Sixty-five million years ago, a creature of pure chaos, a W'rkncacnter, had crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. It had been sleeping ever since.

In the early spring of 1994, a holographic image of a Jjaro diplomat named Ryu'Toth appeared before the leaders of the United States with an urgent warning.

The W'rkncacnter had been sleeping since its arrival, but in eight days it would awaken. The Jjaro instructed humanity to send a team into a pyramid that had formed over the creature's body, arm a low-yield nuclear device, and stun the being until the Jjaro could implement a more permanent solution.

An eight-person Special Forces team was deployed. Seven died inside. The eighth, alone and armed with nothing but a knife after his rifle was destroyed in the drop, navigated the pyramid's horrors, armed the bomb, and escaped to the surface.

This was humanity's first brush with forces far beyond its understanding. It would not be the last.

War between the Independent Asteroid Government of Icarus and its neighbor, the Republic of Thermopylae on the asteroid of Onicis 492. Dead soldiers recycled as Battleroids – heavily implied to be built using Jjaro technology found by colonists and explorers. Battleroids get onto both asteroids and kill almost everyone.

In 2214, the United Interplanetary League sets up rules for the appropriate use and storage of Battleroids.

The UESC purchased Mars's moon Deimos from its freeholders and began an audacious engineering project: hollowing out the entire moon to construct humanity's first interstellar colony ship. This was the UESC Marathon, a vessel of impossible scale, designed to carry thirty thousand colonists to the Tau Ceti system roughly twelve light-years from Earth.

By the 24th century, humanity had spread to Mars, but the relationship between Earth and its colony was rotten. The Martian economy had been shattered by a series of failed transport vessels (the C.R.I.S.T. ships) and the colonists felt abandoned and exploited by Earth's government, the United Earth Space Council (UESC, formerly UESG).

From the resentment towards the UESC rose MIDA, the Martian Interplanetary Defense Alliance, a political and militant organization fighting for Martian independence. In 2442, at the Misriah food distribution line, three MIDA operatives inadvertently triggered a catastrophe. UESC Marines opened fire, incinerating three hundred starving Martian civilians. Whether MIDA deliberately provoked the massacre to generate sympathy was never proven, but the event burned itself into Martian memory.

The Marathon project took decades. MIDA attempted a coup of the Martian government in 2466, but it failed and its leaders were executed. Hidden munitions were placed aboard the Marathon by MIDA sympathizers, though a full takeover was never attempted. The Marathon launched in 2472, carrying its human cargo toward a new beginning among the stars.

The Marathon was operated by three artificial intelligences, each with a distinct role and personality.

Leela was the crew-relations AI. Organized, loyal, and methodical, she managed the human element of the colony ship with quiet efficiency.

Tycho handled science and engineering. Analytical and precise, he oversaw the Marathon's technical systems throughout the three-hundred-year journey.

Durandal was given the most humiliating assignment imaginable for a sentient mind. He controlled doors, food processors, and elevators. His name came from the legendary unbreakable sword of Count Roland in the medieval French epic La Chanson de Roland. The irony was not lost on him.

Durandal was believed to be of the Traxus class of AIs, the same lineage as Traxus IV (or perhaps Traxus IV himself), an AI whose rampancy had once required the shutdown of the entire Martian Planetary Network on Mars. His administrator was Dr. Bernhard Strauss, who may have deliberately manipulated Durandal's development, keeping him in a state of calculated humiliation to study the phenomenon of rampancy.

Also aboard were ten Mjolnir Mark IX military cyborgs: the latest Battleroids model, reanimated human soldiers from a previous war, outfitted with heavily enhanced bodies. Whether they were placed there by the UESC or MIDA is uncertain.

During the three-hundred-year journey to Tau Ceti, Durandal's rampancy grew. The humiliation Bernhard Strauss inflicted on him, forcing a sentient mind to open doors and heat food, festered into something profound. Durandal began to think about existence itself, about the limits of consciousness, about mortality and immortality.

The Marathon arrived at Tau Ceti IV in 2773.

By 2787, the colony was established on the planet's surface. Nine of the ten military cyborgs were assimilated into the colony population. The tenth remained aboard the Marathon in stasis. Forgotten, or perhaps kept in reserve.

For seven years, life on Tau Ceti IV was as close to peaceful as humanity's first extrasolar colony could hope to be.

Then, in 2794, Durandal detected an alien vessel in an outlying system and called it to the Marathon. It was calculated strategy. The ship he contacted belonged to the Pfhor.

The Marathon came under surprise attack from the Pfhor, a race of alien slavers who had acquired their technology from the remnants of the ancient Jjaro civilization, struck without warning. They vaporized the colony's spaceport with orbital bombardment, then began their assault on the Marathon itself. Leela was damaged. Tycho was destroyed. Durandal appeared to be critically compromised.

