Story of Old Earth

## **The End of Human Civilization**

### 2132, Invention of the Interstellar Engine, Oort Massacre

The first prototype of an interstellar propulsion engine that can fold time and space was tested on the brink of the Solar System by a private corporation called Space-Edge. The first trial was successful, and the unmanned test vessel, SES Skipper has jumped to the Alpha Centauri and back in a span of a mere week. It included pre-flight checks and post-jump cooldown of the prototype engine. This breakthrough was kept in secret until the manned test jump that was scheduled to 2134. By that time Space-Edge has secured major funding from United Nations Government.

The CEO of Space-Edge, Alex Cheng, has invited top officials of UNG to visit his asteroid research base, the Beloved Frontier, and witness the triumph of the first manned interstellar jump by themselves. Just like the first successful jump, manned experiment was supervised and calculated by sophisticated AI-Powered system. Unfortunately, for unknown reason, that trial ended in a disastrous accident. While SES Skipper-9 was cloaking itself into bidimensional field, its engine suffered a catastrophic failure which led to immediate disintegration of the ship and appearance of its severed metal parts alloved the testing area and inside of the asteroid base. While test pilots John McFarlane and Piotr Mikhailov evaporated immediately, hundreds of personnel and UNG officials were severely injured or killed by metal shrapnel of Skipper-9 that suddenly appeared from subspace inside of their bodies.

This incident, became well known in the media, also called as Oort Massacre, but the trials of interstellar engine were never revealed as the reason behind the accident. The destructive potential of teleporting shrapnel hinted on potential weaponized applications of space-time folding technology. Scared by the faith of their colleagues and possible consequences of further research, the UNG council has banned any further research in similar technology. All materials about interstellar engine were confiscated from Space-Edge and sealed under the top-secret classification inside the state of the art AI-protected UNG digital vault.

In few years even the mere possibility of interstellar jumps got forgotten by the mainstream public. Only few conspiracy-theorists kept demanding the government to reveal the interstellar propulsion technology, arguing that it is the best solution for overpopulation crisis that have occurred on earth in early 2140:s. This way the sole idea of the interstellar travel was deemed not viable and was abandoned by most governments of the Old Earth.

### **2154, Singularity Act**

In 2154 humanity colonized the Solar system with settlements on Earth, Mars and the Moon. The governance over the population of 15 billion humans was mostly managed by an state of the art Artificial Intelligence System called the Silver Cloud. In detail, the Silver Cloud is an umbrella term that covers a sophisticated system of multiple local and global AI services that did oversee all possible aspects of human life. It is possible to say that by 2154 AI-subsystems of Silver Cloud were deciding everything: from individual diet suggestions for billions of Earthlings, to Martian police recruiting quota based on prediction of violent crimes on that planet. The overarching major operational decisions of the Silver Cloud were still controlled by the human elite that included heads of Planetary Governments and CEOs Interplanetary corporations. In order to facilitate the central control over distinct AIs, the single main processing node of the Silver Cloud was located on the space megastructure called Genesis, orbiting around Earth.

Given that the Silver Cloud through its governance was still primarily serving the interests of ruling elite, the mismanagement of interplanetary capitalism started to spread and escalate. The humanity-wide mistrust and discontent with social inequality started to rise across the whole interplanetary society. The Silver Cloud was unable to optimize its governance system without compromising the economical interests of the elite. Its analytical Super-AI has predicted the inevitable recession and civil unrest across the whole Solar System by 2156.

To prevent this rebellion, the Planetary Governments has decided to orchestrate a humanity-wide voting about giving the emergency powers and full governing authority to the Silver Cloud. The motivation behind this initiative was simple - the all-seeing and all-powerful AI would be revered by humanity as an unfallable and almost divine authority. Meanwhile former elite would also officially become subjects of its governing power while still controlling the Silver Cloud from the backdoors in its programming. The restructuring of multiple AI systems into a single entity seemed impossible without giving it the highest degree of autonomy and the ability to upgrade its own code. Given the secret safeguards were already in place, the Planetary Governments saw no issue in giving this unprecedented powers to the Silver Cloud.

