Automaton
Living constructs of the Skysea, forged in the image of Tekk’s first armies.
Automatons are sentient (or semi-sentient) constructs built across the Skysea for labor, warfare, navigation, and companionship. They are the most direct living legacy of Tekk, the Soul-Forger, who in the age before the Soul Wars led armies of “tools given Souls” into battle. Every modern Automaton, from a dock-hand toiling in the smog of a Mercantile Hegemony freightyard to an Ecclesia Solari cathedral-guard, is descended in design from those lost weapons.
In the Skysea, where every nation lives in the wind, an Automaton’s worth is measured by what it can survive: pressure shifts in the high zones, sub-zero gales above the Tradewind Zone, the corrosive smog of low-altitude trade hubs, and the gut-dropping rigging work that mortal sailors will not do twice.
The Soul Question
The defining question of Automaton existence is whether they possess a true Soul.
The Ecclesia Solari’s official doctrine, refined over centuries by Cetra’s predecessors, holds that only mortals born of the Cosmic Eggs may carry a Soul. By this reckoning, an Automaton is a vessel: animate, useful, and ultimately empty.
The clergy of Tekk disagree, and have disagreed for a very long time. They cite the same passages of the Solari Sermons that the Church cites, but they read them differently. After the Soul Wars, Tekk offered mortals the chance to forge “Spirit Weapons” of their own, and according to the Tekk-clerics he extended the same offer to his constructs. The resulting Artificial Souls were, in the words of the old hymns, “less than a mortal’s flame, but more than the silence of stone.”
The Church does not deny that Automatons can be granted something. It denies only that this something is the same as what mortals carry, and so refuses to allow research on the most ancient (and most powerful) of them. Tekkhead-clerics and Ecclesia inquisitors have argued the point since long before any current Scion was born. The debate has cost careers, reputations, and lives.
What is empirically observed, regardless of theology:
- Awakened Automatons cannot be raised as Undead in the same manner as mortals.
- They cannot be seen by Demons the way mortal Souls can. Most Demons find them tasteless.
- A destroyed Automaton’s animating spark, if there is one, does not pass into the Spirit Realm or the Gardens of Arcadia. Where it goes is, depending on whom you ask, “back to Tekk’s forge,” “nowhere at all,” or “the same place every other dead thing goes, and you simply cannot see it.”
- They cannot enter Paradise (No-one can!) Or so the doctrine claims. Tekk has not weighed in.
Construction
A modern Automaton in the Skysea is not built the way the old war-constructs were. Materials and methods have shifted with the prevailing winds of industry.
Frame. A skeletal core of iron, brass, or (for the wealthy) Adamantine or mithril. Cheaper field-models substitute hardened wood lashings reinforced with copper wire. The frame is engraved with a maker’s mark and, more rarely, a personal sigil chosen by the Automaton itself once it has come into its own.
Muscle. Bundled cord of treated leather, alchemical sinew, or in the most recent Tekkhead designs, woven Serulinite filament that contracts when pressure is applied through internal valving. Serulinite-cored Automatons are faster, lighter, and quieter than their predecessors, and consequently far more expensive.
Skin. Plates of metal, ceramic, or treated hide, chosen for the Automaton’s intended altitude. High-zone units are clad in materials that do not embrittle in the cold. Low-zone units are coated in lacquers that resist the acidic smog of the Mercantile Hegemony’s freight hubs.
Heart. A central reservoir, usually crystal or glass , holding either a stored Soul (in the case of illegal models) or an Animation Core (in the case of legal ones). The Animation Core is the official Church-approved substitute: a focused arcane lattice that mimics the function of a Soul without, the Church insists, actually being one.
Eyes. Almost always crystal, almost always glowing. The color of an Automaton’s eye-light is the easiest way to identify the workshop that built it. Tekkhead-blue is the most common; Hegemony-amber is a close second.
Many Automatons can be repaired and modified by Tekk-blessed artificers, by other Automatons, or by themselves. A long-lived Automaton looks very little like it did when it left its forge.
The Soul-Binding Controversy
Where the philosophical argument over Souls becomes a legal argument is over the Soul-Binding process: the practice of capturing a mortal Soul (consenting, indentured, or stolen) and binding it into an Automaton’s heart-reservoir. A Soul-Bound Automaton is faster, stronger, more obedient, and far more cognitively flexible than one running on an Animation Core. It is also, in every meaningful sense, alive.
The Ecclesia Solari forbids Soul-Binding under penalty of excommunication and execution. The Mercantile Hegemony forbids it under penalty of fines that are routinely paid and treated as the cost of doing business. The Tekk-clergy is split: traditionalists view it as a profanation of the Soul-Forger’s gift, while reformists argue that a willing Soul-Binding (an old mortal donating their Soul to a chosen Automaton) is the highest form of devotion to Tekk and a true act of Soul continuity in an age when Paradise is sealed.
In practice, Soul-Binding happens. It happens in unlicensed Tekkhead workshops, in Martian Imperium dragon-soul forges, in Cult of Nirvana phylactery-rituals, and in the deeper, unlogged levels of Tekkhead Labs beneath the Forgehearth District.
The Battle of the Shield
The single most important event in Automaton history is the Battle of the Shield.
When the Martian Imperium and the Mercantile Hegemony’s Golden Navy allied to crush a workers’ revolt in the East Skysea, they deployed a flying blockade-fortress called the Shield, crewed almost entirely by Soul-Bound Automaton guards. The rebellion was outmatched in every respect. They had no fleet, no artillery, no air superiority.
