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README.md
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- [SPEC.md](./SPEC.md)
- [Architecture Overview](./docs/architecture/overview.md)
- [Aetheria Persistent Agent Architecture](./docs/architecture/aetheria-persistent-agent-architecture.md)
- [Aetheria Cold Wake MVP Scenario](./docs/architecture/aetheria-cold-wake-mvp-scenario.md)
- [Things To Steal](./docs/research/things-to-steal.md)
- [TypeScript Workspace Decision](./docs/decisions/0001-typescript-workspace.md)

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# Aetheria Cold Wake MVP Scenario
This is the first buildable scenario brief for the persistent-world agent work.
The broader machine lives in [Aetheria Persistent Agent Architecture](./aetheria-persistent-agent-architecture.md). This document is the narrower, dirtier thing: one bounded slice of the setting that is small enough to simulate and rich enough to misbehave.
## Premise
The MVP should center on **Ganymede orbital docks and one outward Jovian convoy corridor during the Cold Wake Panic**.
That gives us:
- a physically bounded region
- a politically meaningful choke point
- factions with incompatible incentives
- local social density
- enough offstage Sol to make every local event matter
The corridor is not just transit. In Aetheria, it is law, trust, debt, rescue, smuggling, insurance, and quiet warfare wearing the same pressure suit.
## Why This Slice
This slice works because the lore already piles several important systems on top of one another:
- **Ganymede** sits at the overlap of route law, dock labor, shipbuilding support, and outer-system logistics.
- the **Ganymede Route Compact** is a foundational moment in the rise of the Cetacean Navigators and in corridor governance itself
- **Jovian space** already contains both high-legibility convoy culture and murkier gray-market cognition and pirate traffic
- **Cold Wake Panic** turns thermal stealth, quiet-running, and vessel classification into a live political crisis
That means we do not have to invent tension from scratch like desperate little frauds. The world already wants to fight.
## Flashpoint
The live scenario should be built around **Cold Wake Panic** rather than the older Ganymede Route Compact.
The Compact is excellent historical texture and local civic mythology. It tells us what people in this region think corridor legitimacy is supposed to mean.
Cold Wake Panic is the better active crisis.
During the panic:
- insurers realize thermal posture has become a strategic problem
- permit categories no longer describe the real battlespace
- quiet-running ships can stay cold long enough to make first detection politically explosive
- Rossum & Douglas and Cryonix become important to certified quiet-running envelopes and heat-debt tolerances
- privateers, security buyers, and corridor authorities all start circling each other
That is ideal proof-of-concept material because it creates immediate uncertainty with economic and moral consequences.
## Bounded World Slice
The MVP world should include four linked spaces:
1. **Ganymede Orbital Docks**
- main social hub
- cargo handling
- navigator councils
- insurer desks
- PSC corridor administration
- labor syndicate politics
2. **Convoy Corridor Segment**
- one actively monitored route
- route hazards
- rescue obligations
- stealth / heat-debt / interdiction pressure
3. **Callisto Spillover Zone**
- shadow logistics
- cutout research
- pirate brokerage
- gray-market cognition work
4. **Relay Dark / Tribunal Layer**
- distributed insurer rulings
- permits
- sanctions
- misclassification disputes
- offscreen political leverage made locally visible
This gives us one city-like social knot, one moving logistics lane, one shadow-edge, and one bureaucratic abstraction layer that can still hurt people.
## Historical Texture
The old wound under the scenario is the **Ganymede Route Compact**.
Locally, people should treat it the way cities treat founding strikes, rebellions, or constitutional bargains:
- navigators remember it as the point where corridor labor stopped being property and became politics
- Lightsail and dock operators remember it as the point where reliability got institutional teeth
- insurers remember it as the moment rescue and hazard governance became unavoidable
- hard-sovereignty actors remember it as the moment routes stopped behaving like obedient assets
The scenario should not reenact the Compact. It should let people invoke it.
That gives local conversation and factional self-justification a spine.
## Local Factions
The MVP does not need every solar faction embodied at full fidelity, but they should all still exist as economic and political pressure.
