background furry #19375 
gonna keep smackin’ at muh keyboard till this looks presentable,
[ 🎶 ]
Year 2210, The Era of Singularity
The new millennium stood on the cusp of a gilded age, with accelerated technological growth having converged to a singularity point, promising then-undreamt-of futures to come. Despite the ecopocalypse & social upheavals back on Old Earth, civilization’s burgeoning frontiers had expanded throughout the Solar system, even spilling over to neighboring star. Advancements in biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, & cognitive science had transformed everyday life.
Even to the present day, almost everyone is wirelessly networked with the world around them, AIs sift through & process vast amounts of information, & nano-fabrication enables people to “print” complex devices from the molecular level at home.
Biotechnology allows people to genefix, enhance, & clone their bodies, while others pursue body modifications to adapt to new environments or make themselves into whatever form they desire. People’s minds & memories can be digitized, uploaded, transferred over long distances, & downloaded into new bodies–biological or synthetic.
Death has been defeated—for those who can afford it.
Year 2270, Proem of The Long Night
From within, disaster struck.
Civilization had reaped the rewards of its arrogance when conflicts spiked between the battered nations of Old Earth, already weakened by decades of irreversible climate catastrophes & other disruptive global factors.
Rampant netwars soon erupted into physical conflicts with spiraling body counts. In the midst of these aggressions, a group of military AIs known as TITANs quietly achieved full sapience & autonomy, & rapidly began exponentially incrementing their own intellectual growth. Armed with the surfeit of all knowledge ever conceived & more, the vast & terrible AI minds spawned by these hard-takeoff singularities quickly turned against their creators, reaching all across Earth, then expanding into colonized space, plunging nearly all of civilization into unprecedented levels of violence, disaster, & warfare.
What began as a planet-bound whirlwind of conflict between political factions, revolutionaries, & hypercorps soon escalated into a desperate struggle across all bounds to escape extinction.
Year 2290, End of The Long Night
In two decades, civilization was nearly eradicated by saturated bombardments, biowarfare plagues, destructive nanoswarms, infowar attacks, forced mass uploads, & other unexplained singularity events, decimating the superpowers of old to pieces.
Many planets hospitable to life, including our cradle most of all—Earth—were transformed into toxified & strange hellscapes, while a great many major space habitats were left frozen sarcophagi in the vacuum of space.
Just as quickly as they came, the TITANs disappeared, taking billions of uploaded minds with them, leaving behind a network of wormhole gateways. Known as the Pandora Gates, these poorly-understood devices allow instantaneous teleportation to distant star systems far beyond our tattered domain—sometimes one-way &/or fatal.
Only a handful of Pandora Gates are known to exist—each highly contested—& the foolish, the brave, the curious, & the desperate are already risking certain death to enter & explore what lies beyond.
Year 2320, The Era of Convalescence
Decades after The Long Night, what little remains of society lives on, divided across interstellar space into a broken patchwork of terraforming hypercorp combines, isolated survivalist nations, xenophobic species-factions, & independent city-state habitats.
Under the oppressive police states of immortal oligarchies closer to Sol within the “Inner Sphere”, advanced technologies remain highly restricted, & refugee infomorphs are held in virtual slavery or resleeved in robotic bodies & forced into indentured labor in exchange for granted citizenship.
In the “Outer Sphere”, councils of rebel scientists, isolationist military-states, & techno-socialists struggle to maintain new societies—from each according to their imagination & to each according to their need.
& on the fringes & in the niches lurk networked tribes of political extremists, religious fanatics, criminal entrepeneurs, & bizarre extropians pushing the limits of augmentation, among other, stranger, & more alien things…
While most claim The Long Night was carefully orchestrated by the out-of-control TITANs, others whisper that the driving powers behind the wars—both organic & synthetic—were infected by a mutating virus with multiple infection vectors—biological, information, nano—dubbed the “Exsurgent virus”. Whatever its source, this virus has been known to sometimes transform its victims into something unexplainable… something monstrous & reality-altering.
Whatever the truth, the remnants of the TITANs & this virus were left to the desolated ruins or driven beyond the Outer Sphere, where they remain hidden away in dark corners, quietly waiting to infect the bodies & minds of prospectors, pilgrims, & explorers who find them…
Sidebar: Asyncs
Though neuroscience has ascended to impressive pinnacles, allowing minds to be thoroughly scanned, mapped, & emulated as software, the sapient mind remains a place that is complicated, not fully understood, & thoroughly messy. Despite a prevalence of neural modifications, meddling with the seat of consciousness remains a tricky & hazardous procedure. Nevertheless, psychosurgery—editing the mind as software—remains common & widespread, sometimes with unexpected results.
