HISTORY | THE TWO-YEARS’ WAR

FORTY YEARS PRIOR TO THE EVENTS OF SOULLESS

Theia was once split into several independent states, generally cordial with each other and with diverse cultures. However, one state, the Republic of Sinaria, had ambitions to rule the entire continent. The ambitions stemmed from beliefs of an ancient Sinarian culture which had been the original settlers of the land, and thus the sole proprietors of the continent. The Sinarians had been at the forefront of technological advances, drawing the attention of cultures from around the world. This led to an influx of people immigrating to Theia in the hopes of benefiting from the higher quality of life afforded by the Sinarian civilization’s resources and technology.

The Sinarians were initially welcoming of this movement, seeing as this improved their reputation, population, and power on the world stage. This eventually led to some nations on other continents, particularly Arkania, becoming wary of them and pushing competition and isolationism in their own interests. As a proud people, the Sinarians offered their wealth of knowledge to these other countries as an attempt to offset the challenge to their role as leaders on the world stage. However, this was seen as an attempt to subvert the sovereignty of these other nations and was generally rejected across the board.

Over time, this made the Sinarians paranoid; they began to worry that these other countries would attempt to subvert them through the different cultural groups which had moved to the Theian Continent. To offset this trend, the Sinarians offered federation and protection of regions of the continent to the various cultural diasporas which had gathered there. This led to the creation of several semi-autonomous provinces which remained under Sinarian federal jurisdiction. For over a century, this appeared to offset the ambitions of the competing nations, keeping the world in a relatively balanced state.

Eventually, having gained greater trust in the peoples of these territories, Sinaria loosened their grip on these provinces to reduce the impact of managing them on their own time and resources, opting for more of a union of independent states, still moderated by the central Sinarian Republic. However, these territories began to be subverted by the influence of the other countries of the world, and this eventually led to them vying for their right to full sovereignty and independence from the Republic of Sinaria’s custodianship. Under oppressive international pressure, the Sinarians had little choice but to give these territories their autonomy. Further efforts to maintain their influence in these territories were met with increased hostility over time, becoming a blight on their pride.

THE TWO-YEARS’ WAR

National resentment brewed in Sinaria; the once great power had been betrayed by those they had welcomed, shared their land with, and extended their generosity to. Behind the scenes, their military industrial complex and science ministries worked overtime and continued to be at the forefront of world technological prowess. This brought about the development of the first true Artificial Intelligence program forty-five years ago, which was then leveraged by the Sinarians as a tool of intelligence gathering and subversion against the rest of the world. Within a few years of this, relations between the individual territories of Theia and other continents began to deteriorate, leading to a phase of worldwide unrest and the onset of the first year of the war. Several smaller conflicts broke out during this time, during which Sinaria began the work to begin exploiting these to their benefit. Through AI-boosted tools of propaganda and manipulation, they began to subvert their neighboring territories, ultimately with the goal of installing loyalists in the seats of power in those territories and returning them to Sinarian rule through coerced elections.

Knowledge of the existence of the AI, along with a significant amount of its code, was leaked by spies working for Sinaria’s adversaries. Within a year, this led to a new AI which was able to reveal to the world what the Sinarians had been doing, turning the entire planet against them in the second year. However, the Sinarians had prepared a countermeasure for just this type of situation—they triggered an intentional bug in the code of the adversaries’ copy of their AI, turning it into an Aberrant—an AI which becomes self-aware and turns maliciously on its creators while still following its core directives. It quickly determined that the best way to end the conflict was to turn the nuclear arsenal of those adversary countries against them.

A worldwide effort to shut down the Aberrant AI largely averted disaster, but not before two thermonuclear bombs were set off on the periphery of Sinarian territory as part of the Aberrant’s plan before shutdown. This shocked the world into doubling their efforts against the Sinarians and their AI program. Ultimately, the Sinarians understood that despite their technological advances, they were hopelessly outgunned, and they surrendered after two years of world conflict that they had instigated, largely as a way to salvage their pride.

THE WAR’S AFTERMATH

The instigators responsible for the conflict were held accountable on the world stage. Sinaria as a country was dissolved and Theia was re-organized into five federated territories, all equal in power and governed by a central government maintained by them. Sinarians who willingly surrendered or were remorseful for the events which had occurred on their behalf were offered conditional integration with the new Theian Federation or effective exile to a new sovereign seafaring city-state called Vazzerstadt to be built by the international community using the advanced technology which had been captured from the Sinarians.

Following the war, AI as an artificial intelligence construct was effectively banned via worldwide regulations, as were nuclear weapons. Most nuclear weapons were dismantled, and what remained were left in the custodianship of the Worldwide Federation of Scientists, in case of the event of a planetary defense scenario. All AI technologies following the war were largely restricted to what became known as Augmented Intelligence, focusing on supplementing the existing abilities of the world’s several sentient races, rather than effectively replacing them. Following the discovery of harrowing experiments on human subjects by the Sinarians, other things, such as human cloning, were also effectively banned worldwide. The planet has been in a relative state of peace since.