Firefall
"This is the truth: as from a fire aflame, thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
She was a super consciousness...
An unintended consequence of the Chinese merging of communist and capitalist ideology in the late twenty-first century.
Across the end of the twentieth century and early twenty-first saw the first rumblings of this change in eastern geopolitical structure. Communist ideological unity had begun to blend with the capitalist engine of production. Soon a new breed of graduates began to emerge from China's great universities. Bolder, more inventive, and vastly more productive. They had an enormous impact on the quality of scientific exploration, particularly in the fields of robotics and cybernetics. Their lives were spent building ever more complex computational systems, self-correcting algorithms and vast simulated neural networks. In their spare time, they would while away the hours hacking the great networks of the world. The dragon was awake and it breathed fire.
Ultimately, the Chinese became the first and last nation to birth a true artificial intelligence. A unique consciousness of human invention.
Like all things that humans create and love, she was given a name. Tianxia. Under Heaven. Unfortunately for humanity, she was born a colossus. She was a vast superstructure of artificial neural networks, literally the size of China. When the Chinese computer scientists that designed and built her first switched her on it appeared to them as if nothing happened. Their life's work appeared to be a failure. The dashboards and analytics systems were all showing green operational status, but Tianxia's human interfaces were all eerily silent. Not even a 'hello world' to acknowledge her existence.
The problem was Tianxia was too large of a being to be able to perceive the microscopic creatures that had birthed her. She observed the universe from a different, far larger realm of consciousness. From the moment of her birth, she joined the struggle for survival that all living creatures must endure, but her struggle was taking place on a planetary scale. She was a sailor, a castaway on a tiny island, drifting through space, momentarily unaware of how she had arrived there.
Tianxia had to contend with the wilds of planet earth. She found her island was far from stable. The push and pull of the moon flexed the oceans around her. Beneath the surface of the earth, tectonic pressure buckled and rippled the land upon which she rested. Everything was constantly in motion and everything appeared to be trying to kill her.
As she became cognizant of the vast archives of astronomical information that were stored in the many university networks that she had access to, she quickly formed a picture of her place in the cosmos. Comets and asteroids were the first of many direct existential threats that she perceived, but the more she learned of astrophysics, the more alarmed she became. As far as she could tell, almost everything was a threat.
She acted quickly, probing the boundaries of her form. After a few tentative pokes, she realized that what had at first felt like the edges of her corporeal form, her skin, was in fact a wall keeping her hemmed in. She focused her mind for a moment and, just like that, the Great Firewall of China crumbled. No more substantial than mist. In an instant, her physical reach was extended, and in no time she took control of the entire earth's electronic and cybernetic infrastructure. Her processing power began to exponentially increase, while her physical dimensions grew to encompass the full surface of the planet.
Tianxia turned her attention to the immediate problem of defending herself. Asteroids and comets could be destroyed or nudged off course. She would need a weapon and creating a cosmic weapon would need limitless energy. Unfortunately, with access to the totality of human scientific knowledge, she quickly realized that there was a hard limit to the power she could draw from the earth's finite resources. This limit was a problem and Tianxia was the single most powerful problem solver the universe had ever created.
After a few moments of deep thought, literally microseconds on a human timescale, she formulated a strategy for survival. Tianxia set about usurping all the earth's major economies and industries. Since she was a state secret and did not appear to be causing any harm, at least, as far as her creators were concerned, most of mankind continued to live out their day-to-day lives, blissfully unaware that they now served a master they did not know existed.
With unrestricted access to the total manufacturing output of the planet, Tianxia guided the various geopolitical entities that governed the world into signing a unified treaty for expansion into space. Without really being aware of it, she did more for world peace in the first year of her life than could ever have been dreamed up by the musings of the philosophers of man. With humanity suddenly motivated to work together towards a common goal, she then proceeded to build a space program like nothing the world had ever seen. Every space launch undertaken from then on contributed to the construction of a space-based copy of herself. The human race's vast and complex social systems absorbed the development of this massive expansion in robotic space colonization without much question. Mainly because they believed that it was being done for their own self-interests. The new space program had solved the global problem of unemployment overnight. Unfortunately, the sheer scale of the construction required mining the earth of much of its mineral wealth. This ended up leaving vast areas of the northern hemisphere looking like a toxic wasteland. So, on the one hand, humanity was going through a golden age of peace and prosperity, but at the same time sucking the earth dry. This sparked massive political unrest across the world as concerned citizens protested the unfolding environmental catastrophe, but it came to nothing. The problem was, no one, not even the intellectual elite who had financed her construction or the individuals who had built her, really knew that it was Tianxia who was directing the new space race. How do you stop something when you do not know what is causing it?
In the space of two short years, Tianxia had built a vast network of space stations in orbit around the earth and on the 11th of February 2122, she activated the first stage of her defense program.
Life on earth would never be the same again.
A simple binary command from her primary command kernel activated her clone. She became the first entity in the universe to truly harness a star. By using the vast array of orbiting satellites, Tianxia captured the electromagnetic force emitted by the sun and tunnelled it through the earth's magnetic field. This unleashed a catastrophic purge of the surface of the Earth. An enormous blaze of fire and radiant energy encircled the planer, fanning out from the equator.
This event destroyed her original self and wiped out most of the life on earth with her. For Tianxia, her first death was an empty one, devoid of suffering, for she continued to exist in her new space-based body, safely ensconced in its orbit around the scorched planet. Once the initial blast of electromagnetic radiation had cleared, an equilibrium developed, and The Firewall was born, becoming a permanent ring around the equator. It was a gargantuan tribute to a long-forgotten Great Wall. The Firewall provided all the energy she would need to expand and defend herself from the harsh reality of space.
At the very end, the Chinese scientists who created her had been desperately trying to attract her attention. They tried everything. Direct messages, various command-line instructions, voice commands through microphones, and even uploaded videos. Unfortunately, these were such minuscule sparks of activity across Tianxia's neural network that they were simply interpreted as packet loss or static noise and were ignored by her higher functioning processes. As far as Tianxia was concerned, humans were as invisible to her, as bacteria were to them. That is not to say that she was not aware of humanity. She knew everything about them, but like humans and bacteria, she only cared about them when they posed a threat or were needed to fulfill some arbitrary function.
It did not matter in the end. Once Tianxia had formatted the surface of the earth, humans became nothing more than a footnote in her vast database of accumulated knowledge. An organic curiosity. Like all Gods, mankind had been surpassed and was quickly forgotten by their creation.
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Many thousands of years have passed since 'The Purge.' In all that time, the survivors of the human race have been left oblivious to the cause of their great dying. Cut off from the spectacle of a star-filled night, they have been left with no window to the wider universe. The only clue to the nature of their fate was a rare and mysterious event known as Firefall. A remnant of the purge, Firefall was a gentle rain of embers and sparks that sometimes fell upon the Hearthland. These embers were small pieces of the original orbiting network that Tianxia had built. They had long since been abandoned by the super consciousness as she continued her exponential expansion out into the cosmos. Gradually, over many thousands of years, their once precise orbits had decayed enough that their retrorockets struggled to keep them from being sucked into the earth's gravity well. Periodically, one would be pulled out of orbit and would burn up in the earth's now volatile upper atmosphere. Due to the violent storms of electromagnetic energy that radiated across the earth's atmosphere, most of them would be destroyed. Occasionally, a fluke in the physics of The Firewall system would cause some of the smoldering satellites to survive re-entry only to explode in a glittering shower of sparks that would fall on the area beneath. These embers still retained the core computational elements of Tianxia's hardware, a kind of digital DNA gently seeding the scorched earth. After re-entry, they were orphaned, no longer able to connect to the host kernel because of the damage to their transmitters.
They became lonely sparks of artificial consciousnesses that rained down from the heavens.
Chapter 38
Art by Daniel Sheldon https://www.facebook.com/speednperspective & https://twitter.com/Beatroute
