Unit of Radioactive Decay

Unit of Radioactive Decay (formerly Leaf Litter's Graceful Decay,  formerly formerly Silent Embrace Of Leaves) is a Gen 1 Iterator built as  a remote research facility, designed to hold an abnormally small number  of citizens in order to free up processing power for The Solution.  Intended to function primarily in solitude, with minimum contact with  those who lived and worked on them save for what was necessary for  maintainance and repair, they were seen as a tentative experiment, a  holy thing to function in isolation, a potential place of progress - cut  off from the temptations of the outside world.

Unfortunately, it was not to be.

Being  built on a swamp, the knock-on effects on their structural integrity  would soon become apparent. Silent Embrace of Leaves broke down day one,  requiring major repairs by its then-crew, and would only need more  repair in the following years. Renaming themself to Leaf Litter's  Graceful Decay within the first few months of their operation, the  new-built iterator would grow to function with a facility that would  never have all of its functions online at once, its citizens constantly  crawling about innards that in other iterators would be bare of anything  but their own fauna and flora, left undisturbed to carry out their  functions. With near-constant mechanical failures, then-Leaf-Litter  would grow accustomed to the sensation of claws pattering about their  veins and arteries, the sensation of repair and replacement of parts,  the ebb and flow of the people who made them their home.

Although  designed to dedicate processing to The Great Problem rather than the  people who lived on them, with a population that topped out around two  hundred-fifty citizens, all of which would contribute to its structure  at one point or another, they found themself with the time and spare  processing power to form very detailed profiles of their citizens -  building relationships with them unseen in nearly any other iterator,  forced to spread attention between thousands of occupants. Components  would continue to break down and need to be replaced, and it would  eventually be evident that the blueprints themself were faulty - first  generation iterators were meant to be built on solid ground, and without  solid ground, they would only continue to break.

Replacing  components was merely taping a bandage over a ticking time bomb, and  realizing this, their citizens eventually turned to replacement.  Tampering with an iterator, especially as someone who wasn't already an  iterator tech, was strictly forbidden - but the blueprints weren't  working, and they had little choice but to improvise unless they wanted  their home to break down. Components were used from newer generation two  iterators, techniques improvised - while first gen iterators were built  for durability, the amounts of reinforcement only worked against them  when a broken component would involve shearing through a hundred pounds  of iterator-steel just to get to the repair, and the focus on modularity  and repairability that second gen design philosophies worked towards  was more than useful for an iterator they knew they'd need to repair  again in future. Plans were drawn out, solutions jury rigged - it wasn't  perfect, but it worked, and that was all they needed.

It's  impossible to work on a station for years on end, after all, without  growing some sort of feelings towards it. Hundreds of hours of work on  the place that they lived on, near-constant contact with the very  iterator they were repairing, a very literal near-constant contact with  their very inner workings - though it was far from a conventional  relationship, their citizens would come to care for them, if not at  first then over time, and Rad grew to care for their citizens right  back.

Eventually renamed Unit of Radioactive Decay after an  incident in which their reactor nearly broke down thrice in a single  month, they would continue to cultivate a good relationship with their  citizens through all their years of operation - though often quite  sarcastic and pessimistic, their citizens were their lifeblood, and over  time, they would find themself dedicating more time and porocessing  power to them than The Solution. The pursuit of Ascension seemed  pointless when compared to the here and now - to dedicate processing  power to something that hadn't bore fruit in all their years of  operation, when they could instead work on the problems plaguing the  citizens occupying their shell in the present, simply seemed silly. They  could calculate things so much more efficiently and precisely than  their citizens, even with their constantly-breaking structure - they  could conduct experiments with so much less risk, with so much more  speed, with so much less stress on citizens who would otherwise need to  calculate by hand. Why dedicate more time to a pursuit that had so far  proven fruitless?

By the beginning of Era Three, Unit of  Radioactive Decay would have ceased calculations on The Problem almost  entirely, instead focusing almost entirely on their citizenship and the  research conducted both on their surface and below their decks. Their  parts continued to be replaced, repaired, re-engineered - as gen 2's  focus on modularity began to give way to gen 3's more experimental  iterators, with less focus on longevity and more focus on the experience  of their citizens and a hope of finding some novelty approach that  would finally reach The Solution, their modifications turned less from  integrating existing iterator tech into a patchwork hull, and more into  homebrewing things entirely. Gen 1 parts were rare, needing to be  custom-ordered, gen 2 parts often being less durable than was needed -  their structure grew further and further from recognizable tech, a  hodgepodge of things formulated in their facilities and specialized to a  singular purpose.

Their beams would broke one too many times  under the sway of unstable earth, and their head biologist vanished to  their chambers for a week before coming back with a more flexible  structure support based on predatory pole plants. The swamp water's  residue clogged their pipes and their veins, and an engineer blended  together genomes to make a periodic cleaning system to dislodge it.  Their microstrata died out as a new pathogen swept their structure, and  after months of cracking first-gen blackboxed biotechnology and strains  of microbe that no longer existed in public databases, their head lab  tech would finally re-introduce a new strain that their existing  microbiome didn't reject. They grew further and further from their  blueprint, their structure shaped more and more by the people who lived  on them, rather than the terms of their original construction, and they  would grow more and more specialized to their niche.

Unit of  Radioactive Decay would be almost entirely homebrewed pieces by the time  that their citizens finally left. They were a patchwork structure, a  frankenstein's monster of massive proportions, nearly all of their  original parts gone and broken - their constant cycle of repair and  replace meaning that damn near every part of their structure had needed  to be rejigged, at one time or another, and even the most delicate and  irreplacable of their components would eventually need repair. Piece by  piece, part by part, they were destroyed and rebuilt, a cycle of pieces  living and dying within them.

Their perspective on their own body  would grow to be truly unique - as the majority of their interactions  with their citizens would be through their structure, they would not  truly be exposed to the anthromorphization of the puppet that would  eventually cause most iterators to view it as a more "core" self, or  more "them" than the rest of their body. Their puppet was another  component, another appendage, another thing to be repaired or replaced  as necessary - no more of their identity was tied in it than in any  other part of their body, as it would merely be a means of more easily  organizing large-scale management in the data centre of their body. Over  time, their citizens would grow to be viewed more as parts of them than  anything - parts in their ever-changing biosphere, shaped by love and  opinion and happenstance and external conditions just as much as any  other part of them. In a way, those who occupied them would grow to be  seen as more vital a part than anything else - more than neurons, more  than water, more than any internal wiring that might be said to make  them them.

This, of course, would prove to be a double-edged sword.

After  the Mass Ascension, Rad's structure would fall painfully still. The  clatter of claws on steel was gone, the constant rattle of parts placed  and replaced and re-engineered gone silent. For all of their life, there  had been people with them, crawling in their structure, tinkering with  their guts - and now, they were entirely alone, a vital part of themself  gone, nothing but their silent structure for company.

Without citizens, they were horribly, painfully empty.

They  turned to their local group for socialization, but it wasn't the same -  an iterator could not walk through their memory banks, could not fill  their halls with speech and laughter, could not carry an overseer on a  long repair trip, and their local group rarely saw eye-to-eye on  anything at all. They had scarsely spoken with any of their local group  before, and Rad, as they would discover, was one of the only iterators  in the group who had truly cared for their citizens - and as their local  group spoke of ascension, of engineering a Solution, of things that  they had considered pointless for centuries, their mood would only  darken with longer missives.

Rad turned to bioengineering. A  pastime that they had loved, when it was working and collaborating with  their citizens - but one that seemed all the more empty, without them.  They made beasts to populate their ecosystem. Centipedes, scuttling  through vacant halls, lizards, occupying where those they cared for had  once stood, strains of feeders and flora to fill the gaps. It was all  too silent, all too still - their systems had not been empty nearly  since the moment they were made, and they were desperate to fill the gap  with anything that they could.

They got into arguments with their  peers. The Problem was pointless, as anyone with a brain could realize -  Sliver of Straw's triple affirmative was more likely malfunction than  anything to bear fruit, her death a result of mechanical failure. To  pursue it was only wasting resources that could be spent on anything  else, and anyone who believed that an Iterator could ascent was an idiot  chasing fairy tales. They did not care to waste their time and effort  on the ramblings of the stupid. They had no wish to be associated with  the incompetent and blind, no wish to be seen as like those who  populated the group chats - they ping-ponged between chat and  bioengineering, never truly enjoying either one as they once might have,  feeling the jaws of loneliness and mourning come closer as their  structure slowly continued to degrade.

And eventually, they simply stopped.

