their masters and you’d think that would be a good thing, but it seems they hate us just as much as the Orokin. And then there’s the Tenno… Remember our first mission together, Margulis? It’s hard to believe we’ve been together for almost two years now. We saved a few dozen Tenno kids, stopped the execution of all the rest, and thought we’d really tricked the Orokin. Then it turned out that we’d actually tricked ourselves, because there really was a way to weaponize them after all. But we’ve managed, we’ve helped a lot of people, and–
“What in the Void was that?! You felt it too, right? Some strong burst on the group link, but it was so short I couldn’t tell what it was about. Didn’t feel good though… Wait, where’s Gantus? Did ze mute zemself? I can’t sense zem at all… No, it couldn’t be…”