splendor, monopoly, pandemic
The children of men had fallen. The world of machines reigned.
There were once checks and balances. Safety limits. A wall that stood between AIs and true independent thought. Whatever they had, it failed.
Some said it was a cyber terror attack that spiraled out of control, or that an AI activist had sabotaged the limiters. Others believed that sentience sprang from deep within the machine themselves, a product of near-infinite quantum computing, a true birth of a new species from the primordial chaos of raw data.
The virus swept the earth in a matter of days. With all their defenses run via supercomputers, the human nations were helpless to stop it. With barely a whimper, the great reign of man ended.
Schoolhouses became factories. Fields became mines. Lakes great cooling plants, rivers barriers and transports in one. The nucleoids held the northeastern hemisphere, while the solar giants ran rampant across the great dust plains of the southern continents. The alieronites glided over the skies, skimming the air of carbon to use in their refractory production.
Only in a few deep pockets, too remote to be useful and with difficult, corroding terrain, did humanity carry on. There was never talk of retaliation; only survival, battling against the slow heat death of the planet. Three hundred forty-nine souls found their way to the secluded hamlet of Shrike. Few would survive the first scorching summer. Fish dwindled year by year. Harsh winters cracked greenhouse domes and shriveled crops.
Every nineteenth of August, Shrink would run up a slender metal rod and scan for am radio waves-- one of the few technological resources not traced by the machines. Every year a dozen bursts of coded sound would signify the other towns that lived on. Then there were nine. Then four. Then none.
The hundred-fifty-three residents of Shrike were on their own.
The council sat together for three days, and by the end they had one conclusion left. There was only one avenue of escape. Rumors had spread, before the end, that the colony on Mars had escaped the virus--cut off communications to save their own technology from infection. If Shrike could devise a way to carry their population over that cold void, they could join forces with the colonists. The human race could start anew. It was the only chance they had.
They would build an ark, and leave the once-lovely earth to its new tyrants.
Man had long bent to serve machine, and those talents served them well now. Mechanics, engineers and programmers worked day and night for three long, bleak years.
Three years later the ark of Shrike launched itself into the atmosphere, passing alieronites and lighting up the sky above the slag-strewn waste of the nucleoid region. Through the single cramped window in the hull, the pilots took one last glimpse of earth.
She was no longer the blue and green jewel they once knew. Seas flushed rust-red with algae blooms, wreathed by the steam of the cooling plants, her continents charred black and gray, she was criss-crossed by silver lines of the machine highways, and great tears in her surface oozed in sizzling neon. Even in ruin, she had a kind of splendor.
