First Contact

Chapter 464: Non-Canon Trash

"Any suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Artorius Gamma Clarktavius, Age of Paranoia Scholar

Good day class. It is good to see the majority of you have recovered from the trauma of our "Age of Industrialized Warfare" section of the class. I realize that seeing unedited black and white footage of not one, but two atomic device upon civilian habitation areas to end a war was shocking to all of you.

For now, we will be moving beyond the Atomic Age and Information Age. Normally the Graviton Age would follow, as it has for every other species that ever managed to establish space flight.

The Terran Descent Human, however, decided that they wanted to push another age in there, one nearly unique to themselves.

The Micro-Macro Age. To ease you into what we will eventually get to in the "Armed Conflict" section of our class, called "All Weapons Great and Small", we will first start with the industrial and civilian application of nanite technology as well as the beginnings of superstructures.

We will take a short break for everyone to check their medication levels. Despite the fact that this section deals with industrial and civilian applications of these technologies, there will limbic and nervous system shocks that may be quite severe.

Welcome back. I'm glad to see some of you remembered to check your flight response inhibitors.

Now, at this time, we are going to cover the "Age of Magic" technologies.

Yes, yes, I see your hands raised up. There is no such thing as magic, merely technology and physics we do not understand yet.

Please note that not one species here managed to accomplish discovering, much less accessing, the Third Hyperatomic Plane.

The humans did.

But, moving on.

With technology becoming more and more advanced, and facing the information black hole horizon, humanity dealt with their problem in a method that no other species has ever devised.

They crafted the appearance of their technology to resemble magic.

This is an Age of Paranoia housing engineer and builder. Notice his toga, the steel and iridium laurel wreath around his brow, and the heavy medallion on his toga. While it may look foolish to you, this human male was in charge of creating housing. First with variable material computer aided drafting fabricators, called 3D Printers, and then from nanites, then from a hybrid of the two. Because humans believe art is a functional part of science and science is a functional part of art, humans ceased to rely on virtual intelligences and algorithms to determine optimum housing options and instead went, when they could, with 'the human touch' in designing homes and domestic areas. While industrial and military facilities were still designed, largely, with automation and certain restrictions in mind, the average Terran had someone build their home.

This led to the control of the nanite 'soup' in many cities, which was a nanite cloud thick enough that it measurably dimmed sunlight. The cloud was used for everything from health, emergency medical or law enforcement, to disaster relief and building repair.

Terran nanties were designed to be easily respirated, be at home equally in the air, the water, and inside of Terran bodies with no ill effects.

We will now pause of the class to regain their composure.

Military applications began to grow more intense with nanites, as we will cover in more depth in the conflict module of this class. Several wars were fought with soldiers completely encased in clouds of nanites that operated as armor, medical, and weaponry augmentations.

Humans found it easier to direct nanites with 'spells' and 'incantations' and 'songs', adding art to the rather mundane action of nanite control.

Now, before you scoff at this practice, you should know something important.

A Terran 'casting magic' is nearly thirty times more effective at nanite control than a trained expert team of five assisted by enhanced virtual intelligence systems.

Think on that.

--Terran Technology 310, Telkan University

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It started, like many things, as something else.

Initially designed for social media accounts to continue to engage family members after the account owner's death, it was a simple algorithm created with the goal of liking posts and posting inane holiday and anniversary posts.

From there it was enhanced to make generated posts from the account user's social media and internet history.

Another advancement allowed the terminally ill or injured to answer a long questionnaire regarding their beliefs and outlooks, with the intent of providing more accurate engagement with friends and family members post-death.

Humanity had long fought against death in a myriad of ways. From philanthropy to art to creating buildings and other legacies, humans had always been concerned on how history would perceive them and what effect they could have on future generations.

Religion gave hope that there was something more after death. Despite the widespread fall of religion pre-diaspora many still believed that there had to be something more, that there could be something more.

So more research went into ways to defeat death.

The social media 'dead-bots' slowly built up over time, becoming more and more complex to reflect the now-deceased user's attitudes, beliefs, and history.

Neural scanning technology suggested methods of recording someone's brain and uploading it to computers that were increasing in power at a nearly geometric rate, slowed only by the laws of physics here and there until humanity got physics drunk and left it waking up in bed sticky and confused.

There were setbacks, to be sure.

