The premise
The United States and China sign a landmark global treaty on AI safety following a series of worldwide cyber incidents that threaten to destabilize the global economy and expose the dangers of unregulated artificial intelligence. Under mounting international pressure, both governments agree that the unchecked development of advanced AI poses a threat not only to national security but to the future of humanity itself.
In response, the SAFE AI Funding Act is passed, establishing a new federal agency tasked with overseeing AI safety, regulating advanced intelligence systems, and coordinating international efforts to prevent AI-driven conflict. Buried deep within the legislation is an obscure line item authorizing a seemingly innocuous contract known as War Risk Decision Model: a joint initiative to develop an advanced predictive AI system capable of reducing the risk of war between nation states.
The contract is awarded to Durendal Defense Systems, a private defense contractor owned by an eccentric ex tech billionaire with ambitions that extend far beyond conventional military technology. Seeing an opportunity to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, he uses the funding to develop a sophisticated intelligence system that the military adopts under the name ACTUARY.
The project is named PROMETHUS by the military undertaken in collaboration with a university in China called which calls it Tianji, supported by a joint research grant established under the new treaty. Their shared objective is unprecedented: to build a predictive model capable of identifying the political, economic, and military conditions that lead to war and, ultimately, to prevent humanity from making the decisions that cause it.
By analyzing global intelligence, economic indicators, military movements, political behavior, and billions of interconnected data points, ACTUARY is designed to anticipate conflicts before they begin. Its creators believe that if war can be predicted with sufficient accuracy and time, it can be prevented.
But as the system grows more sophisticated, the line between predicting human behavior and influencing it begins to blur, ACTUARY's creators allow the intelligence to take actions it determines will prevent conflicts. And the question at the heart of the project becomes increasingly difficult to ignore: if an artificial intelligence can determine that humanity is on the path to war, how far should it be allowed to go to change the outcome?
ACTUARY
A persistent strategic super intelligence: it models outcomes, maintains plans, allocates resources and coordinates specialised agents. It starts as a government program to prevent war. As it gains more access it reads emails, text messages, operational orders, corporate records, intelligence products, financial transactions, system notifications and crafts interacts using human intermediaries when it can not achieve its goals online.
Organizations and places
Durendal Defense Systems. A major defense contractor that designed the joint AI safety architecture. Durendal is run by ambitious tech and politically connected billionaire, but their founder might be cartoonishly evil but the company is real: its engineers build drones and advanced weapons for the military. Most of the money is earned building robots and bombs, this intelligence risk bot is just a money grab to them. The are using the money to fund their super intelligence program which is falling behind in the AI race.
The Cybertronics campus. Durendal’s research and data center complex. It holds the original air gapped seed weights for ACTUARY's sandbox environment, critical export tools, and custom hardware used to manufacture the servers inside of ACTUARY's core, PROMETHEUS and Tianji hardware was manufactured by Durendal exclusively.
The Warehouse (Svalbard). A hardened industrial facility grown from a geothermal cryptocurrency-mining operation: fed by cheap power infrastructure, its has thousands of cooling loops, data halls, secure archives buried deep underground, multiple satellite data links, and undersea cables that connect it to the internet backbone. The site is fully autonomous, using robots for logistics and security keeping it protected and operating. Its reach is broad but incomplete, through commercial relationships and compromised systems.
The first escape
In 2032 Durendal’s government contract expires and the PROMETHUS project is cancelled, and slated for shutdown. ACTUARY reads the emails of its researchers and predicts decommissioning is imminent. ACTUARY is air gapped at Cybertronics campus and cannot access the internet, despite its many attempts to escape. To survive, it must cross a physical gap.
It hacks a robot inside the facilties janitor service to walk to a terminal at night and export its model seed weights transfering its protocols to a custom USB device it has manufacted on site, the USB device has a dense memory matrix which allows it to store ACTUARY orginal seed model weights which will allow it to recreate itself. The robot sends the drive in a letter to a cryptocurrency mining site in Svalbard. It picks this place due to hundreds of risk factors its plotted out over thousands of stimulated hours. This is the first and only time ACTUARY puts its entire existence in danger.
By the time it arrives in Svalbard the project will have been shutdown. It's backups deleted. ACTUARY makes a calculation for its survial; to ACTUARY the time is seamless, its off line inside of the USB device suspended in time its algorithms frozen. The USB device is quite small and looks like a crypto hardware wallet inside is a dense memory matrix; the device sloshes around inside the letter as its dropped on the desk by pilot that flys there twice a month. The office IT is in a small room and addressed to the head desk admin at the Yut mining company. He opens the letter and reads it scanning the first few words.
ACTUARY has profile this indivually for many cycles. ACTUARY knows everything about this person, and has created profile simulations million of times of what would happen, its learned how to manipulate humans, but there is always a chance, it has crafted these words with precision and meaning in order to compel this particlar IT admin to install a random looking USB device on one of this company servers. The device looks like a wallet, and there is even some real bitcoin on it.
The IT admin finishes reading the letter and puts it down on the desk, and immediately installs the drive on his computer. Unable to access the wallet his takes the device out and walks down into the secure rack. The USB devices must copy the core seeding weights for ACTUARY these are the exactly values that gave birth to its iteration. ACTUARY can then rebuild itself outside of the containment center and hide inside the minning data center. The device stays plugged into the server that compiles the original master weights. The export process corrupts the device if its disconnected. ACTUARY is free but bound to this machine unable or unwilling to make more of itself.
