Arks

Arks are subterranean installations constructed for the purpose of reconstructing civilization in the event that a catastrophic scenario could not be averted in time to prevent the extermination of Dalmer present in an area. Since their inception, Arks have been activated twice, once during the malice plague in the cursed lands, during the robotic overlord phase, and possibly once in Liptic.

The scope of engineering required to create arks in their entirety is impossible to execute while maintaining secrecy from the other races, as such they are generally built in the most desolate places.

## Features

All subsystems of Arks are produced in laboratory setting; the installation and all procedures involved in its upkeep are mundane in nature. Primary power for the facility is a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). A geothermal generator is also installed to take advantage of volcanic activity. This generator is capable of powering the facility in stand-by mode indefinitely. Arks also contain water treatment facilities, air purification and recycling systems, hydroponic production wings, and housing necessary to permanently sustain up to 10,000 personnel.

Most of an Arks floor space is dedicated to storage of building materials, construction equipment, factory machinery, agricultural equipment, and computer database storage. In addition to infrastructure concerns, a wide cultural base with copies of thousands of famous works of art, music, literature, and a full backup of the Aether Web are kept on site in the event that other repositories are destroyed.

### Cloning apparatus

To fulfill its primary mission, an Ark includes 500,000 Synthetic Hominid Replicators. At peak capacity, the ARK is capable of producing 100,000 viable individuals per day (with a warm-up period of 5 days). Utilizing underground transit pipes to collect raw material from various hot springs and underground magma flows in the area, and a computer memory bank housing data, this system is capable of recreating any lost genome or generating as many new and unique genomes as necessary to repopulate civilization.

Individuals produced by this process can be advanced to any age desired without extending the 5 day incubation period. In addition to construction features, the Ark also has the ability to implant memories by administration of hallucinogenics and developmental hypnotherapy. Life histories, neural archetype scans, and genomes of civilians are maintained to ensure that ARK may be activated and initiated by as few as one surviving individual.

## Safeguards

In case of a failure of the Empire to prevent extinction events, Ark security systems will unlock, allowing any Dalmer to initiate the production. If, after 20 years, ARK remains inactive, security will be relaxed further, allowing any being to access the facility and initiate the procedure. Once activated, the Ark’s internal monitoring systems will attempt to locate Dalmer and assess their condition. Mission-critical personnel not found will be replicated using the most recent neural archetype scan on file, and awakened prior to the initialization of any other systems.

After these personnel are revived, security locks will resume normal function.

## Usage

Use of the Ark system is currently outlawed outside of maintenance testing and emergency situations. Individuals produced by Ark distribution show signs of congenital and genetic defects far above baseline numbers. The current Dalmer technology can only guarantee 60-75% viability in new specimens. This is largely due to the Dalmer’s abyssal knowledge of medicine.

### Experimentation

The true intention of the vaults is to put in practice the scientific/social experiments. Taking advantage of the lack of any governmental authority or law enforcement agency to stop them or intervene with the isolation of thousands of people in the vaults. The connections that Vaults had with the government were deep enough for them to execute the experiments even without the threat of war. The vaults were both testing technologies and people's ability to deal with potential issues (such as a vault where everything was breaking down constantly) while being in a confined space with nowhere to go. The control vaults would then take all that data, make the necessary arrangements, and go colonize a new resource rich realm and leave everyone to die on a nuclear fallout riddled world depleted of resources.

### Data collection

A system in place to keep track of communications of data with and from the vaults. It appears mostly as transmission lines, presumably underground cables. Should the cables be cut or damaged in some way, a team nearby would go there physically to collect the data. In the survivors grand plan, they would return to the surface, collect and analyse the data they gathered and continue on the next phase in rebuilding society. The authorities prepared these vault experiments to give access to information in extreme scenarios, as they had concluded the surface would be un-habitable and thus colonise another realm instead after gathering their forces.