Cruciform

Overview

The Cruciform is the Church of Mekhane's most sacred miracle technology. Promising a true, honest immortality safe from anything short of total vaporization and complete protection of the soul within. It's been known that members of Mekhane caught in deaths such as bomb blasts with nothing left but a slightly dented cruciform have been fully recovered and revived with no issue.

How They Function

On the surface, the faith of Mekhane will gladly explain that Cruciforms work much like Soulcrypts. Complex devices planted in the chest cavity, storing the neural and genetic data of those who accept them. As well as protecting them from harmful technology or parasites that would compromise their body or mind. All while promising total protection of the data within them. However unlike a Soulcrypt a Cruciform doesn't require a subscription to Nanotrasen's proprietary operating system, nor does it come with a heavy price tag - infact they're free and the first step to becoming a fully committed child of Mekhane.

However, that's just what members of the faith will say.

History

The origin of Cruciforms, and by extension the church itself is shrouded in ignorance and oaths of silence. Cruciforms themselves were first seen with Mekhane's philanthropic reveal to society, openly given to the ill and injured much like the miracles of prophets in old faiths. This charity didn't stop with just those on death's door. Mekhane's mission of welfare and love for all of the galaxy turned them from a small, overly benevolent cult to a credible faith seemingly overnight. However those freshly inducted during this initial surge were told very little, if anything on the origins of Mekhane. Nor is Mekhane still recognized by any major state as an official faith.

The Truth

While the cruciform might seem to be supernatural in nature. It's merely a prime example of Arthur Clarke's third law. The Cruciform in truth works very much and is partly based off the Soulcrypt. How it differs however is it's half-organic nature - hosting of a premature, heavily altered symbiotic lifeform, the Cortical Borer.

Also unlike the Soulcrypt the Cruciform forms a bond with the bearer's neurology partly hosting their mind and 'downloading' it in event of death or removal rather than creating a save of the body and mind every half a minute. This bond of the symbiote also explains the Cruciform's litany functions, the 'miracles' preformed by these devices tied to the host's neurological signals with the symbiote acting as an operating kernal.

While the Church will also claim the implantation of a Cruciform is unremovable except in special circumstances and with care. The highest form of excommunication within the faith is the sudden severing of the Cruciform. While in this case it doesn't kill the host, it leaves them heavily crippled and mentally stunted. This however is reserved for those so vile in the faith's eyes true death is too kind a mercy.

All of this is something those ranking enough within the faith to know are willing to murder or die for to keep secret, and just where this technology comes from not even they might know...