|
Spoiler warning!
This article or section contains plot spoilers for the Mortal Engines quartet and the Fever Crumb trilogy. Proceed at your own risk. |
The Remembering Machines were twelve robotic people who were resurrected, in a similar, although far more advanced way to the stalkers of the Nomadic Empires. The main difference is that these were not machines of war, but history recorders, built to remember all that had gone before.
History[]
The Remembering Machines were built by the mysterious Pyramid Builders. According to traction-era retellings, They were hidden in a temple "so far north you started going south again" with workshops attached where the priest-engineers would take one of their number and turn them into a Remembering Machine. Whenever a chief or chiefess died, their body was converted into a remembering machine, so they could tell future generations about their wisdom and experiences. Originally, these Remembering Machines were built to record the first generation of Scriven directly after the Sixty Minute War, having believed that the original human species could not survive the Black Centuries following. They presumably also had knowledge of the Slow Bombs, but knew nothing of the times after the war, only offering the barest of answers to Fever Crumb, and talking continuously about the lost Ancients' knowledge of various molecular chains (possibly to create the Scriven themselves, or at least to clone their cells.)
At some point, the idea of a sentient machine gained more ground, but warping the ideal to one that instead of remembering, the machine would be hired to kill - the first iteration of the Stalkers, in their humanoid form. That idea of a 'killing machine' would spread to animals, such as Stalker Birds and Stalker Whales, some time later. But all the brains and machinery had to be taken from a workshop containing them, as they were too complex for traction-era people to understand. The Stalker Fang's brain was taken from one of these workshops in the days of the Green Storm. The temple was destroyed by the Green Storm after the brain was taken in fear that the Traction City's would discover it and use its secrets against them. The remembering machines would have presumably been destroyed in the blast.
Shrike is a remembering machine, as his brain was taken from the temple by a snowmad and sold to Nicola Quercus. After Shrike (as his original human form, Kit Solent) died, the ancient stalker brain was put into his head (thousands of years later, suffering hits from weapons and even entire towns). At the end of A Darkling Plain, Shrike tells the villagers that he is a remembering machine, and that he remembers the days of Traction Cities and Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, among others.
Gallery[]
