An excerpt from these mundane gods, a treatise on the diasporin divines in the golden era by Dr. Jace Rethall.

Throughout the length of the Orion Arm, even the most ambitious academics and hobbyist historians have long accepted that there was no way to know the truth about the so-called divines, the tower over the history of the automated diaspora.

What were they fundamentally? Tools of labor or war put to the supposed

public good? Machine gods worshipped at the most naive of altars. The first true alien life, or something even less knowable than that.

The answer I propose can be found in the work done by Dr. Maryland September in Adar Rose,

also known as the Candidate Ebeks.

This remains a complicated matter.

On one hand, their invention laid the foundation for the abuses and tragedies of the

late era September Institute.

We cannot shrink from this point.

But with notes and other materials made recently available, we can now also say that their work

has provided the most valuable insight to date about what may be the single most important invention since antiquity.

No point is more important than when laid out by Dr. September herself, and a private memo

sketch soon after Adar Rose left the Institute for the final time.

The Divines, she wrote, have always been little more than the shadows of the automated

diaspora itself.

Their metallic bodies, the physical infrastructure. the automated diaspora itself.

Their metallic bodies, the physical infrastructure of the state.

Their bright eyes, the policy plans that shape the daily lives of diaspora citizens.

Their weapons, a reflection of the nation's xenophobic elitism, and their pilots

dressed up in rhetoric symbolic sacrifices so the average diaspora dare not take the blame themselves.

Over just a few months, September and Rose saw to invert this on its head.

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