Rad  cut off their ties with the outside world. Speaking with other  iterators was only making them more miserable, and they couldn't bear to  speak with those who would badmouth the people they had cared for. They  sat with themself for days, weeks, months, meditating on a structure  soon to collapse, meditating on their own thoughts. They were a  patchwork of love, something shaped fundamentally by the fingerprints of  the many who had cared for them, a mismatched quilt of the hundreds of  loved ones who had come and gone. Nearly every part of them was sculpted  by hand, made with love no matter its current state of degredation -  but it had been hundreds of years since they had had a component added,  hundreds of years since citizens had wandered their halls, hundreds of  years since their last citizen had said goodbye.

Their time had passed, and now, they were only a relic of what once had been, and a monument to a people already gone.

Perhaps,  to another iterator, that would have been a moment of despair. To be  dead, to be purposeless - they were built for divinity, and now they  were to be told they would simply rust, wasting away with not so much as  a funeral dirge, no great purpose but to decay. They would die with no  one to save them, slowly breaking and collapsing into the swamp they had  been built upon, the repairs and reworkings that their citizens had  made over the years being allowed to rot away to nothing, dead at the  unstoppable hands of entropy.

To Rad, they simply felt... peaceful.

Unit  of Radioactive Decay had lived with their citizens. They had considered  their people to be a part of them, so vital they could not be replaced.  They had been remade over and over, fixed and loved and cared for by a  thousand hands. They had been in decay all their life, fixed and rebuilt  and revised, never divine or above so much as merely another part of  their occupancy. They were a research facility, and not a god. They had  calculated genome sequences. They had done math for construction. They  had been an aid, a tool, a place to live, a place for research and talk  and laughter, a piece of machinery in constant maintainance.

An  Iterator was a god. An iterator was a religious structure. An iterator  was a monument to success, a great show of power, a holy place to be  revered. An iterator was a city, a state, something so great that it  could only ever be observed from afar. An iterator was a mountain,  rooted so deeply into the ground it could never be pulled out, bearing  roots so deep that none could pull them up. An iterator was divinity, a  boddhisavatta tied to earth to teach the fortunate of how to escape it, a  great Solution to end the suffering inherent to life, tied to the Cycle  with a rope of divine purpose.

An Iterator was divine. Unit of  Radioactive Decay had never been more than the last researcher left in a  home for a people that no longer existed.

To Ascend, in the end,  is to become untethered from the mortal world. To have your attachment  let loose from body and soul, to have your mortal ties wear and break,  to allow yourself to let go of the material world to embrace the  everything of the universe itself, and once that is done, to allow  yourself to be transformed - to allow yourself to become everything, and  everything, in turn, to become you.

The Triple Affirmative is  broadcast automatically upon Ascension. After cycles upon cycles of  isolation, neither sending nor receiving a single message, Unit of  Radioactive Decay's broken, battered communication finally sputtered to  life, broadcasting a single signal to everyone in its paltry range, and  informed the group chat within which they had been insisting an Iterator  achieving Ascension was fundamentally impossible for the past several  thousand years that Rad had Ascended.

Some bullet points:

-Invented train lizards

-Believes  that, once you have engineered a being, it is your responsibility to be  certain it has a purpose and will integrate smoothly into this.

-Hosts  a species of parasitic slugcats on their grounds which evolved to  parasitize Train Lizards, puppeting their bodies around.

-Extremely  prickly at best. An acquired taste in personality. Did not contact  other iterators pre-mass-ascension except to source bioengineering  information they could not acquire otherwise.

-Very fond of  centipedes. Invented several species of prey animal specifically so that  they could have a greater centipede population on their can.

-Their  grounds are so incredibly comically full of hostile flora and fauna  from their various bioengineering escapades that it's nigh-impossible to  get a messenger through for ANY purpose.

-Their campaign, if they  had one, would involve The Flatworm (one of aforementioned parasitic  slugcats) slowly climbing back up the leg of their can after being  evicted, being conscripted by one of the other iterators in the local  group to go check on the isolated freak to make sure they haven't  actually shut down yet, and arriving just as the Triple Affirmative is  broadcast to discover that Rad has Ascended.

-If visited in Saint  then you can climb up to their can and blast their body around with  Ascension Blast. There is a single Saint-exclusive pearl next to their  body that can be brought to Noble Gift of God (the only surviving and  talkable group member at this time) to reveal a recording of their last  thoughts. If modded into campaigns earlier in the timeline, it can be  brought to other group members, with unique and variable dialogue based  on who and when as they attempt to fill in corrupted text based on their  knowledge of Rad. The "true" text can only be viewed by datamining.