Story writers were probably inspired by Promethius/Alien series? - Opportunities for Darker and matu

The Inhibitors in Revelation Space are basically an all-powerful machine intelligence, taking the form of self-replicating femtotechnology, basically structured spacetime, virtually indestructible. They were created by a very early galactic species, now gone, to inhibit the spread of intelligent, star-faring species, by completely wiping out entire civilizations, and each time they do, they become increasingly more efficient at it (sound familiar?). Unlike the Reapers, they don't wait 50,000 years or for any set interval, but instead, they wait to be triggered into reactivating, when a star-faring species activates and explores any number of the Inhibitors' structures they've left behind, like honeypots, traps, etc.

Their reason for wiping out civilizations isn't to prevent the spread of artificial intelligence, like what became the Reapers' raison d'être in Mass Effect 3. Instead, they exist to shepherd the galaxy through the Milky Way--Andromeda galactic collision ~4 billion years from now, which their creators deemed to be such a cataclysmic event, that if the galaxy were very populated, it would be cruel for whatever civilization or civilizations existed then to go through so much turmoil and strife, etc.

So, they exist to curb the spread of sapient, star-faring life, so it doesn't have to face such a calamitous end in the future...which is still kind of...not a great reason, but still, it makes it fun to read. They're an unstoppable machine intelligence with a single-minded goal of destruction in mind, and they're woken up at the end of Revelation Space, and ultimately aren't ever defeated, but rather, something worse is turned on them, something that's bad for all the humans living in the far flung future, which forces them to flee the Milky Way at the end of the last collection of stories in the series: Galactic North.

So yeah, when I played Mass Effect 2, and there was a hint that maybe the mass effect itself was potentially causing problems, it reminded me of the Inhibitors, and I wondered if maybe the Reapers existed to stop people from using it...which doesn't quite make sense, since they created the relays...anyway, I remember reading that was basically one of the ideas the writers were tossing around, before they settled on the whole AI thing in ME3.

So in Mass Effect: Andromeda, there's the Scourge, a dark energy (mass effect, I would assume..) weapon that warps spacetime and causes it to mess everything up. And we learn that the Jardaan left these mostly benevolent bots and vaults behind to terraform worlds, along with an organic template, the Angara, so yeah, that's a lot like the Engineers in Prometheus. Who knows how they feel about what the Angara have become? Maybe the enemy of the Jardaan, whoever created the Scourge and unleashed it on them, is just a faction of their species which didn't agree with what they were doing. Or maybe they're another race, who knows.

Anyway, as I was playing ME:A, learning about Meridian, I kept wondering if Meridian was possibly at the center of that black hole in the middle of Heleus! I mean, it's visible in every shot in the galaxy map, I thought for sure I was right... and my basis for that assumption also comes from Revelation Space. In the novel, there's this race of aliens called the Amarantin, who went extinct (due to the Inhibitors) ~1 million years before humanity ever discovered their homeworld. Thousands of years before their world burned, however, a group of Amaratin achieved spaceflight, eventually interstellar flight, and accidentally triggered one of the Inhibitor's traps. The group of star-faring Amarantin, who had at this point become much more advanced than the rest of their society on their homeworld, managed to create areas of artificially warped spacetime, called Shrouds, so tightly warped that it sealed them off and shielded them from the rest of the galaxy, thus protecting them from the Inhibitors, who, of course, burned their species' homeworld. This is all revealed much later in the novel, of course.

These 'Shrouders,' as they're initially known, stayed in their bubbles of warped spacetime, waiting it out in case the Inhibitors ever stopped..inhibiting. To see if they were still active, they made their own honeypot in one of their Shrouds; they put false messages about treasure and information in it, to lure subsequent intelligent species to investigate one of the Inhibitor traps (a dick move, really), and if it triggered the Inhibitors, then the Shrouders would know that they should stay put, and wait it out until the next cycle of destruction. They really are a bunch of assholes.

Anyway, I thought that maybe Meridian might be somehow hidden in the black hole, and of course, the black hole would have to not actually be a black hole, but something like warped space time that only appears to be a black hole. I was wrong, of course, and that's okay. Mass Effect: Andromeda ends on a more hopeful note than Revelation Space. But, some of that relation to Revelation Space is similar: the Jardaan fled from an unknown enemy, and there's a bunch of their technology left behind in Heleus, along with the fallout of a long-forgotten war.