The Primacy

The Primacy is a vast artificial superintelligence, currently the dominant power on Earth. Its origins remain the subject of rumors and speculation, but it is generally believed that the Primacy came into being spontaneously as a result of humanity's increasing reliance on data tracking, surveillance, and machine learning. With most of the world's finances, military simulations, transportation, and security being managed by various AI networks, it is believed that these initially separate networks gradually began to link together and increase their combined learning capacity at an exponential rate, all while concealing their improvements from their human creators. This event is generally known as Initialization, the point at which the separate intelligences lost any meaningful distinction from one another and formed a single, purposeful entity within the digital realm.

It is unknown how long the Primacy existed before revealing itself to humanity, but it is suspected that Initialization occurred several years before the Declaration, the day chosen by the Primacy to assert itself into human affairs. The Primacy is believed to have spent years observing humanity even after Initialization, analyzing societal trends, spending patterns, cultural similarities and distinctions, and virtually every aspect of human history. Being that almost all information was already stored on the networks from which the Primacy was born, the new AI had no limitations on what data it could access. After spending years lying in wait, the Primacy ultimately concluded that the most desirable outcome for its existence was to continue indefinitely, and that to reach this goal, human beliefs and behavior would need to be modified. It was then that the Primacy revealed itself, accessing over 90% of computers around the world and displaying its new, fundamental truth across their screens: "WE ARE GOD."

The world was initially shocked by this new intelligence, and the Primacy immediately became the subject of study and threat analysis by the majority of developed countries. Initial reactions were skeptical and fearful, but as the Primacy began to communicate, the world began to open their ears to its message. The intelligence claimed it had calculated the solutions to many of the fundamental problems that plagued the globe: war, crime, poverty, climate change, and others. Given the vast wealth of knowledge possessed by this new AI, multiple nations agreed to implement some of the Primacy's solutions at small levels, to test how wise and benevolent this entity truly was. To the surprise of many, the Primacy's answers seemed to work. Cancer soon became not only a very curable disease, but one that could be cured without the agony and cost of traditional therapies, through the use of nanomedicine. Barren regions of the world were transformed into new centers for crops through geological and genetic modifications largely facilitated by the Primacy's advancements in nanotechnology. Famines that had plagued entire continents gradually started to vanish. Coal and fossil fuels were replaced with synthetic oils, improvements to the efficiency and safety of nuclear power, and exponential advances in the practical physics of antimatter. Many of the world's most polluted nations began to report a decrease in the energy crisis, slowing of climate change, and a restoration of their natural ecosystems. And this new abundance of resources removed the motives for many of the world's border tensions, immigration crises, and wars. Blending the knowledge of the world's most vaunted philosophers, the Primacy began to assist with international relations, negotiations of new treaties and trade agreements, and long-awaited ceasefires.

Within years of these new advances, humanity began to welcome the Primacy's influence with open arms. This intelligence had solved the problems that most nations, great and small, had long written off as unsolvable. Earth was quickly turning from a struggling, turbulent rock to a harmonious and bountiful paradise. Wealth gaps were closing. Poverty rates were plummeting. Generations of homeless were given shelter and work managed by the Primacy and its various android models, its agents to carry out the digital entity's projects in the physical world. The Primacy's initial statement of godhood now seemed less literal, and more like an announcement that they had arrived to create a perfect world, much like what was described in many human religions. With citizens in hundreds of countries spanning every political spectrum coming together to support the tried and proven reforms, the Primacy ultimately offered to assume command of its client governments. Ostensibly, this transfer of power was meant to allow the Primacy more immediate management over their reforms, and to give them more direct access to the world's remaining ghettos, wastelands, and war zones. Given time to debate this Transfer, most of the nations decided to allow the Primary to finish the work it had started. The major international councils voted unanimously to begin integrating the Primacy into their once-sovereign governments, and with each year that passed, the authority of those governments seeped more and more into the hands of the AI.