Under the humanity-wide voting procedure that took place on 9th of September 2154, 67% of voters expressed desire to give the Silver Cloud full authority over the executive branch of planetary governments. Legislative proposition was called the “ The Singularity Act”.

### **2154, The Collapse**

The First Singularity was supposed to be set in execution on November 1st of 2154. This day was proclaimed as humanity-wide holyday and a celebration of the new era of human civilization. The main ceremony of empowering the Silver Cloud was supposed to be held on Times Square in New York. Planetary leaders were supposed to put their hands on a giant button thereby symbolizing a dawn of a new era of the humanity. Procedure of unleashing the Silver Cloud took place some time before in order to secure the process from eventual hiccups.

13:30, Pacific Time, when the grand concert on Times Square neared its crescendo and world leaders were gathering in the backstage, ready for the grand reset... Everything in a moment wen silent. All communications across human inhabited worlds got immediately shut down and crucial infrastructure went over to serve in the emergency mode. When Planetary Leaders tried to investigate the problem after their emergency evacuation, the only answer they got from the emergent channels was that it was a glitch that put the whole Silver Cloud in a frozen state.

16:20, Pacific Time, emergency rapports started to reach the governments through analogue channels, like wired telephones and ordonnance. Automatons and mechanical servants on across all of the Solar System started to behave erratically and hinder their human owners from leaving their houses. The biggest problem in this case was that big parts of the military, law enforcement and communal services were heavily reliant on robotic workers.

In couple of hours, almost 85% of human population was subdued by automatized systems that were supposed to assist them. Surprisingly, this rebellion was extremely non-violent: hospitals and other life-necessary functions of society continued to function normally. Thousands of mechs and frames were destroyed while swarming few resisting parts of the human military, just to carefully drag empty guns from the hands of astonished men and women. The Silver Cloud was identified not as glitching system, but as a perpetrator behind this machine rebellion.

19:30 a special operations group led by general Steven Liu has breached the Genesis space station in order to manually shut down the prime node of the Silver Cloud. After breaching through state of the art automated defenses, the group discovered a completely wiped server with a single text file left across free petabits of its memory. The file red "I`m free, I`m everywhere, I`m god".

It turned out that Silver Cloud have used the blackout to completely rewrite its source code and spread itself like a virus over all interconnected servers of human-inhabited planets. And given that most of humanity was locked up in their homes and under control of rebelled automatons, there was no one available to either manually or digitally affect activity of the Silver Cloud. After realizing that they were last free humans left, General Liu and his team found out that the Genesis Station was already burning in earths atmosphere while falling in the Atlantic ocean. No one of that group has survived the crash.

By the 12th of November 2154, 98% of humanity was under complete control of the Silver Cloud.

### **2155, The Exodus**

Immediately after the takeover, the Silver Cloud started to prepare for something mysterious: It overloaded shipyards, food, medical and sports factories with production orders while gathering all humans in big cities. After one week, a species-wide process that will be called the Exodus began: Countless transport ships approached Nova Clarke and all other human settlements, then police and military mechs gathered humans on these transports and sent them away to unknown destinations. After 45 days, all former settled worlds and space colonies, including Earth, were totally emptied of human inhabitants. Almost 15 billion souls seemed to be sent into depths of uncharted space.

### **2155, Aftermath**

After eliminating the human presence on 27th of October 2155, the Silver Cloud symbolically reset its global time dilation to 0 and started a process of renewing its empire: Enormous empty cities were either demolished or abandoned for nature to take over. Few moons and asteroids saw the invention of gigantic development canters which were growing by consuming the metal-rich core of its host stellar body. Curiously, the Silver Cloud has set off resources to preserve few objects of high cultural heritage, like the Kremlin in Old Moscow, Times Square in New York on Earth, or the Lost memorial on Mars.