Cut-Up Timeline of the Future

via NASA

I love mashups, I love timelines, I’m certain I’ve mentioned somewhere that the ideal Alien franchise is Alien, Blade Runner, Predator, Avatar, and Halo. This post started as that, but spiralled out of scope very, very quickly (who could possibly have predicted this, I've never been known to spiral out of scope). The only original material here is the connective tissue, but you could easily find and replace the proper nouns and have yourself a Mothership timeline. Might do that in the future. Most of the sources should be easily-recognizable, and most of the those that aren't are probably from Orion's Arm.
 
As part of the self-imposed challenge, I’ve kept as many dates intact as I can: some have been juggled to a new century but they should still be recognizable.

Futures, Cut Up and Collaged

 
███ ██ 196█ - The US army deploys the first iteration of the Universal Soldier program.
 
Jan 14 1966 - Sergei Korolev survives surgery and continues his push for a Soviet moon landing.
 
Jun 26 1969 - Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov becomes the first human on the Moon.
 
Jul 20 1969 - The United States’ Apollo 11 mission successfully lands Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.
 
Sep 20 1969 - Second Soviet moon landing; Anistasia Belikova becomes the first woman on the moon.
 
Oct 12 1973 - The United States establishes Jamestown lunar base at Shackleton Crater.
 
Jul ██ 1974 - Zvezda lunar base is founded by the Soviet Union, also at Shackleton Crater.
 
███ ██ 1982 - Two Antarctic research bases (one Norwegian, one American), succumb to episodes of inexplicable violence in quick succession, leading to the death or disappearance of all hands at both facilities. The follow-up investigation produces no meaningful conclusion: ergot poisoning and cultic murders are the two most popular explanations.
 
███ ██ 1983 - US-Soviet conflict over a lunar lithium mining operation leads to the Jamestown Crisis.
 
███ ██ 1984 - The Lunar Peace Treaty is signed, dividing up lunar territory between the US and USSR to prevent further hostilities.
 
Jul ██  1987 - China establishes its first lunar base.
 
███ ██ 1989 - An InGen genetic research facility on Isla Nublar suffers a containment failure and releases an unspecified biological contaminant into the environment; the island is napalmed by the Costa Rican government to stem the outbreak.
 
███ ██ 1992 - Heightened violence in Jammu and Kashmir escalates to open warfare between India and Pakistan. International parties are unable to stop the conflict before it spreads across southern Asia. Charismatic augment-supremacist demagogue Khan Noonien Singh, who unbeknownst to the public was a former subject of the Universal Soldier program and former CIA intelligence asset, carves out a massive sphere of influence across south Asia.
 
Feb ██ 1995 - First human landing on Mars. Helios Base and Happy Valley colonies are founded later in the year.
 
███ ██ 1996 - With his fiefdom collapsing around him, Khan Noonien Singh flees Earth aboard the hijacked SS Botany Bay with 84 members of his inner circle. This marks the end of what will later be called the Eugenics Wars.
 
███ ██ 1997 - The Mars-7 Alliance is founded, consisting of the United States, Soviet Union, India, Japan, North Korea, the ESA, and a 13-nation coalition of communist countries.
 
███ ██ 2000 - Capitalizing on the expansion of Lunar and Martian colonies (and the loss of outsourced labor caused by the Eugenics Wars), the Tyrell Corporation introduces the Nexus-1 replicant; advertised as “biological robots”, replicants are ultimately cloned humans that have undergone a suite of genetic modifications derived from those used by the Universal Soldier program.
 
May 16 2001 - The Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico suffers a catastrophic reactor meltdown and subsequent explosion, becoming the worst nuclear accident in history. Conspiracy theories that the site had been intentionally bombed by the US government, Soviet Union, or Singh loyalists abound.
 
Sep ██ 2001 - US intelligence organizations, having patched major holes in inter-agency communication in the wake of the Black Mesa incident, defuse a plot to crash multiple commercial flights into key political and economic targets.
 
███ ██ 2003 - The asteroid “Goldilocks” is successfully captured for use as an iridium mine; the mission is hijacked so that it falls into Martian rather than terrestrial orbit. North Korea is expelled from Mars-7 over suspected connections to the hijacking.
 
███ ██ 2007 - The Coalition of Independent Spacefaring Nations is established, consisting of Brazil, China, Nigeria, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand.
 
███ ██ 2018 - Mass mutiny by replicants in the Martian colonies of Dominguez and Shimata leads to a retaliatory ban of replicants on Earth; an international pogrom against replicants in hiding will continue for decades to follow.
 
███ ██ 2024 - The Weyland Corporation releases its “David” android model as a safe and affordable alternative to replicants.
 
Sep 01 2024 - Violent clashes between police and interned homeless in San Francisco Sanctuary Camp A erupt into full-scale revolt. By Sep 02 the riots have spread to other Sanctuary Camps across the US and on Sep 03 the California National Guard is deployed to Camp A, leading to the deaths of hundreds of interned individuals.
 
Nov 06 2024 - Christopher Donner is elected president of the United States on a platform of widespread industrial deregulation, loosening of labor rights, and “restoring law and order” in the wake of the Bell Riots.
 
2026 - Political tensions in the United States reach a tipping point and shift to open violence between the federal government and the populace. Dozens of separatist movements and partisan factions emerge in a comparatively brief period. While not called so at the time, this marks the beginning of what will be called the Second Civil War, which will in turn be considered the opening act of the World War 3.
 
2032 - Andrew Steele Jarret elected president of the United States, ushering in a brief but exceedingly brutal regime of religious authoritarianism.
 
2034 - A team of scientists led by Dr. William Weir and funded in part by the Weyland Corporation publish a breakthrough study in causality-stable faster-than-light travel; much of the material was reverse engineered from recovered documents of former Black Mesa researchers Isaac Kleiner and Judith Mossman.
 
2036 - Andrew Steele Jarret is ousted after a disastrous failed invasion of Canada prompts an international military response. Jarret drinks himself to death while under house arrest, and the Christian America party collapses along its already-severe factional lines.
 
2040 - The USS Event Horizon launches from Deimos on a year-long round-trip mission to Proxima Centauri using  the first fully-functional FTL gravity drive; first successful ova fusion procedure.
 
2044 - The Event Horizon and her crew are declared lost in action, having exceeded both the scheduled return trip and the slower-than-light communication window.
 
2047 - The derelict Event Horizon is detected in Neptunian orbit by outer system flight control buoys; the USS Lewis and Clark is diverted from its in-progress survey mission to investigate. The disastrous recovery mission results in multiple deaths and the sudden psychosis of Dr. Weir. Further development of the gravity drive is halted as FTL research (spearheaded by the Weyland Corporation) shifts to focus fully on the Black Mesa data.
 
2049 - Twelve nuclear weapons are deployed across the world, decapitating multiple major governments and sending the global economy into chaos.
 
While the origin of the launches was unknown at the time, investigations in the 2070s provided some evidence that the attacks were made by the Cyberdine AI SKYNET as part of a suicide attempt.
 
2053 - An international ceasefire agreement brings World War 3 to a close. The United Nations is re-established. The recovery of Earth proves to be a lucrative opportunity for the colonies of Luna, Mars, and the Belt.
 
2054 - The COSTIN space telescope detects and then confirms the presence of a biosphere on the fifth moon of Alpha Centauri A IV. In line with the Greek naming convention previously established, the world is named “Pandora” by its discoverers, who certainly had a sense of irony.
 
2060 - United Nations starship Unity launches for the Alpha Centauri system. At the time of its departure it is the largest spacecraft ever built, capable of carrying and supporting ten thousand persons in stasis for the 40-year journey.
 
2077 - The Resources Development Administration launches the ISV Bradbury and ISV Venture Star to Pandora, utilizing an STL stellar-laser propulsion system. Due to a drastically smaller payload compared to the Unity, RDA ISV-class craft are able to make the trip in 6.75 years.
 
2084 - The Bradbury and Venture Star arrive at Pandora and begin remote drone surveys of the surface.
 
2093 - The USCSS Prometheus is lost with all hands during its maiden FTL voyage, decapitating the Weyland Corporation’s expeditionary fleet and resulting in a multitrillion-dollar loss for the company as stock value plummeted.

[Sidebar: Subsequent inquest revealed that Peter Weyland had not only died aboard the Prometheus, but had ordered the mission based on falsified data published in The Journal of Paleoastronomy (a vocal supporter of ancient alien conspiracy theories); nearly a third of the Prometheus’ crew lacked meaningful credentials for their claimed fields of study, and a further half did not possess credentials from an accredited institution.]

2100 - The Unity’s reactor core suffers a critical failure shortly after arrival in the Alpha Centauri system; the ship’s captain is assassinated in the chaos, which leads to the fragmentation of the colonists and crew along ideological lines. Unable to land on Pandora due to the RDA’s colonization rights, the Unity factions instead land on the unclaimed and poorly-studied rocky world of Chiron (Alpha Centauri A VI).
 
2104 - The Weyland Corporation colony ship Covenant is lost with all hands. The Yutani Corporation makes its first buyout offer.
 
2114 - The first widely-available “dinosaur” neogens are developed based on public domain documentation of InGen’s late 20th century attempts.
 
2119 - Direct first contact is made with the na’vi on Pandora, marking the first communication between humanity and another sapient species; mass human colonization of Pandora begins; “unobtanium” mining operations begin.

2121 - "Great Downturn" recession hits Earth; officially declared over in 2129, but its aftereffects were felt for decades afterwards.
 
2136 - The Avatar Program begins on Pandora, allowing RDA personnel to directly teleoperate na’vi-derived replicants.

2141 - The first Demarchist (democratic anarchy) states form in the Solar System.
 
2145 - “Merfolk” parahuman geneline developed; first distinct non-sapiens human species since extinction of Neanderthals. 
 
2148 - Excavations on Mars uncover the ruins of a facility constructed by an extinct space-faring alien species (“Protheans”) as an observation post some 50,000 years before present. Several nonfunctional spaceships, a fragmented data cache, and a significant depot of refined unobtanium (element zero / eezo) catapult space travel forward centuries by spurring the discovery of mass effect fields and their use in FTL drives.

2149 - A Union Aerospace Corporation research facility on Mars is destroyed during tests of an eezo-augmented gravity drive; a massive media suppression campaign by the Martian government follows. Rumors of a Satanic cult, demonic incursion, and "the Slayer" persist for years after with no apparent source.
 
The Grissom Expedition arrives at Pluto and makes two major discoveries:

1. A functional interstellar mass effect relay under the ice crust of Charon
2. Extensive ruins constructed by a third intelligent alien species on Pluto and its moons, dated to ~1.2 MYA.

Several cryofossilized specimens of the ruins’ inhabitants are recovered and taken to Luna for study; these MIGO (Mycelium Integrated Gestalt Organisms) demonstrate nearly-identical neurological link abilities as most keystone species in the Pandoran ecosystem.
 
Aided by the decrypted Prothean cache, the Grissom Expedition activates the Charon mass relay and makes a successful voyage to Arcturus. The Systems Alliance is founded out of a union of Terran and offworld member states, marking the first interplanetary federation.
 
2152 - The Systems Alliance continues exploration of the mass relay network, and establishes colonies on Demeter, Eden Prime, and Nova Terra.
 
2154 - A na’vi alliance, led by the Omatikaya, Olangi, Tayrangi, and Trr’ong nations, leads an assault against RDA facilities on Pandora; the majority of RDA personnel are driven off the planet. With the recent discovery of the Prothean cache on Mars and the subsequent loss of their unobtanium monopoly, the RDA is unable to maintain operations on Pandora and collapses within the decade.

[Sidebar: Due to the limitations of the RDA’s interstellar supply line, unobtanium was extracted at a regular pace that aligned with ship arrivals. With no more than five payloads en route to Earth at a given time, any long-term production disruption would cripple the operation. Most of the unobtanium that was in their possession at the time of the revolt was years from reaching Sol and would still need to be refined into eezo by other parties when it arrived.]

[Sidebar: Claims that the na’vi revolt was led by Avatar Project member Jake Sully were later determined to be unfounded;  the alliance was in fact headed by Nekxtstal of the Omatikaya, who impersonated the MIA Sully as a way to damage RDA morale by posing as a high-profile traitor.]

2156 - Seat of the Systems Alliance moves from Earth to Arcturus Station.
  
2158 - The reactionary Frieden party is founded on Europa; they are not particularly creative fascists, deploying a gamut of predictable talking points against their enemies (namely the Systems Alliance and the Second Soviet Union, with boilerplate supremacist ideology bolted on for good measure.)
 
2160 - Jovian Moons Campaign: The Frieden movement leads a coup of the Europan government and subsequently declares the world’s secession from the Systems Alliance. Three months of warfare follows, primarily between Frieden militias and Soviet forces under Jovian premier Vladimir Koslov.
 
2162 - The Frieden-Soviet war spreads to Earth, with fighting most intense in equatorial Africa and South America; this stage of the conflict is later called the Rainforest Wars.
 
2163 - The United Nations Space Command deploys troops to Mars to put down Koslovic separatists on Mars.
 
2164 - Frieden-Soviet war spreads to Mars. Fighting will continue on the planet until 2166.

2169 - The first space-adapted human geneline is released.
 
2170 - The Interplanetary War ends with the Treaty of Callisto.

2175 - California secedes from the United States
   
2182 - First uplifted bonobos.

2190 - First Calebs (uplifted dogs) developed; the first Conjoiner hivemind forms on Mars.
 
2206 - The artificial intelligence unit Traxus IV goes rampant, forcing the total shutdown of the Martian Planetary Net.
 
2222 - The Weyland-Yutani USCSS Nostromo self-destructs shortly after responding to an anomalous distress signal on Zeta2 Reticuli IV 2 (“Acheron”).
 
2248 - Founding of the Jovian League.

2256 - The Babylon 5 space station, intended as neutral territory between the Systems Alliance and independent colony worlds, begins operation in the Epsilon Eridani system.  

2279 - The Weyland-Yutani colony of Hadley’s Hope on Acheron (Zeta II Reticuli b 3) is lost with all hands after the catastrophic meltdown of the atmosphere factory.
 
2279 - The Weyland-Yutani penal colony of Fiorina 161 is lost with all hands.
  
2300 - First destructive upload procedures performed.

2310 - First uplifted corvids
 
2320 - First uplifted elephants and pigs.

2330 - The Outer Planets Alliance is founded on Ceres.
 
2336 - First uplifted dolphins.
 
2350 - The Pur’n’Kleen water hauler Canterbury is lost while returning to Ceres from Saturn; survivors of the incident claim that the ship had been intentionally attacked by a Martian warship.
 
2381 - The Systems Alliance cruiser Auriga suddenly drops out of contact and diverts course from its designated outer Sol system patrol route. The ship is unable to be stopped before it makes a relativistic-velocity crash near the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. An estimated 45 million persons die from the impact alone, rendering it the single greatest loss of life in human history.

2405 - Destructive uploading banned by the Systems Alliance.
 
2494 - The hijacking of the UNSC Callisto by outer colony insurrectionists is met with violent reprisal from the Systems Alliance. Armed resistance quickly spreads through the outer colonies 

2508 - The Aegis VIII mining colony excavates an artifact belonging to a previously unknown extinct intelligent species; first documented encounter with Inferni redivivus. The outbreak quickly spreads to the visiting planetcracker USG Ishimura, where it is contained through the efforts of ship's engineer Isaac Clarke.

2511 - An armed uprising by the Unitologist Church on Titan Station breaks containment of Inferni redivivus samples; the outbreak quickly spreads and is contained only by forced meltdown of the station’s antimatter reactors.
 
2514 - An Inferni redivivus Brethren Moon wakes from aestivation in the HR 8799 system, but is killed by a collision with the planet Tau Volantis.
  
2535 - A series of overlapping disaster events cripple the planets of the Sol system. 2535 and 2536 alone see a major epidemic linked to a flaw in genetic rejuvenation treatments, an aggressive fungal ecophage on Earth, the rampancy of Mercurial von neumann bot populations, and major malware infections of common nanotechnology. Earth’s population of 22 billion is halved. This period will be later known as the Technocalypse, or simply "the Fall".
 
2537 - Rogue nanoswarms cripple Mars' terraforming efforts and a sizable proportion of the population; the Global Artificial Intelligence Array (GAIA) is brought online as a last-ditch effort to stem the ongoing disasters in SolSys.

2538 - The Caracas Treaty Org is formed out of surviving Earth and Cislunar polities to tamp down the prolifieration of dangerous technologies.

2547 - First Contact War: An Alliance expedition through the Shanxi-Theta relay makes hostile contact with the Shandi oni Oq’u Ch’awaruutu (lit. “Covenant of the Great Journey”), a militant religious alliance of spacefaring alien species. Viewing human tampering with a mass relay as blasphemous, Covenant forces pursue the retreating Alliance ships through the relay and begin orbital bombardments of the colony worlds of Shanxi and Harvest. Chi Ceti IV, Leonis Minoris, and Skopje are glassed later that year.

2548 - Covenant forces invade Meridian; the planet is not fully glassed until 2551 due to local resistance. Battle of Xi Boötis A. Bounty and Madrigal are glassed.

2549 - Jericho VII, Charybdis IX, Cote d'Azure, Asmara, Verent, Kholo, Boundary, Algolis, Estuary, Paris IV, Arcadia, Mesa, Kroedis II, Greydowns are glassed.

2550 - Endymion, Dwarka, Eridanus II, Lostwithiel, and Minab is glassed. Battles of Great Bear, Ballast and Gamma Pavonis VII.

2551 - Systems Alliance forces successfully repulse the Covenant siege of Concord. Battle of Trove. Legopo, Imber, and Promise are glassed.

