OPEN PLAYTEST · SEASONS 1–2 · GAME D

Run an S.M.I. Field Office

BUREAU DIRECTIVE // EYES ONLY

The Bureau has cleared you to open a Synthetic Media Investigations field office. Five case-weeks. One adversary probing your judgment. Your office lives or dies on three currencies of trust — lose any one of them and the doors close.

THREAT PROFILE — ARGUS

Designation ARGUS — a distributed operation flooding your district with counterfeits, fabricated narratives, and quiet data harvesting. It does not need to beat you. It only needs you to overclaim once.

CREATORS

They bring you cases. Abandon them and the caseload dries up.

COURTS

They enforce your filings. Overclaim once and your word is noise.

PUBLIC

They amplify your verdicts. Lose them and false narratives win by default.

OFFICE DOCTRINE
  • Pair one human specialist with one AI agent per case — chemistry matters.
  • AI gives you scale. Humans give you judgment. Neither alone survives court.
  • File what the evidence supports. Confidence is a weapon that points both ways.

ARGUS is fictional. Real threats are rarely one villain — this simulation compresses real dynamics (scraping, counterfeiting, disinformation) into a campaign. No real companies, tools, or persons are depicted.