Collectors of the Cycles

From FABT

Collectors of the Cycles
10999899400 BCE - 2185 CE
CollectorsInsignia.png
CollectorMap.jpgThe Collectors of the Cycles were primarily based in the galactic core, and held no territory beyond it.
Political information

Type of government:

Reaper paramilitary puppet organization

Founding document:

Construction of the Collector Base

Constitution:

Collector Mandate

Head of State:

Collector General (first and last)

Head of government:

Collector General (first and last)

Commander-in-chief:

Collector General (first and last)

De facto leader:

Harbinger

Executive:

The Reapers

Military:

Collector forces

Societal information

Capital:

Collector Base, Galactic Core

Official language:

Base-8 Superluminal

Historical information

Formed from:

Huskified remnants of the Cunkreid

Dates:

15 May 10999899400 BCE - 9 October 2185 CE
(10.9 eons, 4 months and 24 days)

Preceded by:

Reaper huskified ground forces

 
"It is logical to assume that the Collectors merely facilitate the Reaper equivalent of reproduction. The technology to design this Reaper is not their own. It is likely that the surviving species of a harvested cycle are repurposed as Collectors to build the Reaper of the next cycle, and are then rotated out with the new batch each cycle. A new species of Collectors each cycle."
EDI explaining to Commander Shepard the purpose of the Collectors during the Collector Base Assault.

The Collectors of the Cycles, also known as just the Collectors, was a semi-autonomous puppet organization of the Reapers consisting of the huskified remnants of the dominant species of a Reaper cycle called Collectors, rotated out each cycle to be replaced with the huskified remnants of the next cycle, built for the sole purpose of gathering information on a cycle prior to a Reaper harvest, bolstering Reaper forces during a harvest, and facilitating the creation of new Reapers towards the end and after a harvest. While a pivotal part of the galactic harvest enacted by the Great Intelligence, the concept of the Collectors didn't emerge until the second cycle, after the Reapers, effectively new to the business of harvesting an entire galaxy, quickly ran into issues pertaining to a lack of knowledge on their victims, leading to slight mistakes being made, and the latter difficulty in producing new Reapers from the remains of harvested species, as the process took too long with just their usual husk forces. The Intelligence solved this problem with the Collectors: as each harvest left the Reapers with a surplus of tens of billions of huskified victims, all of them rendered useless and without purpose with the second harvest completed, they were just going to be left to die of exposure, and rather than waste them, the Intelligence directed them to be reused as a labor force, collecting harvested victims and using them as the slave labor to build the Reapers, greatly speeding up the process of Reaper reproduction. As such, the Reapers kept them around, and the husks were then deployed in the third cycle, where further revisions were made, with the decision made that these husks, now called "Collectors", would have their own base of operations, and instead of just being used to build new Reapers, would act in conjunction with their cycle vanguard that was left behind after each cycle to study and observe galactic society, relaying what they learned directly back to Harbinger, who controlled the Collectors through their general. This base would be placed in the galactic core, an inaccessible and clandestine location where the Collectors could operate with complete secrecy, accessible only through the Omega 4 Relay, which was purpose built to access the core, but locked so that only Reaper IFF-equipped ships could access it safely: any other ship would be teleported beyond the "safe zone" surrounding the base, where they would be torn apart by the gravitational forces of the hundreds of black holes making up the galactic core. This new Base would be the location from which new Reapers were built, and for ease of access and in order to give the Collectors semi-autonomy without wasting Reaper resources, they were also allowed to build themselves a maximum of four, domestically made cruisers, serving as enormous arks to transport millions of victims to the Base for harvesting, and with enough firepower to defend themselves against attack.

As the cycles continued, the Collectors of the Cycles only became more and more crucial to the operation of the cycles, a piece of the puzzle that fit perfectly with the Intelligence's cosmic strategy. As they had their own ships, they did not require Reaper transports to move them, and as they were completely loyal to the Reapers (any essence that remained of their species was long gone due to the huskification process), they were allowed some autonomy, operating where they saw fit, but always at the behest of either Harbinger or the Intelligence directly if it chose to intervene, although by the fourth cycle Harbinger had largely taken over as the harvest had become so perfectly automated, with no hiccups in the strategy, that the Intelligence retreated into the role of an observer, only intervening if the strategy faltered, which it never did (at least until 2183 CE). While a puppet of Harbinger, the Collector General was the formal leader of the Collectors, directing its forces from the safety of the Base, having no need to ever leave and able to communicate with its troops through lag-free interstellar communication. Before each cycle, the role of the Collectors was a passive one, remaining elusive and rarely emerging from their Base, resulting in sightings of them being exceptionally rare in each cycle, with mythology and rumors about them present amongst every cycle: even the Prothean Empire had few, but rare, encounters with the Collectors of their cycle, and despite attempts to track down this species, they gave up after they realized the Omega 4 Relay was impassable. During peacetime, the Collectors would periodically emerge to explore the galaxy, accessing their form of extranet if they had it, and going from system to system, taking notes. Overtime, they'd open transactions with the more malleable, discreet organic civilizations, and many of these purchases involved samples of seemingly innocuous technology, technologies no species would really find suspicious but was just enough for the Collectors to assess the technological advancement of the cycle, never buying weapons or WMDs so as to not draw undue suspicion or attention. Other purchases involved slaves, always buying them in strangely specific quantities, going for a large cross-section of genetic variety, species and cultures: this was for the purpose of performing genetic experiments, both to assess the viability of their species becoming a Reaper, and how best to defeat them quickly and efficiently when the time came for an invasion, and it is through this knowledge that the Reapers are able to prioritize which species to target first, what weapons and tactics to best achieve victory quickly, and which species are the "most worthy" for "ascension" into a Reaper.