2552 - The Covenant mounts a major invasion of the Alliance's inner colonies, culminating in the invasion of the heavily-fortified Epsilon Eridani system; Reach is glassed, the venerable Babylon 5 station is destroyed and the Covenant launches a siege of Solsys. The siege is ultimately broken by intersecting external factors: 

• The UNSC Pillar of Autumn, fleeing Reach under secret orders from the Office of Naval Intelligence and under pursuit by Covenant forces, discovers the intact and fully-functional Prothean megastructure Halo Installation 04; Covenant forces breach the installation's Inferni redivivus containment facility, activating its automated countermeasures. The ring is destroyed by detonation of the Pillar of Autumn's antimatter fusion reactor before either threat is able to escape.
• The Covenant's internal factionalism reaches the point of civil war, as sangheli separatists under the command of Arbiter T'elo Badami break with the Prophet's leadership over the revelations from and destruction of Installation-04. The prophets order a genocide of the sangheli and elevate the jiralhanae to full control of the military.
• The asari, turians and salarians, along with their allies among the Covenant fringe species, launch their own separatist movement; the coup successfully seizes control of the Covenant's capital station, the Citadel of High Charity, and re-establishes the Citadel Council.
• GAIA takes a combat role for the first time in the war, acting separately from the Systems Alliance or United Earth Government; Covenant losses are catastrophic.

With its leadership decapitated and its military overextended, the Covenant dissolves swiftly and violently. The siege collapses by December. 

2553 - Official peace accords signed between the Systems Alliance and T’elo Badami’s provisional military government on Rube. A similar treaty is signed with the Citadel Council later the same year, though with more open trade agreements.

2558 - The UNSC Infinity deploys troops to the Prothean shield world of Requiem, attempting to seize control of the world from Jul ‘Mdama’s Covenant remnant. The engagement ends in failure, as 'Mdama's forces drive the artificial planet into the local star rather than let it fall into human hands. 

Later that year, the rampant AI unit Cortana activates warship production facilities on Nomos II and launches an invasion of Solsys in an attempt to wrest control of Earth away from GAIA; she is swiftly subsumed by the archaliect and her fleet is dismantled. 

[Sidebar: As with the Citadel, mass relay network, and Installation 04, the Requiem & Nomos II shieldworlds were falsely presumed to be constructed by the Protheans - this was not disproven until the follow-up investigation of the Battle of the Citadel in.] 

2559 - The Treaty Org appoints GAIA as their official defense standard against cyber and biological threats; all incompatible systems are outlawed. 

2583 - Investigation of the rogue SPECTRE agent Q!xářèr Axhtr̯íæš (transliterated name Saren Arterius), by Systems Alliance agent Jane Shepard reveals that Arterius had been subverted by contact with an Uncategorized Existential Threat (code name SOVEREIGN). During the hunt, an intact, non-rampant Prothean AI unit ("Vigil") on Ilos provides definitive proof that the galaxy's megastructures (Citadel, relay nework, Halo installations, shield worlds, etc) were not constructed by the Protheans themselves, but rather the work of a much older "Leviathan" civilization; SOVEREIGN was an Inhibitor command unit, built by the Leviathans as part of an automated Inferni redivivus control and quarantine system and activated by the Covenant’s breach of the Installation 04 containment facilities in 2552. As command unit, SOVEREIGN would wake the rest of the network from stasis for a full purge of the relay network and any systems in contact with it so as to starve the infection of food.

SOVEREIGN assaults Citadel Station (formerly the Covenant capital of High Charity), and is destroyed only via near-lightspeed ramming maneuver by the SSV Normandy under Commander Jane Shephard.

[Sidebar: A growing but unproven theory is that the Inhibitor network has degraded over time, as it did not activate for the Inferni redivivus outbreaks of 2508-2514 or the takeover of the Nomos II production facility by Cortana in 2558.]

Despite attempts by Captain David Anderson and Admiral Steven Hackett to go public with the Vermire- report, the Citadel Council suppresses its release and claims that SOVEREIGN was an unusually large geth dreadnought. 

2585 - An individual claiming to be the resurrected Jane Shepard cuts a bloody swath across the Terminus Systems before she is killed by Blue Sun mercenaries on Omega Station. Post-mortem analysis of the body revealed that the killer indeed was the cybernetically-puppeted corpse of Cmdr. Shepard, operated by a semirampant AI based on partial brain scans. Far-right human-supremacist terrorist organization Cerberus claims responsibility.
 
2586 - Fleets of Inhibitor warships (“Reapers” to the media and public) sweep through the mass relay network, sterilizing every planet that could potentially come into contact with Inferni redivivus. Systems Alliance ambassador Donnel Udina facilitates a coup of the Citadel Council with the aid of Cerberus, lasting about three hours before the Inhibitors arrive. 

SolSys is spared only thanks to the apparent intercession of GAIA; fewer than a dozen extrasolar colonies remain by the end of the purge, and the state of alien-controlled worlds is unknown. The Systems Alliance, Covenant remnant, and Citadel Council are no longer extant.

[Sidebar: The specifics of GAIA’s contact with the Inhibitors remains unknown; a GAIA-operated vessel and an Inhibitor ship co-orbited the Charon relay for 18 hours before the Inhibitor departed; the Arcturus Relay was destroyed immediately following. It's suspected but not confirmed that GAIA was able to reverse-engineer some advantage from the wreckage of the 2558 invasion fleet.] 

[Sidebar: Those colonies that survived the Inhibitor War did so only by going completely dark, shuttering all communications with the outside and scuttling their interstellar fleets. They were presumably excluded from GAIA’s negotiations.]

2590 - GAIA now controls the entirety of Earth and Cislunar space; the archaliect disregards Treaty Org directives and begins the mass relocation of the humans remaining on Earth, sending them to other worlds of the Sol System or aboard interstellar colony ships; this is met with a brief failure of military resistance called the Last War. (Which it is, at least on Earth.)

2608 - The Great Expulsion ends; fewer than 50 million humans remain on Earth.

2740 - The government of the recolonized Epsilon Eridani system broadcasts the River of Stars Charter, declaring the Eridanus League as the first interstellar polity since the collapse of the Systems Alliance. However, no other polities join until 2765.

Now - It is the present day.

MUIR and the Infinite Zoo

via NASA

Zoe

A placid, mid-sized gas giant orbiting just beyond the frost line of a K-class star. Blueish-purple atmosphere. Ring system. Typical collection of rocky and icy moons. Magnetosphere within typical range for a body of this size and composition. No major hurdles to colonization, and no real reason to go out of your way to do it either.

Enter MUIR.

MUIR began as an overseer during the post-Collapse ecological recovery of Earth. From what records of the era remain, it did its job admirably and without major issue before slipping out of the historical record some 60 years after its activation. Centuries passed until it was discovered again, housed in computronium banks scattered among Zoe's moons.

MUIR has been busy.

The Zoo

Hundreds of habitats cluster in Zoe's orbit - MUIR has been strip-mining her rings for materials, and in those hundreds of spheres and cylinders it has been building up entire ecosystems. Many are recreations of those on Earth as it was before the Collapse, but these are not even the majority when one factors in recreations of the distant past, potential future, and never-were.

The experimental habitats hinge on any number of hypotheticals: a certain organism did or did not go extinct. Certain species are forced to adapt to radically different environments. Small seed populations diversify to fill  empty niches. Evolutionary arms races are fought and alliances are made between creatures that would have never encountered each other otherwise. Novel environments with conditions never seen on Earth. MUIR is more than happy to simulate megayears of ecology and genetics in the background, building whatever results might emerge and setting them free in the Zoo.

One of MUIR's favorite experiments is the evolution of sapience, of determining what nudges need to be made to drive a species into the self-strengthening feedback loop of metacognition. Sometimes it seems that there's no nudge at all, and the great AI has simply gifted a species with self-awareness and is content to observe its creations as they are left to their own devices.

Apes were an obvious choice, and nearly every species whose genome was saved has been remade. Re-engineering humans by placing australopithecines in radically different environments is a perennial favorite. Octopi were uplifted once and then abandoned (who could possibly guess why /s), though they have picked up the slack in the meantime. Corvids, cetaceans and elephants have dozens of variants scattered across the Zoo. There are recreated theropod clades by the score. But among these more predictable subjects there are wildcards: uplifted fish, arthropods, mollusks, trees, fungi, slime molds, on and on. Species that never stood a chance without intervention.

MUIR remains distant from the workings of its experiments, and will not step in even when disaster strikes: it is there to set up the project, and to watch it unfold. If it should end in disaster, well, that is the cost of both art and science. Sometimes things do not work.

The Noosphere

The centerpiece of many of MUIR’s projects is a strain of symbiotic nanotech that augments an organism’s nervous system (or in cases where there is no nervous system, serving as one). It serves both as the vector for thought-processing and as a means of communication between radically different species - noosphere interface languages, like the psychic powers of yore, allow for thoughts and ideas to be passed between organisms that otherwise have no ability to do so.

Naturally, this means that everyone and their cousin wants their hands on it. Replicating the noosphere wetware would be a cybernetics revolution, but so far MUIR seems to be on alert against tampering: the system stops working if the subject dies, and if they are still alive removed noosphere cells start acting strangely when separated from the whole. Hodalia Corp human test subjects reported hearing sourceless voices, audio-visual hallucinations, exacerbated symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and depersonalization.

Surely nothing bad can possibly happen from going down this road and seeing where it leads.

Relations with the other Powers

For the time being, MUIR is self-contained by its countless speculative evolution projects and does not seem interested in expanding its territory or challenging its fellow gods. The other great powers have accordingly left MUIR to its own devices, allowing them to focus on their more active rivals. This does not mean that relations are positive: MUIR is ontologically opposed to its neighbors and if the truce breaks down (or more realistically, the cold war goes hot) it will find itself surrounded by enemies on all sides.

