Copper and Chrome

Preliminary surveys found a battlefield very near to the fort, granting us easy access to indigenous and … artifacts alike. Based on a cross-sectional study of the remains, we estimate several thousand native inhabitants of … had been assimilated by the …, only to fight and die on this site. They were not the only cyborgs present at this conflict, however.

A mere few centuries ago, we slaughtered these …. Our team has identified … … along with early prototypes of our species' augments. A strategic assessment of the battlefield suggests our people were deployed here as shock troops. The battle was swift and bloody; the … lacked co-ordination and suffered heavy losses, despite wielding more sophisticated wetware.

We note the ruins of a medical facility nearby; it would seem our predecessors breached the fort via this hospital. Perhaps there we may learn how and why cyborg was pitted against cyborg here, so long ago.

Conflict tore through this hospital like a pulse cannon. None of the remains we found inside are …; only the cyberized natives of … died here. Most were patients at this facility, however very few of them seemed to sustain actual battle wounds. Instead several of these wards handled removal of cybernetic augments, albeit by very primitive means.

Rather being a collateral target, the hospital may well have been the primary objective for the attacking …. After scrutinizing the hard-copy medical data within, we begin to see why. The inhabitants of … possessed several uniquely evolved characteristics - not least a singularly resilient immune system - which the Machine will have coveted for its cyborg troops.

However, these advantages also presented challenges for assimilation. It could not transplant existing augments from species like ours; it had to adapt. Doing so turned this species into even more capable soldiers, but only for a short time. These … appear to have retained some semblance of autonomy, clinging to their old habits and way of life, and so we were deployed to destroy them.

A hidden vault has been revealed beneath the fortress proper. Inside is what looks to have been a Machine substrate: a devolved node, capable of propagating a nearly-independent avatar of the entire Machine Intelligence. We assume this was a last-ditch effort to assert direct control of the stubbornly resistant locals. The technology is unlike anything we've encountered before from the …; further study is sure to advance our own AI research.

In the act of tearing down its now-defunct communications array, we noted that this avatar had dedicated an entire receiver circuit to monitoring signals from the … system.