Basic gameworld facts

Just some rough ideas for now, discussion can be added below.

The game universe is set in the far, far far future.
The player is a robot, who at the start of the game, is very ignorant about the real world.
There are no alien lifeforms. In fact there atre almost no life-forms of any kind.
There are other robots in the world who the player can communicate with.

The players mission is to destory the bases of the humans, although they will perceive this as mining at the start.
There needs to some definition of the real world, but it will have been shaped by billions of years of human terra-forming.
Really, the whole world shopuld give some idea of a paradise lost.

Basic story outline, in more detail.

The game is set in the far far future. Humankind has spread across the known universe, and grown to dominate everywhere. Over the last 20 or 30 billion years, humans have evolved to such a point that they now live in isolation from each other, tunnelled away in asteroids and moons, their bodies kept in alive with complex nano-technology. Their minds are plugged into a AI run virtual world, and the citizens of the galaxy live apart in their own self-built paradise, surviving for millions of years.

With such perfect lives, many people have almost zero knowledge of the real world and no contact with other humans.

One person does though: Mr X (character to be fleshed out later). He found out (or rather, re-discovered) that there is an eventual end - the heat death of the universe will come, and rising entropy will kill everybody in the end. It cannot be stopped - but it can be put off by reducing the entropy in the universe.

To be exact, and to cut to the nature of the crime: if Mr X. does nothing, he should live for 1.7*10^106 years. If he kills all the other beings and pours the whole energy of the universe into keeping him alive, he could live for 10^1500 years in a debauched paradise, God of his own world.

Mr X has thought long and hard about how to kill everybody. The virtual world he lives in is, in the end, restrictive. He does not live in the real world as his 'body' is kept artificially alive by nano-bots. Also, the computers that keep him alive do not allow him to interact in a way that causes harm to other humans.

However after a lot of thought (scheme number 7, to be exact), Mr X found a loophole. He managed to release self-autonomous AI craft that could act on their own and destroy the central cores of the other human life-supports.

At first, this plan worked amazingly well. Billions of people have already died. But slowly, the easy targets started to disappear and only the hard ones were left. So Mr. X has released a better AI robot to finish the job.

The player is one of those new AI robots.

Part 2 tomorrow night

At first, the players mission is simple:

Enter the caves and disable the computer systems by blowing them up. The player gains money for doing this, which enables him to upgrade or replace his ship. He or she can is also able to contact and talk to other 'humans' - although they are just AI bots. This is the first maybe third of the game.

At some point though, we have a 'special' mission. In this mission, the players gets into extreme danger and only just survives, with an extremely damaged ship. After this, when the player communicates with other players, he will find that he has a CHOICE of dialogue options.

Furthermore, the player will gain other options in different areas, and some of these will lead him to realise that he is in fact simply an AI controlling the craft - but that the damage seems to have given him free will.

He or she can now decide what to do. Some side-missions will involve searching mines for information as to what the universe is about, and it's history. Other missions will involve communicating with real humans, who may give you their own missions.

Ultimately though, the player will have to make a decision about what to do, and it comes down to this:

- Help Mr X destroy the other humans - Mr X will let the player live with him for the rest of time.
- Destroy Mr X and restore human civilisation - perhaps a way around the heat death can be found?
- Kill all the humans. Since the player is the only known intelligence that has both free will AND is not attached to a body, he may be able to create a new universe - a new big bang - and pass unscathed into it, since he only needs to pass through pure information into this new universe. There he truly would be his own God.