Drone Piloting

The many, varied repositories of the pre-space Zikrat Scientific Citizenry would decay over time without anyone to maintain them, and without a number of key resources which someone would have to create by working. However, as there were no organic Zikrats left, they would have to formulate a new way to maintain their structures.

The many personalities within these repositories could build robots and pilot them remotely, not dissimilar to using an organic body but with a long range connection to the brain. This does require a high bandwidth connection, but once there were enough robots, production of future robots would become easy.

Initially, the zikrats were planning on remaining inside the repositories for eternity, or for an extremely long time. However, it eventually appeared that they could not take every factor into account and despite immense efforts, decay happened anyway. Structures started falling apart, and each repository turned to alternative methods of obtaining resources. Despite the initial goals of cooperation, many have turned on others to harvest each others useful mechanical parts. 

Some robots were eventually outfitted for war, and vehicles like tanks and aircraft were built, but with the significant atmosphere changes as a result of the repositories' operation taken into account. Most remained as worker robots however, and many repositories have managed to establish long term alliances. The worker robots were also redesigned quite often. Workers often came equipped with large welding or grinding equipment, as well as devices for small scale manipulation. There were dedicated welding drones, sterilization drones, electrical drones, plumbing drones and many more. More military focused drones often had heavier armour and weapons of various roles built into them, like anti air, anti tank as well as standard rifles. Some of these were also commanders. Of course, it was much more efficient to build large vehicles like tanks as a robot instead of having a robot crew, so this was also quite common.

Eventually, some repositories eroded to a state where their entire population were eventually required to pilot robots like these to maintain it. Many were also lucky in that there were abandoned factories and other structures near their location, and had the choice to either scrap them or maintain them but being able to make use of those facilities. Many repositories restored factories or even repurposed them. Some repositories even traded materials with others, and this would often be transported using robots like these in large freight aircraft.

Drone piloting became quite obsolete when technology advanced far enough to build robots that could house a sentient soul. Repositories were quickly abandoned and the mobile population rebuilt the wrecked civilization back in reality, forming the ZSC now that they no longer had to maintain these massive, resource-hungry megastructures. This technology was driven by a desire of the people to move outside of the decaying megastructures and live for longer outside them, and have their own bodies. This was first invented by some later, more advanced repositories but it quickly spread around the planet as the knowledge spread around the planet.

As such, though the main directive of the robots would remain the same, keeping the repositories operational and running, their tasks would change quite often.