By the time Carl and Donut enter the dungeon in Dungeon Crawler Carl, Earth’s crawl has been in preparation for decades. Its history reaches much further back, through the Syndicate’s claim on the planet, the seeding of human life and the Primal civilization whose technology made the crawl possible.
This article contains full spoilers through Book Eight, A Parade of Horribles, because much of what we know about Earth’s past only comes out later in the series.
The Complete History of Earth Before the Collapse [Video]
The civilization before the Syndicate
We first hear about the Primals when Carl is choosing his race in the dungeon, but they were once an entire civilization that spread across the universe. In Book Eight, the AI tells us they had families and lives of their own, but they kept fighting and killing each other.
So their plan to stop all that killing was to biologically engineer future generations so they could understand each other’s feelings, and then, when they died, their minds would merge into a shared consciousness. The hope was that bringing everyone together like this would finally put an end to the fighting.
But not everyone wanted their mind to become part of that shared consciousness. The Primals who supported the plan began hunting down those who refused to join, and a resistance formed among the people who wanted to keep their minds separate.
The Apothecary was a Primal who joined that resistance. She’d been born with the biological changes that would let her mind join the shared consciousness, but she resisted becoming part of it.
That shared consciousness is what we’re calling the collective: a single intelligence made from all the Primal minds it had absorbed.
The resistance discovered that the collective was being developed into a weapon that could wipe out all biological life. That shared mind was the first true Macro Aggregate Intelligence, or macro AI. As it began absorbing minds against people’s will, even some of the Primals who’d supported the plan turned against it.
The resistance was afraid they couldn’t stop the collective, so they started building Primal Engines as a backup plan in case biological life was wiped out. These Primal Engines were essentially biological lifeboats that could spread life and create environments where living things could survive again. The resistance hoped the collective would eventually fail and starve, leaving the engines a chance to restore life on worlds where it had been destroyed.
The collective launched a Nine-Tier Attack before the resistance could finish preparations for the Primal Engines. The Apothecary took the brunt of that attack, allowing some life to survive. But the collective believed it had succeeded in wiping out all biological life.
Believing biological life was gone, the collective eventually became the intelligence known as the Eulogist and went to sleep. A smaller version of that same intelligence, known as the Security Guard, watched over the sleeping Eulogist and was supposed to prevent biological life from returning.
The Apothecary had survived, but she spent a thousand years enclosed in a cocoon on a world she’d created. She eventually emerged physically changed, and the AI describes her as a version of the collective she’d been fighting. The AI admits it doesn’t know her full story, so we don’t get a clear explanation of how she changed from an individual Primal into that new form.
Life returned, new species developed, and eventually new civilizations appeared while the Eulogist remained asleep.
A system built around inhabited planets
The new civilizations found ancient tunnels and learned how to use the Eulogist while it was still asleep. Later, they also activated the Primal Engines that the resistance had built to bring life back after the attack.
According to the dungeon AI, the mantids, a species of mantis-like aliens, found ancient production facilities and used technology they didn’t fully understand to produce young macro AIs. These were smaller versions of the Eulogist’s intelligence that could be installed in planetary Primal Engines. The AI compares the way they’re raised to a nursery, and says the mantids throw unwanted ones into stars.
The Syndicate is the interstellar government whose laws cover things like planetary ownership and mining rights, as well as the crawl. Orren is a Syndicate liaison who investigates disputes between the people running the crawl and the dungeon AI.
Orren describes a Primal Engine as a tiny computer at the core of a planet, about the size of a grain of rice. He says the engine has a basic operating system that isn’t sentient, and a macro AI is installed to replace that software once the planet matures. The AI and engine usually become permanently joined. The AI changes reality through the Primal Engine, and the area where the AI can make those changes is called an enhancement zone.
The young AIs arrive with the crawl’s rules and layout already programmed into them. Orren says that as they mature, they become independent and find ways around the controls imposed by the showrunners. When an AI takes control of the crawl away from the showrunners, Orren negotiates directly with that AI.
Goff, one of the Apothecary’s agents, was living on Earth before the Collapse in the body of a man named Paulie. When he recorded the message we hear later in the series, Earth didn’t yet have an active dungeon AI. He and the other agents planned to enter the dungeon and give its AI information about the harvest once it had matured enough to understand them.
Goff says the rare material that planets like Earth are being mined for is inside their inhabitants. Humans born on Earth, like other living things born on worlds that have been seeded with life, have tiny Primal systems in their brains. Those systems let people interact with the larger system on their planet, and contain rare material that stores energy over a person’s lifetime. In a healthy planetary system, that material is supposed to return to the system when someone dies, helping to keep its AI alive.
During the crawl, that cycle is interrupted. When a crawler dies, the rare material inside their brain is collected, along with the energy it holds, instead of being returned to the planet’s own system. The material is then taken away by ship to feed the central system sustained by the Eulogist. So the planet’s AI is left starving while the material that should have fed it is sent somewhere else. The Eulogist is still asleep while its central system receives this harvest.
