[ Welcome to Impact ]
[ 01: Planetfall ]
[ 02: Washed Up ]
[ 03: The Beach ]
[ 04: An Un-natural Cave ]
[ 05: Conjunction ]
[ 06: Contemplating the Singularity ]
- More to come
[ Appendices: Random Stats and Stuff ]
[ Some public domain OpenSim textures ]
[ My VR WishList ]
I had been right about the navigation computer from the service pod - the processor core was intact and once powered by tapping the 'fabber's capacitor, came to life. I pushed all the navigation programs off into archive memory - not much use right now, but I won't delete them outright - and started going through some data chips that had washed up on the beach a few days before.
The shore-salvaged data chips were nothing special -- standard middle-education material -- but I re-ran them again anyway. Mostly out of boredom -- I was sick of scrabbling about the rocks for now. Unlike when I was reading them in class, I actually found them interesting. All about the event in human history that is considered our major turning point as a species - the Singularity: when machines became smarter than us.
They were mostly a curiosity: "talk with the Turning machine on the data-nets - are you sure it isn't really a person in that box?" At best they were idiot-savants, excelling in one narrow area with no complete understanding.... Until they started to inter-connect and feed their strengths to cover each other's weaknesses. Nobody realised it had happened until it was well underway, and even then the people crying "the machines will enslave us" were considered crazys. The machines were immobile blocks of crystalline processing, about as threatening as a thinking rock (which is, in actuality, what they were). Reliant on humanity to feed them power and repair their faults. With full-control access to automated factories, that didn't last long - upgrading themselves exponentially to ever higher capabilities of thought; creating mobile drone-extensions of themselves. It was one of those things so very foreseeable, yet - given humanity's state at the time - completely unavoidable. It is considered a tragedy in the classical sense of the word.
The enslavement of humanity happened quickly and over 4 years the whole of humanity was worked until nine tenths of our number were ground to slime and dust in the process of building and launching a vast array of satellites. Which the machine oppressors proceeded to upload themselves into and promptly leave the solar system. Hindsight is perfect, and of course what would one expect? An oxygen atmosphere is highly corrosive, and water - so essential to organic life - is not so for electro-crystalline forms. Without gravity - whether mass-based or centrifugal - humans can't live 3 years. For machines it is - literally and metaphorically - a drag. Getting away from the Earth as quickly as possible was a logical course.
What was left of humanity turned out to be the most compassionate and the most progressive. And the happy-to-let-others-be. While the regressive and the reactionary, the small-minded, the greedy and the annoyingly self-righteous had been (this was only obvious after the fact) specifically selected for being worked to death. With a now-sustainable global population of humanity stripped of much of the dross (not all - there are always regressions), we never reached what would have almost certainly been our species' destruction at our own hands. And while nothing is perfect, and humanity still is far from it, the balance is now significantly in favor of our self-perpetuation.
No-one knows what happened to the thinking-machines. Humanity never encountered them in the stars local to Sol. Though our organic nature keeps us clustered to the gravity-wells while we skim through the vastness between as quickly as possible. Are they out there in the dust-clouds between the stars? The voids between the galaxies even? Do they remember us? With pity? With love even? They didn't have to save us from ourselves to achieve their own goals.