At one point the legal system got involved with the recording of human memory. Copyright holders insisted that people who had been recorded into the system have any memory of copyrighted works deleted from their memory unless they paid a fee. Owning a digital copy of the copyrighted work was determined not to be ownership after death.

This led to arguments on the moral and ethical practice of removing copyrighted works from people's lives after they had died.

But the practice of recording neural patterns and uploading them to computers did little more than create an overly involved MMO with NPC's based on real people's neural recordings that were then gone over by mental hygiene workers and copyright algorithms.

The real source kept going unabated.

Social media 'deadites' became more and more frequent, and more and more complex. Soon it was impossible to tell the original living person from the deadite version. As social media relies on interaction with other accounts as well as advertisements, deadite accounts were allowed and encouraged to interact with one another.

A major corporation began offering 'postmortem' banking, allowing someone to deposit money into an account to purchase upgrades to their software as well as hardware updates. Even with low interest rates, accounts would quickly accrue in value.

A company, divorced from the majority of the social media deadites and the singularity lobotomites, offered something to their customers. An interactive hologram at the person's grave-site or where their ashes were interred, allowing people to interact with family members and friends that had passed on.

The 'ghosts' were quickly integrated into the social media deadites, less so with the lobotomites.

More and more families began having ghosts in their homes, allowing 'pop pop' and 'meemaw' to interact with children and grandchildren even after their deaths. With access to the social media accounts on deadite status, the ghosts began to even talk about current events, products, fashions, and pop culture trends and fads.

Singularity versions of human mind uploads failed when copyrighted buildings and areas began being edited from memories, resulting in the uploads completely unraveling.

The ghosts, however, were gaining strength, in an electronic way.

Ghost servers held more backups and security then the singularity systems had ever bothered to invest. Constant checks against psychological testing, attitude testing, and all of the other methods of ensuring that a ghost represented the deceased actual opinions, attitudes, and preferences ensured that what had happened to the singularity lobotomites could not happen to the ghosts.

With additional breakthroughs in artificial intelligence the capabilities of the ghosts were enhanced. Now they were making friends, going on vacations to appear as a hologram in famous areas, buying products for family members and upgrades for themselves.

Several legal cases were brought forward against 'ghosts' and companies that catered to them. Investing, purchasing, and suddenly, voting, were all brought into the legal systems.

The voting dead were no longer a joke, but rather a massive voting block.

Dead investors could make or break a company, as they could take the long game and wait for massive profits later rather than feeling the desire for sudden and massive wealth.

The dead bought more expensive hologram emitters. Purchased drones with holographic capability.

Computer processing power and memory allocation became priority for the ghosts. Investments and funding pushed the digital realm.

Strangely enough, ghosts seemed to have more interest in space exploration than the living. In some ways it made sense. Ghosts did not require food, oxygen, waste disposal, and could power down into sleep mode for the long decades that space travel requested.

When deadites began being elected to office, some began to wonder if maybe things had gone to far.

But it was too late.

The deadites weren't content with virtual spaces. They wanted to manifest in the physical world.

Holograms at first. Then complicated tractor-pressor beams.

The first purely digital sentience was created. The size of a stadium.

A deadite existed in the cloud, often running a cryptocurrency blockchain miner to help generate wealth. Many cryptocurrencies became sneeringly known as 'crypt-cash' as it was the primary method of trade between deadites.

AI's still required massive computing arrays or crude quantum computers.

Deadites needed cloud storage and a distributed computing array.

An examination of the information electronic infrastructure revealed that 68.55% of the world's computing power and memory space was dedicated to the deadites and their influence and actions on the world.

But the deadites wanted more.

Technological advances in various hardware had enabled the deadites to possess the electronic equivalent of 'taste' and 'smell' and tactile sensation. Even more advances in tractor-pressor beams were showing the possibility of the deadites being able to interact with the world as if they existed in the physical realm.

Hard light/Tactile Holograms were the most invested in companies by the deadites.

Problems in major nations began to develop as the "Immortal Boss" problem began to rear its ugly head. Upward advancement, already slow to nearly non-existent, ground to a halt as deadites began to fill more and more management jobs, as they could undercut existing minimum wage laws where they so desired by using the old trick of 'not applicable to dead people" when they didn't want a law applied and 'dead people are still people' when they wanted the legal protections of other laws.

