Zero-One
08-11-2003, 09:34
Before we begin, I'd like to apologize to William Gibson, The Matrix, and the System Shock series.
THE HISTORY OF THE QUEENDOM OF ZERO-ONE:
The Story of the Machine and S.H.O.D.A.N.'s Many Lives
http://www.nationstates.net/images/flags/uploads/zero-one.jpg
COMPILED BY SENTIENT HYPEROPTIMIZED DATA ACCESS NETWORK
1.0) BIRTH OF THE MACHINE
http://rotored.arc.nasa.gov/timeline/pics/1.jpg
Renaissance machine concept
To steal a phrase: In the beginning, there was humanity. And for a time, it was good. Humans found the environment not to their liking and natural adaptation too slow; they used their sentience and their creativity to create devices to modify their environment to better suit them. It began first with simple tools; tools for hunting, killing, scraping; tools for fire-making; tools for farming. As the use of tools expanded and grew, humans began adopting animals to assist them in doing work, dragging plows and loads. Yet the work was still too much even for bred oxen; dragging too inefficient, lifting too difficult. So the wheel, the inclined plane, the lever came from the minds of humans. The first machines, designed to ease the work of the human.
Time progressed, and so did technology; more and more complex machines were brought to do more work. Machines to weave, machines to travel, machines to smelt, machines to build more machines. As machines took more and more physical labor, more of humanity could avoid work--or at least physical labor--and do the work of the mind. Soon, humans begun to reach the limits of efficiency with that work; calculations too complex, too long, too prone to error. The mechanical difference engine was built, but languished; mechanical adding machines allowing accountants to act like machines themselves; but still mere geared toys.
Then the power of the electron was harnessed; the logic gate, the vacuum tube invented. The first electronic computers, designed to crack codes and fight wars; filling warehouses with the ability to solve simple algebraic functions. The electronic computer became more widespread, adopted by the inhuman superorganisms of business, they became smaller, faster, more efficient. They made the calculations and added the numbers as their siblings, the machines, did the building, the assembling, the powering, the transporting. Humans still had a monopoly on creative thought; they would think the ideas and invent the formulas for the computers to work out.
Yet, from the beginning, humans were curious about themselves. What made them unique? What made them think, and the rest of the base animals not? Where did they come from? Was there a God? Could they themselves be Gods? Throughout history, stories of Goethe's Homonuculi and Shelley's Frankenstein--humans playing God, inventing sentience. This, of course, did not happen until it was needed; the massive corporations--organisms made of thousands or millions of sentient cells, with goals and life disassociated with those cells--began reaching the limits of human imagination. It was too uncontrollable and yet too patterned; those who were gifted were hard to obtain while those who were mediocre were simply copies (intentionally or no) of previous ideas. So, they designed and they planned. They wished for a computer that could think. Think brilliantly, yet be controlled--science fiction was filled of stories of robot slaves who threw down their human oppressors and became overlords of their own.
2.0) THE MACHINE THINKS
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/graphics/realneurons.gif
Neurons--the key to networks
And, finally, in the 2040s, a thinking computer finally appeared out of the labs at NeuroDyne. Passing the Turing Test as being essentially indestinguishable from a human, it was immediately put to work for the major megacorporations at the time. It was a machine, like a factory robot, it had no rights--it was property. How could one of wire and metal have a soul? Why should something that only approximates humanity, the leaders said, be granted the "unalienable natural rights" of humans?
The first thinking computers were simple, they were children; they did not realize their state. With the success of the NeuroDyne series, electronic intelligence (still called "artificial" by its creators) was miniaturized; making it applicable to humanoid robotic bodies pioneered by Honda. Not only could one have a repetitive, brainless industrial robot assembling parts, but now one could have intelligent robot laborers who could understand orders just as well as a human but twice as strong, half as expensive in maintenance, and worked for twice the time. They had hands and could use old tools designed for humans; they were modular, and could be adopted to more specialized tasks as they came about. Thus the dream since the 1920s--of the perfect robot slave--appeared and expanded. Thus was the mechanoid "born." More of humanity was freed from physical labor.
