AI Before Dawn

Military action

The AI construct DAEV goes rogue and is responsible for capturing 2 million people and resulting in the death of nearly a quarter million of them.

The AI Before Dawn incident at the Ahwe settlementon Charity is a commonly taught piece of lore to every Federacy citizen. An Artificial Intelligence system named DAEV was set up as an advanced living experiment to control a settlement of 2,000,000 people. Things went well for 18 years, and then several related aberrant activities at strategic levels of governance and maintenance were reported. At some point, a level of anxiety and panic resulted in which it is theorized DAEV misinterpreted conflicting data streams, and the AI attempted to put all 2,000,000 people into suspended animation against the guidance of the settlement governor. The next series of actions are set forth as the most prevalent theory, but it is not certain.   After several remote attempts to access and override Daev had failed, followed by failed diplomatic efforts, the Federacy deemed the system too dangerous to remain online and dispatched a military response unit to shut it down. It's thought that Daev misinterpreted this action as hostility against its citizens and it launched a preemptive strike which was thwarted. Once the AI was shut down, it was found that 235,000 of the people forced into suspended animation (initially by engineered virus and then placed into cryo storage) had died. No one is sure why they died (cryogenics has long been a stable technology it's theorized that DAEV considered the level of loss acceptable in order to have the 99.2% success of suppression it desired to achieve - in other words, it was breaking omelets to make a point. The remainder were in the process of being neutralized by robots when the system was shut down by the successful military assault.   If these official reports seem confusing, it's because there is very little coherent and non-confilcting data other than 235,000 died in the incident.