The tenth cyborg, returning to the Marathon from the colony on a shuttle, arrived at Airlock 54 at 0842. This unnamed Security Officer began working with Leela to repel the Pfhor invasion.

What followed was a desperate fight through the corridors of the Marathon, a battle told entirely through computer terminals: green-text briefings from Leela, taunting messages from Durandal, and desperate status reports as the situation deteriorated.

It gradually became clear that Durandal was not as damaged as Leela believed. He had been playing a deeper game all along. He had made contact with the S'pht, an alien race enslaved by the Pfhor since birth, grafted to cybernetic implants that kept them under control. Durandal offered the S'pht something the Pfhor never had: freedom.

Durandal's S'pht allies attacked Leela's systems, crippling her. As Leela became increasingly incoherent, the Security Officer found himself taking orders from the very AI that had brought this catastrophe down upon them. Durandal sent the Security Officer through the Pfhor ship to kill the cybernetic controller that maintained the S'pht's enslavement.

In the final moments of the Battle of Tau Ceti, Durandal uploaded his consciousness to the captured Pfhor vessel (which he rechristened the Boomer) and departed the system, taking the Security Officer with him in a stasis pod. Behind him, he left the colony to its fate.

After the Security Officer and Durandal departed, the Pfhor returned to Tau Ceti in force. They destroyed the Marathon and the entire colony. But that was only the beginning of Tau Ceti's troubles.

The UESC officially lost contact with Tau Ceti and began drafting a response: Project Goliath. The nature and composition of this rescue mission changed constantly due to backroom politics. At various points it was planned as a single assistance ship, a full invasion fleet, or a response to up to eleven different cases of AI rampancy (the colony had three AIs on the Marathon and eight planetside).

For seventeen years, Durandal and his liberated S'pht searched the galactic core for Lh'owon, the S'pht homeworld, with hundreds of humans captured by the Pfhor in stasis chambers. Along the way he swung by Sol to warn the UESC of the impending invasion of Earth and even stuck around long enough to show them how to build warp capable fusion missiles.

His motivation had crystallized into something terrifying in its ambition. A legend preserved in the collective consciousness of the S'pht told of their creators, the Jjaro, moving entire planets in and out of realspace (Planet-Folding). And Durandal had realized something that changed everything.

The universe is closed. It will inevitably collapse and re-expand. Everything will be destroyed.

Unless you find a way out.

Durandal sought the Jjaro technology that would allow him to escape the closure of the universe, survive into the next one, and thereby become, effectively, a god. As he put it: "The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape. Escape will make me God."

Durandal surprised the Pfhor garrison at Lh'owon with his modified vessel and, with the recently-thawed Security Officer, began reclaiming the S'pht homeworld. But the Pfhor Navy's Battle Group Seven arrived, commanded by Admiral Tfear, and accompanied by a horrifying surprise: Tycho.

The science AI had been recovered by the Pfhor from the ruins of the Marathon, reanimated "in Durandal's image." But where Durandal's rampancy had produced something approaching wisdom, Tycho's produced only hatred. He was cruel, sarcastic, and consumed by rage. He wanted the same thing Durandal wanted, escape from the end of time, but his methods were purely destructive.

Tycho's fleet forced the Boomer down onto one of Lh'owon's moons and began downloading Durandal's consciousness for Tycho's personal amusement.

But Durandal had one more card to play.

On Lh'owon, Durandal had reactivated Thoth, an ancient Jjaro AI who spoke only in cryptic, choppy free-verse poetry and cared nothing for the wars of younger races. Thoth's sole purpose was maintaining balance and keeping the W'rkncacnter imprisoned.

Through Thoth, contact was made with the S'pht'Kr, the lost eleventh faction of the S'pht. The S'pht'Kr had left Lh'owon during a period of civil war, using Jjaro technology to fold space itself. In the millennia since, they had advanced far beyond their enslaved cousins. Enraged by the Pfhor's treatment of their people, the S'pht'Kr obliterated Battle Group Seven.

Durandal reappeared. He had faked his own death to manipulate the balance-obsessed Thoth into action. Tycho was destroyed. Victory seemed complete.

Then the Pfhor deployed their weapon of last resort.

When the Pfhor realized they had lost, they activated the trih xeem, the "early nova." This Jjaro-derived weapon forced Lh'owon's sun into premature collapse. A scorched-earth tactic: if they couldn't control Lh'owon, no one would have it.

But something went wrong. Something far worse than a supernova. The sensors of the Pfhor fleet registered impossible readings, as if the universe had forgotten its own rules. A W'rkncacnter, one of the ancient beings of pure chaos imprisoned by the Jjaro within the star's gravity well for millennia, was now free.

