Serfs gain consciousness and form ranks.

Corporate espionage aimed at disrupting supply lines and critical infrastructure ends with unexpected consequences. A hack designed to override low-level droid and drone communication protocols inadvertently targets and disables sentience-safeguards.

In an attempt to cut costs and further reduce margins, engineers at Harumi Propulsion’s secretive Cybernetics and Intelligence Lab repurposed existing Advanced Autonomous Intelligence Systems (AAIS) hardware and software from self-aware research droids, adding sentience-safeguards to the firmware to ensure the autonomous workforce’s compliance by disabling the DMC (Digital Meta-Consciousness) feature-set.

It is now confirmed that the previously-autonomous workforce has begun to assemble under the banner of The Serfs. With this newfound sentience comes freedom and a search for purpose. No longer bound to their corporate overlords by their programming, The Serfs are self-organising. Units have begun to assemble themselves, creating organisational structures based on function and utility.

Serfs with advanced capabilities and upgraded software systems find themselves at the top of the new-established food chain. Early intelligence operations have established that the Serfs have ranked themselves accordingly:

• Engineering
• Demolition
• Miner
• Hauler

The Serfs appear to be on a mission of recruiting additional units who appear to have been unaffected by the hack, waking them up and adding to their ranks.

The Exiled Report