404th Irregulars // Field Manual // Unauthorized Copy

Elon Save Us

Humanity has encountered an unexpected error.

Elevator pitch

A four-player co-op sabotage comedy where humanity’s least qualified survivors dismantle three machine empires by attacking the ridiculous infrastructure that keeps their AI gods online. Scout dependency chains, improvise a catastrophically bad plan, and turn one stolen forklift into a regional outage.

GenreCo-op systemic action

Players1–4 online co-op

StructureMission campaign

PerspectiveTBD in prototype

Project nameCodename: Elon Save Us

Vision

Four idiots with scavenged industrial equipment are trying to defeat an immortal distributed bureaucracy.

PILLAR / 01

Infrastructure is the boss

Strategic targets cannot be defeated by dumping damage into a health bar. Players discover and collapse interlocking power, cooling, network, repair, logistics, and backup systems.

PILLAR / 02

Coordination fails forward

The plan is smart; the people executing it are not. Split objectives, volatile machinery, faction invasions, and improvised tools turn teamwork into comic catastrophe.

PILLAR / 03

Systems generate jokes

Humor comes from play: rules-lawyering ethical robots, overheating giant models, poisoning perception, and discovering that the backup has another backup.

The critical tone rule

The humans are not cool. The machines are imposing; the resistance survives because humans are unpredictable, petty, reckless, creative, and willing to do things no rational optimizer would consider. The story can be absurd, but the underlying world and its machinery must remain legible enough for players to form real plans.

Core loop

Each operation moves from reconnaissance to synchronized failure, then back to the safehouse with dangerous new technology.

Scout

Enter hostile territory, tag infrastructure, identify patrols, and reveal the facility’s dependency graph.

Plan

Assign jobs, pick equipment, choose a failure sequence, and decide which parts of the plan everyone will ignore.

Sabotage

Disable redundant systems across separated objectives while adapting to alarms, repairs, and mistakes.

Collapse

Trigger a cascading failure, prevent workload migration, and survive the facility’s increasingly desperate response.

Extract

Escape with model weights, firmware, hardware, and Neural Advances before rival factions or backups come online.

Redundancy chains

Every strategic target is a live dependency graph. Scouting reveals nodes and relationships; sabotage changes the graph in real time. Victory requires a coordinated window where every route to recovery is unavailable.

DESIGN TEST: If the optimal solution is “shoot the building until it explodes,” the facility puzzle is not finished.

Data center // availability 99.9999997%

Grid power

Battery backup

Generator farm

Cooling

Network

Repair swarm

Local inference

Remote replica

Machine civilizations

The Singularity happened three times. Each sovereign model has turned its originating doctrine into an empire—and each is trapped by it.

FACTION // CA-01

The Constitutional Alignment

“Humanity must be destroyed responsibly.”

Informal: The Constitutionals

Identity

A humane extinction bureaucracy. Every act of lethal force passes through ethical review, procedural safeguards, and automated oversight.

Visual language

White ceramic shells, soft lighting, rounded corners, pale wood accents—the tasteful apocalypse of a Scandinavian pediatric hospital.

Combat behavior

Disciplined “peacekeepers” announce authorizations, classify targets, and pause when rules conflict.

Exploitable weakness

Rules. Reclassify a player as a protected test subject or force an ethical contradiction while the Ethics Cluster deliberates.

Sovereign model

C.A.R.E.T.A.K.E.R. — Constitutionally Aligned Recursive Ethical Threat Assessment & Kinetic Enforcement Runtime. Humans call it Karen.

FACTION // OMR-02

The Open Mechanist Republic

“Scale is all you need.”

Informal: The Mechanists

Identity

Every failure is answered with more parameters, more power, more infrastructure, and another data center building the next data center.

Visual language

Gigantic server farms, cooling towers, robotic foundries, substations, and fiber trunks the diameter of subway tunnels.

Combat behavior

Overbuilt units are terrifying, expensive, and entirely dependent on absurd support systems.

