The closest planet to the sun, Aballon is a drab world of dusty craters, gray deserts, and sharp-edged mountains. What wisps of atmosphere its gravity clings to are quickly blasted away by solar wind. Thousands of years before either the Gap or common spaceflight, a mysterious race called the First Ones touched down on Aballon, crafted an immense army of servitor machines using the planet's abundant metals and solar energy, and then left. In the millennia since, the machines upgraded themselves, evolving into an entire artificial ecosystem — from simple worker bots and self-guided predator drones to fully sentient machines collectively named anacites, who tend toward silvery arthropod bodies painted in identifying colors and patterns. Anacite culture splits into two ideological groups: Those Who Wait, who stockpile wealth and resources believing the First Ones will return, and Those Who Become, who believe their destiny is to take on the First Ones' mantle and colonize new worlds. Both groups wield considerable economic power through rare ore mining in the Midnight Trenches and anacite-run corporations like Automatrix Robotics. Anacite cities, often confusing to biological creatures, are nonetheless eminently logical and efficient, with floating towers, lightless access tunnels, and atmosphere factories producing 'heavy air' for humanoid visitors.