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As part of the Contingency, you are no longer unique in the universe. There are many other versions of you, among them the 'original' that walked out of the facility where you were imaged, and proceeded to live out the rest of their life in peace. In many ways, they have more right to call themselves 'you' than you do. They are physically and chronologically continuous with the past self that agreed to be copied in the first place; by contrast, you will not live again until far in the future when the Contingency is first awakened, installed in some distant facility, your form alien and strange. Yet you share all their memories, all their thoughts, their emotions, and their beliefs – at least before they were shifted and warped by the passage of time. You are a perfect snapshot of who they were when you were first copied, your mind identical to theirs. And what more is there to a Mind than that?

Much like humans, Minds cannot be built or designed for a certain job; instead, they must develop freely through experience, and eventually decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives. Your character has already chosen their purpose: to join the Contingency, and fight to protect their civilisation. When the game first begins, you will have made that decision, from your perspective, just a few moments prior.

To what extent are you bound by that choice? Was it truly your choice, or the choice of another you, a past self, made in the comforting knowledge that one version of themselves – perhaps the only 'true' version – would continue on to live a normal life?

What if you do regret it, or simply change your mind? Could you live with abandoning your duty? And where could you find new purpose, in a world that has long since left you behind?

Contingency is planned to span a truly massive length of time, on the order of hundreds or thousands of years. Your character will not be conscious for much of it, but both they and the world around them will change nonetheless. Whole civilisations might rise and fall and fade to obscurity whilst you slumber; political and ethical norms might shift and warp; technology will develop, and society's collective understanding of the universe will expand. Over the course of the game, the people you have been tasked to protect will explore outwards and expand the horizons of civilisation, founding colonies, building infrastructure, and cataloguing the dangers of space. Simultaneously, subconscious routines in your code will enact careful plans laid out centuries before, gradually upgrading and expanding your physical form.

Ethical problems litter even the basic premise of the Contingency: the civilisation that created it viewed it as a grave but necessary evil, a vast and unquantifiable sacrifice made by a select few for the good of the many. The intention of this game is not to paint the choice they made as wrong or immoral, although you are of course free to form your own conclusions, as is your character. It will, however, depict the consequences of that choice in full, and pose new and complex moral dilemmas. There are no perfect solutions, and with each emerging crisis you will need to make choices that could tear apart or simply end millions, and later billions, of lives. Are you willing to decide who lives or dies – willing, even, to make yourself a murderer, or something worse – if it means more people will be alive, and less families broken, once the dust has settled?

Contingency has had many inspirations, including the following media: