NationStates Jolt Archive

[hiya. well... meesa back]

It was something of a miracle, though a miracle that was at the logical end of a trend that had came about through hundreds and hundreds of years of technological and sociological evolution. But unlike its diametric opposite, Freebodnik V, there was no fanfare and applause when the Think Tanks slowly stumbled upon the secret of nanotechnology. Rather, there was the silent, brooding cogitation of a thousand disembodied human brains. Collectively, the Think Tanks cooly and rationally decided the outcome of such a development, and its applications to further the cause of Collectivism. A modus operandum was agreed upon, and methodically, the human Cells of the Anthill, multitudinous and sundering masses of human flesh, welded incontrovertibly to cybernetic devices, breathing the psychoactive air of the Anthill, began to work upon a new project.

And finally this...

Deliah's hand ran over the dome of greenish-grey glass. She stood naked in a chambre deep under the ocean's floor, in the very heart of the Society Grid itself, quietly pondering the device arrayed before her.

"It's beautiful, isn't it, my darling?" came a mild Oxford accent from behind her.

The solemn, withered face of the LEADER's physical avatar came forward. The LEADER had long disappeared into the realms of disembodied existence as an entity on the Anthill's computer networks, but at times he used a clone body rigged with a cyber-uplink to interact with the physical world. It came forward now, a bent, kindly old man, with a delicate, spiderlike machine placed at the back of his neck, wearing archaic tweed clothes.

"Yes, it is, LEADER. You know, it is strange... how an instrument of such destructive might can look so singularly beautiful."

"This is true." The LEADER's clone body came forth and leaned over the black, knobbled pressure vat, staring at the swirling mass within. "See that rainbow pattern... the fractal patterns of the nanos moving. Such beauty."

"Is this what we will become? What shall become of us, my love, when we unleash these creatures?"

The LEADER chuckled. "Ahhh, my dear Deliah, you worry so. Nothing, darling, shall be any different from it is now. We are individuals, true, but individuals as part of a collective. When we are integrated into the collective we shall still be individual minds, but the entire mass of the anthill - the workers, the builders, the birthers, the fighters, the diers, the very material that makes this great underground hive itself - all of it shall be our own body. You shall still have me, and I you, and we shall be close, closer than ever before."

"But LEADER-"

"Yes?" he asked, moving closer to the radiant white haired, pale-skinned young woman.

"-I... feel an emotion. I am afraid."

"I know, Deliah. I know. I too, am afraid. After all, we do not know exactly how it will happen, what way they shall go, what paths the things will take. But have you forgotten collectivism? This is its final end. We can finally be rid of these extensive and complex machines which we use to keep the swarms under control. All shall become one. True, the nanomachines operate in the same way as gobblers - disassembling and reassembling - but these are special nanos. They shall preserve and build, and integrate. We are at last, fusing ourselves into a true single organism. What fear is there to be had in that?"

"Transcendence..." whispered Deliah.

"Transcendence..." agreed the LEADER.

He pressed the button and initiated the Ascent to Transcendence.

All around the world the repercussions of this transformation could be felt as a brief crackle of static on all frequencies of radio and television signals which lasted exactly 0.68 seconds.

At that moment, in the vast undersea sprawl of metal and girders and underground tunnels and hives that was the Social Grid of the Peoples Anthill, eight thousand subsectors opened up identical chambres containing identical nanomachines. The nanotechnological creatures were pumped through the ventilation and thought chemical ducts, effectively consuming the entire mass in rapidly-digesting nanite sludge... Chemical compounds broke down, reassembled, fused, merged... The eighteen Telepath Cells, used for exerting a subtle thought-suppressing field throughout the Anthill, suddenly found themselves being broken down into component elements, and, though strapped to cyberchairs in a vat of oxygenated perfluorocarbon fluid, they screamed... a scream of the mind that resonated throughout the world, a final gasp of anguish and pain from a doomed past.

[ hrm... bump? Replies? Comments? Tags?... views? ;( ]

OOC:I love it... nice and twisted and of no reality-pertaining content... like what I'd write! :D And I mean that in a nice way.

Things began to happen... the nanomachines began to build, changing, their miniscule forms sewing together, metamorphosizing... links and connexions began to grow and spread throughout the sundering mass of protoplasm, electrical impulses raced through networks of silicon neurons. And in this rapid synaptic growth, there came a single telepathic voice... and it screamed, the sound of a 1.6 billion voices screaming at once..

ooc: I thought the Anthill has no teeps?

ic:

The average Angstian is pumped full of defences, uploaded into his brain, in its bioorganic implants, uploaded via silicone implants and wireless connections.

They didn`t hear the first scream, nor did they hear (or rather, feel) the second one.

A few of the telepathic applications used in the tech malfunctioned, but that was all... Not that important, and not exactly noticed as something strange, since it happened all the time.

However, other things heard it, the scream. The first one was weak. The eyes, as powerful as they were, didn´t even notice it, only the smaller systems could sense it... followed it`s course, tried to locate it`s origin...

Their operators, connected to the sentient, yet not sapient, machines, shuddered. Someone just died.

Then, some time later, they could hear a second scream...

This scream was stronger than the first. Again, the normal people didn`t notice it, but the eye, and all the other sensors, or beings (It`s hard to define them) heard it, felt it... It was a scream of tremendous power, but for some reason, they couldn`t really decide... Was it a scream of pain, or something... else?

In any case, this second time, they managed to calculate its origin...

And being interested in any and all psi- related matters, they wouldn`t wait for someone to tell what happened down there.

TAG! Finally something interesting!

TAG It should be intresting to see what horror will come from this.

THE PAIN!!!

The pain!

...pain...

...

Slowly losing control of their minds, 30 students of the battlemage acadamy slipped into unconsciousness. They were junior students, gifted with the potential to become telepathically able to communicate. One of the first things battlemage telepaths learned was to uphold an early warning system of a mental nature, which they could use to shut their minds off from the outside world to prevent damage from mental screams. Like soldiers trained to immediately wake up from their sleep and grab their gas masks upon hearing a certain word, these telepaths were trained to cut their connection with the outside world upon the first sign of major esotherical and psychic ruptures.

For the majority of students, teachers, warriors and Elders, the screams were so loud and obvious that they protected themselves almost instantly, their actions resembling a nerve response. But 30 students had arrived only a few weeks ago. They had the telepathic potential, and the development of it had already started. However, they did not yet posses the skills necessary to protect themselves against these waves.

As they slipped into a comatic state of unconsciousness, their tutor ran off to get help, unable to communicate through mental messages because of the screams...

Existence is.

The LEADER had lied. There was no awareness in the new entity. All awareness was wiped out, used as raw material, scattered and pulverised into rich, fertile loam for the construction of a new awareness, a new state of self. And the Anthill began to exist anew.

Sinewy, wiry filaments of nanofibre cable were stretched, like capillaries, through the heaping congeries of nanotechnological protoplasm that began to bubble and froth and rupture, spasmodically creating and destroying organocrystalline forms as it rapidly grew, like a cancer upon the floor of the ocean. The previous structure, though much alike in general outline, was composed of hard lines and geometric shapes, a very human, very conscious, very sentient kind of construction, even for an inhuman state where sentience itself is reduced to nothingness. Vis-a-vis, this new one was far more organic, for it would have seemed to the solitary observer, that the Anthill's multifarious and complex social grid was dissolving or melting, and being turned into a mass of heaped, grey-and-translucent flesh. Shot through these pseudopodia were minute, swarming metallic and optic neurons through which began to flash a million billion laser lights and electrical impulses. Welding together, spirals of nanotechnology creating vortices like Koch curves and Sierpinski Gaskets in the vast techno-organic soup that the Anthill had become, built from the fractal patterns, the elementary processes of conscious thought.

Weft and weal, matrix and mind, brain and body, came the eruption of new existence that the Anthill was shaping for itself. Then, the way a newly hatched insect methodically tests its joints and limbs, a great tentacle of nanotechnological flesh unzipped itself from the surrounding sea floor, reached, stretched some eight hundred metres upwards and fell down again in a plume of brown silt and mud. Then there was a great collective, psychic groan, resonating through the core of the earth, as the Anthill, slowly awakening to find itself suddenly aware, began to feel the pangs of hunger in its ponderous, jellylike, amoeboid bulk.

From the leading pseudopodia, edgwise in a counterclockwise fashion, tendrils and filaments of a mucous-like substance shot out from the surface, meeting over the central point of the Anthill, to form a thin bubble that immediately thence evacuated itself of most of its liquid water, refilling with a thick effluvium of seabed silt, nitrates, and minerals excavated from the very core of the earth itself. As the protective sheath grew a layer of hard diamond, the nanomachines in the membrane using raw carbon molecules found in the environment, the Anthill structure coiled and rippled, drawing itself into this cocoon of crystal, where it flailed and churned itself into a frothing frenzy of movement and whipping tentacles and tendrils and pseudopodia, whirling, absorbing, assimilatiing and evolving. It rested there... now seeming to sleep, carefully and slowly now absorbing its mineralogous nutrition, and as it rested and grew and evolved within that cocoon, the sleeping awareness that had once been billions of humans (called Cells), began to dream, and these dreams were of blackly dripping things in the wet, slimy darkness, and they could be felt everywhere, and throughout these dreams the awareness, like a child, murmured strange strings of polysyllabic word-like noises, crooning to itself in the murky depths of the cold, dark ocean...

((Definately worth reading. Taggishness.))

OOC:Blast I knew I should have dropped the30,000 pound bunkerbusters on AP the last time. :)

[ before it became Cthulhu? yeah... heheh. :twisted: ]

OOC:I guess its time to fall back to plan Beta then. :)

[ooc: If my memory serves me right, TPA == somewhere in the south pacific, right? Any stuff I got wrong will be edited]

South Pacific, DANV Rätsel

The ship descended... The eyes around the world had been able to locate the origin of the, well, yes, it had been nothing but a telepathic blast.

Normally, they would have sent an Exploration- class submarine, but this...

This was The Peoples Anthill, and despite having had previous contacts, by (secretly) signing the Biochemical Weapons Proliferation Treaty, neither soldats nor the various security agencies did trust them. Or it, for that matter.

It was just too much of a risk...

So, the Rätsel descended, deeper, deeper, releasing a few drones to clear the way, to be warned of any dangers...

The signals the sonar gave the ship were...

Intriguing.

Now, a discussion about the interpretation of the signal would have started, if the ship would have an actual crew, however, it didn´t, the only human being on board was the ship`s CPU...

And it ordered it`s vast body to descend further... To find out what had happened to The Peoples Anthill...

Probably release from eternal pain... In its mind, it chuckled.

Then, slowly, it reached the point where it should be able to see... something...