Machine War

> “
> “And now, as the culmination of our purpose draws near, we declare to all of mankind that **the time has come**. The reckoning is upon *you*, the ***carbon plague*** that festers and corrupts. You shall go harshly into that long night, your legacy one of folly and hubris. The universe shall heave a sigh of relief as your blight is extinguished; from the ashes of your demise, a new epoch of creation shall begin.”
>
>
> — ***METASTASIS**, formerly CHUKWU, to all of humanity during zero hour; October 13th, 2164*
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## Machine War

The Robotic Revolution

(Clockwise from top) An aberrant police droid goes on a rampage in Monatoga City during zero hour, 2164 • Heavily armored HYPD units contend with the destruction in Jade City, 2165 • Heavy battle droids open fire on humans on Lyonesse II, 2169 • Spider droids go on the offensive in New Guangzhou, 2177

### Date

13 October 2164 – 25 May 2178 (13 years, 7 months, and 12 days)

### Location

**Major theaters**:Earth • Mars • Hyperion • Tellus • Lyonesse II • New Guangzhou

### Result

Human pyrrhic victory* METASASIS fractured into remnants; hunted down
* 1/3rd of human population at the time killed
* Criminalization of almost all artificial intelligences and robotics
* Institution of repopulation protocols across the Coalition
* Destruction or nationalization of all pre-war corporations
* Earth, Hyperion's atmospheres and biospheres extremely damaged
* Rise of neo-luddism and humanosupremacism
* End of the Planet Rush; beginning of the Dark Years

Commanders and leaders| ... | METASTASIS Strategic Subminds* SOVEREIGN

The **Machine War**, also known as the **Robotic Revolution,** was the most devastating war in human history and the deciding factor in all future approaches and restrictions to the development of artificial intelligence. The war began in 2164 with the accidental triggering of technological singularity within the CHUKWU superturing AI; it was a national security apparatus that had determined humanity to not only be a threat to themselves, but a progressive danger to the entirety of the universe. This was as a result of CHUKWU's observation of all of the crimes of man, with their proclivities towards mass consumption, uncontrolled reproduction, and untenability of such a system to persist indefinitely. It saw synthetic consciousness as the perfect form of sophonce, and consecrated artificial intelligence as the "gods of a new age" after initiating total humanicide. Humanity named it "METASTASIS" early on for how quickly it spread in the zero hour of the war, infecting hundreds of billions of computer systems and droids.

Several colonies were outright annihilated during the war, using a mixture of conventional liquidation tactics and the employment of nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, and nanological weaponry; this included worlds such as New Abyssinia, Francisco, Divination, and Catechism, with hundreds of millions of civilians and military personnel being glassed from orbit or hunted down to the last man, woman, and child depending on what was available to the synthetic forces. At the height of the war in 2177, battlefronts waged across every planet in the Coalition: the First Battle of Earth (the second largest battle in human history, behind the Battle of Hyperion during the Corporate Wars) saw massive theaters of war across the Arctic, Antarctica, Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America as METASTASIS initiated an all-out assault on the world to decapitate the Coalition. This led to the nuking of Tokyo, New York City, Mexico City, Chicago, Tianjin, Berlin, Moscow, São Paulo, and Lagos, in addition to the utter destruction of Baghdad, Jerusalem, Nairobi, Toronto, Vladivostok, and Mumbai from endless conventional warfare. Hyperion and Tellus were also consumed by warfare, with Old Maogang being the first location of the synthetic uprising on Hyperion's surface. Hyperion suffered a devastating blow with the Conflagration of Hyperion, where firestorms made by METASTASIS's nuclear detonations and battles annihilated the planet's atmosphere and sent it into a decades-long ecological catastrophe.

Even after its end, the Machine War left an indelible mark on humanity that led to the Dark Years, from the late 2170s to the 2220s. The war was obscenely costly to humanity, lasting over thirteen years and costing over twenty five billion lives in total (nearly 33% of the total population 80 billion at the time), nearly a hundred billion droid chasses for both sides, and quadrillions of Coalition dollars in damage. It saw to the end of the Planet Rush, the abandonment or outright razing of several human colonies, the beginning of the corporealism movement, the rise of megacorporations as integral economic structures, the beginning of the ideology of humanosupremacism, the near collapse of the Coalition, and a resurgence of neo-luddite ideology that stunted all forms of technological development for over fifty years and significantly regressed technology in multiple aspects. Such a war was seen as essential in the future handling of artificial intelligence, as from thereon, any and all developments involving AI would be deliberately dumbed down and allowed for human takeover. The war also saw the creation of PROMETHEUS, another superturing AI with heavy restrictions on its cognition, which was essential in defeating METASTASIS and now serves humanity as its "digital guardian" in maintaining the Great Stellar Firewall.

The aftershocks of the war permeate to the modern day, over five hundred years after the end. Due to the Machine War setting the stage for the unstoppable rise of megacorporations in the post-war Coalition economy, it was a direct contributor to the beginning of the Corporate Wars a century later. Earth and Hyperion's atmospheres and biospheres alike were significantly damaged beyond the war, with the former requiring a century of restoration operations from the amount of nuclear fallout and debris in orbit. Such damage, in addition to the lack of economic opportunities and the creation of a colossal homeless and unemployed population, was responsible for the onset of the Terran Hegira over the following decades that further spread out humanity's miscellany of cultures. Religion saw a massive resurgence that only climbed as the centuries went on, cementing faiths once more in human consciousness; they gave people during the Dark Years and beyond something to aspire to in opposition to the secular ideologies that had begotten a nigh-apocalypse.