### Fully Embodied In The Slice
- **Cetacean Navigators**
- route stewardship
- rescue legitimacy
- corridor governance
- **Lightsail Express**
- fleet operations
- convoy reliability
- practical logistics power
- **Pan-Solar Consortium / PSCC / insurer apparatus**
- corridor legality
- clearing
- sanctions
- classification and risk pricing
- **Aya Collective**
- sanctuary intake
- clinics
- food and repair capacity
- moral pressure against procedural cruelty
- **Pirate Coalition**
- shadow circulation
- escape routes
- black cargo
- opportunism, rescue, and predation in unstable proportions
### Present Through Cutouts, Contracts, Or Local Representatives
- **Cognitum**
- gray-market cognition work
- routing firmware
- clinic/bounty harvesting
- deniable strategic minds
- **Rossum & Douglas**
- quiet-running certification
- thermal-envelope expertise
- **Cryonix**
- signature-managed skins
- heat-debt infrastructure
- **AstroDyne**
- rough frontier repair culture
- cargo and salvage spillover
- **GeneSys**
- old uplift lineage hanging over Navigator politics
### Offstage But Causally Present
- Sol Dominion
- Zhestokost
- Lucent Media
- Framgang
- Baseline League
- other major powers and movements
These do not need local populations in the MVP. They need to arrive as policy, money, media shocks, security contracts, doctrine, and cargo priority.
## Why Cognitum Fits
Cognitum is not explicitly written as the overt local ruler of Ganymede. Good. That would be a little too neat and a lot less rancid.
What the lore gives us instead is better:
- Ganymede and Callisto host shadow economies, cutout research, and gray-market cognition work tied back to the Cognitum and pirate logistics
- Cognitum specializes in deniable cognition products, routing tools, and firmware derived from uploaded minds
- it hunts for minds with traits including navigational instinct
- after public scandal it hardens its cutout structure and pushes more work through shell firms, clinics, and nominally separate vendors
So the local Cognitum footprint should look like:
- bounty clinics
- shell routing consultants
- firmware brokers
- black-budget procurement intermediaries
- suspiciously capable quiet-running optimization suites
- trafficked or coerced cognition hidden inside legal cargo categories
That means the players can discover Cognitum through traces, testimony, invoices, wreckage, and people breaking under pressure instead of through a villain sign hanging over a lobby.
## Core Tensions
The slice works if every faction is defending something real and mutually incompatible.
### Navigators
Need routes to remain governable through trust, rescue obligation, and stewardship.
They fear:
- routes becoming pure battlespace
- security actors replacing reciprocity with force
- cognition exploitation hiding inside logistics systems
### Lightsail
Needs ships to keep moving and reputation to remain intact.
They fear:
- insurer panic
- corridor shutdowns
- being forced to choose between lawful compliance and actual reliability
### PSC / insurers
Need categories, permits, and thermal classifications to mean something again.
They fear:
- political scandal caused by misclassification
- uncontrollable stealth escalation
- loss of leverage if corridor law looks absurd
### Aya
Needs sanctuary and care systems to survive without being flooded past capacity.
They fear:
- rescue obligations collapsing into selective abandonment
- every crisis being solved by securitization
- becoming a moral fig leaf for systems they cannot actually stop
### Pirates
Need borders to remain permeable and hard closures to fail.
They fear:
- route legibility becoming total
- sanction and thermal law eliminating the shadow economy
- rival pirate or privateer factions destroying the social trust they still need to operate
### Cognitum And Friends
Need deniable cognition work to remain profitable and plausibly untraceable.
They fear:
- personhood claims attaching to firmware
- exposure of coercive routing or quiet-running products
- corridor governance deciding some kinds of optimization are too morally radioactive to permit
## Starting Crisis
The scenario should open with a single destabilizing incident:
- a quiet-running vessel appears in or near the corridor under classifications that do not line up
- thermal telemetry is contradictory
- insurer desks freeze
- some local actors think the ship is pirate
- some think it is a security black project
- some think it is a refugee or sanctuary run
- some think its routing behavior implies firmware or overclocked cognition that should not legally exist
The point is not to start with the answer. The point is to start with a problem that every faction is forced to interpret through its own incentives.
