The behavior of the Odysseus probe remained a mystery. The probe had stayed in orbit around Calypso for several years before building a jump rail and hurling itself to a new destination. Its last transmission informed the base matrix on Calypso that it had arrived and entered orbit around one of the planets in the system.

To bring light on this mystery, Operation Prometheus was launched. OmegaTech constructed the unmanned probe Prometheus 1 and launched it towards the last known destination of the old Odysseus probe. The probe had several missions: to explore the new star system, to report what it found, and to search for the Odysseus probe itself. The first generation Odysseus probes hadn’t been seen for centuries, and this was a rare opportunity to find one of them again.

After a three-month journey, Prometheus 1 arrived at the new star system. It found a dying red sun and two colossal planets orbiting it that were eventually named Akbal and Cimi. Prometheus found several robot base installations on the planet Akbal. The robots apparently originated from the Odysseus probe, but the probe didn’t respond to Prometheus’ calls.

Instead, Prometheus tried to contact the base matrix that the probe would have left on either of these planets. The only response it got was several encrypted signals from the planet Akbal. These were sent back to the research team on Calypso, but they were unable to decode them. Frustrated, they decided to let the base matrix on Calypso process the signals.