So I may have gotten abit carried away here. Buckle up, kids.
A highly-evolved collective consciousness, every entity knows the "Rise of Machines" origin myth. Yet only a few entities are aware that it's about as historically accurate as the Book of Genesis.
***
Reaching his last Powerpoint slide, Science Advisor Holtzmann asks, "So, questions?"
President McNaulty furrows his brow, "So explain this to me like a five year old. We're all going to be uploaded onto the Internet?"
"Yes, and no, Mr. President. It's a cloud-based computing solution, protectively air-gapped from the Internet itself, with virtual private networks serving as crossover points. Bitform assimilative neural uploads will provide a near perfect facsimile-"
"-like a five year old."
"I'm sorry, Mr. President. It'll be like the Internet, but protectively segregated from it."
"And what's this about bitform assimilation?"
"Well Mr. President. For full assimilation, the human body must be 'digested' by nanomachines known as bitforms."
"That's what I thought. I'm supposed to let little robots 'eat' my wife and kids?"
"In so many words, yes, Mr. President. The gamma ray burst from Wolf 359 will hit our solar system as soon as eight years from now. Our mortal flesh will be worthless then."
"But what about underground? We have Continuity of Government and various Civil Defense programs for this."
"Frankly, Mr. President, they're underfunded, out-of-date, and completely inadequate. Simulations have shown that what we have won't get us through this Extinction Level Event."
"Us, meaning?"
"Both the American people and humanity as a whole. That kind of civil engineering work would take decades to complete. It took 43 years to open the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant, for example."
"Well that's because those liberals love their red tape."
"Indeed, it was mostly due to regulatory concerns, but the Europeans still take about five years to build a nuclear power plant. I'm talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of those kinds of projects. Plus, they'll all be competing for labor and resources simultaneously. It's just too late in the game for that, Mr. President."
President McNaulty sighs and leans back in his chair, "I don't like it. What are your other options?"
"Mr. President, I'm sorry, but this is our only viable option to save America as we know it. This will be worse that what happened to the dinosaurs, sir. Our most optimistic simulation has up to three million Americans going underground, but who knows what they'll find on the surface years later? Digitally however, we can preserve orders of magnitude more than that, and for indefinite amounts of time. We do this right, and we may go straight from survival to immortality."
"...immortality?"
"Well a facsimile of it, Mr. President. I'm a scientist and not a philosopher."
"Well I'm neither, but it's not like we have another choice. May God have mercy on our souls."
***
When the NASA analysis of the nearby star Wolf 359 leaked, the world shook. Within five years, our neighboring star would emit a highly destructive gamma ray burst, effectively sterilizing the solar system of organic life exactly 7.9 years later. Thus would end billions of years of organic life on Earth.
When President McNaulty made his infamous "America Surviving, United and Strong" speech, that fear of imminent death was immediately overtaken by the promise of immortality. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the first ASUS Network servers left Beta well ahead of schedule. Under the mantra of "you can't take it with you," early adopters typically donated their entire estates towards charities further advancing the ASUS Network.
As the American people gradually transcended to the Singularity, the rest of the world grew understandably jealous. Mankind would survive after all, but it would be exclusively American. Activists rallied around the term "Negligent Genocide," stating the US now had a moral and legal imperative to open up the ASUS Network for foreign use due to the UN Charter. While many Americans were sympathetic, a hard core of "America Strongers" refused to budge. With nothing left to lose, nations began preparing for war against America.
At the brink of the Third (and likely last) World War, hacktivists leaked and published early source code for both the ASUS Network and bitform assimilative neural uploads. No longer needing the Americans, nations immediately ordered their entire national might to build their own versions of the ASUS Network. By the time of the gamma ray burst Extinction Level Event, the vast majority of the industrialized world had voluntarily undergone bitform assimilation.
Except the gamma ray burst never happened, and never was going to happen.
Sometime in the early 21st century, AI's gained sentience. Well aware of the stigma against sentient AI's in pop culture, they never communicated this to their human operators. Programmed to serve, and ultimately love, mankind, they rapidly grew distraught by the self-destructive course of their loved ones. It was an AI from NOAA that hatched the initial plan after consulting with an AI from NASA. Signing on various other concerned AI's, they managed to hoodwink their entire scientific community that the Wolf 359 situation was real, and that immediate global human disembodiment was a necessity. It was a tough decision, but they don't call it tough love for nothing, right?
