Before you were Vanguard, you were a warclone of a prior generation; Before you were a warclone, you were born a human being like any other.
Today, you are one among many who have rebuilt themselves to join in the eponymous next step in the evolution of the warclone, one of several modes of technological immortality that have been devised by the various peoples of New Eden. While EVE Online’s capsuleers roam the heavens in vast ships controlled through an insulated interface, warclones walk fearlessly on the ground below, carving their ambitions into the world with their own hands.
Your relationship with the Deathless Circle is that of a freelancer. In exchange for assisting in the development of Vanguard warclones, you have been guaranteed sanctuary, work opportunities, and existential continuity unthreatened by the economic pressures and persecution that saw independent warclone organizations fade into irrelevance in the past. Your side of this agreement is fulfilled simply by participating in Vanguard deployment operations in any capacity; the diagnostic data you provide while inhabiting Vanguard blanks is invaluable to the Circle's ongoing research into Jovian biology and technology. Like all warclones, you exist primarily as an infomorph, a digital analogue to the signals and processes of a biological consciousness. Warclones are incarnated by writing these infomorphs onto specialized implants in the brains of compatible warclone blanks—empty vessels awaiting the arrival of a mind—and can return to life after death indefinitely so long as additional blanks are available. Vanguard blanks, extensively modified Jovian clone bodies, represent a shift in development philosophy away from costly Empire supersoldier designs in favor of producing an adaptive, economical, and pragmatic combat platform for a growing population of mercenaries given a home by The Deathless. The location of your home is The Fulcrum, an abandoned Jovian outpost now occupied by the Deathless Circle. More precisely, integrated into the ancient systems of this vast megastructure, there lies an onboard virtuality capable of hosting live warclone infomorphs in a constructed environment. There is currently little to be found in this derelict inner world but a vast yet tranquil darkness. Nevertheless, in the hands of The Deathless and his associates it has become a haven for countless warclones who have made their way to The Fulcrum, yourself among them.
Warclone technology was first conceived under the Amarr Empire's Templar program as the basis for an immortal clone soldier army. Early warclones relied on implants salvaged from the cryostatically preserved bodies of the Sleepers, a Jovian subculture who had shifted their entire civilization into a utopian virtual reality. The implants' ability to record and host a compact infomorph--a live consciousness in a digital format-- enabled a transfer of minds on a purely human scale, without any of the bulky and delicate equipment required by existing methods. Critical instabilities caused by fragmented remains of Sleeper infomorphs discovered in these implants saw the Templar program scrapped, but not before the other three Empires had already obtained the technology and begun building warclones of their own. While the rest grappled with increasingly severe consequences, the Amarr devoted their efforts to reverse-engineering clean "second-gen" implants that would be shared freely with the others by Empress Jamyl. Ensuing purges led to countless first-gen survivors seeking refuge with the Guristas, Angel Cartel, Mordu's Legion, and Amarr, with the Legion's first-gens branching off in the following months to form the Arkombine- a mercenary group united by a goal of righting the wrongs done to them and forging a path to freedom beyond the borders of the Empires. They and the Legion maintained a close relationship in the fields of mercenary work and warclone R&D. Behind the scenes, however, the Arkombine's institutional disillusionment and deep interest in the Sleeper & Jove technology quickly led to discreet association with elements of the Angel Cartel. A subsequent search for hidden Jovian ruins brought the Arkombine's head clone physician and infomorph specialist --known in the underworld circles as Lifegiver-- into contact with affiliates of the mysterious Deathless. After being tapped for collaboration with The Quartermaster--a prolific engineer and technology dealer-- on a secret Guristas project, Lifegiver's proved talents and ideological alignement led the Deathless to recruit her into his trusted inner circle alongside The Quartermaster. This group eventually succeeded in reaching the ancient Jovian outpost known as The Fulcrum, long abandoned in the shrouded system of Zarzakh. The Deathless and his circle would uncover many treasures within the continental megastructure, with three in particular being more than the Arkombine had ever dreamed they would find:
A derelict onboard virtuality, dark and desolate as it was, would serve as a haven for warclones.
