EXOSPHERE
EXOSPHERE Founded
EXOSPHERE is a multinational cybernetics and weapons development corporation, founded in the 1950’s by the families of Nikola Radenović and the man now known as “Rook.” When ownership passed to Nikola upon his father’s retirement, the company was in a fragile state, its prestige mostly outlasting its progress. Over the course of a few decades, EXOSPHERE’s standing with numerous Navan governments eroded, its innovations steadily outpaced by younger competitors, and its name more a legacy title than any promise of the “cutting edge”. Nikola, however, only grew bolder in both instinct and ambition, and understood that reputation alone would not restore the company’s footing.
As one of his first acts as the president of EXOSPHERE, Nikola installed Rook as his Chief Scientist and together they established a new division devoted to artificial intelligence, a gamble which many voices within the company regarded as reckless, indulgent, and irresponsible. However, the strides the pair made together proved to be EXOSPHERE’s saving grace. The intelligence division produced advancements that drew back the attention of governments that had long since stopped listening, although these agencies were hardly the only ones with roused interest in the technology. Within a few short years EXOSPHERE was no longer a relic of its founders’ era but one of the largest and most influential companies in the world, even surpassing its former glory; Nikola and Rook had had become their own kind of world power.
Greater Heights
EXOSPHERE’s impact and profitability rose from the dead, as did its profile, and a name the world had nearly forgotten was spoken again in boardrooms and councils all over. Countless government agencies that had once let their contracts lapse returned with handsome offers. Several sought to buy the company outright, and when Nikola refused them, some even looked for ways to seize control. EXOSPHERE answered by expanding. A web of affiliate branches spread across the globe, many established for purposes that reached beyond the company’s original intentions. One among them was the surveillance and study of Mythran activity, concentrated heavily in Central and Eastern Europe, but any public knowledge of such was quickly and carefully buried.
EXOSPHERE’s growth, of course, did not come without scrutiny. Investors and shareholders pressed harder with every quarter, and while their demands certainly stroked Nikola’s instincts as a businessman, they placed ever-tightening restrictions on Rook’s research, much of it in the name of what were noted as “ethical concerns.” The two men’s visions for EXOSPHERE began driving them further and further apart until there was no reconciling them. Rook terminated the partnership, but not before gutting the company, taking with him his artificial intelligence research and every technology bound to it. Rook turned that very technology on himself. In a matter of just over twenty-four hours, every record of him had vanished. Accounts, archives, identities, the very traces that tied him to the world all disappeared as though he had never existed. Even EXOSPHERE’s own systems, which he had helped build, could not locate a trace of him. Nikola, even with every resource at his command, could not follow. Whether Rook meant to put himself beyond Nikola’s reach, or Nikola beyond his, is a mystery.
But he did not abandon his work. Free of corporate policy and the slow progress of supervision, he pursued it without restraint and somewhere beyond the world’s sight he became even more the technological prodigy. Of his dedication and brilliance, PARAGON, the first “artificial sentience”, was born.
The Birth of PARAGON