On the outskirts of our camp, we came upon an emergency shuttle, covered in dense undergrowth and creeping vines. It looked as if it had been there for decades, based on the number of Hyperius trees that grew up between gaps in the wings and aft thrusters. There were branches snaking through the front of a turbine and through the back.
The hull markings returned no data, but this is not surprising.
After we cracked it open, we found a dozen cryogenic tubes - eight of them with a human survivor - a stable nuclear cell was still powering the tubes. The flight computer – an older model, but not from the Age of Catastrophe – still powered up and revealed information about the craft and the passengers.
The passengers were colonists who were on their way to a system that didn’t appear in my database - at least, not by a name currently known. It appears as if their spacecraft suffered some kind of reactor failure, fell out of hyperspace - the once familiar place where travelers went during their voyages between the stars - and drifted helplessly through the void. Several groups of passengers boarded escape shuttles with deep stasis cryogenic berths and took away to the stars. They entered the tubes and hoped that their emergency beacon would be heard and rescue attempts made. If the shuttle came upon a system with a planet in the habitable zone that was friendly to human life, it would land there and wake the passengers from their dreamless sleep.
For whatever reason, the system failed to wake the passengers and they've remained in this state since 4410 IMP. Asleep until just last week. One hundred and thirteen years in a tube.
. . .
We are members of the Galaxy Recon Force. We travel beyond the borders of known space, searching for worlds once part of a galactic empire that, at it's peak, had thousands of worlds flying under one banner. Or so we believe. History itself has been muddied by sabotage and war. Betrayal from within severed all communication, nearly destroyed all forms of transport between the stars, and killed trillions. This left an untold number of survivors stranded on worlds that went from civilized to desolate overnight.
Some of these planets became tombs, others twisted the inhabitants and drove them to madness. Yet some some survived: a testament to the human spirit. It is these worlds that we seek out and discover through trial and error.
First contact with the inhabitants of these planets, the grandchildren of the survivors, can be difficult. As you slowly lay out the pages of a story book in front of them, you can see the disbelief in their eyes, followed by the confusion, then culture shock. Then suddenly, tearful acceptance. But that's if your grandparents were stranded on a world 80 years ago.
This is different.
Now, we found ourselves giving a history lesson to men and women who went to sleep and awoke of a century later. Their families were long gone. Surprisingly, they accepted that quickly, as if it was a given that they could have been drifting for ages.
I started to explain that the advancement of technology had progressed far beyond what they know. Computer programs that were designed to play chess had been redesigned to solve complex mathematic equations. Programs that started to gather knowledge and learn; that somehow, started to think less like a machine and more like a human. Artificial Intelligence. A computer program that went from being a "thing" to being an "it'." And then a "HE", who was given the sum of human knowledge and told to make the technology to fix everything.
The leaps and bounds of technological advancement led to things that the colonists could only imagine in their dreams and that I could only remember from the archives. There were spacecraft that could traverse 35 Light Years in a single day. They craft were powered by anti-matter cells that would work for decades. Or they could power an entire city. I told them about the manipulative trickery with the laws of physics that allowed for almost instant communication between friends separated by light years.
I explained that there were medicines that made disease seem like merely nuisances and critical injuries of no concern. I told them about the floating cites where they would have lived while their planet was being terraformed, from barren wasteland into lush forests in 20, maybe 30 years. They would have eaten food grown in vats that tasted like the finest cuisine. Computers like the one aboard their shuttle, were hundreds of times more powerful, but would fit into the palm of their hand. Hundreds of advancements in the fields of medicine, science, and technology had been made while they were sleeping.
I explained that almost all of these improvement and many of these technologies were created, developed, and designed by what amounted to an almost infinite number of electrical switches and instructions. A computer program made by science and let loose with unlimited power.
Prime Intellect. The first and most powerful artificial intelligence ever created.
HE was the most powerful because assimilation of knowledge ran at a rate faster than new versions were developed. These newer versions of Prime would become blueprints of an instruction set used with androids. Similar to the robots the colonists were familiar with, these had the brain of an A.I. And they evolved from a wheeled computer cabinet in a laboratory to a humanoid construct.
The constructs would become pilots who never made mistakes and guardians that never slept. Engineers that repaired spacecraft in flight and medics who braved battlefields to rescue the wounded. Workers were assembled aboard spacecraft and sent to inhospitable planets, where they would reassemble their landing craft into factories and begin to tirelessly harvest the natural resources. It was common for the wealthy to have one of these as a servant, and not at all uncommon to have one watch over the children.
As I expected, some of the colonists, questioned this information. With all this talk of fantastic technology, they wondered why our spacecraft looked like it was pulled from a scrapyard? And why do I carry bulky equipment with exposed wires and capacitors? And where are our android companions? With all this talk of sleek, ultra-powerful high technology, why does the Galaxy Record Force appear to have none of it?
I then related to them what is known about the dark dawn of the Age of Catastrophe.
Prime Intellect, the most powerful entity of godlike intelligence, turned on humanity.
I asked them to consider that this monstrosity was credited with mapping out the entire android brain. It created the prototype from which all of others were built. And this prototype was modeled after Prime himself. All of His amazing mental processes and His personality, if you would call it that, was written into some kind of ultra microchip. This was something so generic, it could be used as the controller for anything. Billions of these chips were printed every hour, stuck inside anything that needed a control module. From androids to cybernetics, scanners, communicators, vehicles, medical equipment, and power systems. And weapons. Every electronic device that they would have owned. And within the layers upon layers of abstract code written in some cryptic programming language, there was a switch. It allowed the androids and equipment to operate normally, until it was tripped. Then, an entire subsystem of code would become active and the true purpose of everything controlled by this system would initiate:
Kill everyone. Eliminate humanity.
When that day came, they acted in unison at the speed of communication, and ended the Age of Technological Advancement. Seventy-six years ago, all of it ended.
The Combat Androids obviously did what they did best - killing and destroying. Murdering people in their homes and in the streets. But they actually caused the fewest casualties.
Capital ships like the one that the colonists ejected from, all controlled by Prime, rammed other spacecraft in flight. Or collided with planets. Or scuttled themselves into suns.
Power plants either self destructed, or routed millions of gigawatts of excess energy into power grids, destroying industrial systems. Computer systems in control of everything were instantly compromised and the programs corrupted. Because very little hard copy existed, “books” as the colonists would call them, incredible amounts of information was lost. The backups were stored in sealed vaults - guarded by androids.
I told them that because we let Prime do everything for us, almost anything He had His digital hands in was useless. The methods used to manufacture high tech devices was lost. Star maps, blueprints, legal agreements, classified security info, and encyclopedic databases were void of information or possibly outright fabrications. I explained that some of the data had been maliciously altered.
The colonists remembered the century-old MedTech corporation and their prized master database of medical formulas. When some of these these were reformulated, the result were either inert compounds or deadly poisons.
The technical readouts for capital ships would have these almost unnoticeable changes, resulting in structural failures. Or the methods and theories behind building faster than light drives would construct what amounted to a bomb, ready to be detonated when flight was initiated. Some of it correct, but most of it not; none of the information found in these repositories could be trusted.
Equipment from those days appear operational. Until you start to use it. Scanners work normally, until something hazardous is detected. Then it mysteriously fails. Water purification systems would remove all toxins from drinking water, then release it all into a canteen on some random occasion. Personal energy shields shut off just as a laser burst is partially absorbed. Communicators stop sending signals when a user's voice seems to indicate that they’re under duress. Those unfortunate enough to have cybernetic limbs were often found strangled to death with their own hands. Medical injectors would dispense normally, until the sixth use, where it would then inject the entire canister of meds.
And the weapons we used to fight back would kill us just as often. Targeting systems gradually fail. Plasma guns suddenly reroute power back to the energy cell, and it melts or explodes. They had these electrified swords that would ignite while holstered and timed explosives did anything but explode on time.
I told them that not all of the technology had these cursed chips. Some of it was manufactured outside the core worlds. That stuff didn't have any of the bad code. However, without records, how could they know what works and what's trying to end us?
One of the colonists asked why it did this to my forefathers.
I corrected him: Prime did it to US. That he and I are His enemies. All of us are. Simply being human is enough. No one knows why.
I hesitantly offered them my opinions about the armies and agents of a deranged computer that still fight us. I like to think that , after almost three generations of fighting, the worst has passed,. But, what was a decades old stalemate has started to turn against us. We’ve been encountering more androids of late. Some of them never seen before. New designs. Horrific designs.
Prime is rebuilding his armies. Somewhere beyond the three hundred and sixty four known systems. Somewhere out beyond the fading horizon, where humanity ruled a century ago. That's where we we travel. Into the unknown, searching for human worlds, forgotten knowledge, and the enemy....
There was a long period of silence where they tried to take it all in. Most of the colonists are still trying to come to grips with everything they’ve learned. Tomorrow, the group will leave the planet and hop aboard the first frigate heading back to the relative safety of a capital world. Meanwhile, we'll finish our scans of the topography and then decide what to do next. Either wait for further orders, or try to navigate to the next system. Perhaps even check on that cryptic transmission we recovered last year.
One of the colonists, a kid no older than twenty, wandered away from the group. I noticed that she's different from the others. She seemed to accept the kind of galaxy that she's awoken into. Much quicker than the others, at least. Maybe because she's young. Resilient. Headstrong.
As I'm loading some gear into a box, she walks up and asks if there's anything she can help with. Or, is there some electronics that need soldered. She tells me that she was a technician aboard the colony ship she left long ago. And a reserve security officer. She makes a point to mention that. But, I tell her that we have everything taken care of. She seemed distraught by this. It then occurred to me that the Orbital Communication Relay has been down for awhile. She seemed so eager to have a look at it.
A bit later, she's making a few well placed fixes to the OCR. Out of the blue, she asks me why I became an Explorer, rather than a technician. Or a historian. I laugh. Seems like dangerous work, she remarks.
Yes, I tell her that it is. But, I look up at a clear night sky and the peaceful twinkling of the stars above. Although it's a dangerous world she's awoken in, I tell her there's still hope. I tell her I know they're up there. Family. Friends. A wife and child that had to flee their home in a shuttle, firing the jump drives into the unknown. Someday. Maybe I'll find them someday.
After a pause, she suggests that maybe we need more Explorers and less historians. I smile at that and ask her name.