The Machine Stops

After the previous session’s arrival at the world of Opadajo, and their success at getting the Mainframe to help them refuel the Deepnight Revelation, the players had to come up with a plan on how to get down to the Pyramid on the surface.

For prepping for this session, I realised that as GM I needed to know what the Mainframe’s plan was. Lord Sivas (and NPC) had managed to convince it to help with a really good roll, so we hadn’t fleshed out exactly what arguments had been made. I decided that Lord Sivas had convinced the Mainframe that the Travellers had a sort of Prime Directive, that forbade them from interfering with lower technology worlds.

The Mainframe’s main reason for paranoia, was that it didn’t want anything to happen that would upset the status quo. It didn’t need more technology – it already had enough to keep control of the world. It couldn’t expand beyond the world, because it was limited by light speed delay. Previously it had tried expanding to other systems, and discovered that all that did was create a rival.

It could try to destroy the Deepnight, but that was a risk. The best possible outcome would be the Deepnight would be destroyed with no losses to the Mainframe. But there was always the risk of losing its defence ships, or even parts of itself in a shooting war, which would weaken its position. So starting a fight, except in self defence, served no purpose.

Helping the Deepnight then was the least dangerous path, so it was willing to send fuel up to it, as long as nobody from the crew came down to the planet.

Which is just what the Travellers wanted to do. Head down, get inside the Pyramid, and find out what was there. The Pyramid was rumoured to be sealed with a genetic lock, which the young priestess, a descendent of those bred to help the Ancients, might be able to open. Indeed, the Priestess wanted to go down to explore, so told the crew that she had heard voices in her head telling her to go down. A lie, but it got her what she wanted.

The crew were, as usual, being very careful. They didn’t want to go down unless they were certain that they could get back up. Both getting down and getting up would require being able to do so without being detected. They had about a day, whilst the supply shuttles brought fuel up from the planet’s surface. They came up, unloaded their fuel, then headed back down again.

Their resident hacker thought that she could override the external sensors on the shuttles, so that a few people in vacc suits could board. They were un-crewed, so they had a good chance of not being spotted. Khadashi, Zanobia, and Talliena the priestess suited up (the first two in Battledress, so they could make use of stealth), and floated across to a shuttle. They successfully got inside.

As the shuttle headed back down to the ocean, it detected a problem with its sensors, so redirected to the maintenance shipyard. This took its flight part over the Pyramid, and after it had slowed down enough, the three exited the ship and floated the rest of the way down on grav belts.

As hoped, Talliena’s hand print opened the door, revealing a long passage that led into the pyramid. Lights lit up along the ceiling as they stepped inside, but there was no apparent way of closing the door. There were some lit dots on the wall, which when pressed starting spawning more dots, which spread along the walls in a Game of Life type of pattern.

The passage leads into a circular room where the walls are covered in blank displays. A glass spiral staircase leads upwards to a room above. Everything is musty and covered in dust.

Some of the screens blink on, showing a local star map. Touching the stars starts to bring up information, written in Oynprith. It seems to show information on biology experiments on these worlds, so Zanobia starts to record it.

Khadashi notices that the light outside has changed – there is now a bright spotlight being shone down the passage, carried by a floating grav vehicle. Humanoid shapes are clustering around the outside of the entrance. The Mainframe, having been watching the Pyramid carefully for years, had noticed the open door quite quickly, and has sent its servitors over to investigate.

The only exit from this room seems to be up the stairs, so the Travellers head upwards to avoid contact with the Servitors.

Upstairs is another single room, with no exits. It is somewhere in the centre of the Pyramid, but windows seem to look out over the city. There is an egg in the room, about 1.5m tall. Smooth and plain. It looks like some form of cold sleep casket. At times, the displays change, showing scenes from the first landing of humans outside the Pyramid.

There are no visible controls in here, so Zanobia decides to try voice control, asking questions in the Droyne language Oynprith. That wasn’t something I’d considered, but it seemed like a sensible thing that would work.

The sound of servitors below got louder, and the Travellers’ battledress starting warning of hacking attempts. They switched off their suite external comms, and Zanobia asked for the outer doors to be closed. Then there was silence, followed by a clattering, then more silence. Further questions revealed that three of the nearby systems had been sites of biological experiments, but that things hadn’t been fully successful, and that the experiments had been terminated. At some point the outer screens went dark, and there was a dull rumbling and a slight shaking of the Pyramid.

Asking about the blue stars, they were part of a sterilisation plan.

Initiate Sterilisation? Y/N ? You have 3.26 years to reach minimum safe distance.

Zanobia is quite adamant that sterilisation should not continue. Eventually they manage to get the capsule open, revealing the desiccated corpse of a Droyne. The Pyramid computer confirms that the Droyne came from the expedition that the Deepnight has already found information about, which passed along a similar route 300,000 years ago. There was a fourth world were experimentation had been started, but not completed.

The Pyramid was starting to complain about loss of memory. The outer screens came back on, revealing the city as before – but most of it was dark. Some distance away, towards the centre of the city, was a region that was burning. Beyond that, tower blocks were broken and collapsed.

They requested that the doors opened, and headed outside as the computer systems in the Pyramid died. The last thing it did was to launch two small craft space ward. Radiation levels were high, but below what their suits could handle. Collapsed servitors surrounded the outside of the Pyramid, together with crashed grav cars. No lights were on in the city, but there were some people milling around in the streets not far away. A meteor streaked across the sky, as a starship hurtled into the ground.

Eventually they got contact with the Deepnight Revelation. Apparently, there had been a lot of network activity between the cities where the main computer nodes were. One by one, each was destroyed in a nuclear fireball. Apart from City Alpha, which simply went dark.

The Deepnight was also tracking the two craft – they seemed to be on a trajectory that would take them towards the 100 diameter limit. With sudden realisation, Khadashi asked if they were on a course where they could jump to the two blue stars. On confirmation, a very desperate request was made to destroy them. With some luck, the Deepnight shot both of them down before they could jump.

What followed was rescue and debriefing. From what the crew could piece together, the Pyramid had launched an attack against the Mainframe after the servitors went inside. As the Mainframe’s nodes came under threat, it destroyed them with preset nuclear charges rather than let them be compromised. Possible the Mainframe and Pyramid had managed to corrupt each other beyond repair.

Since the Mainframe controlled everything on this world, everything had stopped functioning. Power had ceased, transport had stopped. Nothing was controlling the spacecraft bringing in supplies. Several million people had been killed in the nuclear fireballs, but the other eight billion had a collapsing civilisation and no functioning government or technology to worry about. Oops. The crew were convinced that it wasn’t their fault though.

Comparing the notes that Zanobia took, it seems the three systems where experiments had been terminated now had Venus-like Cytherean worlds, with acidic atmospheres. The fourth world was habitable, and according to the crew of the trader they had run into previously, had a biology of red plant life. Much like the blood petals which seemed linked to the Biologicals.

The Deepnight had finished refuelling, so it could just leave. Or they could try and stay to help the people here. It was decided that they’d have to fend for themselves. The next destination was the experimental garden world, to try and see if that was the source of the Biologicals.

So this was totally outside the scope of the campaign, but I wanted to bring in some ideas from later in the campaign, as well as provide a way of fleshing out some more details about the experiments that the Droyne had been doing. This will all need to tie in with things that happen later in the campaign (which I read a long time ago, but need to refresh my memory about soon), but I’m hoping that won’t be too hard.

I think the players were a little bit guilty about possibly destroying a whole civilisation. But the other point of view is that they’ve freed them from the control of a paranoid dictator computer. They also managed to stop detonation of the two blue giant stars, which had been the final “nuke everything from orbit” plan the Droyne had left behind in case their experiments went really wrong. So in all, the mission was really a success.