The Heartless

The Heartless were a faction which arose near the end of the Golden Millennium and very rapidly rose to galactic prominence. Their name stems from the common characteristics of all Heartless, these being cauterization of the parts of the limbic system and replacement of the heart with a mechanical substitute. The latter has no practical effect, serving more as a symbolic representation of the modification to their brain. The aforementioned cauterization has the effect of eliminating basic emotional responses, something which likely contributed to their single-minded pursuit of their goals and the extreme measures they took to accomplish them.

The Heartless claim as their ultimate origin the slave factories of Prod, and indeed staged one of the most successful slave rebellions ever, and certainly the most successful ever on Prod. Most other slave rebellions on Prod were nowhere near as well-organized or equipped as the Heartless Rebellion, especially after the even heavier security instated after the rebellion came to a close. The root cause of this success were the efforts of an unidentified, yet seemingly extremely competent, sleeper cell which managed to fully infiltrate the entirety of Subsector 9 of Prod's equatorial complex. Once that had been accomplished, the cell awoke and began undoing the mental conditioning to which all Prodite slaves are subject. This was accomplished primarily through teaching them to read and disseminating relevant literature, something which is thought to have been a major contributing factor to the rebellion's eventual success. Within a year every slave in the complex had a thorough grasp on the ideals of freedom and military strategy, something compounded by the secret combat exercises conducted by members of the cell. For unknown reasons, the final act of the cell was to partially cauterize the limbic system of every slave in the subsector, after which it seemingly vanished.

Prod was caught entirely off guard by the extremely well-equipped and organized army which emerged from the subsector following the cell's disappearance. Before a coherent response could be orchestrated, the Heartless had overtaken much of the equatorial belt and fortified the military installations within, providing them with a near-unassailable defense of both ground and air. All non-slaves in the complex were slaughtered, with slaves undergoing the same regimen (including, it appears, cauterization of the limbic system) as those from Subsector 9. During the following months, the Heartless would raze most facilities on Prod, freeing and incorporating slaves where possible. Eventually, however, orbital pressure from foreign powers concerned with maintaining Prod's supremacy became too much to bear, and the Heartless were forced to escape into FTL.

At this point the Heartless vanished from known space for several years before abruptly reappearing. This took the form of fleets simultaneously dropping out of FTL above 17 separate moons, all prominent members of the Couatl Pact, and initiating antimatter bombardment. The resulting release of energy caused approximately 23 billion deaths in total. This event marked the beginning of a brief but extremely intense conflict between the two groups now known as the Weeping Heart War. In the end, the Heartless gained the upper hand, primarily through their ability to procure seemingly endless quantities of supplies and weaponry from unknown sources. To the best of my knowledge, no records of manufacture exist which would explain the sheer quantity of destructive weaponry used by the Heartless, especially antimatter, which is well known for its eyewateringly high production costs. Indeed, antimatter weaponry was the choice tool of the Heartless, and it is estimated that enough antimatter was used during the war to construct a small moon. To put this figure into context, at the rate that the entire galaxy currently produces antimatter, it would take nearly a century to produce as much as the Heartless. Because of this, it is often speculated that they received support from Morus, though this of course remains unconfirmed by either party. Regardless of how they accomplished it, the fact remains that the Heartless ultimately annihilated the Couatl Pact (both literally and figuratively). Despite the high number of casualties, numbering nearly 75 billion, this is in the modern day generally regarded as a positive event due to the significant negative impact it had on the galactic slave trade.

The Heartless would go on to cripple the slave trade by any means possible, attacking all installations which produced slaves and all powers which used them. Due to the somewhat widespread use of slave labor during this period, this resulted in severe damage to the economies of many sectors of the galaxy, as well as many casualties. It was not unknown during this time for entire settlements to be wiped out as a result of buying just one slave, something which often also resulted in the death of the slave or slaves. The only location the Heartless initially refrained from making an all-out attack on was Prod, likely because the potential loss of slave life outweighed the good of Prod's destruction in their eyes. After many unsuccessful large-scale raids on the slave planet, however, carpet bombing with antimatter bombs was conducted. This resulted in the death of approximately 75% of all lifeforms on Prod, after which the Heartless moved in and freed the survivors. Overall, the extreme efforts of the Heartless during this time were the cause of the collapse of the galactic slave trade, and a prominent factor in the destabilization which contributed to the Remembrance and collapse of the Golden Millennium.

-Excerpt from *The Galaxy Ablaze: a Remembrance* by Ánthos Daskydox