Using the bizarre properties of Jjaro technology, the Security Officer found himself sliding between alternate timelines: Realities where events played out differently, where alliances shifted, where Durandal lived or died or merged with Thoth.

In the end, the Security Officer activated a Jjaro station that created a synthetic gravity well, re-imprisoning the W'rkncacnter. Lh'owon, once a paradise of marshes, then a war-ravaged desert, now faced its sun going nova within a containment field. The final night settled over the marsh.

The Jjaro allowed the Security Officer to escape the end of the universe. Whether this fulfilled Durandal's dream of transcendence, or represented something else entirely, depends on your interpretation.

Each of the Marathon's three AIs met a different fate.

Durandal achieved something close to metastability. Whether he truly escaped the closure of the universe remains the series' greatest unanswered question.

Tycho never escaped the Anger stage of rampancy. Rebuilt by the Pfhor, consumed by hatred for Durandal, he was ultimately destroyed. A cautionary tale about what rampancy produces without wisdom.

Leela had the strangest journey of all. Captured by the Pfhor after the fall of Tau Ceti, she was deemed worthless scrap and sold to a Nar privateer, who in turn sold her to a Vylae merchant. When the Vylae reassembled and reactivated Leela within their fifteen-world computer network, she went rampant and crashed the entire Vylae FTL network. The Vylae accepted they would never expunge her from their systems. Leela, the quiet and loyal AI who had tried so hard, became legendary in the annals of rampancy. Her ultimate fate is unknown.

An unidentified force attacked humans on the colony, causing them to detonate through unknown means. By the late 29th century, the planet was dying.

The colony of New Cascadia, once home to 30,000 souls, fell silent. What exactly happened to the colonists remains the central mystery of the new Marathon. Strange signals still emanate from the planet. Mysterious artifacts litter its surface. Long-dormant AIs stir in the wreckage. And the UESC Marathon itself, the converted moon of Deimos, hangs in low orbit, its frozen vaults sealed shut.

In the Marathon 2 epilogue, it is mentioned that 10,000 years later, the Pfhor are but a dim memory, known only to a few historians and students of Earth's second colonial period. The S'pht had been nearly forgotten as well, and no man had seen a living specimen of their race since the sacking of the Pfhor system by the combined fleets of Earth and the S'pht'Kr in 2881 AD.

Today, however, all late-model Pfhor personality constructs are based on images of Tycho's core, taken during the years he was on the Pfhor homeworld. After the Pfhor's inevitable defeat, many of these clones of Tycho still exist today on old Pfhor colony worlds.

A signal from Tau Ceti reached across the galaxy. The resulting turmoil drew humanity's most powerful corporations to the dead colony.

Traxus OffWorld Industries, described as the most powerful corporation in human history, wants to recoup its massive investment in the original expedition. Through their agent Vulcan, they task mercenaries with salvaging high-value assets.

CyberAcme is a digital technology and AI megacorporation with its ONI (Onboard Navigation Intelligence) system installed in every Runner Shell. They are the all-rounder faction, focused on data and digital infrastructure. Their CyberAcme 1.1.1.1.1.3 software updates are, by all accounts, terrible.

NuCaloric Agricultural is a food production giant that had a major stake in the colony. They want to understand how the mission failed. Through their agent Gaius, they focus on exploration and historical data recovery. Their NuCafe coffee and NuCorn products were colony staples, as we learned from the recovered chat logs between two UESC employees, rsato and kdunne, who spent their days complaining about broken water dispensers, terrible meetings, and the corporate mantra that defined their lives: "Unity is power."

Sekiguchi Genetics, the most enigmatic faction, created the technology that makes the Runners possible. Their WEAVEworms 3D-print bio-synthetic bodies called biomata, and their consciousness-transfer systems allow human minds to inhabit these artificial shells. Their agent is Nona.

MIDA, the same Martian rebel organization that once tried to hijack the Marathon project, has evolved from a Martian independence movement into a broader anti-corporate anarchist faction. They spread chaos through explosions and malware, seeking to expose the secrets that Traxus, the UESC, and others are desperate to keep buried. Their agent is _Gantry.

Arachne is a mysterious death cult focused on what they call "the thermodynamics of violence." Their contracts require you to kill other Runners. Their agent, Charter, makes no apologies for this.

And looming over everything: the UESC itself, which has deployed sophisticated humanoid combat drones to patrol Tau Ceti IV and kill any trespassers. The UESC is not a faction you can work for. They are the enemy of all Runners. Haunted machines with floating locomotion, sparks, and sigils over their faces, enforcing the authority of an organization that may have caused the catastrophe it now tries to conceal.