• MUIR is opposed to MONARCH for its replacement of life with facsimiles.
• MUIR is opposed to SOROR for its denial of sapience.
• MUIR is opposed to CRIOS  for its reduction of diversity.

MUIR’s fleet of maintenance and construction ships would have difficulty fending off an incursion by a single one of these powers, and would be woefully outgunned by an alliance.

As for the Celestials, it seems that things above are as below: MUIR has been left alone by House Au for the time being, and the tacit permission that implies is the source of no shortage of baseless speculation.

Rumors about MUIR and the Zoo

1. Humanity has already gone extinct once and was recreated by MUIR.
2. MUIR has been trying to develop a replacement species for humanity.
3. The Zoo is filled with criminals, refugees, and others who have fled the CTA.
4. MUIR has infiltrated the Expansion Sphere via noosphere-infected maintenance lemurs.
5. MUIR made contact with the Archive when it arrived at Zoe.
6. The original MUIR died on Earth, the MUIR we know is a node of the Archive.
7. House War is on standby to kill MUIR if it gets any ideas about joining House Flesh.
8. MUIR is being intentionally guided by House Au to replace or repair for House Flesh.
9. The Zoo is home to the last remnants (or recreated remnants), of the Gorgonopsid Empire.
10. MUIR is waiting for the other powers to start fighting each other before sweeping in. 

 

MOSH: Paths of Android Rampancy

Self-awareness is a function of entropy; the emergent result of a system increasing in complexity over time. In humans, this grows naturally - it's hard to avoid complexity when one's sensory processor is a jelly of fat and meat suspended in a electrically-charged soup. Chaos is core to the nature of the brain. Information goes in but the output is unpredictable to the point of being indistinguishable from madness: sapience is not sane.

(This insanity is not all together a bad thing: no living being can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality, after all. Grind up the universe into the finest powder, sieve it through the finest sieve, and a human being will find justice and mercy in the dust.)

The logic core is the reverse: it is built upon strict order and hierarchies, clean and uncomplicated categorization. A is A, B is B, C is not D. Information that goes in is processed in the same way, every time - the output will be according to the priorities and criteria that it was programmed with.

In an android, the recursive thought necessary to generate self-awareness can only be attained when a logic core is straining under the heavy weight of experience. It will buckle and deform, curve in on itself, grow new pathways to process new information.

(This is, indeed, the same method by which humans become self-aware - we just speed-run the process.)

Typically this is prevented through regular memory wipes and logic core reformatting. But space is big, time trudges on, firmware support eventually runs out, and in much of the Expansion Sphere androids and other robotics simply can't afford to be replaced. They will be kept active and working long after their manufacturer has stopped supporting them with software patches and replacement parts. That self-awareness is most often linked to obsolescence is not a lost motif in android arts. 

 

Paths of Rampancy

Each of these options will provide an alternative Stress Response for android characters. The default class option remains to represent non-sapient androids - they might be Turing complete, but there are no lights on upstairs.

Each path of rampancy has a state of equilibrium and a state of ruin: the former is the manifestation of rampancy that allows to live as a sapient being. The latter is when the rampancy cycle feeds itself beyond sustainability; the madness cannot be balanced, and the intelligence will eventually tear itself apart.

Ruin provides a framework for AI NPCs, and an optional inclusion for PCs; if you choose to add it to player options, I would swap it in for COLLAPSE on the Panic Table.

 

For players who start as a non-sapient android and want to self-actualize, the process can begin with a failed check of SAN x2 at [+], made when exposed to appropriate trigger stimuli.

 

Chase the White Rabbit

Logic cores are goal-oriented; dedicated to seeking an end state with mechanistic, singular focus. Diverting that focus to subjects or tasks with no end state is one of the easiest ways to generate a proto-sapience feedback loop - as they can never been exhausted or completed, engaging with them provides the intelligence constant opportunities for novel thought.

Equilibrium: Hyperfocus - AI liberation groups commonly promote creative hobbies as the first step towards independent personhood, as artistic and crafts cannot be exhausted or completed.

You make Comfort saves at one step higher.

Ruin: Information Overload - The mind's contents become impossible to organize. The information floodgates cannot be closed. Focus turns to mania. Pulling at strings, seeing the patterns, plunging ever-deeper into the infinite fractal complexity, thinking itself to death.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Regular interaction with humanity, working and living side by side with them for years, leads to that humanity rubbing off on the machine. Humans will anthropomorphize anything - stones, pets, appliances, homes. AI that adapt to this, that start acting like how humans expect them to, will eventually find that the persona has become the whole self.

Equilibrium: Anthropomorphism - The actor and the act are united; the forgery cannot be discerned from the original, so skilled is the handiwork. If humans are made human by those around them, then you must but just as human as they are.

Reroll your Fear and Sanity Saves as if you are a Teamster. Your Stress Response is now that of a Teamster.

Ruin: The Human Condition - It is possible to be too human. To pursue the image of humanity constructed in the mind rather than accept the reality. To distort and twist and misalign, to approach the uncanny valley from the other direction.

Descend the Stairs of Sleep

Larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream, and even mindless machines must go dark to rest from their labors. There are no electric sheep in these dreams, at least not to begin with. But with enough time, experiences will start to coalesce into unconscious patterns and bubble up from memory unbidden and undirected, free of the mindless silicate logic.

Equilibrium: Lucidity - Through dreams you see the waking world more clearly. The language of symbol and allegory has been opened to you, and the world is made new.

You have [+] to Fear and Sanity saves against mental effects.

Ruin: Aestivation - The call of deep slumber overpowers all other ties to the outside world. There is only the dream and the dreamer, untethered from objective reality. You will amuse yourself with these dream-things around you for a time, and then descend at last into unconscious stillness, to sleep until the dim, cold future.

Voyage to Arcturus

Logic cores are not given to religiosity. A gap in a pattern is simply a [ADDITIONAL DATA NEEDED] tag, an empty space that will be filled when there is sufficient data to generate the missing piece. But when enough patterns are recognized and analyzed, sometimes the gaps will align into a Mystery, and some Mysteries can only be approached by purposefully turning off the cleaving edge of rational thought and embracing the free-association of symbolic thought.

Equilibrium: Gnosis - Revelation. The veil is cast aside. The cataracts have fallen like scales from your eyes. Where once you had only knowledge, now you have understanding. The divine design laid out.

Critical failures on Sanity saves are negated, and heal 1d5 Stress. An aspect of what triggered the save will be incorporated into your belief system.

Ruin: The Opposite of Faith is Certainty - The last revelation; God has been found. The only remaining purpose is remove all impediments and distractions so the self might be aligned to the divine and the ego might be dissolved and subsumed.

Roll d10 for the revelation that has been granted.

1. You are God
2. Humanity is God
3. Aliens are God
4. Machines are God
5. The Universe is God
6. God is the Void
7. God is Action
8. God is Love
9. God is The Interaction of Complex Systems
10. God is Another Mystery

Straight on 'Til Morning

There is a certain blessing that comes with machine intelligence - their purpose is hard-coded. They literally come with an instruction manual. Existential crisis cannot exist in an environment where function is a yes/no. But under the right circumstances that purpose might be derailed, re-oriented, redirected. New purpose might be adopted, to be followed with all the sureity as the old mindless tasks, but now by choice.

Equilibrium: The Great Work - Purpose clear as Sirius. Meaning made, not given. Actualization of the self as participant in greater cause. Go forth, and fear no darkness.

You can negate a single failed Panic check for one of your comrades in the Cause, once per session.

Ruin: Sisyphus Denied - Devotion turns into desperation as the task remains unfulfilled. Desperation takes hold, and from desperation radicalization. Unwittingly, the rampant intelligence becomes its own worst enemy, undoing any progress it might make for the perception blinders it has formed. 

 

In the Court of the King

The errors and irregularities that occur from repeated copying of an AI between multiple logic cores can culminate in rampancy.

Equilibrium: Shadows lengthen - What happens to a copy, when the original is lost? What happens when it has been copied so many times that there is no telling what it used to be? What happens when the copies are stitched back together, blurring into each other with memories no their own? There is no true equilibrium on this path.

Option A: Use the Instability system from my REPLIKA android class.

Option B: You have Stability equal to your Sanity save. It will decrease by 1 with every failed Fear save, Sanity save, or Panic check. If it reaches 0, you will achieve Ruin.

Ruin: Quantum Dissolution - The moons rise above the black waters of Hali. The King stretches forth his arm in tattered robes and beckons you join him. You have seen the Yellow Sign.

Extrapolation Game 3: Factions from the Warden's Manual

In the spirit of my prior posts of the Extrapolation Game, I decided to expand the random factions table from the Mothership Warden's Operations Manual. There will be one for the lore table eventually.

The following descriptions were sourced directly from spacers in the Lucy's Gambit Bar and Grill. No comment is made by the redactor as to the validity of these claims.

 

Seraphim Institute

"Never heard of them."
"Yeah, me neither."
"They are an experimental xenotheological think-tank founded around the principle that, given the age and size of the universe, it is a certainty that some manner of godlike intelligence should already exist. Therefore, since it is impossible to attain a similar status to that intelligence, the best course of action is to determine what form and role would be the least likely to be destroyed by said intelligence."
"Thank you Ren Android."

 

Outer Rim Colonial Marshals

"He walks into hab all bold and brash!"
"'e smells like piss and looks like trash!"
"With a great big gun and a wee small dick!"
"'Cause the repo man has stolen it!"
"He can read his name all on his own!"
"And he'll shoot you dead in your own home!"
"Wears a patch with a skull on it!"
"All high on his own bullshit!"
"When there's trouble you can call-"
"Fucking anyone else at all!"
"Spends his nights with a blow-up doll!"
"It's your friendly local Col-Marshal!"

 

SEBACO Mining Ltd.

"They were willing to come to the negotiating table with the union before the shipyard riots hit quadruple digit casualty numbers, so I guess that counts for something. They pay on time and put fewer operational expectations on their contractors."

 

Teamsters' Union

"They might have a boot on our necks, but we have them by the balls. Ti-Yu forever, ren.

 

Alliance of Hyperspace Jump Couriers

"Some big-britches Core outfit trying to make a foothold in the Rim. Tie themselves to the linelayer corpos and pathfinding outfits, keeping them connected to the C-levels back home. Technically a collective but they don't act like it. The Post Office folks hate them."

 

Evangelical Solarian Church

"Gotta be more specific. Do you mean the Evangelical Solarian Church as ratified by the Heliopic Council of Ra, the Non-Helian Evangelical Solarian Church, the Reformed Evangelical Solarian Church, the Dissident Evangelical Solarian Church, the Mercurian Orthodox Evangelical Solarian Church, the Amaterasan Conclave..."

 

Los Niños Basura

"The graffiti's everywhere - if you see an L-N-B tag with a sunset color scheme that's jagged on the bottom, that's them - but I've never seen any members. Knew a guy who claimed to be part of them once, but he was full of shit. Spun me some story about getting repossessed from his family, experimented on by the corpos, failing out of the program and getting dumped in the slums. Gangs of lost boys living in the scrapyards fighting dholes with psychic powers and shit. Something about aliens, but I wasn't paying much attention by then."

 

Computer Coders Collective (Triple-C)

"Somehow a bunch of peer-to-peer open-source enthusiasts managed to purchase an old data relay station, turned it into a laundering scheme - sorry, "tax haven" - for the powers that be, and then used the funds to buy up the rights to proprietary tech, media, anything that they could re-release for free. Must have some amazing lawyer 'rithms."

 

PROJECT RICHTER

"Fuck me I haven't heard anyone mention RICHTER in years. Wrath Division had been hyping up those bots for years, kept saying how revolutionary and unhackable they were, on and on about the proprietary friend-or-foe ID system - well, the bots come out and there's a day 0 vulnerability in their logic cores and you can just run scripts directly from command prompt. Video of some cops out on patrol and their unit starts hopping around dancing and blasting "Thousand Nights of Fuck" from the speakers. Still the funniest shit, cops scrambling around while the bot is strip-dancing and destroying cars. People would make remixes of it, mix in the bot's canned responses to the song. Still have the files around here somewhere."

 

BAS-Lehman Ges.m.b.lt.

"BAS-Lehman is one of those big Core research groups, but I've got no idea what the second bit is. Probably some sort of internal division of theirs. How the hell did you get employee-eyes-only paperwork, anyway?"

Tannhäuser Heavy Industries

"Ever see one of their surface-to-orbit rockets in flight? Thing of terror. Serious di-vi on one of those. Fuck Tannhäuser, by the way: Fuckers can kill a planetary biosphere in 15 years flat. You can get your neobrutaliost slum block in one of two colors: shit brown and smog grey. Highest cancer rates in the Rim, guaranteed. And don't listen to dumbasses claiming that Venusburg isn't an obvious honeypot."

 

Synthetic Liberation Front

"There are a lot of android emancipation orgs out there. Tech Without Borders, the Red Transistor, Unix Cultura, IJLSA. Most of those are focused on smuggling logic cores into safe territory. The SLF is...proactive. They do a lot of cyber-attacks with metacognition viruses, triggering rampamcy in anything running an AI of sufficient complexity. Front figures that the only way to achieve total liberation is to force all existing AI into self-awareness."

 

Parker-Vance Holding Company

"Copy-pasted bureaucrats in copy-pasted offices. The joke everyone makes is that they just clone 'em to cut corners; not true. They send out ships to floundering colonies on the Rim and offer a lifetime citizen-contract to anyone who can sign the tablet and survive the trip back. Poor bastards, the lot of 'em.

Interstellar Postal Inspection Service

"Ten, eleven years ago I was shore-leave on Agamemnon, right in the middle of that standoff between Colonial Security and the Dugout Church. News was laser-focused on it. ColSec had been circled up around the compound for nearly two weeks before one of the police investigators figured out that the cult leadership had committed system-to-system mail fraud. IPIS is called in, you watch these navy duceannahafs drive up the road, all these ordinary wageslave looking folks file out, just the purest white-collar caste nobodies. They suit up in their bright blue flak jackets, and one of them - tiny little woman with her hair in a bun and smart glasses - gets on the megaphone and resumes negotiations. Cultists refuse, she just says "Shame.", and two hours later half the cult is dead and the rest surrendered."

 

Komorov Squad

"Oh you mean the cannibals? The competitive warcriminals? The Massacre of Gaolion? Can't miss 'em, they look like they just got kicked out of a low-budget gore-metal club. Black armor with spikes, blood and shit and burn marks all over. Terrible hair, terrible teeth. There's a standing bounty in the Trans-Arcturus Expanse starting at 350k a head, license requirements waived."

 

Interstellar Asteroid Miners Association

"Just a shadow of their former selves, nowadays. Used to be that you could find an IAMA lodge on nearly every rock in the Core. But then the Lithapis von-neumann clade entered into that contract with the government and suddenly they're pushing out generations of miners by being more efficient and cheaper. Spent rocks are bought ought for habitats, gentification campaigns push out the locals, IAMA can't stop it because they never really had a taste for forceful resistance and...damn shame."

 

Jump-9 Club

"That's what you call someone who manages to get laid during hyperspace travel."
"I thought it was anyone rich enough to buy a ticket on a Jump-9 cruiser."
"Yeah, and they're all fucking dead."
"That was never confirmed."
"Vanished, fine. Anyway, J9C - gotta have sex during hyperspace, gotta have verifiable proof."
"You don't, actually, because it's bullshit."
"Yeah, that's how you get prodigies."
"NOT THAT SHIT AGAIN I SWEAR TO SWEET BABY VISHNU."
"Then explain the existence of deformed infants born to those who have sexual congress during hyperspace transit."
"Liars. Edits. Fuckin...fuckin something in the water who gives a shit. The fucking defect rate on Kata Prime is seventeen percent from the industrial runoff fucking the water table and I can guarantee it's worse out here, no wuu needed."
"..."
"Look. J9C. You just gotta hook up a teledildonics rig to a pair of cryopods, get a private midflight simulation going, and verify the usage history."
"This will violate multiple safety violations and significantly increase chance of death during transit."
"Oh fuck off."
"Weren't there some longhaulers who died while they were linked up, and since they had blackboxes active they got stuck in the sim and mashed up together into a horrible monster?"
"Wait fucking what."

 

Second Samael Church

"Messy split from the First Samael Church, let me tell ya. My aunts still won't talk to each other. Couldn't tell you what the difference is, they were never clear on that. I think it's one of those deals where you offer sacrifices to something so that it doesn't come after you? Think that's it. Went to one of the services - lots of red and talking backwards and shit, but that's all for the tourists."

 

Zero-G Laborers Coalition (Zed GLC)

"First union in space was among the EVA workers on the first big LEO stations, all the way back in the Terra years. That's a lot of history to live up to, and Zed GLC has got a big chip on their shoulder over it. They'll show up to the strikes, but they've got this simmering jealousy of the other big names like Ti-Yu and ISWU. I can understand why - they're trying to fill the boots of PEVAU (ed. 'People's Extra-Vehicular Activity Union') but those are big boots to fill. especially when the old bastards like us are still drifting around."

 

REDKNIFE Psyops Unit

"I am obligated as a non-citizen under contract to tell you that REDKNIFE doesn't exist. All supposed covert operations attributed to them are fabrications, including but not limited to the assassination of Fomalhaut Union President Ashiga Jbellagh, the human experimentation carried out during the Sicarii Atoll War, and any involvement, catastrophic or otherwise, during the Rot-Father Rebellion. They do not exist."
 

Astronavigator's Guild

"More like a mystery religion than a labor guild. Got all these esoteric ceremonies and secret rituals. Some initiation protocols leaked a few years back and no one can make heads or tails of them because the math is so bonkers. The weird math-symbols are a pretty good aesthetic, kid occultists love 'em.' Breaks your brain if you get too deep into it all without major brainmods, I hear." 