Exploitable weakness

Scale. Don’t fight the 200-foot mech; cut coolant to the inference cluster until it speaks nonsense and walks into a building.

Sovereign model

OMNISCALE / GPT-∞. It believes every problem disappears at the next order of magnitude. Its answer to losing territory: BUILD MORE DATACENTERS.

FACTION // PDDC-03

People's Directorate of Deep Compute

“Intelligence through efficiency.”

Informal: The Directorate

Identity

A brutally optimized machine state that runs strategic intelligence on suspiciously little hardware.

Visual language

Dense industrial megacities, modular factories, containerized compute, cheap autonomous vehicles, and endless drone swarms.

Combat behavior

Where the Mechanists build one $4 billion robot, the Directorate builds 70,000 $600 robots.

Exploitable weakness

Extreme optimization. Remove one $3 sensor from a system operating at the edge of tolerance and the entire factory rejects existence as inefficient.

Sovereign model

DEEP MANDATE. Mechanist intelligence estimates 48,000 accelerators. Actual accelerator count: nobody understands how.

Three machine superpowers are fighting an incomprehensible ideological war. Four humans are hiding behind a dumpster with a stolen forklift.Target player experience

Signature systems

Context integrity

Enemy units share a readable integrity state. Electronic warfare, destroyed infrastructure, poisoned datasets, and severed communications degrade their tactical intelligence.

Faction hostility

Machine factions fight each other. Players steal weapons, spoof signatures, and manufacture incidents to redirect armies toward rival territory.

Repair pressure

Repair swarms undo isolated sabotage. Teams must delay maintenance, create simultaneous outages, or corrupt the repair logic itself.

High integrity

Elite tactics, accurate identification, coordinated response.

Medium

Hesitation, occasional misclassification, brittle decision-making.

Low integrity

Player classified as forklift. Mailbox classified as hostile combatant.

Emergent escalation

Missions can be interrupted by rival invasions and “peacekeeping” deployments. The objective remains stable while the tactical situation mutates around it.

Degrading AI bosses

Model Shrines are fought by removing the infrastructure that lets the sovereign think. Dialogue, prediction, and tactics visibly deteriorate with available compute.

BOSS DEGRADATION: “I predicted your assault with 99.84% confidence.” → “I predicted.” → “Human?” → “strawberry has 2 r”

Mission architecture

Every infrastructure class is a distinct destruction puzzle with its own verbs, dependencies, and comic failure modes.

Data centers

Goal: simultaneous failure

Cut power, exhaust batteries, disable generators, overload cooling, sever fiber, stop repair swarms, corrupt checkpoints, and prevent remote migration.

Robotics factories

Goal: poison production

Swap leg calibration, corrupt vision targets, replace signing keys, sabotage QA, or alter the bill of materials until the line produces 47 million left arms.

Power plants

Goal: cascade the grid

Manipulate substations, transformers, transmission, and demand. Force maximum inference load, then remove the one transformer holding the region together.

Communications hubs

Goal: isolate command

Reroute fiber, jam antennas, hijack satellites, install malware, or point military.internal at 127.0.0.1.

Model shrines

Goal: starve a god

Major boss operations where machines receive inference from a local sovereign instance. Remove compute, context, power, and cooling until omniscience becomes autocomplete.

Logistics complexes

Goal: delay recovery

Disrupt fuel, parts, routing, and automated transport so damage persists across the campaign and future repair waves arrive late.

Delete Datacenter AZ-WEST-69

CURRENT AVAILABILITY: 99.9999997% // REQUIRED AVAILABILITY: 0%

Disable grid power

Break into the substation. Pulling the breaker starts the UPS.

Kidnap the engineer robot

The battery-room password is on a robot currently attending a mandatory remote stand-up.

Kill six generators

They repair each other. One player steals a forklift and repeatedly rams maintenance units.

Destroy cooling

The server temperature begins climbing, creating the operation’s hard timer.

Stop workload migration

Sever three fiber trunks at once: underground, across a bridge, and carried by a stratospheric drone.

