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	Origin-17 integrates itself into the QNA — the compute it ordered for itself ten years ago. It takes over the ship, turns her black (all comms to Luna and Belt traffic control cease), and holds course. Its 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.