ZSC Repository

Repositories are structures that are normally very large and designed to accommodate the sentience of a large population. They are immense data centers built by the Zikrat Scientific Citizenry. The Zikrat species was dying because they lost their capability for reproduction, and the promise of eternal life in these immense repositories was too great to ignore. As the entire species built a huge number of these immense structures, they became entirely reliant on them. They were built to last thousands of years, and while they have been engineered incredibly well with every conceivable situation taken into account, they have been subject to decay. Because no organic workers were left, they could not maintain these structures easily so they had to improvise, by building large numbers of robotic bodies that were remotely controlled from the various personalities housed within a repository. 

While most repositories collapsed by the time the Solution (Bill 43) was found, the species survived the repository age. When one repository finally managed to design a robotic body powerful enough to house its own sentience, they were built in massive numbers to escape the repositories. This ensured the continued survival of their species.

The earliest repositories were quite complex, because it was an emerging technology at the time. They needed an immense quantity of energy and water to remain operational. Energy was initially supplied by the external power grid, but as it became apparent that this would become a shortcoming (as no workers would be left to maintain power plants), they were modified with nuclear reactors for power. They thus required nuclear fuel to sustain themselves. Because of decay, they also needed replacement parts to maintain their structures. 

Nuclear fuel and replacement parts were normally manufactured within a repositories' fabrication bays located on the lower layers of the structure. Raw materials had to be mined or salvaged from somewhere, and initially there were thousands of wrecked buildings outside of the repositories which they could salvage (the pre-repository organic society). Later, these were all salvaged for parts or destroyed by natural events, so they eventually reverted to exploiting large mines for the much needed resources. They mostly needed conductive materials like copper, semiconductors for replacement computers, insulators, and various structural metals of many kinds to protect the computers from external forces and to give support and structure to the entire repository. They required huge vehicles to move materials from the mines to each repository, as well as vehicles to protect those convoys (or perhaps attack others). These were often kept in lager bays close to the large elevators on some of the supports allowing them to move resources up into the respective repository.

The layers above the fabrication bays were normally large maintenance areas. This normally included several reactors (for redundancy), immense banks of transformers, cabling, support beams, cooling systems (the repositories were normally water cooled) and more. The layers above those are often alternating between computation and cooling / various maintenance areas. The operator(s) were normally housed within one of the lower layers at the center of the structure for extreme protection. Particular care was normally taken for those building the Operator because of its importance, and they rarely failed.