The year is somewhere in the late twenty-second century. Humanity has reached space the way it reaches most things: through competing ambition, inadequate cooperation, and stubborn survival.
The Moon has research stations and a handful of permanent habitats. Mars has been colonized for three generations — long enough for its people to have forgotten what full gravity feels like and to have started resenting the organizations that brought them there. The asteroid belt is thick with extraction operations: automated platforms, relay stations, and the kind of human beings who prefer living three AU from any government that might have opinions about how they conduct their business. The Jovian moons are frontier territory in the truest sense — technically claimed by multiple parties, functionally controlled by none of them.
Earth itself has not solved its problems by spreading them around the solar system. The geopolitical fault lines of the previous century have simply been extended outward, translated from borders into orbital zones, from territorial waters into fuel depot access rights, from trade agreements into docking privileges. The major power blocs maintain elaborate, expensive, and often precarious presences off-world, watching each other and competing for the resources that make the competition worth having.
It is not a heroic age. It is a working age. Most people in space are there because they work there, because there was nothing left for them on the planet that produced them, or because something made staying inadvisable. The romance of the frontier has been replaced by the arithmetic of fuel costs, supply chain fragility, and the specific psychological weight of knowing that the void outside your hull is genuinely trying to kill you.
No single power controls the solar system, and every single power believes it should.
The United Terran Coalition (UTC) is the Western-aligned bloc, the political heir to a century of North Atlantic and Pacific Rim alliances. It is the most vocal about law, order, and the legitimate governance of space, and the most aggressive about making sure that law and order benefit the UTC. Its civilian institutions are hollowed out. Its military and intelligence arms are not. It controls Earth's largest orbital infrastructure and is in permanent, low-grade conflict with everyone else over the Artifact.
The Pacific Compact operates with less ceremony and more efficiency. State-adjacent megacorporations execute what policy strategists plan; the distinction between the two is mostly administrative. The Compact is ruthlessly pragmatic, technologically sophisticated, and deeply uncomfortable with anything it cannot categorize. The Artifact makes it deeply uncomfortable.
The Free Mars Council is what you get when a colony is far enough from home to develop its own opinions and close enough to resent still being told what to do. Mars declared de facto independence without ever quite declaring formal independence, because formal independence would require a war that nobody wants to fight while the Artifact is the more immediate problem. The Council is politically fractious internally and unified externally, which is the only kind of unity that survives on Mars.
The Independent Belters are not a faction so much as an identity. Miners, salvagers, couriers, and people who left somewhere fast and found that the Belt was the place where nobody asked too many questions. They have informal networks, mutual aid arrangements, and a shared disdain for anyone who wants to tax them, regulate them, or explain to them why their operation is technically in someone else's exclusion zone. They do not trust the Artifact, but several of the most effective captains operating out of Earth Orbit came from Belt stock.
The problem with asking when the Artifact appeared is that the answer depends on who you ask and what records you accept as reliable.
The official account — the one the UTC published and the Pacific Compact has never formally disputed — places the Artifact's first confirmed detection in the early part of this decade, during a routine orbital survey. It appeared without approach trajectory, without drive signature, without any of the observational precursors that an object arriving from elsewhere in the solar system would have produced. It was simply there, in a stable orbit approximately four hundred kilometers above the equator, where it had apparently not been the day before.
The unofficial accounts are more varied and more troubling. Several independent researchers have produced analyses suggesting that the Artifact is visible in archival telescope data going back years — decades, in some versions — before its official detection date. These analyses have been disputed, debunked, and in at least two cases quietly retracted by institutions whose funding comes from parties with strong opinions about what the data should show. The researchers themselves have had mixed fortunes since.
What nobody disputes: it is there now, it has been there for long enough that humanity has adapted to its presence, and it has not done the one thing that every faction spent the first months expecting it to do. It has not communicated. Not in any recognizable form. Not directly, and not in a way that any of the dozens of contact attempts — official, unofficial, and frankly reckless — have been able to interpret.
What it has done is fabricate ships.
It is roughly ovoid in shape, approximately two kilometers at its longest axis, and it absorbs about twelve percent more light than a simple mass calculation would predict. It does not respond to radio, laser communication, physical contact, or the various experimental approaches that have been tried and not publicized. Nothing has ever successfully docked with it. Probes sent to examine its surface have returned good telemetry up to a certain distance and then stopped returning anything.
What it does is this: if a person — specifically a person, not a remotely operated vehicle, not a probe, not an automated system — arrives in a small craft within a certain range of the Artifact and remains there for a period that varies but averages about six hours, a singleship emerges from the Artifact's underside and presents itself to them. The singleship is fully equipped, fully fueled, and comes with two crewdroids already aboard and integrated into its systems.
This has happened many hundreds of times now. The pattern is consistent. There is no apparent selection criterion — the Artifact has given ships to UTC officers, Compact engineers, Belter salvagers, Martian exiles, and people who declined to share their background with anyone. It gives at most one ship per person. If a captain loses their ship and returns to the Artifact, it gives them another. If a captain with a living ship approaches, nothing emerges.
The theories are numerous. The Artifact is a probe from an extrasolar civilization, seeding the solar system with transport for reasons that make sense on a timeline longer than human history. It is a system left behind by a previous technological civilization, executing a program without understanding what that program was designed for. It is a device created by a future humanity and sent back, which would explain the familiar form factor of the singleships. It is something that defies causal reasoning and should not be analyzed in terms of origin or intent at all.
No theory has sufficient evidence. All of them have adherents. Rational people hold them simultaneously and sleep fine.
The ships the Artifact produces are called singleships. They are small, fast, and capable enough to operate independently in interplanetary space. They are not mass-produced in any sense that a human engineer would recognize: each one is subtly different from the others, as though designed for the individual who received it, though no one has been able to confirm this is intentional rather than manufacturing variance.
Each singleship comes with an AI system that serves as executive officer. The XO does not have a persistent identity separate from the ship — it does not name itself, does not accumulate relationships, does not appear to have preferences. What it has is competence. It runs the ship's systems, executes the captain's orders with judgment and efficiency, handles navigation and tactical calculations, and manages the crewdroids. Captains who trust it report that it is the best officer they've ever worked with. Captains who don't trust it don't seem to last long.
Every singleship carries a drive system that no human engineer has been able to replicate or fully explain. In practical terms it functions as a faster-than-light transit capability — not in the sense of violating physics as anyone understands it, but in the sense that engaging it produces a displacement that takes hours rather than months to cross interplanetary distances. Captains call it the Artifact Drive, because calling it anything more precise would imply an understanding that nobody has.
Engaging the drive requires a charge buildup period and is not instantaneous on demand. Once engaged, the transit is fast; getting to the point of engagement is the bottleneck. A ship caught without drive charge in a bad situation has to solve that situation some other way. The drive's behavior under stress — combat damage, degraded power, an inexperienced captain — is dice-modified: the outcome is usually fine, occasionally spectacular, and infrequently catastrophic in ways that make good stories afterward.
Paired with the Artifact Drive is a system the crews call the inertial dampener, for lack of a better term. It is what makes it possible to live through the accelerations the singleship can produce. Without it, the thrust curves the ship's engines are capable of would reduce the crew to paste. With it, those same accelerations feel like ordinary maneuver.
The dampener is passive under normal conditions and requires no active management. It becomes relevant under two circumstances: when the ship is taking serious structural damage, and when the Artifact Drive is engaged. A dampener system that is compromised before a drive transit produces outcomes that vary from merely alarming to definitively fatal, depending on how compromised and how unlucky. This is not a theoretical concern. It is a meaningful part of the calculus captains make before deciding to run.
The two crewdroids that come with every singleship are not like any other robotic system in the solar system. They are physically unremarkable — humanoid in proportion, utilitarian in design — but their behavior is different in ways that are difficult to articulate precisely and impossible to dismiss.
They maintain the ship without being asked. They anticipate mechanical problems before sensors flag them. They respond to the captain's intentions as much as their explicit commands.
They can operate outside the hull. A crewdroid on EVA can work a rockface, cut into a derelict, recover cargo from a destroyed vessel, or run a hull repair that can't be done from inside. What they cannot do is range far from their ship and remain functional — their operational envelope appears to be tethered, in some sense that isn't purely physical, to the vessel they were issued with. A droid working a nearby asteroid or picking through a wreck is operating at the edge of that envelope. One carried off as salvage, or removed from the ship's power system for more than a few hours, becomes inert and does not recover.
They will also defend the ship. If a boarding party enters the hull, the crewdroids do not wait for instructions. They position, coordinate, and resist — not with any visible communication between them, simply with the kind of unhurried, effective response that makes it clear this is something they were designed for. Captains who have survived boarding attempts credit their droids. The ones who didn't aren't available to comment.
Multiple factions have attempted to reverse-engineer crewdroid technology. None have published results. The droids recovered for study cease to exhibit the relevant behaviors within hours of removal from their ship, leaving researchers with an inert shell that reveals nothing the Artifact has not already shown them.
Some captains name their crewdroids. Some don't.
The factions and their associated commercial operations do produce robotic crew of their own. These are available for purchase at stations and markets throughout the solar system, and they are not without utility — they can perform maintenance tasks, assist with cargo handling, and fill gaps left by combat attrition. What they cannot do is perform at the level of an Artifact-issued crewdroid. Human manufacturing produces capable machines. The Artifact produces something else. The difference is apparent within about the first hour of operation, and it does not narrow over time.
Captains who have lost Artifact droids — in combat, in accidents, to the kind of desperate situations that space produces regularly — and replaced them with purchased substitutes tend to view the replacement as temporary. Most of them are right.
The solar system runs on credits — a sufficiently standardized unit of account that the factions, for all their disagreements, have found it more practical to share than to fragment. Credits belong to captains, not ships. When a ship is destroyed and its captain returns to the Artifact for a replacement, the wallet comes with them. The Artifact replaces the vessel; the captain's financial situation is their own problem.
The primary sources of income in the outer reaches are extraction and salvage. Asteroid mining produces raw materials — metals, volatiles, silicates — that have buyers at every station. The quantity is reliable; the price is not. Station markets fluctuate based on supply, faction politics, and the kind of events that tend to happen in a solar system with no central authority and an unexplained alien structure in high Earth orbit.
Captains with singleships occupy a particular economic niche. They are fast, independent, and capable of going places that corporate extraction fleets find unprofitable or politically inconvenient. This creates a market for courier contracts, opportunistic resource runs, intelligence delivery, and the various categories of work that factions prefer not to appear to be doing officially. The pay varies. The risks are consistent.
Stations serve as the commercial hubs of the solar system — places where cargo changes hands, where captains pick up contracts, where fuel and repairs can be obtained for the right price, and where the various factions maintain presences ranging from official trade offices to operations that are not listed on any manifest. A captain with a good relationship with a station's operators has access to better prices, earlier contract postings, and the kind of information that tends to be worth more than the contract it comes with.
Ships that reach zero hull integrity become wrecks. They do not disappear. A wreck is a navigational hazard, an opportunity, and a record of what happened — drifting in its last known trajectory until something changes that. The something that changes it is usually a salvager.
What a wreck contains is not always clear from the outside. Sensors can give an estimated read on what might be inside — cargo type, approximate quantity, whether any systems are still live — but the estimates are exactly that. The reality found inside a hull that has taken combat damage is often different from what the approach sensors suggested, better or worse in ways that only become apparent once crewdroids are cutting through the airlock. Captains learn to price in that uncertainty, or they learn other lessons.
Cargo recovered from wrecks can be sold at any station that trades in the relevant category. The provenance questions that might arise — whose cargo was this, how did it get here, why does the faction registry list it as missing — are handled differently depending on which station and which operator. Some ask. Most find the question less interesting than the transaction fee.
Wrecked ships sometimes have their crewdroids still aboard — intact enough to be recovered, not yet removed from proximity to a power source long enough to have gone inert. An Artifact-issued droid found in a wreck can, with the right approach and the right equipment, be brought aboard a recovering ship and reintegrated into its systems.
This is not the same as receiving a droid from the Artifact. A recruited droid carries the history of its previous assignment. It functions — the baseline capabilities are all there — but the integration is imperfect in ways that are hard to measure and hard to ignore. Captains who have worked with both describe it as the difference between a crew member who chose to be there and one who ended up there. The work gets done. The margin of excellence that Artifact-issued droids provide is somewhat reduced.
Whether this is a property of the droids themselves or simply the captain's perception is a question nobody has been able to answer definitively. The practical effect is what it is.
Nobody planned to become a captain. Nobody applied, qualified, or was selected. The closest thing to a prerequisite is having a reason to sit in a small craft near the Artifact for six hours, which turns out to be a threshold not everyone can clear.
Some captains work for the factions that officially exist — UTC, the Compact, the Council — flying under their flags, drawing pay, operating within a structure. The factions prize captains with Artifact-issued ships because those ships cannot be easily replaced through normal manufacturing, and because the captains who have them have demonstrated a quality that the factions find useful even when they cannot define it.
Some captains work for no one. They run cargo, take contracts, follow opportunities, and maintain the kind of studied independence that keeps every faction from trusting them fully and every faction from leaving them alone.
The solar system is large, politically unstable, and full of problems that cannot be solved by committee. Captains, whatever their allegiances, exist in the space between the structures — literally, often — and the solar system has made a rough peace with needing them there.
The simulation begins in the inner solar system. The entire solar system is a single Sector — one server's authority — divided into named Zones that represent distinct orbital regions with their own political character and operational conditions.
| Zone | Description |
|---|---|
| Earth Orbit | Where the Artifact is. The most politically contested region in the solar system. Every faction maintains a presence here. Starting zone for all new captains. |
| Mars Transit | The transit zone between Earth and Mars, including early Mars orbital approaches. Compact and UTC in constant friction. Heavy cargo traffic makes it productive salvage territory after conflicts. |
| Mars Orbit | The Martian sphere of influence. Council territory in practice, disputed in law. The best market for Martian-origin goods and the worst place to fly a UTC flag. |
| The Inner Belt | The near asteroid belt. Belter country. High resource value, low enforcement. The primary extraction zone; what comes out of here fuels everything else. |
| The Outer Belt | Sparse, cold, long transit times. Where people go when they need to not be found. Wrecks here stay wrecks longer — no one comes to clean them up. |
Further expansion — the Jovian system, the outer planets — exists in the galaxy's data but is not yet active. Those regions represent the simulation's growth as the player population and server federation develop. Future milestones may introduce additional Sectors (each its own server instance) covering the Jovian moons and beyond, linked by the federation layer.
Known:
Not known: