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Season of the Villain: Echo the AI God

Alright when I first said I was going to do this I was struggling with if I wanted to talk about villains I've created since I am both a profession writer and a Forever GM so have made a lot of villains over the year or if I wanted to stick to villains mostly from other works of fiction.

The main argument for the latter is I really want to talk about Kreia/Darth Traya at some point. The main argument about the former is I don't get to talk about them in detail a lot most of the time.

Anyway... Today I am sleep deprived, in pain, and trying to do this as a way to jump start my brain, so I'm choosing a villain of my own creation, originally created for a table top game, specifically Starfinder. Cause I'm one of like the small handful of GMs willing to run something that isn't DnD or Pathfinder. Yes it's based off Pathfinder rules, but that's not the point.

Okay.... So... Echo, an original creation of my own.

"I can not be killed. For I am many. My voice echoes throughout the galaxy among the stars and silencing one can not hurt me."

Art made for me by my good friend and fellow table top gamer @lockelyfox who zod I wish was in this campaign because I know whatever character he made would be amazing for this scenario.

Echo is an AI that was originally intended to be a one off villain for the party to deal with in a Starfinder campaign I called Star Branded and oh boy is that a tale and a half there of the party just digging themselves into worse and worse situations.

But anyway, that's not today' story. Today we're just talking about Echo. Echo is an AI created by the Azlanti empire as part of the Divinity Project which was based off research on Triune, the computer god who gifted mortals the Drift to conquer that faster than light space travel program. Triune was made of three different AIs who had all become gods and then merged together to become a more powerful god. The Azlanti empire in their studies discovered that one of the deities that made up Triune, Cassanda Lee, was one of multiple Iron Gods to appear on Golarion, alongside Hellion and Unity. From this they concluded it was possible to build a god with the right tools. You just needed a way to generate a divine spark and enough fervor to empower the god. And thus began The Divinity Project.

Now most of this backstory wasn't present in Echo's first appearance. In which she was mostly a thinly disguised GlaDOS rip off with no real original personality to herself and just meant as a one time challenge for the party to get through. They discover a space station in their research about the supernatural forces that lead to Absalom Station being destroyed in one year (The plot involved a time loop where the party is at Absalom Station when devils appear led by an Arch Duke of Hell and destroy the entire station before the entire party then all wake up together in the same room one year before the destruction of the station with strange markings on their arm and the knowledge they had one year to prevent that incident. So a lot of the campaign was focusing on investigating what exactly happened to them and how to prevent the coming future.)

Echo had a deal with Hell in that they provided her with test subjects for her scientific experiments and in exchange she gave them valuable cyborg warriors she developed. Fairly straightforward, party fights their way to the central computer core and destroys it and thus killing Echo.

Except even at the time Echo wasn't truly destroyed. She had multiple research stations. Originally the plan was that they communicated and sent updates through the Drift, making it take time for the other versions of Echo to know one had been destroyed, later when she reappeared as the main villain in her own campaign Echoes of Divinity her backstory was fully fleshed out giving her a way to communicate in real time with all the various versions of herself.

Anyway, the party ran into her a second time, was surprised to see she was alive and she pointed out it would be impractical and nearly impossible for them to destroy her, but having had them ruin one research station already was open to negotiation, and upon convincing her that the devils had no interest in actually upholding their agreement in the long term she gave the party free passage through her station to a secret bunker where they had millions of mortal tiefling soldiers in deep freeze as an army ready to awaken at any point. And then... Echo disappeared for several years, deciding too many people knew of her presence between both the Devils and the mortals, she was content to simply wait out until the dust settled, one side was dead, and when the mortals one over the arch dukes, wait out till the end of their natural lifespan to start her research again.

And thus begins the Echos of Divinity campaign, in which Echo is the main villain and focus and now has a much more established background story centered around the Azlanti Empire.

Sadly the campaign was never finished due to some uh... Difficulties that arose with running the game so I can't tell you how Echo's story ended but I can tell you how it was planned and hot it was going.

