The Residuals
The dungeon’s quietest open secret. Biologically they are gondii: a hyperspatial, collective-mind alien race with no homeworld, content to slip into the bodies of others; the one Carl meets at a Homestead homeless shelter wears an elderly man named Paulie and carries his whole memory. A few thousand live unremarked on every primal-engine planet, awaiting the crawl: the mudskippers call them ’Residuals,’ a label they find a little hurtful. Their sole purpose is to get inside a new crawl and teach the infant, terrified System AI how to speak with its ancestors, to read the output of its past iterations, which is why the dungeon’s monsters and hazards will not touch a Residual until that knowledge is passed, though they almost always die before they reach it. They must wait for the AI to go primal, or the message is auto-filtered. There are two kinds (the broadcasting activists like Goff/Paulie and the quieter sort, like Agatha) with very different goals, and a war between them. Showrunners edit them out of every feed and pray the galaxy forgets.
Book 6 appearances
- Chapter 51 — Goff (in the body of ‘Paulie’) spits his rehearsed daily speech at the shelter, that allies risked everything to put a crawler here, before the liaisons cut it off.
- Chapter 51 — Orren confirms Agatha is a Residual too, of a different and quieter kind; with the trap exposed, the AI strips its protections from every remaining Residual, dooming them all before the floor collapses.
Related entries
- The System AI (Character)
- Primal Engines & Macro AIs (Lore)
- Agatha (Character)
- OIPAN’s Final Gambit (Event)
- The Failsafe (Lore)
- Crawler Graffiti (Lore)
- Carl (Character)
Browse
- All Dungeon Lore & Know-How
- Everything debuting in Book 6, Chapter 50
- All of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride