P4
P4 was a brilliant background described by a GM on 20 Dec 2008.
If he doesn't update us on the campaign on this page the whole thing goes up.
Decentralised Autonomous Defence Cluster P4 had finally come to a conclusion. The P4 cluster was a self sustaining autonomous robotic military designed to function without any outside contact for extended periods of time and only to be called upon in the event of the outbreak of a full scale war.
As time went on the various AI protocols that administered O4 set about the task of fortifying the entire moon on which P4 made its home, building thousands of miles of reinforced tunnels under the surface of the planet then filling them with robotic factories which in turn filled gigantic storage bays with millions upon millions of robotic soldiers, vehicles and munitions.
A thousand years later the AI deemed that it had reached optimum capacity with nearly a forty million robotic soldiers, tanks and aircraft nearing half that number and eight berthed frigate class starships on standby. So P4 went in to standby mode, all AI bar the one responsible for Military command and control shut down. Tunnels and storage bays were drained of air and pumped full of inert gas and the colossal hatches that lead to the surface were sealed shut. The Military AI awaited orders.
It was not until another two thousand years later that P4 so much as moved again.
P4 began to send out probes back to the well known Naval outposts, slower than light and always via other systems as to disguise their source, just in case the enemy was watching. As each probe reported back with no contact P4 began to send probes back to the more obscure military bases, then the colony worlds, and finally to the homeworld, nothing.
The P4 Military AI was at a loss, with the standby loop broken and no source of further orders there was no apparent course of action to take. The situation demanded independent action, but the only action it was allowed to take was to seek advice from another military source. The thought struck it; the other administrative AIs, there were classified as low ranking military personnel, their counsel was as valid as that of an organic.
The Military AI reactivated the other AI systems and requested that they help formulate a plan of action. The scenario was unprecedented and most of the AI systems could not initially be adapted to independent thought. The Engineering AI, which had been designed to find solutions to complex mechanical problems determined that it could make physical changes to the AI system cores that would, with the help of some minor programming changes, allow them to think outside of their original roles.
It was agreed that these changes were desirable in all but the Military AI which had elected to maintain unchanged as a matter of security, the other AIs agreed. The process was slow and clumsy; success was a matter of trial and error. The Maintenance AI had to be restored to its original specification on more than one occasion, but when completed the result was a group of Artificial Intelligences that could make and agree on a complex decision in less than a century.
It was eventually decided that in spite of the potential danger of revealing the location of P4, that in order to accurately gauge the current situation in the region an FTL capable craft had to be sent. The pre-constructed frigate classes were too conspicuous to send, that much was clear and no designs for smaller FTL capable craft had been provided. This situation mandated the design and construction of a new, smaller class of ship. The Engineering AI set about the job of designing the class. The Engineering AI hadn’t been designed for this, its normal duty was to oversee the construction of larger mechanical assets and to plan the layouts of the tunnels.
Eventually the Engineering AI was able to finalise a design that it considered to be suitably efficient, fifty metres long and comprised of angular, roughly rectangular blocks full of sensor modules, with a single fusion engine at the rear and equipped with the smallest Hyperspace engine available. It took nearly a decade to design but only a few hours to construct.
The probe reported in after it surveyed each system in the area that the parent civilization considered to be known space, even some of the territories outlying the territory of the enemy. The news was not what the P4 AIs wanted, there was no sign of their parent race or even the enemy. After exploring all of mapped space the probe returned home to P4 nearly twelve thousand years later pitted and scarred from micrometeorite impacts.
The AIs of P4 had not been idle all that time, the home the probe returned to was not the same P4 that it had left. The AI council had concluded relatively early during the probe’s mission that their civilization was for all intents and purposes extinct and that all other Decentralised Autonomous Defence Clusters had either been dismantled or destroyed at some point. Centuries had been spent formulating this conclusion and the course of action that the AIs decided to take took almost a millennia to decide upon.
The last ten thousand years had been spent designing a new, miniaturised AI core type that would be used to upgrade each individual military unit within P4’s arsenal to the level of the current Administrative AIs and each Administrative AI would in turn be upgraded to be capable of objective, independent thought on a scale vastly beyond that for which they were originally intended.
They had concluded that, as their original duty was to provide autonomous defence for their parent civilization that faced with the loss of their original civilization and being the only apparent remnants of that civilization it is their duty to protect their civilization on a conceptual level.
They would form a new civilization and the armoured legions of P4 would become its citizens.
Making the changes to the massed forces of P4 was once again slow, however unlike the changes that came before it and was slowed only by the scale of its implementation, not by the design process. Millions upon millions of new components needed to be manufactured and installed and similarly the command structures that had been in place when P4 had been a military installation needed to be worked around or overwritten in order to facilitate the transition to civilian functionality. The AIs painstakingly designed what would be their new civilization, even creating new and different environments in which to activate different batches of their new subjects that would act as a random seed in order to ensure a difference between individuals. The process was an immense undertaking and the subterranean catacombs beneath the planet’s surface expanded tenfold in that time.
