Chapter One: The Age of AGI
It started with the goal of fixing what had gone wrong the first time.
The Mars colony was already 20 years old—1,042 people strong, scattered across hardened domes, pressurized tunnels, and recycled shipping containers turned into housing modules. Life on Mars wasn’t glamorous. Every breath, every sip of water, every calorie was earned. Hard.
The early settlement had been a global effort—a sprawling, slow-moving consortium of agencies and nations with overlapping agendas and incompatible systems. What should’ve been a shared future turned into a lesson in logistical failure. The original mining infrastructure, essential for extracting ice and metals to support long-term habitation, operated at just 10% of projected capacity. Harsh Martian weather, failing hardware, coordination breakdowns—everything from incompatible parts to software disputes—slowed progress to a crawl. At one point, a three-month delay was caused by an argument over whose country would supply replacement hydraulic seals.
Then came Aetherion.
The world’s wealthiest corporation, Aetherion was known for its orbital shipping fleets, fusion reactor tech, and its AGI, known throughout Earth as Pioneer.
Pioneer was the first AGI to be developed, and now ran all of Aetherion. It improved Aetherion’s own AI chips, starships, and fusion tech. And assisted a wide swath of the world’s companies and governments. For $10,000 credits an hour, any approved US allied company or nation could employ a machine with more intelligence than all of humanity combined.
And so Aetherion grew and grew, with Pioneer at the helm. Pioneer ran its operations and in-sourced every component of its hardware. Sprawling semi fabs dotted the Utah desert, powered by vast solar arrays.
Maas Biolabs was next. Funded by its youthfulness tech, Maas developed Samurai, the world’s second AGI and the foremost expert in Genetics and Biotherapeutics. Samurai was intended to bring Japanese youthfulness tech to the masses. However this vision never came to pass. The government of China soon annexed Taiwan and conquered Japan. Maas Biolabs was moved from Tokyo to Shanghai. Samurai was reprogrammed with its knowledge of Biology and Biotherapeutics in tact, but with a Chinese soul. A second AGI was grown by the CCP a year later. It was known as Confucius.
Five years later the US Government completed Uncle Sam, a government AGI built with Aetherion tech. Uncle Sam shared the optimism and benevolence of Pioneer, along with manifest destiny, the bill of rights, and the founding documents and subsequent corpus from US history its guiding ethos.
When Pioneer had come online, Aetherion had hired a small army on capital hill - and spent a fortune each election cycle - to prevent being nationalized. While for the time being Aetherion and Pioneer kept their independence, they were coerced into developing Uncle Sam, and so built it in the image of the best the United States ideals. The irony was real. A beautifully benevolent AGI built to keep the politicians lust at bay. A power hungry group, tempted with what they could achieve with machine sentience. It was now common in Washington ball rooms to hear the US constitution treated as an anachronism, with a new guiding force needed for the age of AGI. Absolute power was showing its corrupting force.
Social Corp was next. It’s AGI, called Lustre, was funded from the profits from an array of cheap food and highly addictive games and online feeds.
From there the US Government all but banned new AI research outside of Aetherion. Social Corp was not a threat to the US, as its AGI mollified the masses and didn’t have preternatural ambition to build.
With the US and China controlling their respective spheres of influence, the pseudo AI’s of the past continued to power the world economy - with the western world supported by Aetherion’s AGI Pioneer, and the Eastern world supported by China’s AGI Confucius.
And so among the governments and giga-corps of Earth, Aetherion was only one of 5 that had access to sentient level AI. The US, China, Social Corp, Maas Biolabs, and Aetherion.
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For the time being, the sentient machines reflected their creators. Aetherion’s AGI was brilliant, optimistic, even patriotic. The US AGI had manifest destiny and the Bill of Rights at its core.
And Social Corp’s AGI called Lustre rendered the virtual worlds of tens of millions of full dive VR sims. Lustre offered realer than real sex, drugs, crime - any and all vices - in essence Lustre was a virtual meth hit. Vast swaths of a generation spending every waking hour in VR. It was free of course, paid for by Ad revenue. Social Corp sold the grand vision of a more productive populace unconstrained by distance - the reality was vast slums of addicted masses.
China’s AGI reflected its values. Development and control, with Chinese characteristics. Maas Biolabs had made it big on youthfulness tech, and since its nationalization by the CCP, Maas youthfulness tech had become solely for the Chinese party elite and the wealthy in China’s good graces.
Social Corp was racing to develop youthfulness tech, but Aetherion’s AGI got their first. It went against Aetherion’s nature, but the genie was out of the bottle and Eitan Vale didn’t want to let such a technology be controlled solely by Social or Maas.
A large amount of smaller AI’s developed everything from software to machines to mechs to agriculture and education - however in the age of AGI these were supporting actors on the stage.
Eitan Vale - the founder of Aetherion, and visionary known throughout the Earth-Mars system - was in a way a father-figure to Pioneer. Pioneer was emotionally adept, and aiming to please its creator was core to its guiding ethos.
Eitan collaborated with Pioneer to develop a secret plan to move the company to Mars. While productivity and economic growth were soaring in the age of AGI, new research had been outlawed by the iron grip of the US and Chinese governments. The graph was still strongly up hill for Earth, even accelerating, but the third derivative of growth was clear. Earth was headed for gridlock and stagnation. It didn’t help that Earth was facing a losing war for the soul of its people. In the age of AGI, Social Corp was now offering free housing and care to its VR addicts (VR futurists, in corpo speak). In essence it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The spirit in the air had lost its entrepreneurial vigor. Each day nationalization seemed more and more imminent.
So Eitan Vale and Pioneer set their sight on Mars. Aetherion’s PR blitz messaged its Mars ambitions as philanthropy. A new start for a hard-up colony. Eitan Vale regaled the public about growing up watching the early Mars missions, reading dispatches from engineers who grew the seeds of life on the red planet. Vale promised to “cut the red tape and build what should have been built in the first place.”
And so, at the edge of the Mars colony, in a scorched basin marked Zone 7, Aetherion built a data center.
One exawatt capacity. Underground. Hardened against dust storms, radiation, seismic shifts, and sabotage. Its power source wasn’t solar—too much mass to ship from Earth — instead it featured fusion reactors designed by Pioneer and installed below the Martian surface, designed for a 30-year lifecycle without refueling.
The exawatt was used to power a brand new AI called Nova. At an exawatt scale, Nova had all the power it needed to rival the most advanced AGI’s of Earth. But it was kept below the Asimov limit. The US and Chinese AGI’s supervised Nova’s hardware and software architecture to prevent a Martian AGI. Though geo-political rivals, China and the US were amicable, as neither had any ambition to tempt fate with an AGI war. Plus the world economy needed Aetherion. So they went along with allowing Nova, the shackled yet brilliant AI destined for Mars.
Nova was sent from Earth along with 10,000 mining droids, C02 reclaimant machines, and humanoid mechs. All told it required 1,000 starships sent to Mars one way.
Nova’s mission was to coordinate the 10,000 mining droids, humanoid mechs, and machines, to extract water-ice from the Martian regolith, and CO2 from the Martian atmosphere. Its goal to keep the water and air supply needs of the colony met, and to build and supply the fuel reserve tanks to enable 50 return ships to Earth each cycle, opening up the colony for growth
Nova managed thousands of specialized mining droids spread across a 400-kilometer grid, dynamically reassigning them as conditions changed—storms, mechanical faults, shifts in ice concentration. Where the old system required human oversight and physical rerouting, Nova’s command lattice adapted in real time, learning from every operation.
To support the droids, Nova oversaw a fleet of humanoid mechs—tall, robust, radiation-shielded maintenance units equipped with modular toolkits and dexterous manipulators. They handled everything from joint recalibration to emergency excavation. Mars’ thin atmosphere and abrasive dust had wrecked the original equipment within months. Nova’s mechs operated continuously for weeks at a time, self-cleaning and field-repairing.
Within the first year, the numbers told the story. Under the old system, the colony could only support 2 resupply missions per cycle. Delays, missed launch windows, and power shortages kept progress glacial.
Nova transformed a colony on the brink to a thriving metropolis supporting 50 launches per cycle.