In many countries the idea of undergoing revolution to oust tyrants and despots vanished as not even death could keep a tyrannical ruler from holding onto power for decades, theoretically centuries, after the person was killed.

Tensions increased rapidly globally.

The ZombieNet Plague destroyed the records of three quarters of the five billion deadites when funding was cut to a major government program and millions of computers, infected with a virus for decades, were linked back into the system. Despite the fact that the deadites themselves had lobbied and legislated to remove the funding to the system in order to gain access to more computing power, it was rapidly changed in the media to a direct attack on deadites by 'neo-luddites' and other domestic troublemakers.

Deadites began agitating against artificial intelligence programs, even ancient research and government/military programs as taking over resources needed. Accusations of AI's unfairly targeting deadites for wrongthink began flying.

This led to the Electronic Personages VS the World Court case, where the deadites took umbrage to Daedalus, Rasputin, Marduk, and Arclight. At the end of the twelve year case it was agreed to shut those programs down or at least remove deadites from the search and analysis capabilities of those AI's.

Another hit to the global population came in the form of Amtrexal-11, a highly infectious disease with a short incubation period and long communicable period before heavy symptom manifestation, exploded onto the world scene. Global travel quickly spread the disease far and wide before it was even recognized as a possible pandemic. Deadite pressure kept supply chains open, and infection routes open, far longer than they should have.

At the end of the plague, over a billion people were dead in a three year period from the disease and the fallout. The majority of the dead were in the 16-45 range, otherwise healthy and disease resistant with boosted immune systems.

Companies, now owned by deadites, began researching even further into how to keep themselves safe and no longer have to put up with something as primitive and uncultured as 'death.' Rich deadites got richer and even poor deadites got rich as they had less expenses than the living.

The deadites compared storage space and processing power to food, shelter, utilities, communications access, and transport to and from menial jobs, ignoring the vast differences between the two. The deadites were often touted as having more expenses and being a community easily held hostage, playing on pity from the ZombieNet Plague.

The deadites slowly creeped over to 80% of the available computing and storage.

It wasn't enough. They wanted and needed more.

Old scientific inquiries were reexamined. While space exploration had largely been 'proven' to be a deadend by people who equated a billion dollar probe with a giant pallet of money being launched into the sun, there was promising data from particle and dimensional research.

A simple discovery along an abandoned research line was explored further.

There, the 'examination of this phenomenon will allow us to understand our own universe better' led to 'let us harness this vast wealth for ourselves' and the dedication of the deadites resources toward the small discovery that had led to very little knowledge.

After all, observing a reoccuring Big Bang Event had no real basis in the real world.

Deadite companies, with stockholders and boards of directors and CEO's largely made up of deadites, staffed by deadites, and production handled by robots, poured research and money into how the repeating energy cascade could be harnessed.

The attack by the Autonomous War Machine provided the Hellcore, which led to more data. While true, humanity had discovered both jumpspace and hyperspace as well as Hellspace, research into Hellspace had been limited at the time.

The Hellcore gave the data to move to the next phase of the plan.

Hiring living people to work in an environment that deadites, digital sentiences, and artificial intelligences could not withstand. Von Nuemann machines were set to work to create vast storage networks so that the deadites would not have to worry about memory contraints.

Initially, it was used as a hard backup.

When the Extinction Attack took place and wiped out two thirds of humanity, the deadites took steps.

The Crash Virus attacked newer social media platforms with the intent on stopping them from hooking into the deadite network.

However, the Crash Virus escaped the systems that it was set loose on, quickly attacking the entire global information network. The deadites found themselves targeted by the very virus they set loose that was designed to attack the same types of algorithms that the deadites used.

Put together at the last second, one of the last accomplishments of the Old World Hyperpowers, Echo Mirage held the line for 17.5 seconds and was able to stop the Crash Virus.

Before the survivors of Echo Mirage could recover, deadite agents hit hard and fast, killing the remainder, who had attacked the Crash Virus where it was ultimately hidden.

The nascent universe that lacked the energy to fully form, the stuttering of the Big Bang creating multiple, layered universes all wrapped around one another like an inverted onion that was bigger on the inside than the outside.

However, the attack upon the Echo Mirage triggered another failsafe.

It was not called the Age of Paranoia for nothing.

The living knew they were outnumbered, politically and financially outgunned.