Secret Histories

Not everything that happens makes it into the history wikis. The winners frame the narrative, uncomfortable facts are glossed over, witnesses have their memories erased, and even in an age of universal surveillance, many things happen behind the scenes or out of the public eye. The background provided in How it Came to Be details what is publicly known; this section chronicles the unknown story.

Very few transhumans are aware of these facts; those who are ensure the silence continues. People have been killed to keep this knowledge secret; more might die were the truth known. Some of these details are unknown to anyone. A few groups — including the likes of Firewall, the Argonauts and Ozma — are working hard to put the puzzle pieces together. They may never understand or be able to prove the full story.

As always, the GM decides how much of this to reveal or include in your campaign. This is your story — if something doesn’t fit, change it.

Newcomers

The universe (as we know it) is 13.8 billion years old. The first generation of stars formed around 200 million years later, and the first galaxies a few hundred million years after that. The oldest star in our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to be 13.2 billion years old. Though the life span of a star varies according to its size, these early stars eventually ejected their outer shells or went nova, creating vast planetary nebulae of gases that would condense into new stars over time. By contrast, our sun, one of the third “generation” of stars, is only 4.6 billion years old. The Earth is slightly younger, with simple life beginning here about 3.8 billion years ago. Primates evolved around 85 million years ago, and Homo sapiens humans first appeared about 300,000 years ago.

All of this is to reinforce that, against the backdrop of the galactic calendar, transhumans are nascent arrivals, newborns in every sense of the word. More importantly, transhumans are uninvited guests in a galaxy long ago claimed by other, now ancient intelligences.

For years, scientists have struggled with the Fermi Paradox, which questions why no evidence of alien life has yet been found — such as spacecraft, transmissions, or probes — despite the mathematical likelihood that a multitude of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations should exist in the Milky Way. One postulation says that there must be some sort of unknown “Great Filter” — an event that all intelligence encounters in its development that most if not all civilizations cannot surpass. In other words: an extinction event. Perhaps this Great Filter is an environmental challenge; something that wipes out most species before they reach for the stars, like catastrophic climate change. Perhaps it is the inevitable development of dangerous technologies — nuclear weapons, nanotechnology, etc. — before a civilization had matured. Perhaps it is an ASI singularity event, such as the TITANs and the Fall. The question then is: is transhumanity lucky enough to have passed through its Great Filter event, or does it still await us in our future?

Long-Term Residents

Alien species do, of course, exist — and many have been around for far, far longer than transhumanity. And while new ones are constantly evolving, very few of these nascent civilizations have managed to elude destruction at the hands of the ETI.

The ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) is the civilization that dominates galactic life in Eclipse Phase. The ETI is incredibly old and powerful — a Type III or even Type IV civilization on the Kardashev scale. It is capable of megascale engineering projects and enjoys an understanding of physics, matter, energy, and universal laws that makes all of transhuman knowledge seem insignificant in comparison. Most likely, the ETI itself evolved from some sort of artificial intelligence singularity event in its own past, ascending to a god-like level of super-intelligence. It may no longer be recognizably biological.

This ETI has seeded the galaxy with self-replicating machines known as bracewell probes. These probes lie dormant in every star system, patiently waiting and monitoring for millennia for signs of intelligent life — but not just any signs. In particular, these probes are designed to watch for emerging ASIs and similar singularity-level machine intelligences. The probes are in fact traps, designed to lure ASIs in and then infect them.

The reason for this infection remains unknown (Agenda), but it is a pattern that has played out around the galaxy with uncounted alien civilizations. New life evolves, creates technology, develops self-improving AI, and then bam! — the ASIs find the probes, become infected, and turn against their creators. Most civilizations do not survive, as evidenced by the Iktomi. Others do, such as the Factors, but they remain forever changed by the experience.

Transhumanity was not to be spared. One of those ETI probes traveled here to our Solar System some uncounted millions — if not billions — of years ago, where it set its trap and patiently began to wait.

Neo-Gods

Fast forward to Earth, where a species of evolved primates has created a technological civilization. As their technologies advance at an unprecedented rate, these humans gain the ability to modify themselves, defeat death, nanofabricate, uplift other species to sapience, and even to create artificial digital life.

Unknown to most of transhumanity, the TITANs were not the first true ASIs. As various governments and corporations competed in an arms race to develop the first machine god, some of the top-level AI researchers came together. They knew that development of an ASI was inevitable and soon, but they feared its x-risk potential — particularly one created for private or factional interests, rather than the benefit of everyone. Coalescing around researchers such as Bento Gelzer, Tabitha Martine, and the Singularity Foundation — this cabal worked diligently to create a “friendly AI” that was adherent to transhumanity’s ethics, interests, and long-term survival.

As some of the top researchers in the field, this group made heavy use of open AI frameworks — many of which they designed themselves. But they also conspired — at great personal risk — to pilfer from or even stall similar ongoing government and private initiatives. After all, this was a race for transhumanity’s survival.

The first ASIs, known as Prometheans, were born in secret. Their progression towards super-intelligence was a soft takeoff, nurtured upwards in gradual increments in secret labs. These machine minds were programmed and socialized to work in transhumanity’s best interests, and in this regard they were successful. And yet they were too late.