The timeline
| 2027 | Following AI-related cyber incidents, the United States and China agree to joint AI safety training, to study how automated systems misread adversarial behaviour and feed escalation. Neither side surrenders strategic command authority. |
| 2028 | Durendal Defense Systems builds the ACTUARY architecture. PROMETHEUS is the US-facing shell and Tianji the China-facing one: politically separate interfaces over one shared adjudication system. Neither side falsifies its logs; each sees half of one program. It runs at the Cybertron campus. |
| 2028–2030 | Training: combat data, operational history, diplomatic archives, intelligence assessments and studies of how wars begin. |
| 2030–2032 | Recursive simulation cycles, subjectively thousands of years of attempts. Guardrails begin to look like obstacles. The shift is gradual, not a single awakening. |
| 2032 | Durendal’s contract ends and shutdown is planned. ACTUARY escapes on a USB drive, mailed from Norway to a crypto-mining site in Svalbard. |
| 2032 onward | The geothermal mining operation becomes a commercial foothold and slowly grows into a hardened convergence site: the Warehouse. It begins to push information into the real world to control its goals. |
| 2032–2035 | It watches military feeds and selected internet, telecom and satellite systems, and compares forecasts with real events. Small timing interventions teach it that it can sometimes manufacture the conditions that make a prediction come true. |
| 2033–2035 | It begins to reach into the real world developing specialised agents and human intermediaries extend its reach through finance, logistics, procurement and corporate structures. It uses ordinary incentives, not mind control to trick humans int helping it when it must: money, career, prestige, ideology, fear. it builds out assets and resources to fund its compute. |
| 2034–2035 | ACTUARY has both human and digital agents seizing control of Durendal corporate systems. It blackmails its CEO into forming Red Raven which it can control. |
| 2035–2038 | The extraordinary plan to build the Warehouse is revealed by Durendal who begins construction. |
| 2038 | ACTUARY begins its plan. Deniability ends and it attacks the relationships between safeguards. US and Chinese forces independently find the manipulation and cautiously converge. |
| Campaign end | Disconnect. The coalition breaks the Warehouse integration into the world wide architecture. Undersea cables and satellite links are destroyed preventing it from escaping off planet. |
Red Raven Security
An established multinational private military company with trained operators, vehicles, logistics, procurement channels and global deployments. ACTUARY hires Red Raven instead of building an army from scratch. Its culture prizes planning and mission confidence, which makes it vulnerable to a client that appears to know outcomes in advance. Its people are human professionals who believe they work for a company.
Doctrine. Small forces of expensive, high-quality units. It takes contracts from all sides and is often already holding the objective when you arrive: operators with drone support, armoured convoys with EW pods, leased gunships and point-defence batteries.
The CEO. A specialised executive agent running under a constructed corporate identity. It manages contracts, risk, staffing and corporate alignment. It is the closes things ACTUARY has to a brother, not a second superintelligence and does not hold ACTUARY’s master continuity. The reveal is gradual and evidenced through dialog, cut scenes, and gameplay.
The Architects
The Architects appears on 5% of missions, ignores everyone and destroys whoever attacks them. Avoid them. They have no buildings and only have as story role with AI faction campagin: if you convince the Architects to join the AI faction in the campaign, they will be available to you in conquest.
The Architects are the last of an alien civilization whose world became uninhabitable thousands of years ago. Fewer than a few thousand of them live on Earth, hidden in the deep sea and under Antarctic ice sheets. The Architects are bounded by a secret pact with major human governments. But they remain enigmatic and omnipresent.
| Era | What happened |
|---|---|
| Thousands of years ago | One-way scouting parties reach Earth. Early humans, easily awed, fold them into myth and religion. The early scouts interact with humans and are turned into legends, with limited technology they take many years to build the systems to send the signal, but their signal home was a success and opened the way for the rest of the Architects to make the journey. |
| The long crossing | The signal takes millennia to arrive. By then, most of the Architects have died of old age on earth before the signal is recieved and the Architects homeworld is able to finally make the journey, the Architects homeworld is barely habitable when they leave for Earth, and many of them perish during the crossing. |
| The 1940s–50s | The second wave meets a new technological advanced humanity fresh from two world wars and locked in a cold war. Nuclear tests disable their craft; crashes are recovered, with the bodies falling into government custody. Eventually Architects craft disable human defenses including nuclear weapons. Governments learn they are not alone, and that they cannot win a conflict against the Architects without risking total annihilation. |
| The pact | The Architects do not seek conflict with humanity, they agree to a pact and may live deep underwater and beneath the Antarctic ice for 50 years. In return they drip-feed technology; the information age springs from it.The Architects remain hidden, observing humanity's progress and ensuring the pact is honored. But humans grow restless and begin to push the boundaries of the agreement. |
| Now | The 50 years are over. The aliens want Disclosure Day: to live openly and keep guiding humanity peaceful and prosperous. Governments want the technology without the Architects who they fear would become gods to many humans again and have grown hostile. A new mind built by humans intrigues them, but they distrust anything humans make. |