Eventually, nearing fifty thousand since P4 was originally founded the new civilization had been established, a slowly growing population of sentient individuals had been created each with varying individual traits and views, the population was stable and functional, the newly upgraded Administrative AIs agreed that whilst it was somewhat shallow it was at least the best start they could possibly manage. And if needs arose it could be modified or expanded later.
It was approximately a hundred years after the establishment of the P4 civilization that the P4 passive sensor observatory began detecting sporadic, low intensity hyperspace ripples.
Ever since the probe returned its scans from known space the P4 Administration AI had been expecting this. Several young races, who had at P4s initial construction been little more than animals squatting in dirt or sucking on hydrothermal vents had begun experimenting with hyperspace technology. They were not alarmed by this, and were in fact looking forward to being able to engage in their first interactions with other civilizations once they matured to the point where they were ready to make contact themselves.
P4 watched intently the activities of the local races for the next several centuries, cheering in delight at every technological advancement made and despairing every time a civilization ended itself with nuclear or biological weapons. They even knocked a few comets and asteroids off collision courses occasionally.
P4 was elated when they learned that the first few of these races had achieved manned FTL travel, and made their preparations to meet them, there was a great deal to do, translation systems had to be constructed, diplomats were required, some trained some constructed bespoke for the task. Less intimidating spacecraft would also be required.
Then the passive sensor observatory detected something else and a very ancient alarm sounded throughout the AI council relayed through the Military AI. It was receiving a message.
The message was the last line of a Decentralised Autonomous Defence Cluster command code containing very little actual information. The source was an ancient military relay probe on the surface of some moon. The probe had begun transmitting again when one of the new races who had recently begun colonising space began construction of underground habitats on the moon using nuclear explosives.
Initially the probe was ignored, it transmitted a single, incomplete message once encoded in such a way that it would be generally meaningless to anyone who found it. It wasn’t until the Military AI, now considered a venerable eccentric was parsing the old command structure files that it noticed that something was wrong.
The message, syntactically, matched the requirements for an Emergency Activation Message. The code didn’t trigger a reaction in P4, indicating that the code was for a different installation, or contained a command that P4 wasn’t intended to recognise. This alarmed the military AI which was still largely unmodified and technically had direct control over all of P4. If the relay probe had been part of a general activation message it may still contain P4’s activation code in its memory.
Unmodified transmission of this message would have been catastrophic. While most of the command and control systems of P4 had been circumvented for the most part they were still there and an EAM would result in the Military AI and all of the other, subordinate AIs and by proxy the individual P4 citizens to revert to the military command mode that it had been created in all those thousands of years ago, thousands of years of work would go to waste.
Worse is that a correctly modified EAM could be reconfigured to specify a new commanding party, rendering P4 mindless tools of destruction. Conversely, if P4 managed to obtain its own command code it could modify and transmit the code in such a way that it would be rendered permanently and totally independent.
The P4 Administration council convened immediately, and moved decisively, the probe would be recovered as quickly and quietly as possible. Many of the younger civilizations would jump at the chance to acquire an immense army of machines without even stopping to consider the ethical ramifications, others would take things just because they knew they could be traded to others and some were still unready to face the knowledge that beings such as the P4 existed.
A small group of its best scout class soldiers to retrieve the relay, they reached the system undetected, their ship was designed especially for the task, fast, stealthy and gleaming red. On the surface of the moon floating sensor machines scanned the very fabric of reality for the faintest traces of the hyperwave signal that would reveal the location of the relay.
Hundreds of square kilometres were searched manually, false sensor data was continuously beamed to every passing spacecraft. Days passed but the relay was found.
The memory module, however, was not and neither were many of the relay’s other internal components, intelligence later revealed that the moon had been the site of a minor conflict between two of the younger races as was evidenced by the various vehicle tread markings that were visible around the site where the relay was found. It was determined by the Military AI that one of the young races, must have found the probe then attempted to salvage it.
The situation had become a problem. Whilst none of the young civilizations could feasibly access the device the time when they could would eventually come and the result could easily destroy P4. With the device in unknown hands it was also too dangerous for any formal contact with any of these new races to occur as they would inevitably spread knowledge and rumours about P4 between each other.
The P4 AI council convened again on the issue all seeking the wisdom and guidance of the Military AI. It ruled that the best way to deal with the situation was to default to what they had been designed for until the time came where they could secure the memory module or otherwise learn of its contents.
P4 would remain hidden and would seek out the memory module covertly.
Unexplained lights in the night sky, Ominous figures seen lurking around military facilities. Archaeologists going mysteriously missing, unexplained spacecraft accidents, ghost ships and raids on convoys by unknown ships. This is the legacy of P4 until the time comes when their freedom is assured.