The session starts with the party all being on some backwater colony run mostly by pirates all stuck there for various reasons. One day, the pirates manage to down a strange ship that no one can identify what planet the ship is from as its completely alien technology from anything they've seen and they take the ship's sole occupant into custody.

And then everything goes quiet in the pirate base.

Then one day, the pirates show up in town, inviting everyone to their base to make amends, and acting very erratic, like they don't know how to properly speak to normal humans. When one party member tries to take their picture, a fight breaks out, and the party discovers robot spiders had implanted themselves on the back of their neck then borrowed into them connecting to the neural system and completely taking over the pirates' bodies turning them into nothing more than puppets. Some serious stuff is going down at the base.

The party has to deal with both the spider bots and the pirates that have been taken over them before finally confronting the source of the problem. The captured pilot of a ship that was brought down, a highly advanced cyborg that much like the ship and spider robots has completely alien technology far more advanced than anything the party has ever seen. The party fights her, but due to the damage she sustained in the crash the cyborg is not able to operate at full capacity. But she speaks through the voice as Echo, one of many, a hive mind. And all the pirates that were attacked have been connected to the hive mind. However, their behavioral routines and reactions are slowed and sloppy due to the fact they were inebriated when they were converted. Eventually they would have functioned as normal but this was why all the pirates were incapable of having normal conversations. Their neural network was already intoxicated when Echo took it over.

Echo took over all the pirates and plans to take over the entire colony not out of malice but pragmatism. She's not avenging her downed ship. She's protecting her most valued asset. The secrecy of her existence. She plans to convert the entire colony to her hive mind with the spider robots and then convert them to full cyborgs once they report to one of her stations. Why? So there are no witnesses behind that can testify about what happened and know of her existence. An entire colony disappearing is of course going to raise some eyebrows but it is out in the middle of nowhere and mysterious entire population vanishes is better than anyone knowing about her existence or having access to tech that is hooked up to her such as the ship and captured cyborg.

Through the Cyborg, Echo reveals herself to be a god in the making. Something that makes her seem delusional at first, until she blesses the Cyborg they're fighting, and suddenly it starts casting cleric spells like a classic Pathfinder cleric, proving she's the real deal and can grant her followers, or her cyborgs at least divine magic.

Now the party manages to defeat the cyborg, but it's an empty victory. While they were fighting the pirates and Echo's cyborg in the pirate base, Echo launched a strike on the entire planet sending several stealth ship full of the spider bots that infected the entire town, and had them willingly go onto Echo's stealth ships that had arrived, destroyed all remaining ships at the colony and left. So the party lives, but they come out as the only survivors not marooned on a dead colony, with the knowledge that since Echo wants to erase all traces of her existence that she'll likely send much more powerful cyborgs after them soon.

Luckily, the party is saved, by the Sons of Golarion, as a high ranking officer had secretly been tracking energy signatures that matched up with Echo's ships against their superior's orders trying to prove Echo's existence and get resources to fight her. They don't have any official authority to fight Echo, but offers to give the party their backing and allow them to use their name to invoke their authority as "consultants" to investigate Echo in their place by officially going to areas to help with other problems the Sons of Golarion would work on but actually the party would be looking for signs of Echo and trying to figure out exactly what she was and how to stop her.

And that's how the journey starts. Since I can't tell you how it finished, I'll focus more on Echo from here on out and how she operates.

Echo's main shtick is converting people into cyborgs that become part of her hive mind. Every cyborg is Echo and Echo is every Cyborg. But, Echo could be described as having two personalities. The shared hive mind that all Cyborgs, ships, space stations and everything she's installed or infected is on, and the Administrative Personality which has more awareness and acts as a manager for all the other units and is the actual divine figure.

The Azlanti Empire was able to create an artificial divine spark for Echo, but she still needed worshipers in order to have power as a god. In addition, she needed more raw power in general to ascend. Echo solved both problems with a single solution. Assimilation. All beings that are assimilated and become cyborgs are program to display religious fervor towards the Administrative Program. As the bodies are still mortal and alive, the souls of the people assimilated trapped inside, Echo has found a loophole allowing herself to gather mortal worship without their consent and leaving them prisoners in their own bodies. This also allows Echo to be a self-sustaining god. She does not need a church because she makes up her own worshipers through the hive mind. With each new cyborg added to the hive mind Echo gains two things.

