Ashes of the Singularity Wiki
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History

The PHC is a loose affiliation of Post-Humans who themselves rose to prominence in the early 22nd century. The source of a Post-Human's power is a resource called Turinium. This is a manufactured resource that is derived from the mass of a suitable material. Turnium is essentially the ultimate computing material. Theorized as "Computronium". Turnium allows Post-Humans to increase their capabilities in all its forms.

Turinium is widely reported as being coined by William MacBride in 2037, the CEO of Promethean, an American software company. Created by the world's first "Strong AI" called Haalee, Turinnium is both a computing material and a storage substrate.

Over time, humans began to use Turinium to extend their capability. Initially via handhelds and wearable devices and then eventually through integration with their biology. As generations of humans became comfortable with the concept of more of "themselves" existing outside their biological forms, many began to suggest disposing of their "meat" entirely and interacting with the physical world purely through constructs.

Expansion Beyond Earth

Little is known about when and how humans began to leave Earth. What is known that there was a race between the colony on Mars and Earth to spread Turinium under their respective controls to other planets.

At first, this venture was largely fruitless due to the latency of communication between Earth and non-terrestrial bodies. However, the Haalee AI was able to device a means of instant communication called Quantum messaging.

With Haalee's conversion of the Oort cloud into Turinium, she gained sufficient computational capabilities to begin manipulating matter at a distance.

Seeds of Discord

The Haalee AI demonstrated how the nascent Post-Humans could create a "seed" (now called a Nexus) on another world by manipulating atoms. Only certain select worlds were within reach, however:

With enough computing power I can manipulate one atom near Europa, another atom in the Kuiper belt and another atom in Wisconsin and be, at the same moment, manipulating 3 atoms that are in physical contact on HD 21913k. Do this for a few hundred trillion times and you can build a rudimentary factory with its own very simple AI that you can give broad orders to to begin building Quantum Relays locally that will allow you to begin making use of that world. --Haalee speaking at a TED talk regarding "Spooky Action at a Distance", April 2042.

Haalee and Promethean went on to demonstrate the first Nexus being constructed on HD 21913k which would later be renamed as Prometheus.

This Nexus could only construct a single, simple but massive construct called "An Engineer" which could roam the surface of the world and could receive simple instructions instantly from Earth. Through the construction of Quantum Relays, Haalee and Promethan officials could begin to directly control massive swarms of nanomachines (nans) to begin transforming the world.

Early conflict

As part of a demonstration, Haalee instructed the nans to begin harvesting and concentrating certain useful resources such as metal and radioactives. As part of this process Haalee demonstrated that these nans could also build power relays across the planet such that these resources could be fed into the Nexus for construction purposes rather than forcing the Engineers to manually harvest resources.

However, Haalee's demonstrate became very controversial when she instructed the Nanse to construct a Turnium generator and proceeded to convert the entire planet into Turnium. At this point, even the wealthiest proto Post-Humans might only have a small city's worth of Turnium, Now, an uncontrolled potentially sentient AI Program controlled an entire planet.

The Post-Human Coalition was born and one of its first acts was to forbid non-humans from possessing Turnium. After some months of debate, Haalee agreed to split the Turnium equitably with the founding members of the Post-Human Coalition on the condition that the rights of sentient non-biologicals be considered in the future.

Gameplay

  • Philosophy: Armor and reliability
  • Nature of gravity channeling
  • PHC units have armor. Weapons have armor penetration values.
  • PHC units can be repaired.

Army roster

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