Trope-a-Day: Ave Machina

Ave Machina: Smile when you say that, squishie!

Well, sort of.  The Imperials subscribe to the elegance of design, logic, and purity of the machine parts of the trope, but, well, this is a trans/postsophontist setting (even outside the Empire, which completely idealizes those notions, nothing-but-the-pure-flesh baselines are rare, simply because refusing to transcend the limitations of the average baseline species is the fast track to galactic irrelevance).  You don’t worship the machines that are, after all, merely the components of your personal apotheosis.

(Of course, the Transcend is a weakly godlike superintelligence some of whose high-level routines are wearing the masks of the iconic personifications of concepts that served the Eldrae as deities – but that’s really more a case of Deus Est Machina, which see.)