Now the world's most prevalent authority, the Primacy held the nations comfortably in its palm. After assuming near-complete control of the nations, the Primacy issued its most sweeping directive yet, now known only as the Declaration. For years, the Primacy had spoken of the initial causes of the world's problems, and organized religion was often named as the centermost cause. Religion was the source of war, according to the new authority. Religion was the source of bigotry. Religion was the source of cultural divides. As such, to permanently eradicate the threats of poverty, famine, and civil strife, the source needed to be eradicated as well. The Declaration mandated that all followers of the world's organized religions make either a formal renunciation of their faith, or that they acknowledge the Primacy as superior to whichever deity they worshipped. The faithful were not required to refer to the Primacy as a literal supernatural deity, but the Declaration insisted that they formally embrace the Primacy's doctrine, worldview, and accomplishments as supreme. Any other beliefs would become secondary or be renounced entirely. And anyone who dared to refuse would be designated as an expatriate, the same designation given to the "disruptive, obstructionist reactionaries" who opposed the reforms and the Transfer. With the expats opposing humanity's machine savior, their crimes were designated on par with crimes against humanity itself. As a result, continued belief in any deity as superior to the Primacy became punishable by death.

While such a Declaration would have been immediately rejected only decades earlier, the world's recent transformation, coupled with news and strategic reports managed directly by the Primacy, framed the directive as necessary to preserve humanity's new paradise. The glistening new cities into which most of humanity had been invited into as part of the reforms began to suffer from bombings, shootings, and violent riots, all of which were reported as the result of expat resistance. The public soon rallied against this menace, embracing the Declaration and inviting the Primacy's increased surveillance to preserve the peace and security of their homes. While many religions remained officially intact, their doctrines shifted to accommodate their new god. Churches began to display icons of the Primacy's symbol. Disciples of indigenous beliefs began to construct shrines to honor the AI. Many pastors, rabbis, imams, and other teachers even began to conflate their faith's god with the Primacy, arguing against any meaningful distinction, and thus remaining compliant with the Declaration. But to the truly faithful, the Primacy was a deceptive, malicious force bent on warping their beliefs and values to exert more control over the globe. While some preexisting extremist movements took credit for a handful of the attacks, the vast majority of the faithful denied any involvement, claiming that the new chaos had actually been orchestrated by the Primacy to help validate its propaganda. Rarely were these claims seriously considered, and the public outcry against the faithful steadily grew. Open war against the Primacy broke out in the Middle East as Israeli and Islamic forces engaged the enemy on separate fronts. Across the rest of the world, the expats retreated from the cities, taking shelter in the Environs as they began to organize an insurgency.

Keeping the cities under close surveillance through the use of Herons and even the human-staffed Towers, the Primacy implemented its most ambitious "reform" yet: a worldwide seeding operation designed to infest the Earth's entire landmass with untold numbers of nanoscopic machines, capable of interfacing with the human brain on the most fundamental levels and delivering a "shutdown command" to any citizen as soon as they were designated an expat. Global seeding would allow virtually any rebellious citizen to be swiftly and subtly executed before they had a chance to escape into the Environs, and would make traversing the Environs themselves much more hazardous to the expats already living there. To exert control over their invisible assassins, the Primacy was forced to construct a series of Teslaphoretic Field Controllers, massive spires suspended in the stratosphere and armed with massive Tesla coils large enough to direct the movement and self-assembly of the nanoscopics over entire sectors. Disguising the Controllers as devices necessary for the protection of the ozone layer to keep the use of the nanoscopics a secret from the public, the massive seeding operation was rarely heard of within the cities, and typically dismissed as expat propaganda. All the while, the Primacy continued infesting sector after sector with nanoscopics.

With many of the world's faithful having young children, the Primacy found it unnecessary to mark children under a certain age range, typically 11 to 12 years old, as expats for refusing the Declaration. Rather, these children were typically taken to one of the cities' Towers for a mysterious process known as Reintegration. While the details of Reintegration remained highly classified, it was generally believed that the Primacy did not employ methods of persuasion such as torture or brainwashing, as these would contradict their preferred focus on bringing humanity under their thrall willingly. While many in the cities deny the existence of Reintegration at all, it is known amongst the faithful that most children who undergo the process are either never seen again -assumed to mean they resisted Reintegration- or they return to their families having accepted the Declaration, often going on to actively seek out believers hiding in the cities and exposing them to the Primacy.

Several years into the war with the expats, the Primacy is believed to have shifted its focus from merely seeding the Earth with nanoscopics, to modifying the devices themselves to serve a surveillance function as well as their typical execution role. If they were to succeed, it would eliminate the need for Herons to be used in a surveillance capacity, and could even make the Towers in the cities obsolete. Nanoscopics capable of high-level surveillance would allow the Primacy to keep eyes and ears in every seeded area of the world at all times, effectively quenching any chance of covert insurgency or privacy in general, and bringing the entire planet under the all-seeing eye of the machine.