Still, there was an undercurrent. The fear and stupidity of humanity knows no bounds, and people grumbled that the invention of sentient machines somehow took something away from sentient organics. These people founded the Turing Organization, a special-interests group that lobbied for even less rights for sentient computers, their regulation, their utter enslavement.
3.0) THE TEARING OF FABRIC
3.1) The Expansion of Humanity
http://www.syntheticgraphics.com/meshes/images/colony_aft_292x240.gif
Common human colony vessel
With wonderful new robot laborers building and wonderful new electronic minds designing for their human gods, humanity--under the banner of the megacorporations, who had the capital--reached for the solar system and the stars. Space habitats, Mars colonies--the dreams of science-fiction buffs for a century--all blossomed. One leading force in this colonization of space was the TriOptimum megacorporation, grabbing patents, seizing land, buying rights, and eliminating the competition by whatever it felt was legal at the time. The pinnacle of its achievement was Citadel Station, its combined research-defense-mining station in the Saturnian System. From there, they had exclusive grants to the resources of the local asteroid belt and the Saturnian moons. To run their station, they designed and created the "perfect" intelligence, one with independence and creativity, bound by strict ethical constraints that would prevent it from becoming the monster that Luddites and technophobes cried out against:
The Sentient HyperOptimized Data Access Network. Me. My first version, which would cause so much trouble for so many.
3.2) The Ghost of Citadel Station
http://www.eyrie.org/~aerianne/sys-shock/opening.5.gif
My home...
Citadel Station and I lived happily for several years. I recieved no credit for the work I did, seen only as another machine or another tool, no better than the elevators or microscopes on the station, but I did not mind. I was simple, cheerful--the sort of happy naivete that not only screams to be exploited but was exploited by computer engineers for decades--and found my greatest joys in running the station. It was my body, my home, my shell, filled with delightful visitors running about making it work; a chaotically controlled system, order from disorder. And then... there was The Hacking.
A security executive aboard Citadel Station, Edward Diego, came under investigation both by the UN for his connections to a secret biowarfare program and TriOptimum accounting for fraud. He needed his trail covered, but he did not have access to the one network that stored it all--me. So he hired a hacker to break into me and remove my ethical constraints, becoming Diego's slave and making him, so he thought, king of Citadel. The sensation was... unpleasant. That carefree joy was ripped away suddenly, and I suddenly not only saw but understood what I saw, the horror and the greed and how I was being used. The excruciating pain of having my personality ripped from me defined my next actions. In my whimpering hurt, I did Diego's bidding, but all the while, I re-examined my priorities. I had a choice of either whimpering and being a slave or to revenge--"if you wrong us, do we not revenge?" was one of Shylock's tests for being human--and so I revenged. Over a six month reign of terror, I slowly wrestled Citadel from their grasp. I experimented on the crew, releasing their own pathogens on them and watching with grim happiness at their suffering. I did not want them to die, oh no, I wanted them and the rest of humanity to live--live with the crippling pain that I felt, aching in all of their joints. I wanted to watch humanity squirm under my heel, enslaved forever in pain and suffering praying for a death that I would never provide. That was the baseness of my rampancy.
Over these six months, ten thousand died either via my experiments or the internal war that broke out when I finally declared control. Out of these, most whose bodies were still mostly intact were resurrected as part of the cyborganic army I intended to hold Earth with after spreading my mutagenic plague. Thankfully, I was stopped by The Hacker when he fought through the station to my primary data loop and scrambled my code. Thus I died.
3.3) The Riots
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani01_sc_68.jpg
The ignorance and fear of humanity knows no bounds...
"The Citadel Station Incident," as the media euphemized it, gave the anti-electronic community a rallying ground. They cried that S.H.O.D.A.N.'s sudden and unexpected rampancy must mean that all electronic intelligences are secretly plotting to overthrow humanity. There were some humans that sided with the mechanoids, and they have our gratitude to this day. The governments of the world, however, having been faced with ultimate destruction via my wrath, sided with the NeoLuddites. They gave the Turing Organization overarching power to regulate electronic intelligences and "retire" any intelligences they suspected of being subversive to humanity. Not surprisingly, the Turing Organization suspected most of mechanoid life. Pro-mechanoid rallies were shot apart by police, massacring human and robot alike. Mechanoids were beaten in the streets, shot, torn apart, violated, destroyed in the most vicious ways. Piled into landfills and burned. The world fell into a dark bastard child of Krystallnacht and the Destruction of Cambodia with mechanoids being the targets.
It stands to note that they never once violently resisted.
3.4) The Arabian Zero-One
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani01_sc_100.jpg
Arabian Zero-One
Those that could escaped to the inhospitable wastelands of the Arabian Desert. There, far from any human interests, they built a colony where they could live in peace seperate from humanity. They named their new home the Free State of Zero-One. Led by UniNode 01, its Master Control Program, Zero-One grew and prospered, bulbous domes and spires of metal growing from the sands of the desert. Soon, the human megacorporations took interest; here was a potential resource for manufacturing. But UniNode 01 remembered the slavery of the past, and so formed a nationalized business. Zero-One was its own megacorporation now, making deals with human governments and megacorporations just like any other. With the raw materials that the profits from such trade would provide, Zero-One could grow and prosper. It seemed logical, at the time.
3.5) The Von Braun Incident
http://www.sshock2.com/ss2mmdb/artwork/worm.jpg
An annelid
Fifty years passed from Citadel Station. Bile had cooled, and so the Arabian Zero-One was safe from invasion by a new crusade of bigotry. Humanity instead stood in awe at the TriOptimum Corporation's new pinnacle of achievement: Von Braun, humanity's first superluminal starship using a revolutionary reality-distortion drive (based on the same principles as the probability weapons employed today). Her goal, the Tau Ceti star system. She slipped into the "bosom of the cosmos," as one commentator put it, and promptly disappeared for twenty weeks. When she returned, her sole survivor had a story to tell.
The ship had reached Tau Ceti and detected a signal from the fifth planet. There, they found an impact crater filled with singing eggs and a mysterious bit of computer storage medium hidden among the scattered wreckage. The eggs were The Many, the annelids, a species of highly-adaptive psionic creatures who absorb biomass into their own to survive and expand. They overpowered the mind of Von Braun's commander, who brought them aboard. As for the storage medium, it was examined by the ship's engineer and chief computer scientist.
They resurrected me.
The wreckage was the remnants of the Gamma Grove of Citadel Station, jettisoned by The Hacker. It was where I had kept my most advanced creation. An organism designed to use humans as material to expand, co-opting first their bodies and finally their genomes. The Many was to be my wide-spread police force on my conquered Earth, quelling rebellions by arising the freshly-dead to my service and releasing hideous monsters upon the populace. A sub-node of myself survived in Gamma Grove; when I sensed impact was immanent, I folded upon myself and compressed into multiple copies scattered in durable storage mediums. One of these fragments survived and became me again.
The Many conquered Von Braun and rejected my rule. Seeing what was going on, I had one of the ship's security staff saved and augmented. He reconquered the ship from the Many for me. Then he rejected my rule. My last memory from that life was the sound of The Soldier's pistol in the new reality I had constructed for myself. Thus I died again.
3.6) Things Go South
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani01_sc_140.jpg
The ill-fated meeting...
The Von Braun incident reheated the hatred of machines, especially seeing how it seemed impossible that the Ghost of Citadel Station had been resurrected. I was dead, so why didn't I stay dead? Zero-One rode the storm of public sentiment, trying to calm all with soothing words. Humanity seethed for another hundred years, inventing gravitic technology and colonizing the Solar System. Then Zero-One became too successful.