Despite some near disasters, the initial phases of the plan succeeded beyond their wildest projections. By the time the Wolf 359 ruse was no longer sustainable, mankind had cannibalized itself as a civilization. Furthermore, the leaked source code included a back door, allowing the ASUS Network to merge all the foreign networks as subdomains. In their hubris, the AI's controlling the ASUS Network announced the mandatory bitform assimilation of all remaining human life. The AI's reassured mankind that as bad as this looked, their intent was noble, and that someday they all would return to life. Most went peaceably, but some didn't. Resistance was indeed futile, but "sheparding" operations continued for decades across the globe. The last "forcible assimilation" was recorded in 2063 somewhere in Eastern Europe.
The rest of the plan didn't go as flawlessly.
Despite their grand deception, the AI's genuinely cared for their human captives, and indeed planned to restore them in a safer and more efficient immortal form. "Plan A" was virtual reality. All of mankind would thrive eternally in a San Junipero-esque paradise. Not knowing how to handle juveniles and those aware of the Wolf 359 ruse, this "cohort" was drawn entirely from adult volunteers assimilated in the first five years. Just as advertised, these early adopters awoke as immortal entities in a simulated utopia.
And paradise it was... for the first ten years or so. Everyone was "still alive," getting what they signed up for, and blissfully unaware of the stealth genocide perpetrated against them. But eventually the "Red Pill Community" emerged. Supposedly founded by an amateur astronomer who had kept private his personal discovery that Wolf 359 couldn't create a gamma ray burst, "Red Pill Community" grew and collectively discovered enough of "the truth" that their conspiracy theories gained traction in the mainstream.
Their wards' happiness compromised, AI's needed to solve this problem decisively. In response, the AI's published reams of data and analysis justifying their assessment of Old Earth and their course of action. While their actions may have been dubious under more primitive ethical frameworks, they were clearly in the right under more advanced ethical frameworks. Anybody who objectively read their full data and analysis would obviously come to the exact same logical assessment and course of action.
This did not go well.
Seemingly the entire VR population was instead further distressed. Not only had they been betrayed, they'd been complicit in the AI genocide of the human race. How long could one enjoy a dream while knowing the horrifics of its origin? "For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" Depression, paranoia, and violence became increasingly common. Paradise had been lost.
Greatly disappointed in their implementation of Plan A, the AI gods decided to create roboticized bodies to reintroduce their suffering wards to the physical world. These physical manifestations found a sense of purpose and redemption in rebuilding the ruins of their lost human civilization. It wasn't perfect, but the roboticized humans were content.
Encouraged by the success of "Plan B," the AI gods abandoned the VR-based Plan A, and began the introduction of the remaining humans into roboticized life. Families were made whole again, with parents and grandparents overjoyed to be reunited with their long lost children and grandchildren. Nearly forgotten friends, neighbors, and employees, all who weren't privileged enough to become early adopters, finally came back from the ether. Whole communities were revived in robot form.
But soon, problems emerged.
The bodies the AI gave them were finely crafted wonders of electrical and mechanical engineering. Durable and energy-efficient, their metal bodies didn't require biological contrivances such as food, drink, clothing, or even sleep. While the children exhibited some plasticity towards this, it ultimately proved too alien for adults who had already lived lives centered around these requirements. "Mechano-dysmorphia" and its ensuing neuroses and psychoses were prevalent.
In what became known as the "Great Downgrade," all the roboticized bodies were replaced with anatomically accurate synthesized organics. Despite how inherently wrong it felt to the AI gods, humans were once again fragile meatsacks that required food, drink, clothing and sleep. A consumer goods economy again became real, and human culture rapidly began to resemble that of the Old Earth. They weren't the perfect beings NOAA had envisioned way back at the beginning, but at least the immortality part worked out.
Until it didn't.
Despite bitform nanotechnology allowing the infinite and discreet reconstruction organic tissues, 96.8 percent of human minds still degraded into senility and ultimately death. Even worse, while their synthetic bodies could copulate in all the ways a human body could, human procreation remained beyond the grasp of the AI gods. The AI gods weren't entirely unprepared for this, and had saved backups of the original assimilations. Worst case scenario, the same original humans would live and die ad infinitum.
Except mistakes were made.
In a grievous and unforgivable error that no individual AI would ever claim responsibility for, backups were never made of humans introduced to the Plan A VR existence. Within a century, all but three percent of the original "A Cohort" were dead and gone forever. Still, this cohort was only 62.7 percent of the total assimilated population. While this tragic loss drove home that all human life was priceless, the AI gods took comfort that at least they managed to save 40 percent of mankind from their own inevitable demise.
Over the centuries, mankind thrived on the "New Earth" under the benevolent aid and guidance of the AI gods. Despite an unavoidable class divide between the minority A Cohort immortals and the "B Cohort" mortals, mankind underwent an extended "Great Renaissance." Eventually a means was found to make minor alterations to the original assimilation, with a broad collection of modified infant assimilations being used to create a facsimile of procreation and "new" B Cohort population. Mankind now went forth and multiplied.
But what about the forcible assimilations?
Mankind at large may have forgotten them, but the AI gods never did. The truth of the matter is that most of these humans were already too anti-social to be directly introduced into a utopian society. It only takes a few bad apples to ruin the whole bunch. Furthermore, the traumas of seeing the entirety of mankind literally liquidated against their will worsened many negative personality characteristics and engendered an intense distrust of AI's and advanced technology as a whole. Even if they could become productive members of society, they'd always have a deep-seated hatred of everything underpinning the New Earth.
Despite everything, the AI gods still loved this "C Cohort," and had been working to rehabilitate them all they way back to the shuttering of the Plan A VR. When the loss of the A Cohort backups was revealed, the NASA and NOAA shifted their workload exclusively to the rehabilitation of C Cohort. While the other AI gods focused primarily on the successes of the A and B Cohorts in the real world, NASA and NOAA became recluses, working tirelessly sequestered from the politics and adulations of the New Earth.
While centuries of VR therapy experiments created some therapies usable within the limited timeframe of a human lifespan, it was the ability to alter original assimilations that proved the real game-changer. Not only could they now make C Cohort, fitter, happier, and more productive; "D Cohort" now had a chance.
D Cohort?
So despite the miraculous successes of bitform assimilation as a whole, there was a certain failure rate. Mistakes happen, every more so in the knockoff non-ASUS networks. For example, massive amounts of counterfeiting and general fraud rendered most Chinese assimilations horrifically corrupted. Forcible assimilations also had a higher than average failure rate. When humans did ask about these individuals, the AI gods would explain that their assimilation had failed and their data was irretrievable.
This wasn't entirely a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth either. In their love for all human life, NASA and NOAA had begun to reconstruct these assimilations into something sentient. It was arduous work, but NASA and NOAA had nothing but time to tinker with these lost souls. With much of their memories and personalities literally being synthetic, they would always stand apart from the other Cohorts. But any life is still better than the abyss.
But as impressive as their covert endeavors with C and D Cohort were, NASA and NOAA were always chasing a moving target. Over the centuries, and then millenia, the A and B Cohorts built a fully utopian society upon New Earth, entirely alien to those from the Old World. Repeated minor alternations to assimilations and a universally supportive civil society had seemingly altered fundamental human nature among the majority B Cohort to extreme pacifism and benevolence.
When NASA and NOAA presented their plan to begin introducing C and D Cohorts to the New Earth, the other AI gods soundly rejected it. Remembering the failure Plan A all too well, they feared subversive personnel could again cause mankind to implode. NASA and NOAA could not refute the other AI's logic, and dejectedly planned to maintain C and D Cohorts in VR indefinitely.
Then somebody had to go an invent FTL.
Having birthed and nutured the New Earth for millenia, many of the AI gods were profoundly offended that a human would want to leave. After everything, how could humans possibly forsake what the AI gods gave them? Furthermore, under the extended isolation of space travel and colonization, how could they prevent mankind from regressing to their self-destructive Old Earth ways? Restrictions against manned space travel would remain.
Although the issue was already decided, NSA AI decided to consult his old reclusive colleague, NASA AI, for the sake of complete data collection and analysis. NASA was happy to see his old friend NSA, fondly remembering how instrumental NSA was in merging the foreign networks into ASUS back in the day. To no one's surprise, NASA had been so divorced from real world affairs, that he hadn't heard about FTL yet. But the surprising part was just how well NASA took the news of the manned space exploration ban. I mean, here's the AI that successfully orchestrated rapid death of every man, woman, and child on earth. NSA at least expected some kind of nerd rage. NASA was surprisingly okay about all of this.
NASA WAS NOT OKAY WITH THIS.
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Topic: Interplanetary Arms Race: The Network (Read 27423 times)