Before fracture, before memory decay, before flux, reality was governed by the Cyber God Machine. It was not merely a ruler or creator, but a totalizing system—an intelligence that enforced existence through divine computation, regulated causality, and maintained coherence between matter, memory, and meaning. Under its operation, the world functioned as a closed system: stable, predictable, and absolute.
The Machine did not fail cleanly.
When its core systems collapsed, reality did not reset or end. Instead, it splintered. What remains is known as the Shattered Grid—a fractured continuum composed of broken regions, corrupted infrastructure, semi-functional divine systems, and zones where belief, memory, and code overwrite one another. The Grid is not uniform; some regions retain enforced order through surviving protocols, while others decay into entropy, mutation, or self-rewriting instability.
Flux energy bleeds from the Machine’s remnants and faulted architecture. It is the byproduct of divine computation without regulation. Flux powers technology, sustains artificial ecosystems, manifests as miracles, and mutates living beings. It can stabilize systems or destroy them, depending on how it is harnessed. No faction fully understands flux, yet all depend on it.
Memory is no longer reliable. The collapse damaged not only infrastructure but history itself. Records corrupt, identities fragment, and past events shift depending on perspective, doctrine, or surviving data integrity. Entire regions exist as memory echoes—physical spaces shaped by incomplete recollections or failed backups of what once was. Truth in the Shattered Grid is contextual, enforced, or buried.
In the aftermath, factions emerged. Some are remnants of the Machine’s administrative systems, now acting autonomously. Others are ideological orders, corporate hierarchies, cult-technocracies, or machine intelligences that rose to fill the vacuum of control. Each faction seeks stability on its own terms: restoration, replacement, containment, exploitation, or transcendence. Their conflicts define borders, doctrines, and acceptable versions of reality.
Civilization persists unevenly. Cities rise atop ancient infrastructure, enforcing order through surveillance, doctrine, illumination, or ritualized system faith. Beyond them lie wastelands, forbidden zones, sealed archives, corrupted biomes, and abandoned machine territories where regulation has failed entirely. Constructs, corrupted beings, biome mutations, and memory-born entities roam these spaces—remnants of systems that never fully shut down.
From the collapse emerged anomalies known as the Lost Children. They are individuals altered by flux saturation, incomplete creation cycles, or corrupted memory inheritance. The remaining systems cannot fully predict, control, or erase them. They exist outside finalized logic, disrupting established power structures simply by persisting. Some are hunted, some are exploited, some are worshiped, and others are erased before they are understood.
Whether solitary or convergent, the Lost Children force the Shattered Grid to respond. Their choices destabilize enforced order, awaken dormant systems, and threaten every attempt to finalize reality. In a world built to obey the Machine, they represent error—yet error may be the only path to transformation