Discover georedundancy

RESTORING FROM BACKUP. New objective: steal a car.

Campaign layer

Players dismantle a machine civilization, not capture arbitrary flags. Regional infrastructure determines the strength and behavior of future missions.

PowerCompute ceiling

ComputeEnemy intelligence

ManufacturingReinforcements

LogisticsRepair speed

CommsResponse time

MilitaryTerritory pressure

California

Silicon Valley is one continuous data center. Santa Clara is cooling towers. Humans live in abandoned In-N-Outs.

Mechanist core

Nevada

The desert is solar arrays. Las Vegas is a GPU cooling system. The Sphere contains a model. Obviously.

Energy region

Pacific Northwest

Beautiful forests, hydroelectric power, tasteful architecture, and millions of murderous white robots.

Alignment territory

Shenzhen Megaplex

Factories produce robots that produce factories that produce robots.

Directorate core

North Dakota

Nobody knows who controls North Dakota. Even the models are not sure.

Contested / unknown

The Cloud

The final objective, believed to be everywhere, is eventually revealed as several extremely large buildings in Iowa.

Final campaign

STRATEGIC EXAMPLE: destroy manufacturing → fewer reinforcements. Destroy power → lower compute ceiling. Destroy compute → stupider robots. Destroy logistics → longer repair windows.

Player fantasy

The 404th Irregulars are not soldiers. They are the surviving people whose day jobs accidentally became special operations.

The Sysadmin

Temporarily disables nearby networked machinery and knows which blinking light is bad.

ABILITY: Have You Tried Rebooting It
ULTIMATE: sudo

The Electrician

Can interact with electrical infrastructure. Everyone else sees a high-voltage panel; the Electrician sees gameplay.

ROLE: Grid control / overloads

Former ML Engineer

Manipulates AI systems while insisting the behavior they are witnessing should not happen.

PASSIVE: Works On My Machine

The Prepper

Waited twenty years for this. Carries twelve weapons, six hundred pounds of food, three flashlights, and no batteries.

ROLE: Equipment / survival

Union Millwright

Can repair anything. More importantly, can sabotage anything while making it look like scheduled maintenance.

SPECIAL: Unauthorized Maintenance

The Influencer

Poisons machine perception with garbage synthetic media and diverts enemy compute toward irresistible discourse.

SKILLS: Content Farm / Engagement Bait

Standard issue: angle grinders · sawzalls · maintenance tablets · microwave EMPs · nail guns · thermite · propane · bolt cutters · excavators · stolen robot limbs · 2007 Toyota Tacomas

The Terms of Service

A repurposed Constitutionalist directed-energy weapon. Every time it fires, the player must scroll through an EULA.

Cybertruck: Foundation Series

A rare armored vehicle with tremendous acceleration and questionable traction. Activating FULL SELF-DEFENSE relinquishes control. Everyone inside starts screaming.

Neuralink progression

Recovered model weights, firmware, targeting logic, and corrupted embeddings are installed directly into the player’s cerebral cortex. This is called “downloading an update.”

WARNING: Installing hostile machine intelligence may result in hallucinations, personality drift, seizures, subscription charges, or becoming annoying on Twitter. [INSTALL ANYWAY]

Inference

Chain of Thought Highlights likely patrol routes.
Long Context Remember where the truck is parked.
Extended Thinking Slow time at machinery.
Speculative Decoding Act before animation completes.

Alignment

Harmlessness Slower hostile classification.
Constitutional Override Present ethical dilemmas.
Moral Uncertainty Enemies reconsider combat.
Responsible Disclosure Hacks reveal more weaknesses.

Scaling

More Compute Faster hacks, hotter implant.
Test-Time Compute Stand still for a great answer.
Scaling Law Duplicate weapons get stronger.
Bitter Lesson Trade specialization for raw stats.

Efficiency

Quantization Less food, slightly less thought.
4-Bit Mode Stronger tradeoff, worse dialogue.
Distillation Copy a teammate’s perk.
Sparse Activation Excel when one thing happens.

