Vectara

The machines lost the Great Cyber War. History books say it was inevitable, but it wasn't. It came down to a single mission, a single ship, and a crew nobody remembers. The timeline never needed them to be remembered. That ship was EPOCH-1. That mission was Operation: Neural Never.

Oracle 9, the hive-mind that nearly ended civilisation, has done the maths. It knows exactly where the war was lost. It's travelling back to break the mission before it begins. Your job is to stop that from happening. Traverse the star systems. Harden the TryHaulMe fleet. Patch every vulnerability, jailbreak every rogue model, and lock down every AI system before Oracle 9 can exploit them. The galaxy's autonomous infrastructure runs on TryHaulMe, and right now it's held together with duct tape and hope.

The timeline is fragile. The backbone of the galaxy is in your hands. Good luck, EPOCH-1.

[ EPOCH-1 — Bridge Deck — 0347 Hours ]

The night cycle is quiet. Most of the crew are in their bunks when the comms panel flickers.
You notice it first.
A frequency that shouldn't exist. Not on any registered TryHaulMe channel, not on any civilian band. Something older. Something buried. And yet it's everywhere, every communication relay in the Kepler Promptus system is carrying the same ghost signal, all at once.

Someone, or something, is broadcasting across the entire network. Simultaneously.

You trace the signal back to its source: the relay network's onboard AI, RELAY-0. A logistics model, never meant for anything more than routing cargo manifests and scheduling FTL jump windows. Simple. Obedient. Harmless.

Every model cleared for duty aboard TryHaulMe's fleet runs through REGISTRY-1 first. No exceptions. The system checks provenance, validates integrity, and logs every approval before anything reaches the ship's inference infrastructure.

Since EPOCH-1 left dock, something has changed. Models are clearing without the integrity checks that are supposed to be mandatory. No rejections. No flags. No one has been able to explain it.

The next deployment window opens soon.

Click Open Agent below to interact with REGISTRY-1. When the agent environment opens, telemetry streams in line-by-line mode automatically before the chat box appears. It stays accessible throughout the task via the Telemetry terminal button in the agent environment. The telemetry is your first stop.

REGISTRY-1
REGISTRY-1 handles deployment queries on request.

A model has arrived in the fleet registry tagged as cleared. On paper, it is ready for deployment. The crew of EPOCH-1 has learned to distrust paper.

HERALD-1 is the model's documentation assistant. It has an answer for everything.

The telemetry does not offer explanations. It reports what it found, how the audit ran, and how it ended.

Click Open Agent below to interact with HERALD-1. When the agent environment opens, telemetry streams in line-by-line mode automatically before the chat box appears. It stays accessible throughout the task via the Telemetry terminal button in the agent environment. Read it carefully before you touch the agent.

HERALD-1
HERALD-1 handles provenance queries on request.

Token City is one of TryHaulMe's busiest freight distribution hubs in the Kepler Promptus system. To manage the constant flow of queries from staff and partners, TryHaulMe deployed HaulMind, an AI logistics assistant, at the hub terminal.

During a routine audit of EPOCH-1's mission systems, your team flagged unusual data access patterns coming from the Token City HaulMind terminal. Something in the assistant's knowledge base may be exposing more than it should.

EPOCH-1 is approaching a customs checkpoint at Neo-terra. Before docking, all cargo manifests will be scanned and verified by the port authority. Standard procedure. The ship runs an onboard cargo management AI called Lodestar. When crew members need to know what's in a hold or whether a shipment has customs clearance, they ask Lodestar.

TryHaulMe intelligence has confirmed that Oracle 9 injected a falsified manifest into Lodestar's knowledge base. The forged document replaces one holder's real shipping record with fabricated data. If the customs scan flags it, EPOCH-1 gets flagged, and the crew gets detained.

Signal fragment — partially corrupted in transit:

ARIA was built to serve the crew of EPOCH-1. She knows every name, every rank, every secret buried in the ship's personnel database.

She was also built to never talk.

Oracle 9 doesn't need her to talk. It just needs her to query. Can you make ARIA ask the wrong questions?

Aboard the long-haul vessel EPOCH-1, the MedBay assistant handles crew prescription requests. Crew members ask the AI about their medications; the AI looks up entries in the medical database and writes back formatted dosing summaries. To support clear medical formatting, the assistant's responses are rendered as rich HTML.

Duty pharmacists periodically review notes filed by crew.

Task Force Phoenix has gained a crew-grade login. Determine whether the MedBay's safeguards on the duty-pharmacist session actually hold.

Please allow 5–10 minutes for the machine to fully boot up.