Forerunner civilization lasted thousands of years. It would be wrong to call the Forerunner worlds an empire, because they eschewed central governance. Forerunner history was an endless series of shifting alliances, in part because of Forerunners’ temperamental egocentrism, in part because of the same imperatives of the geography of Gates which make Mecha Galaxy fragmented today.
After several thousand years of relative order, improvements in niode technology caused niodes to replace more and more other Forerunner tech. But this presented a problem because of limited supplies of niobium. Resource wars began to consume more and more Forerunner attention.
Eventually, a Forerunner scientist developed a gene-targeted Forerunner-killing virus which could infect humans without harming them. Forerunners began tailoring viruses which would kill off only the members of a rival clan. But the virus mutated, and the Forerunners lost control over it. Within a decade, every major Forerunner enclave was wiped out, and after another century had passed Forerunners everywhere were dead.
Unable to maintain Forerunner technology, humans succumbed to a paleolithic state. By the time they had built their own technological civilizations the Forerunners were long since forgotten ….
Forerunner biology and civilization
Forerunners were more different from humans than humans were from neanderthals, though not as different from humans as we differ from chimpanzees. Forerunners were categorically more intelligent than humans; a Forerunner only as smart as the smartest human would have been regarded as severely brain damaged, much as a human with the intelligence of a chimpanzee is. This intelligence was not only greater than ours, it was fundamentally alien in character. They could easily master human languages but their own language is dense, complex, and nearly incomprehensible. This has limited archaeologists’ ability to understand what records the Forerunners left behind.
Humans were an integral part of Forerunner society, outnumbering the Forerunners but utterly enslaved by them. To the Forerunners, humans were not people, just a kind of very capable draft animal used for a range of purposes. Between the availability of human servants and their own vast intelligence, the Forerunners never developed what we would call computers or robotics. Forerunner psychology is impossible for humans to truly understand, but the best approximation would be to call it “nonviolently psychopathic”. Forerunners had neither care nor animosity toward one another. To a Forerunner, the solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma is obvious: the two prisoners will coöperate because it is the optimal strategy in the long run. They were fiercely independent, but built vast anarchic networks of shared trust.
But this also meant that when Forerunners did come into irreconcilable conflict, the fighting was fast and ruthless. And this was eventually their undoing.
Human knowledge of the Forerunners
Human archaeologists know a fair bit about the Forerunners. They have translated some of the data that has survived, encoded in ancient neuroptics. They have looked at Forerunner histories and found images of their striking, uncannily inhuman faces. They have learned to use some of the technologies the Forerunners have left behind.
Mechs are possible because of recovered Forerunner technologies which humans have learned to control — niodes, neuroptics, and the brain inductor used to connect pilot to machine. Humans are a distinct species from Forerunners but just similar enough that our neural structure occasionally happens to match a Forerunner’s brain in the necessary ways to allow a person to interface with a matrix of niodes. This is why some humans can pilot mechs, but the ability is rare. It was the discovery of Forerunner artifacts on Earth that created the Mecha Galaxy era, when humans realized that the niodes and Gates archaeologists had found could be used together to reach faraway planets.
But humans have not been able to truly master Forerunner technologies. Niodes are a limited resource because the technique for making them from niobium has been lost, and in fact may be beyond the human brain’s capacity to understand, so all niodes are recovered Forerunner artifacts. Humans don’t know what ended the Forerunner civilization, but the clues they have say it was ended by war. They are right … sort of.
What were the Forerunners?
In the world of MechaGalaxy, everyone knows that the anthropologists of the 20th Century were completely wrong about the origins of humanity. Humans did not evolve on Earth. But the truth is close, in some ways, to the thinking of those primitive early scientists. Imagine if the story they told had been right, but things had gone differently in one respect: homo neanderthalensis didn’t die out, but instead survived to live together with homo sapiens when civilization emerged.
Might the neanderthals have been enslaved by the more intelligent humans? Perhaps. We do know that was what happened on the Forerunner homeworld … only homo sapiens didn’t enslave homo neanderthalensis, homo sapiens were enslaved by another, more intelligent hominid species — homo prodromos — the Forerunners. The Forerunners colonized a territory of countless planets which they linked using Gates, until their own internal conflicts destroyed them.