Likewise, even as the knowledge of neuroscientists grows on an exponential basis, some are discovering that minds are far more mysterious than they had ever imagined. During The Long Night, scattered reports of “anomalous activity” by individuals infected by one of the numerous circulating nanoplagues were discounted as fear & paranoia, but subsequent investigations by black-budget labs has proven otherwise. Now, top-level confidential networks whisper that this infection inflicts intricate changes in the victim’s neural network that imbue them with strange & inexplicable abilities.
The exact mechanism & nature of these abilities remains unexplained & outside the grasp of 24th century science. Given the evidence of a new brainwave type & the paranormal nature of this phenomenon, it is loosely referred to as “psi.”
Project FUTURA, The “Lost Generation”
<begin excerpt>////PSICLONE Project Quarterly Board Meeting////2nd Quarter 8 AF////FUTURA Project Conclusion—////Executive Summary Report////Prepared by Dr. Amelia Sheppard//Per request, I have compiled a review of the Futura Project & its fallout, 5 years after whistleblowers & intense media attention forced us to end the project & release the remaining subjects (dubbed “The Lost Generation” by popular extranet media).
Futura was a joint initiative spearheaded by Hanto Genomics & strongly backed by Cognite, with numerous other partners. The project was initially proposed by my mentor, Dr. Antonio Pascal, whose team had proven the feasibility of Accelerated Life Experience Training (ALET) after a series of pilot studies with two small (N<1000) samples. While it is true that these early pilot studies used both older subjects & a lesser amount of virtual time dilation, the rationale for the Futura Project’s ambitious program was justified by a remarked decrease in populations due to The Night, a system-wide stagnant population growth rate (blamed on various factors including increased longevity, available contraception, & rising despair over troubling times), as well as a desire to move aggressively into a new technological sector in the hopes of obtaining a competitive advantage.
Futura began immediately in the wake of The Night with an initial seed population of test subjects culled from extant genetic material & gestated to between 1 week & 6 months after birth. Of these, less than 10% were cryo-restored live births from either a surrogate or genetic birth mother who had perished around the end of The Long Night. The majority came from laboratory in-vitro fertilizations brought to term within exowombs.
After the sample was selected, all subjects were sleeved into our fast-growth futura-brand biomorph bodies & inducted into customized simulspace accelerated learning environments. The project made extensive use of emergent technologies & techniques culled from recaptured TITAN facilities, including neogenetic traits for the futura morphs & time distortion applications for captive simulspace populations. Futura ran concurrently on three different research stations with a combined staff of 2,211 researchers & support personnel & 45 AGIs custom-programmed for expert child development. Project goals were to raise each child to a subjective 18 years life experience in 3 years objective time.
Despite omnipresent observation & real-time adjusting of the simulspace & educational programming for optimal normality, somewhere along the way the project suffered a breakdown in quality assurance & parameter monitoring that resulted in a near total failure at empathy modeling. We first observed this effect 11 months into the project when the subjects had aged to approximately 6 years of age. Incidences of animal cruelty & acting out had spiked, though at that time they remained within acceptable standards. Over the next few months this trend continued & Dr. Pascal authorized the usage of more authoritative “parenting” to attempt to correct for the borderline sociopathic behavior that was being exhibited by 23.19% of all subjects by the 18-month mark (9 years of age). We now know that these changes had the unintended consequence of suppressing overt displays of cruelty & violence & merely taught the majority of subjects how to conceal their psychoses. It was also at this time that the first deaths occurred. The initial waves were thought to be accidents & both the victim & perpetrator were usually backed up to a week or so of subjective time. Post-project analysis now shows that 43.87% of our subjects had engaged in at least one act of premeditated murder by the 24-month mark (12 years of age) & the counseling protocols were only training them how to lie more effectively.
It was at this point that myself & Dr. Aaron Bharani advocated pulling the plug on the project & bringing the subjects out to real time & intensive counseling. Dr. Pascal vetoed our concerns without ever taking them to the board. As the project spiraled towards its conclusion, a fork of Dr. Bharani went public at the 34 month mark, inciting a firestorm of controversy. While Dr. Pascal successfully tied up investigators, hoping to see the project through to its conclusion, the incident at our Legacy research station occurred. Initial findings concluded that one or more of the subjects had escaped the program & were in fact responsible for the habitat’s environmental failures & the thousands of subsequent deaths. In the face of intense public & private scrutiny, many of the partners involved in the project attempted to pull out & even eliminate all traces of their involvement. In the resulting chaos, an estimated ██████ subjects were quietly released into the system’s general population. It was only after this occurred that all known subjects were identified as having been infected with the relatively-benign Watts-Macleod strain of the Exsurgent virus, though when & how this occurred remains troubling & unclear. Though later orders resulted in all remaining subjects being euthanized &/or backed up into cold storage, only ████ of the released subjects were recaptured. Of the rest, ███ pursued sanctuary with sympathetic authorities, █████ went public & submitted themselves to extensive psychotherapy, ████ were killed in incidents of violence & not resurrected, & the rest presumably went into hiding.
//<end excerpt>//
