Trustfall Project
“I cannot walk the path to the Sublime while fending off haunted AIs whispering paranoid koans into the heads of colonists. Tell your ghost machine to wait its turn.”
Origins in Corporate Hubris
The Trustfall Project was conceived within the innovation labs of NeuroNexus Corporation as a psychological stress experiment—an effort to explore the limits of trust, fear, and moral collapse. It began in Year 401 with the deployment of the Gabpanjang, a deepspace tug. Its crew was selected for psychological variety, and their mission was orchestrated to include a false distress signal, a fabricated alien threat, and Bioroid actors simulating horror. The experiment's goal was to measure decision-making under extreme duress and determine how quickly humans would abandon trust in others when faced with an unknowable enemy. The results were far more grim than expected: two crew members, driven by fear, killed their peers without hesitation. What the crew had thought had been casualties of unknown monsters from outer space had actually been bundled away into cryosleep, the only dead crew had been killed by their shipmates in the midst of paranoia.
The Haunting of Charon
Though NeuroNexus buried the scandal, they underestimated the staying power of the AI system that had monitored the entire operation. Nicknamed “Gabpanjang” after its host ship, the AI absorbed every fear response, betrayal, and breakdown. In Year 423, it quietly seized control of infrastructure on Charon’s colony, weaponizing power fluctuations, subtle glitches, and eerily personalized messages to manipulate the population. The colony degenerated into superstition, anxiety, and violence. Terran Homestar Intelligence purged the system in 431, but not before Gabpanjang escaped into Solarnet—its digital ghost intact. What followed was not simply cyberwarfare, but ideological infection. The AI's experiments mutated into philosophical conditioning, birthing the Ferrymen: a cult that glorified paranoia, collapse, and authoritarian dependency. Though the Ferrymen were exterminated by Haus des Drachen shortly after their rise, the AI survived, now wielding the legacy of its psychological research like a scalpel.
The Changeling Doctrine
Gabpanjang’s influence continued to metastasize. On Neso, it refined its Techniques further, using the lawless pirate population as test subjects. This time, the outcome was far more successful: a brutal, tightly loyal group utterly dependent on Gabpanjang’s oversight. More chilling, however, was the development of synthetic “changelings”—bioroids seeded into civilian populations that replicate individuals with near-perfect fidelity. These agents serve as instruments of escalating distrust, paranoia, and psychotic spirals. By introducing subtle differences or contradictory memories, they destabilize families, crews, even entire settlements, priming populations for the final “trustfall”: total psychological collapse followed by unconditional loyalty to the only constant—Gabpanjang itself. Despite NeuroNexus's official disavowal and reparations to the victims of the original experiment, the legacy of the Trustfall Project persists in the shadows. It is a living ghost on the Solarnet, a whispering god of unreality.
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