Jason Jones Doesn't Know This

But perhaps you might want to. (Though it's a bit wordier than I intended it to be.) Following are various of the Maker's recollections of its origins.

The Maker was born (or spawned, as you will) on another world. Its creator, another of the same species, had recently gained a great deal of territory through the destruction of a rival, and (to control it) created the Maker as a subordinate. On that world, the Maker's species (subsequently referred to as the Vat-Children) is utterly alone across the entire continent on which it exists. Wisened by its experience on Earth, the Maker suspects that there may be other continents unconquered by the Vat-Children, but this is a thought foreign to the Vat-Children; only become truly sentient in the past ten thousand years, they focus the vast majority of their thought and effort to competition with one-another, ignoring the coast save for the creation of a few, outlying power-vines on it.

On their native world, the Vat-Children's society (such as it is) is a lesson in the economics of scarcity. Every source of renewable energy is exploited; blue vines are a complete canopy over the continent, save for the mountains and larger lakes - those presenting too much effort to colonize for a race with little concept of cooperation and enemies on every side. Their destruction, in a society utterly dependent on them, is the act of the desperate or the insane. Roots reach deep within the earth, harvesting geothermal energy near natural faults and hot springs. The soil is completely devoid of nutrients; the corpses of dead Vat-Children and their creations are absorbed by their conquerors long before any bacteria could decompose them into the soil. The Vat-Children themselves are pitted against one another in constant rivalry - every Vat-Child will gladly attack another if it sees potential territorial (and thus energy) gain for itself in doing so. Battle is done with creatures spawned for the purpose, whose design and maintenance takes up the vast majority of the Vat-Children's time. Their numbers and size are a balance between ever-scarce energy and mass and the desperate necessity of victory in combat.

New Vat-Children are only created when another is defeated, and the conqueror has insufficient range to control the new territory. (They control their creations via ULF radio signals.) This, as with so much else, is a trade-off: their effective range (and potential territory size) is greatly expanded, but the new Vat Child consumes a great deal of biomass and energy in its own right. Worst of all, if a parent's control grows weak enough and it presents a weak front (perhaps while fighting a war with another Vat Child), its children will betray it in hopes of absorbing its territory and gaining their freedom to boot. This is the main reason that the continent has not been united under a single rule.

The Maker, in its time on its native world, survived seven minor wars and innumerable skirmishes. It helped kill its own parent, with the aid of two other siblings (who he attacked even as the corpses cooled) and a neighbor, but gained little from it territorially due to a poorly-timed ambush, and resolved to be more careful henceforth. It won two wars, lost one, and came off with more-or-less a draw from the other four, gaining or losing territory accordingly, and growing in skill with each. It was close to victory in another war, using a variant of the slicers that it used in Iowa (very dumb creatures, sent out with very specific instructions), when it was brought to Earth. Or so it recalls. The Maker doesn't fully trust its own memory on events before its arrival.

When the Maker arrived on Earth, it had never before seen any creature of another species than its own. The discovery of other sentient beings, other species, completely changed the way that it thought about life. The very idea gave the Maker grand concepts and goals previously unthinkable; and those goals guided it from the moment of contact even up to the present moment, as Jason Jones awakens in the meat-filled pit.