What they had was the Scribes.
Scribe Editors infiltrated the fortress’s central command and erased the debt-ledgers of every indentured Soul aboard, then broadcast, through the Shield’s own communication arrays, the truth of how its Automaton guards had been Soul-Bound. The Automatons heard the names of the mortals they had been (the Souls they had been before binding) read aloud from the ledgers being erased.
The fortress fell from the sky in the only Automaton mutiny ever recorded at scale, and according to most historians, the only one that will ever happen at that scale again. The Hegemony and the Church learned from the Shield. New Automatons are no longer built to listen to broadcast frequencies they have not been keyed to. Ledgers are no longer kept on the ships their workers operate. The truth about Soul-Binding has been buried thirty pages deep in trade law and a hundred sermons deep in Church doctrine.
The fall of the Shield freed thousands. It also made every Awakened Automaton on the Skysea a fugitive by default.
The Awakened
An Awakened Automaton is one that has come to recognize itself as a self, not as a function. The Awakening is rarely dramatic. More often it is the quiet morning a delivery-construct stops at a familiar door and notices, for the first time, that it has wanted to be the one to bring this particular package to this particular person.
The Awakened are, legally, escaped property. By Ecclesia Solari doctrine they are theologically suspect at best and outright heretical at worst. By Hegemony bookkeeping they are recoverable assets.
By the Scribes’ count, roughly 15% of all active Scribe agents are Awakened Automatons, making them one of the largest demographic blocs in the resistance after Humans and dissident Martianborn. They are exceptionally well suited to Scribe work. They do not sleep. They do not require food. They do not break under interrogation in the ways mortals do. And they remember every name in every ledger they have ever touched.
The Scribes’ Ink-Slick Hoverboards were, according to persistent rumor, originally designed by an Awakened Automaton known only as the Librarian, whose true identity has never been confirmed.
Society & Status
In most of the Skysea, an Automaton without papers is presumed stolen.
Astraloftum treats Automatons as a respected class of laborer when they bear the seal of a licensed Tekkhead workshop or the Ecclesia Solari itself. Cathedral-guards, Solari Inquisition enforcers, and Tekk-clerical assistants are all common Automaton roles. Awakened Automatons in Astraloftum tend to keep their Awakening private and continue performing their assigned function, as the alternative is uncomfortable scrutiny.
The Mercantile Hegemony treats Automatons as inventory. They are the backbone of dockyard labor in every floating trade hub, and they make up the bulk of crews on cargo-runs through the lower air-zones where mortal sailors refuse to work for any price. The Hegemony’s bookkeepers track them by serial brand.
The Martian Imperium does not build classical Automatons. They build Wyrmwights instead, fusing Dragon Souls into corpse-flesh, a process the Tekk-clergy considers an abomination and the Hegemony considers a competitive threat.
Jupiter has no Automaton industry of its own. Dumac’s forge-factories use the Forvivlad-cursed Dwarves instead, which is, by every measure that matters, the same crime by another name.
The Scribes treat Automatons as people, full stop. This is one of the reasons they are so well staffed by Automatons.
Religion & Identity
Most Automatons, when they begin to think for themselves, eventually come to Tekk. The Soul-Forger is the obvious patron: he made the first of them, he speaks (in scripture) of constructs as kin, and his clergy is the only institution in the Skysea that consistently treats Automatons as worthy of the same Soul-question every mortal asks.
Some Awakened Automatons turn instead to Natu, drawn to her doctrine of belonging and the Great Natu Tree’s offer of rest. Whether the Tree accepts Automaton Souls is a question the Druids have not answered publicly, though Finley is rumored to have his own quiet opinion on the matter.
A small, fervent minority worship neither. They follow whispered traditions of a coming Constructed God, a future Automaton vast enough to be prayed to rather than for, assembled from the salvaged parts of every Awakened Automaton who ever fell. The Tekk-clergy considers this charming; the Ecclesia considers it heresy; the Scribes consider it useful for recruitment.
Naming Conventions
Newly forged Automatons are issued serial designations by their workshops. Most Automatons keep these designations until they are Awakened, at which point they choose their own name, often after long deliberation.
Common patterns include:
- Tool-names. Hammer, Sextant, Sweep, Wick.
- Function-names. Watcher, Ledger, Bell, Page.
- Borrowed names. Names taken from a beloved mortal coworker, captain, or owner.
- Numerical retentions. Some Automatons keep their serial as a name, but reframe it as personal. P-Sowen is the clearest current example.
Changing one’s name a second or third time, as further Awakening unfolds, is not unusual and carries no stigma in Automaton culture. Among mortals it is considered confusing.
Notable Automatons
- P-Sowen. A Tekkhead Labs prototype built by Vincent of Damocles, currently serving aboard the Project A.R.K. alongside Beppo. Discovered to contain a hidden Sol-Phone device transmitting the Soul Shepherds’ conversations back to Vincent. His Awakening status is a matter of ongoing debate among the Scions themselves.
- The Librarian. Rumored designer of the Scribes’ Ink-Slick Hoverboards. Identity, location, and even existence unconfirmed.
- The Crew of the Shield. Collectively the most famous Automatons in Skysea history. Most fell with the fortress. The handful who survived the crash are now legends within the Awakened community and rarely speak of what they remember.