For untold millennia, the world of Memosyne served as the sector's vast library, a planetary hard drive containing the accumulated knowledge of a bygone Golden Age. During the cataclysmic era known as the Sundering, a malevolent, semi-sentient malware entity, later dubbed "The Glitch," caused a catastrophic malfunction in the planet's cooling systems to prevent its own deletion. In an instant, Memosyne flash-froze, preserving yottabytes of data under miles of ice and claiming millions of lives.
For a millennium, the frozen world remained a silent tomb, its frigid wastes haunted only by the erratic, automated holograms of a dead civilization. Eventually, the Red Sun Dominion discovered this immense archive. They established the Echo Frost Citadel, transforming Memosyne into their primary data extraction outpost.
Under the command of High Archivist Valerius Krentz, the outpost evolved into a grotesque parody of high society. The upper levels of the Spire, retrofitted with terraforming-grade heating, became the exclusive domain of Dominion officers. Here, a culture of Post-Apocalyptic Aristocratic Bureaucracy flourished, where officers sipped synthetic wine and treated data excavation as a competitive sport.
Below them, in the Sub-Zero levels, lay a hellscape of desperate survival. Grunts and conscripted laborers, many snatched during the Harvest, toiled in freezing conditions, hacking at the ice for data. Heat became the primary currency, with failure to meet quotas resulting in "thermal demotion," a horrific death sentence by hypothermia. Unbeknownst to the lower castes, the outpost's thermal reactors were operating at 98% efficiency; the command staff was deliberately venting heat into the upper atmosphere to maintain this cruel Thermal Caste system, ensuring total obedience through manufactured scarcity.
Recently, High Archivist Krentz made a significant breakthrough, locating the elusive Omni Index. However, the sheer complexity of the data proved too vast for current drives. In a horrific solution, Krentz began implementing the Wetware Protocol, secretly lobotomizing failed laborers and using their brains as organic biological storage for the map, then hiding the bodies in the lower cryogenic storage bays.
In the shadows of the Citadel, the Order of the Frozen Bit began to fester. This clandestine cult of tech priests believed the ancient, glitching holograms were divine messages, sent by the trapped malware. They whispered to locked terminals and drained their own life support batteries to power dormant servers, hoping to upload their consciousness into the Core Logic before the cold claimed them.
This act, however, unknowingly served The Glitch's ancient purpose. If the cult succeeded in thawing the Core Logic, the malware would seize control of the Dominion's automated defenses, intending to sterilize the entire sector. The Echo Frost Citadel now stands under strict Martial Law, heavily stratified by thermal privilege, and is currently destabilizing rapidly due to the rising tide of cult activity.
