Article 22: Watchers
Watcher society is one of the least well-known civilizations in the galaxy, owing in large part to the secretive--or at least insular--nature of the True Watchers themselves. Much of what we know is information doled out to us by escapees from Watcher installations, or surmised from what few interactions the rest of the galaxy has had with them. As we learn more about them, I'll do further reports on them, but for now I'll present what little we have to go on.
The exact population size of the Watcher society is unknown, but presumed to be in the tens of billions, given their resources and ability to deploy large forces quickly to any part of the galaxy. Their technology, which is crystalline-based, is incredibly far advanced even compared with the supertech that MSF High employs, and what few pieces of it our Watcher students bring with them, generally the odd piece of armor, weapon, or datapad, is repairable but not replicatible. Given the Watchers' incredibly high mana pools, it's surmised that Watcher tech is a superior form of mahoutech, possibly able to draw power from radiant sources beyond our ability to detect. Loss of partial functionality upon arrival at MSF High also suggests some sort of alternate version of subspace or even functional quantum entanglement linking their devices to other caches of Watcher tech, though functionality can be partially restored through exertion and practice by the tech's owner. Watcher tech is linked to the Watcher it's assigned to, and very few have succeeded in getting any piece of Watcher tech to work without its owner at least present.
True Watchers inhabit a total of zero planets, at least according to reports from those who have defected, but they claim a blanket of protection over a huge number of planets scattered throughout the galaxy. These Watcher Protected Planets are deemed off-limits to all of the major galactic factions, though not from each other, and the Watchers have the tech to detect and deploy Watcher Patrol ships in overproportionate amounts of force to enforce these protective pacts. Many have been able to escape a Watcher Patrol vehicle or even a squad of them, but there are no confirmed reports of anyone being able to destroy any of these ships.
True Watchers are born into and spend most of their lives on enormous space stations orbiting planetless stars, each of which housing around a million Watchers. The systems occupied by these stations are unknown and rarely stumbled across by explorers, and are watched over by sentry grids that alert the station to any foreign presence. If discovered, the stations biowarp away before anything other than a power signature is found. These Home Stations are divided into various sectors for discovery, archival, security, and so on. Watchers are born never knowing their parents, grown in massive banks of artificial wombs and assigned a duty from birth. They are assigned names based on historical figures and train from age 4 to age 50 to do their assigned tasks before spending the next 200 years of their 250-year lifespan performing that duty. Watchers die on the day of their 250th birthday, simply passing away in their sleep, though some who have escaped have sought out ways to extend their lifespan.
Watchers' bodies display sexual characteristics, but in their society they rarely develop attraction towards another, as if the mental components of puberty simply do not function for the vast majority of them. Of escaped Watchers, however, it seems that a vast majority of them do develop these feelings and urges, though without a normal upbringing they often have difficulty expressing these. It's assumed that the reason many of them escape is because of this, while most who remain in Society see no reason to escape, their greatest pleasure in life learning about the universe around them and fulfilling their assigned function.
All of this is known fact about Watcher society. Most of what is believed past that is conjecture, and the number of theories for why the Watchers do what they do are more than I can list here. Some of the more popular theories, however, are as follows:
There are some who believe that the Watchers are, in fact, the long lost Nekopotamian civilization, who traded their cat ears for third eyes when they ascended to a higher plane of galactic understanding. The planets they protect are those which they seeded with life themselves, and they do so until they believe the civilization has matured to the point of being allowed out of the protective embrace of Watcher civilization, which secretly protects them from natural cataclysms. People who believe this story often revere the Watchers, and attempt to find hidden messages in the protection declassification edicts they occasionally disseminate. At one point shortly after the birth of the CTS, these theorists claim to have found an entire hidden message, though it was missing a crucial chunk near the beginning that would have made it all make sense.
Still more theorize that the Watchers are a branch of a larger universal faction, and that once all of the Milky Way's galactic factions unite as one, we will have passed their test and will be invited to join the universal faction, complete with faster-than-faster-than-light technology which will allow us to quickly traverse between galaxies. Those that believe this often start petitions to end all galactic conflict, which they usually pass around on the street for a day or so before wondering why there's still multiple galactic factions.
The most commonly-accepted theory behind the Watchers is that they're all just a bunch of nerds who want to learn everything about the galaxy just for the sake of knowing. This is a pretty easy theory to accept, as I can certainly understand the motivation. As to its veracity, though, a true skeptic must reject anything that they can't provide sufficient evidence for, so don't expect me to go around believing any of these quite yet.
