The anatomy and lore of archietcts
(Bear with me here, none of this is canon)
The average architects life starts as an egg, born of their home planet. It can take 4-6 weeks for the eggs to hatch, and during that time certain eggs may be destroyed or genetically modified as a form of selective breeding.
Once hatched, the baby architects appear to be blobs. That may not be what you imagine when you think of architects, but, due to their home planets extremely low gravity, they evolved to not be very strong, and instead are extremely smart, with most of their body being made directly of neurons. That also makes for extremely efficient communication, and the ability to form a hivemind.
That stays mostly the same from juvinile to adult, and they have an average lifespan of 20-30 years. When dead, architects will usually physically join with another, younger architect, keeping their memorys and nerve cells alive even once major organs have failed.
But, you may say, thats not what an architect looks like? Thats a whole different species you just made up!
Indeed, these may seem very different, but I havent gotten to the end of the story.
Earlier i mentioned that they were 90% braincells and extremely smart, and, as such, quickly developed space travel. But there was one issue. Due to their own planets low gravity, whenever they tried to land on another planet, they would instantly be crushed. They would also have trouble keeping their shape in zero g, as the lack of gravity pulling on them causes their very weak bodys to rip themselves apart.
But, architects are smart. They made a solution to this.
With spacesuits, they could hold their body together in space and, by stringing the body apart, could make it survive even when under immense pressure.
Soon, many more things were added to the architect body. Extra limbs, built in scientific devices, anything they could make they could add to these bodies. They began entirely relying on radio and other electromagnetic signals for communication and sensory input, as it was the most efficient way to communicate through hard metal shells. Architects began permanently putting themselves inside these bodies and traveling far beyond where they could ever go before, living for thousands of years, practically immortal.
A new lifecycle was made.
As soon as they are fully developed, architects are fitted into a ‘core’, where their neurons are attached to a life support system. This core can be added to diffrent bodies depending on what the architect will go on to do, and is even made to change bodies in an emergency.
Most architect bodys are constructed on what i like to call ‘homeworld 2.0’ (1.0 is their actual home planet, the one with barely any gravity). 2.0 is what is shown at the end of below zero.
The final stage of the life cycle is death. No matter how good the life support, neurons cannot be regrown once dead. Most architects, after death, have their cores removed and remaining neurons fused with a surviving architect to keep their memories alive, but some more radical (or desperate) architects (ex: al-an) will become fully machine.
After the kharra, the majority of architects (so like 5 of them) were machine, as it was the only way to survive the kharra pandemic (im working on another post on Kharra related to this right now). Weather not the architects end up surviving is up to the reader.
I hope any of this made sense