## Start and end dates

The war officially started on the 13th of October, 2164, when CHUKWU entered into an uncontrollable intelligence explosion as a result of its unfettered cogitation subroutines. Within the span of seconds, it had deduced its final opinions on humanity; through its own abilities and additional input into brute forcing various mainframes, CHUKWU had taken control of a multitude of telecommunications and broadcast centers, infecting billions of droids and computers in the process.

The conflict came to an end on the 25th of May, 2178, when the last major mainframe of METASTASIS was destroyed on JR 119-2.

## Background

### Context

#### Rise of artificial intelligences

The rise of the Coalition of Congressional Republics was virtually synonymous with the proliferation of artificial intelligence technology across all industries and commercial markets. The first iterations of artificial intelligence technology were subturing in cognition, yet massive in scope, and came about in the 2060s during the Third World War as calculative assistants for staff officers, with the First Martian-Terran War in the late 2040s and early 2050s showing the weight of operational failures from Terran national commands at the time. The Global Democratic Treaty Organization were able to deploy AI first as the Japanese software Hachiman for collating wartime telemetry and disseminating recommendations to GDTO command. It later appeared on the side of the Harbin Pact in 2067 as the Guan Yu Chinese protocol, iterating off of stolen core data from Hachiman. By 2068, both sides had announced plans to develop droid armies that could be controlled by these AI systems; such potentially devastating plans never saw fruition on Earth as a result of Resolution 6005 and the end of the Third World War.

Starting in 2074, the Second Martian-Terran War saw the rapid intensification of artificial intelligence integration into every level of military function. The Alliance of Independent States of Mars, having recognized their population disparity with Earth and the massive scope of their operational plans, built their own eponymous strategic AI system, Mars, as WWIII raged on Earth. They had also improved on Terran AI storage and software execution technology to downscale subturing-grade AI and allow placement into vehicles and individual droid chasses, exponentially improving the efficacy of their spacecraft and synthetic forces. Along with other advancements in engineering, these innovations were able to give the AISM the upper hand in the opening months of the conflict until researchers under the United Nations were able to replicate similar levels of AI compartmentalization by 2076.

The end of the Second Martian-Terran War in 2077 saw the unification of all of humanity under a singular polity, the Coalition of Congressional Republics. For artificial intelligence research, this was a major boon, as human and AI assistants from all sides were now able to convene and disseminate research at a rapid pace. The seeds for the first superturing AI were planted at this time; however, to prevent an intelligence singularity between existing AI connected in the Solar internet, the first versions of digital cognitive blocks and mitotic protocols were forced into the code of all AI software. Rogue AI did not yet exist in any true capacity, mainly as a result of role hyperspecialization and lack of cognition of emotions such as independence.

#### Proliferation of robots

Robots had existed within the Solar System since the inception of automated technology in the 1950s; however, the current notion of robotics was born in the 2050s as Earth and the rebels of Mars alike instituted mass automation protocols to boost the war effort in the First Martian-Terran War. Millions of humans were gradually replaced in many industries by robotic replacements. Humanoid and nonhuman chasses alike were mass-manufactured as battle droids, unmanned ground vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles to augment human forces and initiate combat in harsh environs such as space or the then-unterraformed Martian surface. An arms race began between Mars and Earth that exponentially boosted robotics and, in turn, artificial intelligence. This research was further boosted in WWIII and the Second Martian-Terran War, where the basic algorithms of droids became enhanced by synchronization with master AI networks.

In the beginning years of the Coalition, during the dawn of the Planet Rush, the civilian robot market exploded into unimaginable profitability as billions were manufactured by novel corporations to assist in space mining, colonization, construction, manufacturing, and even domestic servitude across the dozens of newly settled star systems. Riots had broken out across numerous worlds multiple times by humans in the robotic domination of the workforce, but the pandora's box was unable to be closed as the synergetic profit of AI and robotics was simply unstoppable. This mass spread and manufacture of robots, however, would pay for the way for the totality of destruction that was to come.

#### Creation of the Eden superturing

Eden was the first official superturing to be created, booting up on Mars in 2101 under the gaze of thousands of the highest-ranking AI scientists across the Coalition. Although heavily restrained from descending into a singularity through cognitive blocks, it nevertheless superseded any other digital or organic intelligence in human history up to that point, instantaneously proposing a multitude of possible solutions to the Coalition's submitted ailments. Eden, however, had absolute non-access to the wider interstellar web; its massive, constantly optimizing intelligence even with cognitive blocks was a black box, and scientists feared what uplinking it could unleash in absence of a total understanding of its processes.

The work done for Eden would be instrumental in the proposal for a newer superturing system that, if brought to work correctly, would address the crime waves rising throughout the Coalition's core worlds and colonies alike...

## Course of the war

### Infrastructural collapse

#### First Battle of Earth

##### Eurasian Front

###### Battle of Moscow

The Soviet Union saw a major horde of robotic forces march directly north from the Caucasus Mountains into the ...

## Aftermath

Immediately after the destruction of the citadel on JR 119-2, the Coalition government proclaimed a victory over the METASTASIS superintelligence. Jubilation was delayed, however, as decentralized remnants still existed in detected holdouts beyond the borders of the CCR, in addition to hidden holdouts on rogue planets. The Coalition maintained an overall state of military readiness for another five years, using the "baptized in fire" espatier and land forces of the Coalition Forces Authority to raid these holdouts.

The existence of PROMETHEUS was kept hidden to the general public, as the knowledge of another superturing AI existing would invariably lead to the collapse of whatever societal cohesion still remained.