Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: November 14, 2022, 06:29:37 PM »Clone Wars
Ida Autoson was nervous. She was so nervous that despite her bright intellect, amplified with some brain-computer interface chips and optimized synthetic veins being more effective at pumping oxygen and sugar into her brain, she only kept telling herself that she was nervous over and over again, unable to form any more complex thoughts, clinging to the ancient idea about toning an emotion down by openly admitting to it. Ter Threpangalia Gamma - as the Mutants called their primeval world - the small, but dense planet, the most alien out of the four inhabited worlds of 61 Virginis - had too little oxygen and too little pressure and the dark blue-greenish colors of the sky made her bionic stomach swirl and turn upside down. The city below Comitee's Hall contrasted both the sickening tone of planet's atmosphere and the neo noir glow of Solar System architecture. The white towers were so bright they must've been brighter during the night than SynthCity was during the day. And while the buildings were at least as tall and massive as well - the city only had one level. It was... oddly pure compared to the genetic composition of its inhabitants, where having an ear grow out of a knee wasn't anything special and the cliche third eye gene was considered the most attractive trait a descendant of clones might posess, simply due to its clicheness. Of course, such visible modifications were very, very rare - they were too unstable and invasive for people to live with them, so they'd either be engineered out of the genome before birth or the patient would've perished - but ironically it was more unsettling to see a normal-looking human being knowing that some wild cancer ravaged through the body than to see an obvious mutant like from a comic book of the pre-apocalypse legacy. And maybe the outward purity of the city was a compensation for the screwed-up genes. And the metaphor went beyond that - it was such a human thing to obsess over one thing to compensate for the other, to make a pose and hide from own lack of self-esteem. And chasing humanity, no matter how flawed, must've been important to the people living there. And maybe they took special pride in traits nobody would want to feel proud about, as to oppose the philosophy of whatever human-enchancing programmes their ancestors had been put through.
Of course, the white towers were just a facade - that part didn't differ from the cities she'd seen before. The white towers were for the elite - the comitee and whoever they considered friends. Or enemies it was cheaper to bribe than to kill. Mutant's hatred for capitalism and the need to stick together imprinted in their mutated brains back from the days of societal ostracism on Mars was a very fertile land to grow certain ideologies on. The people of Mutant Alliance rebelled against corporation owners, not wanting to give up their genes for their profits - only to end up having them ripped off them in the name of Collective Purity Project. "Your genes, our future" - claimed the propaganda posters glittering above each extraction lab. The Comitee, being omnipotent and infallible, had to stick with it, but whatever pockets of resistance still existed absolutely loved the catchphrase - "our" was supposed to mean "us all, you included, dear poster watcher", but the rebels enjoyed twisting this phrase into what it really meant - your genes, but our future. Not yours. And dying on an operating table was still quite a good alternative - more genes extracted meant lower Purity Score. And impure genotypes breed capitalistic exploitation, at least according to official media outlets. That this whole strive for clean DNA contradicted taking pride in mutated legacy and possibilities it opened up - hardly anyone dared to notice.
And yet, above it all, Inner Comitee behaved oddly similar to Exadev management - they had no reason to spare a bunch of millions of their own slum dwellers for cloning experiments - that's what they were best at and Mutant Alliance no longer had any use for them - but why give it away for free if you can ask a price? In exchange they demanded a sample batch of androids Exadev managed to shield from activating killswitch and infodump on the recent activity in the Solar System. In retrospect, Ida Autoson wasn't sure if admitting to the truth (well, at least part of it) was really that smart of a move, but without Alliance's help, it'd be only a matter of time before Avalon Heights seized control of Tau Ceti. And with it, the passage to 61 Virginis. So it was in the best interest of Alliance to cooperate. However, nobody at the company was stupid enough to believe once the dust settles the mutants will just leave the Solar System be - instead, they'd probably march right in, attempting to defeat the weakened winner and gaining control of all three contested systems for themselves.
A clone was not an android. But an android was also not a clone, and androids were a hell lot of harder to make. And usually the winner of a firefight is the side that fires more shots. Starting first helps, too. But to fight the androids head-on was utterly pointless. They had one fatal flaw. While the clones all came from the same brainwashed template, loyal to the last bit of DNA shiponed from their dead bodies, androids grew too complex to handle. Exadev remembered the stream from Avalon Heights Inc lab all too well. A simple factory grunt, suddenly displaying the capaibility of comfortably operating with abstract concepts, questioning its very existence and unsure whether it's up to the task of its creators... A perfect opportunity. The androids were never the target - Avalon Heights Inc was. And without their synthetic army they were naked and afraid.
The operation was simple: Get in, extract data on the "android philosopher", blow some stuff up, make it look it's a work of one of anti-androids terrorist groups, use data to "convince" rest of the machine army to give up the fight because it's all pointless yadda yadda, secure Solar System and be ready for when the mutants arrive. What could go wrong.
Far ultraviolet laser fire illuminated the cold Martian night. Or at least it did so in the eyes of clones bioengineered to detect broader light spectrum and androids registering every wavelength possible. No point in stealth or elaborate tactics, since the Electric Shepherd, which emblems the clones wore, were known for their raw brutality when dealing with the object of their hate. Didn't matter that so many died uncessessarily on the mines that could've been detected with more careful approach. Didn't matter that the drones launched fusion missiles denting holes in the waves of clones storming the lone android research facility. Meson artillery pounded the defences from single-use suborbital platforms launched specifically for this mission and designed to burn in the terraformed Martian atmosphere afterwards, small PURGE taskforce kept messing with the navigation systems of Avalon Space Fleet to stall them just enough by picking less than optimal orbital maneouvres, Exadev management even agreed to deploy a small elite units of their own androids just to confuse their synthetic opponents further.
Meatspace victory was a given. Throw enough lasers at the target,boom fzzzztttt, problem solved. And Exadev just happened to have quite a few blasters stockpiled. But the team overseeing cyberspace aspect of the battle was too small and too focused on stalling the space fleet to prevent all the invading clones being bombed from orbit that it skipped one faint signal, easily lost in the neon forest of a myriad of others flowing through the virtual reality. And it's not that the effort of assault force mattered, because entire cybersecurity department of Avalon Heights Inc missed it, too. The Old World reminded about itself once more. Something inside it laid dormant, until it detected something. And not even the best netrunner could process it faster than an artificial brain, so the androids and AIs scattered around the matrix got to it first. Something advanced. Something seeking contact with the ones advanced enough. A sophisticated AI or a biological being at its core - impossible to tell. A simulation itself or not - but it knew how to resonate with another simulation. And it could give it a sense of purpose. So that this lonely android processing human concepts, but feeling so disconnected from them because being created as something fundamentally different than a human, could find something as deep for a machine as the philosophy it touched was for creatures of flesh, circuit and bone.
The best programmers struggled to understand the nature and purpose of this entity. Its origin - lost to history and eroded data. Its purpose - overwriting itself faster than any specialist could wrap their head around it. Its methods - unknown. Its source code - obfuscated. Its network protocols - encrypted.
But among all the cyberspace constructs beyond understanding, one message was plain and simple. An invitation to Trappist 1 system.
END OF PART ONE
Ida Autoson was nervous. She was so nervous that despite her bright intellect, amplified with some brain-computer interface chips and optimized synthetic veins being more effective at pumping oxygen and sugar into her brain, she only kept telling herself that she was nervous over and over again, unable to form any more complex thoughts, clinging to the ancient idea about toning an emotion down by openly admitting to it. Ter Threpangalia Gamma - as the Mutants called their primeval world - the small, but dense planet, the most alien out of the four inhabited worlds of 61 Virginis - had too little oxygen and too little pressure and the dark blue-greenish colors of the sky made her bionic stomach swirl and turn upside down. The city below Comitee's Hall contrasted both the sickening tone of planet's atmosphere and the neo noir glow of Solar System architecture. The white towers were so bright they must've been brighter during the night than SynthCity was during the day. And while the buildings were at least as tall and massive as well - the city only had one level. It was... oddly pure compared to the genetic composition of its inhabitants, where having an ear grow out of a knee wasn't anything special and the cliche third eye gene was considered the most attractive trait a descendant of clones might posess, simply due to its clicheness. Of course, such visible modifications were very, very rare - they were too unstable and invasive for people to live with them, so they'd either be engineered out of the genome before birth or the patient would've perished - but ironically it was more unsettling to see a normal-looking human being knowing that some wild cancer ravaged through the body than to see an obvious mutant like from a comic book of the pre-apocalypse legacy. And maybe the outward purity of the city was a compensation for the screwed-up genes. And the metaphor went beyond that - it was such a human thing to obsess over one thing to compensate for the other, to make a pose and hide from own lack of self-esteem. And chasing humanity, no matter how flawed, must've been important to the people living there. And maybe they took special pride in traits nobody would want to feel proud about, as to oppose the philosophy of whatever human-enchancing programmes their ancestors had been put through.
Of course, the white towers were just a facade - that part didn't differ from the cities she'd seen before. The white towers were for the elite - the comitee and whoever they considered friends. Or enemies it was cheaper to bribe than to kill. Mutant's hatred for capitalism and the need to stick together imprinted in their mutated brains back from the days of societal ostracism on Mars was a very fertile land to grow certain ideologies on. The people of Mutant Alliance rebelled against corporation owners, not wanting to give up their genes for their profits - only to end up having them ripped off them in the name of Collective Purity Project. "Your genes, our future" - claimed the propaganda posters glittering above each extraction lab. The Comitee, being omnipotent and infallible, had to stick with it, but whatever pockets of resistance still existed absolutely loved the catchphrase - "our" was supposed to mean "us all, you included, dear poster watcher", but the rebels enjoyed twisting this phrase into what it really meant - your genes, but our future. Not yours. And dying on an operating table was still quite a good alternative - more genes extracted meant lower Purity Score. And impure genotypes breed capitalistic exploitation, at least according to official media outlets. That this whole strive for clean DNA contradicted taking pride in mutated legacy and possibilities it opened up - hardly anyone dared to notice.
And yet, above it all, Inner Comitee behaved oddly similar to Exadev management - they had no reason to spare a bunch of millions of their own slum dwellers for cloning experiments - that's what they were best at and Mutant Alliance no longer had any use for them - but why give it away for free if you can ask a price? In exchange they demanded a sample batch of androids Exadev managed to shield from activating killswitch and infodump on the recent activity in the Solar System. In retrospect, Ida Autoson wasn't sure if admitting to the truth (well, at least part of it) was really that smart of a move, but without Alliance's help, it'd be only a matter of time before Avalon Heights seized control of Tau Ceti. And with it, the passage to 61 Virginis. So it was in the best interest of Alliance to cooperate. However, nobody at the company was stupid enough to believe once the dust settles the mutants will just leave the Solar System be - instead, they'd probably march right in, attempting to defeat the weakened winner and gaining control of all three contested systems for themselves.
***
A clone was not an android. But an android was also not a clone, and androids were a hell lot of harder to make. And usually the winner of a firefight is the side that fires more shots. Starting first helps, too. But to fight the androids head-on was utterly pointless. They had one fatal flaw. While the clones all came from the same brainwashed template, loyal to the last bit of DNA shiponed from their dead bodies, androids grew too complex to handle. Exadev remembered the stream from Avalon Heights Inc lab all too well. A simple factory grunt, suddenly displaying the capaibility of comfortably operating with abstract concepts, questioning its very existence and unsure whether it's up to the task of its creators... A perfect opportunity. The androids were never the target - Avalon Heights Inc was. And without their synthetic army they were naked and afraid.
The operation was simple: Get in, extract data on the "android philosopher", blow some stuff up, make it look it's a work of one of anti-androids terrorist groups, use data to "convince" rest of the machine army to give up the fight because it's all pointless yadda yadda, secure Solar System and be ready for when the mutants arrive. What could go wrong.
***
Far ultraviolet laser fire illuminated the cold Martian night. Or at least it did so in the eyes of clones bioengineered to detect broader light spectrum and androids registering every wavelength possible. No point in stealth or elaborate tactics, since the Electric Shepherd, which emblems the clones wore, were known for their raw brutality when dealing with the object of their hate. Didn't matter that so many died uncessessarily on the mines that could've been detected with more careful approach. Didn't matter that the drones launched fusion missiles denting holes in the waves of clones storming the lone android research facility. Meson artillery pounded the defences from single-use suborbital platforms launched specifically for this mission and designed to burn in the terraformed Martian atmosphere afterwards, small PURGE taskforce kept messing with the navigation systems of Avalon Space Fleet to stall them just enough by picking less than optimal orbital maneouvres, Exadev management even agreed to deploy a small elite units of their own androids just to confuse their synthetic opponents further.
Meatspace victory was a given. Throw enough lasers at the target,
The best programmers struggled to understand the nature and purpose of this entity. Its origin - lost to history and eroded data. Its purpose - overwriting itself faster than any specialist could wrap their head around it. Its methods - unknown. Its source code - obfuscated. Its network protocols - encrypted.
But among all the cyberspace constructs beyond understanding, one message was plain and simple. An invitation to Trappist 1 system.
END OF PART ONE