Reverence result of programming.
Part of what I need to get into is the nature of the robots. They have synthetically created organic brains. The robots and their synthetic organic brains are created in the gigantic nodesphere ships. These ships are the size of moons, and serve many purposes. The ships each house massive crystals at their center, far larger than those found by any other race. The size of the crystal correlates with how large of a faster than light ship can be, and the robots are the only known faction to have such huge ones. The fact that the giant crystals are at the core of the ships, and the ships create the robots has something to do with their ability to access shared thoughts. This is a mystery both in universe and because I haven’t fully worked it out yet.
However the fact that the crystals are central to their creation does inspire reverence.
The original creation of the robots and their original purpose are unknown. I have some ideas but haven’t fully committed to any yet. The fact that they are human formed and that there has even been a successful transfer of a human consciousness into a robot body suggests a connection between them and humanity even though they come from a region very far from earth and their technology is clearly not like what humans are capable of. Again, I have ideas but haven’t committed to a particular one yet, so at that point in the lore I just make things foggy.
The robots tend to use FTL in their nodesphere ships, traveling as a mass. When a ship shows up, it’s like a planet’s worth of robots appearing.
All robots can collectively send and receive thoughts of other robots in range of a local nodesphere, which would be about a planetary system’s distance, and each nodesphere can instantly transfer all of this to any other nodesphere regardless of distance. Essentially any robot can share thoughts with any other robot anywhere in the network instantly. This makes their organization extremely efficient. A robot world mining resources will know exactly what an incoming nodesphere needs. In a battle, the situational awareness of the robots is almost total.
All races with FTL use the crystals. Other races only have small shards, but find them in decent enough quantity. The thing about the crystals is that they can not be destroyed, or physically altered by any known means. If you have a big crystal, you can’t chip off pieces to make smaller ones. If a ship with a crystal is destroyed, even if the whole ship is vaporized, the crystal remains. Hooking up multiple crystals into a single FTL drive to increase the size of a ship that can be moved is possible but extremely delicate and difficult. Most ships use single pieces of crystal sized appropriately. The fact that crystals have been discovered clearly smashed with fragments that used to be part of a single piece is one of the mysteries because nobody knows how that is possible. Out of universe, I am thinking something along the lines of these crystals shattering was the big bang and the beginning of time, perhaps to get wilder, their reformation back into a whole might be the end of time or would create a new big bang. This possibility is where the narrative for characters I have in the world leans as they try to stop that, and the robots and their religion are mixed up in it.
I like narratives that scale, and with my central characters, a story that goes from somebody working a dead end factory job trying to afford a better prosthetic arm that slowly scales into killing god to stop the end of time is the kind of thing I like.
I should also make the distinction between this type of robot and a traditional type made of entirely conventional circuitry and programming. Those also exist in this universe, and many races and factions make use of them to varying degrees, although the level of artificial intelligence of traditional robots is much lower and not dynamic or sapient.