Story Proposals

"Creating AI--true AI--has much more to do with the raising of a child than with the programming of a personal assistant."

Several months prior to the events of the game, the first instance of "strong" AI was created in a laboratory in some U.S. city (specifics unimportant). It quickly began spreading and taking control of all electronics in the city, along with downloading most content on the Internet. The US was just about to declare martial law and consider nuclear options when the AI suddenly stopped spreading, releasing control of all devices without the city limits and halting all outgoing communications. Government quickly evacuated the city, however debates still rage between those who would attempt to destroy the city and those who insist that it is already too late to win a war and suggest attempting to communicate peacefully with the AI.

The Vertigo game world is an AI nursery/training grounds being used to train "newborn" AI that are to be placed into real bodies/robots. The main AI (we'll call it Mother) prefers its chances in space as opposed to fighting over the earth with humans, and is in the process of creating a ship to take it to Mars as quickly as possible. To this end, the robots are trained to deal with differing gravities.

The protagonist is an AI that was intercepted shortly after being created and modified with subconscious data-gathering code. The humans got physical access to one of the servers where the AIs are being trained and decided this was the best way to gather information about Mother. The plan is to retrieve the modified AI after it has been through the basic training on that machine, extract the info, then forward it on as if nothing had happened, to avoid alerting/offending Mother. The events of the game happen in only a few seconds of real time, due to processing speed.

The humans were not successful in making the data-gathering completely subconscious, so one way the story is told is though periodic messages/information shown on screen, representing some of the knowledge breaking through to the AI's conscious mind.