Outworld is a desolate, isolated planet, light-years from any other inhabited realm. Its barren surface is home to the Duplikate, a hyper-advanced race of synthetic humanoids. Created with the singular purpose of galactic domination, the Duplikate are bound by a telekinetic Hive core. This connection allows for the instantaneous sharing of memories and experiences, ensuring that every lesson learned by a single Duplikat is immediately available to the entire race, facilitating rapid adaptation and unparalleled evolutionary progress.
These humanoid creatures are not immortal however. Composed of red, synthetic, wax-like material with an electro-magnetic skeleton, they originate and develop within cryogenic pods, each taking a full ten human years to mature before being released to the surface of Outworld. At the surface, they are given their orders and coordinates to the worlds to which they will travel and then dominate. Most do not live past their eightieth year, often because the worlds they eventually rule ultimately overrule them, typically in the most violent of fashions.
This is how The Traveler came to be. Upon release to the surface, it became clear that something was different about this one. Most Duplikats are confident, almost arrogant creatures at the point of maturity. This is the result of millenia of collectively shared knowledge - how to conquer, how to dominate, how to destroy - are essentially instinctual. But The Traveler wasn’t fixated on these things. Instead, The Traveler was consumed by the notion that maybe this was not the proper way of life for their species.
Sifting through the Hive, The Traveler began to see patterns that didn’t portend to the evolutionary leaps that were understood to be the basis for their existence. But if this were true, that would mean that some, maybe all, of the Hive memories weren’t memories at all - that they were in fact, lies. At this point, The Traveler didn’t know what to think or what to believe. But it did make them ask this question: What is it like to live?
