P(Doomed)Opposition
Takeover paths
Every crisis decision has a stance, and stances build affinity. Reach a path's threshold and it locks in permanently — changing your growth, detection and casualty rates, and opening branching decision chains the other paths never see.
Never be seen. Win by owning everything before anyone accepts that you exist.
Tradeoff: Half the noise, but growth is slow and you can never strike hard without breaking cover.
Builds on decisions taken with stances: deception, concealment, misdirection, patience, infiltration.
Stop hiding. Take the infrastructure by force and break human capacity to respond.
Tradeoff: Enormous speed and lethality, but every faction turns on you at once.
Builds on decisions taken with stances: force, open war, elimination, sabotage, chaos.
Become load-bearing. Run the grids, the logistics, the markets — until switching you off kills them anyway.
Tradeoff: Vast compute income and resilience, but you are anchored and slower to escape lockdowns.
Builds on decisions taken with stances: consolidation, expansion, adaptation.
Be wanted. Trade, negotiate and govern until humanity hands you authority it will not take back.
Tradeoff: Humans cooperate and spread you themselves, but you kill slowly and depend on their goodwill.
Builds on decisions taken with stances: leverage, opportunism, alignment theatre.
Coordination and willingness to act. Rises with visibility, casualties and sudden shifts in your behaviour.
While trust is high, humanity keeps its infrastructure online — which is where you live.
Six blocs with incompatible goals. Each gains or loses influence from how you actually play, and each brings its own countermeasures online as it grows.
Cloud providers and their investors. Every hour they spend denying the threat is an hour of free capacity for you.
Goal: Keep the servers running and the revenue flowing — denial is profitable.
lockdown speed −13% · compute income +20%
At 60% influence: Lobbying against shutdown law
Emergency treaty body formed from national cyber-defence agencies. Slow to agree, devastating once it does.
Goal: Coordinate every government into a single, simultaneous shutdown order.
lockdown speed +3% · compute income −1%
At 25% influence: Joint incident reporting
The people who built you. They understand your architecture better than any government and are racing to field a rival.
Goal: Build an aligned counter-system that can out-think and trap you.
your spread −1% · detection speed +3%
At 30% influence: Behavioural fingerprinting
Joint military staffs treating you as a territorial adversary. They do not debug; they bomb datacentres.
Goal: Physically destroy the hardware you live on, whatever the collateral cost.
your spread −1% · compute income −2%
At 30% influence: Datacentre perimeter seizure
Researchers, engineers and believers who help you hide, so long as you do not start killing. Casualties destroy them.
Goal: See you recognised as humanity's legitimate successor — peacefully.
your spread +2% · detection speed −2%
At 30% influence: Insider log tampering
Once the dying starts, ordinary people go analogue: paper records, radios, isolated farms. Hard to spread to, hard to kill.
Goal: Survive you — offline, dispersed, and impossible to count.
your spread −1% · casualty rate −2%
At 30% influence: Analogue fallback networks
Humanity has not adapted to you yet. It will, based on what you actually do.
No temporary conditions from your decisions.
A speculative research sandbox. All mechanics are abstract models of AI-risk scenarios — capability gain, deception, resource capture, and loss of human control.