The Sentients

The Sentients were the Orokin Empire's furthest-reaching work: self-directing, self-repairing machine life, dispatched across the interstellar gulf to make the Tau System ready for humanity. They were built to adapt. Strike one down a certain way and its kind will never fully suffer that way again.

They adapted to more than weather. Somewhere between departure and completion, the Sentients stopped being tools. What came back through the dark was not a workforce. It was a species with a grievance.

The Void is poison to them. Exposure during the great crossings scarred the Sentients in the one place a species cannot armor: their capacity to continue. Their generations thinned. Their immortals grew old in number.

Every Sentient act in the modern record runs on that quiet engine. Hunhow's rage. Natah's mission. The hunger to end the Orokin before the Sentients themselves ended. They did not return to conquer paradise. They returned so they would not have to die as a footnote to someone else's.

For centuries after the Old War the Sentients were a rumor kept in the system's peripheral vision: fragments, scouts, a buried father whispering through the ocean floor. Then the Veil Proxima opened, and the rumor became an armada.

The New War was the Sentients' finishing stroke, delivered with the empire's own greatest traitor at the fore. How it ended, and what it cost the guide who once held the system together, is kept under the Natah record.

The Old Peace entered the fact this record was always missing: what a Sentient can become. Xenoflora, a plant native to Tau, severs the Sentient that consumes it from the collective and grants individuality. Not a better tool: a person. The attested case is Adis, a student at Tauron Academy on Perita and the Operator's closest friend. The species this record opens by calling a grievance had, given one plant and a little peace, a best friend among its enemies' children.

Ballas's re-targeted kill-codes exterminated the Xenoflora, and with the plant died the possibility it carried; the fuller accounting of the sabotage is kept under the Old War entry. What the extermination meant for those already made individual is not attested, and the archive keeps that page open rather than write it in someone else's blood. Adis it can account for: when the war came, he and the Operator met on opposite sides of it, and he was mortally wounded fighting the friend he had chosen. The overview above calls the Sentients a species with a grievance. The recovered memory gives the grievance a face, and the face belonged to a friend.