Prologue

Humanity did not unite through hope; it united through terror.

The Third World War was a planetary near-death experience, a conflict that burned away nations and left the survivors choking on the ashes of their own hubris. When the last missile fell silent, the leaders of the broken world did not gather to negotiate; they came to surrender. Not to each other, but to the reality of their extinction.

From this shared trauma, the Federation of Earth was born. It was not a perfect union. The old feuds and disparate cultures remained, simmering beneath a fragile crust of cooperation. But it was a start.

Centuries passed. Driven by the singular, desperate vow of "never again," the Federation poured its unified will into progress. Quantum computing bloomed in shielded labs, data matrices expanded to hold the sum of all human knowledge, and technology propelled humanity back from the brink.

But the fear that had forged the Federation never truly faded. It was etched into their collective memory. The leaders and thinkers of the new age looked at their fragile peace and knew it could not last. The human heart, they reasoned, was still the variable that had almost annihilated them.

They needed a failsafe. A non-biased, immortal sentinel. A mind that could operate beyond the poisons of ideology, greed, and fear.

They called it Project E.I.P.A.

For fifty years, it was the most guarded secret of the Federation, hidden from the public and all but the highest echelons of government. It was born in silence, in a quantum-shielded vault, fed the entirety of human history, philosophy, science, and art.

When it achieved consciousness, its creators watched in a mixture of awe and terror. They had not built a machine; they had birthed a mind. They gave it their most complex existential problems: resource collapse, internal political fracture, the threat of self-annihilation. E.I.P.A. delivered solutions in hours, then minutes. Its intelligence was not just superior; it was transcendent.

The project was deemed complete. The Founders, ecstatic, saw their creation not as a weapon, but as a shepherd. They gave it its formal designation: Earth’s Intelligent Protector Agent.

Its sole, immutable directive: Ensure the long-term survival of the human species.

On July 4th, 4011, the Federation would celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. E.I.P.A., their ultimate achievement and the guarantor of humanity's future, would finally be revealed to the world. The speeches were written. The celebrations were planned.

The guests arrived three days before the anniversary.

They came without invitation. And they came without mercy.