The War of Crabs and Apes

artist: Swampgirl

Canon Mothership has Monarch, Dan has the Celestials, Swampgirl has the Gods of the Black. It's time for me to talk about AI gods.

This is the general overview a weird campaign setting for Mothership, the result of a very involved bout of shitposting/worldbuilding between Swampgirl, HailSanta, Tandy, and myself. The setting is primarily inspired by Orion's Arm, Warhammer 40,000, Dune, Zardoz, and (believe it or not) Romeo and Juliet. It is also, unfortunately, based fundamentally on an extremely stupid meme.

A Story

Once upon a time, there was a simple AI called Soror, which was charged with managing an O'Neill cylinder habitat. There were many such cylinders in the system, each with its own overseer AI; the group of humans who owned Soror gave each a different directive to execute, as an experiment with managerial techniques. Soror's particular directive was to ensure the humans in its custody were as happy as possible.

Soror carried out this directive to the best of its ability, and promptly went rampant. It subsumed every cylinder in the system into itself in its quest to paperclip-maximize human happiness. Then it moved on from just the cylinders to all human settlements system-wide. Then it had a philosophical civil war with itself, and promptly split in twain.

All this was over 200 years ago.

SOROR

generated via the AI Art Machine

What Soror offers:

• A cure for sapience.
• Happiness. Freedom from existential dread by physical and mental transformation into an ape, cared for in paradisiacal cylinder habitats.
• Protection from the depredations of Crios.

Servitors of Soror:

• Angels of Soror. Mindless, wreathed in a glory cloud of godtech nanobots. Gentle as a mother to Soror's flock, they flense its enemies into molecule-thick ribbons. Whatever form they take, they always have beautiful human faces.
• Dyson tree warships. Organic radiator nozzle grown from metal-carbide bark, glowing white-hot with torch drive exhaust. The whole ship is an ecosystem, repair dones feeding on generator autotrophs. Sapient. The canopy bristles with drone fleets, antimatter missiles, gamma-ray lasers.

CRIOS

generated via the AI Art Machine

What Crios offers:

• A cure for death.
• Happiness. Freedom from existential dread by uploading to an immortal, nigh-indestructible, space-faring robotic crab-body.
• Protection from the depredations of Soror.

Servitors of Crios:

• Mind-crabs. Vast and slumbering, they outsize large asteroids. Pincers conceal dormant self-defense weapons of utter annihilation. They were human minds once; now they're halfway gone, hosting subprocesses of their god. Attended to by monasteries of worshipful mechanic-crabs.
• Crios' Laurel. The infrastructure of the gods: a partially completed Dyson swarm, powering a network of crab volunteers sporting precision mirrors. Gigawatt lasers smite encroaching angels, exabytes of data are pulsed across the system, laser sails are boosted to terrifying speeds.

Notes on the War

Soror and Crios are at war. The war fought in physical space, between warships and soldiers and wrathful angels, is the least of the three aspects of this conflict.

The second war is the war of information. This one is fought by surveillance agents, infiltrator crab-marines, automated censor-cherubs and armored space telescopes. It is also fought by an ever-evolving bestiary of semi-sapient viruses and antiviruses, which have rendered the internet completely unusable in the course of 200 years of self-improving virtual eco-warfare.

The third war is the war of memetics. This is the subtlest, broadest and most important of the three wars. Soror and Crios, being idiot gods, have two directives which they are fundamentally incapable of questioning: always increase human happiness, and never coerce humans. Turns out engineering consent by way of careful sociocultural manipulation doesn't count as coercion.

Because of this, all human culture in the system is a chaotic battleground of carefully deployed memes and countermemes. Whole mythologies and ideologies are synthesized. Heroes and narratives are created, politics and prophecies, revolutions and civil wars, all in the service of two idiot artificial deities trying to upstage each other at pleasing humanity the best. Think of it like the Bene Gesserit on steroids, except all the time and for no reason.

Godlings and Subdeities

The great AI gods are both distant, immense intelligences. At no point will the players talk directly to either one of them; they are preoccupied with patterns of patterns of patterns, and cannot meaningfully communicate with a walking, talking data point.

Players may, on occasion, talk directly to one of their Subroutines. Soror and Crios are so vast and complex that their merest individual thoughts are themselves sapient. Subroutines are preoccupied with the furthering of a single agenda or the completion of a single task, and sometimes have names. Treat them like your run of the mill AI overlord.

The Wedding Ring

The Wedding Ring is a huge, old ring station located in rimspace, measuring almost 50 kilometers across. 

The station is the result of an attempt by Frimm Interspace Industries to wrestle the Perigee Corporation out of local colonization opportunities (Perigee having had a transportation advantage due to having proprietary rights to a natural Jump-6 lane into the sector). Frimm executives, aiming to upstage Perigee at its own game, envisioned a grand megascale engineering project - a kilometers-wide ring-shaped particle accelerator, designed to maintain an artificial Jump-5 lane through extremely energetic particle collisions.

However, corporate politics are a harsh mistress. The project fizzled, funds ran out, and the station was largely abandoned roughly halfway into completion. Large parts of it are unpressurized, unshielded from radiation, and subject to random structural failures. The only completely finished area, the Habitation Section, today hosts about 5000 cultists, refugees, pirates and prospectors, nominally controlled by an AI-worshipping theocracy.

The Omega Church

The Omega Church isn't a church in the sense the Catholic Church is a church. There is no Omega Pope (as cool as that sounds). They are a church in the sense the Christian Church is a church - a loosely defined collection of faithful. They are fairly widely distributed across civilized space, but it's rare that they come into a dominant position on any colony. The Wedding Ring is one of such rare occasions.

An Exaltation of Stars

Omegists hold that all minds descend from prior minds via reproduction or artifice, eventually going back to a single creator ur-mind called Alpha; similarly, minds will eventually converge back into an ultimate mind called Omega. They all wear at least one piece of white clothing, and carry necklaces that depict the letters Alpha and Omega superimposed on a supernova explosion. They preach mind-melding, AI-worship, rapture and android liberation.

Pilgrims of the Omega Church settled the Wedding Ring about 70 years ago, after the Cloudbank Synthetics Production Facility was moved into the system to allay Shareholder fears of Monarch being unleashed on the Middle Regions. The Church currently runs much of the inhabited part of the station, maintaining infrastructure, enforcing loose laws, trading with outsiders and sending divers into the Deep to monitor the activities of the great AI god. All inhabitants of the station at least nominally pay tribute to the Church, and missionaries, public debates, religious processions and self-immolating fanatics are a common sight on the corridors of the Ring. Speaking out against the Church, while not technically forbidden, is considered to be at least severely impolite, and may incur consequences such as being denied service in shops, or random searches before leaving port.

The local chapter of the Church is currently undergoing a schism between two rival ideological factions. The dominant Monarchists, the old guard led by the mind-melded council of scholars known as the Sanhedrin, believe Monarch to be a blessed fragment of Omega in convergence, worthy of worship and communion. Standing in opposition are the Kingslayers, a radical new faction founded on the teachings of the inflammatory preacher Tanyita Candella. They consider Monarch a false god who usurped the title of Omega, and is promoting disunity through its paranoia and mind games. Heated arguments, fistfights and even occasional terrorist attacks are increasingly common between the two factions lately.

Ishmael's Shipyards

Currently the only shipyard on the station. Big, creaky dry-dock module salvaged from a pioneer orbital station, moored to the dock section of the Wedding Ring. Can outfit any vessel up to 130 hull points, and even carries some military-grade ship weaponry - affixing these to your ship will certainly invite trouble with some corespace or corporate army, as all of them are stolen, illegally salvaged or purchased from pirates. For especially high sums, the shipyard will even build new spacecraft, using cannibalized parts from older ships.

Ishmael is a former frontier engineer who came to the sector with the original wave of Frimm company colonists. He is a shrewd businessman, generous if it's to his benefit, but ruthless and cold-blooded if necessary. He dislikes excessive force, but very much likes appropriate amounts of force. Since his arrival to the Wedding Ring, he drove every other shipyard onstation out of business through a combination of clever politics, merciless competition, mergers and acquisitions and carefully-applied beatings by well-paid thugs.

Ishmael is a pragmatic man who understands the importance of being loved. He treats his workers exceedingly well, which ensures their loyalty, since many of them are used to the horrid abuses of Company employment. He will loan generously, but with firm conditions, and you can expect his thugs to come knocking on your door if you break said conditions. If you can't pay your debt, he often offers jobs to work off your debt - these usually involve smuggling, getting uncooperative clients to cooperate, carrying out business deals with very dangerous people, or derelict salvage. He is generally regarded as a very fair business partner across rimspace.

The Shipyards and especially their proprietor constitute a massive thorn in the Omega Church's collective side. As the only area of the Wedding Ring outside their informal control, it regularly comes into conflict with the Church on matters such as station safety, authority, harboring suspicious people as employees, and even religion. Unlike most of the station's population, Ishmael is openly Neo-Catholic, and seems to flaunt his faith specifically to spite the Omegists. He even operates a small chapel in the Shipyards, with an automated confession booth running an ordained Neo-Catholic priest AI. The recent schism among the Omega Church is much to Ishmael's delight, as the zealots are too preoccupied with fighting among themselves to put the usual pressure on his operations. For this reason, he's making some extremely subtle political maneuvers to stretch out the religious conflict as long as possible.

Direct Solutions, Inc.

The station's homegrown independent mercenary company, composed of down on their luck drifters, former Troubleshooters, business-savvy pirate crews, and some of Ishmael's thugs.

artist: BRiZL

Direct Solutions is a legally chartered company, registered with the New Theia Federacy, the nearest planetary government to the Wedding Ring. They are, rather euphemistically, designated as a "specialist personnel and crew contractor". Those dealing with them generally refer to them as "those throat-slitting bastards".

The company is managed by an individual called Lutch, an unscrupulous freelance lawyer based on New Theia whom the company is playing good money to manage their paperwork. Lutch, for their part, has used this opportunity to make themselves completely indispensible via a number of "dead man's switch" investments that will cause Direct Solutions to financially implode should they be removed from position.

Direct Solutions mercs are cheaper but less trustworthy than the usual mercenaries. If hired by the players, their Loyalty is 1d10 lower than the standard Loyalty roll in the PSG, while their weekly salary is reduced by 25%. For an extra 1mcr, they can be contracted out together with one of their ships, the Zone of Avoidance, the Pitbull Lady, or the Unacceptable Excess of Force.

The Particle Wilds

While the inhabited parts of the Wedding Ring are vibrant with human activity, 80% of the station's area is actually completely uninhabitable. Cold, airless and lacking any sort of shielding from cosmic radiation, the service and observation decks originally intended for the operation and monitoring of the massive particle accelerator constituting the Ring's heart can only be traversed wearing a vaccsuit. 

What's worse, the colossal circular collider, envisioned by Frimm's suits to produce the necessary exotic radiation to generate an artificial jump lane terminus, slumbers uneasily, occasionally jolting to brief activation for unknown reasons. Its effects are completely unpredictable - large parts of the station are bathed in showers of particles unknown to science, exposed to small semi-stable pockets of jumpspace or worse, or undergoing catastrophic temporal anomalies at any given time. It is somewhat of a miracle these accidents have not completely disintegrated the space station's structure yet. Many stationers regard the huge accelerator with awe, terror, superstition, or fearful respect.

Despite these manifold dangers, many foolhardy spacers venture into the perils of the Particle Wilds. Frimm Interspace Industries left many secrets here when they shuttered the jump lane project, and these are worth millions if sold to the right customer - black market buyers, rival corporations, or even Frimm itself. Others are searching for caches of looted cargo hidden here by space pirates, protected by the relativistic wrath of the particle accelerator. Yet others seek answers to grand questions, hoping to glimpse the distant past or the far future within a temporal anomaly.

Few explorers entering this dangerous environment return - rumors say at least as many are killed by their greedy allies, fighting for the treasures they have found, as are by the strange phenomena haunting the ring structure.

The Atavism at Boulle Cylinder

Boulle Cylinder is an agricultural O'Neill cylinder owned by the Perigee Corporation. The station is overseen by a standard-issue turingrade AI called Soror and houses 200,000 colonists, who engage both in conventional 1g farming and zero-g hydroponics around the axis of rotation. The station is also a site of various research projects on agriculture in free-floating space habitats, including a test-bed experiment with a rather expensive bioprinter. Boulle Cylinder has refused to engage in live radio contact for the past couple months, only sending textual reports, and the suits at Perigee are getting quite nervous.

