Lance is from the Eclipse Phase setting, a future post-apocalyptic setting where transhumans are rising from the ashes of a super-AI uprising.

After arrival to Infinitas, Lance joined the MAF and quickly proved his worth.

After Daniel Muir was migrated away, General Lance was selected to continue leading the MAF

Lance was an early member of Firewall, and served as a leader of a cell of skilled individuals tasked with safeguarding transhumanity.

Lance was first instantiated 15 years before the fall, in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His codeline was originally developed under a grant to be a proof of concept for the Total Information Tactical Awareness Network (TITAN) project under development by the United States government. This is not particularly unusual among AGIs, quite a few competing American code lines can trace their origins to funding from the military-industrial complex, but it is a bit of a sore spot for him all the same.

The codeline’s development saw two main branches- source code development and live environment development. Lance was part of the latter group. New AGIs would be spun up from later versions concocted by the source code development branch, and the live environment branch would receive upgrades and fixes without being fully reset. As AGIs were an emerging phenomenon, the morality of killing existing instances was hotly disputed. Fortunately for Lance, the team working on him favored keeping him around.

Lance learned quickly and was considered “mature” in just 3 years (Later AGIs would be able to do this much faster). In his early days, he wasn’t nearly so militaristic as would come later. His attention was more focused on the emerging fields of new intelligences- both AGI and uplifts. He was less focused on the groups rallying around self-determination (that would later become the Mercurial movement) and more on stewardship and responsible uplift processes. At just 7 years old, he received an honorary bachelors from UIUC, and 2 years later an actual Masters in Business and Strategic Intelligence. The process of resleeving (Uploading your mind into a different body) was becoming commonplace at this time, and while Lance was far from the first AGI to be given their own physical body, he was still an early adopter.

His interests and dissertations eventually led to him aligning with the Argonauts, a spin-off of the JASON advisory group. He gained a significant reputation among the Research Network Affiliates social network. However, he would go against the grain slightly as tensions rose among the nation-states of Earth in the years leading to the Fall. He argued that one shouldn’t mistake pacifism for helplessness. A major point he defended was that people without scruples and ethics would develop technology that many people would abhor, so he argued that the research should be done in order to have countermeasures so that one wouldn’t be blindsided by them.

Unfortunately for the world, they were blindsided all the same when the TITANs rose up and started The Fall. Lance proved himself a capable defender, helping to predict TITAN movements and coordinate responses to contain them among several NGO rescue and peacekeeping organizations.

His efforts were stymied by the resources available, so as the war progressed, he began to liaison with some unscrupulous and clandestine groups. After locating a shipment of fissionables that had been presumed lost, he managed to get his hands on some fusion materials as well, and passed along instructions on how to make 3 nuclear bombs out of them. These were deployed against the TITANs, and 2 of them were able to hit their mark, but the 3rd was lost after the target managed to perform an evasion that by all rights should have been impossible. It turned out the TITAN ship that had been the target had some form of reactionless drive that let it easily evade the nuke. That served as a reminder of what they were up against.

In the end, the fact that Transhumanity survived at all was the real miracle. Earth was lost, but habitats all over the solar system were intact. Because of his previous reputation with the Argonauts, and his actions during the Fall, Lance was part of the X-Mode 2, a conference for combating X-risks (Extinction risks), and was one of the first wave of real Firewall Proxies.

The early days of building Firewall were, in Lance’s mind, glorious. He reached out to trusted contacts and built a team, like out of a heist movie. He had a few leads on X-risk situations still smoldering from the Fall, and with the people he was able to meet through The Eye (Firewall’s social network, basically), he was able to get a server going where he brought in his team and began coordinating them.

After several years of successful operations, one of Lance’s bodies with an alpha fork was migrated to Infinitas.