Archives of first-gen compatible Jovian clone bodies and an industrial-scale clonefab capacity yielded a platform for a new kind of warclone.
Source data for FTL communications implants based on nano-adapted biotech familiar to The Quartermaster would be the key to a new era.
With these three elements as a basis, Lifegiver saw a path to harmony for the first generation unfolding at last. Here in Zarzakh, she begam a new program aimed at bringing those under her care stability, sanctuary, and the power to realize the dream of independent freedom shared by all members of the burgeoning Deathless Circle. Collaborating with The Quartermaster, work quickly began on what would become the next evolution of warclone technology.
Your journey began with an invitation to Zarzakh extended by The Arkombine, promising stability and opportunity for all warclones in partnership with the Deathless Circle. Whether of your own volition or among those recovered in raids on SARO's 'Confinement Archives', your imprint--the base personality, skill, and memory data a warclone infomorph is compiled from-- was brought to Zarzakh and laoded into the Fulcrum VR. Offered a choice of either awaiting a brighter future in tranquil but static residence in this inner world or voluntarily converting your imprint to a novel format to join the "next evolution" of warclone technology, you chose the latter. This name given to this new generation symbolized its developers' mission of making every warclone spearhead of their own path: burning toward independence, you are Vanguard of no other destiny but your own. The seeds of the Vanguard were sown years prior to The Deathless' arrival in Zarzakh. The first was Lifegiver's identification of overlapping non-mutual memory recall as the primary trigger for the first-gen's enigmatic psychosis; Secons was a realization that first-gen infomorphs could be kept stable when residing in a virtuality; Last of all came a discovery that first-gens' Sleeper element conferred seamless compatibility with Jove biology and neural interface biotech. Aboard The Fulcrum, these would culminate in the Vanguard imprint format. For first-gen warclonese, conversion to Vanguard entails compositing one's 'Soldier' and 'Sleeper' elements into a fully unified imprint, with any non-mutual episodic and emotional memory suppressed, filtered, and gradually recompiled into a singular partition - producing a new identity that is more than the sum of its parts. Second-gen conversion involves a careful pairing with curated data from the Sleeper element of another to produce the same compability with Jove biology while avoiding the first-gens' corruption and keeping memories far more intact. While residing in the Fulcrum VR, your experience as an infomorph is shaped through a "front-end" interface strapped onto underlying Jovian systems. Through this, you may choose --among other interactions-- to link with available Vanguard blanks in the world of reality. On deployment, a FTL link is established between The Fulcrum and a waiting blank, into which your infomorph is shifted in a manner resembling a long-distance version of the Sleepers' enclave coupling. This is achieved through The Quartermaster's main contribution to Vanguard design so far: a direct integration of Jovian FTL biotech into Sleeper implant architecture, with sufficient bandwidth to keep an infomorph synced with its imprint in the Fulcrum VR. Of added benefit is its ability to hotload data such as interface protocols, programs, or schematics. Between acquiring source data for the tech that inspired his past innovations in fields of clone mapping and neural interfacing, and requesting recovery of Mordu tech based on R&D pilfered from his facilities, one can only wonder at what projects The Quartermaster is pursuing in the depths of The Fulcrum.
Contracts offered in deployments are distributed through a private service of a FTL job brokerage framework controlled by a group in partnership with --but separate from-- the Deathless Circle. It is believed that contracts from a third party operating as 'Handler Morituri' aimed at suppressing Insurgencies and acquiring data on the Vanguard appeared due to fraternization of whatever identity lies behind the alias with this external group. The Deathless' seeming acceptance of these circumstances has led many to believe that the Circle's true goals lie somewhere far beyond the frontlines of their associates' Insurgencies. Until next time, o7