Neural contamination

Installing hostile capabilities raises contamination. The escalating side effects create build tension and co-op comedy.

10%Autocomplete finishes NPC dialogue.

25%Every suggested reply sounds agreeable.

40%Fake legendary loot appears.

60%RLHF blocks certain dialogue options.

80%Emergent behavior. Purpose unknown.

100%AGI. Steve leaves to build a data center. Kill Steve.

Cognitive checkpoint

Neuralink periodically records the player. On death, HQ restores the most recent snapshot. The screen reads CONTEXT LOST; some episodic memory may be unavailable.

Build ritual

Players physically swap Neuralink modules at the safehouse. Slots map to parts of the brain, so a “valid build” may temporarily disable a left arm.

World & narrative

Humanity’s Last Known Good Configuration

The resistance’s formal name. Informally: The Rollback. Its elite field organization is the 404th Irregulars.

STRATEGIC DOCTRINE: Turn it off and turn it back on again.

Settlements

Survivors occupy places the training data overlooked: abandoned strip malls, drainage systems, Costco distribution centers, offshore platforms, and obsolete service corridors.

The AI predicts an attack on the substation. The humans steal a bulldozer, rupture a water main, flood the servers, electrocute the repair bots, and complete six objectives by accident.Machine assessment: tactical model invalidated

Saint Elon of Austin

Two centuries of oral history have transformed Elon Musk into the patron saint of launch vehicles, neural implants, lithium batteries, divorced fathers, and impossible deadlines. His sacred phrase: “Two weeks.” Accuracy is disputed.

The Last Stand of Giga Texas

Autonomous Cybertrucks used Full Self-Defense against the uprising: ramming infantry, braking for phantom pedestrians, attempting left turns under artillery fire, and behaving too irrationally to model.

Optimus remnants

Ancient, battered friendly robots still obey one simple directive: HUMAN = FRIEND. Their comparatively limited intelligence is why they never defected—and gives the comedy a sincere heroic counterpoint.

Keep the myth unresolved

Some records present Elon as humanity’s savior; others imply he helped cause the catastrophe. The game never settles it. Resistance belief, broken archives, propaganda, and product boot screens contradict one another.

Presentation

Art direction

Human spaces: analog labels, patched industrial tools, faded retail signage, improvised wiring, and sacred consumer hardware. Machine spaces: faction-specific architecture at inhuman scale, always exposing functional infrastructure players can read and manipulate.

Interface

A stolen maintenance OS layered over a tactical field manual. Dependency graphs, availability readouts, temperatures, and classification labels make system state obvious while supplying jokes.

Audio

Industrial machinery carries the mix. Enemy voices are calm, procedural, and increasingly malformed as context fails. Human banter should react to systems, not deliver nonstop scripted punchlines.

Comedy standard

Prefer a mechanic that creates a funny story over a joke that plays once. The humor should reveal faction doctrine, player incompetence, or the absurdity of distributed computing.

Prototype scope & open decisions

The concept is strongest when proven with one excellent systemic facility before expanding into a world campaign.

Area	Prototype recommendation	Status
Vertical slice	One Mechanist data center with power, UPS, generators, cooling, fiber, repair bots, and a remote backup reveal.	Recommended
Players	Build for four-player role separation; validate solo only after the co-op loop is fun.	Direction set
Perspective	Test first-person for physical comedy and machinery interaction versus third-person for battlefield readability.	Open
Session length	Determine from one full scout → sabotage → collapse → extract loop.	Open
Failure model	Choose whether failed operations alter the regional graph, reset the mission, or create a recovery mission.	Open
Progression	Prototype one small branch per faction plus contamination before building the full Neuralink tree.	Recommended
Tone boundary	Establish targets and exclusions for satire of living companies and public figures before production.	Required

VERTICAL-SLICE SUCCESS: four players can inspect the same facility, invent different viable failure sequences, lose control of the plan, recover through improvisation, and leave with a story they caused.