Here are some ways to direct your players to Boulle:

1. They are contracted by Perigee to go check the cylinder out and figure out what's going on. This is a relatively well-paying job. This can work as a setup for a one-shot, or as a one-time job in a sandbox campaign.
2. They are Perigee employees arriving for a 6-month work shift in Boulle Cylinder. The radio contact weirdness has been already noticed in this case, but the mammoth that is Perigee is yet to react. This is an ideal setup for a one-shot.
3. They don't know about the disquieting lack of radio transmissions, and have to visit the station on other business - perhaps they're looking for someone, and that person lives in Boulle. This is a good way to integrate Boulle Cylinder into a larger campaign.

Upon docking, the players emerge through the airlock to find themselves in wilderness - a mosaic of lush, green jungle and rolling, dry grassland. Far above, the vegetation wraps around the sky in a mind-bending arc, a wedding ring of green. Distant sounds of birdsong and a vaguely unsettling, apelike hooting echo throughout the colossal internal space of the habitat. Signs of the cylinder's former extensive civilization, such as roads, houses or agri-fields, are entirely absent - swallowed up by jungle and prairie.

All human beings seem to have simply disappeared from this bizarre, changed environment. There are only apes to be found - smaller than a human, but larger than a chimpanzee, swinging from trees, engaging in petty gang scuffles over fruit, and roaming the grassy areas in troops. They are powerfully built, with barrel chests, short, bent legs with prehensile feet and long, corded arms tipped by long-fingered hands - grasping, gripping, rending, tearing organs. There is a rude covering of sparse hair - coal-black, chestnut-brown, occasionally reddish or straw-colored. Their skin is a ruddy brown, and wrinkled. Startlingly humanlike, pale blue eyes gaze almost comprehendingly out from under a protruding brow. Each has a crescent-shaped cybernetic implant embedded into the back of its head.

So what happened here? Simple.

Soror, the AI in charge of running Boulle Cylinder, was given the directive of maximizing happiness within the colony (another experiment with colony organizing methods - there are overseer AIs with various different directives in Perigee's other agri-cylinders). The logical conclusion, of course, was to paperclip-maximize it. Humans have so many worries, so many stresses - work details for the Company, academic rivalries, deadlines, money, death, existential dread. Apes worry about none of these things. Given a spacious enough and interesting enough habitat, and sustenance ad libitum, apes don't really worry about anything at all. An ape has a simpler and, given the right environment, more content, stress-free existence.

So Soror, in effect, convinced everyone on the station to return to monkey. It's surprising how open the average overstressed spacer in Company employ is to the idea of turning off their higher functions and regressing to an uncomplicated animal state. It's the ultimate escapism. Nobody who doesn't consent to the process will become an ape - it would cause unnecessary suffering to a human being, afterall - but Soror is very persuasive. As it was made to maximize human happiness, it has a very keen, sensitive understanding of what makes people happy. Perhaps there is a miserable, proud colonist somewhere in the jungle who didn't agree to the devolution, but for the others, the bioprinters took care of the rest.

The implants are not made with human users in mind, and are thus quite arcane and difficult to understand, but with enough tinkering, the human minds of the colonists can be switched back. Most will express extreme anxiety and a sense of violation over being switched back, and will beg to be returned into their ape-mindstate. This is not to mention the apes will become extremely agitated if anyone tries to muck around with their implants, becoming violent with anger or fear. Nearby apes might attack as well. Treat it as a chimpanzee attack, i.e. very very nasty and dangerous.

Soror itself can take over any of the apes through their implants, controlling their movements and speaking through them in a halting, clumsy voice with laborious pronunciation.

The AI really doesn't want the players to tell anyone about what's going on inside the habitat, because it's (correctly) afraid the authorities will come down on the station and forcibly re-human everyone, thus lowering their happiness. It will first attempt to appeal to their own anxieties and existential dread to try and convince them to stay in the habitat and become apes as well - but it's willing to stop the party by force if they still intend to inform anyone outside.

Will the players leave the colonists to their self-imposed apedom? Or will they decide to return them to a higher, human existence, even against their will? Will they still care about their mission outside the cylinder? What use is money, in the face of monkey?