Sights in the Strange Stars

Few galactic sporting events offer the sheer spectacle of the giant robot combats of Gogmagog. The robots are of unique design (but all humanoid) and tower anywhere from around 10 meters to over 80 in the world’s low gravity. Mostly they stand waiting for some signal—or maybe just the right moment. They may not move for years or even decades. Then abruptly, they sally forth to engage one of their fellows in hand to hand combat.

That’s when the motley bot breaker gangs go into action. They race to the location of the latest match on their dilapidated walkers, their howdah shantytowns rattling with the jarring motion and their frantic preparations. They have to work fast to salvage what they can from the defeated giant before the swarms of von Neumann machines skitter and crawl from their underground lairs to repair the fallen gladiator—and dissemble the bot-breakers’ tools and transport for raw materials. What the bot breakers can get away with they can sell to fringe scientists and inventors trying to duplicate exotic alloys or wealthy collectors looking for an alien objet trouvé.

A more transcendent vista can perhaps be found around Altair, the home system of the winged deva. Ten moon-sized artificial worlds are strewn like jewels around the oblate star, their diamondoid coatings glinting and iridescent in its light.  These are said to be huge brains, or perhaps the separate components of one even larger mind. Some appear damaged,  the result of some ancient war. The deva flit between between them, working to repair the spheres and restore the mind.  They let few visitors enter the spheres themselves, though that may be with good reason. Rumors abound that the damaged psyches of the spheres produce dangerous qlippothic demons from deranged code.