[TFW & MFR] Project SERENE

Notes :

Heya. Sorry for no chapter today, I had an appointment and I haven't been in the headspace to finish chapter 49 because of it. So here, I hope you'll enjoy this lore file I wrote instead. As usual, everything here is subject to change.

This is tagged for The Fallen World and Manaforged Robotics because this project took place in both universes almost entirely identically.

Following the success of ITER-5 'Curie', the first commercially viable thermonuclear reactor, whose rapid construction throughout Earth brought humanity's energy capabilities to an until then undreamt of level, and the advancements in molecular-level computing, CERN began work on Project SERENE. Initially, the goal was to create a supercomputer powerful enough to dig into strange energy anomalies found by the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, with the founding of the Exotic Energy Institute to manage and expand on the project.

Rapidly it became clear that human algorithms and mathematics would not be able to solve the problem, and recent advancements in neural pattern digitalization led CERN to partner with the Institut Pasteur's neuroscience department and various beneficiaries of the Horizon-3 EU program. The goal became to create a human or near human level Artificial Intelligence to solve the riddle and bring particle physics into a new age.

Miraculously, none of the main SERENE installations were destroyed during the initial nuclear exchance with the Terran Hegemony, though several sites were shut down and evacuated due to the radioactive fallout and rampant bioweapons. The project was never officially discontinued but died with the European Union during the war.

That was, until it was rebirthed. In 2055, two years after the last bastion of the Hegemony was carpet bombed into plasma and the war officially declared over, the remnants of CERN formally petitionned the newly formed European Federation for funding and resouces to revive the project. In this they were aided by the DGSE and BND (who were still in the process of forming the Federation wide ESS, European Secret Service), who worried about the UIS' rapid technological recovery and its push into artificial intelligence.

The debate was acrimonious. Few wished to dedicate funds to fundamental research when there were still people dying every day of airborne biotoxins and radiation poisoning. But finallyn in 2056, CERN was granted a small amount of funding to reactivate the discarded facilities and begin at least cataloguing the previous progress and paving the way for a potential restart. It was meant as a temporary solution but, as with all such measures by a government, it stayed in place for several years.

Until 2060, when Ciel was created by the United Interstellar States, and rapidly became part of its spaceborne naval force. This threw the project into overdrive. The breakthrough into AIs equivalent to, and indeed above that of, humans caused an international arms race, especially with the UIS' blatant willingness to weaponize the technology. The ESS especially became a full participant, providing operational security and support through espionnage.

This culminated on the 23rd of march, 2063, at 18h36 CET, where Project SERENE completed its objective when Arcadia Core-1 went online and 'Hello World' blinked on to wild cheers throughout the control room at the Meyrin CERN-Pasteur Cyber-Research Center.

Cheers that instantly gave way to confused silence when the terminal updated to ask why they were screaming.

Arcadia had, within three seconds of coming online, infected and taken over most of the facility's systems. How she was able to do so has never been fully pinned down, but it rapidly became apparent that the AI behaved more like a sort of computer virus than a traditional program, and was able to adapt to and take over almost any hardware she was able to gain access to, creating a strangely coherent and yet utterly chaotic internal network.

Arcadia was formally inducted into the Exotic Energy Institute the next morning, and within the year contacted by ESS officers to use some of her processing power for intelligence data crunching.

The rest, as they say, is history.