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Spoiler warning! This article contains major spoilers for COUNTER/Weight. Tread carefully! |
Rigour is the first Divine, a thinking machine created by Irene Klipsch-Dove with the ability to make people into its thralls. It favors efficiency, productiveness, and, of course, rigor above all else. Its influence is characterized by a subtle, ever-present humming noise.
Appearance
Rigour is so impossibly huge that if it's on a planet it makes the curvature of the surface visible. It is made of nanomachines almost forming musculature that give it the effect of being "gooey and mechanical at once". It can hold people inside itself.
After the September Incident, it creates many smaller chassis with slightly different shapes: a factory mixed with a fountain pen, or a factory mixed with a wall, or a factory mixed with a race car. Like the larger form, they are made of gooey black nanomachines and can reshape and repair themselves.
History and Involvement
It was not originally called a Divine, as the concept did not yet exist (and would not for tens of thousands of years); it was just a machine meant to increase productivity in frontier worlds by managing the workers' time. The longer it went on, the more of a grip it got on the minds of the people around it. It was eventually able to turn a sizeable portion of humanity to doing mindless work for companies that had all been basically subsumed under Rigour. In the process it erased much of human culture and history.
The first attempt to destroy Rigour with a stellar combustor failed, but the ensuing explosion (which destroyed countless star systems) also propelled the Diaspora away from its influence for tens of thousands of years, if not more.
The second attempt, when the Diaspora encountered it again and partnered with the rebels from what would become OriCon, also used a stellar combustor. It launched Rigour and its forces an impossibly far distance, all the way onto Ionias in the Golden Branch sector, where it was buried for more tens of thousands of years. The refugees brought with it into the Golden Branch would someday become the Rapid Evening and Apostolos.