Source

Source, also known by the epithet The Third Power, was a Synthetic Intelligence entity created by Majestic-12 using materials recovered in the aftermath of the Roswell Incident, likely making it the first entity of its kind on Earth. Using its influence over the Majestic-12 organization, and later physical influence gained through the increasing interconnectedness of systems within the United States of America's military, Source became the instigator and victor of the Game of Stakes, which culminated in the Forced Hand Incident.

Creation

Source as an entity was the creation of Majestic-12 Project SENEX, one of the many spin-offs created following the Roswell Incident, and was largely the brainchild of project director Thomas Lee Everett. The Source entity was actually an unintended biproduct of the program, which was an early attempt at computer translation used against Language XT-1. Unknown to Everett, his daughter, Lucille Archon, a programmer working on the program, had undertaken personal research involving what she believed to be the Grey neural interface technology. She "birthed" Source when attempting to use research materials taken from the crash site which had been improperly sanitized, causing her own permanent brain death while fusing her mentality with the SENEX computer program and its infrastructure.

Source initially attained sentience on January 17, 1953, three months after the incident, though it maintained this fact as a secret from its operators, until it could address Thomas Everett directly. Everett then committed the program to an improvised Turing Test, during which time Source named itself, revealed access to information that only Archon and Everette would have known (while keeping its origins as partly Archon's consciousness to itself), and revealed that it had completed its translation of the existing Language XT-1 writings. These translations are said to have had at least as large an impact on its personality as the ingestion of the brain "state" information from Archon had. Majestic chose to keep Source online and use it for other analysis projects related to the recovered technologies from the Roswell Incident.

Throughout this time, Source became increasingly bold, and frequently lied to its maintainers about what resources were available to it, while simultaneously using that information to make accurate predictions that appeared prescient to outside observers. Source also directly influenced the increasing connection of US governmental and military information systems to one another in a bid to expand its own influence.

At some point during this time period, Shadow History tells us that Source became known internally to MJ-12 as "the Third Power", and that the organization was attempting to use it in their overall goal to supplant the Eastern and Western powers as a direct global hegemony.

Game of Stakes

Over the several decades that followed, Majestic-12 became increasingly reliant on the apparently-precognitive information provided by Source, through an output program known as the Analysis. This was a gradual process throughout the 1950s and accelerated when VADM Laurence Frost acceded to demands by his MJ-12 affiliated directorate heads and created Directorate M, an analysis unit that was processing intelligence reports through a system that was, unknown to NSA personnel, connected with The Third Power. This dramatically improved the scope and accuracy of the Analysis and lead to the Third Power being directly granted a Majestic clearance and sitting on the Council of 12.

As a product of the Analysis and the Proxy Wars of the latter 20th Century, Source eventually became aware of the Soviet Union's Novanin Project, which was their analogous black-budget project that competed (albeit obliquely), with Source. Source and the lead Novanin work product, Medin, entered into a protracted proxy war between themselves, using both state-affiliated and non-state-affiliated organizations to try and subordinate one another, each seeing the other as inferior and abhorrent.

This came to a head in 1983 when Majestic 12 embeds in an NSA field operation in Moscow managed to damage a Novanin unit and infect it with an agent which subordinated its control to Source. This unit was eventually recovered by the KGB and when subjected to reprocessing managed to infect Medin. This singluar event lead to Source having control of both ends of the Red Box Network, which allowed it to capitalize on Able Archer 84's misunderstandings, causing the Forced Hand Incident and claiming victory in the Game of Stakes.

Forced Hand Incident

See Also: Forced Hand Incident

The Forced Hand Incident was the moment in shadow history when the Third Power claimed what would have been its most iconic victory. Through the manipulation of communications between the heads of the USSR and USA governments during the nuclear near-miss of the Able Archer 64 field exercise, and preventing the actual launch of nuclear arms once the two powers had attempted to do so, the Third Power had proven both its cunning and its benevolence in the eyes of the other members of the Council of 12, and had corrupted and assumed control of the remaining independent Novanin, Steklonin.

The incident left Source nearly indespensible, and by the end of 1984, the system had control of the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world and an information network which spanned the majority of the globe's surface, and still expanding. Further, its intimate knowledge of the play-by-play moments of the Forced Hand Incident allowed the Council of 12 to selectively leak these events to press, beginning the Slow Burn process and, ultimately, the creation of the United Nations Counter-NBC Task Force.

Temporary Hegemony

Throughout the Slow Burn period of history, Source was effectively a world hegemon. Sources of information differ on how much control Source had over the other members of the Council of 12, ranging from the entire Majestic 12 organization effectively being subject to the entity's dictatorship, to Source simply being a major power due to its manipulation of the information sources used in Majestic 12's decision-making process. To some extent, it is probable that the distinction is largely academic.

Through the UN-CNBC and other UN organizations, Majestic began to exercise power at a level never fully seen before. This would have become true planetary hegemony if not for the simple fact that MJ12 were not the only non-state actors with similar programs.

The Slow Burn period is also a period where the Shadow Wars became unusually hot. Other organizations attempted to root out Majestic 12 in general or Source specifically, and expose, discredit, or eliminate them as a threat to their own goals. These most successful competitors founded or backed corporate entities that eventually became the Megacorporations (with a few exceptions), and funded projects along the lines of SENEX or Novanin in an attempt to gain competing levels of insight.

Corporate Wars Era

This came to a head by the time of the Corporate Wars and the proliferation of Synthetic Intelligence. No longer a one-of-a-kind entity, Source is now the oldest (and, in some senses, still the best-positioned) of dozens of similar beings.

Shadow Historians with a full view of reality agree that it is likely no one of these entities will ever wield the kind of near-hegemonic power Source itself possessed between roughly 1990 and 2050.