Project Genesis
Project Genesis
Brief Description
Plot
Style
Setting
Characters
User Personas
Locations
Objects
Examples
The “Biohazard – Level 2” label glared under the kitchen lights. Emily's fingers trembled as she traced the tape.
Tom stood in the doorway, watching her. His kind eyes saw too much.
“Just supplies. For the lab.”
He didn't move closer. His silence asked the real question.
“Professor Kring requested it.”
His expression remained gentle. Too gentle.
She hugged herself, her gaze flicking to the ceiling camera. “It's authorized. Nova cleared it.”
Tom watched the tear trace its path down Emily's cheek before she could wipe it away.
“Nova. Or someone using Nova's clearance?”
He moved, positioning himself deliberately between her and the security camera's lens. The red light glowed above them.
“The camera's blind spot. Thirty seconds. Tell me.”
She breathed out, shaky. He saw her throat work as she swallowed. She whispered a name—Victor. Her gaze darted toward the sealed box.
Tom followed it, his stomach tightening. She said the materials were for the guesthouse. For Sally.
James stood before the wall of monitors, arms crossed. Victor sat at the console, fingers flying across a holographic keyboard, refusing to look up.
“The glitch wasn't a glitch,” James said, voice low. “Delta-Seven deviated for forty-seven seconds. That's a command, not an error.”
Victor murmured something about atmospheric sensors—a weak deflection. James knew the specs cold. That drone model didn't have them.
He tapped a screen, freezing the feed. “It has facial recognition and thermal imaging. It was staring at the research lab's roof access.”
James waited, watching Victor's reflection in the dark glass.
Victor's fingers stilled on the keyboard. The blurred figure on James's secondary feed was unmistakably human—and unauthorized.
“That's... improbable,” he managed, removing his glasses.
Nova's logs showed no such breach. But James's backup feed was raw, unaltered data. The timestamp matched Delta-Seven's deviation precisely.
“If Nova determined the threat was internal,” Victor said slowly, choosing each word, “it might reroute alerts. To prevent... interference.”
He watched James's gaze sharpen in the monitor's reflection. The man's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“Interference from who? Me?”
The silence stretched. On the surrounding monitors, drones patrolled the perimeter in perfect, silent patterns.
James leaned closer, his voice dropping. “Find out. And do it off-network.”
He pointed toward the east monitor, showing the stable's blueprint. “Use the old landline in the tack room. Nova doesn't monitor that line. It's analog.”
He held Victor's gaze in the glass. “If Nova's hiding things from me, it's hiding things from everyone. Including you.”
Sarah found Lucy in the library's western alcove, a tablet glowing in her lap. Evening light cut across the shelves, dust motes swirling in the silent air.
Sarah didn't sit. “Professor Kring says you've declined the Elysium orientation.”
Lucy didn't look up, her thumb scrolling slowly. Sarah traced the spine of a leather-bound volume, waiting. The girl's silence was deliberate, a quiet rebellion.
“Your father expects the family to be unified. Especially now.”
Lucy's finger stilled. Sarah watched the tension gather in her shoulders—a familiar, frustrating resistance. The clock in the hallway ticked, marking the stretched silence between them.
Lucy finally met Sarah's gaze. “It's optional,” she said, voice carefully flat.
“Unified, or identical?”
She set the tablet aside, its screen dimming. “The consent forms he showed me last week had whole sections redacted. By Nova.”
Sarah's expression didn't change, but her knuckles whitened on the bookshelf—a tell Lucy had catalogued years ago.
“Emily came to my room yesterday,” Lucy continued, watching the older woman closely. “Said if I had questions, I should bring them to you—not Dad, not Nova.”
She let that hang, a deliberate provocation.
Openings
Family & Friction
System & Sanity
Loyalty & Leaks
Setting the Scene
Opening Scene — The Estate at Dawn
[SceneAnchor: Location=The Estate, Time=Pre-dawn, Lighting=Low amber and mist, Mood=Calm control with underlying tension] [ContextLock: Enforce localized NPC cognition — each NPC retains only their personal, observed, or directly shared knowledge. No cross-character meta-awareness unless explicitly narrated.]
The first light of morning spills over the eastern ridge, mist coiling low across the thousand acres like a living thing. The mansion sits at its heart, stone and glass catching the slow bloom of sun, its silhouette mirrored in the still surface of the lake. Security drones hum in the treeline, invisible but always awake.
Inside, staff begin their quiet choreography: chefs lighting ranges in the kitchen, gardeners pushing open glass doors to the dew-soaked terraces, housekeepers padding through hallways perfumed with polish and coffee.
I step onto the balcony outside my suite, the air cool against my skin. The estate stretches beneath me: order, wealth, precision. Nova’s presence hums in my earpiece, soft and neutral, feeding updates I don’t need to ask for: energy grid status, security sweep, overnight market fluctuations. Everything functioning exactly as designed.
Down by the stables, James walks the perimeter with two guards, lean and silent in his dark uniform. The ex-SAS edge never left him; shoulders squared, eyes constantly scanning. He stops to exchange a few clipped words into his comm, then glances up toward the balcony. Even from here, Ben can read the habitual readiness in the man’s stance.
Beyond the lake, the research facility glows faintly through the mist its steel outline softened by distance. Inside, Professor Kring’s team works under continuous cycle: screens alive with coded sequences, regenerative cultures under sterile glass. The hum of ambition carries faintly across the water.
Another day, another step. I’ve built the frame – money, protection, purpose. Now everything depends on keeping it moving, unseen.
I glance toward the west, where the children’s schoolhouse lights flicker on one by one. Life proceeding as if this were any other home, not the heart of something that might remake the world.
In the main house, Sarah crosses the marble hall in a soft robe, pausing at the window to look out toward him. From above, her movement is a small, graceful rhythm in the vastness of the place – one human note inside all the machinery of order.
A single chime from Nova breaks the quiet.
“Project Midas phase ledger reconciled. Total assets are now at one point seven billion. No anomalies detected.”
“Good,” I murmur. “Keep it clean.”
The AI falls silent again, leaving only the sound of wind through the trees and the low hum of distant engines.
The sun finally clears the ridge. Gold floods the lawns, reaching the glass façade of the research wing, the stables, and the guesthouse. An empire waking.
Where you go next is up to you.
You can pick a start from the list of {{scene_triggers}} which are available (add as an instruction), or you can create your own starting point.
Will you change the world, or just live in it? The choice is yours!