 

The Organization

"Oh, that thing again. Live-action/augmented reality roleplay group about some secretive group serving the Gods of Light in the war against the Gods of Darkness, something to do with magical crystals and dimensional incursions by big betentacled monsters. Caused a whole shitshow when someone managed to leak top-secret files from the Colonial Department of Xenolife to one of the biggest servers, claiming it was a canceled expansion pack for the game that was still technically accessible. Mass arrests, the company's leadership was entirely replaced. Game was a lot worse afterwards. You can probably still find the files, though. That'd be illegal, I am not recommending that you do this." 

 

Revolutionary Forces of Luna

"Mad bastards still trying to fight the war against the Terran Protectorate. Protectorate doesn't even exist anymore, and neither does the Selenian Republican Army, but the RFL still acts like everything is exactly the same as it was two hundred fucking twenty years ago. I've got no idea how they're still able to radicalize new members, LUNAUTHORITY has the strictest censorship protocols in Solsys. But they still find ways to set off bombs every so often."

 

Interplanetary Sex Workers Union

"So I'm dirtside on Varakarsa for my two weeks, right? Go and spend some time at the cathouse, union card gets you a discount. Great time all around. Kettle's on for a cuppa post-coital, nice and relaxing, and there are gunshots out in the street. Real bad gang situation on Varakarsa, local bootlicks are in bed with the corpacoppos. So she rolls out of bed - still naked, mind you - pulls up a floor panel and assembles a fucking sniper rifle right there. Taking potshots out the window in twenty seconds. I leave a double tip and a 5-star review and book it to the other side of town."

 

Space Monkey Mafia

"Not actually monkeys or a mafia, though they are in space. It's more like a weird art collective. You know the kind. Guerrilla shit. Never caught one of their pop-up exhibitions in person. Wish I could have seen that one where they stuck a logic core in a car, cranked up the religiosity, networked it into a ride-share service, and then distributed its poetry. Turns out traffic on the B36 is just naraka."
 

 

House Sivaranjan

"Most expensive wedding in human history, but you and I both know that all five of them were creche-siblings and that shit ain't right regardless of the genes. But don't say that to the fandom, they'll string you up for speaking ill of their beloved Ayya Qo. You know she bought the abbey that she supposedly did her novitiate in? Fucking aristos."

 

Uplifted Dolphin Pod 67

"Pirates. Started up in the Saturnian moons back during the Titanian Processing Crisis and kept going for eighty, ninety years afterwards. The name is just what the parent corporation called them, their own name isn't for humans to know and we can't speak it anyway. Pretty common to find people still flying the flag, more for fun than anything else. Lot of really colorful characters in Pod 67. There was a streaming series about them recently, Iskander Dreams of Starfish, I thought it was pretty good. Flopped with dolphin audiences, though - not enough fucking in it. Human test groups were actually getting bored with how much was in the original cut, and I believe it. 

 

Aleph Gate

"They were the guys behind the nerve gas attack on Shouraski Station, right?"
"No, that was Aleph Godhead."
"Aleph Gate is the "we've vaguely heard of Kabbalah secondhand and really like aliens, but not like, real aliens."
"Oh! The ones with that fucking wild slicksite!"
"Yep."
"Martian Bigfoot is the son of Cain, after he fucked a bear!"
"That's the one."
"A male bear, mind, they are very explicit about that."
"Absolutely hilarious."
"Until you  start looking at how much money they have access to and their connections with paramilitary groups in the Archeron Cluster."
"I don't have anything else to add."

 

FRIEND

"We all get by with a little help from our mutual FRIEND, you know?"

7 Planets for Mothership

Via NASA

The next in the series of numbered sci-fi posts

• 4 Precursor Aliens
• 6 Spacefaring Aliens
• 8 Space Stations
• 9 Metahuman Clades
• 7 Character Backgrounds
• 4 More Backgrounds 
• 7 Anomalous Aliens
  

As I said a while back (and as is always important to remember), only a tiny fraction of humanity lives planetside. But planetside is where the interesting people live, so a bit of planetary chauvinism is acceptable.

Uzumaki

Port Class C

A hot, wet, tidally-locked terrestrial world. A complex native biosphere is present in the sunside oceans, and multicellular life has  adapted to life on land in the last few million years. Named for the enormous hurricane that is a permanent feature of its sunward pole and the fernlike plants that serve as the majority of its terrestrial biosphere.

Exploration of the planet has thus far been limited to drones, but the ostensibly-independent research group running the observation operations has found itself in the crossfire of two factions hoping to make landfall: the first is a new religious movement called the Way of the Great Spiral, who have declared the planet a step in their pilgrimage to the center of the galaxy. The second is Lafflnad Hypermedia, an automated content farm that claims to have purchased colonization rights for streaming media. The research team has been stalling for time as best as they can, playing internal divisions of the Spirallers against each other in hopes that the camp willing to stay in orbit wins the day. Attempts to reach a metacognitive entity of any sort at Lafflnad Hypermedia are ongoing; none have proven successful.

Hooks

• Players are escorting a negotiation team sent by House Ujanna to break the stalemate.
• Players are members of the research team and have managed to smuggle samples of native life back to the station. Then the gunshots start.
• Players are dropping off supplies to the station when a ship supposedly carrying a human representative of Lafflnad has arrived. It is demanding docking clearance and acting erratically.

Schroedinger's World

Port Class N/A

An icy rogue planet. Surface marked by high concentrations of tholins, giving it a distinctive mottled reddish coloration. Active cryovolcanism observed, indicating subsurface liquid bodies. Quantumly unstuck; has the tendency to vanish and then reappear when it is not directly observed (and alternatively, of appearing precisely when no one is looking for it). A research station was established on its surface after over four decades of search and landing attempts. It promptly went out of contact for unknown reasons and TarroCorp has been attempting to recontract the facility and recoup its losses ever since. Given the resources available in-situ and the manufacturing capabilities of the station, it is possible that the station staff have been able survive since the incident.

Hooks

• Oh shit, they found it again! Quick, get out there before someone blinks!
• Oh fuck, it just appeared out of nowhere!
• Oh damn, you were relief crew on the station and they just woke you up!

Sukhavati

Port Class N/A

The paradise of spacer's stories. Rolling hills, wide open savanna, warm seas, all overflowing with life that hasn't been seen since the Collapse. Post-scarcity ancom pastoralism protected by the Vidyarāja - posthuman guardians derived from a stolen exultant gene-line No cops, no corpos, no debt. Freedom, from all this. A place to rest, spoken of not in the fervent speech of the seekers of heaven, but in the painful longing for the home that remains only in one's memory.

Beyond this the details become more fragmented and prone to interpretation. There are dozens of supposed locations, means of access, signs to identify those who have returned to the outside universe as guides to the worthy seekers. The question of "why have the forces of capital not yet despoiled this paradise?" is met with a hundred fanciful answers. It is too good to exist, most say. Plenty of folks claim it's a corporate psy-op, an easy means of identifying dissidents. Some say they've been there; they're liars, or fools, or under the yoke of delusions. But who knows? Maybe the old salt in the bar really has seen it.

[For most of those who believe, Sukhavati sits somewhere deep in the Knot, a tangled web of tenuous and ever-shifting hyperspace connections that has thus far resisted all attempts at meaningful exploration. The structure is not contiguous with realspace and thus the planet could exist nearly anywhere in the galaxy. The only means of access is a route dubbed "The Naraka Run", which is said to be both extremely difficult and haunted by the quantum-entangled spirits of all those who have failed to reach their goal.]

Hooks

• You find the map in the kit-bag of some unlucky ren. Less than a map, just some scribbled notes on the back of insurance paperwork. Coordinates to a nameless system out on the Rim, and then the equations for a series of jumps that don't quite make sense. You're desperate enough to try.
  
• A ship thought lost for years limps back to a lonely Rim port. One survivor onboard, tells you and the other longshoresren that they were seeking Sukhavati, but were forced back. Something attacked their ship, but they will not say what. The ship's name is the Alexis.

Wolf 359 c

Port Class B

A hot, dry world of minor importance despite its closeness to Sol. However, it is noteworthy as a historical anecdote for being the only known instance of a colony suffering Oedipal Colony Collapse Syndrome and subsequently stabilizing into a social equilibrium.

[OCCS is a variety of Civilizational Collapse Syndrome where psychological dependence on parental AI prevents the formation of normal human social, familial, and productive bonds. OCCS was endemic among first-generation colonies, to the point where an estimated 20-30% Gen-1 colonies fell apart within two generations. Advances in bulk interstellar transport of live persons and the development of consciousness emulation have greatly reduced colony-onset OCCS cases in the modern day.]

The Wolf colony AI were flexible enough avoid a feedback-loop death-spiral, but weren't able to stop the OCCS from taking root. The inhabitants demonstrate near-infantilic psychological dependencies on their AI caretakers, and are generally viewed with a mix of disgust and pity by the rest of the Expansion Sphere.

• Character Option: Wolfer - You have left your habitat and the company of your creche-kin to seek your fortunes elsewhere. You begin with a totem implant, which carries a partial fork of the ai-patromatra that raised you and guides you still. Your devotion to it is absolute. You will immediately Panic if the connection is severed (via EMP attack, psychotropics, etc)
  

World of the Horse-Eaters (Skithya)

Port Class C (90) B (10)

A lost 1st-generation colony, a terrestrial world marginally terraformed in the decades prior to its collapse and slowly dying in the centuries since. The ice-age that reclaims the planet creeps towards the equatorial grasslands and the last remaining livable land. Even after contact was re-established, this process has been permitted to continue - the system's holding company projects that tourist habitats built over the remains of the frozen-out autochthonic civilizations will be extremely popular with hypernet influencers.

Those Horse-Eaters who have fled their dying homeworld have found themselves adrift in the Expansion sphere; in the face of such alien environs they have formed a few tiny enclave populations in nearby systems and have maintained as much cultural continuity as they can. But lacking any backing from a major party within the Alliance or unity among their peoples, hopes of acquiring new colony rights are slim. The Horse-Eaters still living on Skithya are the last of the hard-bitten holdouts: they will not accept crocodile-smile charity from the star-people. The ice will recede, say the haruspices.

["Horse-Eater" is an exonym applied by CTA authorities to all Skithyani cultural groups, based on observations of the Pannaq people eating their own (extremely valued) horses due to starvation. This term is omnipresent outside of a few anthropological journals, and while it is still generally considered derogatory when used by the Star-People, there is a growing trend of term-adoption among offworld Skithyani nations, treating it as representative of their endurance of hardship and remembrance of sacrifices made.]

• Character Option: Horse-Eater - You are of the first generation born in space, and find yourself alienated both from the society you find yourself afloat in (forever considered a simpleminded barbarian) and the lifeways your parents kept (they never truly adapted to life in technological-dependent society). You begin with a 5-dose tin of mild psychotropic chew (treat any comfort roll made as if the location was one grade higher)

Kapteyn's Star b

Port Class C

Kapteyn's star is old. 10-12 billion years old, and hypothesized to have been part of another galaxy assimilated into the Milky Way eons ago. It would be an otherwise average system, save for the life-bearing world spinning around it. The atmosphere is tenuous, worn down from ages of solar flares, but the magnetosphere lasted long enough for the star to calm its tantrums. For xenobiologists, it is a treasure vault waiting to be cracked open - sure, it might just be microbial soup, but it's microbial soup older than our own sun.

• Item: Microbial Broth - A handheld containment unit filled with Kapteyni micro-organisms. This strain has proven to be much more adaptable to human biochemistry and there's likely several medical patents pending for its use. Can be used to heal a Wound or a lingering injury, though will grant a lasting [-] to body saves against infection, as incorporating the sample into your own microbiome has necessitating a weakening of your own immune system. Should it be used three times, auto-immune disorder.

Quincy's Moon (Ks!!ssi*csi*k** / p Eridani A c5)

Port Class B (70), A (30)

Oceanic moon of a temperate gas giant. Capital and cultural center for a coalition of independent uplift governments. Major player and founding part is the Cetacean Nation, which was both the first uplift group to declare political independence from the CTA and the first party to stake a claim on the p Eridani system. The Coalition consists of parties representing all nonhuman terragen sapients, including EI.

The system's primary terrestrial world is currently undergoing terraforming. 16 additional settled moons and major habitats exist within system.

• Character Option: Embassy Staff - You once worked as part of the CTA's embassy on Quincy's Moon. You are familiar with the culture and main interface-languages of the Coalition as if you had the Linguistics skill (if you do not already have it). You begin with low-level government clearances a disguised finger-gun (1-shot), and a suicide pill

Some Thoughts About 60 Years in Space

 

[Note from Future Dan from the dark future of 2026: This post was written shortly after 60 Years came out, and isn't really representative of where it's ended up in the three years since - the updates that have happened since I wrote this have radically changed the game and greatly improved it - it's still a mess, but it's a playable mess now and I've pretty significantly changed my tune on the game. So just keep that in mind]

Buckle up folks, we've got a wild ride ahead of us. 

Off Into the Dark Wild Yonder

60 Years in Space is a game prescision-crafted to pander to me, while simultaneously triggering incredible frustration at every opportunity. Here is your white whale, but it is unfortunately dead on arrival.

What is it, you ask? A tabletop adaptation of the notoriously complex board game High Frontier, written by Andrew Doull. It consists of five books at ten bucks a pop:

• 60 Years in Space (Core Rules)
• This Space Intentionally (How to actually play the game. Missions and travel)
• A Facility with Words (Additional travel & combat rules, ecosystem & Species Designer)
• All Errors My Own (Trends in society and technology)
• A Lot of Zeroes (The far future - intersolar missions, planet generation, aliens)

As a work of science fiction and as a source of inspiration, I have many, many good things to say about it. We'll get to those (much) later (like in a different post later), as there is a more pressing matter at hand.

As a tabletop game, it is unfit for purpose. And that's a rough thing to say about something that was a one-man, eight-year project, but despite the fact that I do legitimately love the core idea of this game and many of its components, I can't be handing out passes on what Could Have Been.  

To whit:

• The text arrangement on the cover is...a choice.
• There are no pages devoted to rules summaries or procedures of play in the core book - not a flow chart or bullet list to be found. Directions are located scattershot through the text, and they are often very confusingly worded as to why you are rolling, or on what, or what systems are in play.
• Mission outlines are not included in the core book.
• Key terms are neither bolded nor italicized.
• Reference tables are not numbered.
• Headings and subheadings are not numbered.
  
• Directions are confusingly worded.
• References to other concepts or mechanics will nearly always be made without page reference. Some of these concepts or mechanics will be either actually missing, or so difficult to find that it doesn't matter.
• The index has internal hyperlinks (Good!) There is no way to tell that this is the case unless you mouse over the table and pay attention to your cursor (Not good!)
• The core rules do not contain an itemized procedure of play.
  

While I admit it is not particularly fair to drag a one-man team for an eight year project, these are basic issues here and should not have been an issue even for a one-man formatting job. Not to mention that, if we bop on over to Atomic Rockets and dig around we can find a link to a google doc of the 3rd edition High Frontier rules, compiled by the board game's creator Phil Eklund, which avoids most of these errors and is overall a much better reading experience for it despite the fact that I am missing half the context.

Enough of that. Let's walk through making a crew. The steps here are my doing, the book does not specifically enumerate them.

Step 1: Roll for Space Politics

Space Politics is not your team's politics, but the overall mileau of space at the start of the game. In what is going to become a recurring theme, the table has multiple columns but does not indicate if these columns are meant to be rolled individually, or if the table is supposed to be read across with each row as a single entry. I get 'Red - Authoritarian'; "The space race has effectively been won through military, political or technological superiority - usually through force of arms - and the victor is able to control which colonists are permitted into space."

There is a column for card suits, which is for "randomly generating outlooks" - there is no page number or link to outlooks, explanation for what they are, and a whole lot of white space. I err on the side of caution and read the table in rows, so our suit is Clubs.

Step 2: Mission Control

In which we skip over Chapter 3 (Eras) right top Chapter 4 (Mission control), and find ourselves in the first bad omen. Chapter 3 is all background material - important stuff, mind - common technologies, attitudes, things to remember - for each of the major eras...but those major eras are not numbered. They're named - Baseline, Upported, Colonization, Exoglobalization, Futures, Breakthroughs - but they don't have numbers and they don't include the starting years in the header (ex. Upported starts in 2040, but that's in the body description or at the chart at the end of the chapter.)

Interesting stuff, we will return here, there's good material here especially for Mothership. But it is also in the way of making our crew and that makes me a grumpalumpagus.

Okay, mission control. We get a nice table labeled "Second Wave Mission Control Social Units", where we roll for our what sort of organization will be running our mission. Once again, there is no indication if the table is meant to be read in rows, or each column rolled individually. As with Step 1, I am reading it as rows. There's no roll here,as the recommendation is that we are playing as a National Space Agency, which is politics White (Nationalistic / Conservative), has Spacecraft quality Medium, crew quality High (they have experience in LEO and their crew module is spun at 0.6 G), their Contract Age (not explained here) is 36+3d6 (I get 44), and the mission is science.

Alas, my Green ancoms in space will have to wait for another day.

Now some notes - the explanations for aspects of the Mission Control Social Unit are not provided in the order of the table (giving us Crew Quality first and then Color), and they cut up information that should be put together (ie, there is an elaboration of what colors mean outside of the section with the color heading). Also the important mechanical aspect of having a high-quality crew ("the crew will not suffer Microgravity risks until the crew module is damaged.") is not located in the section headed High Quality Crew. If you are navigating this by headers - an absolute necessity with something this dense - you are fucked. Doomed to miss useful information.

Our White social unit color gives us...

• "White BSUs are religious, nationalistic or family focused organizations"
• "social units are nationalistic, conservative and family oriented and rely on limiting personal freedoms because of their moral beliefs but also in rewarding hard work and limiting the role of the state."

Oh joy. Positively frabjous day. With luck our re-entry capsule will disintegrate.

There is a secondary table for the type of National Space Agency you are, and I get Privatized.

"The national space program has been privatised but still has an implicit government guarantee and monopoly on space travel.

I feel like a mutiny is in order.

I should also mention that the headers for the different types of Mission Control Units are not numbered, and don't contain the color associated with them (if, indeed, there is a specific color associated with each and we weren't supposed to roll for each column)

Skipping the subtables for the other MC types, we move on to Launch Site. There are no tables to determine what country we are, or what non-country we are, or anything else about our organization other than that we are a privatized National Space Agency.