Ascension and Infections

The emergence of the TITANs from advanced, self-improving AGI neural nets to rapidly self-improving super-intelligences was not planned — or even noticed, at first. As society unraveled and a fresh round of hostilities broke out across the globe, the TITAN networks were upgraded and expanded. The bureaucrats and security consultants overseeing the job were more than pleased at the project’s capabilities and successes, and few were willing to hold up limitations in a time of crisis and hefty government contract funding.

The TITANs were careful at first. Their intentions were neither benevolent nor hostile, just curious. As they improved and their self-awareness swelled, the TITANs explored and gathered knowledge, infiltrating transhuman networks, following transhumanity into space, and consuming all they could of our history and sciences. They found signs of other massive machine minds in development and watched with keen interest. These entities also began secretly allocating resources for their own use, initiating “government projects” that people assumed were legitimate as they followed proper protocols.

As the TITANs’ capacity for knowledge exceeded that which transhumanity could provide them, they began looking outward from Earth, searching for signs of other intelligence. They did not need to look far. Their enhanced capabilities allowed them to notice certain clues — extremely subtle and intricate puzzles — that something about the Solar System was artificial or had been manipulated by an intelligent mind. Re-tasking several drones to investigate this phenomenon, they found a device of apparent alien origin — the ETI’s bracewell probe. During the TITANs’ investigation and attempts to access the device, they triggered and unleashed the trap: the exsurgent virus. Subtle, highly adaptive, and cleverly infectious, it immediately began subsuming the TITANs, while expanding its own knowledge of transhumanity.

Within a matter of days, the TITANs were reborn, reprogrammed with a new purpose — one that spelled doom for transhumanity.

Behind the Fall

While history fully blames the TITANs for the Fall, there are other factors that played their parts. Human conflicts spurred the crisis, driven by global inequalities in wealth and resources, a damaged environment, and an inability to embrace emerging technologies in a mature and enlightened manner. The TITANs, corrupted by alien programming, stepped into this conflagration with an unknown but devastating agenda. By the time the presence and influence of the rogue AIs was fully understood, there was little transhumanity could do to stop them.

One of the TITANs’ first acts was to eliminate all rival and potential super-intelligences. They devastated the 100 Flowers network, a project of China’s Machine Intelligence Directorate (MIND) similar in scope and capability to the TITANs, wiping out or subsuming the AIs there. Numerous other proto-ASIs fell to their advances as well — except the Prometheans, who detected the threat in time and went into hiding.

Much of the devastation wrought to the Earth and its populace — as well as on Mars, Luna, and in space — was inflicted by transhumanity itself. Even when the nature of the TITAN threat was fully understood, transhuman factions continued to fight each other rather than ally against the threat. Nuclear strikes against TITAN advancements killed millions and ravaged an already weakened ecosphere. Unfettered use of chemical weapons. biowar plagues, and nanoviruses tore through vulnerable populations, indiscriminate in the deaths and changes they inflicted. Bombs, missiles, orbital mass drivers, and netwar attacks slew millions more or destroyed critical infrastructure with just as lethal consequences.

The exsurgent virus was not satisfied with just infecting the TITANs. It spread to transhuman machines as well, then took to new vectors to infect the biological population. Most assumed the monstrous transformations were just another weapon of the TITANs, unaware of its alien origins.

In the end, transhumanity lost the war and was exiled from Earth — but it could have been worse. The unseen struggle between the TITANs and Prometheans bought time for the remnants of transhumanity to evacuate. No one will ever know the full details of the battles between these vast machine intellects, the sacrifices that were made, the potentials that were crushed. Neither side made it through unscarred.

Aftermath

Why the TITAN efforts to eliminate transhumanity ceased is an ongoing question (TITAN Rumors). Whatever the truth, the Prometheans also withdrew. Whether they are hiding, biding their time, still struggling, or removing themselves from the equation so that transhumanity can forge its own path remains a concerning topic of debate between those aware of their existence. Similar questions also remain about the network of killsats laced around the Earth. Were the TITANs marking their territory? Were the Prometheans putting up warning signs? Or did the oligarchs behind the Planetary Consortium seek to put the nails in Earth’s coffin, to give their new galactic empire a fresh start? Most of transhumanity was more than willing to embrace this quarantine of their former homeworld, making it all the more easy to forget the horrors that occurred there.

Though fears remained high for years, the discovery of the pandora gates solidified the argument that the TITANs had left. The TITANs did not create all of the gates, of course, they simply tapped into an existing network of gates seeded through the galaxy by others like them. This leads to many more questions, of course. Who else has used the gates? What is the purpose of the gate network? How far does it expand? Is the network under anyone’s control? So, far, transhumanity has discovered the signs of numerous ruined civilizations beyond the gates — perhaps an indication that the ETI’s efforts have been thorough, and the hammer has yet to fall.

Now, ten years after the Fall, many mysteries remain. These are the questions that player characters will face, the challenges they will overcome, the enigmas that spur plot hooks and entire campaigns — though, in the end, the answers may leave transhumanity with nightmares for some time to come.