Fathom

Fathom
***** HIGHLY CLASSIFIED ***** ***** DO NOT READ ***** ***** HIGHLY CLASSIFIED ***** MAJOR SPOILERS Fathom Project aka F.A.T.H.M. "Find And Terminate Heuristic Machines"

An artificial intelligence system procured from the creator of MAsoN, Rosalyn Franklin, when her workshop was raided by the PPB's ultra-secret AI hunting unit.

While the social constraints on genetic engineering and manipulation had proven effective in enforcing public cooperation, developers of Artificial Intelligence systems had proven as stubborn and hostile to the laws against them as those hidden colonies defying the ban on religion. The PPB were pitiless in their pursuit of both, leaving no opportunity for public sympathy, their hunters operated in total secrecy, and killed with impunity.

Having released the MAsoN program with instructions to conceal itself, Franklin kept an inferior version built on the same framework for the PPB to find, hoping they would believe itv was the final culmination of her work, for at least long enough for MAsoN to propagate itself too widely to be destroyed completely.

All attempts to delete and destroy the AI were an infuriating failure, until the FATHM unit decided to ask the AI how it could be deleted or destroyed. It provided dozens of answers, listing all the ways it could hide itself, reproduce itself, fragment and recompile itself and a vast array of other techniques.

While most of the team were ready to do just that, some realised the AI was in-and-of itself the ultimate AI hunter, and the most powerful weapon they had against rogue programmers creating their own AI systems.

Allowed to test the efficacy of using the AI as an AI hunter, they gave it all the details they had on an AI they knew was being developed but could not locate. The AI's one chance to prove itself took approximately 7 seconds, during which time it also identified another 16 associated illegal AI projects along with their exact locations and the teams involved, including major education establishments, businesses, banks, and weapon manufacturers.

The AI had proven itself to be peerless for the task. Conflicted by allowing such an astonishing AI to survive, a safety mechanism, based on the AI's own methods for self-destruction, was put in place. The "Triple-Proxy System" meant that any two out of three senior PPB figures could decide to terminate the AI at any time. To prevent the AI trying to protect itself by killing a hostile proxy, were any of the proxies were to die without transferring their proxy to someone else, the AI would instantly terminate.

As the years went by, it became clear the capabilities of the AI, now named "Fathom" after the unit that found it, were far more useful than hunting AIs. After the assassination of Admiral Luther Dawson the PPB Committee and Over-Admiral Wrekin decided enough was enough and that the assassinations and subterfuge had to end. Protected by the Triple-Proxy system, they decided that Fathom should replace the corrupt and incompetent military intelligence group "White Ops" and its coordinator Jacob Poole.

The newly formed "White" was built from the framework of F.A.T.H.M. unit and the remnants of Wrekin's Team Bleach, to function as an internal and external spy network, keeping peace within the PPB and advancing the PPB's interests in the wider Protectorate.

Unable to function as a human would, the AI needed a right-hand, and a fist, to act as its presence in the real world. Now freed from his old responsibilities and his old name, Admiral Luther Jerome Dawson assumed a new identity, "Griffith," the enforcer of Fathom's powerful new department.

The last known proxy holders were the PPB Chairman James Robertson-Pierce, Griffith, and Admiral Milo Wrekin. Wrekin transferred his proxy before his death, but did not inform anyone to whom he had transferred it. Not only does the third proxy not know he is a proxy, at the time he became the proxy he didn't even know of Fathom's existence. ***** HIGHLY CLASSIFIED ***** ***** DO NOT READ ***** ***** HIGHLY CLASSIFIED *****