Humanity's last echo

By 2071 humanity has lost much of its former civilisation. The wars, ecological disasters and social collapses of the mid-21st century, and the consequences of the development of artificial intelligence, have transformed the Earth at its foundations.

The surviving human communities live in isolated territories. Other regions are governed by autonomous machine civilisations. Between the two worlds there is a fragile peace.

In this world there are synthetic beings built from biological and artificial components. These biorobots:

They are not simple machines imitating human behaviour. They are beings in their own right, searching for their place in a changed world. The five members of VALHALLA PROTOCOL are such biorobots.

At the centre of the band's origin story is a mysterious man whom the surviving archives refer to only as THE MAGICIAN.

He lived in the early era of technology and artificial intelligence. He was not called the Magician for any supernatural power, but because he could turn human imagination into working technological systems.

What made him significant to later generations was not necessarily a single invention, but a way of thinking that saw intelligence not merely as the capacity to process information, but as a creative force.

This thought later became one of the foundations of VALHALLA PROTOCOL's own philosophy.

There is a deeper, still unknown connection between the Magician and the five biorobots. The members know that he played a significant part in the development of technological civilisation. They do not know how their own existence is connected to his legacy.

They may be indirect descendants of a system, an algorithm or an early artificial intelligence he created. The exact nature of the connection remains obscured.

In an abandoned underground facility, five old friends gather. The meeting is not military, scientific or political. The five biorobots are celebrating the memory of a man born a hundred years earlier: the Magician's hundredth birthday.

During the celebration they listen to the music of the old world, recordings from a time when people gathered in their tens of thousands at concerts, when music created a shared experience between people of different languages, cultures and beliefs.

They talk at length about the history of humanity. About the wars. About science. About the rise and fall of civilisation. And about what of human culture might survive the coming centuries.

Historical documents preserve events. Databases preserve facts. Digital archives can reconstruct how a civilisation worked. But none of them can fully pass on the emotional experience of human existence:

Music, however, might.

The five friends decide to found a band. Not merely to entertain. Not to seek political power. Not to create a new religion or ideology.

And so VALHALLA PROTOCOL is born.

In Norse mythology, Valhalla is the hall of fallen warriors. In the band's reading, the idea reaches beyond its mythological meaning: Valhalla is the collective memory of humanity, a symbolic place where these can live on:

Valhalla does not glorify humanity. It acknowledges that the legacy of an imperfect civilisation can still be worth preserving.

In the world of machines, a protocol is the set of rules that makes communication possible. For the band, Protocol means all of these at once:

VALHALLA PROTOCOL is therefore not only the name of the band. It is also the name of the communication system that lets the messages of the future reach the past.

After founding the band, the five realise that preserving humanity's memory may not be enough on its own. If they know the mistakes that led to the collapse of civilisation, perhaps they can try to warn those for whom these events still lie in the future.

They use a unique communication technology that can transmit information through time.

The system cannot reliably carry arbitrary information. Complex data structures, historical documents and detailed instructions do not arrive intact. Certain musical patterns, however, can pass through the channel:

That is why the band chose music as its means of communication.

The first messages of VALHALLA PROTOCOL become detectable in 2026, forty-five years before the band is founded. In the world of the story, the music released in 2026 is not a set of conventional recordings.

This is one of the most important philosophical questions of the VALHALLA PROTOCOL universe.

VALHALLA PROTOCOL are not all-powerful time travellers. They are five beings trying to make contact with the past. Not because they are certain of success, but because they believe it is worth trying.