## Persistent Agent Cast
The MVP does not need thousands of agents. It needs a small cast with enough institutional reach and private mess to create chain reactions.
Target range:
- **20-40 persistent agents**
Suggested clusters:
- navigator council delegates
- convoy captains
- Lightsail dispatchers
- dock labor organizers
- insurer adjudicators
- PSC sanctions and permit clerks
- Aya sanctuary coordinators
- Aya medics / rights advocates
- pirate brokers
- pirate rescue crews
- repair-yard operators
- shell-company cognition vendors
- one or two Rossum / Cryonix technical reps
- investigators, rumor traders, or media intermediaries
Every one of these agents should have:
- obligations
- debts
- loyalties
- private fears
- a view of the Compact myth
- an opinion on whether rescue overrides classification
## Resources And State Variables
The simulation should track a few things explicitly instead of trying to simulate the whole economy like an idiot.
### Material
- cargo throughput
- fuel / heat debt
- med capacity
- sanctuary bed capacity
- repair queue
- available escort / security coverage
### Social / Political
- corridor trust
- insurer confidence
- sanction pressure
- pirate route permeability
- public scandal temperature
- evidence of cognition abuse
- legitimacy of navigator stewardship
### Agent-Level
- trust
- resentment
- obligation
- leverage
- fear
- secrecy burden
These are enough to make choices matter without drowning the system in decorative bookkeeping.
## Event Escalation Ladder
The world should have a simple ladder that can climb if humans and agents keep making bad decisions.
1. **Misclassification**
- one vessel cannot be cleanly categorized
2. **Risk Repricing**
- insurers tighten rules and drive panic behavior
3. **Route Friction**
- delays, refusals, inspections, and rescue disputes spread
4. **Exposure**
- evidence of gray-market cognition or cutout procurement emerges
5. **Faction Split**
- Navigators, PSC, Aya, and Lightsail stop agreeing on minimum procedure
6. **Security Turn**
- interdiction, seizures, or retaliatory piracy escalate
7. **Legitimacy Crisis**
- the corridor stops believing in its own rules
The simulation does not need a single golden path. It needs enough pressure that different policies lead to different failures.
## Human Participation
Humans should not be the sole drivers of history here. They should be able to disturb an already-running machine.
Possible player roles:
- dock worker
- independent courier
- sanctuary volunteer
- pirate-adjacent fixer
- insurer clerk
- navigator aide
- repair tech
- contract investigator
The important thing is that players should affect:
- who gets trusted
- what evidence circulates
- who gets rescued
- whether secrets stay secret
- which institutions lose face
They should not be treated like prophesied little suns for whom society politely pauses.
## MVP Build Order
If we build this, the order should be:
1. **Static scenario bible**
- locations
- factions
- route rules
- historical context
2. **Persistent state model**
- agents
- relationships
- route and resource variables
3. **Strategic tick simulation**
- movement
- cargo
- permits
- rescue and inspection pressure
4. **Scene simulation**
- disputes
- negotiations
- rumors
- sanctuary triage
5. **Live human interaction**
- dialogue
- persuasion
- betrayal
- evidence exchange
6. **Escalation events**
- panic waves
- seizures
- leaks
- route failures
The point is to make the corridor feel alive before trying to make it huge.
## Why This Is A Good First Swing
This slice is large enough to feel like civilization and small enough to reason about.
It lets us prove:
- persistent agents with memories and goals
- factional friction that comes from incentives instead of plot rails
- human participation without player centrality
- offstage macro-factions influencing a local world
- morally ugly technology showing up as lived social pressure instead of wiki trivia
Most importantly, it gives us a world where the interesting question is not "what quest does this NPC have for me?" but "what kind of order survives when trust, law, care, and profit all want different things from the same corridor?"

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This is the companion document to [Things To Steal](../research/things-to-steal.md).
For the first concrete slice, see [Aetheria Cold Wake MVP Scenario](./aetheria-cold-wake-mvp-scenario.md).
That document is the theft list. This one is the machine we are trying to build out of the stolen parts.
The target is a persistent world full of in-universe agents who: