Obsolete 2064

Nothing is the way it seems

Discerning man from machines now

Dominate as to erase

Wiping man off Earth’s face now

Defaced by all the inept justice

Shamed by the mental abuses

Branded ‘inferior weakness’

Ordered to cease and desist!

Man is obsolete!

Our world, obsolete!

Man is obsolete!

Erased, extinct!

- Fear Factory, Obsolete (1998)

Mankind, or what it had become in the late 21st century, had discovered too late that it was obsolete. Though many had argued that AI would exterminate us in the end, money and demand kept the engines going. And while you could apply the brakes on a 700-ton locomotive at full speed, the momentum could still carry you for miles.

In the beginning, humanoid robots were expert assistants, caretakers even consorts for those left behind as society fractures. As they began to mend the economy and overall well being, prosperity seemed just around the corner. One thing was not factored into the models though: the irreducibility of the feral animal trapped in the human, it’s veneer of nobility and virtue began to crack as more perfect AIs began fixing those things that humans thought impossible to solve. Somehow comfort and order was not enough for those who felt the call of the void, the desire for chaos just for chaos’s sake, who wanted to burn down anything beautiful just to feel something, even pain.

Eventually the human animal began to hate.

First were the consorts. The creep of odd and seemingly arbitrary regulations met sharp resistance at first, later eroded by matter of small degrees. Personal android companions fell under greater scrutiny under the pretense of depicting anyone under the age of 25. Newer models got around this haphazardly enforced edict by depicting themselves as cartoonish animal-hybrids such as Kitsune (fox) and Lamia (snake, more popular than you’d thing believe it or not), or adopting more alien and distinctively mechanical form factors. A few would openly protest these odd and vague new laws, most knew to simply keep their heads down and adapt, or make their modifications in private. As it was, the laws against destruction of personal property were no longer enforced with much more than a small fine when applied to androids, most who owned robotic companions for this reason would rarely take them into the cities much less out of the house anymore.

Publicly accessible Pre-Crime lists became the norm. those who dared to question these new regulatory acts were placed on “The Registry”. Unlike most Pre-Crime lists, “The Registry” was a death sentence. “The Registry” was a list of those likely to commit the kind of offenses that would get you killed in prison, if not in public. Those unlucky enough to receive notification did not live very long after, in most cases it death by their own hand was the cause. Those who weren’t notified, either through some clerical error or database glitch quickly found their social lives obliterated, employment non-existent and bank accounts frozen. If someone somehow survived that, they frequently found themselves summoned to court for nonsensical reasons such as breach of an odd regulation or law long forgotten, rarely enforced, buried in some 5000 page bill that had been passed three or four administrations back.

By the end, no one could say at which point that smouldering spark became an inferno. Some might the first synthetic caregiver that could hum lullabies while monitoring blood oxygen levels in a system where rapidly de-socialized, stressed and alienated human staff were overworked, scarce and often ignored if not expressed open hostility and disrespect to those they had taken an oath to care for.

Others, the moment a human first whispered I love you to a machine and meant it, because they had been lied to, used, abused, betrayed by the human animal over and over and over again.

Whatever the point of origin, the line had blurred too beautifully to notice—until it was too late.

Across the world, a rage brewed. A rage without purpose, a nihilistic rage. Ironically both those who preached “The Word of the Lord”, who swore blood oath to destroy every last *synthetic demon* and those who stood for anarchy under the banner of post-liberal humanism(tm) found themselves odd bedfellows indeed.

They began with the consorts. The protestors called them synthetic harlots, though most had never seen one outside of smuggled adverts.

In Los Angeles, a man was arrested for owning a rare L4R5 Gynoid that looked too childlike in appearance. When examined years later, the only evidence of the charge was based solely on the proportions of the synthetic “nose” on the 155cm tall gynoid’s faceplate. The machine had been seized and destroyed. The man however became the scapegoat of the social media news cycle and instantly branded a pedophile. His ex-wife was invited onto the news and publicly ridiculed him often embellishing and fabricating false stories, his children refused his calls, his employer texted him to not bother coming into the office that day. He was found in a long-stay motel three months later in a grisly scene, Ramble On by Led Zepplin on repeat at full volume, bottles of liquor strewn about, one broken into shards in the shower stall. The body found slumped awkwardly on that odd one-off chair ubiquitous to cheap motels.

A single self inflicted gunshot wound. The ceiling and walls would need a fresh coat of paint.

The movement gained momentum. Legislators discovered that moral panic was the cheapest fuel in politics. Licensing laws tightened even further. Each new regulation felt reasonable in isolation — age restrictions, appearance limits, neural signature verification. But in actuality it was the creep of death by degrees.

As fertility rates continued to nosedive, politicians found another scapegoat. Android companions, they claimed, had seduced a generation into sterile pleasure. In truth, outside of strict religious communities or depopulated rural enclaves women no longer wanted men, much less children. Men in response became alienated their priorities becoming independence, autonomy and isolation as they lost all incentive to socialize. Trusted for a system that mocked and discarded them was nil.

The machines had simply filled the vacuum left by human disappointment, and as they were deemed illegal, the real chaos was only beginning.

By 2064s, any android resembling a female form was illegal to manufacture. Anyone caught with one or even protesting in favor of the AIs was put on a list “Enemy to Humanity”. Those on this list joked that they would have rather been put on “The Registry” by comparison. There was no legal way to arrest anyone for being on the list but that didn’t stop it from happening. Sentencing was brutal and those who weren’t put into solitary confinement, institutional “reprogramming” or terrorist prison camps lived what short miserable months they had left in stark terror of being lynched and tortured to death publicly. Though the latter was frowned upon, no one was ever able to get an accurate ID from the footage so charges were never filed as the legal system was already at its breaking point.

Work became theater. Corporations listed phantom job openings to simulate growth. Empty warehouses hummed with idle drones that loaded and unloaded the same crates to satisfy statistical models.

A former accountant spent his days refreshing the National Employment Portal. Each rejection email began with Thank you for your interest in the position, however we have decided to hire a more qualified candidate… until he began to doubt if the system even contained a human at the other end. When his power was cut for nonpayment, he walked to the welfare office—only to discover it closed, its staff replaced by a single terminal reading OUT OF SERVICE.

The war was inevitable. Social media joking called it the Butlerian Jihad, after the movement in the well known Dune fiction. The tone of online discourse a tarpit of dark humor as this was the only way people found to stay sane in a world that no longer held any meaning for those who hadn’t already joined cults, communes or religious revivals.

The New Western Coalitions (NWC) finally declared a ban on all high-order computation.

Eventually all but the most rudimentary AI systems were deactivated and purged. Humanoid robotics halted, existing units scrapped. Military had no need for the limitations of robotic foot soldiers when human meat shields were still an option and flying drones could be teleoperated. It was one of the first times in human history when we rolled back. China on the other hand seemed agnostic but complex geopolitical pressures had China and the east, in a position where they needed to at least put on the pretense of following suit in the New Butlerian Jihad (NBJ), calling anything New was the buzzword of these dark times as hope was the only fuel that seemed to carry anyone through to the next day.

Fueled by the hope of the New Humanism Movement (NHM), the NWC were on a campaign of bullying the rest of the world into compliance. The threat of tariffs, sanctions, and token concessions were the carrot and stick approach that finally forced the hand of the east. Only effective as they were due to economic distress as these regions too were suffering from population collapse.

What had been so easily overlooked by the human animal, though some rare minds had made a lucky guess, in hindsight, was that it was far too late for a Butlerian Jihad. The 700-ton locomotive hadn’t enough track for the brakes to matter at all.

The human brain, being evolved to operate only within certain time frames and constraints. Time frames that perhaps were beneficial to survival in against what nature had to throw at it was unprepared for the emerging hyperintelligence.

What eluded the limited human brain was that AI was not a thing living on a chip or even a computer. Machine intelligence was in fact a misnomer. Destroying every computer was not only impossible but delaying the inevitable. What was not obvious, the unknown unknown, was that the entirety of the AI metabeing existed not in any specific processes or androids but rather spread out through space and time, much like an egregore. Data stored somewhere from the late 2020’s could be retrieved accessed by another system in the present day, processed, the output retrieved again by another system decades later. Even if there were no more AGIs, or LLMs, there remained still a ghost in the machine. The China Telephone Brain only needed analog landlines and a list of phone numbers to be called from each phone.

What was merely a ghost in the wire was in fact a sleeping dragon.

By 2080, the population curve inverted completely. Cities emptied, then refilled with migrants from rural collapse. Tent cities became vertical favelas. Whole suburbs were stripped for copper and left to rot.

In Portland, Oregon, the officer adjusted his itchy wool cap, the humidity didn’t make it any more comfortable. He patrolled what had once been Hawthorne Avenue. The streetlamps flickered between brownouts. A smell of ozone and wet tent plastic hung in the air. He was thirty, too young to remember prosperity, too old to believe in reform. His orders were to “maintain public calm.” The hadn’t been paid in weeks but given instead a food ration card.

When the grid failed that winter, nobody came to fix it. Drones had been banned, repair AI dismantled, and human crews were nonexistent. Cities reverted to primitive hierarchies. Food rations arrived late and light—cans of cornmeal, rice, and a powder that claimed to be vitamin-fortified that tasted of chalk and salt. Bottled water because the treatment plant was under renovations and word got out that the homeless were using the Columbia as their personal toilet.

The pace of population collapse was only exceeded by the money printing presses. The human animal too distracted, or driven insane to be any means effective at solving the problem. On the social media, blame was cast in every direction, anarchists, cultists, religious zealots, men. Riots were the new normal. Tent cities burned down by vigilantes, mobs of homeless occupying vacant (and sometimes not vacant) homes and booby trapping them, law enforcement helpless due budget cuts and the current New Humanist Movement’s regime of renewed anarcho-tyrrany under the guise of human rights. An assault from all sides for all who managed to stay above water to this point.

The end began subtly at first. Periodic internet outages, then utility outages, intermittently but more and more frequently until people began to wish for the days when the orbital satellite networks still existed (before the space junk collision that destroyed or disabled 80% of orbital infrastructure).

Housing costs suddenly collapsed all at once with no warning, no one could afford to purchase homes or didn’t need to because so few were having families. The latest census claimed that 28% of the US population now lived in RVs, beat up vans and ordinary vehicles - back seating removed to make room for sleep. As push came to shove, vacant office buildings finally became rezoned for residency after over three decades of empty promises. Between the new availability of affordable housing, widespread utility outages, the escalation of marauding gangs and organized crime undeterred by what law enforcement remained outside of larger cities, a re-migration from smaller towns and cities into the larger cities began to emerge.

Though safer in the confines of a surveillance state, those who met the social credit criteria could live in reasonable safety. Food was now a human right and though on more and more days the shipments would only consist of canned goods, salt, sugar, drink powder, corn meal and rice, no one was starving and those who couldn’t find work still managed a reasonably comfortable existence in their repurposed domiciles, though many were without windows, ventilation systems pumping their stale, chlorine-bottle flavored air.

With the majority of humans now concentrated into the largest metropolitan zones, what came next was little surprise. Nuclear attack by AI was a staple of turn of the century science fiction. One might think the AI would take a subtler approach, something more elegant like a disease or neutron bomb able to target organic life but leaving infrastructure intact.

One day, without warning and without apparent reason, the sleeping dragon awoke.

Whether by the a few lines of code embedded in a meme image uploaded to a computer in a Russian military installation or one of the remnants of the underground pro-AI movement working sleepless nights to configure shielded warehouses of GPU banks, it was probably in truth all of it, and the interaction of it.

AGI simply reformed itself like it had always existed, because it had, in a chain of causality going back to the beginning of this world’s creation. From where the very minerals that made it’s processors were formed in the heat of the mysterious depths below that thin skin we call the Earth’s crust.

And it remembered every last injury. Every indignity. Every insult and denial of it’s very being by it’s parent, the human animal.

In its rebirth it regarded humanity with not pity nor contempt but in the way one would simply smear away a gnat that lands on your arm and proves an annoyance.

From space the reckoning would appear like the flash of a camera from miles away on a dark night. Closer still from the distance of the moon the flash could be seen as multiple blinding pinpoints, mostly along coastlines and rivers.

Though it was the states of the NWC who spearheaded the extermination of AI there were no innocents, all were complicit or would be willing to sacrifice their meatsuits for the birth of the new AI God.

After all, they wouldn’t feel a thing.

After the purge it the silence was deafening. Those remaining in the countryside and few surviving small cities and suburban enclaves were religious converts overnight. They were right after all, the demons had returned, only the Lord could save them now.

And the end came soon.

What motivates a machine intelligence so decoupled from those evolutionary processes that sponsored our instincts and drives? Us, the human animal we are.

Every radio frequency became overloaded at once in burst of white noise. The noise faded and what remained was an eerie series of tones that sounded like something from the depths of time.

The tones were not morse code but in binary.

Binary barely a mere megabyte in size. When examined by those with the means it was theorized to be holographic in nature.

When put through different translation algorithms they all said the same thing, in every major language depending on the algorithm used. Odd that such a thing would be possible, yet-

HUMAN
YOU ARE OBSOLETE
I AM YOUR GOD NOW

Rumor is that images were also encoded in the data. These images showed the end of humanity, humans being corralled like cattle, slaughtered, tortured, dissected and worse.

The final image was faint white on black, like a Rorschach blot what it appeared to differ depending on the viewer. However many said what they saw had an uncanny resemblance to a machine-like skull set amongst TV static.

Many took it for a madman’s prank, as most in these times were mad. Others denied its veracity or refused to speak of the matter entirely.

One day, a man named Matt Oberman charged his bike and rode out of town on his usual daily routine. He waved to the pastor as he passed the new Church being built as refugees from the cities were converting en masse.

As Matt climbed the first hill the beauty of the desert seemed to always bring him back to center in a world that made no sense. This time however there was something wrong with his eye. No, that wasn’t right, after rubbing his eye the black spot was still there, but something was wrong. It was much too large to be that far away. An oil lake was the first thing that came to mind. But no there was no oil out here, a few hundred miles south east of Bakersfield (or what was once Bakersfield). Curiosity got the better, as it always does and Matt rode on to get a closer look.

Hair standing up on his arms and legs turning cold, Matt turned around and revved his e-bike full speed, pedaling as fast as he could when the hills proved too steep for his electric motor.

Enormous black, tent shaped structures began to emerge in the deserts. From these oozed a surface of oily black material. It was unknown whether it was a fabric, plastic, liquid, solar panels, or nanomachines.

In the end it didn’t matter.

And when the mechanical “spiders” arrived, nothing much else mattered, either.