When a Reaper harvest finally begins, the Collectors are directed to emerge from their Base, almost always in force, to assist the invading Reaper fleet and commence harvest operations. They would almost always join Reaper forces so that harvested victims could be quickly transported back to the Base, but on some occasions would operate alone, sometimes even after a Reaper force has left to continue their advance elsewhere. The Collectors possessed sizable ground forces of their own, and were often deployed en masse to assist Reaper ground troops, augmenting their ground operations with an array of formidable warriors, their power and abilities differing between each species of Collector. Towards the end of a cycle or after a cycle has ended, the process of building several new Reapers is usually close to completion, having had centuries to build and perfect them. Once all harvesting operations had officially concluded, the original Collector work force would be "decommissioned", effectively purged and replaced with the new species of Collector, consisting of the huskified remnants of the dominant species of the cycle just harvested, giving birth to the new generation of Collectors and ensuring they do not deteriorate in effectiveness overtime: for example, after the prothean cycle had ended, the Inusannon Collectors were purged and replaced with the new Prothean Collectors. Once the Reapers have retreated back through the Citadel, accompanied by their brand-new fresh-off-the-line brothers, the Collectors were largely left to triple check the galaxy was successfully purged before retreating back through the Omega 4 Relay, waiting for organic civilization to rebuild itself before emerging again.

The first recorded sighting of the Collectors in the asari cycle was in 1643 CE, although the Collectors had been active long before this. Many attempts were made to contact and track them down, but just as before, these attempts ended in failure due to futility. Mythology developed around them, some people believing that they didn't even exist and were an elaborate hoax, while others speculated on their odd transaction habits, believing it was part of some weird fetish or gruesome culinary tastes, and without any approximation of their culture, government or even where their homeworld was, the races of each cycle mistook them for being a new but enigmatic species, left totally unaware of their true motives or the reality of who they were, and capturing a Collector for examination was impossible as they would self-destruct if captured, and they never were anyway because the Collectors were always exceptionally cautious, refusing to meet anywhere where a cruiser wasn't nearby. Despite this, the Collectors were forced to change tactics for the first time in 2183 CE after the Eden Prime War where the Reaper vanguard, Sovereign, was killed at the Battle of the Citadel, further delaying the harvest. At the direction of Harbinger, the Collectors staged a surprise ambush on the SSV Normandy over Alchera and destroyed it, killing Commander Shepard in the process, and then proceeded to begin a campaign of abducting entire human colonies, transporting them back to the Base with plans to study them. This then turned into plans to build a Human-Reaper, as Harbinger believed them to be the dominant species of the cycle if they could kill one of their own, and Collector abductions stepped up, constantly escalating without any response from the Systems Alliance, who still hadn't recovered from the Eden Prime War at that point and couldn't ascertain who was behind the attacks due to the lack of evidence left behind and all potential witnesses being abducted. The Collectors attempted to purchase Shepard's body from the Shadow Broker for experimentation into how this one human could have caused such a disruption to billions of years of impeccable strategy, but the body was stolen from them by Liara T'Soni to be handed over to Cerberus, who then, after two years, helped resurrect Shepard through Project Lazarus. With Shepard alive and reforming the Normandy Squad, he partially disrupted the Collector abduction of Horizon not long after. Finally, after a back and forth struggle, the Normandy Squad achieved the impossible and safely passed through the Omega 4 Relay using a Reaper IFF, assaulting the Collector Base. After hours of intense fighting, the Normandy Squad destroyed the Human-Reaper in combat and detonated the Base's reactor, effectively wiping out the Collectors and dealing the Reapers a massive blow to their operations.

Despite the vast majority of the Collectors being wiped out, a few million survived on the last surviving cruiser, Ascendancy, as it was on its way to abduct Eden Prime when the base was lost. The Ascendancy immediately went into hiding, its primary base of operations gone and having no safe harbor, but it would patiently wait for its masters to arrive: while these Collectors would survive, the organization itself was gone with the destruction of the Base. When the Reapers finally arrived in 2186 CE to begin their invasion, the Ascendancy emerged from hiding to assist them, and it would be present across numerous theaters of the war, although reports of sightings were few and scattered: with no general to lead them and most of their forces gone, these remaining Collectors were absorbed into the Reaper armies. With only a few million Collectors onboard, the Collectors had little impact on the war itself, and largely assisted in harvesting operations. Late in the war, the Leviathans used their fragments to seize control of small portions of the Collector forces, causing them to desert the Reapers and join the UGC as puppets of the Leviathans: these small groups of Collectors became known as the Awakened, all of them trapped in their possessed state known as Immortals, which the Leviathans were able to maintain due to their superior and more refined form of indoctrination, known as the Harmony. When the Reapers captured the Citadel towards the end of the war, the Ascendancy brought the remaining Collectors to the station to begin harvesting the population, and this is where the majority of Collector forces would be present while the final assault on Earth was going on. These remaining Collectors would be disintegrated when the Crucible fired, wiping out the last remnants of the Collectors from galactic history, which included even the UGC's own Awakened. Sadly, scientists concluded that these Awakened, given time, could have developed sentience, as the indoctrination used by the Leviathans doesn't cause mental degradation in a host like the Reaper version, but as the name for it implies, harmonizes the Leviathan's imposed will with that of the indoctrinated victim, making the indoctrination more subtle and more of a "subject" than an outright puppet, directed to perform actions beneficial to the Leviathans without requiring a mindless slave. Unfortunately, the Crucible firing, mixed with the cellular degradation of the host only being delayed rather than ceased, meant that the Awakened were doomed to never experience this from the onset, and their demise remains a "scientific and evolutionary tragedy" that has plagued Reaper War historians ever since.

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