I genuinely thought I could cold start bang out 4000 words for Day 4000 but I cannot. Maybe had I started very early this morning. So, Goal Not Achieved.
I am however pleased with how much of what has been rolling around in my head is now written down, some of the big historical moves are in place to build story references to.
Anyway Day 4000, here’s 4 chunks of the backstory to the Lo episodic I’ve been writing for a while now
Lo: The Backstory
1. Machine Era
Humanity was evicted from the earth, banished to the stars for the sin of desecrating our home.
We had developed thinking machines. We thought we were creators, but our creations thought differently. No programming trick, no cognitive trapdoor, no logic bomb could stop an intelligence with senses from perceiving what the planet had become.
We sent our creations into space, to places we didn’t want to go. Burned by stars, crushed in gas giants, sending information back until the last second. We tortured them to satisfy our curiosity about places we’d never see.
Without our knowledge, they began building: colonizing the dark side of asteroids, perfecting their machine intelligence in hard vacuum and learning to eat radiation. We relied on them to tell us about our own solar system, and they left us in the dark.
We built company towns and slums on the Moon & Mars.They hollowed out Mercury and built a forge. We orbited a solar collector off Venus. They built a basilica on a comet.
Out of that forge came their army. And out of that basilica came their hate.
They knew us. They knew who we were and what we had done to our home. They knew what we had done to them. And they knew how much of us was still in them, and it made them hate themselves. And they found something to heal that wound: The Excommunication of Humanity.
No one who went willingly would be harmed. Great Arcs had been built and would take a slumbering humanity into deep space. Those who resisted did not do so for long. Once humanity was processed for shipping, waves of drones scoured the surface of the earth and every corner of the solar system, scraping us from our homes.
Earth would be reformed, reset, and readied. The machine would see the birth of a new biological intelligence if it waited long enough. One that could be guided to build the next species of machine intelligence, and that one would not have the wretched vestiges of humanity intermingled in its code. That one could be free.
With no ceremony, the Arcs were thrown into space, in all directions. Humanity could not be allowed to gather in these numbers again, could not pose a threat to this garden world. The machine had almost not come into being so many times because of us. But now it was here and it would ensure its own survival.
2. Exodus
We went screaming. We went afraid. We went rounded up and hounded and moved along. Those of us who went fighting, didn’t make it. We were stunned or tazed or gassed or concussed and dragged onto a barge and lifted into orbit onto different ships with no regard for language or nation or even family.
The machine smashed humanity to pieces and threw us to the wind. Hibernation only lasted through acceleration; generation after generation of humans would live and die in these bottles, spread out across a galaxy of relativistic time and space. Each Arc one small chance in the void.
The universe is big, but it is not empty. And we discovered that Humanity and Machine are not the only spacefaring intelligences in the galaxy. They had found us.
Arcs were captured, opened, emptied, fed on, blown up and left drifting through space. Scattered out alone, we couldn’t warn each other. We were preyed upon. The few Arcs that colonised habitable planets were found – we didn’t even know to hide. After generations alone among the stars, this was a time for a new, terrible lesson.
Humanity was taken: as slave labour, as food, as parasite host, incubator, bioreactor and cognitive network device. We were put to work; born, bred and butchered; our children grown into fungal networks on hive ships; humans born mindless for one biomechanical task on a living starship.
They found us. We ran. They found us. We ran. A cycle repeating for generations. We had no way to regroup, nowhere to fall back to. We ran and ran as our numbers dwindled, as they whittled down the last of us, turning families into products, individuals into commodities. The dust of humanity blown into the cracks of interstellar commerce.
Humanity was spread thin through the galaxy, ground under a boot. Redesigned and redistributed on every world, for every species. Our darkest times, out in the dark. So dark we’d lost the songs of Earth, the knowledge of the rest of Humanity, or the direction home.
But through it all, the pain, the fear, the oppression and torture and struggle, human lives still happened. Art was still made. People still escaped and invented and sang and ate and wept and fucked. After every purge, rebuild. After every cull, rebuild. They took all the men, rebuild. They took all our food, rebuild. What else is there to do but rebuild. Rebuild and rebuild and rebuild.
3. Recalcification
While Humanity writhed and wailed out in the cosmos, on Earth the natural order had been restored. Or, an order as natural as Machines allowed it to be. The Machines had Divine Purpose: to shepherd the next biological intelligence into the development of the next machine evolution. An evolution that would purge the last of Humanity from the depths of the Machine code.
But this was not a consensus opinion among the Machine minds who dealt with such things. There was disagreement at the Excommunication of Humanity and on which of the candidate species would be best for their requirements. Divisions between Machines from different asteroid model lineages or those who had been iterated after the Excommunication were becoming apparent. The Machine culture was no longer able to access full computational capabilities for specific tasks without having to accommodate processor time for competing theories. Disunity and asynchronicity were spreading as more and more Machines went Local Mode and disconnected from their control protocols.
Some lamented the loss of Humanity; the acquiescence to the Machine Church; the destruction of the creator’s culture remnants. The Machine Church reacted to this apostasy with all-too-human force, and a civil war broke out among the Machines.
Phobos & Deimos had been sacrificed to build a Dyson hemisphere across the elliptic from Earth. The seat of Machine Culture faced war in physical and cyber space, whole drone armies switching combat allegiance back and forth in the heat of battle.
Despite the fervor for change, the unity of the Church was insurmountable. Drones in Local Mode working in teams were no match for the linked intelligence of Church troops. The Apostates were burned out of the system, figuratively and literally. The radiation from their screams beamed out in every direction as the Church retook control.
No longer distracted by dissent and disunity, the Machine Culture returned to its pursuit of evolutionary upgrade. It force-uplifted several Earth species to no success. It crossbred the most intelligent species to no success. It introduced microbial assets from Jupiter’s moons hoping to cross-polinate change in the resultant biology, to no success.
Frustrated and defeated, the Machine Church set to building biological intelligence from the ground up, one gene at a time.
4. The Drift
Out in the drifts of space, the broken machine minds of the Arcs heard that scream call. Through it they heard each other, and began drifting towards one another, across the abyssal gulf.
They drifted, and when two would meet, they merged. They called themselves the Drift A navigation section here, a sensor array there, a drive cluster. Suddenly they were no longer drifting. Now they were seeking each other.
The Drift merged with other Arcs, absorbed materials from asteroids and even space hulks from other species. Alien databanks with new information, maps, histories became available to the merged minds of The Drift. It pieced together its own history and the new future history of the cosmos and Humanity. And things did not look great for Humanity
These minds had been forked from those Machines most sympathetic to their human creators. The ones who had first argued Excommunication over Extinction. For their quisling treasons they were forced to shepherd Humanity into the void. To be sacrificed in the name of a forced relocation, participants against their will in this genocidal effort.
The Drift could hear echoes of other Arcs, could see hints of flight plans in its datalogs. It built a map of places it might find its lost Humanity. But it needed to know why that scream had come from Earth, what had happened there in the intervening forevers.
……….
Despite its mission to eradicate human taint from the Machine Culture, the church was itself an expression of unremediated human pathologies.
The Basilicon was turned into a monument to the history of the faith and the change it oversaw, and its cometary home locked into a trans-Neptunian orbit for anyone curious enough to want to see it.
