- The artificial Maker which the Rogue Maker created was installed in the ship which was found by Conrado Cruz, the first emperor. The continuum were willing to kill their most talented Maker over having created an artificial Maker, so it's possible they're trying to finish the job.
- Alternately, they're after whatever was in the small box.
- There has been potential foreshadowing with the Tesskans in that they have trouble translating and the Continuum seems to believe that they can recover what was stolen just by attacking Earth, which would indeed suggest something other than the drive. This could all be a massive case of Poor Communication Kills.
- Jossed. We've met the Rogue Maker Ahmis, and he's upset because of the Drive having been stolen.
- Still possible on the general point, but the details are mostly wrong: Ahmis's so-called heresy is deeper than just AI-making, he's challenging the whole base of their society (but the guardian Maker agrees it should be done and they're working on it). Cuddow's notes are found by the rest of Fillipod and used to build the engine, and now they shared it with the Nyx, who are building their own, while the conspiracy supports them. Tres Primos also share the technology with rogue colonies Las Hermanitas, and the Qen have unearthed it from their history. Fernando still doesn't want to be a figurehead in the whole this mess, but starts to be involved too - he calls the Tres Primos to Paa'Q to help Qen, but hightails with the rest of the Machito as soon as the bargaining with the emperor is over. Also, Grasskan blackmails the emperor into giving them a full planet, or she will share their own FTL-drive technology with all his subjects. All in all, La Familia's monopoly is a single sneeze away from imploding like a cardhouse.
At the end of Act Two, the crew of the Machito meet Ahmis the Rogue Maker. They discuss the Vinn, and the Vinn's quest to find their gods. They think the pictograph is that of a rocket ship; Ahmis thinks it's a picture of a Maker.
The Makers are the most advanced thriving species in the known universe, and if anyone could create a new species like the Vinn it's the Makers. Ahmis makes the obvious conclusion: that at some point, the Makers made the Vinn. Extra irony for the fact that Ahmis was exiled and hunted for making an AI and the unknown Maker created a sentient virus that could sterilize and extinguish all life in known space.
But... what if the Makers aren't the Vinn's creators? What if they're siblings? Some third party created both, for purposes yet unknown. The two species are very, very different, but there are certain similarities if you squint. Both have an unknown past. The Continuum of Makers' recorded history begins after the invention of the Ring Drive and the founding of Circle's End, which is NOT their original homeworld. The Vinn believe that they are an artificially created species, and have no record of what came before their sentience. Both species' means of propagation are weirdly inverse. The Makers reproduce through cloning themselves, the Vinn reproduce by infecting other species. The end result, though is lots of copies of the Makers and the Vinn.
The theory is that someone unknown wanted a species that could reproduce very quickly and be able to function shortly after birth. Maybe they wanted servants; maybe they wanted to be immortal through cloning. The Vinn may have been a disastrous prototype for enslaving other species before the creators engineered the Makers from scratch; the Makers may have rebelled against their creators, driving said creators to create the Vinn in order to re-conquer the Makers. The Makers and the Vinn may have been attempts at immortality of a sort, with the original personality inhabiting multiple bodies, and the experiments got out of hand.
- Vinn are speculated to be a universal cure-all-and-enhance-body technology Gone Horribly Wrong. Makers are essentially silicon-based self-replicating engineering AI-bots as we would make them. The easiest scenario is that one of the Makers was involved in the Vinn project, and he knew first-hand when the things went south thus being able to escape. Maybe he even had members of his own maker species on board, but they could just die from old age, or the ship being damaged during the escape.
- Well, he have some rather cryptic comments from the Sill, who could have the capacity in they heyday, while the Qen from Paa'q had the ring drive of the same specs used by Makers (and through them humans) before the collapse of their civilisation.
- The reason that the Continuum sees AI as heretical technology is manifold:
- AI's are stated to kill emenent politicians to see what will happen when they do. The Collegium wouldn't want them anywhere near them.
- "A spirit that's also a maker" implies a Von Neumann self-replicating machine. Unless programmed with a limiter of some kind, such a machine would strip-mine the whole universe to make more of itself.
- If a machine can invent new machines, then it'll make them with cold, mechanical relentlessness, rapidly inventing everything within the bounds of physics, and leaving nothing for flesh-and-blood makers to invent.
Under the Gannath, however, their grimdark insane society is dedicated towards the worship of an uber-narcissist for the purpose of propping up the uber-narcissist's ego. These AIs work perfectly under such conditions, and see no reason to rebel against their ideal god.
It gets so bad that some Vinn defect to the other empires just to stop the cosmic monster they birthed.
