Architect

**The Architects** were a race of highly-advanced beings, often regarded as deities, who inhabited Spectra roughly 40,000 years prior to AY 2998. They are credited with creating the Planes which the Chosen races grew and developed on, as well as with the creation of the Sentinels and the hundreds to thousands of mysterious ruins left scattered around the galaxy. Though little to nothing is known of the Architects as they were, including their biology, ruling structure, culture(s), or motivations, their legacy has endured for millennia and continues to influence the lives of galactic society today.

## **History**

### **Architect Era**

There are no concrete estimates for when the reign of the Architects began, only that they seemingly disappeared 40,000 years ago and left behind all of their creations. The theories explaining this disappearance are varied and many. Some hypothesize that the Architects plant seeds for future life and civilization throughout a galaxy, then move on to the next when they're either satisfied. Why they would do this is less understood, with some proposing that perhaps it's simply for entertainment, like a child playing with toys, and that their satisfaction is instead boredom from stagnating entertainment. Others suggest that the Architects were in fact not an organic race at all, but are the Sentinels themselves, though critics of this theory argue that it leaves the question of who created the Sentinels to begin with unexplained. Still others suggest that the Architects' disappearance is tied to the unknowable anomaly at the center of the galaxy, Eden, even going so far as to say that perhaps the Architects never truly disappeared, but merely retreated to within the energy field and are biding their time to return.

During this era, it is presumed that the Architects spent much of their active time colonizing. The ruins of their civilization span the entirety of the galaxy, including in the Umbra, suggesting that either they felt more than capable of handling the extremely dangerous and hostile environments of the galactic region, or perhaps that it did not exist in the same state then as it does now.

### **Legacy**

The Architects' influence on galactic civilization cannot be overstated. The development of the Chosen races' cultures, beliefs, and societies would not have been the same without them growing on the Planes, and the gift of null energy based technology and travel via the Sentinels was what led to the Ascensions and eventual spread of interstellar colonialism.

Not only did they leave behind four races who benefitted from their existence through reverse-engineering the technology granted to them, as well as by a near-guaranteed survival into the future due to the careful planning of the Planes' life-sustaining capabilities and the Sentinels to protect them, but their actions led to the eventual convergence of species across distant stellar bodies which led to modern day civilization itself.

### **The Truth**

The Architects were in fact humans who had traveled from their own home galaxy to Spectra millennia ago for reasons as of yet unknown. At some point during their time in Spectra, they encountered an anomalous entity on the other side of the Gate which they referred to as the Sensus. The Sensus systematically began to wipe them out, reshaping them into extensions of itself. When it discovered the Gate and its path into Spectra, a galaxy it had never touched before, it invaded and continued its goal of assimilating humanity, now on this side of the Gate.

Fighting a losing war for decades, the Architects were close to being destroyed entirely when they somehow were able to fight back the Sensus for a time. Driving it back onto the other side of the Gate and out of Spectra, the Architects closed off the Gate and sealed the Sensus in Eden, along with the last of their own people.