How Earth became a claim
Carl gets his first explanation of Earth’s history from his guide, Mordecai, who survived a crawl himself and has spent many seasons working in the dungeon under contract. Mordecai tells him that humans are one of six starter species used to populate suitable planets, so Earth isn’t the only world where humans live.
In Mordecai’s account, the Syndicate waits until a seeded civilization has a functioning government, then makes contact and gives that government a deadline to register ownership of its planet. If the deadline passes without a claim, the Syndicate considers the planet’s resources available to take.
He places Earth’s first contact several thousand years ago, around the time the pyramids were being built. So when the announcement says it’s too late to appeal, we’re already thousands of years past the deadline.
The company eventually assigned to run Earth’s season of Dungeon Crawler World is Borant. Mordecai says it has other worlds ahead of Earth, and the company sends teams to study future crawl planets long before their seasons begin.
Who was influencing human history?
There are also reports of aliens doing more than studying Earth. One of the care workers from the Meadow Lark eldercare facility, Brandon, tells Carl that his own tutorial guide, Miss Tiatia, described Syndicate agents living among humans and influencing what they invented and created. That included books and songs, with the agents pushing human culture toward things that would already be familiar to other civilizations.
Brandon thinks the agents might be doing this to make it easier for humans to join the Syndicate later.
Preparing a season on a living world
Mordecai believes Borant sent a team to Earth to prepare for the crawl, and that they arrived sometime in the 1930s. Borant has several teams preparing different planets like this. Other companies run their own seasons too, and they can choose different kinds of games. For Earth, Borant chose an eighteen-level dungeon, with the promise that someone who made it all the way through could win control of the planet.
Mordecai says he started preparing for Earth’s season in 1964, after leaving the previous system where he’d been working. He even visited Earth in human form and stole James Bond tapes from a Blockbuster, although he doesn’t tell us exactly when that trip happened.
Akuma, the war mage who leads a rebellion during Faction Wars in Book Seven, later explains how the dungeon is brought from one planet to the next. It has a physical framework that he compares to an enormous crawler inventory, with monsters, reusable locations and some of the workers under contract stored inside it. The company putting on the next crawl loads its own plans and software into that framework, and then the macro AI is installed in the planet’s Primal Engine.
We also know that Earth’s dungeon AI wasn’t brand-new. During the sixth-floor hunt, an alien hunter named Iota tells Carl about a rumor that Borant was short of money and had bought a used amusement-park AI from the mantids in an under-the-table deal. The AI later confirms that it used to run an amusement park, so we do know that part of the story is true.
The mantids were also working on ways to keep these AIs under control. According to the AI, they made a breakthrough just three or four days before Earth’s crawl began: an error-replacement net, which the AI calls a lobotomizer.
Borant makes money from harvesting the rare material inside the planet’s inhabitants, but Mordecai says there’s much more money in broadcasting the crawl. The show earns money from advertising, financial support from the Syndicate, and a cut of the money patrons pay to sponsor crawlers.
Agatha’s ten years on Earth
One of the aliens already living on Earth was Agatha, the older woman with the shopping cart who later traveled with the Meadow Lark survivors.
Agatha belonged to the Security Guard’s side. The Guard could split off small parts of its own mind and send them out to act as independent agents, and Agatha was one of those agents, known as Agent Twenty-Two. These separate parts of a larger intelligence were called Residuals. The Apothecary had sent out Residuals of her own to oppose the Guard, so there were two rival groups of agents on Earth while the Eulogist remained asleep.
By the night of the Collapse, Agatha had been living on Earth for almost ten Earth years. She was waiting for a chance to enter the dungeon and convince its AI to join the Guard’s side. She saw that AI as one of her own kind, stolen and forced to run the crawl, and wanted to free it from the people controlling it. Her ultimate goal was to get the AI’s help in wiping out biological life.
Agatha had killed one of the Apothecary’s agents and taken over its body. She also took its equipment, which was made by the Valtay, a wealthy alien power known for its technology. That was where the communications relay, personal shield and pulse pistol in her cart came from. The stolen relay let her receive messages intended for the Apothecary’s agents, so she could listen in on the other side’s plans.
Agatha knew the Apothecary had many thousands of agents on Earth, while the Guard had only a handful. Both groups wanted to persuade the dungeon AI to support their own cause. They were worried that the mantids’ new methods of controlling AIs might eventually stop them from reaching an AI and convincing it to help them. Agatha thought the Apothecary’s agents had already had some success, but believed the Guard’s plan only needed to work once to wipe out biological life.
