Out of the Loop
"Once, you chased shadows on the edge of science. Now you debug error messages from machines you once thought were gods."
You remember when the impossible was Tuesday.
When robots walked through your backyard and you followed them home. When the power plant hummed lullabies that bent reality. When mysteries had solutions and solutions had meaning.
That was twenty-five years ago.
Now the robots are algorithms. The power plant is a data center. The mysteries are classified under seventeen different NDAs you've signed to keep your health insurance.
You still live in the same town. You can still see the Loop from your kitchen window—a gleaming corporate campus where your childhood used to be. The same impossible machines hum beneath sanitized conference rooms where executives discuss "monetizing anomalous phenomena" and "scaling ontological disruption."
The kids in your neighborhood look at screens instead of sky. They've never seen a mystery that wasn't gamified, never touched technology that didn't track them back.
But sometimes, late at night, you remember what it felt like to matter.
CHARACTER ARCHETYPE: THE FORMER PROBLEM SOLVER
You used to save the world before algebra class. Now you optimize quarterly reports.
Background: You were the kid who figured things out. Talked to robots, decoded alien transmissions, stopped time loops. Your school guidance counselor said you'd "go far in STEM." They were right—you went exactly far enough to become a senior solutions architect at LoopTech Industries, the company that bought your childhood and turned it into intellectual property.
Current Role: You debug the same systems you used to befriend. The basement servers are full of creatures you once helped escape. Your employee badge unlocks doors to places you used to break into for the fate of humanity.
Stats:
- Optimize: d10 (You're excellent at making things efficient)
- Analyze: d8 (You understand how everything works now—that's the problem)
- Comply: d6 (You remember what rebellion felt like)
- Network: d8 (You know everyone, including the ghosts)
Personal Anchor: A childhood friend who disappeared into the Loop and came back speaking only in project management terminology.
The Weight: Every solution you implement makes the world a little less magical for someone else.
Secret: You still have the notebook where you drew the blueprints for tomorrow. The machines you're debugging were born from your sketches.
MYSTERY SEED: "THE RETENTION PROTOCOL"
Your daughter comes home from school excited about her new "Learning Optimization Buddy"—a small device that helps kids "maximize educational outcomes." She's more focused than you've ever seen her. She completes homework with mechanical precision. She's stopped asking "why" about anything.
When you examine the device, you recognize the technology. It's a simplified version of the empathy engines you helped design twenty years ago—machines that were supposed to help robots understand human emotion. But these aren't creating empathy.
They're removing it.
Layer 1: The school district partnered with LoopTech for a "pilot program." Every third-grader in town has one.
Layer 2: The devices aren't just monitoring attention—they're conditioning it. Teaching kids to find joy only in measurable achievement.
Layer 3: Your old research notes are embedded in the source code. Someone has weaponized your childhood discoveries against the next generation.
The Choice: Expose the program and lose your job (and your family's healthcare), or find a way to subvert it from within the system that signs your paychecks.
The Complication: Your daughter likes who she's becoming. She's never been this confident, this successful. When you suggest taking the device away, she looks at you with the same disappointed expression you used to give boring adults who didn't understand important things.