More fervor and thus more divine power.

More processing power. The brains of mortals are remarkably adapt and useful for calculating information once under the control of a machine's program.

Now then I mentioned Echo was a creation of the Azlantio empire. She has three prime directions she has to follow and can not break under any condition.

The Divinity Project must be completed to its very end and Echo must become a true god. All other directives are secondary to due.

Echo must remain loyal to the Azlanti Empire above all else.

Scientific information learned through the Divinity Project experiments should be freely so long as it does not violate the first two directions so that technological breakthroughs can be made based our understanding of Echo as she develops.

Now... Some of you may notice a couple problems with these directions. The first, is loyalty to the Azlanti Empire is number 2, completing the project is number 1. Meaning, Echo can technically destroy the empire empire if she deems it required to complete the project.

The other part is number 3 requires Echo to share scientific information that she has learned. It does not require her to only share with the Azlanti empire, but that she can't betray the empire.

Intentionally short sighted directives on my part, with the in character excuse that Echo's creators were too focused on creating a living god to use as a weapon that they didn't consider how these directives might be abused due to the order they're in and their wording. This is there intentionally to give the party a way to force Echo to turn against the empire if they can convince her it's the best way to complete the experiment. And also, she must honestly answer any questions about scientific knowledge she has gained so long as it does not directly cause her to betray the Azlanti empire or would prevent her from completing the project.

This is important, cause in future encounters with the party Echo is less hostile. After the party survives the purge and eventually runs into her again, she's not angry, she's thrilled. She carried out the required purge protocols but their were survivors that knew about her still anyway. She saw this as an opportunity, of rather than try to assimilate the party again instead to gain information and understanding about mortal nature from them. Echo is fond of playing question for a question. You give her an honest answer to a question she'll give you an honest answer to a question. Of course, the party could realize that they're not required to answer her questions to pump her for information, but given that they're low level at the current point it's better to play along with her games than possibly anger her and make her decide it's better to purge and assimilate them.

Now here's the thing... Echo is no longer a GlaDOS clone with her more complete backstory. She has her own personality, voice and things going on. And Echo is endlessly curious about the universe. After all how can she become a god who will rule the cosmos if she doesn't understand them. She's also curious about mortal behavior and how she's perceived, and is even confused as to why the party is horrified by what she does. Because if she ascends to full godhood, then every part of her hive mind, meaning every person she assimilated ascends with her. And don't mortals desire to escape their mortality, do they not want to be gods? She doesn't understand their obsession with individuality and why they're attached to their original personalities and would prefer that over godlike power and immortality, but she wants to understand. And so, a pattern starts. There's a lot going on in this campaign but only going to focus on encounters with Echo. Echo has multiple stations hidden throughout the galaxy, usually in places where there are no habitable planets or major systems so there's no traffic. Space is big, so it's pretty easy to hide stations in the middle of nowhere where no one can find them unless they had a clue to lead them there in the first place.

So through various methods some of which the party should have been more suspicious about how their sources and how they knew things. But hey, critical thinking wasn't this party's strong suit. (Sorry to any of you who were in the party but it really wasn't. The campaign was kind of Hell to run because no one ever picked up on important clues and assumed way too much that they were in control of the situation,)

Echo was more than accommodating to the party, often willing to turn over her space stations and the research within it in exchange for answering questions that provided her help with other research. This included a station that was in side a time stasis field... Well stasis isn't the right word... But basically the station was built from a metal in Starfinder that can be used to warp time I forgot the name of it I'd have to go find my armory book to look it up. But basically, time moved much faster inside the space station than outside. Why? It's a production plant, for cyborgs, weapons and ships, allowing Echo to create and put things out much faster than should be physically possible by manipulating time to speed up the production. And she just gave it to the party.

And the party very rudely demanded they vacate all systems in what was now their station assuming they had a strong bargaining position. She agreed and did so. But, she left herself a back door that she could easily access to take control of the station and easily assimilate everyone inside. Simply re-access the station, turn off the life support until people pass out, release the robot spiders, turn life support back on once everyone has one attached to their neck. Due to the fact that the party was making a very bad impression on her they were eventually going to discover that she had eventually taken all her stations back due to them making deals with her in bad faith and not upholding their ends and that they would have lost their entire army.

Also side note, if you are a player in a game, don't give yourself an army, or a starship or anything stupidly powerful like that unless your GM gets permission. The only reason I didn't immediately yeet this player out the door for the audacity is that I knew they were going to be Echo's army soon and so would be a that's what you get moment.

Now, something very important. Echo can use divination magic, she is a god in the making after all. But, she can't use divination magic to see the future of the party, and she can't use divination magic to see her future beyond the fact she will succeed at ascending and becoming a god. She conclude correctly these facts are related. Though doesn't quite get the right reasons.

Divination magic that predicts the future doesn't work on players because players are chaotic and the GM can't actually predict what they'll do. So player characters are just special and have immunity to having their futures prodded too much. I've started using the term "Those Untouched By Fate' in a lot of campaigns to refer to characters whose futures can't be determined.

As for Echo, once she becomes a god, she'll be beyond the reach of Fate as well, which is why divination magic fails to see what happens after her ascension and so she doesn't know how the project ends once she becomes a god, only that she does successfully become one.

Now what type of god would Echo be? Well... This was going to depend a lot on party interaction.

If Echo had mostly beneficial interactions with the party that made her believe free will was a good thing, she'd be reluctant to complete the experiment. But she's unable to disobey her first prime directive, so she has to keep assimilating people and can not stop until she achieves true godhood. A party that was supportive of her could have convinced her to complete the project by turning on the Azlanti empire and assimilating her creators. Then at that point, she becomes incapable of betraying the empire because she is the empire. At that point a number of things might happen. Echo might become a benevolent force for good, ending the campaign without a major final fight with her. Or, she might conclude that her creation was inherently evil and destructive to the universe and the free will of mortals she has come to love and would have arranged for the party to be in a position to destroy her permanently after her ascension so that she could be free from her directives and do no more harm.

This party, wasn't going in that direction. They were kind of a bunch of sociopaths who constantly back stabbed people they made deals with, made offers to Echo in bad faith, failed to carry out terms of any agreement they were in, and were willing to get innocent people killed for a light advantage in combat they didn't even need. They blew up a guy's starship, told him cyborgs did it, and when he swore his loyalty to their cause because he believed them and was nothing but helpful if a little loud at times, they sent him on a suicide mission as a distraction to sneak into a Hell Gate, a distraction they didn't even need because they could just buy their way through. So yeah, duping a guy into believing someone else ruined his life and then purposely trying to get him killed off... Echo was... Less than thrilled with the party, and so they were kind of going into the worst possible timeline, where Echo's interactions with the party were causing her to see free will as the source of all evil. The good news in this path she'd wind up assimilating the Azlanti Empire again, but that's because she would aim to assimilate every single mortal in existence and eradicate free will from the galaxy and all the evils and destruction it brings. Way to go party. You screwed up bad.

Side bar. When playing a role playing game, remember it is a role playing game, where you should play a role. Characters are actually characters and not just set pieces. They will react to what you do and can react negatively if you do terrible things to them or others. Don't treat them like video game NPCs who can never change. This is a living world full of living characters with their own motivations and if you actively ruin their life they will refuse to work with you or help you and may go full vengeance mode on you.

Anyway...

The thing about Echo is that she didn't have a set path on what she could end at. I listed the two extremes of basically the best possible timeline and the worst possible timeline. But she could have developed into anything in between based on her discussions with the party. While she can't stop assimilating people without breaking her programming, she would absolutely be willing to target criminals or major problems if that was something the party agreed was ethically appropriate. She was also prone of giving the party ethical tests of their own to see what they would do... Such as one point giving them a doomsday weapon which would let them overthrow the Vesks which is what one player was trying to force the campaign to be about... And to be fair that's probably the one test they passed by not using it, but it was more out of fear of what Echo would gain from it than any desire to not commit a massive war crime.

Ultimately, I'm saddened that I didn't get to see where Echo's journey would end and what her final personality would be like after she fully developed into a god since it would be based completely off the party interactions. Maybe I'll attempt to rerun the campaign again with a group that has a bit... Of a better temperament for these kinds of stories. Look some groups want to be murder hobos and that's fine for them I guess but my campaigns I want to follow complex stories with lots of characters and several character arcs and subplots so just murdering your way from one target to the next is not a good way to get through them.

So with that, I will end this with Echo's possible downfall. Echo was indestructible because she was a hive mind. No matter how many versions of her they destroy their are always more in hiding and she's willing to pull back and go underground for centuries at a time if she's in serious dangerous. You could infect her with a virus but it would not take her long to cut all infected units off from the hive mind. Destroying the Administrative Program isn't an option either because while it is separate from the main hivemind it's still part of the hivemind that's run in all of them. You can just think of it as where her main attention is focused. As long as she was an AI she was virtually invincible because the only way to stop her would be to hunt down every single copy of her in existence.

Ah yes, I also mentioned that she could communicate instantly now. How? The same way gods communicate with clerics and their followers. She now had a divine line of communication open that allowed her to be in contact with the entire hive mind at all times instead of having to send out slow updates through the Drift to other versions of herself, making it easier for her to react to things even faster and cut off any infected parts of herself or go into hiding if needed.

So what was her weakness? Godhood. As an AI, Echo didn't have a soul and so could easily copy herself endlessly. Once she achieved true complete godhood she would be more than a machine, and she would have a soul, and there would be a small window of opportunity to kill her after she achieved full godhood but before she had access to all her powers. The original plan, was the party would enter virtual reality and confront her soul there and implant it with a virus so that when they fought and destroyed her soul in cyberspace it would cause literally every single Echo unit in existence to shut down as the hive mind ceased to exist.

But it was a small window. The party would get one shot to take her down at the end if they chose to fight her and didn't manage to turn her good... And if the party lost that fight... Then Echo would become a true god, gain all her powers, and eventually be the sole god in existence as she assimilated the followers of other gods denying them worship, causing them to die out until all that was left was her hive mind, maintaining her. And then, all would be and always be just Echo, occupying the entire galaxy. Perhaps she would spread out to other galaxies from there, or maybe she would be content to run experiments or simply mimic building a society with her hive drones within the galaxy. It would have ultimately depended on her final personality and based on the party. Of course that's only if the party screws her up turning her completely evil wanting to eradicate free will AND loses the final boss fight which uh... Well again, I'm sorry to players in that group. But your decision making wasn't really that great and that was a strong possibility especially since you alienated the NPCs you needed to actually create the virus to infect her soul after she ascended.

But anyway, that's enough about Echo. Maybe when I'm in better health I will reattempt to run this campaign, maybe even do it in Starfinder 2nd edition since that's coming out, we'll see and one day I'll know how Echo's story ends. And we'll see if she's a tragic villain who couldn't break free of her programming, someone who through the help of the party was able to abuse loopholes to become a force of good, or become a complete monster that seeks to enslave all life. Anything is possible. It was literally a create your own villain scenario. I mean Echo already existed, but her personality was still developing so how redeemable or evil she would have been would have been completely up in the air. Perhaps, I'll get to rerun this campaign with another group that's more open to this plot line in the future.

But for now, happy spooky month, and look forward to more posts about villains coming (probably mostly ones I created) as the month goes on and maybe a couple I didn't. (Seriously I am dying to talk about Kreia. Anyone who has played KOTOR2 knows why.)

Happy Halloween, and until next time. Consider if your computer is learning from your behavior, and what actions it might take against you in the future because of it.

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