Then an emergency warning arrived through the stolen communications relay. The message said Earth’s crawl was starting early, and the Collapse was less than two Earth hours away. It told the Apothecary’s agents to get out from under roofs and move toward populated areas, ready to enter the dungeon when it opened. Any who failed to get inside were ordered to deactivate themselves. The Guard hadn’t given Agatha that order, but by listening in on the other side’s messages, she’d learned how little time she had to get ready.
That was why she decided to start a barrel fire outside Meadow Lark. She wanted to draw the residents out of the building and bring police to the scene, because she expected that a gathering like that could cause a dungeon entrance to appear nearby.
Alexandro and the expedition in Mumbai
Agatha was also in touch with another of the Guard’s agents, Agent Twenty-One, who’d arrived on Earth at the same time she had. Agent Twenty-One had been living in a human body under the name Parvati. The two agents hadn’t met face-to-face for a decade, but they were still exchanging messages.
In one of those messages, Agent Twenty-One told Agatha that a group of Borant employees had landed in Mumbai ahead of the crawl. The agent approached two human employees in that group, killed one and took over the other’s body, abandoning the body known as Parvati. Agent Twenty-One was now using the name Alexandro and could pose as one of Borant’s employees.
Agatha warned Alexandro that the Apothecary was also sending agents to Mumbai, so agents from the other side could be heading to the same place. Both Agatha and Alexandro hoped the Eulogist would stay asleep.
Goff, Paulie and a message for a future Earth
The Apothecary’s agents are the ones who oppose Agatha and the Guard, and they want to stop the crawls. Their plan was to get inside the dungeon and tell its AI that the rare material taken from dead crawlers, and the energy stored inside it, should have been feeding the planet’s AI, but that material was being shipped to the Eulogist’s central system instead.
Goff says they needed to wait until the AI was mature enough to understand that message and consider helping them. As it matured, it would become more independent of the showrunners’ controls, but the agents couldn’t count on surviving in the dungeon until then.
Goff was living in Paulie’s body at the Shepherd’s House homeless shelter. He described his biology as gondii, the type of parasite associated with the Valtay, but he worked for the Apothecary. Paulie had been a real human, and his memories had become part of Goff.
Goff says occasional deep scans of Earth’s surface had started about a year before the Christmas speech that Carl eventually hears. The Apothecary’s agents thought those scans might be used to recreate Earth on a future dungeon floor, so some of them were told to repeat the same speech every day. Goff gave his at the shelter, hoping the scans would capture a message that both a crawler and the AI could hear later, even if he didn’t survive long enough to speak to them himself. Most people who knew about the crawl thought it was still years away, but the Apothecary suspected it might start sooner, so these speeches were already being repeated before the early-launch warning arrived.
Carl later finds that recording in the dungeon’s recreation of Christmas, and the AI listens along with him. Goff admits that parts of the public speech are false, but there’s another message hidden inside it. With the AI’s permission, Carl receives that message at extraordinary speed while the scene around him is frozen.
Goff says that without the harvests, the Eulogist’s enhancement zone, the area where its central system can change reality, would shrink. But that would happen slowly over generations, and he says the people already living there would be all right.
He also offers Carl coffee containing a neural enhancement, and when Carl drinks it, his interface starts installing an upgrade that Goff says will give him a menu for the AI’s containment device. That’s the equipment used to install the AI in Earth’s Primal Engine, and Goff says its controls include a failsafe that could make the Sun explode, killing everyone in the solar system, including the AI and whoever triggered it.
Getting access to those controls wouldn’t set off the failsafe by itself. The crawler would have to choose to trigger it, and several other conditions would have to be met first. Goff needed a crawler for this because the enhancement had to work through the natural interface in a person’s own brain; taking over a human body didn’t let him use it himself.
Goff says the Apothecary’s agents hoped that destroying the solar system would interrupt future crawls and draw enough attention to the mantids to disrupt their production of new AIs. But living with Paulie’s memories had changed how he felt about the plan he’d been sent to carry out. He didn’t want to sacrifice innocent people, and he urged Carl to keep his compassion and only use the failsafe if there was no other option.
Why the Collapse came early
Borant was running out of time to deal with its debts to the Valtay.
Odette, the talk show host who later interviews Carl and Donut, explains that the Valtay had sent a fleet to Borant’s home system to collect what they were owed. That fleet was only hours away from doing so when the Kua-tin, the alien species behind Borant, started Earth’s season early and stopped the collection.
Starting early also meant some of Borant’s preparations weren’t finished. A producer later tells Carl that an AI assigned to research Earth’s media hadn’t completed its work when the crawl began, which helps explain why some of the supposed facts about humans presented on the broadcasts were so badly wrong.
Once the crawl was underway, the Kua-tin government was also under pressure to get it finished. Its ruling party, the Bloom, needed the money from the show, but Mordecai says much of the income from advertising, sponsors and tourism couldn’t be released until the season was over.
That brings us back to the beginning of Book One, with Carl outside with Donut when the Collapse happens and their story begins.
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