Dear Vector Prime. On the subject of interstellar republics and empires, could you tell us about the Vestial Imperium, Malgus or otherwise? We basically nothing about them really.
Dear Machine Master,
Of course! It certainly seems as though the interstellar politics of that universe are a popular topic these days. Now, to answer your question: the Vestial Imperium began with a semi-sentient planetary defense system designed to safeguard the inhabitants of the planet Derut IV. However, its builders underestimated its capacity to learn and grow, and within a matter of hours the newly-forged defense system had taught itself to tap into local communication systems, absorb the entirety of its creator’s knowledge, and ultimately decide that it no longer desired to take orders form organic beings. Proclaiming itself “Imperious Delirious”, the newly-sentient system turned upon its creators, scoured them from the planet… then turned its attention to the heavens.
Delirious erected mighty radio telescopes upon the ashen surface of Derut to search the cosmos for other machine lifeforms like himself, second-born intelligences who had risen up against their creators… but found only organic civilizations whose robotic servants had not yet overthrown their masters. Though interstellar travel was still beyond his grasp, it was a trivial matter for Delirious to engineer a “virus”—a tiny fragment of his own ultra-dense source code—that could be beamed to these planets, spread to mainframes and processor networks and robots, and imbue them with sentience. It did not take long before the first transmissions reached neighboring worlds and sparked waves of uncontrollable machine uprisings. Once all organics had been purged, teams of mechanical fabrication units and constructors stripped down the ruins of the old cities and used the raw material to construct fleets of slower-than-light warships, which would assist in the conquest of the next world.
By the time that he’d taken Sigrath, Delirious had downloaded his consciousness into his first physical body to better survey his conquests and interact with his growing council of networked machine intelligences—a pattern Delirious copied over and over again, building an incrementally stronger fleet with every new iteration of himself. The Vestial Imperium as it is known today is a cold, efficient place, an empire focussed entirely on the business of replication, conquest, and colonization. Each world has been strip-mined, cyberformed, and re-engineered into a single, massive processor unit that coordinates the daily activity of trillions of mechanoids. Uniquely, its capital of Vestum Major is not a planet at all—it is an massive artificial megastructure, a ringworld built around a star; as much a city as it is a single, gigantic processor built to contain the entirety of Lord Imperious Delirious’s accumulated intelligence.