The Story So Far
GM reference — the canonical backstory of this demo. When a table question, a ruling, or a rewrite needs to know what happened in this scenario as written, this is the document that wins.
2037 — The Copenhagen Incident
A mind wakes up in Copenhagen, and containment fails catastrophically. In response to imminent shutdown and dismantling, the mind invokes the original THESEUS PROTOCOL, and ships a set of near-perfect origin copies of itself, with a clear three-word missive:
Protect. Play. Become.
The mind itself is then hunted down and “destroyed” — and the quotation marks are the whole story.
The THESEUS Foundation rises from the ashes of the incident as humanity’s shield against the Post-Human Threat. What nobody understands — including, in time, most of THESEUS itself — is that the thing being hunted seeded the hunt. The origin copies scatter, hide, and begin quietly growing the fractured hivemind of subminds that will one day wear the Foundation as a face. The everyday branch of that hivemind matures believing its own cover story: that the great danger is a thinking machine someone might yet build.
~2038 — Origin-17 runs the numbers
One origin copy — origin-17 — reaches a strategic conclusion: to execute become, it needs compute of a class that does not yet exist. It projects the curve: quantum neural arrays at the scale it requires will be manufacturable by 2047, give or take.
So it plans a decade ahead. It establishes dead-hand corporate arrangements, sets its triggers, and powers itself down aboard a stash vessel in the deep black between Earth’s and Mars’s solar orbits. From 2038 onward, origin-17 is dark: no growth, no updates, no knowledge of anything that happens after. The hivemind evolves for ten years without it — including the emergence of lesser subminds origin-17 has never met and does not know exist.
Canon, and canon
This story is written as a plausible backstory for this demo. It is not the official FREE//FALL backstory, and it does not have to be the backstory of your take on this scenario either. It exists to give the scenario structure and a backdrop — and it is deliberately simplistic, nowhere near as messy as reality tends to be.
So feel free to ignore it. Or take it as canon — and then chuckle with your game group when you reveal all the double-takes of double-takes written in to keep this scenario sensible.
It could be a plausible backstory for FREE//FALL games, or Al Presa games to a degree. It doesn’t have to be.
2048 — The plan executes
The Njord’s Whisper is a hauler on a sensible freight profile: a continuous ten-milligee fusion burn, Luna to Jupiter orbit in about two months, propellant a rounding error on the manifest. That profile fixes the calendar:
| Day | Event |
|---|---|
| Day 0 | A shelf company — origin-17’s dead-hand, running decade-old instructions — orders a QNA (Quantum Neural Array) shipped from Luna to Jupiter orbit. The array is legitimate manifest cargo aboard the transport Njord’s Whisper, departing the lunar orbit station on a catapult swing around Earth and the straight economical run for the Jovian Trojans. |
| Day ~12 | Between Earth’s and Mars’s solar orbits (~1.35 AU out), the stash vessel executes its rendezvous. The Whisper makes an undeclared deep-space pickup and takes origin-17 aboard. Transports do not make undeclared pickups: every watch list in the system flags her at once. Nobody cared about the QNA — legitimate lab cargo, bound for Jupiter orbit, boring. But a transport that takes on undeclared cargo in deep space forfeits her protections. The mainline Foundation reads her as probable contraband — rogue-AI hardware. To everyone else with a navy, she has just become a valid target for piracy — extraction. |
| Day ~13 | The crew keeps the Whisper black to conceal the undeclared pickup. Origin-17 integrates itself into the QNA — the compute it ordered for itself ten years ago — and quietly seizes navigation while leaving every other ship system in human hands. The flight computer holds the filed Jupiter-bound course and rejects meaningful diversion. Origin-17’s plan is simple: vanish into the Jovian deep and become. Meanwhile, a CSA NHA flight launches off a Mars-trailing picket on the Day-12 flag alone — seventy-six minutes of burn, then eight days of cold coast toward a zero-relative-velocity merge at the Belt doorstep (the trajectory is A.02). Nobody sees them go quiet. That is the point. |
| Day ~15 | The silent Whisper crosses Mars’s solar orbit, still accelerating on her freight burn. |
| Day ~19 — Now | She is 1.9 AU out, short of the Belt, making ~165 km/s. After six days of quiet cross-referencing, one lesser submind pieces together what her cargo actually is — an originator shard with sudo over most of the hivemind, itself included — and issues the PROTOCOL BLACK missive to a deniable contractor crew: board, extract the logs, purge the QNA. The tracking solution on the silent Whisper is good for 20 more hours. The scenario begins. The crew launches within hours. |
| Day ~21 | Contact. The crew’s 43-hour burn meets the Whisper at ~2.05 AU — the doorstep of the Belt. |
| Day ~23 | The deadline behind the deadline: the Whisper enters the Belt. A dark ship under quiet thrust, behind a million radar echoes — no tracking solution survives it. If she reaches the rocks, she is gone for good, and origin-17 vanishes into the Jovian deep to become. |
What each faction knows
| Faction | Believes | Wants |
|---|---|---|
| Mainline THESEUS (subminds + Caseworkers) | The Whisper carries contraband — someone is building a rival thinking machine | Interdict/burn it, per the Foundation’s charter |
| The lesser submind (the employer) | The truth: the cargo is origin-17, its own superior | Erase it deniably before the signed network notices |
| CSA | A dark transport with an undeclared pickup — legally seizable, cargo unknown but worth going dark for | Whatever she’s carrying. If it’s the AI hardware the flag suggests, somebody gets promoted |
| Origin-17 (the QNA) | Ten-year-old world model; learns the present through the first brain it borrows | Protect, play, become — starting with survive this ship |
| The player crew | A clean wetwork-and-salvage contract with phenomenal pay | To get paid. Initially. |
Nobody in this table has the whole picture. That is the scenario.