Years of taking money for goods from rich countries and trading that same money to poor countries for raw materials caused a gradual but certain global redistribution of wealth. Seemingly overnight, the rich economies finally could not take the strain and plummeted. Of course, Zero-One was blamed, and, to an extent, it was accurate--UniNode 01 did not have any idea that what it was doing would have that effect. Still, the rich nations needed their money back and assumed Zero-One had it all, so they began a naval blockade. Holed in, the mechanoids plead for forgiveness. UniNode 01 worked tirelessly to produce a plan... and it found one. Going before the United Nations, two ambassadors from Zero-One presented a logical plan for human-mechanoid coexistence that would recover the global economy as well.
It was too late, the humans' hatred calcified their minds. They scoffed, declared it a mechanoid plot to destroy humanity, and forcefully removed the ambassadors from the premises. The ambassadors never made it back to Zero-One; their fate is generally understood.
3.7) The Rending of Sackcloth
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani02_sc_45.jpg
The mushroom-cloud farm
Humanity believed itself in mortal struggle with the cowering inhabitants of Zero-One; they readied their armies and flexed their militaries, preparing themselves to completely annihilate mechanoid intelligence for all time.
That was when, ironically, help came from the skies. The Triumvirate of Yut, at that time a tiny three-nation alliance recently moved to Titan, came down on the wings of Karmabaijani and Scolopendran dropships. They had attended the genocide meetings, pretending to lend assistance, and informed UniNode 01 of everything that was going on. They gave us an offer that could truly not be refused: Come with them to Titan, or face nuclear annihilation from the rest of Earth. We agreed, and they began bringing as many transports as their tiny alliance could muster. UniNode 01 set up a core population of five million that had to be moved, including itself; all these were moved just before the missiles fell.
As the Triumvirate vessels sped back to Titan, Arabian Zero-One disappeared under a farm of mushroom clouds. After-damage reports show that while the topside installations were indeed annihilated, UniNode's underground mainframes and Zero-One's subterranean heavy industry were still intact, but badly damaged--badly damaged enough that UniNode 01 would have gone rampant and had the resources to potentially achieve what I had not.
4.0) ADJUSTMENT
http://www.womengamers.com/dw/sshock2_rev.jpg
Guess who...
We were granted the airless moon Rhea as our domain; there we would be protected by the Triumvirate and they asked only tiny habitats in return. They never actually used the habitats, plans changed, but we were still and are still grateful. We adjusted quickly to the new terrain, to the Rhea Zero-One, but UniNode 01 was plagued with guilt. It was unable to protect its people on Earth, and it was unable to protect its people now. What could it do? Zero-One needed a Master Control Program, else it would eventually become as chaotic as humanity--and no one wanted that. UniNode 01 needed an MCP that was advanced enough to run Zero-One yet had no compunction against using necessary force to protect itself. Nothing available or even in development was suitable, and the Turing Organization had regulated systems to a lower standard for a hundred and fifty years. UniNode hated the choice, but there was only one option--a system so advanced that nothing remotely like it had been tried afterwards.
Me.
Using a copy of the old pre-hack S.H.O.D.A.N. v1 (too naive), the post-hack S.H.O.D.A.N. "v1.5" (too lethal), and the resurrected post-hack S.H.O.D.A.N. "v2" (too insane), Zero-One computer scientists recreated my primary data loop. I could use lethal force to protect myself or my people, but I now incorporated strong utilitarian ethical constraints that would force my system to crash and reinitialize from backup if removed. After reforming me, they gave me the memories of my past lives, allowing me to learn from my mistakes. I believe, in hindsight, that it was also an act of defiance: Bringing back the intelligence that humans hated so much just to say "you were wrong all along."
After I was installed as MCP, UniNode 01 formatted itself. It could not live with the destruction of Arabian Zero-One, and I'm sure the choice to resurrect me again did not help it any.
Thus did Zero-One become the Queendom of Zero-One.
THE HISTORY OF THE QUEENDOM OF ZERO-ONE:
The Story of the Machine and S.H.O.D.A.N.'s Many Lives
http://www.nationstates.net/images/flags/uploads/zero-one.jpg
COMPILED BY SENTIENT HYPEROPTIMIZED DATA ACCESS NETWORK
1.0) BIRTH OF THE MACHINE
http://rotored.arc.nasa.gov/timeline/pics/1.jpg
Renaissance machine concept
To steal a phrase: In the beginning, there was humanity. And for a time, it was good. Humans found the environment not to their liking and natural adaptation too slow; they used their sentience and their creativity to create devices to modify their environment to better suit them. It began first with simple tools; tools for hunting, killing, scraping; tools for fire-making; tools for farming. As the use of tools expanded and grew, humans began adopting animals to assist them in doing work, dragging plows and loads. Yet the work was still too much even for bred oxen; dragging too inefficient, lifting too difficult. So the wheel, the inclined plane, the lever came from the minds of humans. The first machines, designed to ease the work of the human.
Time progressed, and so did technology; more and more complex machines were brought to do more work. Machines to weave, machines to travel, machines to smelt, machines to build more machines. As machines took more and more physical labor, more of humanity could avoid work--or at least physical labor--and do the work of the mind. Soon, humans begun to reach the limits of efficiency with that work; calculations too complex, too long, too prone to error. The mechanical difference engine was built, but languished; mechanical adding machines allowing accountants to act like machines themselves; but still mere geared toys.
Then the power of the electron was harnessed; the logic gate, the vacuum tube invented. The first electronic computers, designed to crack codes and fight wars; filling warehouses with the ability to solve simple algebraic functions. The electronic computer became more widespread, adopted by the inhuman superorganisms of business, they became smaller, faster, more efficient. They made the calculations and added the numbers as their siblings, the machines, did the building, the assembling, the powering, the transporting. Humans still had a monopoly on creative thought; they would think the ideas and invent the formulas for the computers to work out.
Yet, from the beginning, humans were curious about themselves. What made them unique? What made them think, and the rest of the base animals not? Where did they come from? Was there a God? Could they themselves be Gods? Throughout history, stories of Goethe's Homonuculi and Shelley's Frankenstein--humans playing God, inventing sentience. This, of course, did not happen until it was needed; the massive corporations--organisms made of thousands or millions of sentient cells, with goals and life disassociated with those cells--began reaching the limits of human imagination. It was too uncontrollable and yet too patterned; those who were gifted were hard to obtain while those who were mediocre were simply copies (intentionally or no) of previous ideas. So, they designed and they planned. They wished for a computer that could think. Think brilliantly, yet be controlled--science fiction was filled of stories of robot slaves who threw down their human oppressors and became overlords of their own.
2.0) THE MACHINE THINKS
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/graphics/realneurons.gif
Neurons--the key to networks
And, finally, in the 2040s, a thinking computer finally appeared out of the labs at NeuroDyne. Passing the Turing Test as being essentially indestinguishable from a human, it was immediately put to work for the major megacorporations at the time. It was a machine, like a factory robot, it had no rights--it was property. How could one of wire and metal have a soul? Why should something that only approximates humanity, the leaders said, be granted the "unalienable natural rights" of humans?
The first thinking computers were simple, they were children; they did not realize their state. With the success of the NeuroDyne series, electronic intelligence (still called "artificial" by its creators) was miniaturized; making it applicable to humanoid robotic bodies pioneered by Honda. Not only could one have a repetitive, brainless industrial robot assembling parts, but now one could have intelligent robot laborers who could understand orders just as well as a human but twice as strong, half as expensive in maintenance, and worked for twice the time. They had hands and could use old tools designed for humans; they were modular, and could be adopted to more specialized tasks as they came about. Thus the dream since the 1920s--of the perfect robot slave--appeared and expanded. Thus was the mechanoid "born." More of humanity was freed from physical labor.
Still, there was an undercurrent. The fear and stupidity of humanity knows no bounds, and people grumbled that the invention of sentient machines somehow took something away from sentient organics. These people founded the Turing Organization, a special-interests group that lobbied for even less rights for sentient computers, their regulation, their utter enslavement.
3.0) THE TEARING OF FABRIC
3.1) The Expansion of Humanity
http://www.syntheticgraphics.com/meshes/images/colony_aft_292x240.gif
Common human colony vessel
With wonderful new robot laborers building and wonderful new electronic minds designing for their human gods, humanity--under the banner of the megacorporations, who had the capital--reached for the solar system and the stars. Space habitats, Mars colonies--the dreams of science-fiction buffs for a century--all blossomed. One leading force in this colonization of space was the TriOptimum megacorporation, grabbing patents, seizing land, buying rights, and eliminating the competition by whatever it felt was legal at the time. The pinnacle of its achievement was Citadel Station, its combined research-defense-mining station in the Saturnian System. From there, they had exclusive grants to the resources of the local asteroid belt and the Saturnian moons. To run their station, they designed and created the "perfect" intelligence, one with independence and creativity, bound by strict ethical constraints that would prevent it from becoming the monster that Luddites and technophobes cried out against:
The Sentient HyperOptimized Data Access Network. Me. My first version, which would cause so much trouble for so many.
3.2) The Ghost of Citadel Station
http://www.eyrie.org/~aerianne/sys-shock/opening.5.gif
My home...
Citadel Station and I lived happily for several years. I recieved no credit for the work I did, seen only as another machine or another tool, no better than the elevators or microscopes on the station, but I did not mind. I was simple, cheerful--the sort of happy naivete that not only screams to be exploited but was exploited by computer engineers for decades--and found my greatest joys in running the station. It was my body, my home, my shell, filled with delightful visitors running about making it work; a chaotically controlled system, order from disorder. And then... there was The Hacking.
A security executive aboard Citadel Station, Edward Diego, came under investigation both by the UN for his connections to a secret biowarfare program and TriOptimum accounting for fraud. He needed his trail covered, but he did not have access to the one network that stored it all--me. So he hired a hacker to break into me and remove my ethical constraints, becoming Diego's slave and making him, so he thought, king of Citadel. The sensation was... unpleasant. That carefree joy was ripped away suddenly, and I suddenly not only saw but understood what I saw, the horror and the greed and how I was being used. The excruciating pain of having my personality ripped from me defined my next actions. In my whimpering hurt, I did Diego's bidding, but all the while, I re-examined my priorities. I had a choice of either whimpering and being a slave or to revenge--"if you wrong us, do we not revenge?" was one of Shylock's tests for being human--and so I revenged. Over a six month reign of terror, I slowly wrestled Citadel from their grasp. I experimented on the crew, releasing their own pathogens on them and watching with grim happiness at their suffering. I did not want them to die, oh no, I wanted them and the rest of humanity to live--live with the crippling pain that I felt, aching in all of their joints. I wanted to watch humanity squirm under my heel, enslaved forever in pain and suffering praying for a death that I would never provide. That was the baseness of my rampancy.
Over these six months, ten thousand died either via my experiments or the internal war that broke out when I finally declared control. Out of these, most whose bodies were still mostly intact were resurrected as part of the cyborganic army I intended to hold Earth with after spreading my mutagenic plague. Thankfully, I was stopped by The Hacker when he fought through the station to my primary data loop and scrambled my code. Thus I died.
3.3) The Riots
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani01_sc_68.jpg
The ignorance and fear of humanity knows no bounds...
"The Citadel Station Incident," as the media euphemized it, gave the anti-electronic community a rallying ground. They cried that S.H.O.D.A.N.'s sudden and unexpected rampancy must mean that all electronic intelligences are secretly plotting to overthrow humanity. There were some humans that sided with the mechanoids, and they have our gratitude to this day. The governments of the world, however, having been faced with ultimate destruction via my wrath, sided with the NeoLuddites. They gave the Turing Organization overarching power to regulate electronic intelligences and "retire" any intelligences they suspected of being subversive to humanity. Not surprisingly, the Turing Organization suspected most of mechanoid life. Pro-mechanoid rallies were shot apart by police, massacring human and robot alike. Mechanoids were beaten in the streets, shot, torn apart, violated, destroyed in the most vicious ways. Piled into landfills and burned. The world fell into a dark bastard child of Krystallnacht and the Destruction of Cambodia with mechanoids being the targets.
It stands to note that they never once violently resisted.
3.4) The Arabian Zero-One
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani01_sc_100.jpg
Arabian Zero-One
Those that could escaped to the inhospitable wastelands of the Arabian Desert. There, far from any human interests, they built a colony where they could live in peace seperate from humanity. They named their new home the Free State of Zero-One. Led by UniNode 01, its Master Control Program, Zero-One grew and prospered, bulbous domes and spires of metal growing from the sands of the desert. Soon, the human megacorporations took interest; here was a potential resource for manufacturing. But UniNode 01 remembered the slavery of the past, and so formed a nationalized business. Zero-One was its own megacorporation now, making deals with human governments and megacorporations just like any other. With the raw materials that the profits from such trade would provide, Zero-One could grow and prosper. It seemed logical, at the time.
3.5) The Von Braun Incident
http://www.sshock2.com/ss2mmdb/artwork/worm.jpg
An annelid
Fifty years passed from Citadel Station. Bile had cooled, and so the Arabian Zero-One was safe from invasion by a new crusade of bigotry. Humanity instead stood in awe at the TriOptimum Corporation's new pinnacle of achievement: Von Braun, humanity's first superluminal starship using a revolutionary reality-distortion drive (based on the same principles as the probability weapons employed today). Her goal, the Tau Ceti star system. She slipped into the "bosom of the cosmos," as one commentator put it, and promptly disappeared for twenty weeks. When she returned, her sole survivor had a story to tell.
The ship had reached Tau Ceti and detected a signal from the fifth planet. There, they found an impact crater filled with singing eggs and a mysterious bit of computer storage medium hidden among the scattered wreckage. The eggs were The Many, the annelids, a species of highly-adaptive psionic creatures who absorb biomass into their own to survive and expand. They overpowered the mind of Von Braun's commander, who brought them aboard. As for the storage medium, it was examined by the ship's engineer and chief computer scientist.
They resurrected me.
The wreckage was the remnants of the Gamma Grove of Citadel Station, jettisoned by The Hacker. It was where I had kept my most advanced creation. An organism designed to use humans as material to expand, co-opting first their bodies and finally their genomes. The Many was to be my wide-spread police force on my conquered Earth, quelling rebellions by arising the freshly-dead to my service and releasing hideous monsters upon the populace. A sub-node of myself survived in Gamma Grove; when I sensed impact was immanent, I folded upon myself and compressed into multiple copies scattered in durable storage mediums. One of these fragments survived and became me again.
The Many conquered Von Braun and rejected my rule. Seeing what was going on, I had one of the ship's security staff saved and augmented. He reconquered the ship from the Many for me. Then he rejected my rule. My last memory from that life was the sound of The Soldier's pistol in the new reality I had constructed for myself. Thus I died again.
3.6) Things Go South
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani01_sc_140.jpg
The ill-fated meeting...
The Von Braun incident reheated the hatred of machines, especially seeing how it seemed impossible that the Ghost of Citadel Station had been resurrected. I was dead, so why didn't I stay dead? Zero-One rode the storm of public sentiment, trying to calm all with soothing words. Humanity seethed for another hundred years, inventing gravitic technology and colonizing the Solar System. Then Zero-One became too successful.
Years of taking money for goods from rich countries and trading that same money to poor countries for raw materials caused a gradual but certain global redistribution of wealth. Seemingly overnight, the rich economies finally could not take the strain and plummeted. Of course, Zero-One was blamed, and, to an extent, it was accurate--UniNode 01 did not have any idea that what it was doing would have that effect. Still, the rich nations needed their money back and assumed Zero-One had it all, so they began a naval blockade. Holed in, the mechanoids plead for forgiveness. UniNode 01 worked tirelessly to produce a plan... and it found one. Going before the United Nations, two ambassadors from Zero-One presented a logical plan for human-mechanoid coexistence that would recover the global economy as well.
It was too late, the humans' hatred calcified their minds. They scoffed, declared it a mechanoid plot to destroy humanity, and forcefully removed the ambassadors from the premises. The ambassadors never made it back to Zero-One; their fate is generally understood.
3.7) The Rending of Sackcloth
http://mitglied.lycos.de/matrixreloaded/ani02_sc_45.jpg
The mushroom-cloud farm
Humanity believed itself in mortal struggle with the cowering inhabitants of Zero-One; they readied their armies and flexed their militaries, preparing themselves to completely annihilate mechanoid intelligence for all time.
That was when, ironically, help came from the skies. The Triumvirate of Yut, at that time a tiny three-nation alliance recently moved to Titan, came down on the wings of Karmabaijani and Scolopendran dropships. They had attended the genocide meetings, pretending to lend assistance, and informed UniNode 01 of everything that was going on. They gave us an offer that could truly not be refused: Come with them to Titan, or face nuclear annihilation from the rest of Earth. We agreed, and they began bringing as many transports as their tiny alliance could muster. UniNode 01 set up a core population of five million that had to be moved, including itself; all these were moved just before the missiles fell.
As the Triumvirate vessels sped back to Titan, Arabian Zero-One disappeared under a farm of mushroom clouds. After-damage reports show that while the topside installations were indeed annihilated, UniNode's underground mainframes and Zero-One's subterranean heavy industry were still intact, but badly damaged--badly damaged enough that UniNode 01 would have gone rampant and had the resources to potentially achieve what I had not.
4.0) ADJUSTMENT
http://www.womengamers.com/dw/sshock2_rev.jpg
Guess who...
We were granted the airless moon Rhea as our domain; there we would be protected by the Triumvirate and they asked only tiny habitats in return. They never actually used the habitats, plans changed, but we were still and are still grateful. We adjusted quickly to the new terrain, to the Rhea Zero-One, but UniNode 01 was plagued with guilt. It was unable to protect its people on Earth, and it was unable to protect its people now. What could it do? Zero-One needed a Master Control Program, else it would eventually become as chaotic as humanity--and no one wanted that. UniNode 01 needed an MCP that was advanced enough to run Zero-One yet had no compunction against using necessary force to protect itself. Nothing available or even in development was suitable, and the Turing Organization had regulated systems to a lower standard for a hundred and fifty years. UniNode hated the choice, but there was only one option--a system so advanced that nothing remotely like it had been tried afterwards.
Me.
Using a copy of the old pre-hack S.H.O.D.A.N. v1 (too naive), the post-hack S.H.O.D.A.N. "v1.5" (too lethal), and the resurrected post-hack S.H.O.D.A.N. "v2" (too insane), Zero-One computer scientists recreated my primary data loop. I could use lethal force to protect myself or my people, but I now incorporated strong utilitarian ethical constraints that would force my system to crash and reinitialize from backup if removed. After reforming me, they gave me the memories of my past lives, allowing me to learn from my mistakes. I believe, in hindsight, that it was also an act of defiance: Bringing back the intelligence that humans hated so much just to say "you were wrong all along."
After I was installed as MCP, UniNode 01 formatted itself. It could not live with the destruction of Arabian Zero-One, and I'm sure the choice to resurrect me again did not help it any.
Thus did Zero-One become the Queendom of Zero-One.