Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys

As with the nothings, there is still a great deal of speculation and argument regarding the true nature of Stuff Central. The distillation of all the surviving legends is that a place existed somewhere in the Damaged World that was the ultimate source of all material things. Its roots obviously lay in the matter transporters that came into regular use even before the development of the Mahler drive. The matter transporter was capable of moving people and cargoes over short distances in space. Its essential principle was that it disassembled the basic subatomic structure of any solid object in its send chamber and broke it down into a complex microcode. This code was then transmitted to the receiving unit, which, using that code, reassembled a perfect replica of the object from available local matter. Despite the obvious moral and philosophical problems and some sensationally unpleasant early accidents, the matter transporter rapidly become part of human technology and quickly expanded its capabilities in terms of both range and the size of the objects it could handle.

By the start of the Thousand Years War the technology had been perfected whereby, instead of simply transporting matter, the microcodes could be recorded on permanent templates, and multiple facsimiles could be created at will of any object — including animals and living human beings — for which there was such a template.

The constant references to templates in all the hundreds of stories referring to Stuff Central make clear that if it existed at all, it must have employed some advanced form of this technology, and it is probable that much of the hardware, the flora and fauna, and even sections of the human population in the Damaged World were products of these templates. What is not clear is whether Stuff Central directly transmitted the required objects, or whether it only supplied a file of templates for later use. Unless the legends are totally fanciful, it would seem that we have to assume that there was some kind of center that had the capability of transmitting microcode signals with great accuracy through the chaos of nonmatter to the scattered stasis settlements of this strange era.

Unfortunately, much of this will have to remain pure speculation. The hard archaeology for this period is so flimsy that it is unlikely that any of the theories will ever be confirmed. Not one copy of the often-mentioned Stuff Catalogue would seem to have survived the Final Cataclysm and the Reformation.

— Pressdra Vishnaria