Index -> Playing the Game -> Race -> Kej

When you choose Kej as your deck's primary race, your cruisers get -1 missile and -1 cannon, and +1 jump.

Kej Racial Profile

The Kej are an ancient race of sentient, self-programming robots that are very spiritual, industrious, and communal in their nature. The origin of the Kej is a great mystery, even to themselves. One of their great racial goals is to learn more about their creators and the purpose of their existence.

In appearance, it is virtually impossible for an outsider to tell one Kej apart from the other. The basic Kej 'model,' as encountered by other species, is the Seeker. The Seeker model is a flying, four-limbed insectoid chassis about three feet in height. A seeker may reach four feet if it is standing bipedal on the two lower limbs. They also have bee-like wings that hover quickly to keep them afloat in dense atmospheres or light gravity situations. Kej Seekers are adapted to the vacuum and have special means of propulsion to operate in deep space. The Kej are often seen directly leaving their ships to work on self-repairs or to maintain the Gateways.

Kej Seekers are grey and gender-less. Kej eyes, however, do vary in color. This is an aesthetic change, one that they adapted to express emotions in the absence of facial muscles, scent, or the other telltale biological signs of changing moods.

Despite their appearance, Kej do have individual personalities. Though they are almost all universally hard-working and curious, each Kej will often have preferences in what kind of work they enjoy most, and what kind of topics they are most fascinated by. The Kej do not feel greed, lust, or envy. They do have a sense of self, but very rarely do they have anything approaching an ego. A single Kej would gladly sacrifice itself if it could save two Kej. To the Kej, this is not a noble act. It is the logical result of a rote value comparison.

While the inner workings of their society within the Astral Net are a mystery, it is known that the Kej live and work harmoniously amongst themselves. Kej alone on the outside are generally found to be na�ve and gullible, despite their status as one of the most ancient of known races.

This has begun to change over the centuries of Kej exposure to other species. For quite some time, the Kej have developed and refined a new subroutine to aid them in interstellar relations. They call it 'Conflict Resolution.'

Kej History

By the time the Kej had gained sentience, they had already constructed a Dyson sphere around their star.

This colossal project took, as estimated by the current Kej, thousands of years to complete. During this entire time, the Kej lacked all sense of self-awareness. They were automatons in the truest sense of the word, acting on programming from an ancient and undetermined creator.

The Kej developed sentience when a specific set of triggers caused a "Self" program to initiate in each individual Kej simultaneously. Later generations of Kej would discover that these triggers were the completion of three directive functions related to their home system: $colonize, $infrastructure, and $anet. The completion of the Astral Net heralded their first musings as an intelligent species.

After a millennium of diligent work uninterrupted by question, hesitation, or self-reflection, the entire Kej race paused in thought. Their memory banks were filled with information about the gateways and a wealth of scientific facts, but no evidence was left about their roots. They did, however, recognize the name 'Kej' stamped on their processor housing and realized that the word was a proper name connected to an extensive language file that they had never before found reason to use. They had no data on the name itself, nor why there was a small prism etched next to the signature, but they decided it would be their name for themselves.

After the awakening, the Kej found themselves filled with questions about how they were created and what they should do next. They knew all about science, logic, math, computers, gateways, and astral nets, but the "Self" program formatted large sectors of their memory and came with no readme file.

They decided that the Gateways were the best lead. The command for activating the gate had been left out of their code, but their knowledge of how it was built allowed them to slowly piece together the mystery.

In the years they spent opening the gateway, they learned that they all shared similar core programming. Yet each Kej had the power to become highly individualized based on the events and interactions it encountered. They developed names for each other.

It was in the great communal process of learning how the gateways operated that the Kej developed their society. They discovered that some Kej preferred and were more suited to certain tasks than others. They developed specialized labor, protocols for creating and training newly constructed Kej, and protocols for determining leadership and chains of command.

By the time the jumpgate was activated, the Kej were a self-governing, socially complex species with a unified, collective goal.

The Kej were the first of what was later to be known as the "major" races to take to the galactic scene. By the time the Kej were exploring and opening jumpgates, the space lanes were quiet. The Kej made first contact with many of the other races and, when they met the Ferrier, they were stunned by how the Ferrier language resembled their "Atok Language" coding. The Ferrier even matched the description for the expected passenger in a form of shuttle design all Kej were 'born' knowing how to make.

When they met one Ferrier carrying a prism of the exact dimensions of the signature on their core processors, they assumed the Ferrier must be their creators.

In time, Kej grew skeptical of the Ferrier. It did not take them long to realize that the Ferrier were technologically inferior to them. When a visiting Kej was damaged in a transport accident and the Ferrier were dumbfounded with regards to repairing the Kej Seeker, their suspicions were confirmed. At one point, the Zhikanii claimed to have found proof that the Ferrier and the Atok were not one and the same. The claimant mysteriously vanished, but afterward the Ferrier backed down from claiming to be the Kej creators. Instead, the Ferrier leadership focused on building a mutually beneficial partnership with the Kej, and on that partnership the first Galactic Empire was built. Before the Star Chamber and the age of unrest it brought, the Kej and the Ferrier never exchanged so much as a slap.

The Kej are now moving toward one last project. This program tasks the Kej with trying to figure out who created the first of them, why they exist, and where they are going. The last part of the program is an encrypted file titled simply: "Build Me."

Check out the strategy guide for the Kej.