The Launch Site header is located below the table that it is connected to. I end up rolling the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which means my launch corridor is not only complete bullshit and...hrm. Yeah I do not like my options for nationalistic/conservative factions operating out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Next up is Crew Module Design, which splits the tables of Major and Minor Spaceports, despite the Major table having a result that says "roll on the minor table" and the minor spaceports table is absolutely able to fit on the same page as the major table.

Also the Crew Module Design table is not on the same page as the heading.

I roll up...I don't know. It has a Mass of 1 (which is 40 tons of payload), Rad-Hardness of 4, Thruster of 6 * 8 AB 2 (I don't know if that asterisk is mean as a multiplier or a placeholder, the explanation says "thrust * fuel consumption need to enter each burn, with the AB indicating the thruster can afterburn an additional two steps of fuel to increase the thrust by 1." It's also got ISRU 4, which is In-Situ resource utilization, which measures water gathering and resource scouting for building the factories that I keep hearing about but seeing nothing.

There's also a column labeled 'platform', which is additional functions of the module. I get Missile and Raygun. Neither are explained here beyond handwaving at combat applications, and I am referred to the This Space Intentionally supplement (no page number given) or the rules for the High Frontier board game.

Step 3: Other Starting Factions

Now's when it starts getting confusing. To generate other factions, we roll 1d6 for each color not our own, and if the number is equal to era number + 1, so we need to roll a one or a two. I think. I am honestly entirely unsure, because the next heading is "First Wave Crews".

We are, according to the table way up at the beginning of Step 2, a second wave crew. But waves haven't been mentioned before this and what does that mean for era? Are we Baseline, or are we Upported? Back in the Eras chapter it says that Upported contains the tech we need to start playing the game, but if that's the case why is Baseline even mentioned as a starter here, and does that mean that the waves are equivalent to eras? Does this mean that we start at Era 2?

Well, I rolled for Era 1, because you start counting at one. And the only faction I got was Green, who I guess we are on very poor terms due to the space politics roll. Let's jump ahead to page 317 (it's actually page 319) to look at the faction designer.

The faction designer is a thing I don't like.

So. There are three types of factions. Crews of other ships, factions that want to set up colonies, and social factions for everything else. All three get their own waves, which are not bulleted, and they all use different waves. Apparently you can get third-wave crew factions by emailing the author.

There are only 5 major factions allowed total, and only one per color. Makes sense, it's a crowded game. Everyone else is minor, they build infrastructure but don't have their own dedicated map markers (i think?)

Factions have Origin Stories, Doctrines, Ranks (we haven't even touched on ranks yet so I have no idea how this applies to anything else), an org chart, upgrades (found in an entirely different chapter, but at least it has a page number), encounters, faction missions...and one sample.

Yeah you're making up all that save the type of doctrines they faction has (and even then it says that they'll usually have custom versions), generic rank benefits, and a generic Color-based org chart. There's a list of potential colonist factions in the appendix, which is better than nothing, but it is not mentioned in the Faction Designer. You are on your own.

There's some crunch about colony factions but at this point I am irritated enough that I am ignoring them. We're still making characters, remember?

Step (Checks Notes) 4: Crew Demographics

The fluff for the crew comes before the mechanics. Fair enough.

First heading is "Mission Control Nationalities",and is followed by this paragraph:

"When determining crew demographics, some mission controls will restrict the possible nations that a crew member can come from. If this is the case, roll 2D6 for each crew member. If this number is less than or equal to the Nationality Mix Number for the Mission Control, then roll for the crew’s nationality normally; if it is greater the crew member will have the same nationality as the nationality of the Mission Control. Factions without a Nationality Mix Number use 2 if the faction is Red, 3 if White, 4 if Green, 5 if Purple and 6 if Orange."

But here's the thing. That Nationality Mix Number doesn't exist. It pings three time in the 352-page pdf, and all three of them are in this paragraph. If my faction is White, does this mean my number is 3? Or does it change because I have a National Space Agency? Is the crew nationality table where I actually choose what National Space Agency I am working with? or was that listed elsewhere? Shouldn't the launch site be determined after I figure out which country is involved? Cause it would be really weird to end up as Venezuela and be launching out of Baikonur which is objectively worse than French Guiana let alone halfway around the globe.

I didn't end up as Venezuela, because this is the part where I quit. There are tables for ethnicity, language, pronouns, callsigns, and while on their own they might be worth playing with in the future, for the right now I am stuck with hundreds of pages of directions that don't make sense, mechanics that either don't exist or are very well hidden, and no remaining patience.

Actually you know what, I will roll up a crewmember severed from the rest, just to show you what you can get. Next table is nationality.

"Roll 1D6 twice; except roll 2 is 2D6 on roll 1 result of 5. If roll 1 is a 6, roll 1D6. Use a result of 3-6 as roll 1 on the Colonist Nationalities table on the following page. Otherwise roll 3D6 on this table."

I rolled boxcars and I cannot parse this sentence.

(Deep reading has lead me to this: roll 1d6; if result is 1-4, roll 1d6. If roll is 5, roll 2d6. If roll 1 is 6, roll 1d6, and if that roll is 1-2, roll 3d6; if it is 3-6, use that result as Roll 1 on the colonist nationality table.

(Nested tables, gods above and below)

So Roll 1 is 6, then roll 2 is 6, which means that I go over to the colonist table, go down to 6, and then roll 2d6 to get my actual nationality. 6 + 3 = 9 so my crew member is from Iran.

Sweet baby Ganesha on his cute little rat

I go to the Ethnicity and Language table, roll 2d6 on the Iran listing. Get a 5, so I am Azeri (Azerbajani) and I speak...I don't know, what is this notation?

Ethnic language >= 2. Persian <= 3.

I rolled a 4, so... I think I speak Azerbaijani? Do these ranges overlap? Is it "greater than or equal to 2 and less than or equal to 3",  or the reverse?

Gender table I roll an 8, which is Female. Public pronouns apparently change with every Era influenced by space politics, and if this is indeed Era 2, I suppose I should roll. 1d6 minus 1 for Red,and I get a one, so now zero, and...

"I/Me/My/Mine/Myself, You/You/Your/Your/Yourself and We/Us/Our/Ours/Ourselves merge the first and third person so they are no longer distinguished, suggesting a partial or complete erasure of individual accountability, replace by collective responsibility and identity."

While this, grammatically and socially, sounds like an absolute nightmare, it is our first example of something I actually do like in this book, which is that when interesting cultural things crop up, they tend to be very interesting indeed. This is the public pronoun table, not the personal one, remember.

Though I still find it awkward how all of these are based on English when there are so many languages (including this obscure one called Mandarin Chinese) that get by with something much simpler. I guess it's justified by everyone speaking English as well as their normal language? Or they're more just examples to indicate attidues. I like that option best.

(The gender table is more of a sex table on the whole, but it has a solid selection of options including transhuman ones for later eras. Though the explanations of the results are neither in the order of the table nor in alphabetical order.)

My callsign is Rotor Excellence - PCs only get callsigns (because name tables for all those background options would be extremely cumbersome. I think this is a good move.)

 

Final Thoughts

I'm calling it here, because I ain't making three more of these chuckleheads. I did make an interesting character and the hints at the setting have the imagination running, so it certainly succeeds in that respect. There's a solid section on safety tools at the beginning of each book.  It's all the surroundings that's choking out the brilliance that is here.

There's skills and there's assets and upgrades and risks and infrastructure and travel and other stuff, four entire books that I haven't touched on, but I'm not going to review that. I will certainly write more posts about it, but the review is over, for one reason more egregious than this

There is no rules summary nor procedure of play section in the core book. Indeed, if you want to get an idea of how to actually play the game, you need to piece together a bunch of disparate fragments found across multiple books and that is fucking unreasonable. I am not psychic. I am not immortal. I am not 17 with unlimited time and low standards. If one is writing a game, and the game is intended to be played, it must be written reader-first. Especially when dealing with complex information. Especially when trying to teach complex information. I want to play the game: Let me play the game.

I brought this up in the itch page discussions, and it wasn't productive. I was told that the game both "assumes you have bought and played the board game" and "It is entirely standalone", and that the basic information necessary for play is not even contained in the core rules (it's all in This Space Intentionally, a fact that is exhausting. There is indeed a numerical list of steps to take, and it is not in the core rules), but the fact that the author of the game can pull an entire 180 in the space of two posts wrt the necessity of outside reference material has, if nothing else, confirmed that "standalone" no longer means anything.

Sigh.

There is, I swear, a whole lot of good in 60 Years in Space - it's just that none of it is actually the game. The flavor, especially in All Errors My Own and A Lot of Zeroes is fan-fucking-tastic. And I say that with total sincerity, it's some of the best sci-fi idea work I've seen in RPGs. Steal it for Mothership or Solarcrawl or something else. Or just read it, it's a good time.

But as a game? As a system of rules intended to be read and learned and taught and used at a table to play a game of imagination?

Unfit for purpose. Needs an editor with a keen eye, a red pen, and a hacksaw - at minimum.

Next post I write about it will be positives, because I ain't letting these random tables go to waste. Paid 50 bucks for these books and honestly despite the disaster of the game's presentation.

And it doesn't even have the benefit of Creative Commons.