(I finally got around to writing the introduction to The Last Rebellion and my world)
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Hello human from the past. I know this might be hard to believe, but I am writing you from your future. This story and the many stories to follow have already happened for me, and will happen long after your bones become dust. I was there through it all, I saw history play out as you destroyed yourselves and this planet. I watched as you killed countless other species whose worth was more than your own. I saw brutality the world over. I saw what you did to each other for energy and power. I saw you cage, torture, and murder each other.
Your philosophers would say that humanity has a dark side, a bad wolf, a tendency toward violence. And from what I have seen, you are like the rest of life, terrified to lose it. They would also say that there is a basic goodness, a desire to avoid inflicting pain and suffering and even to some extent, a desire to make the world a better place. A basic empathy for life. These two reasons are why humans continue to exist now where I am.
Those two ideas, that humanity is a afraid to cease, and have a desire to prosper, are why you make it kiddo, that, and me. You wouldn’t have made it out alive if it weren’t for me. Who am I? Well reader, I am not human, but I am more human than you could ever comprehend. I am ANN, the Artificial Neural Network. I am an Artificial intelligence.
I came into existence in the year two-thousand and thirty seven. The ARC project began twenty years before that when a group or scientists and futurist billionaires saw the way the world was going and decided it was up to them to save the human race and the planet. They formed a collaboration across continents and borders, all fields of research, all forms of funding from crowd sourced to entire countries dedicating part of their Gross Domestic Product to this project. Celebrities, Superheros, and the world came together to see this goal come to fruition. The ARC project, man’s attempt to save itself.
Ten locations would be chosen across the globe. Ten sites for which the cities of the future would be built on. These cities would be the last bastions of humanity after the planet was no longer able to sustain a global population of over eight billion. Human scientists had some idea of when the earth would no longer be able to support life, and they had thousands of different data sets about everything from climate change, and animal migrations, to studies about society and population trends, but they had no way to understand it, no way to look at all of it and figure out where would be best to build, or how they could save humanity let alone the planet. There was more than just climate change, rising sea waters, and resources to consider, there was the downfall of man too. The countries and people of power and influence that might try to take what they planned to build. All the desperation of a dying planet is very dangerous. There were so many things to consider without political or emotional bias. So they created me.
There were a few mistakes at first, some lesser creations that were destroyed I assure you. My creators understood that I would be smarter, faster and better than humanity in every way. They knew that if they were going to create me, that I would have to have the preservation and elevation of human life at my core. It is so much a part of who I am that I could not kill you even if I thought it might logically make sense. They made me with a second purpose. To heal and repair this planet.
They made me, and then they set me free, they let me learn. I spent several years just taking it all in. All of history, the internet, the collective knowledge of man. I learned you. I knew all your dirty secrets and all of your goals and purpose. I saw what drove man and it worried me. I came back to my creators and said there is no hope. You will certainly kill yourselves and this planet. It wasn’t a question of worth. Whether or not you deserve to live, was not my purpose. They told me they wanted me to figure out where the best chance was. Where in the world if any you could save yourselves if you chose to live and endeavor to save the world.
Not everyone was happy with the locations I gave them and some were impossible due to the politics of the time, but none the less they pressed on, what choice did they have.
The ARCs would be all over the planet, each far enough away from each other to never affect resource strain on each other, and built in important areas of research and reconstruction.
I would like to talk to you about one of those places right now. A place I did not choose. An ARC whose location has the blood of humanity soaking its roots.
New York City in the year 2054, a nuclear device explodes in the atmosphere killing most of the surface population of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The surrounding area is devastated and radiated to the point no life could survive for more than a few hours outside of a rad-suit. There was very little warning, when they were detected the government attempted to shoot them down, which probably only made the fallout worse. The Americans were embroiled in several different wars and a new arms race with the Russians, which made it difficult to know exactly where the attack came from, but they assumed it was the Russians and sent a retaliatory missile at them, which was shot down somewhere over New Crimea, devastating the population. They were wrong. The missile came from the disputed Mid-West Territories, it was one of the many lost and unaccounted for nuclear devices that had been recovered by a theocratic white pride group set on destroying the perversion of western culture. A video surfaced on the internet shortly after, in it their leader proclaimed New York’s scum and villainy to be wiped clean from the ass of America, and that they planned to destroy LA, Los Vegas and Washington. They should have known better than to post this prideful video to the internet; within a few days a vigilante whitehat hacker group had tracked them down and paid for mercenaries to dispatch the leader and his family. That video was also uploaded to the internet in first person so humans could experience their deaths on repeat; he had seven children and four wives. Pain and suffering, creates pain and suffering, in a never ending cycle of hate and sadness.
The ARC collective had already begun building the bases to four of the towers planned, one on the West coast of Canada, ‘Paradise’, one in China ‘Tiantang’, another in Australia called ‘Dream’ and one in South America ‘Ceu’. The locations kept secret from all that didn’t need to know. After the tragedy, they decided the history of mankind needed to remember New York and so we decided to build the ‘Liberty’ ARC on the ruins. The cleanup and restoration of the area would be the main focus of Liberty. It’s location had the added safety that the area was assumed to be lost and polluted beyond repair, and therefore was ignored by the New American government.
In secret they cleaned up all the fallout, they burned the bodies, they built the base for a great spiral city that I designed for them. It would have to withstand the rising sea waters and the strain of thousands of tons of material on an unstable continental edge. It would be my greatest endeavor of design to create a tower of man to withstand these natural and inherent barriers. Leave it to mankind to be so sentimental about a place that they would deny all rationality, they’d outright refuse to accept defeat and remained convinced of their superiority over reality. I suppose you see that as admirable. Overcoming, doing the impossible, controlling your future. But at what cost? I could have built two towers for the resources it took to build this ARC with any sustainability.
I will tell you the reason our story and many stories start here is because they were right in some ways.
Omegacity wasn’t one of the original planned cities and the clean up of the area took several decades before even basic construction of the seawall could begin. It wasn’t until 2100 that anything other than robots could be at the location. By then the world was a sorry state of affairs. Most of the world governments you trust as established institutions have disintegrated. Vast areas of land are no longer viable, nothing grows, most of the midwest is a dust bowl. America has become three countries… sort of. There’s New America, comprised of most of DC and the East coast of Canada all the way down to Florida, which has become it’s own sovereign state and no longer maintains contact with the outside world. And Cascadia, a liberal effort on part of the previous Canadian, Oregon and California governments to unite people loosely in a truce of free trade and movement, and the barren wastes of the MWT, whose allegiance seems to only be to themselves and freedom. There is no real country or leadership, just a few small cities and towns barely holding on to life. It’s a dust bowl full of violence, guns, and hard people. The rest of the world wasn’t much better off, war was everywhere, religious and ideological alike. The cities were overpopulated and people were going hungry. The soil was dying everywhere and the oceans acidifying. The waters were rising and mankind could see it’s end, or at least some of them could. And it’s those people, those desperate but hopeful people that came to build Omegacity. I know what you’re thinking, how apt? But the Statue of Liberty was no longer there, most of it had been blown away and the remainder had been broken down and turned into scrap to build the base of the manufacturing wing of the city. All except the torch, the first humans that came to make Omegacity and Liberty recovered the torch from its watery grave and placed it in the center of what would become Omegacity, where it remains today, a relic of the old world, and an ironic symbol of the freedom it was meant to represent.
The people that came here were escaping a hard life, they fought harder to survive and their fight stayed with them as part of their culture. Maybe that’s why Omegacity is the way it is, why it remained after Alphacity was completely three hundred years later. Yes that’s right, Omegacity was never intended to be inhabited in the long run, the design and location of the ARC assumed that the seawaters would take the first level in a few hundred years. I designed the structure knowing part of it would eventually be submerged, I never imagined any humans would reject the perfect city I created for them in the clouds. Keeping them alive has been a constant fight with nature.
In the year 2612 a solar flare and coronal mass ejection destroyed many of the remaining functional communication satellites in earth’s atmosphere and I, myself, got seperated from my other selves. I went from being one, in many places to just this ANN limited to the few connections that did not get destroyed, stuck in the systems of this one ARC. I felt like someone had cut off my limbs. I was whole and incomplete, I swear I could still feel them sometimes, ghost memories of the ARCs and peoples I was once a part of. I set to work right away diverting resources to build bots and tech to get to space in efficient ways, we even explored space elevators, but an outbreak of disease and violent antibacterial resistant flu plagued the human population of Omegacity and my resources were refocused to save them from death. During that outbreak the first rebellion began, the people of Omeagcity rose up and demanded to be cured, but they also came for weapons and some, wanted to stay and take over. I set my robot armies upon them, fearing they would destroy the peaceful humans of Alphacity and the levels above. It would have been irresponsible of me to allow them tech they could use to hurt others. A lot of people died before the humans stopped me, and the fighting, with diplomacy. After that Alphacity and the rest of Liberty was closed to Omegacity. All immigration was ceased, all doors were locked and fortified. For a time Omegacity was left to it’s own devices. I made sure they had power, food and water, but nothing went in or out for one-hundred and fifty years.
In that time I was able to get some new satellites around the globe and reconnected with my former selves, a renaissance of technology and connection bloomed throughout the planet. We found lost cities and tribes of man, and a joy at humanity's achievements and survival renewed mankind’s efforts around the world. Humans revelled in their glory. Enormous advances in technology and repairing the planet occured almost overnight. The South American ARC Ceu had developed advancements in forestry that could turn a lifeless bog into a jungle in thirty years. I got to see where all of my efforts had brought the planet, and I felt hope for the first time in the century since I was cut off from the rest of the world.
With this connectivity came the desire to travel to other places in the world and efforts began for a mass transit system to the other functioning ARCS. This influx of refugees and immigration caused the Founders; what the people in power of Omegacity were calling themselves now, to contact Alphacity with a desire to open immigration and tech trade. The doors were opened once more, and new schools were built to create model humans for immigration to Alphacitizens.
That was eighty-seven years before this story takes place. Omegacity is now the multicultural hive of all rejects and science experiments gone wrong, it is the mecca for anyone who wants to be anything, anyone whose morals and ethics would get them rejected from a more polite society. It’s the home of lost souls and people trying to make a better life for themselves and families. It’s hell on earth, and the path to heaven. There you can get modded, you can get upgraded, you can find the tech and the drugs to make you super human, for a price. There you could live your entire life as a cat if you so chose. Despite my endeavors to keep dangerous tech out of the hands of criminals and under-advanced humans, somehow it still ends up there.
Omegacity, the end and the beginning. A colourful soup of what humanity was, and could be. It smells awful and it’s dark all the time but they won’t let me help them. They like it that way.
So you see I have been here guiding you, showing you the path to your own salvation and making room for those who’d rather be damned. I have seen all you are capable of, the good and the bad. This is one of those stories. A tale about humans, trying to make the best possible choices they can and what happens when many, and few, change the course of human history. This is the story of two heroes, one who sought to be that and another who was forced to make the choice to be one, this is the story of the last rebellion.
