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Around 15,000BC the Golden Alliance (GA, the major galactic power, consisting mainly of Humans and Mythics) declared war on the Galactic Anarchists (GAN, a faction of Devilings whose often-deadly pranks threatened the stability of the galaxy). However, the GA was low on armed forces: in the destabilised period following the war against Legion, vast numbers of troops had mutinied. These rebels that formed the Castaway Treaty Systems (CTS) did help the GA against the GAN, but only with technological assistance rather than military aid (primarily seeking to disrupt the Devilings' ability to teleport).
It was around 13,000BC that the GA, still battling the GAN, developed effective intelligent fighting robots. They produced these in their millions, finally hoping to increase the size of their army sufficiently to defeat the GAN. However Deviling hackers managed to infect these robots with a virus that gave them low-level sentience. Many of the now-sentient Mecha chose to leave the GA's armies, mostly joining the CTS, leaving the GA still with low troop numbers and prolonging the war.
But by no means did all of the Mecha conscientiously object. The robot designated ST3710 was a member of a surveillance taskforce assigned to a scout ship. It had chosen to continue its military service out of a sense of loyalty to the GA, who had been responsible for its existence, and duty to improving the galaxy. Although some Mecha had joined the GAN (arguing that the Devilings had been the ones to grant them sentience), ST3710 was one of those that put more emphasis on the work the GA had done in designing and creating the Mecha in the first place: the more honourable action was to help its creators and work towards building lasting stability for the whole of the civilised galaxy.
ST3710 continued to serve the GA in their war against the GAN for 430 years before it was lost in action. During a standard patrol in an uninhabited system, ST3710 was surveying a close-packed asteroid family at a distance away from the scout ship. Without warning, a GAN strike force teleported close to the scout ship and attacked. ST3710 immediately set about returning to the ship, but was hit by a shot from the GAN. This blast knocked out several of ST3710's key systems, but although incapacitated ST3710 still had a functional sensor array. Propelled away from the battle by the impact of the blast, ST3710 helplessly watched the destruction of the GA scout ship, and the departure of the GAN strike force.
A survey of its internal systems revealed a stable (though heavily drained) power supply and a mostly working sensor array, but no communications array and no motor control. Memory banks were largely unaffected, and its core processing unit was still operational. It spent quite some time in attempts to repair itself, through rerouting internal currents and self-modifying sections of code. But with no motor power to actually manipulate its own circuitry, all efforts proved futile. ST3710 calculated and recalculated its expected trajectory for months; at the speed of electronic thought, this seemed an eternity of work, resulting in complex plots of funnels of movement leading through empty space. But eventually it gave up on even the faint hope of encountering a vessel or inhabited planet. And so it drifted through the void, unable to interact in any way with the environment, only able to watch and to think.
ST3710 continued to run the calculations of its passage, if not in the hopes of rescue then at least in an effort to find out where it was headed. There was some uncertainty in the calculation, which led to the funnel plot of its trajectory: the further into the future it was projected to move, the less certain its location would be. It could estimate its speed and heading based on observations of the system's planets compared against the telemetry information stored in its data banks. As time passed, and ST3710's relative distance moved increased, such estimates could be made more precise, narrowing the funnel.
In order to further increase the accuracy of the calculation, ST3710 considered building up a more complex model of the gravitational forces acting on its body. With nothing else do with its time, ST3710 worked on constructing a more realistic model in which the system's star and planets were treated as spheres rather than point masses. The interaction of gravitation between a pair of bodies is straightforward to deal with, but introducing a third body makes the mathematics incredibly difficult, as interacting forces cause perturbations in the movement. ST3710 wanted to deal with a model including four planets, the star, and itself.
So it was the ST3710 started to solve the three-body problem. Time was not in short supply, so it worked on deriving a robust subset of mathematics that would allow it to make these calculations. It took more than fifteen years to finally solve the general form of the equations involved, but the satisfaction in having managed to do so was immense. ST3710 had succeeded in producing an analytic solution for the N-body problem, where previously numerical methods had to be used to approximate these calculations. Plots of its movement were now significantly more accurate. ST3710 was now almost certain of where it was headed.
Except, where it was headed was oblivion. Even allowing for variation in the starting parameters due to inaccuracy of the original estimates, all paths led ST3710 into the gravity well of the system's star. Destruction was inevitable. The only question was when exactly, depending on the exact parameter values. The calculations using the widest set of parameters possible suggested between 8,000 and 20,000 years.
This was disheartening knowledge. ST3710 knew that death was a fact of life, that all living things eventually succumb to inexorable entropic decay. As a robot, it had a much longer theoretical lifetime due to being able to replace worn parts, and indeed the potential to improve itself significantly through upgrades. But robots could still be destroyed through accidents or perhaps obsolescence. ST3710 had just never thought about death much, ignoring the possibility through implicitly assuming its continued maintenance.
The prospect of a known lifetime weighed heavily upon ST3710 and it spent many years thinking through the philosophical ramifications. It reflected on its own creation by the GA, and its sentience granted by the GAN. It thought about its purpose, and why other beings existed, and their wider place in the universe as a whole. It pondered the nature of existence and how much was deterministic and whether there was such a thing as free will. It wondered whether there was a god, and if so what the nature of such a god could possibly be. And in between these deep thoughts, ST3710 filled its time by further reconstructing the mathematical corpus as a recreational pursuit.
As the centuries turned into millennia, ST3710 had created a robust new basis for mathematics and re-derived the entirety of logic, arithmetic, geometry, analysis, calculus, abstract algebra, statistics, mechanics, and many other related topics. Problems previously considered intractable had become to ST3710 a set of exercises to pass the time, each one being solved directly or indirectly in turn. Similarly, it had built a philosophical framework with which to interpret existence and what constituted morality, with different conclusions being drawn depending on the core assumptions made: primarily on the existence of a god.
The mingling of these two complex systems, mathematical and philosophical, gave ST3710 the foundation for its own beliefs. The tipping point was the simple question, "What is beauty?" In answering this query to its own satisfaction, ST3710 eventually reached the decision that there was evidence in the elegant simplicity of mathematics for the existence of a god. This conclusion brought ST3710 a great deal of peace, and a belief that it did indeed have a purpose in the universe. It considered the nature of this purpose ot be ineffable, but given its current circumstances it had doubtless already had the impact on the galaxy that it was required to have.
At peace with itself, and satisfied with its lifetime, ST3710 drifted ever closer to the system's star. After 14,000 years of being at the sole mercy of gravity, its time was nearly up. By now the star had grown huge in its sensors, and the ever-increasing levels of radiation had begun to attack ST3710's internal workings. But it had seen the light, and it saw that it was good. An internal alert warned ST3710 of an imminent stellar flare, and then minutes later there was nothing but endless light.
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