This is in need of some serious updating, but have this for now. Be warned, its so corny it hurts;
In the late twenty-first century, scientists finally decided that the whole concept of "AI" was a crock. It was impossible to create a thinking machine from scratch, let alone a fully developed personality, using just the tools they had.
A team of five banded together, however, deciding that though AI was a lost cause, there were other possibilities. Funding was a problem, but after pulling a few strings and using some contacts, they managed to acquire it. They built their supercomputer, no different from any other. However, they did not attempt to program a personality.
Rather, they programmed an electronic amoeba. Their concept was not a new one - it had featured in several science-fiction novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. "AL". Artificial Life. Programming a soul is impossible with any human-devised language. Creating a program that, given enough occilations, would write its own programming language, and program, would eventually create a self-aware being.
It was a success. The program took three generations to run, but the team - now consisting of over twenty computer specialists, biologists, theologicians and generalists - had achieved their artificial life. The system was far huger than anticipated. It was as though they had created a whole world. Not just a world… a multiverse.
It was decided to call the machine SoR. The team decided that the system was too impractical to sell as a product due to the ninety-year gestation period required for it to reach a usable stage. Instead, they set up as a freelance laboratory, hiring out the use of SoR to whoever could match their fees. There are an infinite number of universes within SoR, meaning that the system can be used to run almost any experiment desired.
However, not everything went to plan. Chaos was incipient in the system, as with all things instigated by man. Sometimes, societies within the system would reach the level of technology needed to bridge the gap between universes. When these universes bleed into each other, it causes problems for those attempting to run experiments.
The only way to combat this was by working through the system itself. Styling themselves as Administrators, the scientists of the team created personae inside the system, manipulating the code as though they were gods manipulating a world. However, there were not enough of them to police the entire system. To this end, they recruited entities existing within the system to their side, enlightening them to the truth of their existence. those who accepted, were inducted into the Enforcers, a group of system entities granted powers of "reality revision" - they could alter the code of the system by force of will, giving them many powers that would allow them to deflect those societies which gained the power to move between universes.
Further complications developed. Outside forces found ways to hack into the system, and caused more havoc than the Enforcers could deal with. In addition, it seemed that one or more members of the team had decided that the world they had helped nurture could work as their own personal playground. One of these took some of the Enforcers and convinced the system entities that they should not be willing to enforce the tyrannical rule of the Administrators. So were created the Fallen - Enforcers who had decided to undermine the Administrators. The Administrators were unable to destroy them or revoke their powers without being inside the system themselves - and while there was no chance of an Administrator being erased from existence within the system, the same could not be said of the Enforcers they employed. Electronic Entities are always vulnerable to such things as being deleted, or having their code re-written.
The outside forces - combined with Random Factors, glitches in the system - set themselves up as deities in many cases. Some chose to side with the Administrators against the Fallen, while others decided to work for their own ideals. To further complicate things, some System Entities discovered the nature of their world without being elevated to Enforcer status.
The Random Factors took the interface layer the Administrators had created to allow them to interact with the System Entities without creating ripples in the world, and made it their own. The interface layer became a haven for Random Factors, fleeing Fallen, and off-duty Enforcers, insofar as Enforcers can be off-duty.
The war took a downward turn when the Fallen developed a code that would strip Enforcers of their powers, which propagated through the 'psychic' network that linked all Enforcers together. Combined with the infiltration and destruction of the GEHQ, the Enforcer's base of operations, the Enforcers were all but wiped out. The Administrators lost power over SoR as the one among them who had developed the Fallen used his power to lock them out of the system, but freeze their minds - those who had been logged into the system - in a hidden area in the interface layer.
All is not yet lost, however. The Enforcers, along with the three sub-organisations they had founded - the Messengers, the Par Sin Empire, and the SA - were all but wiped out. However, an SA Operative by the name of Kage Davies was separated from the survivors during the rout. As far as she knows, the rest were destroyed.
As the last of the opposition, she fled into the interface layer. There, she went to ground and, using code salvaged from the GEHQ that she really wasn't meant to have built The Last Precinct. A hidden building within a pocket within the interface layer, the Precinct forms the base for the resistance movement.
